doubting thom

For today’s “So there!” moment, however, the Pew Internet Project has released a report on “Gaming technology and entertainment among college students” that concludes that computer, video and online games “are more of a social/socializing activity [for college students] than most suspected,” rather than an isolating “geeky” behavior. Some key findings included:

• All of those surveyed reported to have played a video, computer or online game at one time or another. Seventy percent (70%) of college students reported playing video, computer or online games at least once in a while. Some 65% of college students reported being regular or occasional game players.
• Students cited gaming as a way to spend more time with friends. One out of every five (20%) gaming students felt moderately or strongly that gaming helped them make new friends as well as improve existing friendships.
• Gaming also appears to play a surrogate role for some gamers when friends are unavailable. Nearly two-thirds (60%) of students surveyed agreed that gaming, either moderately or strongly, helped them spend time when friends were not available.
• Two-thirds of respondents (65%) said gaming has little to no influence in taking away time they might spend with friends and family.
• Students integrate gaming into their day, taking time between classes to play a game, play a game while visiting with friends or instant messaging, or play games as a brief distraction from writing papers or doing other work.
• Gaming is integrated into leisure time and placed alongside other entertainment forms in their residence, and that it forms part of a larger multitasking setting in which college students play games, listen to music and interact with others in the room.
• Most college student gamers seem to associate positive feelings with gaming, such as “pleasant” (36%), “exciting” (34%), and “challenging” (45%). Fewer students reported feeling frustrated (12%), bored (11%), or stressed (6%) by gaming.
• Close to half (48%) of college student gamers agreed that gaming keeps them from studying “some” or “a lot.” In addition, about one in ten (9%) admitted that their main motivation for playing games was to avoid studying.
• College student gamers’ reported hours studying per week match up closely with those reported by college students in general, with about two-thirds (62%) reporting that they study for classes no more than 7 hours per week, and 15% reported studying 12 or more hours per week.
• One third (32%) of students surveyed admitted playing games that were not part of the instructional activities during classes.

So, I’m not necessarily an antisocial loser-geek. Well, at least not just because I play computer and online games.

In today’s “well, duh!” moment, Britney Spears admitted that despite her repeated claims over the years that she would wait until marriage to have sex, she actually lost her virginity several years ago to ex-boyfriend Justin Timberlake.

In a related story, though it’s the American people who were screwed this time, the Bush administration also acknowledged “that President Bush should not have alleged in his State of the Union address in January that Iraq had sought to buy uranium in Africa to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program.”

Last night, Jeff and I were sharing some laughs over a reprint of a February 1950 Popular Mechanics article about predictions of suburban life in the year 2000 (thanks to Arts & Literature Daily for the pointer to the article). [Note: the reprint is part of a larger, fascinating MIT site dedicated to the “home of the future.”]

The article starts off pleasantly and unsurprisingly enough, describing the imaginary suburb of 2000, Tottenville, as “clean as a whistle and quiet. It is a crime to burn raw coal and pollute air with smoke and soot.” Descriptions of the relative merits and uses of electrical, atomic and solar power are informative and fairly non-controversial. Where the article starts to become silly, by today’s standards, is in its expectations that function and ease of use completely would overrule issues of style and good taste:

When Jane Dobson cleans house she simply turns the hose on everything. Why not? Furniture (upholstery included), rugs, draperies, unscratchable floors–all are made of synthetic fabric or waterproof plastic. After the water has run down a drain in the middle of the floor (later concealed by a rug of synthetic fiber) Jane turns on a blast of hot air and dries everything. A detergent in the water dissolves any resistant dirt. Tablecloths and napkins are made of woven paper yarn so fine that the untutored eye mistakes it for linen. Jane Dobson throws soiled “linen” in the incinerator. Bed sheets are of more substantial stuff, but Jane Dobson has only to hang them up and wash them down with a hose when she puts the bedroom in order….

Some of the food that Jane Dobson buys is what we miscall “synthetic.” …By 2000, a vast amount of research has be[en] conducted to exploit principles that were embryonic in the first quarter of the 20th century. Thus sawdust and wood pulp are converted into sugary foods. Discarded paper table “linen” and rayon underwear are bought by chemical factories to be converted into candy.

While candy made out of discarded rayon underwear is perhaps unappealing and a little frightening, the truly alarming predictions were from the area of weather forecasting and control:

[S]torms are more or less under control. It is easy enough to spot a budding hurricane in the doldrums off the coast of Africa. Before it has a chance to gather much strength and speed as it travels westward toward Florida, oil is spread over the sea and ignited [emphasis mine]. There is an updraft. Air from the surrounding region, which includes the developing hurricane, rushes in to fill the void. The rising air condenses so that some of the water in the whirling mass falls as rain.

