doubting thom

Tonight’s the night. Jeff and I have tickets to see Stephen Lynch at the Birchmere. As I’ve noted before, it’s search engine requests on his name and for his lyrics (which do not exist on this site) that bring significantly more visitors to my blog than any other search term.

Tonight is also Jeff’s and my first return to the Birchmere since our very first face-to-face meeting (though not yet, at that point, clearly a “date”) centered around a Kinsey Sicks concert there on June 22. So tonight’s a kind of anniversary of place, if not of time.

Last October I began as a beta tester of The Sims Online and became very addicted to it for a time (I’ve posted about that and some of the other angst associated with my off-and-on online habits in a previous entry) and later to another online community, There.

Even before Jeff and I started dating, though, I’d pulled way back from both TSO and There; by April of this year already I was rarely on TSO, and by early summer my attention to There similarly had diminished. There wasn’t costing me anything, but I was still paying for two monthly TSO accounts. Even though I wasn’t accessing the service, I was finding it difficult to actually cancel my accounts and end the lives of my virtual personas.

Last night, though, I finally thought about it again and decided to start cutting the cord; I logged onto my secondary account and transferred that character’s cash and belongings to another, and then called and cancelled the account. My primary character will be more difficult to resolve; not so much because I’m still as attached to the Sim itself, but because of the time, thought and passion I put into developing the property he owns, a beautiful park. Even as I type this, though, I realize that I really do need to just let go of that Sim and the property, and I’m not feeling any real anxiety about it. I need to arrange with Roger a time for us both to log on so I can transfer the property and all its contents to him.

I am keeping the There account, though, even though it’s moving to a pay model (albeit a very affordable one, since as a beta tester for it I’m eligible for a lifetime subscription with a single payment of under $30).

Toyota sent me another email about the new 2004 Prius yesterday, announcing the EPA-estimated fuel ratings: a pretty impressive 60 mpg city and 51 highway for a combined city/highway average of 55 mpg and the highest fuel economy of any mid-size car. The email also announced that the Prius will begin arriving at dealers on October 17.

With the Saab experiencing yet more problems–yesterday the knob for controlling the air flow location, which I just paid way too much to have repaired a month ago, started to break again, for example–I really need to plan to unload it and try to acquire a Prius instead… soon. I will miss the convertible top, especially since right before the hurricane we were having such beautiful weather for a change, but I won’t miss the expense and hassle of the particular lemon of a car I ended up with, or the smug criticism, money-hungry attitude and general unhelpfulness of my dealer over the past year.

Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting
and autumn a mosaic of them all.

— Stanley Horowitz

Today, as Jeff also has noted, is the autumn equinox, also known in the pagan calendar as Mabon. Today is the day of equal light and darkness; from now until the winter solstice the nights will begin to lengthen as the days grow shorter.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth
seeking the successive autumns.

— George Eliot

August is my favorite season of the year. I relish the crisp tang in the air and deliciously musty smells of fading leaves and rising smoke, the cooling temperatures as the heat and humidity of the DC summer begin to abate, the opportunity to break out my turtlenecks and sweaters (though I miss my camp and Hawaiian shirts), the beautiful fall colors, crisp apples and yummy yams, and Halloween. I truly feel more alive in October and November than any other time of the year.

There is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

An article in today’s Washington Post notes that:

While the United States fiercely debates the issue of allowing same-sex marriage, marriage for gay men and lesbians in the Netherlands has become so commonplace that today, two years after being legalized, it is hardly recognized as different….

[M]arriage registry records show that 7 percent to 8 percent of marriages in the country are between gay men or lesbian partners. “It’s going smoothly,” [Henk Krol, editor of Gay Krant (Gay Courier) magazine] said. “Once people are used to it, there’s no problem whatsoever. It’s not an issue anymore. As long as you don’t have it, it’s an issue.”…

To Dutch same-sex couples, the fierce opposition in the United States seems misplaced. “It’s sad,” said Hans Blommaert, 38, a fashion editor of a men’s magazine who was celebrating his two-month wedding anniversary with his husband, Michel Ferreira, 25, a university student. “It doesn’t make my opinion of America any better.”

