June 2003 Archives

Conservative queer blogger and journalist Andrew Sullivan and I are in agreement today about some of the troubling subtext of Bill Frist's remarks, particularly in regard to his support of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage because of his belief that "marriage is a sacrament," including a definition of it as being "between a man and a woman," and that this religiously influenced belief somehow should be reflected in law.

Sullivan also points out another problem in Frist's comments in support of amending the Constitution, an hypocrisy given that the conservative voice usually strongly voices support for state's rights, and that some already have condemned the Supreme Court decision precisely for, in their opinion, usurpation of a state's right to criminalize private sexual behavior:

Of course it was dismaying to hear Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist casually declare he favors writing permanent discrimination against gays and lesbians into the U.S. Constitution. Tampering with the Constitution as a way to prevent states deciding, as they always have, what constitutes a legal marriage would be an assault on federalism, an assault on gay citizens, and the equation of the meaning of the United States with active discrimination against minorities.

Granted, this was in the works prior to last Thursday's Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas, but it's picking up some new steam with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's statement yesterday on ABC's This Week. As reported in The Washington Post, Frist said that he supports a proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriages, introduced May 22 by Rep. Marilyn N. Musgrave (R-Colo.) and referred to the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution last Wednesday, one day before the Supreme Court decision.

One of the more disturbing elements of this revelation is in Frist's statement that "I very much feel that marriage is a sacrament, and that sacrament should extend and can extend to that legal entity of a union between--what is traditionally in our Western values has been defined--as between a man and a woman. So I would support the amendment." Sacrament is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as:

1. Christianity A rite believed to be a means of or visible form of grace, especially: a. In the Eastern, Roman Catholic, and some other Western Christian churches, any of the traditional seven rites that were instituted by Jesus and recorded in the New Testament and that confer sanctifying grace. b. In most other Western Christian churches, the two rites, Baptism and the Eucharist, that were instituted by Jesus to confer sanctifying grace.

2. A religious rite similar to a Christian sacrament, as in character or meaning.

If marriage is purely a sacrament, then it has no place in the law of this country; I suspect that laws designed to define baptism or the Eucharist would clearly be seen as an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment. Religious conservatives shouldn't be allowed to have it both ways, then: either marriage is a religious sacrament, in which case it shouldn't be legislated by the state, nor should it confer any special benefits by the state to the parties married. If it is to confer special legal and civil benefits, however, then it should be divorced from its religious, sacramental underpinnings, and should be available to all citizens, regardless of the sex of the parties involved.

We need a clearer demarcation between the legal union of two people acknowledged and encouraged--through the range of legal benefits conferred--by the state, and the religious recognition of a commitment between two people; we probably shouldn't use the term "marriage" for both. Personally, I'd prefer if the state only recognized "civil unions" or "domestic partnerships" for all, heterosexual as well as homosexual, reserving the word "marriage" purely for religious ceremonies, which in and of itself would confer no special legal privileges.

The Post article also notes that "Frist said the Supreme Court's decision last week on gay sex threatens to make the home a place where criminality is condoned." So, despite the Supreme Court's recognition that gay sex is, in fact, not a criminal act, the Majority Leader of our Senate continues to equate the two. And this man, someone who so clearly does not understand the concept of "equal justice, for all," who named Rick Santorum as a "man of caring, compassion and tolerance," is the person leading our legislative branch. Thank goodness he's no longer practicing medicine, at least.

hear the clip

Transcript follows:

"Virginia is for Lovers" has been the tourism slogan of the Commonwealth of Virginia since sometime during my childhood. Yet this is a phrase that has always sounded hollow (and still sounds superficial and ridiculous) to me, a Virginian by birth and a resident for all but seven years of my life, given the familiar usage of the word "lovers" to denote the partners in a gay or lesbian relationship and that mine is very clearly a state that, at the state level, at least (there are pockets of tolerance and acceptance, particularly including my own Arlington County), is not at all supportive of its gay and lesbian citizens.

Granted, Virginia historically hasn't been particularly supportive of all other lovers, either, even fighting for the right to keep its miscegenation laws on the books all the way to the Supreme Court in 1967, in the case of Virginia v. Loving.

True to form, then, following yesterday's Supreme Court ruling that has the effect of overturning Virginia's own "Crimes Against Nature" law, as reported by The Washington Post and noted also by Gene, our Attorney General, Jerry W. Kilgore (R), has spoken out against the decision:

Kilgore (R) expressed disappointment with the ruling, which he said invalidates a state statute banning oral and anal sex between consenting gay and heterosexual couples. "As one who believes that the courts are to interpret and not create law, I disagree with the ruling and am always disappointed when a court undermines Virginia's right to pass legislation that reflects the views and values of our citizens," he said in a statement.

My own disappointment comes from the degradation of Virginia from its position as one of the centers of the birthplace of the American Revolution ("Mother of States and Statesmen") through its lamentable position as hosting the capitol of the Confederacy to its current pride in an extremely regressive political mindset exemplified by Kilgore's statement. Aren't I a citizen of Virginia? What about reflecting my views and values? As a child growing up in Virginia, I was inundated in school with classes in Virginia History, and I felt so proud that, by an accident of ancestry and birth, I was one of a long line of Virginians. My senior year of high school, I was honored by the Daughters of the American Revolution as the "Good Citizen of the State of Virginia," delivering a speech to them about patriotism (I am so embarrassed to remember the degree of my naïveté, even as late as 17; I'm just so grateful now that it wasn't an honor bestowed by the Daughters of the Confederacy) at a dinner in Richmond fêting my youthful accomplishments. I suspect that had I been out that year, rather than a few months later once I reached the safety of college, that award would have gone to another; even now there are those, like Kilgore, who believe that a gay man cannot de facto be a "good citizen," and, until yesterday, I was indeed an unapprehended felon and recidivist for my (all too) occasional acts of sodomy.

Yet I still sometimes feel the stirring of that bizarre erstwhile pride in having been born a Virginian. When I moved back to the DC area from my seven years in Massachusetts, I made a deliberate decision to live in Virginia rather than Maryland. Even now, as the Commonwealth has delivered disappointment after disappointment to me as a gay man, especially, but as a human and civil rights advocate more generally, I still identify, to some degree, as a Virginian--or, at least, as a Virginian of an ideal Virginia, the Platonic Commonwealth that might have been. And, while I remain in the DC area, I feel that it's important that I stay here, and try to change things, and not to cede this, which is my home, too, to the narrow-minded, those who idealize a different historical Virginia, and who pray to their Dixie God, as per the lamentable state song, to Carry Me Back to Old Virginny:

Where I labored
So hard for old Massa,
Day after day
In the field of yellow corn....

