Oppenheimer at AMC Lincoln Square IMAX 70mm

(I originally posted this on Reddit.)

So, I live in New York City, but I’d been completely unaware of the significance of seeing Oppenheimer in IMAX 70mm until I read the New York Times interview with Nolan last week. I’d bought a ticket in regular old laser projection, not IMAX or 70mm or anything special. Then I read that article and I thought, damn, I wish I’d known! I went online and all the showings in IMAX 70mm at Lincoln Square were sold out for the three-week run except for some seats in the front row, on the sides, and I wasn’t interested in that because I thought it would be incredibly uncomfortable.

So on Saturday I saw Oppenheimer at the regular old movie theater. Decent seat in a recliner. There was a small green pixel on the side of the screen the whole time but I mostly didn’t notice. Terrific movie.

But I was still having FOMO about IMAX 70mm, so in the next few days I kept reloading various showings on the AMC website over and over, because people sometimes cancel. Eventually seat E32 opened up for Wednesday morning, so I snagged the ticket.

But I kept wondering whether it would be hard to watch from that angle and distance. The seat was was 3/4 along the row (32nd out of 42 seats) and I wondered if it would be too close. It might have been fine… but I kept on reloading various showings throughout the next day, because why not.

Finally last night, seat L25 opened up for the following morning (this morning)! I grabbed it immediately. Second row from the back, just 3 seats off center? Yes please.

So I saw it this morning. There were two guys in the near center of the row, L22-23, and I asked them when they’d bought their tickets. They said June 1. And they were visiting all the way from Iowa.

On top of that, whoever had the ticket next to me for L24 never showed up. So 30 minutes into the movie I finally moved into that seat – one seat closer to the center.

My seat was practically perfect. What a great experience to see it on such a huge screen!

Honestly, there wasn’t a whole lot of the movie that really needed to be in the IMAX aspect ratio, since deep down it’s more of a character film. And there are hardly any shots that linger on outdoor landscapes, so there’s not really a chance to immerse yourself in those.

Also – there were bits of dust or something that kept appearing and sticking around on the screen for extended periods of time, these little dark spots that would just hang out, especially over characters’ faces, which was a little distracting, especially in the black and white shots. Does anyone know why that would happen? This was only the fifth day of showings. Is it just the nature of film? Something having to do with dust getting caught in the IMAX projectors? Are those projectors hard to maintain? Or have I just gotten so used to pristine digital projection?

[Update: someone responded to me in another Reddit thread:

“It’s dust in the film gate of the projector.

“Because of the nature of IMAX being a big blown up image on the screen, ordinary specs of dust look ENORMOUS. IMAX has a great compressed-air dust busting system, so there’s actually LESS dust than normal film projection. But what gets through looks BIG!

“Yes, digital doesn’t have this issue.”]

It was also a bit distracting to have the aspect ratio constantly shift between regular and tall, and the film resolution was less sharp in the regular shots as well. I don’t remember a difference between shots when I saw it in the ordinary theater.

In addition, a lot of the dialogue was hard to hear. I’d had the same issue in the ordinary theater and I’d thought the sound mix would be better at IMAX, but it wasn’t. The music and explosions, etc., were nice and loud and reverberating in IMAX, but the dialogue wasn’t any easier to make out than in the ordinary theater.

I know I’m being nitpicky. It really was a wonderful experience, and my persistence totally paid off in an excellent seat. So if you live near an IMAX 70mm and are despairing at not having gotten a ticket already, keep reloading the website for your theater because seats do open up.

Crossword: Four Apparently Random Clues

My favorite British TV quiz show, Only Connect, returns in the UK tonight. To celebrate, I’ve created this crossword. (Technically, I guess the British would call it an “American-style crossword.”)

The basic unit of gameplay in the show: host Victoria Coren Mitchell gives the contestants a group of four apparently random clues, and they have to figure out the connection among them. The fewer clues they need to figure out the connection, the more points they get. Victoria is a wonderful host with a very dry wit. If you don’t watch the show, this puzzle will probably be meaningless, and you should go find it on YouTube. Now.

Otherwise, enjoy.

pdf / puz / embedded puzzle below

The 2022 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament

The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament this weekend was an unexpectedly emotional experience for me.

For one thing, there was the pure giddiness of being with my crossword friends in person for the first time since the August 2019 Lollapuzzoola tournament. It felt cathartic to see everyone and to feel the buzzing energy of so many people from the crossword community in the same place once again. It’s been too freaking long. We’ve had (and are still in) a pandemic and there’s been other national/world trauma, and meanwhile the crossword world has exploded online. There are many people who’ve become established names in crosswording since 2019, and it was almost sensory overload to see so many of them in the same place. Until this weekend, I hadn’t completely realized how much I had missed all of this.

As for my tournament performance: wow. I had no expectations of anything going in. At the last in-person ACPT in 2019, I came in 95th out of 700-ish people. My goal this time was just to rank in the double digits again.

[Note: this is my own blog, of course, so obviously I’m writing about this from my perspective and putting my own feelings and point of view front and center.]

There were fewer attendees this time because of the pandemic, under 500 total. But I figured there’d be some amazing rookies there after such a long gap between tournaments.

So. We did the first three puzzles on Saturday morning and then went to lunch. I didn’t think about scores, because I didn’t want to get into that stressed-out mindset yet.

But eventually, in the middle of Saturday afternoon, the scores for the first two puzzles were posted online, and I looked, and I was in 24th place.

Wow!

That felt really cool.

Later in the afternoon, the scores for the third puzzle went up, and I was doing even better – I was tied for 14th! And then after the fourth puzzle, I was still 15th!

And then, after the notorious puzzle #5, which usually breaks most people, I WAS IN ELEVENTH PLACE.

WHAT?

How was this possible?

I was sitting in the hotel bar with some of my friends who are amazingly good crossword solvers. We were all looking at the scores. I was doing so well. Some of them congratulated me. I’ve never really felt good enough at crosswords – I’ve had a bit of fragile self-esteem about it – and it all felt wonderfully validating.

At that point, I was ranked 4th in the B division, and I started to wonder if I could possibly make it into the top three of the Bs and get to solve the puzzle on stage during the B round, while Ophira Eisenberg and Greg Pliska did commentary. It was doubtful, because the competition was fierce. It was of course going to be Paolo Pasco and then Jenna Lafleur and then someone else. Maybe it was possible I could be that third. Who knew. Maybe? Could you imagine?

After puzzle 6, I was ranked 14th again, but still number 4 in the B division. I doubted things would break my way. But I was definitely daydreaming about it.

To that point I’d had six clean puzzles in the tournament. No errors. I’d never had an error-free ACPT before. In fact, I’d only had one completely error-free puzzle tournament before – Lollapuzzoola online, last summer.

