doubting thom

Last Saturday, Jeff turned 27. My oldest nephew–the son of my younger sister–graduates high school next month and starts college this fall. My own 20th college reunion is next month, though I don’t plan to attend. Had I followed the pattern established by my great-grandmother, grandmother and mother, I’d have married at 19 and had my first child at 20, meaning that I would now have a kid about to turn 22, just five years younger than my boyfriend.

When I think about it in those terms, it seems like it should feel really weird to be in a relationship with someone almost 15 years my junior. And when we first started communicating and then started hanging out, I thought it would seem odd and perhaps even uncomfortable. But I don’t feel like there’s really a meaningful age difference or generation gap between us; we typically like the same movies, books, theatre, music, and places, and generally even share the same cultural references. I don’t know if Jeff is old for his age, if I’m young for mine, or even if such attempts to understand people’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors on the basis of the time they’ve spent on this planet are in the end really just pretty unhelpful. It’s probably all of the above.

And it’s not as though I’m experiencing some existential middle-age crisis, I don’t think (just the usual unending, non-age-specific existential crisis), as might be evidenced in taking up with a hot, young trophy stud. After all, I traded in the expensive convertible for a (gasp!) four-door sedan (albeit a funky, technologically cool one).

On the other hand, I do find myself yearning for something different out of life, at least vis a vis where I find myself professionally. I so envy the people who stuck to their dreams–and even more so those who even knew what their dreams were. I still have no idea what I want to be when I grow up (and is it odd, at 41-5/6, to still not feel anywhere near grown up?), but I fear more and more that it may be too late to do it even if I figure out what it is. When I took this government job two years ago, my then-boss’s first words to me were not about the importance of our mission, the interesting things I’d be doing, or the quality of my co-workers, but rather my “incredible luck” at having been hired as a civil service employee since I was now set for life and couldn’t easily ever be fired. Surely there’s more than that?

As Gene prepares for his upcoming trip to London, I’ve been musing about my one trip there so far, a few years ago.

In the spring of 2000, I went to London and Edinburgh pretty much on a whim–I was able to take advantage of a British Airways promotion that required that you ticket within a week for travel to begin within a month. In London I stayed at a small gay B&B, the Noel Coward Guesthouse (it had been one of Coward’s residences, apparently). On the morning of the day I was to head to Edinburgh I sat down for my breakfast of bangers and mash to discover a very attractive American man at my table. We talked, and seemed to hit it off, and he noted that he had just arrived–having taken advantage of the same promotion, but a week later–and was waiting to check into his room, the current occupant of which was to be checking out that morning. It turns out that it was the room I was vacating that was to be his. As we spoke further, we discovered that he was taking the same itinerary, and was heading to Edinburgh later that week… where he had reservations at the same place where I would be staying, again arriving the day I would be leaving.

Once I got to Edinburgh, I found out that the room they had reserved for him was the one that I was occupying there.

Moreover, we discovered that in the U.S. we lived less than 10 miles apart, were both single and gay, our university studies were in the same fields, and our names were eerily similar–my middle name being his last while my last was very similar to his first.

I was convinced–privately–that this bizarre set of coincidences meant that we had been fated to meet and to be together. I wrote down for him my email and telephone numbers. He said he’d call me when he was back home in Virginia, a week after my own return.

I never saw or heard from him again.

But I still had an absolutely wonderful time in London and Edinburgh.

Gentle Reader, following on an earlier post about strange bathroom behaviors of people at my office, I have to comment on a new disturbing trend I’ve observed over the past several months. Granted, we live in an increasingly sanitized, disinfected, antibacterialized and mysophobic society–don’t get me started on my vision that the strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria whose evolution we’re facilitating will find us one day battling their rodent-sized descendants with baseball bats–leading to an epidemic, apparently, of people being terrified to touch a door handle with their bare hands.