There's where the old darkey's
Heart am long'd to go.

Frankly, I'm ready for a brand new Virginny, a Virginia that looks forward rather than nostalgically back, one that truly is for lovers, not haters.

In my previous entry about the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence et al. v. Texas, I reported that Justice Scalia, author of the dissent, stated that he had "nothing against homosexuals," as quoted by the AP this morning, which quote conjures up the stereotypical comment of the racist that "I have nothing against black people, some of my best friends are black; I just wouldn't want my sister to marry one, etc.".

Now that I've had a chance to read the full text of the opinion, concurrence and dissents, I find that what Justice Scalia actually said was that he has "nothing against homosexuals... promoting their agenda through normal democratic means," which is very different from the impression left by the original AP quote taken out of context.

I still think that some bigotry against homosexuals clearly comes across in Justice Scalia's words, the use of the phrase "homosexual agenda" several times not the least, but I don't approve of selectively quoting a portion of a statement and using it in a way that its original author did not intend. So I apologize for compounding that error by using the AP quotation directly before reading the dissent for myself.

The ruling is in, and in a 6-3 majority the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a Texas law prohibiting consensual homosexual sex violated constitutional privacy rights. This decision, based as it is on privacy rather than equal protection, means that Virginia's own sodomy law--which prohibits both heterosexual and homosexual sodomy--also is unconstitutional. I will soon no longer be a criminal for having sex in the privacy of my own home (ok, so it's an academic distinction given the state of my sex life).

While the best ruling for invalidating sodomy laws in the nine states like mine that technically prohibit it in all cases, not just between members of the same sex, it's not necessarily the best ruling that could have come overall, if my legal understanding is correct (Tin Man, a lawyer, gives a great rundown on the potential ramifications of the various rationales for deciding this case). If the Court had invalidated the Texas sodomy law on the basis of equal protection, while potentially allowing states like Virginia to keep their sodomy laws intact since they are (theoretically) applied equally, the ruling might have given greater strength to other areas in which gay and lesbians are treated disparately--like marriage, adoption, inheritance, etc.--though such an outcome was by no means guaranteed, so invalidating the Texas law on the basis of privacy may very well have been the best we could hope for in the current political and social climates.

Oddly, the edited version of the AP article that first appeared this morning in The Washington Post omits a portion of the original, a damning statement by Justice Antonin Scalia. [Update 11:18 am: the Post since has replaced this with the full text, including the comments by Scalia.]

"The court has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda," Scalia wrote for the three [dissenting: Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice Thomas and himself]. He took the unusual step of reading his dissent from the bench.

"The court has taken sides in the culture war," Scalia said, adding that he has "nothing against homosexuals."

He has "nothing against homosexuals," but he would deny them the right to have consensual private sex? Are we back on Bizarro World again? Hypocritically, and as Gene also points out, it's the members of the court considered most "conservative," who here have taken the very anti-conservative approach of suggesting that the government should be invasively policing our personal, consensual, private behaviors.

So... I feel like I should have some celebratory consensual homosexual sex. Any patriotic individuals out there who want to help me honor the wisdom of our judicial branch?

At the library a few weeks ago, I picked up some books from the sale table, at ten cents per paperback and twenty-five per hardcover. For those prices, I could take some risks; one of the paperbacks I picked up looked like the kind of urban fantasy genre that's one of my guilty pleasures: Sister to the Rain, by Melisa Michaels.

I'm about two-thirds of the way through it, and I'm quite enjoying it. But the most pleasant surprise was the discovery that Ms. Michaels' title is taken from a poem--a hauntingly beautiful poem--by that favored wit of literate gay men, Dorothy Parker:

Rainy Night

Ghosts of all my lovely sins,
  Who attend too well my pillow,
Gay the wanton rain begins;
  Hide the limp and tearful willow.

Turn aside your eyes and ears,
  Trail away your robes of sorrow,
You shall have my further years--
  You shall walk with me tomorrow.

I am sister to the rain;
  Fey and sudden and unholy,
Petulant at the windowpane,
  Quickly lost, remembered slowly.

I have lived with shades, a shade;
  I am hung with graveyard flowers.
Let me be tonight arrayed
  In the silver of the showers.

Every fragile thing shall rust;
  When another April passes
I may be a furry dust,
  Sifting through the brittle grasses.

All sweet sins shall be forgot;
  Who will live to tell their siring?
Hear me now, nor let me rot
  Wistful still, and still aspiring.

Ghosts of dear temptations, heed;
  I am frail, be you forgiving.
See you not that I have need
  To be living with the living?

Sail, tonight, the Styx's breast;
  Glide among the dim processions
Of the exquisite unblest,
  Spirits of my shared transgressions,

Roam with young Persephone.
  Plucking poppies for your slumber...
With the morrow, there shall be
  One more wraith among your number.

"I am sister to the rain;
  Fey and sudden and unholy..."

Beautiful.

Twenty-four percent of Americans surveyed in a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll actually believe that Iraq used biological or chemical weapons against U.S. troops during the war this spring--not just had or even had had biological or chemical weapons, but used them. And 56% would favor pre-emptively striking Iran as well, to prevent them from developing nuclear weapons.

My stomach hurts; my mind boggles.

I'm such a sucker for personality, intelligence and other (pseudo-)psychological tests, and Vernon has just drawn my attention to yet another (choose the link for "Do you use your left or right hemisphere more?").

My results:

Your Brain Usage Profile

Auditory : 53%
Visual : 46%
Left : 44%
Right : 55%

Thom, you show a slight right-hemisphere dominance with a moderate preference for auditory processing, an unusual and somewhat paradoxical combination of characteristics.

You are drawn to a random and sometimes nonchalant synthesis of material. You learn as it seems important to a specific situation, and might even develop a resentment of others who attempt to direct your learning down a specific channel.

Your right-hemispheric dominance provides a structure that is only loosely organized and one which processes entire swatches of reality, overlooking details. You are emotional in your reactions and perceptual more than logical in your approach, although you can impose structure and a language base when necessary.

