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Stories from a man who fails to meet media expectations of what it means to be gay:
white, frivolous, over sexed yet sexless, shrill, single, stylish, a clown, unimportant, et al.
Tuesday 09/09/2003
Nondisney conversations:
Daytime temperatures are still largely summer hot, but nights are rapidly getting cooling. The sun is slowly setting earlier each night. Even with the supposed lack of seasons in Los Angeles, it is clear that Autumn is rapidly approaching.
As is my thirty-sixth birthday. It�s only a couple weeks away. I am never going to achieve my life long ambition of becoming a young twinkie. Especially if I keep insisting on aging like this.
Thirty-six. It sounds so very adult. Thirty-six. Heck, I should face it, I am an adult. I have the career thing going on, a mortgage, car payments, responsibilities... it all adds up to, so why don't I feel like one?
I am entering my late thirties, yet I feel like I should be worried about class schedules and the fear that I will have to sprint across campus and run up eight flights of stairs in less than ten minutes in order to make it to O-Chem lab in time. Of course, that was actually a long time ago. Quite a while ago. A long while ago. A very long while ago. A mighty, mighty, mighty, mighty, mighty, mighty long ways back.
Dang am I a geezer. Or a geezer wanna be. Why is it that I find the prospect of becoming an old geezer a cheerful one?
Enough of this, here are the real bits and chunks of the entry in a somewhat nonchronological order:
one:
John got it into his head that we needed to redo the office, as in paint, get new (cheap) furniture, and try to get it all to look good; so we have spent the past two weekends painting, buying new (cheap ikea) furniture, trying to get it all looking good, and getting on each others nerves as often as possible. Despite ourselves, the office looks good. After years of being decorating challenged, we finally have a room that looks like gay male homosexual interior decorator types (on a limited budget) had a hand in �designing� it, or at least as close to that look as two nerdy guys like John and I could get to such a look.
The �inspiration� for the room was certainly foofy enough. I have a set of postcards that are reproductions of old faded Mexican movie posters, and we decided to not only to frame and hang them, but to paint the room to match the faded/yellowed papered look of the poster backgrounds. Using these colors would go well with some Arts and Craft style lamps that John wanted to get, and doing some sort of murky paint effect (ragging in this case) would also have the added and convenient benefit of helping to hide the various and numerous imperfections of an older house.
Sadly, there was an unintended and unfortunate result from our bout of interior decorating. We now loathe the white walls of every other room of the house, and god forbid, but the temptation to do more is strangely compelling.
With somethings in life, it is safer to never have started.
two:
Continuing with the going to the movies alone because I can�t anyone else to go with me theme in my life, I saw American Splendor last weekend. Luckily, the movie also continued the seeing good films streak I�ve been having. I really liked the movie.
I�m not a huge fan of Harvey Pekar�s work, but I have seen enough of it to have laughed at how there are various images of him (depending on who is drawing an issue) in the comic was mirrored in the movie as well, with actors and the real people they portray both showing up.
There was a mid forties woman sitting behind me who seemed to be having a much more intense experience of the movie than I was. Something funny would occur, and I would chuckle while she would guffaw. During the cancer years section of the movie, I felt sad, while she sounded as if she were desperately trying not to weep out loud.
One of these days I�m going to have to get my friends over their fears of art house/independent movies.
three:
Every time I hear a cell phone that screams out "DING!!!!!DING!!!!!! YOU HAVE AN INCOMING CALL!!!!!DING!!!!DING!!!!!!" I want to go into a murderous rampage, but I don't, since that wouldn't be very nice, and I'm, you know, a nice guy.
Just thought I�d share.
four:
One of my mother�s ghosts has been hanging around the house lately. The last time he was here, he got on my nerves and I told him to go home, so he sulked back to my parents house. Which may be why this time around he�s been avoiding me. He has taken to skulking around in rooms that I�m not in, and amusing himself late at night by turning faucets on and off to annoy me.
There�s nothing worse than a prankster figment of the imagination.
five:
John and I had dinner a couple of weeks ago with Fernando and Enrique at downtown disney of all places. It was the middle of the work week, but late enough that we didn�t hit too much by way of rush hour traffic heading down to Orange County. I�m still not sure why the decision was made to meet at a big tourist trap, but then again, I never understand these things.
We ate at the sandwich/salad place at the very end of the shopping mall close to the park entrances. The food was unexciting and overpriced, but the location did give us a view of folks leaving disneyland and california adventure trying to decide if they should look for one last souvenir in the ginormous disney store conveniently located directly across from the waiting area for the trams which take you out to the parking structure and freedom.
Nonunexpectedly, work talk dominated a lot of the conversation that night. That and the mechanics of developing photographs, but since John is the photographer of the family, I just sat there and looked pretty during that section of the conversation. Ok, ok, I just sat there not looking pretty, enjoying the last bits of sunlight as the sun set.
We left late enough that the nightly summer fireworks show at disneyland started as we walked back to our cars. We stood there between the monorail and the lego store and continued with our nondisney conversations, watching the sky burst in colors and noise. Talk went from discussing the recent boy meets boy TV show, to one of us mentioning that he once dated a man who actually lived in the trailer park next to disneyland back before it was torn down to make room for the expansion we were standing in.
It was a slightly odd time. For me at least, the disneyland firework show is a mark of summer, like the everpresent heat, or chomping down on a juicy watermelon, not that I have actually seen the firework show from inside the park since I was a kid. It�s normally something you see in the distant sky at an Orange County friend�s party, or something you drive by as you head up the 5 freeway heading back home. This was the first time I�ve seen it this year, and summer is nearly at an end, so it felt a bit off, a bit strange.
I was very tired by that point and had to get up the early the next day for work, so that probably helped with the melancholy feeling as well. We stood there until the show blew it�s last wad, then we called it a night.
more later,
nico
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