doubting thom

Last night, I logged back into There for the first time in several weeks. That sabbatical hadn’t been intentional so much as just incidental, but it still lasted longer than I expected or even realized. Roger and Lee hadn’t been pressuring me to come join them, and I hadn’t heard from Matt at all, so I just didn’t really give it much thought. But yesterday There released a new beta version, so the process of downloading the new installer and reading the release notes put it back in my consciousness, and Roger did make a specific comment that he hoped he’d see me in There.

We had fun exploring some of the new functionality and some of the new areas. And when Matt showed up, I was flooded with warm feelings; until that moment, I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed not seeing him regularly for several weeks. Later, near midnight, Roger went off to give a tour to a newbie–someone he knew from TSO–and that gave me an opportunity to suggest to Matt that I call him on the phone so that we could chat for “a few minutes” before I went to bed.

As usual when I’m on the phone with him, time flew by, and it was 63 minutes later before I looked at the clock again and realized that it was after 1 am and that I really did need to get to bed. Matt and I are so sympatico in many of our beliefs–particularly our political leanings and current frustrations. Emotionally, intellectually and philosophically, at least, we seem to fit so well. I keep suggesting that he plan a trip to DC, and he keeps agreeing that he’d like to, but we always fail to make specific plans. Perhaps there’s a level at which we’re afraid to move this relationship more concretely into the physical plane. Admittedly, I’d hate to jeopardize the easy, comfortable, non-judgmental, no-pressure friendship we currently have, but at the same time I wouldn’t mind exploring whether it might be possible to have that and more, inasmuch as might be possible in a long-distance context.

Sunday’s issue of The [San Jose] Mercury News included a positive piece about the more recent practice of many colleges and universities to reach out to prospective queer students, “signaling… that they have gay-friendly campuses.” Stanford , for example, distributed a CD highlighting the university’s gay and lesbian resources to everyone it admitted this year; this fall, it also will launch a database of gay-friendly staff and faculty. Berkeley offers a web site listing all students, staff, instructors and alumni who are openly queer. And a Massachusetts college fair for gay youth pulled in 95 universities, more than twice the number of the previous year–on the flip side, a few colleges asked to be removed from the mailing list for the event, and one school was reported to have sent back something “negative.”

I have to admit that my own experience even twenty-some years ago was really quite positive, at least once I got to college. Given that consciously I identified through high school as asexual–since I didn’t feel secure enough to come out there and then–knowing about the presence or absence of Harvard’s gay and lesbian groups and other resources probably wouldn’t have made a difference to my having chosen to matriculate there. But the fact that it did have a fairly strong gay and lesbian presence, fairly easily available resources, and that it was a liberal environment more generally made my coming-out process once there a smooth, comfortable, and largely angst-free experience. I was also fortunate to have allied myself–unconsciously–with what turned out to be a group within the Glee Club–which I had joined–comprised largely of gay men. My very first exposure to out gay men was in the context, then, of a group with which I already had bonded, and which I saw was appreciated, respected and admired no less than any of the rest of the organization.

After seeing this first on boing boing a few days ago and then again today at Neil Gaiman’s journal, I have to pass it on. The pictures and the Japanglish are priceless, as are the happy, dancing cartoon cats–especially in comparison to the sullen, almost incredulous look on the faces of the real cats. Of course, Alex would quickly relieve me of a quantity of blood if I tried to dress him in any of these outfits.

The Anne of Green Gables costume especially cracks me up.

And remember:

1.You need to dress a cat. And you will say to a cat together with a family. “It has changed just for a moment”. [ “it being very dear” or ] You will pass pleasant one time.

2. If a family and a cat become fortunate, you will take a commemorative photo! Therefore, please photo your cat lovelily with much trouble.