Your auditory preference, on the other hand, implies that you process information sequentially and unidimensionally. This combination of right-brain and auditory modes creates conflict, as you want to process data more rapidly than your natural processes allow.

Your tendency to be creative and free-flowing is accompanied by sufficient ability to organize and be logical, allowing you a reasonable degree of success in a number of different endeavors. You take in information methodically and systematically which can then be synthesized rapidly. In this manner, you manage to function consistently well, although certainly less efficiently than you desire.

You prefer the abstract and are a theoretician at heart while retaining the ability to be practical. You find the symbolism in a great deal of what you encounter and are something of a "mystic."

With regards to your lifestyle, you have the mentality which would be good as a philosopher, writer, journalist, or instructor, or possibly as a systems designer or social worker. Perhaps most important is your ability to "listen to your inner voice" as a mode of skipping over unnecessary steps to achieve your goals.

This feels like rather a good fit to the way I view and interact with the world and, not surprisingly, my brain usage profile again is described as having "an unusual and somewhat paradoxical combination of characteristics." Words to this effect seem to pop up in most of my testing and personality assessments. I suppose that means I'm unique, complex and challenging, or perhaps just a mixed-up, screwed-up mess.

This was a particularly interesting test, albeit I have no assurance of any real validity, other than the fact that it feels "right" (and there's that "perceptual more than logical" bent right there). For each question, there's no right or wrong answer--rather, each choice corresponds to either left- or right-brain dominance, and either auditory or visual processing, or a neutral orientation to one or the other--so it was interesting to see how I wrestled with choosing the "best" for me, when I could come up with a rationale in each instance for any of the responses.

Very little creeps me out, but this Reuters story is the sort of thing that can.

A 13-year-old Indian boy has begun producing winged beetles in his urine after hatching the eggs in his body.... Doctor Chittaranjan Maity, Medical Education Director of West Bengal state where the boy is from, said doctors found the beetles while examining him for pain in the groin area.

"Doctors were really surprised to see the beetles," he told Reuters. "There are eggs of the beetle in a fistula in his body and he is getting medical treatment to try to kill the eggs," Maity said.

The boy had been taken to hospital Sunday after complaining of pain while urinating.

The beetles--more than half a centimeter in length--belong to the Staphylinidae rove beetle family of insects. Most types are predators but some feed on fungi, algae and decaying plant matter.

During my early teenage years, I was stroking the family cat, when I noticed a soft swelling on her side. I called my dad in, and he determined that she had a warble--the name for both the larva of the parasitical warble fly and the swelling that it creates under the skin of an animal as it grows. Warble flies usually lay their eggs on the skins of large mammals like cattle, horses and deer; when the eggs hatch, the larvae burrow under the skin where they migrate beneath the muscle, usually to the esophagus or spinal canal where they remain dormant during the winter; in spring they migrate back closer to the surface of the skin where they mature. This was already a mature larva under our cat's skin; while I held the cat, my dad punctured the swelling with a needle, and abruptly and startlingly the worm-like larva popped right out. It was one of the most frightening and disturbing things I'd ever witnessed to that point.

Since then, the idea of being infested by something that eats its way out of my body has been one of--not "fear," precisely, since I don't think of such an event as being terrifically likely to the point of giving it much conscious thought--discomfort, but with a simultaneous, perverse interest when reading of such cases or similar medical oddities, like bezoars and fetus in fetu (parasitic twin).

The past two years have been very disappointing for me in terms of vacation and travel. During the period between October, 2001 and August, 2002, during which I was unemployed, I theoretically had plenty of time to travel, but was reticent to spend the money to do so, to ensure that I continued to be able to make my mortgage and car payments. After Dad became very ill in the spring of 2002, I travelled home and later to Richmond to visit him in the hospital there. And, once I did start working again last August, I was expending almost immediately what little annual leave and sick leave I was earning, travelling back to Richmond for my own medical examinations as I was being evaluated as a potential kidney donor. Then, in January, when a cadaveric donor was located and the transplant took place, I again spent several days with Dad and Mom at the hospital. More recently, I'd had to take annual leave to take Alex, my cat, to the vet; the specialist he had to see earlier this month, and who wants to see him again in July, only sees patients in this area on Mondays, so I can't schedule a weekend visit in order to protect my leave.

I did take two days of leave the end of this past April to visit Roger and Raymond over a four-day weekend in Tucson, but that's the only trip I've taken for myself--with the exception last summer of a one-day flight up to Niagara Falls to meet Kent, spend a few hours sightseeing, and then fly back home that evening--since my trip to Vancouver in the spring of 2001 for the annual gay and lesbian squaredance convention.

And even now I have only three days of annual leave, so I can't even look forward to taking a week off and getting away this entire summer. After having had to forego last year's convention in Toronto, I had hoped to be able to attend this year's in San Diego, but the lack of sufficient annual leave means I won't be going next month, a particular disappointment since I've never been to San Diego.

My friend Peg, though, now has asked if she might come to Arlington and spend a few days with me the week following her own attendance at convention, so while I won't be able to see all my squaredance friends, I will at least have a social visit from her.

And, now that I have the temporary use of my friend Craig's car, which is more reliable than my own, I've also been planning to take a trip back home to visit my family, whom I haven't seen since shortly after Dad returned home from his kidney transplant in February. I had originally thought to drive there over the long weekend of Independence Day, but most of my family--including Mom and Dad, my sister and her family, and my aunt, uncle and cousins--are leaving early that Saturday morning for their family vacation in North Carolina. So I contacted Sheldon and Lisa to find out their plans for that weekend, and they've invited me to come spend it with them at their new home in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia.

I may go to see my parents as early as this weekend, then, or I may wait until the third weekend of July. Either way, it looks like there will be three weekends in a row before the end of next month that I'll either be away or hosting visitors of my own. Feast or famine.

And while it will be very nice to see Peg, Sheldon and Lisa, and my family, I'm still frustrated and a little depressed that it likely will be winter or even into next year before I'm able to take a significant vacation of my own. And I'm struggling with whether to use the few hours of leave I do have to at least take some long weekends away--maybe a trip to New York, for example--but thereby postponing even further the accumulation of enough additional leave to provide for at least a week off, while also leaving enough hours for emergencies or other necessary time off, like Alex's veterinary appointments.

Sometimes it really sucks being a (reasonably) responsible adult and holding down a job.

