doubting thom

In my immediately previous entry, I described a dream in which I was the superhero brother of The Incredibles‘s Elastigirl, but in that posting I didn’t detail my own superpowers. I noted that during this dream, I had remained aware at some level that I was, in fact, dreaming; my superpowers actually were impacted by that awareness, changing on the spot in ways that mimic my own conscious imaginings of what superpowers I’d want to possess.

As a little kid I most often thought about desiring the power of invisibility or teleportation. My thoughts about the latter persisted, albeit changed somewhat–my reading of Zelazny’s Amber series, my learning of the law of similarity in magic systems, and my interest in quantum mechanics leading me to a limited form of teleportation in which places, roads or the like with the same name could be merged together, or folded like space, so that for an instant they would be the same, and one could start at one such but exit at another–even to adulthood, especially during long road trips when I’d see route numbers or highway names near my starting point that were named or numbered the same as routes and roads nearer my intended destination.

But mostly as an adult I wanted one of two powers: weather control, like the X-Men‘s Storm, or shapeshifting, which I also liked since it seemed a bit of a cheat, giving you multiple other powers depending on what shape you chose–e.g., flight, if you became a bird; near-invisibility, if you became a “fly on the wall”; water-breathing; walking through doors, or at least under them or through keyholes, by becoming a small insect; etc. Shapeshifting generally won out for its utilitarian benefits, though for sheer drama you can’t really beat summoning up a small tornado or throwing lightning bolts.

More recently, though, I’ve become fascinated by another power–a more intellectual superpower–that I don’t think I’ve come across in my own exploration of the genre. It’s a subtle power that doesn’t lend itself well to the action of comics or movies, and that on a typical mission would probably find you not out fighting the bad guys but back in the mission room monitoring everyone’s radio communications, or manning the X-Jet, yet one that under the right circumstances could accomplish amazing things, some of which would be difficult given any other power. I’m talking about the power of perfect and absolute communication, the ability instantly to understand and be fluent in any language or communication system, written, oral or even non-verbal, mechanical or alien (not just translate Ancient Sumerian cuneiform with ease and speak fluent Arabic at will, but perhaps even dance with honeybees, sniff out the territorial clues of mammals, program computers as easily as talking to a friend, etc.). These days, that’s the power I want.

In my dream, then, I kept switching back and forth between the shapeshifting of my more earlier adulthood wishes–in order to get close to or keep away from the omnidroid, as needed–and the perfect communication power of my more recent fantasies, suspecting that I might be able to disarm the robotic killer if I could just get access to its programming, effectively rewriting it on the fly, or even communicating with it wirelessly and achieving the same end without having even to get close to it.

Alas, the dream ended before I got that far. I do find myself wishing, though, I had the artistic or writing talent to explore drawing or narrating the continuing adventures of this hero. At this point, I don’t even have a name for him; I’m just pretty sure I don’t want to call him the Cunning Linguist.

Strange dreams last night. In the one from which I eventually woke, my father was still alive but had called me into his bedroom to tell me privately that he’d been diagnosed with prostate cancer, and had only four to six months to live. He had important information about his finances that he wanted me to know, so he handed me a Palm Pilot on which he had encrypted the information, and told me to input the pass phrase he was about to give me in order to make sure that I could access the information later. As he spoke the phrase, I mistakenly typed in a homonym for one of the words rather than the correct word, and a security program immediately began to erase all the data on the device. My father was furious with me for typing incorrectly, and it turned out that he didn’t have a backup of the data anywhere else, so all the information was gone. There would now be no way to get at any of his savings or investments, leaving my mother with no support, and he blamed me. At that point in the dream, I fell to the floor, sobbing, in a fetal position, and couldn’t even speak to my mother when she came to find out what was wrong.

My earlier dream of the night was disturbing in its own way, but at the same time less realistic, a fact of wh

We had a jam-packed weekend, about which Jeff posted partway through, providing a glimpse of our basic itinerary. Friday night, as he noted, we saw Chanticleer in concert at George Mason University’s Center for the Performing Arts. They were, as usual and as expected, nearly flawless (with only the very first selection not seeming quite up to their usual standard of excellence); it was a delightful evening.