With storms diverted where they do no harm, aerial travel is never interrupted.

Thank goodness. I’d hate to think that we couldn’t put all this fossil fuel to good use by deliberately releasing and igniting it in the ocean.

After discussing the requisite personal helicopter stored on the roof, and the eradication of aging, influenza and the common cold, the article takes a final disturbing turn in a way that shows the influences of the Cold War and McCarthyism, and suggests that this little suburb of Tottenville is just up the road from Stepford:

Any marked departure from what Joe Dobson and his fellow citizens wear and eat and how they amuse themselves will arouse comment. If old Mrs. Underwood, who lives around the corner from the Dobsons and who was born in 1920 insists on sleeping under an old-fashioned comforter instead of an aerogel blanket of glass puffed with air so that it is as light as thistledown she must expect people to talk about her “queerness.” It is astonishing how easily the great majority of us fall into step with our neighbors. And after all, is the standardization of life to be deplored if we can have a house like Joe Dobson’s, a standardized helicopter, luxurious standardized household appointments, and food that was out of the reach of any Roman emperor?

There’s old lady Underwood now… let’s get her! Baseball bats, probably now made of recycled feminine hygiene products, are amazingly light yet still pack a wallop.

I left Yorktown around 2:30 yesterday afternoon, and got back home after 6:30, another depressingly overlong drive that took almost twice the time it normally would on a non-holiday weekend.

It was a relaxing, low-pressure weekend in which, as Sheldon pointed out in his LiveJournal entry, the three of us quickly and easily, though not unsurprisingly, fell right back into our comfortable ways of being with each other, even after nine years of having lived far apart. It would be very nice if we could end up living together again, or at least in the same city; some of my fondest memories are from the years we lived together in the early 90s.

On Saturday we did make it to lunch at one of the nicer restaurants to which Sheldon had wanted to take me–The Trellis, in Williamsburg, the home of Marcel Desaulniers and his famous “Death by Chocolate.” I had a wonderful mushroom pâté served with walnut bread, and the three of us shared a nice dessert that included a chocolate-hazelnut-raspberry cake and scoops of chocoate-toasted coconut ice cream and blueberry sorbet.

The weather, though sunny, was just much too hot and humid to make being outside enjoyable or even particularly bearable, so we didn’t do much out of the house; after lunch on Saturday we did briefly walk around some of the shops near the restaurant, and made a visit to two wine tastings, including one at the shop from which Sheldon stocks much of his own cellar. Otherwise, we just stayed in, reminisced, caught up, watched television and drank some very, very good wine. We didn’t even observe any fireworks, or attend any cookouts, but I didn’t regret either.

And now I’m back home. Alex was very glad to see me, and was very affectionate and needy all evening; unfortunately, he also decided to be very needy at 5:00 this morning, wandering around the house and crying until I got out of bed and played with him. Considering I hadn’t gotten to bed until after 2:00, I’m feeling rather wonky today. Fortunately, it seems to be a pretty quiet day at the office.

Thursday evening after a meeting at church that ended around 8pm, I braved the holiday traffic to drive down to Yorktown to spend the long weekend with my friends Sheldon and Lisa, now living back in Virginia after nine years away in Belgium and Anchorage. It took four hours to make what should have been just over a two-hour trip; in the stressful first two and a half hours I only got about seventy miles from home, though after that the traffic lightened considerably and the rest of the drive wasn’t too bad.

Yesterday we took in Terminator 3 to avoid the depressingly muggy heat, had a couple of meals (unfortunately, the nice restaurants we’d hoped to visit were closed for the fourth, so we just hit a Ruby Tuesdays for lunch and an Uno’s for dinner), and relaxed in front of the tv with two very nice bottles of wine.

This morning I’m catching up on email and making at least this one entry to explain why I’m not otherwise posting much this weekend, the first of three weekends in a row where I actually have fairly significant plans. This weekend I’m with Sheldon and Lisa, next weekend my friend Peg comes to stay with me, and the weekend after that I’m finally driving down to visit my family for the first time in months; I’d have spent this weekend with my folks, except that the entire family (not just Mom and Dad, but sister, brother-in-law and nephews, aunts, uncles, cousins and second cousins) was leaving early this morning for their annual vacation at Ocean Isle Beach in North Carolina.

After I post this, I think we’re going to head out to brunch; today we’re trying again to get to the nicer and/or more interesting restaurants. Afterwards, I think we’re going to spend some time in Williamsburg. I’ll report more later.

It’s been a very strange morning here at the office. By 10:00 I’d already been involved in two personal conversations–including one with my boss–about homosexuality.