Here’s a picture of Jeff and me at Busch Gardens last month, as promised in my comment to his blog entry earlier today.

My mom’s response after seeing this picture (and after already having been told about the 15-year age difference) was “Thom, I’ve always thought you look younger than your age. But standing next to him… well, he looks very young.”

OK, so maybe it’s a bit too trendy, but I have to confess that I quite like [sour] apple martinis. Jeff and I were having dinner at CPK the other night, and I ordered one and began critiquing it, comparing it to one I’d had at Fuzio several weeks earlier, and he suggested that I begin a search for the best appletini or variant.

Of the two in recent memory, Fuzio’s is the clear forerunner. Their sour apple is described in the menu as “Smirnoff Citrus Twist Vodka and apple liqueur.” It was served in a deliciously sugar-rimmed and stylishly funky martini glass with a slice of Granny Smith apple, and sold for $7.95. It was really very good.

CPK’s apple martini (not listed on their web site’s beverage menu), however, was extremely disappointing; Jeff and I have learned that one does not go to CPK for its bar drinks. Frankly, now that the neighborhood CPK has stopped serving Dr. Pepper, and with the flavorless bread and bad service we’ve received there several times, I’m not sure what one goes there for, though every now and then we still get cravings for their pizza or, in my case, for their Szechuan Slaw that comes with the vegetarian focaccia sandwich. Listed on the menu at $4.99, but appearing on the bill at $5.49, their apple martini was served in a small plain martini glass with no seasoning on the rim and with a single maraschino cherry–sans stem or skewer–as garnis. Quel dommage.

As the search continues, I’ll keep you updated. This follows on previous, non-documented searches for the best crème brûlée (so far, probably the rosewater brûlée at Rubicon in San Francisco I had back in the mid-90s) and best banana split (I’m still waiting to try the sinful sounding Grillfish’s Black Russian Hot Fudge Banana Split before making a determination; come to think of it, their Cheesecake Brulee with Butterscotch-Caramel Crust sounds like a contender for the other category). I may need to re-open those cases.

Sunday morning I was sharing with Jeff a dream I’d had the previous night. I can only remember bits and pieces of it, but basically I had discovered a way to travel among parallel universes. I had reached an alternate Earth, and found myself captured and imprisoned in what seemed to be a cross between a jail, a mental institution, a spaceport and a military base. I discovered that on this world the scientific-military leadership also had discovered a way to move long spatial distances in a split second by travelling interdimensionally. However, the people they sent on these trips, though arriving near-instaneously, experienced in their minds the full amount of time it would take at light-speed to travel the real distance; for example, a person sent to Alpha Centauri and back would appear to the observer to flicker in and out, yet would experience eight subjective years of travel in a featureless void, all alone. These travelers were all returning with various degrees of mental anguish, hysteria and, in the severest cases, complete catatonia.

My interdimensional arrival had been detected, and upon discovery that unlike them I did not experience this subjective travel time I was captured and I presumed that I was going to be experimented on to discover why. One of the orderlies in the institute, though, gave me an ID badge that had been hacked to make me appear invisible, or at least other than my real identity, to the automatic scanners throughout the facility. He offered to help me escape if I would help him with something first. It turned out that his sister was being kept in a secure isolated ward; she had been one of the first travelers, and had been sent tens of thousands of light-years in a single jump. My new friend wanted me to try to get his sister out of the facility, and he had me pose as her husband, carrying a bundle that looked sometimes like a bouquet of roses and other times like a baby wrapped in blankets.

I made it through the checkpoints, and had finally reached her bedside when a troup of humanoid robots, metallic and featureless but for a facial slit and two sensors that looked like eyes made out of buttons (thanks, Neil Gaiman, for that image from Coraline), surrounded me.