And then Sunday morning turned out to be bit of a roller coaster for me.

Puzzle 7.

I took a little longer on it than I wanted to – I got slowed down in a couple of places. But I completed it, and the timer was nearly at the minute mark, so I gave the final grid a quick once over, and it didn’t seem like I had any errors. I turned it in. Fingers crossed.

But then: bad news for me.

I was chatting with some folks after the puzzle, and it turned out that two of the people in the running for the top three of the B division, Jesse and Matt, had finished faster than me. I didn’t know how Jenna had done, but she’s amazing and I was sure she’d crushed it as always. So I was probably going to be ranked 5th in the B. Oh well.

But a little bit later: A TWIST!

I was talking with Matt and he said he’d realized he’d made an error on the puzzle.

And then, on Twitter, I learned the heartbreaking news about Jenna: she had overslept and had missed puzzle 7 entirely. I felt awful for her. That really sucked.

I refreshed the website to see if my puzzle 7 grid had been scanned yet, and it turned out it had – and I had no yellow squares! I had seven clean puzzles. I was probably going to make it into the top 3 for Division B. Oh my god oh my god oh my god.

But then: ANOTHER TWIST.

I was talking with Matt, and during our chat, the final overall scores for the tournament were posted. And… I was ranked way lower than I should have been. Even below Matt. How? What had happened? What was going on?

Matt and I started to write a note to the judges so they could figure out what had happened.

But then, curious, I reloaded the page with my scan of puzzle 7 – and now there was a yellow square.

Ugh.

I guess it had been re-checked. And, yeah. I looked at that yellow square. I’d screwed up.

I’d made a stupid, stupid mistake in that one square. It wasn’t even that I didn’t know the answer: it was that in filling in the unfilled squares in the answer, my hand and my brain didn’t communicate properly and I wrote a letter that I’d previously already written in the word instead of the one that it was supposed to be.

This is not the first time this has happened to me in a tournament.

Heh. Of course. The balance of things was restored. I wasn’t meant to be up there.

But I was very happy that Adam Doctoroff made it up there instead, because he got screwed out of being on stage a few years ago due to a judging error that wasn’t discovered until after the tournament. Adam is a freaking sharp solver.

I spent a lot of the morning kicking myself for my stupid mistake.

But: a final ironic twist!

Eventually I looked at the scores more closely. And I discovered that even if I hadn’t made my stupid mistake, I still wouldn’t have made it onto the stage! Adam had performed so well on puzzle 7 that I still would have wound up 10 points behind him overall.

That made me feel better. I’d made a dumb mistake, but at least it wouldn’t have changed anything.

Anyway:

In the end, I finished 23rd out of 474, which is amazing, way better than I could have possibly imagined. And I reunited with old friends. And I made new ones. Overall, a pretty wonderful experience.

And one of these days I’ll learn not to make stupid mistakes.

On Sondheim

I learned that Stephen Sondheim had died while we were going up the escalator after seeing “House of Gucci.” I looked at my phone and there was a text from my mom:

Stephen Sondheim died today.

I gasped. I turned to Matt. “What? What is it?” he said. I showed him the text. “Oh no!” he said.

I came late to Sondheim. And it was Matt who finally made me a Sondheim devotee.

I don’t know why it took me so long. I grew up with musical theater. My mom has loved it her whole life (the first Broadway show she ever saw was Carnival in the early 1960s), and she instilled that love in me. She took me to my first Broadway show, Peter Pan starring Sandy Duncan, when I was a little kid. (Clap for Tinkerbell!) I started performing in shows in elementary school, and I continued doing it all through high school and into my first year of college.

But Sondheim was never really on my radar.

I do remember that one night in 1987 or 1988 my parents went into the city to see the original production of Into the Woods. I remember them telling me that the first act was amazing, and that they wondered, what is there even left to happen in the second act? And then that second act was something crazy.

In high school I listened to the cast album of West Side Story all the time. As a teenager I saw Tyne Daly perform in Gypsy, and that album joined the rotation. But I associated West Side with Leonard Bernstein, and Gypsy I didn’t really associate with anyone. I wasn’t a deep thinker about musical theater. I just enjoyed the music.

I did listen to my parents’ copy of Into the Woods every so often and thought it was brilliant.

And in high school I got to see another high school’s theater group do a production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum – with all the music taken out. I didn’t know the show, but it made for a hilarious one-act play. And it was obviously a blatant rights violation, but this was Japan before the World Wide Web so it was easier to get away with things like that.

And then I went to college and tried out for a production of Sweeney Todd. It was produced by a group called First-Year Players, which put on shows cast entirely with first-year students as a way to ease them into the UVA drama program. I knew nothing about Sweeney Todd. In high school we’d done Annie Get Your Gun, Anything Goes, and The Music Man. Good old-fashioned musicals.

I had never heard anything like the music in Sweeney Todd. I don’t think many of us had. (I remember two different women auditioned using the same song from Les Miz.) I got cast in the chorus and I remember thinking, what the fuck even is this show and how the hell am I going to learn any of this music? But I did. And I came to love it. It was brilliant. The following summer I bought the original cast recording and was so happy to have the music.

And yet despite loving Sweeney, I still didn’t know anything about Stephen Sondheim. I guess I knew that he’d written the show, but I wasn’t interested in learning anything about him or exploring any of his other musicals. After my first year of college, after not getting cast in any university-wide shows, I mostly turned away from theater and toward choral music and a cappella groups. My big thing for the rest of college became singing. From that point on, theater remained an interest, but only an occasional one.

I saw Nathan Lane perform in Forum on Broadway. But again – I had no interest in exploring further.

In 1996 or 1997 I got really into Rent. I bought the cast album and became obsessed.

In “La Vie Bohème” there’s that line:

to Sontag, to Sondheim, to anything taboo

Again – despite having performed in a Sondheim show – I didn’t really know who Sondheim was. When I heard that lyric I associated his name vaguely with opera or ballet or some highbrow New York City art form. Someone sort of like Leonard Bernstein maybe? Leonard Bernstein, whose biography I had read and whom, as a classical music fan, I was genuinely fascinated by?

I look back at myself now and think, come on, Jeff!

I saw the 2002 revival of Into the Woods with my mom.

That was about the extent of my Sondheim knowledge.

But then eventually I met Matt, and we started dating. I was almost 30. (“I was younger then…”)

Matt was a walking musical theater encyclopedia, and his enthusiasm was infectious. After we’d been dating for a couple of months, he was about to go visit his parents for the holidays, but before he left, he burned three data CDs’ worth of his favorite cast albums and gave them to me. There were several dozen albums there – well-known and obscure.

And from Matt I learned how great Sondheim was. I decided to read Meryle Secrest’s Sondheim biography. I started to get to know Sondheim’s shows.