OK, fine, if you want to use a paper towel to grasp the door handle in order to exit the restroom–notwithstanding that there’s a huge button to automatically open the door, so that you don’t even have to touch it with other than a shirt-clad elbow–I don’t have a problem with that. In addition to avoiding the colonies of germs you envision there, you’re also not contaminating the handle with your own. But, really, must you then throw the paper towel on the floor? Were you raised to throw your napkin on the dining room carpet after every meal? When visiting friends at their house, do you regularly toss the handtowel on the bathroom tile after wiping your hands? Are there piles of used diapers collecting on the floor just to one side of the changing table in your kid’s nursery?

I thought at first that this might be an isolated incident, a single individual on my corridor, and that this lack of concern for proper waste disposal might be a sad but forgivable manifestation of some mental illness or some childhood trauma. But I’ve noticed that this practice seems so widespread at the Institute that signs have begun to spring up in men’s rooms all across campus exhorting exiting patrons to take their door rags with them and discard them properly in a wastebasket elsewhere.

Last month I posted about the bill just passed in Virginia that would outlaw private contracts between same-sex partners that would “bestow the privileges or obligations of marriage,” a bill that many legal scholars believe would make illegal such standard contracts as wills, powers of attorney and custody agreements between same-sex partners.

This weekend The Washington Post editorial staff weighed in on the “Marriage Affirmation Act”, condemning it:

IN THE GATHERING debate over gay marriage, some state legislatures have moved to ban it, others to create civil unions or domestic partnerships. Then there’s the Virginia General Assembly, which last month — brushing aside proposed amendments from Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) — passed with veto-proof majorities a jaw-dropping bill that bans not only civil unions but any “partnership contract or other arrangement between persons of the same sex purporting to bestow the privileges or obligations of marriage.” And it declares “void in all respects” and “unenforceable” in the commonwealth any such arrangement made in another state.

In other words, not only is any public affirmation of gay relationships banned but even private legal arrangements between two people who love each other are prohibited. The bill’s broad language would preclude contracts to share assets or provide for medical powers of attorney, and though its sponsors deny they intend to do so, it would seem to ban even certain contractual business relationships undertaken by people who happen to be of the same gender.

The bill’s only saving grace is that it so flagrantly violates norms of basic fairness and decency that federal courts are likely to balk. The Constitution, after all, declares that “No state shall, without the consent of Congress . . . pass any . . . law impairing the obligation of contracts” — and this bill unambiguously voids existing contracts. The Constitution also guarantees the equal protection of law — a promise that would surely be violated by a statute that forbids gays and lesbians to enter into the same private arrangements that opposite-sex couples are permitted to undertake.

Mr. Warner pointed out these problems in attempting to amend the law. The governor, himself an opponent of gay marriage, pointed out as well that Virginia law already prohibits same-sex marriages and nowhere recognizes civil unions of any kind.

But legislators were less interested in making policy than in sending a message: Gays and lesbians aren’t welcome in Virginia. That message goes into effect July 1; the courts must make certain that it doesn’t stay in effect for long.

That same day, the Post also printed a letter to the editor from attorney Tracy Thorne, vice chair of Equality Virginia, on the same topic and entitled “Virginia Is for (Straight) Lovers,” a play on Virginia’s long-standing tourism slogan “Virginia Is for Lovers.”

With the passage of the Marriage Affirmation Act last month, the General Assembly has called on Virginians to rally at the parapets for another round of massive resistance to social progress. Like segregationists of decades past, legislators have drawn a pink line in the sand relegating gay Virginians to second-class citizenship. This isn’t just a return to one of Virginia’s most sacred institutions — “separate but equal” — this is 21st-century apartheid, Virginia style.

Despite last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision invalidating sodomy laws, Virginia’s legislature refused to repeal its ban on sodomy. Del. David Albo (R-Fairfax) suggested doing so would lead to an unabated rash of sodomy in the streets. Albo’s cries echo the admonitions of his predecessors, who warned against the integration of schools and interracial marriage.