Even at 40, it's possible to have truly new experiences. Last night I heard one drag queen sing a love song--in Yiddish--and another perform a paean to herpes, to the tune of The Way We Were: "Can it be that it was herpes simplex then?", when Jeff and I went to see Winnie, Trixie, Rachel and Trampolina, otherwise known as The Kinsey Sicks, "America's Favorite Dragapella Beautyshop Quartet," at the Birchmere, and I had a blast.

It was a wonderfully funny show, with clever lyrics, tight harmonies and terrific performances, and with vocal and stylistic ranges as broad as Rachel's hips. The four divas in their over-the-top drag performed for a solid two hours, starting with "You're Scaring Us," a song about aging queens, sung to the tune of "Age of Aquarius." The only vocal break was provided by their sick and bizarre (and therefore hilariously popular) audience participation game, Choices, which began with such questions as "Would you rather have your face epoxied to a urinal, or be tit-clamped to Martha Stewart for a week?" and proceeded through "Would you rather have sex with Mr. Rogers, or Mr. Ed?" which generated some discussion--and changing audience opinions--based on whether they meant alive or dead.

Now, the interesting thing I just learned today is that the man behind Rachel, who also serves as the group's lyricist and manager, is Ben Schatz, former executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association, and the president of my college's Lesbian and Gay student group when he and I were undergraduates together 20-odd years ago. I wish I'd known this last night; I'd have stuck around after the performance at least to say hello.

Oh, and Jeff's hair looked fabulous. I think I need to make an appointment to be coiffed and pampered at the Grooming Lounge.

On Tuesday, I wrote about my thoughts about trying to reconnect with a guy I'd been dating earlier this year. After we stopped dating, he had suggested that we get together sometime for lunch, but we never arranged anything. Since then, we hadn't been in contact at all.

So, right after I posted that entry, I sent him an email saying hello and asking if he wanted to try again for that lunch, and to catch up on each other's lives.

His first response was a curt and non-committal, though not overtly impolite, one sentence. Yesterday, though, I received a longer, more vituperative email, suggesting that he'd only gone out with me in January and February because he was "very vulnerable and depressed," and his "clarity wasn't the best." Now, though, "in a much better place" and "much more sure" of himself, he knows "whom [he] would like to spend [his] time with socially," and apparently that doesn't mean me. He went on to decline the invitation but said he preferred not to discuss the rationale or his feelings about it.

Ok, ouch. But at least there's a sense of closure, which is probably what I needed more than I needed to actually see or speak with him again. As time goes by, I have a strong tendency to smooth over rough edges and bad memories, often creating a nostalgia for false or selective memories of only the best times and most positive features. His response, though, and the subsequent chorus of "I told you so" from friends, jarred me back into a set of more balanced memories--including his racist conversation on the phone with a co-worker, about another co-worker; the night I treated him to dinner and a flamenco concert for his birthday, which started with him accusing me of being unfaithful (when I noted en passant in the record store that a poster of Julio Iglesias was "attractive"), and ended with him crying and screaming at me on the sidewalk after the show; the suggestion, the first time we tried to sleep together, that I might consider getting rid of my cat, since he was allergic--leaving me bewildered now why I'd even have wanted to reconnect. I think it really was just a reaction to the sentimentality and some degree of loneliness I've been feeling after watching Daddy & Papa, All Over the Guy, and Big Eden, among others, rather than an honest appraisal of what and whom are most suitable for inclusion in my life. But given that my thoughts even at the end of All Over the Guy were shock and dismay that those two incompatible guys could continue to try to create a relationship together, I really should have known better than to start to make that same mistake--again--in my own life. For an allegedly smart guy, though, sometimes I'm awfully dumb.

Yesterday morning, in the first of a number of incidents that made it a Bad Wish-I'd-Stayed-in-Bed Day, the database files for my MovableType installation were, for some reason, not working. This resulted in being unable to log in; to use the search engine; or to post new entries, comments or trackbacks. Some research in the MovableType manual and on the support boards suggested that it was most probable that my ISP had made changes either to their version of the Berkely DB Library or of Perl, such that the current version couldn't read the database files created by an older version.

After a number of messages back and forth with my ISP throughout the day, around 11:00 last night they were able to update my database files and resolve the problem, and I didn't lose any data. So, for better or worse, I'm back in business with barely a stutter.

hear the clip

Transcript follows:

My TiVo has been recording a lot of gay-themed programming, especially from the Pride Month lineup on Sundance. Last night, for example, I finally saw the gay-themed All Over the Guy, written by and starring Dan Bucatinsky, and also starring Richard Ruccolo (one of the two cute guys from the TV series Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place).

Nearly a day later, I'm still not sure what I think about the movie, whether I "liked" it or not. There were times I was really angry and frustrated with both characters, even though I know they were intentional caricatures of patterns of behavior in and out of relationships for the sake of the story, wondering why the hell two people like them would continue to put up with one another. What probably has left me most ambivalent, though, was that I saw myself and some of my own self-destructive relationship-sabotaging behaviors not in either character alone--though I did identify with Eli much more--but to some degree in both, as I've also been guilty of Tom's push-pull, "any guy who would want me must not be worth having" philosophy. Despite the romantic comic tone of the film, it was rather sobering to see myself so clearly at times in the dysfunctional relationship portrayed on the screen.

The timing also was interesting in that over the past couple of weeks I've often found myself thinking about the last guy I dated, for a month or so at the beginning of the year, and how the interactions and relationship between Eli and Tom offered some parallels to my own experience. At the time, I had been truly convinced that the timing was completely wrong, that he needed more separation from his dissolved marriage before embarking on a new relationship with me and more acknowledgement of his frequent and unmerited feelings of jealousy and anger, that we both also first needed to deal with our individual struggles with depression and anxiety, and that for these reasons we really were better off breaking up; but I also see now the ways in which I obviously was hurtful and intransigent and distant, though back then I focused mostly--though not solely--on his own sabotaging and contributory words and deeds. I was sorry then that it ended the way it did, but I think I'm even more regretful now; I've stayed on good terms with my other former boyfriends, usually remaining very close, in fact, yet in this case--with someone who may have been the best fit to my physical, intellectual and spiritual ideals--we spoke only once or twice after breaking up, and not at all after a couple of weeks had gone by.