Eventually I was lucky enough to see productions of all of them – even Saturday Night (and in the case of some shows, multiple productions) – except for one: A Little Night Music. I know some of the songs, but I’ve never seen a production and I’m not too familiar with the plot. Somehow I never got around to seeing the Broadway revival that ran for more than a year in 2010. Why why why?

Matt and I used lyrics from “Being Alive” in our wedding vows.

We got to see him in person a couple of times over the years. The best was when we saw a preview of his musical Road Show at the Public Theater about a decade ago and he sat right behind us. After the show, he started to walk out through a side entrance that led backstage and an usher yelled at him. “Excuse me! Sir! You can’t go that way!” Someone told the usher who he was and a bunch of people around us laughed.

We also got to see him near us in the audience at Symphony Space watching Anthony de Mare perform reinterpretations of his music for piano.

I knew that someday Sondheim would die. Many times over the years I’ve imagined what Twitter would be like on that day. (It turned out to basically be like what I expected.) When it finally happened it felt inevitable but still shocking, perhaps for its suddenness. He’d given an interview just a few days before.

I don’t have anything profound to say about his music or his work. Others more insightful than me have said it much better than I could.

But I’m sad he’s gone. Never again will I be able to sit in a theater watching a new musical and think “I wonder what Sondheim will think of this?”

I don’t believe in an afterlife. I don’t believe he’s looking down at us watching us. But it’s hard to believe in someone not existing, so instead I think of it like this: when someone dies, their soul loses interest in anything or anyone earthly. Their soul forgets who they are and instead is in some inaccessible place, eternally pondering things that are inaccessible to us.

It’s such a gift that we were able to be alive at a time when Stephen Sondheim lived too. It’s hard to imagine, for the first time in our lives, a world without him. But his children – his art – will always be with us.

Twenty Years Later

I’ve been immersed in thoughts and memories of 9/11 this week. Lots of them.

I. Doug

My college friend and hallmate for two years, Doug Ketcham, died on September 11, 2001. He was 27 years old and worked as a bond trader for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, a few floors above where the first plane hit.

As the Richmond, Virginia, Times-Dispatch put it four days later:

Douglas D. Ketcham’s last known phone call was to his parents in Florida.

He was in his Cantor Fitzgerald office on the 104th floor of One World Trade Center when the first plane hit several floors below him.

“He called his mother just after and said there had been a terrible explosion, and to tell them that he loved them,” said his friend, John Riley. “He called from underneath his desk.”

After Ketcham said those words, the connection went dead. No one has heard from him since, and he is missing.

Doug grew up in Midlothian, Virginia, a suburb of Richmond. I met him at the start of my third year at UVA, his second year, when we both moved into a pretty small dorm. Most of us were new to the building that year, and we quickly bonded into a close group.

We all played a lot of cards. There was almost always a game of spades or hearts going on during free moments. And Doug was an excellent card player. His mom had taught him bridge. How many college students knew how to play bridge?

As I wrote on my blog 20 years ago:

Doug liked to have fun. And he could charm the pants off of anyone. And he could fall asleep in almost any situation – on a couch, in a bar, with his hand in a bag of chips.

My friend Doug, who was an awesome card player; my friend Doug, who once broke his leg right before a spring break trip to Ireland; my friend Doug, a terrific schmoozer who had no problem striking up a conversation with the prettiest woman in the room or on the subway, to our constant amusement…

Sometime after college, Doug moved to Manhattan. Eventually, I moved back to the New York area too. I rarely saw Doug, even though I lived just across the river in Jersey City. But if I stepped outside my apartment I could see the twin towers looming large on the other side of the Hudson, and they would make me think of him, because I knew he worked there.

Two weeks after 9/11, I went to Doug’s memorial service in Richmond, and afterwards I wrote this:

Doug shouldn’t be dead. It makes no sense. He wasn’t supposed to die like this, so young, and under such ridiculous circumstances. We were sitting in the church, and the music began and the family walked in, first his parents (his mother was sobbing, and I lost it at that point), and then his sister, and his grandparents, and then his girlfriend – escorted by his roommate – and for a second I imagined that it was a wedding and Doug was marrying his girlfriend. And then I thought, Doug’s never going to have a wedding now.

To get to Richmond for the service, I had to rent a car. I remember calling the rental car company – a national chain – and saying that I lived in New Jersey. The woman on the phone said, with sadness in her voice, “We’re all thinking about all of you up there in the New York area.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I was renting the car so I could drive down to the memorial service of my friend who had died in the attacks.

For three and a half months from 9/11 through the end of 2001, the New York Times published capsule profiles of everyone who had died that day. Their profile of Doug, in a very eerie coincidence, ran on the same weekend that many of our gang gathered for the wedding of another friend from our group.

Here’s an excerpt:

Mr. Ketcham was remarkably close to his mother. He would call her, even at 2 a.m., if he had just spotted a celebrity, and even told her about his love life.

She had an uncanny knack for sensing, long distance, when he was feeling down. “He told me stuff,” Mrs. Ketcham said from her home near Orlando, Fla. “I’d say, ‘Son, remember, I’m your mother. I’m not old enough to know that.'”

In her son’s briefcase, Mrs. Ketcham found an envelope on which he had scrawled an itinerary for a visit to New York that she had planned but postponed. “I was going to be taken everywhere,” Mrs. Ketcham said. “I was going to be the queen of New York.”

When I read that amazing Atlantic article about Bobby McIlvane last month, it hit home, because Bobby was about the same age as Doug and me.

Here’s something else I wrote:

You graduate from college and so many of your friends go to work for consulting firms and investment banks and brokerages with these prestigious names. You send out resumés and go on interviews and get hired. You expect to make a great salary and get valuable work experience and start to build a terrific life. You’re young and you’re living in New York City. You go to work and you compile spreadsheets and have meetings and write on whiteboards and talk on the phone and meet with clients and send money to your college alumni associations. When you get a chance, you go out to bars in Tribeca with your coworkers and you hit on people and you talk about where you went to school.

You’re not supposed to be trapped inside a 110-story building that’s rapidly filling up with smoke and jet fuel from a hijacked airplane.

I’ve thought about Doug over the last twenty years. He’s eternally 27 years old in my mind. He never got to grow older than that. I still can’t believe he’s not alive. It’s always been hard for me to reconcile my college memories of Doug – totally ordinary memories that we all have of our friends – with the fact that he died in a geopolitical terrorist attack.

My friend died in a terrorist attack? I mean, really?

After twenty years it still feels absurd.

(I’m tangentially connected to two other people who died that day. My parents knew Howard Kestenbaum, who lived in my hometown of Montclair; incidentally, he comes right before my friend Doug Ketcham in the alphabetical listings of the victims. Scott Johnson was the younger brother of someone I went to elementary school with, and my brother knows his sister.)