Although Virginia has been home to some of the most horrific examples of gay-related assaults and murders, the Senate committee considering legislation has refused to include hate-based crimes against gays. Likewise, the General Assembly has prevented local governments and school boards in Arlington and Fairfax from making it illegal to fire someone for being gay or to harass a gay student. Perhaps our legislators should talk with some of the students who have been beaten or spit on for being different before they next consider this issue.

With the Marriage Affirmation Act, legislators enacted far-reaching legislation that Virginia’s legal scholars call “recklessly overbroad.” The name of the act itself is misleading. It does nothing to affirm marriage. Gay marriage has been illegal in the commonwealth since 2000, and civil unions have never been recognized in Virginia. Even so, the act goes further than outlawing civil unions: It prohibits members of the same sex from entering into any “arrangement” that “purport[s] to bestow the privileges or obligations of marriage.”

It is precisely because Virginia does not recognize civil unions that gay Virginians enter into these “arrangements.” They take the form of wills, medical directives and custody agreements, just to name a few. For gay Virginians, contracting for all of these rights was once a difficult and costly process; now it is illegal and impossible.

Despite the painful lessons of the past, the General Assembly has chosen to take the path of ignorance and put the commonwealth on a course of backward thinking. Thomas Jefferson wrote that “laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind as that becomes more developed [and] enlightened.” Yet Virginia has often led the charge to ignore this advice from its most revered founding father.

Before we pull up the welcome mat for gay Virginians for good, we should consider the costs and consequences of this discrimination. Are we, as a commonwealth, ready to write another chapter in our history of intolerance? Will we accept the simple truth that gays are deserving of fundamental human rights or will we once again rush to the parapets to defend the commonwealth against enlightenment?

In his own blog, Jeff failed to mention that on Sunday he cooked for us a variation of Jacques Pepin’s Les Oeufs Jeannette, which it turns out he had first and last prepared one year ago, on Mother’s Day 2003, and on the entry for which was one of my first comments, in which I volunteered to be a guinea pig for his culinary exploits. An offer that still stands, and that should be made easier by the fact that we now live together. But while he does cook often, this was one of the very rare (I can count them on one hand, I’m pretty sure) occasions that he has cooked for me from scratch; not that I’ve done any better, to be sure.

The eggs were very delicious, though we now have so much leftover parsley that Jeff was suggesting that I put a spring of it in my drink, and sprinkling it over my ice cream. And who cares if his plan to create a “quick” brunch around them ending up taking several hours to complete; after a couple of mimosas, who’s complaining? Besides, in the interim I and my superpowered, superbodied alteregos stayed busy saving Paragon City from the evil Circle of Thorns and the notorious Fifth Column.

As I was saying, before I sidetracked myself, Jeff already has posted about our birthday-related (his) and weekend activities, so you can go read them at his site; I’ll post only any specific comments or amplifications of my own below:

Friday night (Jeff’s birthday eve): Wine tasting, gallery hopping, French dining. I also had the mesclun salade but instead of the steak maison I opted for the tournedos, which was served rare and wonderfully tender. I truly loved Micheline Frank’s artwork at Studio Gallery, and really wish I had a spare $6K with which to purchase the incredible title piece.

Saturday (Jeff’s birthday): flowers, movie, sushi, Freddie’s. As Jeff noted, I went downstairs to pick up the FedEx delivery–when the phone rang from the front desk letting us know that Jeff had a package, he seemed unconcerned and continued to dilly-dally about the house. I knew that the box contained flowers, and wanted to get them out and in fresh water as quickly as possible. So I ran downstairs to pick them up for him while he was puttering in the kitchen.