So I've been thinking about attempting to reconnect, trying to re-establish the friendship. On the other hand, I also wonder if maybe this is more just a sentimentality born of my feelings of solitude, which recently have seemed more prevalent than usual; relationship envy, as more and more of my friends--even the ones I thought were confirmed bachelors--pair off; or maybe even just a form of spring fever compounded from not even going out and getting myself laid in lieu of finding love and commitment. But rather than continuing the second-guessing and assuming the grapes are sour, I may as well take the risk and give him a ring.

On the way home from work today, I stopped by the Safeway across the street to pick up some catfood and Diet Dr. Pepper. As I was checking out, a very cute guy joined the express lane next to mine, carrying only a jar of hot fudge. Another clerk came and opened a new lane, and I moved over to it; a few seconds later, he appeared behind me in that lane. He definitely pinged my gaydar, but I was concentrating so on completing my transaction and getting out of the store that I didn't think to smile or say hi.

When I got to the car a few minutes later, the car parked next to mine, which hadn't been there when I arrived, had two rainbow stickers and an HRC sticker. Not necessarily his, of course, but the parking lot and the store both were pretty empty, so I think the odds were pretty good.

If I were Faustus, I'd be covered in chocolate syrup right now rather than sitting here alone posting this entry.

As though it weren't bad enough that easily one-half to two-thirds or more of the email I receive is spam, in the past week some spammer has used one of my email addresses as the alleged sender and reply-to addresses for a couple of series of spam mailings, so my mailbox has been flooded with undeliverable messages; today this occurred again. I sent a message to my email provider after the first incident last week letting them know, because I was concerned that people might start making (unfounded) complaints that I was spamming them; I've heard stories of ISPs cutting off email accounts of accused spammers without attempting to resolve the situation. An examination of the headers shows that the emails didn't actually come from my mail server, but I don't trust my email provider to take the care necessary to confirm that. And, sadly, but much as I expected, their response didn't hearten me, given that they completely misunderstood my message, interpreting it oppositely as a complaint that I had been spammed by one of their users and letting me know where to report it.

Each time I speak with my parents, they invariably ask me to give my maternal grandfather a call sometime, and to try to call him regularly. I'm usually hesitant to do so. Despite my very close relationships with my parents and the rest of my family, that with my grandfather has been far less comfortable or mutually respectful. Everyone agrees that he's a difficult man--stern, close-minded, selfish and controlling, and more and more often demonstrably angry and bitter. Yet all of the family who live still in my home town are afraid to question or cross him; we've all been "cut out of the will" at least once or twice for failing to meet his exacting standards or whims, a tactic that fails to impress or affect me, but which seems to terrify the rest of the family, as they seemingly buy into his equation of money and land to love. My mother and aunt crave his regard and praise, yet in their entire lives he's never once told my mother that he loved her, or my aunt that he was proud of her.

For years, my grandmother worked a full-time job; raised their two children (though admittedly my mother ended up doing a lot of the housework as well as providing much of the care for her sister, twelve years her junior); worked beside my grandfather building fences, planting, cutting and baling hay; and cared for her own mother who moved in with them after suffering a stroke, while still being expected to take care of my grandfather's exacting needs. Yet now that she needs his support--as over most of the past decade Alzheimer's has regressed her to the mind and memories of her childhood and an increasing level of physical struggle against her caretakers--he is largely unable or unwilling to step up to the plate. Rather, he demands that my mother, aunt and sister alone care for my grandmother while steadfastly refusing to allow anyone even to suggest that other arrangements might be necessary or provide better quality of life for everyone. It's not uncommon for him to just leave home for a week or more at a time, often with only a few hours' notice, to retreat to his hunting cabin in the woods, leaving the rest of the family to handle all the responsibilities at home.

On the other hand, when I was a child and even a young adult, he most often seemed very proud, loving and giving. He doted on my sister and me when we were children, as he does on his great-grandchidren now, more or less: he has a very special relationship with one of my nephews who shares his love of hunting and fishing, but is less involved with or supportive of the other two nephews, who have different interests or who are challenging in other ways, as with my youngest nephew, whose speech impediment frustrates my grandfather who, with his own diminution of hearing, is unable to communicate successfully with him. And my parents tell me that he asks about me every day, part of a growing preoccupation with matters of family and mortality.

Our conversations often are stilted: we share little in common, and my life is a mystery to him. When we do speak on the phone, our conversations are formulaic and safe: we speak of the weather, he makes a political joke, I ask about his health, he asks about my car and when I'm coming home to visit. My phone call to him this past Saturday followed that pattern, though I have to admit that it felt different to me this time, as though he and I were relatively at peace with each other. I didn't hear--or elected not to hear--value judgments or criticisms, and in turn I didn't hurry to end the conversation, but let him drive the amount of time we remained, to the degree possible, connected. Every activity, for him, seems now to be colored by the question, perhaps unspoken by him though occasionally voiced to me by others in the family, of whether this will be the last time: will this be his last trip to the beach? his last summer baling hay? our last phone call?

And while I can never forget the pain he's often caused my mother, especially, and the rest of my family, nor can I summon up an unquestioned respect for someone who has been capable of such cruelty and unconsidered stubbornness, I can--and do--forgive him, just as I must learn to forgive myself for such of these behaviors and patterns of thought as I discover mirrored within me.

Wednesday evening, as I had reported, I reconnected with an old friend at Craig's pre-Europe trip get-together. I was telling her about my car woes, my pending decision to buy a new car, and my continued sense--first noted in one of my comments on Gene's journal--that my choice will be between the MINI Cooper and the Toyota Prius. After telling me that she and her husband had bought a Saab, which is what I also currently own, she said that they too had looked at the MINI, and she was urging me to get one; also encouraging style over function, W-- at work has been encouraging the MINI over the Prius as well.

When I got home that night, there was a note in my mailbox that a package had been delivered, but the concierge was making his security rounds at that time, so I wasn't able to pick it up from the front desk. I stopped downstairs Friday morning on the way to work and picked up the package, which was from Roger; he had told me he was going to send me some video of his and Raymond's trip to Long Beach and Disneyland, and of Raymond's most recent concert, and that he had put in "some extras." The box contained three video tapes, a music CD of the Jekyll and Hyde soundtrack, another MP3 CD of a variety of music, a pin of a cute animated Disney guy (especially interesting given Roger hadn't even read my Audblog entry about my attraction to animated hotties)... and a 1:32 IR remote control scale model of a MINI Cooper, with which Alex and I have had a lot of fun playing.

