doubting thom

For those of you who read Rebel Prince, you’ll already know that this news has been scooped; certainly it hasn’t taken much reading between the lines even here, despite a lack of explicit confirmation. But, yes, we’re dating. This also explains why I haven’t been blogging as frequently during the weekends this past month, as I’ve been, um, otherwise occupied.

It’s also a little odd to be confronted with the prospect of dating another blogger, and trying to decide how much to reveal when the other person certainly is reading your posts, and when their privacy also is at stake. Even this acknowledgement feels like it’s making this relationship somehow more “public” than if I were just writing about some non-blogger I might be dating, someone who isn’t already and independently “known,” however that may be defined in this context, to my readers in his own right. It will be interesting to see how it continues to play out blogwise.

Note: The references in the subject lines here and in Jeff’s posting are to the Turtles song “Happy Together,” which in an episode of synchronicity we kept hearing played–on television commercials, at the diner where we were having brunch, at a party hosted by some friends of mine, etc.–last weekend, around the same time we started acknowledging the “boyfriends” word.

Now I think I know a little bit how the victims on What Not To Wear or Queer Eye… feel. I received an email today from “Club Crest,” thanking me for signing up and letting me know that my coupon for free Crest Whitestrips will arrive in four to six weeks. The only thing is, I didn’t sign myself up, so apparently someone is trying to let me know that even brushing with a whitening toothpaste twice daily just doesn’t produce sufficiently attractive results.

Maybe next my anonymous makeover artist will sign me up for a free trial gym membership, too, or coupons for the tanning salon.

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On Monday, the restrooms on my hallway at work were closed, so that automatic door openers could be installed to make them more accessible. The problem now is that the electronics controlling the doors either haven’t yet been activated or weren’t correctly installed, while the hydraulic system now in place to automatically open and close the two doors you pass through to get into the bathroom has the effect of making the doors significantly harder to open manually. So for now the handicapped aren’t able to open the doors using the automatic system, and those of us without physical handicaps struggle even to open them by hand.

Previously, I’d commented about my unorthodox play with my G.I. Joe doll as a young boy–dressing him shirtless and in short shorts, and having him hang around in Barbie’s dream car with my sister’s Ken doll. I’d often wondered, given that and my other habits and predilections as a youngster, how my family didn’t figure out very early that I was queer.

In that same vein, I recall that the very first 45rpm singles I ever bought included Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” and Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Right now outside my window I can see some amazing flashes of lightning, feathery staccato punctuation marks highlighting the beautiful pink and purple of the night sky. The rain now is starting to hit the window. The wind also has picked up and the trees around the pool and courtyard have begun to sway. It’s so beautiful in the wildness of the storm.

I love thunderstorms. All I really need to complete the picture is someone sitting next to me here on the futon sharing the weather, a glass of port, and–as my friend Roger notes that electrical storms make people more horny–some summer loving.

Top this: Newt Gingrich wants to be my new boss. Not really likely, of course, but the purported front runners for the job–Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz–are almost as scary.

The Washington Post reported today that Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage will step down from their posts should Bush be elected to the presidency in 2004. Granted, it’s not at all a surprising announcement, but personally a distressing one, nonetheless. Powell has been the only member of this administration for whom I could muster any respect and even despite my disappointment with his statements to the U.N. in February about Iraq’s WMDs, he’s remained practically the only voice of restraint and caution in an adminstration of cowboy diplomacy and hawkishness.

He’s also been a positive leader within the Department, pushing an agenda of mandatory–and badly needed–training in leadership and management for mid-level and senior staff, greater opportunities for employee education, and a more positive sense of collaboration and “familyhood” between foreign service and civil service employees, and in embracing and endorsing appropriate technology. On the latter front, surprisingly, Department of State employees didn’t have desktop access to the Internet until Secretary Powell made it a priority his first year. The Secretary also spearheaded an initiative to create the first childcare facility at the Foreign Service Institute.

At my level within the hierarchy, to be fair, the identity of the person at the very top probably doesn’t have much of an effect on my day-to-day activities, and the Department is probably large enough–and the non-political appointees entrenched enough–that even the overall culture wouldn’t shift dramatically under a new Secretary. But it’s been nice, if even just in the abstract, to have someone at the top of my chain of command that I largely can respect and whose priorities I personally can endorse. Intellectually, at least, it’s made my new life as a paper-pushing bureaucrat marginally easier to endure.

My parents called last night, and among their news was that they’re planning a vacation in October, a 17-day trip by bus across the American Southwest and into California. It’s a bit of a whirlwind tour, so I’m not precisely envious of that aspect of it (most major cities or tourist attractions along the way get less than a day, with Los Angeles alone getting almost three), but I am envious that they’ll be going to places that I haven’t yet been: the Grand Canyon, San Diego, Tijuana, San Juan Capistrano, Hoover Dam and Lake Mead, Sedona and the Petrified Forest.

This is an ambitious trip for them. Several years back, before my dad’s kidney disease and his dependence on dialysis, they had taken several shorter bus trips, but only east of the Mississippi; Mom has never been any further west than Ohio and Michigan, while Dad accompanied me once as far as St. Louis. Their only trips out of the country, to Canada, were made only within the past decade; my dad had an opportunity to drive into Canada from Detroit about thirty years ago, while out there for a softball tournament, but he was uncomfortable then with the idea of crossing the U.S. border.

I, in comparison, have had some wonderful opportunities to travel, taking my first trip to Canada in junior high and traveling abroad to France and Switzerland just a year later. I’ve also visited all but a handful of the states, and have traveled to four Canadian provinces, Mexico, England and Scotland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, and around the Caribbean.

I’m really pleased and a little proud, then, that Mom and Dad finally have decided to travel to the West Coast. They tried to get Dad’s sister and her husband to go along, but my aunt said she couldn’t imagine being away from their small hometown for 17 days. And, frankly, I wonder how my parents will handle that length of absence; after six days in North Carolina at the beach each year, they’re both usually a little homesick, and that’s even with almost the entire extended family there with them, about twenty of them sharing two three-bedroom condos.

Come to think of it, after only a couple of days at the beach with my entire extended family crammed into two condos, I’d already be homesick.

How thoughtful of Pope John Paul II and the Vatican to reach out to me on my birthday, with their “Considerations Regarding Proposals To Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons.” With no regrets, however, I’d like to return the gift, as it just doesn’t fit; I guess it was difficult for the Holy Father to shop for something appropriate with that huge log in his eye.

The hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, especially in categorizing homosexual unions as “evil,” and in condemning the adoption of children by “persons living in [homosexual] unions” as “doing violence to these children,” is particularly egregious. If “clear and emphatic opposition” is a moral duty, as this document maintains, then given the almost unparalleled violence against children perpetrated and covered up by the Catholic Church, its own members must clearly and emphatically oppose its assumed authority in such matters.

Pope Pius did not condemn the Nazis as “evil” on behalf of the Catholic Church, nor has the current Pope been willing to use that term to describe Saddam Hussein. Yet homosexual unions are branded as “evil,” “immoral,” “deviant” and “against natural moral law,” and homsexuality as “objectively disordered”: such inflammatory language is considered, by the Vatican, to express its “respect for homosexual persons.”

Puh-lease. This definition of “respect” is more twisted even than Dubya’s “welcoming” attitude toward homosexuals and the “inclusiveness, fairness, tolerance and compassion” (per Mssrs. Bush and Frist) of Senator Santorum. I don’t need the Catholic Church’s respect; I just need them to keep their inquisitional, collaborationist, pedophilic hands the hell out of my life.