On Saturday, after a late breakfast and some necessary errands, we took the three-hour drive down to the Hampton Roads area for a holiday party that evening, where we indulged in amazingly delicious hors-d’oeuvres accompanied by cocktails, champagne and some very good wine. We also spoke again with a gaming friend of Shel’s we’d first met when we visited back in October, a charmingly earnest and intriguing woman, and we also were introduced to some very cool new people, including a couple from the Maryland suburbs of DC, and an adorable young man with whom I spent the waning hours of the party–after Jeff had retired a little earlier with a headache–engaged in talking politics and commiserating about the sad state of civil liberties and intellectualism in the current American political climate. I was somewhat surprised to find someone so very intelligent and with such a strong liberal–or at least libertarian–bent in the person of a near-lifelong resident of Tidewater Virginia (yes, there’s another one of my biases–even having come from a southern Virginia town, or perhaps specifically because of the experience of that upbringing, I tend to assume pretty much all Virginians outside of Arlington and Alexandria are conservative, religiously fundamental, bigoted and intentionally and proudly ignorant) who moreover had been born in Texas. Not only was he smart, funny and thoughtful, he was devilishly handsome to boot, yet at the same time sweetly shy and seemingly unaware of his good looks.

After a delicious breakfast the next morning (Jeff and I stayed over with our friends who had hosted the party), we started back to Arlington around 11, arriving just in time to drop our things off at home, relieve ourselves, and get back in the car and drive to the Metro, where we took the train downtown to U Street to see the matinee performance of the Washington Gay Men’s Chorus’s holiday concert, “Men in Tights: A Pink Nutcracker.” The first half of the concert was a fairly typical selection of seasonal choral works, while the second was a sometimes almost hysterically funny all-male rendition of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite, complete with swans; Chinese acrobats; Russian soldiers; a gay love story courtesy of gay matchmaking Uncle Drosselmeyer between the protagonist–here known as Clarence rather than Clara–and his prince in pink tights, including several pas de deux; and an unforgettable, massive Sugarplum Fairy.

We had a wonderful weekend, but between the three activities, all the driving, and the mild overindulgence in spirits Saturday evening, a very exhausting one as well. After the concert yesterday afternoon we had dinner at California Pizza Kitchen on the way home, and then pretty much collapsed on the futon in front of the TV, heading to bed very early last night. Even today and tonight, I still feel worn out. But satisfied.

I am incredibly blessed by, and am so very grateful for the presence of Jeff in my life, as my partner. I am very much in love, happier than I have any right to be, and amazed that I was able to find someone who puts up with me and with whom I’m such a good–nay, nigh-perfect–fit.

I love you, Jeff. Thank you for allowing me to love you, and for loving me back. Thank you, Internet, for bringing us together. Thank you, universe, for being a place where such things as friendship and love exist. Thank you, heart, for not having given up on love after all.

I‘m ensconced tonight at my mother’s house in the Alleghany Highlands of Virginia, where it’s already feeling like winter. When I left Arlington around 7:45 this morning, temperatures there were in the 60s (though projected to fall into the lower 40s later in the day), but just a few hours later and 220 miles further southwest I was seeing snow flurries, sleet and frost with accompanying temperatures in the mid-30s.

The office closed yesterday at 3:00, though I ended up there an extra half-hour; even so, that fortunately still left me a little time to visit with Jeff at home before driving him to the airport a little after 4:00 for his flight out to SF to spend Thanksgiving with his own family. I then spent most of the rest of the evening cleaning off my old data from a computer I was planning to bring home to give to my sister’s family and updating the OS and system utilities, doing laundry and packing. I had talked to my mom earlier in the day to let her know that I’d be heading down early Thursday morning rather than Wednesday night; the combination of bad storms they were having here (my sister reported hail), my dislike of nighttime driving, and the huge numbers of deer also being reported along the route (my sister was hit by a deer earlier this week, in fact) had her in agreement that it would be better to wait to do the drive.

And while I heard horror stories from friends who tried to travel last night, my trip this morning was uneventful. Traffic on I-66 and I-64 was almost nonexistent, and even I-81 was far, far better than usual. In fact, I made the trip in about 3-1/2 hours rather than the 4 or more it often takes. A strong headwind, though–and perhaps also the heavier-than-usual load of computer, 19-inch CRT, and luggage– kept my mileage a little low; I was achieving only 40mpg in the Prius this time around, rather than the 50-55 I usually get in highway travel. Still, I guess most people find it hard to feel sorry at my “only 40mpg,” so I’m not really complaining.

We spent most of the day at my sister’s house nearby, but the number present sadly has dwindled. Thanksgiving was never the huge family holiday for us that Christmas is (when there will be 30-40 family members at my sister’s house on Christmas Eve), with the men of the family–excepting usually my father and me–almost always out at the hunting camp on Thanksgiving, or coming in just long enough to eat and head back out to try to bag a turkey or deer. With my father’s death last year and my grandfather’s this year, my grandmother’s absence-by-dementia thanks to Alzheimer’s, and my brother-in-law and middle nephew continuing the hunting tradition, there were only seven of us at dinner this afternoon–my mom, sister, oldest and youngest nephews, aunt and her husband, and me. There was an overabundance of food, common at all festivities hosted by my sister–20-pound turkey and ham; mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole and stuffing; deviled eggs; rolls; spiced apples; two kinds of cranberry sauce, and two kinds of gravy; and four pies plus “dirt pudding,” the latter made by my youngest nephew. Yes, five desserts for seven people. Yet my sister still spent the day apologizing that there wasn’t the array of food “we used to have for Thanksgiving.” Given this history, it’s actually kind of amazing that I manage to keep a waist size smaller than my age; I was just really lucky to have the right kind of metabolism as a kid, and as an adult to visit–and eat–with my family only a few times a year.