I must confess that I’m very pleased with Proflowers, which I’ve used on a number of occasions to send flowers to my mother, and which I also used at Easter to send live plants–a Calla Lily to my mom and a miniature rose to Jeff–with great success. The flowers are shipped quickly–shipping from California one day and arriving even in my mother’s small town in rural Virginia the next–and are packaged very well; each rose was in its own vial of water, all were wrapped securely with moist paper covering the buds and plastic around all to keep them from moving about. The package also included food to keep them fresh longer, and instructions on removing the outer “protective” layer of petals from each individual rose. And I’ve ordered often enough from them that now they tend to offer me pretty nice discounts and extras like free vases.

Jeff is very diplomatic about Freddie’s, the only gay bar in Arlington and therefore the closest to us. The eye candy, though admittedly nice where it was found, was spare, and the MC who introduces the karaoke singers was excruciatingly unfunny. As I almost apologetically noted to Jeff at one point, he probably didn’t expect to be hanging out in a bar like that until he was more my age than his own, at which he looked around and admitted that he almost singlehandedly brought down the average age. There was also an interesting group of straight folk–a wedding party including the bride and groom; as Jeff and I mused, any bride whose husband takes her to karaoke at a gay bar on their wedding night is probably in for a rude Kate Jackson Making Love moment some day. I suggested to Jeff that she might have seen the signs when his wedding day makeup and coiffure were better than hers.

As to Jeff’s mock horror at turning 27. Yeah, my heart’s bleeding.

One advantage to having a blogging boyfriend is that it often saves lazy me the trouble of having to post about shared activities, as I can just point directly to his entries, especially since for several months he’s been fufilling an admirable aim to post daily while I, on the other hand, continue to post less frequently and less regularly, and to fall way behind on reading other blogs.

I’m not altogether sure why that is, though I recognize a number of potential contributing factors. Truly, I feel that I rarely have something new or insightful to say. Life also is going reasonably well, so for a change there’s little of the drama or crisis–thankfully–that can make personal journals interesting; work, on the other hand, continues to be stressful and largely emotionally unfulfilling, but now that that’s a given, what more is there to say about it, really? Also, I’ve become distracted by a new MMORPG–City of Heroes–and am acting out simultaneously the heroic and violent aspects of my psyche.

Given my track record (with Everquest, Dark Ages of Camelot, The Sims Online, and There, to name a few), after a couple of weeks or months of overdosing on the game I’ll likely drop it entirely, but for now I’m engrossed at creating new–and ever sexier–superheroes (as I read somewhere else online, the visual character creation aspect alone is a gay man’s wet dream, as you are able to customize with an amazing array of options extraordinarily lithe and/or muscular spandex-clad–or even bare- and barrel-chested–comic book heroes) and then launching them into the streets of Paragon City to do their part in saving the populace from an increasingly powerful array of evildoers and miscreants.

I’ve begun to think of the stable of superheroes I’ve created rather as superqueeroes, giving them back-stories and a creation mythos in tune with queer identities, and have even discovered that another server (other than the one on which I’d already created my highest-level characters, unfortunately) already hosts an all-gay SuperGroup (the game’s equivalent of the Justice League or the X-Men) called, I kid you not, Rough Trade. “Flame on!” indeed.

After my harrowing drive home from visiting my family this past weekend, it was looking like a nice week in the DC area, with perhaps a little rain but overall gradually warming temperatures and blue skies. Yesterday morning the forecast was for a chance of rain, but as the day wore on and the skies continued to look beautifully blue, I commented to my boss that it looked like they’d gotten it wrong.

Then, as I left the office at the end of the day, a few drops of rain began to fall. By the time I reached my car, no more than a hundred yards away, the rain had intensified, and very large drops were beating a tattoo on the windshield. As I turned out of the facility onto the highway, the skies got very dark, and the large drops turned from rain into little pieces of hail that broke apart into icy mush as they pelted the car, punctuated by booming thunder. The hail continued off and on for the ten-minute drive home, but I also saw an amazingly bright, beautiful rainbow that covered an entire 180° arc.