3. If it finishes taking a photograph, you will make it remove clothes from a cat immediately. You will say then, without forgetting the language of gratitude to a cat…

The lethargy that had gripped me the rest of the long weekend seems to have finally worn off. I was up until 3:00 last night watching the I Love the 80s specials on VH-1. There was even a segment on Member’s Only jackets, of which I’d owned and been proud of several–give me a break, even the celebrities on the show were admitting to having owned Member’s Only wear–but which I’d forgotten all about until watching the special. The shows also brought back a lot of other memories from high school and college. Then today my dad called and chatted with me, and my nephew got on the line to talk to me afterwards–he told me that he’d been looking at my senior high school year book, from 1980. So I pulled it out this afternoon and was looking through it, laughing and reminiscing.

So here for your amusement are two pictures of me from 1980. Yes, I had big 80s new wave hair–my dad’s mother used to manage to inadvertently and simultaneously insult me, my sister and my female cousins by telling us, in effect, “what a shame it is that Tommy got the pretty curly girly hair and the girls got long ugly straight hair.” In the photo to the left, captured in my valedictory vestments at graduation (and the big hair is showing its unmanageable curliness in the humidity of the Virginia summer; my college graduation pix show much the same in the humidity of a rainy June day in Boston, which is why now I keep my hair relatively short), the caption reads, in part, that I am “expressing [my] real emotion for the camera.” What a gay pose! Fortunately, the picture of me wearing a white pinstripe polyester leisure suit as part of our senior skits is much too small to scan very well.

After dad and Matt and I chatted, the phone rang again and it was my cousin Allyson. She and I talked for a while, and then I tried to call my grandfather–my father said he’d been asking about me, and dad asked me to give him a call. I let the phone ring ten times, but no one picked up. I answered a couple of emails from friends I’d been neglecting, though I still need to reply to some responses I’ve received recently to my Match.com and PlanetOut personals.

I also dropped the Star Trek movie back off at the video store, and picked up Spirited Away, which is the movie I’d most wanted to get when I walked over there on Saturday, but all copies of which were rented out at the time. I’ve already watched it this afternoon, and it was so totally awesome (ok, yes, I’ve probably OD’ed on the 80s today); I definitely want to get that DVD for my collection.

I also got two loads of laundry washed, dried and folded, and read half of Candace Bushnell’s 4 Blondes. And Roger and I made plans to spend some time together online later tonight. So while it’s been a somewhat lazy weekend, I did get a few necessary things accomplished, while managing to relax quite a bit and catch up on some movies and reading at the same time.

And another holiday weekend begins to come to a close. Fortunately, with Independence Day coming on a Friday this year, it means there will be another long weekend not too far away.

It’s been a mostly grey, somewhat gloomy day starting off what promises to be a mostly grey, rather gloomy weekend. The pool at my condo building officially opened today but even if I were the swimming pool type (I don’t think I’ve been in the pool here in at least two years), it was too cool and soggy to spend any time down there today. And since the bedroom windows and the balcony all overlook the pool, I get to enjoy those rare occasions when there actually are cute guys down there, without actually having to leave the comfort of my air-conditioning.

Unlike the bulk of D.C.’s queers, who have headed to Rehoboth for the Memorial Day weekend start of the beach season, or even Gene, who has been spending the day cleaning, or Jeff, who has been cooking and who is also preparing to spend part of the weekend in New York, though, I am being an unindustrious, antisocial slob this weekend.

On the way home last night, I stopped by the grocery store and stocked up on $100 worth of frozen dinners, snack foods, and Diet Dr. Pepper. This afternoon I walked to the library to return the four books I read last week, and to pick up four more, along with this week’s Blade and three CDs, including the soundtrack to Jekyll & Hyde, which seems to be a favorite of Roger’s. Then I walked to the Video Warehouse on Glebe, where I bought a previously viewed copy of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and checked out four other movies: Star Trek: Nemesis, the obligatory science-fiction fluff, which I just finished watching; Monsoon Wedding, the obligatory foreign wedding comedy; Kissing Jessica Stein, the obligatory queer film; and Y Tu Mam

Tuesday night, Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia attended a dinner in honor of Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia, The Advocate reported yesterday. The dinner was hosted by the Urban Family Council, which has sued to stop the city of Philadelphia from registering same-sex “life partners.”