My closet having been blown wide open when I started coming out in 1980 to my friends and family, the final splinters from the closet door were swept away in 1992 when I finally officially came out to my parents. I’ve always been out in the workplace, too, even spearheading efforts to add sexual orientation to my previous employers’ antidiscrimination policies, to gain domestic partner benefits, and to organize company- and industry-wide queer employee groups.

So the past eleven months at the Department of State have been oddly and somewhat distressingly–albeit inadvertently–like going back into a closet of sorts. I’ve been told that State may be the most progressive federal agency on glbt issues, yet I feel a greater sense of disapprobation here for those who are openly gay and less self-disclosure from other queer employees than anywhere else I’ve worked; it’s been almost completely a non-issue in all of my other employment over the past 19 years. Granted, staff here seem less likely to engage in any kind of personal sharing or making personal connections than anywhere I’ve worked before. With a few notable exceptions, mostly among the contract staff, I’ve noticed very little socialization among employees.

So, back to the issue at hand. One of the contractors I oversee is lesbian, and she and I do tend to share more personal information with one another; she’s also probably the most visibly out person here at the Institute, often talking about her partner or mentioning that she is gay within minutes of meeting someone else, sometimes in ways that seem even to me more gratuitious than relevant. In this regard, too, I’ve noticed that other staff tend to talk disparagingly about this aspect of her communication, and they focus on what they describe as “wearing her sexuality on her sleeve.” More accurately, though, I think that she’s just more informal and less careful about her conversation more generally; she often blurts out things about a wide range of issues and people without thinking of the context or the level of appropriateness, not just about her or others’ sexual orientation, though that’s what many of my straight colleagues seem to focus on. I, on the other hand, have been less forthcoming about my personal life since coming to work here, not because I’ve made a deliberate decision to withhold information, but primarily just because I really haven’t had much of a personal life to share during the time I’ve been employed here. I’ve been single and haven’t even dated much, and largely have been wrapped up in a variety of concerns–my dad’s health, problems with my condo and my car, etc.–that haven’t left much time or energy for a social life. At the same time, I haven’t become particularly close to anyone here, with the exception of one colleague, so my sexual orientation has remained largely unspoken and uncommented upon.

Yesterday, though, in a meeting with the contractor and my immediate supervisor, the latter made a complimentary comment about the support I’ve been giving her in organizing and managing some projects, and the contractor quipped, “Well, we knew we needed a gay man for the job.” Though I suspected my supervisor knew that I’m gay, we’d never personally spoken about it. There was a short awkward pause in the conversation, but then we went back to the topic and moved on. I was amused more than anything else, and after the meeting was over didn’t even think about it again.

My boss, though, apparently was disturbed by it, and she came to me today to tell me that she planned to speak to the contractor about it, and that it had potentially created a “hostile work environment” that could set the stage for a complaint, by me, of sexual harrassment. While I agreed in theory that the comment had been potentially inappropriate, and it was a little frustrating to hear that the contractor, without first asking or telling me, had outed me to my supervisor months ago when my supervisor first returned to the job after a year’s sabbatical, I suggested that she take the approach not of focusing specifically on the comment about my being gay, which in and of itself I found neither offensive nor threatening, but about the contractor’s tendency more generally to speak without thinking or being aware of the environment and context for her remarks.

This led to a conversation about where people draw the lines of their own comfort level, and I pointed out that while my boss defines the contractor’s references to her partner as “giving too much detail about her personal life,” she herself has shared a great level of detail about her own marriage, divorce and new relationship with her opposite-sex partner, to whom she’s not married. All in all, it was a positive conversation; sometimes I’m amazed at the comfortable relationship I have with my boss, and our ability to be completely blunt and honest with each other, given that before she came back I’d heard comments about her previous behavior that left me feeling anxious about working with her.

After this conversation, one of my other contract staff came to speak to me, and she wanted to share some personal health-related issues that were having a bearing on her emotional state and, by extension, on her work performance. In the context of recognizing that she and I are developing a personal relationship as well as a professional one, and her burgeoning friendship with the lesbian contractor as well, I ended up outing myself again, as a natural part of the conversation. She already had guessed as much, but told me that she assumed that I was closeted here, which was a strange and discomforting thing to hear. But it opened another door to developing some social relationships here, and we’ve already begun to make plans to start having lunch together more often.

So while at eleven months into the job it’s taken significantly longer than usual to reach a comfort level I’ve usually taken for granted, at least it does look like I may finally be finding some additional personal connections here that may help make the workday a little more engaging.

While watching last night’s episode of Family Guy just now (thanks to TiVo), I was pleasantly surprised to see a Chili’s commercial featuring Esera Tuaolo, the former NFL athlete currently focusing on a musical career, who came out publicly as gay last year. It wasn’t long ago that athletes who were gay–or even presumed gay–were seen as liabilities, and were very unlikely to receive commercial endorsement contracts. And in Chili’s we have, like Wal-Mart, an institution that historically has been seen as appealing to the American middle-class mainstream demonstrating–explicitly in Wal-Mart’s case and at least implicitly in Chili’s–a wider acceptance of the gay community.