I had first assumed that if I bought a MINI, I would get it in green, my favorite color. But there's been a yellow one in the parking lot at work, which looks particularly sweet and has more of an impact than the green; the model that Roger sent also was yellow.

In the meantime, Craig offered to lend me his car--a Hyundai Santa Fe--while he's away in Europe. He dropped it by Friday evening, and I drove him to the airport. I had planned to drive it out to the MINI dealer yesterday, but in addition to another day of bad weather outside, I was feeling under-the-weather inside--with a headache, earache, sore throat and fatigue all day-- so I stayed in and rested. Perhaps next weekend I'll finally get to take a test drive in a MINI.

Craig joked that he wants to get me hooked on his SUV so that I'll join the ranks of the gas guzzlers. To be fair, the Santa Fe's gas mileage actually is pretty good, almost as good as my Saab. And while there are aspects of the ride I quite like, including being up higher on the road and the amount of room, after taking it Friday evening to the airport and today to church, I find that I'm feeling rather uncomfortable and hypocritical driving and being seen in an SUV. So the Santa Fe hasn't supplanted the MINI or the Prius.

Alex, my cat, almost never seems to be interested in television, though the soundtracks of any programs broadcast in surround sound, and especially those in Dolby Digital, often do produce a reaction. However, he is often fascinated by animated computer games--The Sims Online especially captures his attention.

I recorded the new Lifetime program, Meow TV, allegedly for people and their cats, but Alex showed great intelligence and taste through his complete and almost disdainful disinterest in what turned out to be not just bad but dreadfully and almost singularly wretched.

At the moment, though, Ice Age is playing from the TiVo, and something about it seems to have drawn his interest.

I almost didn't go to my friend Craig's informal pre-trip-to-Europe get-together last night; at rush hour, and given my car's increasing state of disrepair, I didn't want to drive into DC and try to find parking in Dupont Circle, so I knew if I went I'd need to park somewhere out here and take the Metro. Driving home from work, I took a route that was the starting point for either a Metro station or home, and at one point turned off toward home but changed my mind en route and went to the Metro, and then on to the gathering, instead.

I was a little nervous, specifically because a former co-worker and very good friend during my dot-com days had indicated that she was going to attend. Immediately after my department was abolished and I was laid off along with my staff, she and I had made plans to get together, but the first time she had to postpone and the second I did, and then we never communicated again. Over time, I started to realize that I felt some anger at her, in that I felt she had been complicit in her silence while the company's CEO--her fiance's friend and college roommate--committed a number of dishonest, potentially illegal and, in my opinion, absolutely immoral acts in his oversight of the organization, and in his cavalier treatment of staff. So by the time last night's event rolled around twenty months after I had severed ties with the company, I just wasn't sure I wanted to see her again.

And, of course, when she showed up and people shifted at the table to make room for her, the empty seat available was right next to me. I have to admit that I was a little cool at first, though not, I think, unpleasant. But as the evening wore on, the situation continued to ease and my demeanor to warm, and by the time she and I were readying to leave at the same time, we were absolutely pals again--and I realized that I had indeed missed her very much--and we had exchanged new contact information and pledges to get together soon.

I'm glad that I decided to go. In addition to reconnecting with S--, I was also very happy that I had the chance to spend some time with Craig before his trip to Europe; and in the course of my conversation with him, he offered to let me use his car while he's away, which will finally allow me to get down to visit my parents over the next six weeks since my own car isn't suitable for longer trips, and he will borrow my digital camera for his trip. There was also a cute guy at the get-together, a new co-worker of Craig's roommate, but I didn't have an opportunity to talk to him at all--and akin to the fox's grapes, he likely was straight anyway, despite being surprisingly well-dressed for a computer engineer, which probably was what threw off my gaydar.

On my way home from Craig's get-together earlier tonight, I took the Metro to Pentagon City, where I'd left my car in order to take the train to and from Dupont Circle. When I left the club, and when I arrived at Pentagon City, the skies were gray but dry; I decided to spend a few minutes in Best Buy and Borders. Fifteen minutes later I left the store to walk to my car, and the skies had opened up in the meantime, and lightning was flashing all around.

I dashed to my car, about a block away, but my hair and clothes got pretty wet. Then when I got to my car, and stepped off the sidewalk into the street to get in, I noticed too late the deep puddle surrounding my car. My Kenneth Coles and the bottom three inches of my slacks were completely soaked. Meanwhile, the lightning was very close, with the thunderclaps practically simultaneous; the short drive home in the ragtop with the lightning arcing down all around was really rather exhilirating and a little adrenaline-inducing.

Adding fuel to my theory that Thoms-with-an-h are almost invariably gay, the list of bios for the "cultural experts," the "Fab Five" queer men (as noted on Gothamist) participating in the upcoming Bravo TV reality show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy includes a Thom--along with a Kyan, a Carson, a Jai and a... Ted. Ted? What kind of homo name is that? Seems to me that one of the "Fab Five" needs a nameover. Maybe give that uninspiring "e"--which after all appears three times in the words "heterosexual" and "breeder"--a stylish little circumflex: Têd. Even the word "circumflex" has such a homoerotic ring, don't you think, containing within it both cum and flex?

While lately I haven't been experiencing the emotional downswing of my depressive tendencies, I still have been very much perpetuating my social withdrawal, both in the real world and in the virtual environments in which I participate.

This came particularly to light on Monday, when I received an evite from my friend Craig--whom I'd consider my best friend locally--for a pre-summer get-together tonight at a local beer and billiards hangout. The invitation said "Nothing formal!... Eliot [his roommate] and I just needed an excuse to get out and drink," but seemingly contradictorily, "This may be the last time we get to see some of you for quite some time." And Eliot, in his acceptance of the invitation, wrote, "Got to see my roomie go out with a bang!"

Confused, I wrote to Craig, and in his reply email he told me that he's leaving this coming Monday for five and a half weeks in Europe. I'd been so out of touch with him over the past month or more that I didn't even know he was planning a trip to Europe, much less preparing for an imminent departure.

And my out-of-town and Internet friends have been wonderfully patient with me through this bout of uncommunicativeness, for which I'm grateful. I've made some small strides over the past couple of months, having gotten back in touch electronically with three people very important to me, and in person with Sheldon and Lisa; given that it's often a struggle for me to keep up my end, I'm very fortunate that my closest friendships have tended to weather these stretches of inactivity and inattention so well.