My mother told me on the phone yesterday that for the sake of peace there was to be no political discussion while I was here–my immediate family tends to the NRA-card-carrying, religious right especially the 18-year-old nephew, more’s the pity (though, to be fair, as is common with his generation, he’s completely accepting of my gayness), while I, well, not so much. My nephew, sister and I nevertheless indulged in some heated discussion earlier, but stopped when Mom came back from church, so she never knew there was anything but pleasantness between the rest of us today.

After dinner, we all spent some time cleaning up the disaster area that was my youngest nephew’s bedroom, and then Mom, my nephews and I came back to my mom’s house, where the youngest is playing one of my Playstation games, the oldest is on his laptop, Mom is watching TV and I’m indulging my Internet habit. I spoke briefly to Jeff, who was at relatives’ in San Jose, but the poor cell phone signals here in the country eventually dropped our connection; it sounded like he was having a nice time, though.

Apropos Jeff and California, I mentioned to my family that he and I were thinking of leaving Virginia for the West Coast in the next one to two years, and that went over like a lead balloon. Even though I’m in my forties, my family still don’t even like it that I live only a four-hour drive away, and the idea that I would move out of the state, or try to live my own life apart from them, still distresses and angers them even after more than 20 years on my own. Not many of us have managed to create any real separate existence; as I’ve noted before, my relatives all live nearly on top of one another, and even vacation together every year despite spending every day together–and talking on the phone throughout the day, despite living no more than a few hundred yards apart.

I’m so different from them, in so many ways. Sometimes I’m still amazed that the same DNA could create such incredibly different creatures as my sister and me, or even that I could be the offspring of my parents.

Nonetheless, I give thanks that they love me so much, love my partner, and tolerate–relatively well, though not without conflict–my emotional, intellectual, and political differences from them, and that I’m always welcome here in their homes and in their hearts. As much as I complain about them, I’m really blessed to have come from among them, and I give thanks for that.

Happy Thanksgiving to all, and may you be as blessed.

[Of course, right after posting this, I had to go break up a fight between the 18-year-old and the 9-year-old when I heard very loud shouting coming from the other side of the house. Ah, brotherly love.]

According to the man who may be the next chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (“Scalia says religion infuses U.S. government and history,” AP via Newsday):

…a religion-neutral government does not fit with an America that reflects belief in God in everything from its money to its military.

“I suggest that our jurisprudence should comport with our actions,” Scalia told an audience attending an interfaith conference on religious freedom at Manhattan’s Shearith Israel synagogue. …

In the synagogue that is home to America’s oldest Jewish congregation, he noted that in Europe, religion-neutral leaders almost never publicly use the word “God.”

But, the justice asked, “Did it turn out that, by reason of the separation of church and state, the Jews were safer in Europe than they were in the United States of America? I don’t think so.” …

Scalia told them that while the church-and-state battle rages, the official examples of the presence of faith go back to America’s Founding Fathers: the word “God” on U.S. currency; chaplains of various faiths in the military and the legislature; real estate tax-exemption for houses of worship; and the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. …

An “originalist,” Scalia believes in following the Constitution as written by the Founding Fathers, rather than interpreting it to reflect the changing times.

Ok, I’m not a lawyer–much less a Supreme Court justice–but even I know that the word “God” on our currency and the phrase “under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance don’t go back to the founding fathers; in fact, the former, in the phrase “in God we trust” was added only in 1957 and the latter just three years later, both during the height of McCarthyism. Meanwhile, “originalist” Scalia seems to ignore the fact that the word “god” appears nowhere in the U.S. Constitution or Bill of Rights.

And what’s with the bizarre meaningless statement about the separation of church and state vis a vis the treatment of the Jews during the Holocaust? Is Scalia suggesting that Jews were in fact endangered in Europe specifically because of an apparent lack of faith in God by European leaders? Given his bizarre logic, Pearl Harbor and 9/11 should never have been possible, since we’re a country that wears religion on our sleeves and therefore somehow should be “safer,” right?