II. My 9/11

I wasn’t supposed to be in Manhattan that day.

I was still living in Jersey City. But I was at the beginning of a two-week break before starting a new job, and I’d met someone on gay.com the night before, and I’d taken the PATH train into the city to meet him in the Village and stayed overnight with him. On the morning of 9/11, I didn’t even know what had happened until about 10:50, when I left his apartment and walked down West 10th Street to Sixth Avenue and saw everyone staring southward. There was just a wall of smoke at the southern end of Manhattan. I asked one woman what had happened and she paused for a moment like I was stupid. Then she told me.

So I’ve always felt like I was one of the last people in the country to know about 9/11. It seems like most people experienced the horrors of the morning in real time, but for me, it happened all at once, a fait accompli. To this day I’m not really sure how I processed it. I’ve watched the archival TV footage many times since then, and sometimes I’ve forgotten that that’s not how I originally experienced it. (There are lots of times when I wish I had experienced it the same way everyone else did. I feel a little left out, somehow.)

I wound up going back to the guy’s apartment – by which time he had learned about what had happened too – and we walked around together all that day, both in shock, down to lower Manhattan and then across the Brookyn Bridge with the throng, turning back to look at the long jet-black stream of smoke, and then back to Manhattan via subway. He had just moved to New York a week earlier.

He spent the afternoon with me as I realized I had Doug’s phone number and called Doug’s roommate and learned that nobody had heard from Doug since he’d called his mom and girlfriend from the towers that morning.

After that day I never saw my 9/11 companion again, but several months later I found a blog post from him – in which he wrote that he’d narrowly escaped from the World Trade Center that morning.

Huh?

I didn’t contact him. And eventually I lost his contact info and couldn’t completely remember his last name. I don’t know what became of him.

When I finally got home that night, I wrote an epic blog post about everything that had happened that day. I wanted to get it all down. (I rambled too much at the beginning, with the really long prelude about how the World Trade Center figured in my day-to-day life, but I wanted to get everything down.) I primarily considered myself part of the gay blogging community. Blogging was only just about to go mainstream (helped by 9/11, in fact), and there was no social media, but my blog post got read by lots of people, as did anything written by anyone who was in New York that day. (It got included in a Slate.com recap five years later.)

I am deeply glad I was blogging back then. I recently went back and re-read lots of what I wrote that month, not just that day but in subsequent days and weeks. I read some of it for the first time in years. I’d forgotten a lot of it.

Sometimes I think about how, if I’d stayed home in Jersey City the night before, my 9/11 would have turned out totally different. I usually slept with the ringer on my telephone turned off, so I would have missed the frantic voicemails my mom left me that morning. And I didn’t usually watch much TV. But I lived on a busy street that, if you were on it, you could see the Twin Towers. I couldn’t see them from inside my apartment. But I probably would have heard people screaming on the street as they watched what was happening, so I probably would have gone outside and seen it too.

I’m actually glad I was in Manhattan that day. It’s where I would have wanted to be. And I’m glad I didn’t have to spend the day alone.

Nine days after 9/11, I saw “The Producers.” Nathan Lane was out, but it didn’t matter. I needed to laugh. It was cathartic being in that audience.

At the end of the month, I got a cell phone. If you didn’t already have one on 9/11, you soon got one, because it might save your life.

During the holiday season I was lucky enough to be able to attend an event at the Rainbow Room at the top of 30 Rockefeller Plaza on the night of the Christmas tree lighting – but from the top of the building I could see all the way to the southern end of Manhattan and the white glow of Ground Zero, where workers continued to sort through the rubble almost three months after the attacks.

III. Time

I think a lot about time. I always have. How we perceive it and its passage, how our perceptions of it change, how it tricks us.

9/11 feels like an event that exists outside of time. It’s the only event that, when the anniversary comes around, I snap back to that day like there’s a rubber band attached to it on the calendar. It’s like I physically left part of myself there and I have to revisit it once a year. I don’t feel this way about any other event. Is that how the older generation feels about JFK’s assassination? That suddenly the intervening years disappear?

Tied up with this for me is a personal issue – that everything that has happened to me since I graduated from law school in 1999 and came back up north feels like a blur. Is that just a part of getting older? Does time just move more quickly as you get older, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it?

I don’t know.

But some years, when early September arrives, time collapses.

I live in a neighborhood with a lot of college students and it blows my mind that on 9/11, most of them didn’t even exist.

In recent days I’ve looked up coverage of past 9/11 commemorations: the first anniversary, the fifth anniversary, the tenth anniversary. It felt weird to read about. Wait, so we already experienced the tenth anniversary of 9/11? And that anniversary was ten years ago? How is that possible?

III½.

And now for something meta and bizarre.

I’ve written this blog post over the course of several days. When it was practically done, I thought to myself, hmm, did I write anything about 9/11 on the tenth anniversary?

It turns out that I did.

Not only that, but I wrote some of the exact same things ten years ago as I’ve written in this post. And I started my narrative almost the exact same way:

I wasn’t supposed to be in New York that morning.

God, I am so predictable. How could I have used almost the exact same words? And then forgotten that I’d written them?

Echoes of echoes, flashbacks of flashbacks, infinite mirrors facing each other.

Stories solidify in our minds, I guess.

The 25th anniversary, the 50th (should I live that long), and onward – the rubber band will get longer, but I think it will always pull me back.

IV.

While doing research for this post this week, I learned that Doug’s mother died in October 2012.

Nine years ago and I didn’t even know.

The news hit me in the gut. It took me a while to figure out exactly why.

I didn’t know her. But over the years, especially after seeing her at Doug’s memorial service in 2001, I’d sometimes imagine her continuing on with her life, always carrying that grief for her son. And it made me feel connected to her.

I also found an article from the May 3, 2011, Richmond Times-Dispatch, right after bin Laden was killed:

For nearly 10 years, Raenell Ketcham has been mourning the death of her only son, Doug, a Chesterfield County native who died in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, disappearing without a trace after calling his parents from under his desk in the Cantor Fitzgerald offices on the 104th floor.

On Sunday night, a wave of relief washed over his mother as she learned that U.S. forces had killed bin Laden in Pakistan.

“I will never forgive (bin Laden), but it will help to bring closure,” said Ketcham, who lived in the Richmond area for 25 years. “The guy had to pay for what he had done.”

After spending more than a year in bed after visiting ground zero two days after the attack to provide DNA, she has tried to move on with her life, enjoying her retirement in Florida with her husband, Dennis, establishing a scholarship in her son’s name at his alma mater, Midlothian High School, and now paying for children to go to the camp where Doug had worked.

She hopes bin Laden’s death will enable her to make even more progress. “Maybe now I can start to put it behind me,” she said.

. . .

She died a year and a half later.