Based on some of the Pride month programming from the Sundance channel I'd recorded over this past week and a half, my TiVo now has been recording more and more suggestions with queer content on its own. Last night I watched "Daddy & Papa," an episode of PBS's Independent Lens series, and I found it very affecting.

Never having had any real angst about coming out and identifying as queer, for many years I did regret, however, what I thought was an implication that I'd never be a parent. More recently, of course, I've come to realize that I could become a parent--not necessarily easily, especially as a gay man living in Virginia, but it would be possible. I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about it, off and on, but haven't done any more in-depth research, or joined any "maybe baby" groups. Five years ago I had told myself that I needed to decide one way or the other before I was forty, an arbitrary cut-off age in my own mind for bringing a baby or young child into one's home. Now that I'm but six weeks away from 41, though, I'm not sure that I'm ready to cut myself off from the possibility just yet.

On the other hand, I've also come to realize that I'm not always even particularly successful at taking care of myself, my cat and my houseplants to the standards I think I should, so it might be best that I haven't pursued the possibility of fatherhood more vigorously.

At one level, I think I've been hoping and imagining that someone who already has kids would fall into my life, and that I'd get the husband, kids and white picket fence all in one fell swoop. The armor and charger are completely optional, of course.

Kelly Wallace--one of the men in the documentary, who was single at the time of filming and according to the update on the PBS site is single still--just really tugged at my heartstrings. Earlier in the film, Kelly talked about his realization that bringing the two young brothers into his home would make it much more difficult to have a adult relationship of his own, and his conscious decision to become a parent even if it meant he'd never again be someone's partner; but he also talked about how lonely the situation can be-- "not for the sex, but just to wake up and have someone hold you." Later, in a segment that even choked himself up--and I, who've been known to cry at fast food commercials, had tears streaming down my face as I listened, sitting there alone--he told about a story that his adopted son Jesse had told him:

Jesse woke me up and said, "You know what, daddy? When I was little I didn't have a family... so I just walked around the street by myself and I went up to one house and I said, 'No, that's not my house.' And then, Daddy, I came up to your house and I said, 'That's my house.' So I knocked on the door and you answered it, and I said, 'Would you be my Daddy?'" And I said, "You know, honey, I'd love to be your dad." And Jesse said, "So then I moved in... and now I have a family."

Too bad I don't live in San Francisco, where Kelly and the two boys are... at the very least, I'd want to get to know them better. See? I do have a romantic side, surprising as that may be, albeit an unrealistic one (ah... the cynic you all know isn't entirely absent today either). So... given that I know his name and his occupation, and therefore could probably fairly readily find his email address, would it be pro-active, friendly and bold--or creepy and invasive and stalker-like--to contact him and let him know that his words and actions touched me?

There's another good reason today to emigrate to Canada. An appeals court ruled today that the country's ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional, and Toronto's city clerk was ordered to issue marriage licenses to the couples named in the original suit. This afternoon, following the ruling, Michael Leshner and Michael Stark were married.

Meanwhile, just a little more than a week earlier, six members of the U.S. House of Representatives (three Democrats and three Republicans) introduced the Federal Marriage Amendment, seeking to have the U.S. Constitution amended in order to permanently ban gay marriages from being recognized.

And those Canadian men and their accents are so cute, too. Anyone up there interested in hiring this Yank, eh?

Each month, Washington Post columnist Bob Levey posts a neologism contest. Last month, the challenge was:

What do you call the little shake that people give a packet of sugar or artificial sweetener to settle the contents before they rip it open?

I sent in two entries, and one of them-- "dextrosterity"--was selected as an "almost and nearly" for the month. I had thought this was the poorer of the two, with "Equal-ization" being the one I thought was surely a contender for runner-up, if not the clear winner. But it didn't even get a mention. I thought maybe it was because "Equal" is a trademark, but some of the other runners up included "Sweet 'n' Lower," "Low 'n' Sweet," "Nutraswing" and "Nutra Swat," so that obviously wasn't the problem.

And the "winning" entry?

Sucroscillation?!

Guess there's no accounting for taste.

At the risk of jeopardizing my queer card or incurring the wrath of teenyboppers, I just do not get the appeal of Justin Timberlake. Sure, at times he demonstrates an interesting almost-fey quality to his movement and manner and, as Jeff noted in March, he has developed a relatively nicely gym-toned body. But I find his face--and I'm trying to be kind here--plain and uninspiring, at best (though I must admit that Herb Ritts did a great job of maximizing its strong points and minimizing its weaknesses in the Rolling Stone cover), and the current scruffy look, which I normally find attractive, on him really is quite unappealing.

Oddly, I was in the midst of posting this because Justin had come to mind both from my quick fast-forward through the TiVo recording of the MTV 2003 Movie Awards, and from Terry's numerous mentions of him. But when googling for a picture for him, the second headline of the three that Google returned as news was an article today from icWales, showing that results from a recent VH1 poll in the UK put Justin as the 14th sexiest person, one spot behind Elvis and just one spot ahead of Duran Duran.

I feel vindicated already.

<rant>

The federal government allows employees to request alternative or flexible work schedules, one of which is called a "compressed work schedule," or CWS. CWS enables an employee to work eight nine-hour days and one eight-hour day in a two-week period, with the tenth day off.

However, the executive director in my bureau is restrictive about granting such schedules and I've been told that above a certain GS level she won't permit it, so I've not been allowed to change my work schedule (never mind that my interim supervisor for most of the past year, two GS levels above me, was granted CWS).

This wouldn't bother me so much, except that, as I've whined before, I'm too much of a conscientious nice guy in the office. For months we've only had one Administrative Assistant, and she has been coming in at 7:45 and leaving at 4:30; when she is on break or at lunch, and between 4:30 and 5:00, I've most often been the one stuck answering the phones or greeting visitors to the office. I've had to forego my own lunch a number of times in order to cover, and at my level I'm also not permitted comp time; yet the AA diligently and accurately records every minute that I'm out for a doctor's appointment or otherwise on leave.

Last week we filled a second open AA position, so we finally managed to have full coverage on the front desk. Before the end of that first week, though, she'd requested and been granted CWS, which begins next week. After that, the original AA also requested and has been granted CWS. Fortunately, they're taking different days in alternate weeks as their day off, but it means that now there will be one day every week that we'll be back to a single AA; moreover, the nine-hour days will have the AAs here on their own after regular business hours end for the rest of us. With most of the trustworthy support staff I've known in the past, that wouldn't be a problem, but I've seen at least one of these AAs playing solitaire, buying things and taking care of personal issues on the phone, throughout the day, as well as taking long lunches, every day. So I don't expect much work to be done between 5 and 5:45 after the rest of us have left the office.