Federal judges are barred from raising money for political, civic or charitable organizations, or permitting the use of the prestige of their office for that purpose; the Urban Family Council says that the $150-per-plate dinner was not a fundraiser, and that the ticket price would only cover the cost of the banquet. The Advocate notes that the event, for which about 125 guests were expected, was closed to reporters.

The council’s founder, William Devlin, was quoted:

We just thought, what better way to honor Cardinal Bevilacqua than to have a sitting Supreme Court justice up to speak? It’s nice to be able to say you have a friend like Justice Scalia.

Indeed. Especially when, as in this case, that “friend” just happens to have heard and presumably soon will be issuing a ruling on the challenge to Texas’s sodomy laws for same-sex couples. Sounds like a conflict of interest to me; but what can we really expect from one of the five that handed the unelected Bush the U.S. presidency?

And you may remember Cardinal Bevilacqua–whom the Justice was honoring on Tuesday–from his statement in April, 2002 calling homosexuality “an aberration [and] a moral evil,” and confirming that the Philadelphia archdiocese screens seminary applicants for homosexuality because “we feel a person who is homosexual-oriented is not a suitable candidate for the priesthood even if he had never committed any homosexual act.”

Ok, so it’s bad enough that I–an intelligent, gainfully employed, reasonably attractive gay man–live alone with my cat. To add injury to insult, I’m now supposed to simultaneously hold said cat still, tilt its head up, get one of its eyes open and keep it open, and squeeze a half-inch bead of antibiotic ointment onto the surface of said eye? A cat that still has every single one of its claws?

I really should’ve gone for the pet rock.

I called Alex’s vet this afternoon to see if she had the results of his lab work. I also told her that the ophthalmologist hadn’t been able to offer me an appointment until three weeks from now; she suggested another I could call. That second ophthalmologist only comes to the local animal hospital on Mondays, and since this coming Monday is a holiday, would be able to see Alex at the earliest on the following Monday, June 2, a week and a half earlier than the first. I asked the vet if she thought that was ok, and she said that barring any changes in Alex for the worst, that it would be fine to wait until the 2nd. So we have an appointment in Alexandria that afternoon.

Alex tested negative for feline AIDS and leukemia. The cytology report for the sample the doctor tried to aspirate from the lump under his tail was non-diagnostic, which means either that it’s along the lines of a lipoma–a benign fatty tumor–or of a sort that couldn’t be adequately sampled. His total white cell count was normal, but there was a slight hyperglobulinemia (5.5, where the normal range is 2.3-5.3); an elevated globulin level can be a sign of FIP (feline infectious peritonitis), which often does include ocular problems, including glaucoma, and which is incurable and routinely considered fatal, usually within a few months. Given that we think that the eye problem might be a year or more in the making, though, the vet and I agreed that a diagnosis of FIP is unlikely and certainly premature at this point.

So for now I continue to use the ointment on his eye twice daily, to guard against infection, and we’ll wait until Alex has seen the specialist before the vet makes any specific diagnosis or treatment recommendations.

Sitting here listening to the CDs in the BOCA–Best of College A Cappella (shouldn’t it be BOCAC, though?)–Box set that just arrived today. I ordered it a few days ago after coming across a reference to some humorous a capella pieces and the resultant trip down memory lane to my own college glee club and a capella days (interestingly, right about the same time as Jeff’s entry about his college theatre group).

A quick search with Gr*kster this weekend even turned up a recording (which I already own on vinyl, so it’s not like I was stealing it) of the Franz Biebl Ave Maria from one of the concerts during my own Glee Club days. Ah, the Harvard Glee Club, that all-male chorus, seemingly at least 25 percent gay, that eased my coming out–publicly first announced at a college choral convention in New Orleans right after Mardi Gras–my freshman year. In fact, I had my first sexual experience with one of the graduate students in the chorus; the smell of Camels still can take me back to riding in his car one crisp autumn Cambridge night, inhaling the stale cigarette aroma permeating his sweater as I leaned against him while he drove us back to his place. Mmmmm.