What happens to someone’s grief when they die?

I realized that when Doug’s mom died, her grief finally ended. I had felt connected to her and her grief for years, and they’re both gone.

It makes me sad. But I’m glad that she’s at peace.

Taking a Twitter Break

I’ve been on a Twitter break for the past two and a half weeks.

A couple of Sundays ago I decided to avoid Twitter for the day. I just needed a break from the constant news misery. One day became two days, which became three days, and now it’s been 18 days. I’ve tweeted a couple of times, and I’ve looked at a couple of non-news-related Twitter accounts once or twice, but I have not actually checked my feed since that Sunday.

I’ve still been following the news, but only by going directly to particular newspaper websites, like the New York Times and the Washington Post, and occasionally a news magazine site or two. I’ve basically turned the clock back on my information consumption about ten years.

I don’t miss the constant updates and anger and doomsaying about every news event large and small, and you-know-who’s looming presence over everything.

I do kind of miss seeing friends’ updates on what they’ve been up to and having jokey Twitter exchanges with acquaintances – the things that pass for being social on Twitter.

I will see how long this lasts. Even though I miss some things, I’m afraid to re-engage with the blue bird, because it has an addictive quality that I find I want to avoid. For now, it’s nice being away from it.

The 2019 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament

I attended my second American Crossword Puzzle Tournament this weekend. Socially, it was wonderful — I got to reconnect with old friends and make new ones, and a couple of people even recognized my name from my NYT puzzle with Derek Bowman a couple months ago.

As for my performance: it’s complicated.

Last year I came in 105th out of 674, making the top 16%. My goal this year was to do better than that. During the last two weeks I did a lot of prep: I did dozens of crosswords. On paper. As fast as possible. I tried to get better at reading more than one clue at a time to speed things up. And: at previous tournaments, ACPT and Lollapuzzoola, I ruined several potentially perfect grids by making stupid errors, thereby forfeiting valuable bonus points. So I vowed that this time I’d check my grids before turning them in, making sure nothing looked obviously wrong. I was going to do better.

And I achieved my goal — I came in 95th out of 741, in the top 13%.

Now, if someone had told me going in that that would be my result, I’d have been thrilled. But instead I was really annoyed at myself, because of how I got there.

After the first four puzzles of the tournament, I was actually in 20th place out of 741 people. My puzzles were all error-free. I was so, so happy. All my efforts were paying off.

And then Puzzle 5 happened.

Puzzle 5 is traditionally the hardest, trickiest puzzle of the seven-puzzle tournament. This year it was by Evan Birnolz, constructor of the weekly Sunday Washington Post crossword. I love Evan’s puzzles, and I’ve met him in person — he’s a great guy. But for some reason, I was just not on the wavelength of this puzzle. I couldn’t figure out the theme. I first noticed something was weird when I tried to write down ROMA and the A was conflicting with the I in PHONE BILL. I couldn’t figure out why. Was it a rebus? Was I supposed to enter both letters in the square? Then in another part of the puzzle, the R in A MINOR clashed with the E in TEST (as in “Beta TEST,” or so I thought). What the hell? I kept re-reading the puzzle title and the blurb and trying to figure out what they meant and why the hell this puzzle wasn’t coming together for me, as the minutes kept passing and I started panicking more and more. Finally I had the whole grid at least filled in, and I realized I wasn’t going to get anywhere by spending more time looking over the grid and losing more points as the time continued passing (you lose points the longer you take). So I decided to cut my losses and turn it in.

Ultimately that puzzle wound up being a total car crash for me. I had THIRTEEN wrong squares. Before puzzle 5, I’d been ranked 20th; after puzzle 5, I fell to 138th. Jesus. I learned after the fact what the theme was. But I just hadn’t been able to figure it out.

Next was puzzle 6, and I rebounded. It was nice and smooth, and I completed it error-free. That was a relief — but I still felt so glum the rest of the evening about puzzle 5.

Sunday morning was puzzle 7, and again – no errors!

So ultimately, puzzles 6 and 7 pushed my ranking back up to 95th place. And if I’d known before this weekend that that’s where I’d rank, I would have been really happy. But if I’d known how I would get there… I don’t know.

Puzzle 5 was a total mess for me and it ruined my score. But on the other hand, I’ve clearly improved my fundamental crosswording skills since my last tournament. I completed six puzzles without stupid errors and with great times. I did well enough that even with my disaster, I still finished in the top 100.

There’s always next year. And more importantly, I got to hang out with terrific people for a whole weekend. Ultimately, nobody else but me cares how I ranked. Making friends and spending time with great people is more important than a crossword tournament ranking.

But I’ll conquer you next year, puzzle 5.

Total Eclipse

The total eclipse was amazing.

I learned more than a year ago that there’d be a total solar eclipse from coast to coast in August 2017, and I saw that my inlaws’ house was just within the path of totality, so I’d thought for a while about going down to visit them. In the last few weeks I started to think about it more seriously, and I decided that if the weather forecasts a few days beforehand for the big day looked good, I’d do it. Last week it seemed like there might be thunderstorms on Monday, but as it got closer to the day, the forecast turned clear. Finally, on Thursday morning, I bought a plane ticket to Chattanooga. I flew down on Sunday afternoon. Matt couldn’t make it because it’s a busy time of year at work for him, and at any rate, he didn’t think it was a big deal!

My inlaws live just north of Chattanooga. Last week they scoped out Dayton, TN, which is about 20 miles north of their house and would get 2 minutes and 21 seconds of totality. So yesterday morning, we drove up there, beating the traffic, and set up a standing tent in a ballfield around 10 a.m., along with chairs, a table, and a cooler full of food. I was with my inlaws, my brother-in-law, and some close friends of my inlaws who I’ve gotten to know over the years. Only one other car was there when we arrived, but as the morning went on, more people showed up. It was never crowded – we were on the edge of a big field with plenty of empty space.

The weather was perfect: a totally clear sky, with just a few clouds only at the horizon. A puffy white cloud did pass overhead at one point as the partial eclipse progressed, but it went by pretty quickly and never covered the sun.

We walked around a bit and got to chat with some of our fellow viewers. There were some locals and some people from farther away. One woman had driven up by herself from Mississippi, and she called herself a “weather nerd.” She had chemo last year and had decided that if she survived to this year, she’d come up and see the total eclipse. There was a couple who came with a tripod and camera and recorded the whole eclipse from start to finish.

The eclipse was an awesome experience, literally.

At around 1 pm, through my eclipse glasses, I could just barely make out a concavity in the sun, so subtle that I thought maybe I was imagining it. But then it became more visible and more defined. For the next hour-plus, the chunk got bigger and bigger.