What a wonderfully queer week this has been.

While having my hair shampooed and styled yesterday, and writing about it today, some of my favorite memories of my parents and my paternal grandmother came to mind.

As a young boy, I would sit next to my grandmother in the pew every Sunday at church services, while my mother and father were up front with the choir, my mother as organist and my father singing. During the sermon, my grandmother would scratch my head, often lulling me to sleep.

Similarly, on Sunday mornings before church, my sister and I often would climb onto Mom and Dad’s bed, where the four of us would read our Sunday School lessons, while Mom would scratch Dad’s back or mine. My sister never really liked this kind of physical contact; even with her own husband and to a lesser degree with her children she’s not very physically demonstrative.

And I remembered many times sitting on the floor with my back against the sofa on which my dad would be lying, with him watching tv or resting, but with one hand outstretched to quietly and unconcernedly scratch my head. This style of physical communication and affection from my father continues even now; when I’m visiting my parents, it’s not at all unusual for me to sit on the floor at the foot of their bed, while Dad lies on the bed with his feet toward the headboard, idly scratching my scalp while we watch a DVD together. I realize sometimes how lucky I am–especially given the generations to which my dad and I belong–to have a father who’s not afraid to express affection and love to his son.

Having my head scratched or massaged by a partner continues to be a wonderful treat for me, more a sensuous indulgence from my remembrances of experiencing it with my family than entirely a sexual pleasure (though on the latter front, I do rather like having my hair tugged, though at its current length that would be more difficult, since there’s little with which to find a handhold); it tends to put me into a quiet, comfortable, dreamy mood, where I feel safe and loved. Considering how much I enjoy this, it’s a wonder I don’t have my hair styled much more often than only every 2-4 months.

Yesterday evening I had an appointment for a haircut. I had been a bad boy and hadn’t seen my stylist since February 28, so my hair had grown longer than anyone in my current job had seen on me, though still relatively short, and certainly not nearly as long as during my high school days. (As a data point, the picture in the left-hand column was taken two months after the last haircut, and two months prior to this one.)

My hair is naturally wavy, but the wave is not as readily apparent–nor as unmanageable–when my hair is kept very short, which is one reason I tend to do so. Over the past four months since the last trim, though, and especially with the high humidity we’ve been enduring this spring and summer, the curl was becoming more noticeable, and two colleagues, including my boss, had commented that they particularly liked it longer and wavier. For at least the past three weeks, though, it had been driving me crazy, and with the weather getting warmer I was ready for a summer do. I had been trying to make an appointment for about a month, but my stylist was away part of that time attending his grandfather’s funeral in Ireland, and then booked upon his return for two solid weeks. I was even startin–and feeling guilty about–an internal debate whether I should go to someone else in the meantime, but the couple of external compliments helped me decide to wait until John was back; after all, while I hated seeing my more unruly hair briefly in the mirror as I was preparing for work in the morning, I wasn’t the one who had to look at it throughout the rest of the day.

I told John I wanted to go “short, short, summer short” and he took it a little further even than we’d gone before; the back and sides especially are about as close to a buzz cut without actually being one as one can go. When he first started, his clippers kept getting clogged up, and he said it felt like shearing a sheep. And shampooing this morning felt so odd with practically nothing to run my hands through as I lathered, rinsed and repeated.

Reactions today seem to be polarized; I’ve gotten several very positive comments, but at least two–including one from my boss–bemoaning the loss of my curls, and one colleague nearly shrieked when she turned the corner and saw me, saying as she walked off that I “look like a marine,” not precisely the look I was going for, though I don’t think it’s quite that severe, but probably just hyperbole on her part.

Of course, now that I’m shorn for the hot humid DC summer, today’s high temperature is only in the mid 70s as opposed to the low 90s we’d been seeing; moreover, the air conditioning at work seems to be running much cooler than usual, so today my head is freezing. Oh, the price we pay to try to look fresh and smart.

As if the religious right weren’t apoplectic enough after last week’s Supreme Court decision legalizing private consensual sodomy, I can’t wait to see their reaction to the announcement that that bastion of rural couture and puritanism, Wal-Mart, announced yesterday that it has added sexual orientation to its corporate antidiscrimination policy.

With this formal change to Wal-Mart’s policy, nine of the ten largest Fortune 500 companies now bar discrimination against gay and lesbian employees; the tenth, Exxon Mobil Corporation, revoked the nondiscrimination policy and domestic partner benefits already in place at Mobil when the latter was acquired by Exxon in 1999.