Fortunately, the hail was small and slushy, so there was no damage to the Prius. And, ten minutes after getting the car home and safely into the garage, the skies were practically clear and a gorgeous shade of blue again. It was really rather surreal; science-fiction/fantasy geek that I am, I kept thinking it was like driving through alternate realities a la navigating to Zelazny’s Amber, or “scampering” along the branches of the world tree of Chabon’s brilliant Summerland (which I’m reading–and enjoying immensely–right now).

Check out today’s Online Diary column about Dude, Check This Out (the second item covered in the column) in The New York Times. Yes, that’s me quoted therein:

Thom Watson, a technology manager in Washington, is an experienced blogger who longed for a better way to keep track of notable sites. “I keep my blog mostly for personal thoughts,” he said. “I wanted a really easy way to collect links by topic and comment on them.”

Mr. Watson now maintains three MyBlog pages, on general topics, modern architecture and the Toyota Prius. Better yet, the service sends him suggestions on sites of potential interest based on similarities between his postings and those on other MyBlogs. There’s even a social-networking aspect that links users based on their contact lists.

I was interviewed about a week ago for the column; apparently one of the founders of the site told the reporter that I was one of their most active users and suggested that she speak with me. The quote in the first paragraph really was meant to distinguish between my more customizable use of Movable Type for personal blogging and my freeform quicklink blogging, for which I use Dude, rather than to describe Dude as the place I go to for the former. Also, one of my three (now four, actually; I’ve started a new quicklinks blog about gaming since the interview) Dude blogs mentioned is really focused on mid-century modern style, of which modern architecture is just one facet. Minor quibbles, though, and overall I’m tickled to have been quoted.

[Update: Turns out that my boyfriend beat me by a few minutes in detailing my moment of Times-related fame. Our synchronicity never fails to amaze and amuse me.]

[Further update: BoingBoing also noted today’s mention in the Times–Cory is a former colleague of the Dude guys–keeping the paragraphs with my quotes intact.]

Since I seem to be in a ranting mood, but at the risk of tarnishing my Prius-evangelism mindset, I must confess that there is one thing about the Prius that disappoints me. It has a wildly inaccurate digital gas gauge (notoriously so, since this is a common topic of discussion on Prius listservs and among Prius owners). What’s worse is that the direction and magnitude of the inaccuracy aren’t consistent, so there’s no really no way to use the gas gauge at all to determine when to fill up.

When the tank is full, the Prius shows ten lighted boxes along a continuum from empty to full. As the tank empties, the boxes theoretically begin to go dark. However, sometimes the entire set of ten remains lit for a while and then very quickly a number of them will darken in succession. Other times the entire set begins to darken quickly, getting all the way to a single remaining lit box even though there’s still gas–sometimes a considerable amount–in the tank.

Before my trip to visit my mother this weekend, for example, the boxes had darkened so that only a single one remained lit, so I went ahead and filled up, even though my mileage suggested that I had several gallons remaining. I was able to put something over 9 gallons in the tank, which allegedly holds between 11 and 12. This morning, however, after my trip there and back, the gauge still showed just short of half of the boxes lit; but on the mile-and-a-half commute to work, three of the four lit boxes darkened in a matter of minutes, leaving just one still lit. At the end of the day, when I got in the car, that single box began flashing, and the computer screen flashed an ominous–albeit politely so–“Please Add Fuel,” neither of which I’d yet seen. So, worried that I might run out of gas, even though again my mileage suggested I shouldn’t be anywhere near empty, I filled up on the way home. The tank only accepted about 7-1/2 gallons, meaning it still had 4, which would have taken me at least 160 miles.

I start to panic, though, when the gauge goes nearly dark–and especially today when the car started sending me messages about needing fuel–because the manual is very unequivocal about not driving the car without gas, even though it does have a battery-powered engine as well as a gas-powered one, promising dire consequences if this warning is unheeded. Even when I know I certainly have gas remaining, and probably a generous amount, I worry about running out of gas.

You’d think a car otherwise so technically sophisticated would have a gas gauge more reliable than casting bones or reading tea leaves.