Totality was scheduled to begin at 2:31. About 15 minutes beforehand, the quality of the light around us started to change. It got dimmer, but in a way I’d never experienced before. I felt like I was on another planet, under an alien sun. As the light continued to grow dim, I began to feel like I was wearing sunglasses, even though I wasn’t.

The sun had been beating down on us all day, but now it wasn’t very hot at all.

The strains of a bagpipe played in the distance. It added to the contemplative atmosphere.

It got to be 2:30. Through my eclipse glasses, the visible sliver of sun in the sky got smaller and smaller, until suddenly it disappeared, and we were in a total eclipse! Everyone cheered. We all took off our eclipse glasses.

I looked up and a black circle had blotted out the sun, just like in all the pictures I’d seen. I could see the corona very clearly. I tried to take a quick photo, but it didn’t come out well at all.

I looked around me. It was twilight, with a 360-degree sunset. A bright star or planet was visible to the right of the sun. The lights in the nearby parking lot came on. A couple of cars on the road drove by using their headlights.

We began to hear crickets. A radio played “Sunglasses At Night” and then “Dancing in the Moonlight.” In the far distance, I saw fireworks.

I lay down on the grass and looked up at the eclipse. Just looked at it.

And then, too soon, the Baily’s Beads and diamond ring began to appear and the sun started to re-emerge. I put my eclipse glasses back on. It was over. The 141 seconds had passed by so fast. It all happened too quickly. There was so much to see and experience and feel and not enough time for it all.

Slowly the sky began to grow lighter, the crickets began to stop, the daytime bugs started up their songs once more, and the air gradually grew warmer. About half an hour later, things felt sadly normal again.

It was an amazing day, and I’m so glad I got to experience it. I’m ready to see another one!

A Response to Modest Mom About Disney and LGBT Issues

On Twitter today I saw a link to a blog post by a woman who wrote that she has cancelled her family’s trip to Walt Disney World because Disney is including a gay character in the new live-action “Beauty and the Beast” movie.

Today, she wrote about the hate mail she received.

I left a comment on that post. I don’t know if the comment will get approved, but here’s what I wrote.

* * * *

Hi. I don’t know you. I’m sorry that someone called you a pig. It can be startling when you write something for your usual friendly audience and it somehow goes viral and gets read and shared by lots of people who don’t normally read your blog. That can happen on the internet. But it’s wrong for someone to call you a pig. People have every right to disagree with you and tell you why you’re misguided, but it’s not helpful to call you names.

Insults aside, it might be useful for you to try and understand why people criticized you.

For one thing, you said you were “forced” to cancel your Disney World vacation. But you weren’t forced to. You chose to. Framing it as something you were “forced” to do makes it sound like you’re trying to portray yourself as a victim.

Second, you said that the reason you decided not to go Disney World is because you don’t like the fact that some men love men and some women love women. Sorry, but that’s a very silly thing to be uncomfortable with. Being gay doesn’t hurt you or your children or anybody else. It doesn’t make the world a worse place. In fact, it makes the world a better place, because when people are allowed to be who they are – when they are happier, and when the things that make them happier do not harm themselves or other people – the world’s net happiness is increased. It seems puzzling that someone would be against increasing net happiness.

You also seem confused about what Disney is doing. It’s not like Disney is going to show gay sex on screen. Do they show heterosexual sex on screen? Do we ever see Prince Eric being sexually intimate with Ariel, Prince Charming having sex with Snow White? No. Little kids don’t need to know about sex. But we’re not talking about sex. We’re talking about portraying someone who has feelings for someone of the same gender. Human love. That’s all.

Third, and here’s a big one: plenty of people who have the same opinion about gay people as you do have done actual harm to gay people over the years. They condemned their gay fellow human beings who contracted HIV and died of AIDS in the 1980s. Instead of giving compassion and – more importantly – funding for anti-AIDS research, they criticized them and told them they were going to hell. More recently, people who hold your beliefs actively worked to try and prevent us from getting married. Getting married is a pinnacle of human happiness, but people actually tried to keep us from realizing that happiness. They didn’t want me to marry my husband. What kind of a person would try and prevent such a thing?

Fourth, you don’t just talk about your beliefs in your post. You actually encourage action. You tell people to sign petitions and participate in a boycott to try and prevent Disney from providing role models for little boys and girls that are going to grow up to be gay. Do you know that LGBT teens have a higher-than-average rate of suicide? Why are you against something that is going to make the young version of me that much less scared to grow up and be who he or she is? Why are you trying to prevent this?

There are plenty of Christians who do embrace gay people and support our full rights as citizens. I would ask how you reconcile your beliefs with the willingness to take action that hurts an entire segment of your fellow human beings.

I guess you don’t see it that way. I imagine you’re probably a good person in many ways. You love your family and your children. It’s great that you feed the poor and clothe the hungry. I honestly mean that: it’s more than most people do. But you seem willing to take action that will harm millions of other people, just because of your feelings.

It was still wrong for someone to call you a pig. But maybe you could try a little better to understand where other people are coming from.

Books I Read in 2016

Here’s a list of the books I read in 2016, in chronological order:

  • Interactive Data Visualization for the Web, Scott Murray
  • Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, Jon Meacham
  • The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, Walter Isaacson (first part)
  • The Magic of Math: Solving for x and Figuring Out Why, Arthur Benjamin
  • The English and Their History, Robert Tombs (first half)
  • Project Future: The Inside Story Behind the Creation of Disney World, Chad Denver Emerson
  • Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church, The Investigative Staff of the Boston Globe
  • Three Years in Wonderland: The Disney Brothers, C. V. Wood, and the Making of the Great American Theme Park, Todd James Pierce (first few chapters)
  • The Oxford History of the French Revolution, William Doyle
  • Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari
  • Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire, Simon Baker
  • John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit, James Traub
  • America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union, Fergus M. Bordewich
  • Test-Driven Development with Python, Harry Percival (most of it)
  • Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939, Volker Ullrich
  • The Nix, Nathan Hill
  • Death’s End, Cixin Liu
  • Time Travel: A History, James Gleick
  • Herbert Hoover: A Life, Glen Jeansonne
  • Herbert Hoover in the White House: The Ordeal of the Presidency, Charles Rappleye
  • The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution, Michael J. Klarman
  • Moonglow, Michael Chabon
  • The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon
  • Jefferson the Virginian (Jefferson and His Time, Vol. 1), Dumas Malone
  • Jefferson and the Rights of Man (Jefferson and His Time, Vol. 2), Dumas Malone

Day 6

Sorry, Trumpolini, you can’t win me over by saying that you believe same-sex marriage is “settled,” for three reasons.

(1) You’re a pathological liar who will say anything and change any position if it gives you what you want, which is power.

(2) You’ll appoint right-wing judges.