And that’s when I woke up.

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This morning I remembered a bit of a dream from last night in which I was able to polymorph both myself and others. At one point, I came across a fox who started following me around. In this erotic dream, I remember first turning myself into a vixen and then later turning him into a male human (gorgeously red-headed, lithe and energetic).

Another update about the past weekend involves my own health. Friday evening Jeff and I went briefly to Pentagon City after eating, but I started feeling very tired. When we got home, I had developed an increasingly uncomfortable and distracting headache in addition to the fatigue. I decided to lie down for a nap, but within an hour or so had developed excruciating pain–the most painful headache I can recall having, even including the migraines I experienced several years in my early twenties–and an increasing sense of restlessness and some slight disorientation. I nearly screamed aloud a couple of times from the pain–and I suspect I did moan once or twice–and also experienced some pretty intense visions (without the prophetic connotations, of course), first of a fully three-dimensional overflight of a forest with every leaf and needle clearly visible, and then of a beautiful series of cascading, rotating and soaring tapered cylinders of rainbow-colored light. A fascinating experience but for the pain.

As the headache worsened, I also began to feel increasingly nauseated. My first rushed trips to the toilet, though, as I began to feel that I was about to throw up, consisted only of vomiturition rather than any actual disgorgement. On my third trip, though, around 10:00, I experienced an explosive ejection of the entire day’s contents of my stomach. After that I began to feel a little better, though the headache didn’t entirely abate until I woke up the next morning, with an extremely mild queasiness that day the only sign that anything had been wrong at all.

Jeff was wonderful throughout. He brought me a cold compress for my head, sat next to me on the bed and held my hand through the worst of the pain. Considering all the things that have been happening to my family and me, I can’t quite believe how amazingly wonderful things are with Jeff, and almost effortlessly so. But get that gift horse away from me; I just want to enjoy this relationship without questioning it or expecting disaster.

In my previous entry, I noted that my condo and I had been relatively unaffected by the hurricane. On Saturday afternoon, though, when Jeff and I went walking outside to get something to eat, we discovered that the front of the condo building hadn’t been so lucky; three trees on the front lawn had lost a number of large limbs and were leaning badly. A crew was on hand to begin the process of cutting them down and removing them. And, at the end of the street a utility pole in front of an apartment building was leaning precariously. Deciding to drive to a diner rather than eating in the neighborhood, we found the first traffic light up the street not working and orange safety cones set out to prevent left turns onto that side street.

Today there are half a million people in the DC metro area alone still without power, so we really were very fortunate not to lose power or water. In Richmond it’s even worse. My mother has running water but no power in order to boil it, as directed by the County; power to the hospital was restored on Friday, but they only restored water there very early yesterday morning. The utility company is stating that they only expect 75% of those affected to have power by this coming Thursday. Fortunately, my sister is driving to Richmond today, and she’s taking Mom additional bottled water, a cooler full of ice, and a battery-powered radio; Mom’s had only two candles and a single flashlight with which to weather the past four days. Yesterday, she was able to get her first cup of coffee in three days; she’d been drinking warm Dr. Pepper in the interim in order to keep her caffeine levels high enough to prevent withdrawal headaches. She started to venture out on Saturday, but there still were trees across the roads and no working traffic signals, so she parked the car at the hospital and walked the block back to the apartment.

Dad is doing ok. His temperature, from the pneumonia, has been up and down. Currently it’s not terribly high, but several times over the past few days, especially without working air conditioning in the hospital, they’ve had to pack him in ice because his temperature had gotten dangerously high. He’s not yet conscious again, but now that the storm has passed and they’ve restored power they’re again planning to start bringing him back out of sedation. Mom reports that they took out the ventilator tube for a short time on Saturday, and while his breathing muscles were able to work a little (they’re not, in fact, completely paralyzed), his breathing was so labored that they had to put him back on the machine.

All the doctors continue to stress that this is going to be a very, very long recovery process, so we continue to wait.