I know, I know... I probably should be grateful I have a job at all, and that it's one that allows me to leave at 5:00; after all, it's been many, many years since I last was able to work only an eight-hour day. On the other hand, I was making one and a third to two times as much back when I was working my twelve to sixteen hour days; a government salargy doesn't provide a great deal of incentive to put in such long hours.

And I also can see that, given that the AAs are making even less than I am, it's nice that they're provided an opportunity for more flexibility in their work schedules. Sigh... I'm always trying to see it from both sides, even in the midst of feeling that the truism about nice guys sometimes does play out for me at the finish line.

</rant>

Despite the last few days devoid of posts, I am still here, and haven't given up on this. Friday through Sunday, though, I was spending much of my waking hours editing my friend's dissertation. My edits to chapters one through three were pretty extensive, but I have to admit that by Sunday, especially with the headache from all those hours reading onscreen text, I wasn't able to be as thorough with chapters four and five, though I still think the results were an improvement over the originals.

And given the soggy Saturday--parts of the metro area were under flood warnings much of the day--I wasn't too disappointed not to be outside. The gay and lesbian squaredance club with which I used to dance even cancelled their participation in the Pride parade Saturday night; I suspect a number of other groups likely did as well. Sunday was relatively dry, if still gray and cool, but my workload didn't permit--and my mood didn't encourage--visiting the Pride festival that day.

My friend had offered to pay me for my editing work, but I had told her that a nice dinner somewhere would be sufficient. Given that when I woke up this morning, I felt like I hadn't even really had a weekend, I almost wish I'd agreed to the payment; I think I'll have to select a very nice restaurant as compensation.

Last night, I wrote about my ambivalence about the upcoming Pride festival. The situation already may have been resolved, however, as today I agreed to do a friend a favor by reading and doing an additional final edit on her doctoral dissertion, which is due to the committee on Monday morning. At 200+ pages, I'll likely be working on it most of the weekend, which probably won't leave me time to worry about going downtown for Pride anyway. I've got the first chapter in hand now, and will try to get it out of the way tonight, but there are five more after this one.

Truly, I'm flattered that she asked me to do this; granted, her first choice was someone who already has a Ph.D. in the field, but when he had to back out due to other commitments, the fact that she felt my educational background and previous editorial experience qualified me to give a reasonably intelligent evaluation of her work (I'd prefer to think that way than to assume--as I might have at various times and mental states--that I was just her last hope and better than nothing) provides a little ego boost.

Oh, I was also really proud of a joke I made at work this week. I was in a security training class, and the instructor was explaining the various categories under which information might be classified. She noted that a new executive order is expected from Dubya, and will include a new category for classifying information: weapons of mass destruction. I mused aloud that I suspected that even though he was purporting that "weapons of mass destruction" would be in the document, we probably wouldn't find it in the final analysis.

ba da bing. Thank you, thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, elvish has left the building.

I must be getting old... or perhaps just more jaded. This coming weekend is the DC Pride Festival, and I haven't even decided if I'm going to go to the parade, the festival or any other events, much less think about getting my hair cut, going to the gym, or buying any new clothes in order to look my smartest for the occasion. I'm sure I probably will end up going downtown, if even just for the eye candy--though sometimes that ends up making me even more depressed--but I don't feel any particular excitement or anticipation about Pride this year.

hear the clip

Transcript follows:

hear the clip

Transcript follows:

Alex and I visited the veterinary ophthalmologist today. We're fortunate in that the animal hospital where he gets his regular veterinary checkups is just up the block, so I normally can take him over there, on foot, in his carrier. The appointment today, though, was in Alexandria, about a twenty-minute drive. Alex hates--truly, madly, deeply hates--the car, but he was pretty good on the ride there. He did meow a lot, but he didn't scrabble against the metal bars or plastic sides of the carrier like he did the last time I tried to drive with him; that time I got so worried that he was going to hurt himself badly that I had to turn around and bring him home.

He also was really good in the waiting room, and initially during the examination. After a while, though, he got very fed up, and started hissing and spitting at the doctor and her assistant. After an initial examination, the doctor decided she needed to dilate his eyes, so she put the drops in and sent us back out to the waiting room for fifteen minutes. He was starting to get very antsy at that point, and was starting to cry and scrabble a bit. Oddly, two people with dogs came in at that point--well, it wasn't odd that people would bring dogs to a vet's office, of course, but odd in the way that Alex reacted, as he calmed right down, making no noise and just curling up in the carrier and watching them very carefully. Normally he would hiss at dogs, but he probably felt very insecure and just wanted to try to hide.

In the post-dilation examination, he was a very unhappy camper, indeed. The doctor did manage to check the pressure of his eyes for glaucoma, but he didn't make it easy, and he let out one hideous yowl, the likes of which I've only heard him make once before, at his regular vet's two weeks ago when they shaved his neck to check a bump there--he hates being restrained, especially by the neck.

The ride home was very rough; he cried the entire time, and started his wild scrabbling against the sides of the carrier. I kept talking to him and trying to reassure him, but by the time we got home, he was panting heavily and even gasping a little--I end up worrying that I do perhaps as much harm to him, in terms of his stress levels, by even taking him to the vet as he might be suffering otherwise.

Unfortunately, the ophthalmologist is stumped, and she says that it's an unusual presentation. While the ocular pressure is higher in the affected eye than the other, she doesn't believe that it's glaucoma; significantly, and more positive, she does believe that he still has sight in the affected eye, something Alex's regular vet thought was likely not the case. She believes that possibly his lens has become luxated and is adhering to the iris, or that there's some neurological damage to the right eye that is keeping the pupil from fully dilating or constricting (she was able to fully dilate one side of the right eye but only partially dilate the side of that eye that seems affected, using drops); another possibility is a tumor. She wants to just continue to observe him for now, and to have his regular vet screen him for hypertension, since the blood that appeared in his eye two weeks ago--and which had drained by the following week--sometimes is indicative, in cats, of high blood pressure. So we'll see her again in a month, unless there are any changes in the meantime, and we'll go back to his regular vet to have the blood pressure checked and to take care of the lump on his rump.