(3) You can’t divide your enemies by giving some of us crumbs and hoping you’ll peel us off. Even if I were a straight white Christian male with a large estate, you’d still disgust me because of what you’re going to do to immigrants, Muslims, people of color, people without means, people who need birth control, people who need abortions for reasons that are not ours to judge, and others.

Nice try.

Day 4

My therapist hosted a group session today for any of his clients that wanted to discuss how they’re feeling about the election. I went. There were five of us there, and it was really helpful.

He said he’d decided to do this special session because in his 26 years of practice, he’d never experienced a week with his clients like this one. Not even after 9/11. People have been upset, scared, worried, and depressed, and he thought it would be helpful to get folks together to share their thoughts and feelings.

I met some nice, interesting guys, and it was cathartic to hear how they’ve been dealing with the last few days.

As for me, what I took away from the session was that I don’t have to feel bad about feeling miserable about what’s happened. Some people are emotionally resilient and can easily compartmentalize their thoughts. That kind of thing is a little harder for me. Some people are moving immediately to anger and protest. I’m not really up for that right now. It will take me as long as it takes to return to normalcy, and that’s okay. You have to be who you are and you have to know what you need. As they say on airplanes, you should put on your own oxygen mask before helping others.

My therapist decided that in lieu of a fee for the session, we’d pay him whatever we wanted, and we’d collectively choose a charity to give the money to. We’ve decided to give it to a Muslim rights group – not sure which one yet.

I’m really glad he did this.

Day 3

I’ve been feeling emotionally and physically better today than in the last few days. It’s because I was able to catch up on some sleep last night. I mean, the world still sucks, but taking care of your physical and mental health helps a lot.

Day 2

Fortunately, I had therapy last night. I sat down, sighed, and paused for a few seconds.

“I don’t even know if I want to talk about it,” I said.

He smiled sadly. “Well, then you’d be my first patient today who didn’t.”

But of course we talked about it. And it was helpful, for a time.

The world has turned upside down. So we talked about how to engage in self-care, self-maintenance. Self-soothing. Be good to yourself. Focus on the things you can control. It’s amazing how much your mental and emotional state can affect how you feel. (Which I know is a tautology, but still.)

Some people have expressed rage and anger and are gearing up to fight the coming battles. But I don’t have the emotional or mental energy for that right now. I’m too depressed and drained. And I still haven’t had a good night’s sleep.

I talked to my dad last night and my mom this morning. My dad’s away on business right now. It was great to commiserate with him. And my mom always has amazing insight.

There’s a lot that I’m scared of.

As a gay man, I’m scared that federal recognition of my marriage will be taken away.

As a Jew, I’m scared because we as a people know what fascism brings.

As an American, I’m scared for what’s going to happen to the country and to the world. A guy with the attention span of a gnat is going to be in charge of the U.S. military.

I just… can’t.

And imagine being a Muslim-American, an immigrant, or a person of color right now.

Some of my fears are less likely to come to pass than others. But it’s hard to know which ones. I mean, the unthinkable has already happened, so who knows anymore?

I feel like sometime on Tuesday night we passed through a wormhole into an alternate universe. The darkest timeline. It really feels that way. I mean, obviously this is reality.

It just doesn’t feel anything like reality.

The Day After

I’m terrified.

And I feel ill. Physically ill, in the pit of my stomach.

I’m trying to hold it together, but it’s really difficult.

It doesn’t help that I didn’t get much sleep last night.

This morning, I walked around the corner to the grocery store. The vibe on the street felt like post-9/11. A collective, communal shock and despair. Same thing later, on the subway. Everyone being quiet and polite to each other.

I walked past the Javits Center on the way to the office. I stared at it and broke into tears.

But it wasn’t really about her. It was that she was the only thing saving us from disaster. And she lost.

I was very dejected when W won, and then when he won again. But I wasn’t terrified like I am now.

I’m terrified for the future of our country – socially, financially, and in other ways. I’d feel that way if any Republican had won. But because it was this particular person, I’m also terrified about our civil liberties, about impending fascism, about geopolitics, about what’s going to happen to the world.

Our country doesn’t survive this.

It’s like a nightmare, but I can’t wake up from it.

So, where to go from here?

Self-preservation. Be good to myself. Find new hobbies. Start to pull back from following the news. I hope I can do that.

Other than that – sorry, I got nothing.

My First Crossword Tournament: Lollapuzzoola 9

On Saturday I attended my first-ever crossword puzzle tournament: the ninth annual Lollapuzzoola. It’s the second-largest crossword tournament in the US, and the only one held in New York City.

I’ve loved puzzles forever. When I was a kid, my dad used to buy Games Magazine, edited by the great Will Shortz (who is now the longtime New York Times crossword puzzle editor and the nation’s puzzle master), and bring it home from work. When he was done with the issue, I’d take it and do the puzzles myself.

I’ve done the New York Times crossword every day for years. I can’t remember the last time I missed one; when I go on vacation, I do the ones I missed when I get back. I do them by hand — I like the tactile feel of writing on paper — and in pen. (Some people marvel that I do them in pen, but it’s not that impressive; it just makes for a sloppy puzzle when I get a letter wrong and have to write over it really heavily.)

I can do a puzzle pretty fast, but I don’t usually solve for speed. I like to savor the jokes, the witty wordplay, the words I’ve never seen before. Still, I was curious to know how I’d do in a tournament. I just missed out on attending last year’s Lollapuzzoola, because I didn’t learn about it until a week after it had happened. But I downloaded the puzzles on my own and my times were pretty good, so this year I decided I’d sign up and compete in person.

The tournament is hosted by Brian Cimmet and Patrick Blindauer, and it takes place in a church basement on the Upper East Side. This year there were about 230 competitors (a few competitors were pairs, but most were solo). The competition consists of five puzzles, three in the morning and two in the afternoon. Each one is timed. There are two big digital clocks in the room, and it’s on the honor system: when you’re done, you write down your time on the puzzle and raise your hand, and someone comes over to collect it.

Scoring on a puzzle is as follows: the fastest person gets 3000 points, the next fastest gets 2995, the next 2990, and so on, in decreasing five-point intervals. You get a 100-point bonus for completing a puzzle with no errors, and you lose 10 points for each square that’s incorrect or empty.

There are two individual divisions: Express (anyone who was in the top 20% in the previous tournament), and Local (everyone else). At the end of the day are the finals. The top three scorers in each division come to the front of the room and compete against each other by doing a puzzle on a whiteboard while wearing noise-canceling headphones. The Local and Express finalists do the same final puzzle, but the Express clues are harder than the Local clues.

So, how’d I do? Really well! After the three morning puzzles, they posted the scores, and at that point I was 29th out of 230 overall. I was #6 in the Local division, and I was the #2 rookie, i.e. it was my first time at the tournament (designated by an R):

Lollapuzzoola 9

The rookie ahead of me at that point — by a huge margin — was Paolo Pasco, a 16-year-old crossword puzzle constructor.