Neither Jeff nor I have been very good lately about blogging our outings. Just for the record, then, this past Friday night we saw A Tuna Christmas. Chortlingly funny in a lowbrow, let’s-make-fun-of-red-staters kind of way (and three days later we’re still quoting lines from the show). The couple next to us–20-something, straight, mixed-race–didn’t seem so sure, though. During the first act, while she clapped politely at the end of each scene, neither of them did so much as laugh or even crack a smile otherwise. I was surprised to see them return after intermission, but during the second act I did see her smile at least once, and they stood during the curtain call ovation, something even we didn’t do (I’m fairly miserly in giving standing ovations).

The previous week we saw Il Trovatore at the Kennedy Center. Unfortunately, with the sole exception of Krassimira Stoyanova’s Leonora, with a beautifully clear voice like the ringing of a bell, the performances were uniformly mediocre and the staging pretty dreadful, which were huge disappointments even given our reduced-price tickets.

Interestingly, after typing the word “mediocre” above, I went in search of the Washington Post‘s review of the show, and critic Tim Page agreed, using the noun “mediocrity,” but going even a little further into the realm of “horror”:

Aside from [the conducting; the score; and Denyce Graves’s performance, though regrettably she wasn’t performing the night Jeff and I were there], the production is a thoroughgoing horror, and Saturday night in particular provided one of the worst performances of any opera I’ve ever seen. Graves aside, the singers strove mightily to pull themselves up onto the lowest rungs of mediocrity (were we really at the Kennedy Center?). …

Harsh reviews often can generate anguished responses. And, yes, I am sure that the singers were doing their best, but the stark fact remains that their best was nowhere near good enough, not for Verdi, not for the Kennedy Center, not at prices that rise to $290 per seat. Right now, our Washington National Opera, the leading such company in the capital city of the United States of America, is offering a production that wouldn’t — and shouldn’t — play in Peoria.

He really was right on the mark, sadly. Normally I cry when opera protagonists die their melodramatic deaths, but this time ironically they were tears of joy and relief that my own suffering was thereby ended.

In more positive news, Harvard rousted Yale, 35-3, in yesterday’s Game, in a perfect ending to an undefeated season and clinching the Ivy League title.

[Title taken from the lyrics to Tom Lehrer’s (’47) parodic “Fight Fiercly, Harvard!”. Other Harvard fight songs are available at the same site.]

With inauguration still nearly two months away, the Republicans have wasted no time in pushing an appalling agenda. In merely the last few days alone, we’ve seen:

• Republicans sneaking language into the federal spending bill that would permit two Republican committee chairmen and their staff to demand, without regard to any privacy protection, income tax returns of any American.
• A paving of the way, in that same spending bill, to cut back college loans for as many as 1.2 million low-income students, with nearly 100,000 losing their federal grants entirely.
• Inclusion in the spending bill of far-reaching anti-abortion language.
• Oh, but the spending bill does include $2 million to buy back the presidential yacht Sequoia, sold by the government 30 years ago, for Bush, even though the present owners have said they do not want to sell it.
• Republicans killing a bill that would have implemented the major recommendations of the 9/11 Commission in regards to creation of a cabinet-level national intelligence directorate.
• Approval of the third increase in the nation’s debt limit under Bush’s watch, to $8.184 trillion.
• The party allegedly of “high moral values” changing their own rules so that a leader indicted by a grand jury will no longer have to step down from a leadership role.
• A Senate subcommittee hearing on pornography (wonder how much something like this costs to hold?), including testimony by The National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality which said that porn can do even what heroin can’t and noting how dangerous the Internet is as an efficient porn-delivery platform.

There’s more, but it’s depressing enough already. Welcome to the next four years.

With a boyfriend who shares the same hobbies of blogging and photography, I’m beginning to feel like one of those computer images of a computer on the screen of which is the image of a computer on the screen of which is the image of a computer, ad infinitum, or one of those mirrors that contain a reflection of itself reflecting itself, and so on.

Since discovering the Flickr online photography site and community, I’ve become newly obsessed with photography and my new digital camera, and Jeff’s interest also has been renewed. Last night, as he writes, found us photo-documenting his pumpkin-apple muffin-baking endeavor. By the end of the process, when the muffins were ready to eat, we spent more time photographing them than actually eating, to the point where we were taking pictures of each other taking pictures. And now I’m writing about a post of Jeff’s in which he wrote about a picture I’d taken of him taking a picture of the muffins about which we’re writing. I think I’ve just ripped the fabric of space-time, or at least soiled it.

Below, Jeff’s photo of his muffin, with me in the background adjusting the settings on my camera, and below that my picture of Jeff taking a picture of his muffin.

The muffins, by the way, were delicious. The recipe is available from epicurious.com.