In addition to the Glee Club my freshman and sophomore years, I sang with the mixed-sex Collegium Musicum my senior year, with a barbershop quartet throughout, and with a close harmony group. And a small group of us used to gather and sing in the North House stairwells, for the great acoustics; we jokingly called ourselves Escalatum Musicum (yes, I know that the Latin for stairwell really is scalae, but escalatum just had the right pidgin-Latin ring to it).

There are some great tracks on these CDs, including some fantastic and well-arranged renditions, among many others, of Madonna’s “Ray of Light,” Loreena McKennit’s “Mummer’s Dance” (who’d have thought you could do such a credible a capella job on a richly orchestrated piece like that?), ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” (the first 45 I bought as a teenager, along with Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” and Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”–how could my parents not have known I was gay?), and the song that always makes me cry, and which I played over and over when JJ and I broke up a dozen years ago, Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me.”

I miss singing.

Alex and I saw the vet this morning. A different doctor was on duty today than the one who treated him for a respiratory infection several years ago; both are women, and both have a terrific tableside manner. I was surprised at just how well Alex behaved, given the many more indignities and needle pricks he had to endure this time around, and given how frightening it must be for him to be at the vet’s. The only time I really heard him in more serious emotional distress was when they took him out of the examining room, where I was able to be with him, to another room to draw blood and try to shave some fur off his neck to examine a small bump there. I could hear him yowling then, and the doctor told me later it was before they’d even stuck him; that it was just the process of trying to get him to lift his neck to be shaved. I’ve always noticed that he doesn’t particularly like having his neck stroked, something that other cats of my acquaintance have almost universally enjoyed.

An hour later and $370 poorer, I really didn’t know much more than when we went in. The doctor believes that Alex probably has lost all or nearly all of his vision in the one eye, and she agrees that it might be glaucoma but isn’t sure, and since she doesn’t know what the underlying factor might be–there was never any trauma to the eye that I observed–we have to try to figure out if there’s something more serious going on that might endanger the other eye or his life. She drew blood to test for feline AIDS, leukemia and other cancers, and she hopes to have the test results sometime tomorrow. She also looked at the little bump on his neck that I had at first taken to be a tick, and then thought was just a scab; she thinks it’s actually a tumor of some sort, and because it’s pigmented, this worries her. It’s too small for her to aspirate or biopsy, so she wants to have it removed, but she’s going to wait until we find out what else might be needed, so if we have to do any surgery(ies), we can do it all at once. She also found a lump at his tail, that she thinks might just be a fatty cyst, but she aspirated it and will get a cytology report on it. She gave me ointment to put in his eye twice a day, and I also have to make an appointment with a veterinary ophthalmologist, who is down in Springfield–Alex is unhappy enough in his carrier the two blocks to the vet; I’m not looking forward to driving with him the half-hour to Springfield. It’s also very interesting to me that I have to take him there, given that one of my dreams last night had my car breaking down in Springfield.

So… until the specialist sees him and the bloodwork is back, I don’t know what will be needed next, but we’re there may be surgery needed–and probably expenses in the four-figure range, given it was nearly $400 just for the initial examination and laboratory work today–for several things: the eye, the small tumor on the neck, and the cyst on his rump. I’m already feeling a ton of guilt about not having taken him in sooner or more regularly, and now I’ve got a bunch of other emotion building up… it’s like there’s a floodgate holding it in check right now, but I can feel it back there. I’m tasting some acid in the back of my throat, too, so it appears that the stress is bringing back some of the reflux.

But there’s also a detachment, to some degree. After all the things my family has been through in the past two years–dad’s kidney disease and coming very close to death, my cousin’s addiction to pain killers, my aunt’s divorce, my sister and brother-in-law’s car accident, my grandmother’s continuing decline into Alzheimer’s, and my 10-month unemployment–I feel, not numb, precisely, but inured to the less pleasant events in my life. The worst thing, perhaps, is that I sometimes find myself no longer waiting for or expecting positive change (though, to be fair, there have been some positive moments, especially dad getting a kidney two weeks before I was scheduled to donate one of mine). A string of tails in a series of coin flips might seem odd, but of course it’s no more or less likely than any other set of results. My infinite number of monkeys just seems to be churning out Sylvia Plath instead of Shakespeare these days.