Someone at my table told me that if I kept doing well and some of the other Locals stumbled, maybe I could make it into the top three. I was hopeful, but I wasn’t counting on it.

After lunch, I did well on puzzle number 4, except I had my second error: The Karate Kid takes place in the city of Reseda, not Peseda. (The first letter crossed with a theme answer, and had I understood that theme better, I might have gotten it right.) But I was still hopeful.

And then, on puzzle number 5… I collapsed. Ugh. Some of the puzzles had been quirky, but this one I just could not get. I couldn’t figure out what was going on with the theme or how the puzzle worked. There were blank lines at the bottom and you were supposed to write something in them. Letters? Words? What was going on? It wasn’t clicking. The seconds ticked by, and other people at my table were finishing before me, while I’d been the first one at my table to finish every other puzzle. I got panicky.

Suddenly I had an aha moment and finally realized what was going on. I turned in the puzzle with what I later realized was an error. (I’ve seen The Apartment twice and Promises, Promises once, so I really should have gotten it right.)

So anyway, I didn’t make it into the top 3 of the Local division. I ended at #12. And I wound up being the #3 rookie. Overall, I was 49 out of 230, which is still very respectable. And since I just missed the top 20%, I get to compete in the Local division again next year.

Oh, and guess who showed up in the afternoon? Will Shortz. I got up the nerve to go over and introduce myself to him. I told him I was a fellow UVA Law grad and that I’d been a fan of his ever since reading Games Magazine as a kid. I was really excited, but I think I played it cool. And I got a photo:

me and Will Shortz

I had a blast at Lollapuzzoola and got to meet some great people. I’m looking forward to going back next year!

Books I Read in 2015

Time for my annual list of the books I read in the past year. As usual, it was mostly history and nonfiction, with a smattering of fiction, mainly sci-fi this year. My reading fell off in September, when I began my three-month coding bootcamp at The Flatiron School. I haven’t finished a book since September, although I started a few that I got tired of.

By far the best book I read this year was Mark Lewisohn’s two-volume, 1,600-page story of the Beatles from their ancestors and childhoods up through the end of 1962, when they were on the brink of nationwide fame. (Beatlemania wouldn’t come to the U.S. for more than another year!) Reading this took two months and some discipline, but it was so worth it, and I look forward to parts 2 and 3 of Lewisohn’s trilogy.

In fiction, The Martian was great, as were parts 1 and 2 of Cixin Liu’s trilogy, and Hugh Howey’s Wool.

Here’s the list:

  • Franklin Pierce (The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857), Michael F. Holt (1/1-1/7)
  • Washington: A Life, Ron Chernow (1/8-2/2)
  • James Madison: A Biography, Ralph Ketcham (2/2-2/20)
  • Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America, Nick Bunker (2/24-3/7)
  • A Monarchy Transformed: Britain, 1603-1714, Mark Kishlansky (3/8-3/16)
  • Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty, John M. Barry (3/18-4/3)
  • Bigger Leaner Stronger: The Simple Science of Building the Ultimate Male Body, Michael Matthews (3/26-3/27)
  • How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism, Eric Hobsbawm (approx. 1st half) (4/5-4/12)
  • Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928, Stephen Kotkin (4/13-5/16)
  • The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu (5/18-5/25)
  • The Martian, Andy Weir (5/25-5/29)
  • Wool, Hugh Howey (5/30-6/5)
  • The Beatles – All These Years – Extended Special Edition: Volume One: Tune In, Book 1, Mark Lewisohn (6/10-7/5)
  • We Don’t Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy, Caseen Gaines (7/2-7/3)
  • The Beatles – All These Years – Extended Special Edition: Volume One: Tune In, Book 2, Mark Lewisohn (7/5-8/4)
  • Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, Peter Ames Carlin (8/12-8/23) (about 30%)
  • The Dark Forest, Cixin Liu (8/24-9/18)
  • Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel (9/21-?) (first few chapters)
  • Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow (10/5?-?) (first few chapters)
  • Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, Jon Meacham (11/10-currently reading)

On Marriage Equality

As of today, thanks to the United States Supreme Court, gay Americans are fully equal citizens, nationwide.

In his 1995 book Virtually Normal, Andrew Sullivan called for an end to all public – that is, government-directed – discrimination against gays and lesbians:

What would it mean in practice? Quite simply, an end to all proactive discrimination by the state against homosexuals. That means an end to sodomy laws that apply only to homosexuals; a recourse to the courts if there is not equal protection of heterosexuals and homosexuals in law enforcement; an equal legal age of consent to sexual activity for heterosexuals and homosexuals, where such regulations apply; inclusion of the facts about homosexuality in the curriculum of every government-funded school, in terms no more and no less clear than those applied to heterosexuality…; recourse to the courts if any government body or agency can be proven to be engaged in discrimination against homosexual employees; equal opportunity and inclusion in the military; and legal homosexual marriage and divorce.

We’re there.

In 2003, gay sex was decriminalized across the country. In 2010, we were permitted to serve openly in the military. In 2013, the federal government recognized our marriages. And as of today, we can get married and stay married all over the nation. Legal gay sex, legal military service, and legal marriage; we’ve won.

Private discrimination still exists in housing and employment, and we’ll see what happens with private parties who provide wedding services. But when it comes to how our governments directly treat us, the governments we fund with our taxes and support with our allegiance, we are equal.

I’m a married gay man, and now Matt and I are married all over the country, even when we visit Matt’s family in Tennessee. When I was young and alone, and scared of these strange feelings about other boys that wouldn’t go away no matter how hard I tried, worried that my parents would disown me if they ever knew, I never could have imagined that I’d live in a world like this – a world where a majority of the Supreme Court supports my equality and the president of the United States (a black man, at that) praises that decision.

I wish I were 20 years younger. Maybe 30 years younger. I wish I’d grown up knowing that I could marry a man as an adult, that I’d live in a country where our public institutions and the head of our government supported my equality. I wonder if my parents would have been more accepting more quickly. I wonder if I wouldn’t have had to come out to them at 19 only to go back into the closet for another five years because they couldn’t accept it for so long. I wonder if I would have started dating earlier than age 24, gotten more relationship experience under my belt, been able to live it up in my college years, enjoyed more of my youth. Maybe I would have even gotten into more than one college if I’d been openly gay; maybe I’d have gone to a school more accepting of gay people than the University of Virginia in the early 1990s. Maybe I wouldn’t have put so much of my life on hold for so long.

But you can’t choose when you are born. You can only choose what to do with your life today, now. There are people older than me who didn’t live to see this day, people who never even found someone to marry. I’m glad I’ve got a long life ahead of me, knock wood.

I’m glad I’m young enough to live in this world and appreciate the rights I have – today.