Posts - April 2005

This Washington Post editorial today is worth quoting in full.

“We will look at an arrogant, out-of-control, unaccountable judiciary that thumbed their nose at Congress and the president.”

Thus did House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-Tex.) respond yesterday to the unwillingness of the federal courts to participate in the cynical game Congress played with the last days of Terri Schiavo’s life. What exactly he means to do about judges — who are appointed for life — was a little vague. His message of intimidation, however, was crystal clear. Asked whether he would consider impeachment proceedings against the robed villains who thwarted his will, he responded, “There’s plenty of time to look into that.” His remarks cap a remarkable set of attacks on judicial independence by a Congress that has acted in this matter with profound disrespect for the judicial function. Such crude threats of retribution against judges of both parties who were only doing their jobs is, indeed, a mark of an arrogant and out-of-control federal power — but that power is the legislature, not the judiciary.

For all that conservative partisans rail against “judicial activism,” the bill Congress passed asked the courts for exactly that. They sought an intervention from the federal courts based on the thinnest of constitutional reeds to overturn a lengthy and comprehensive state-court adjudication of a sensitive matter traditionally governed by state law. In response, the federal courts — liberal and conservative judges alike, up and down the federal appellate ladder — politely and respectfully demonstrated precisely the values of restraint that conservatives purport to admire. Already, some conservatives are suggesting that the Schiavo case shows the need to break the filibuster and confirm President Bush’s judges. They delude themselves. For conservatives on the bench were no more itchy than liberals to bend to Congress’s will. Having been invited to jump in and find a way to help Congress’s favored party prevail, the bench declined with near unanimity. Having been invited to play games like politicians, in other words, America’s judges responded like judges.

And for this, the majority leader of the House of Representatives promises that “the men responsible for this [will] answer for their behavior.” This country has an independent judiciary precisely to shield judges who make difficult decisions under intense political and time pressure from the bullying of politicians. It is essential that the judges who stood up to Congress now receive ample support — so that judges will feel secure in emulating them.

As he does every year, Brad of The BradLands has transformed his site in honor of April Fool’s Day.

Also in honor of the day:

Google presents Google Gulp.

Google’s GMail is offering “Infinity + 1″ storage. I love the chart.

Here’s a funny parody of BoingBoing.

NASA has a picture of water on Mars.

Here’s a list of more April-Fool’s-inspired webpages.

The PATH system is finally replacing its cars. But they won’t be used until late 2008, by which time I may or may not still be using the PATH. Still, some of the cars are 40 years old, so it’s about damn time. The fleet is “the oldest of any heavy rail line in the country.”

The new cars will have “improved lighting, air conditioning and heating; cantilevered seats with room underneath for passengers to store items; prerecorded station announcements; better signs; and three door sets on each side to allow for faster loading and unloading.”

Is there any greater irony than the fact that the Christian Right actually got their precious little adolescent daughters to say to their freshly scrubbed boyfriends: “Please, I want to remain pure for my wedding night, so only in the ass. Then I’ll blow you.” Well, at least these kids are really thinking outside the box.

- Bill Maher

Here is a primer on the transition from one pope to another. Interesting.

As I remain an obituary geek, here’s an update to an old post of mine.

As I noted in the original post:

Length of Ronald Reagan’s obituary in the Times: 10,757 words;

Length of Richard Nixon’s obituary in the Times: 13,158 words;

Length of Queen Victoria’s obituary in the Times: 16,142 words;

And now we have the obituary of Pope John Paul II.

Length of Pope John Paul II’s obituary in the New York Times: 13,364 words.

I’m pretty sure Richard Nixon had the longest obituary in modern Times history, but this one breaks it by more than 200 words. (Still not as long as Queen Victoria’s, but people were wordier back then.)

My friends Matt and Marc had dinner at Union Square Cafe on Saturday night for a belated anniversary dinner and Ann Coulter was sitting at the next table over.

I think I would have been ill.

Temping in Vatican City

“It is not your bad. You are infallible. I was erroneous. The creamer is not rancid.”

[via]

Andrew Sullivan has a very interesting piece on Terri Schiavo.

I have used the Catholic arguments because this case involved a Catholic, but they apply more generally. What we have lost today is the prudence and moderation of old moral teaching. Thomas Aquinas, the father of Catholic natural law theology, argued that a human being did not exist as such immediately after conception. He believed that the soul entered at about the time of “quickening” — roughly the first trimester.

Even today we accept that a fertile procreating woman spontaneously aborts countless fertilised eggs after conception. That does not make her guilty of involuntary manslaughter on a massive scale. So the abortion of a foetus the morning after conception is intuitively different from an abortion in the third trimester. But that insight was dropped by the church in its fierce opposition to every aspect of modernity in the last part of the 19th century.

Relative judgments get turned into absolute ones when religion feels threatened by new technology or new ways of life. We live in an era of two great trends. One is the miracle of modern science and its awesome capacity to prolong and better life. The other is the rise of religious fundamentalism in which bewilderment at technology, global change and cultural and moral diversity understandably leads some to cling to the most absolute of moral claims.

Best tidbits from the obituary of Prince Rainier of Monaco (widower of Princess Grace), who died today:

The fairyland he was groomed to take over had been in the Grimaldi family since 1297. It became a Grimaldi holding not because of any act of chivalry performed by a remote ancestor and rewarded by a king. Rather, it occurred when Francesco Grimaldi of Genoa, leading a group of men dressed as monks, appeared at the front gate and told the guards they were tired and hungry and needed shelter for the night. The guards, who were also Genoese, felt sorry for the monks and let them in.

But the men in robes, who belonged to no religious order at all, immediately drew their swords and slaughtered their hosts. Grimaldi then became known in Italy and France as Francesco the Spiteful, and the bloody event that made him a prince became part of the Grimaldi family’s coat of arms, which to this day shows two men who look like monks holding swords.

“Francesco the Spiteful.” I like that. I’m going to start calling myself Tin Man the Spiteful.

And:

In 1996 Princess Stephanie, then 32, quickly divorced her husband and former bodyguard, Daniel Ducruet, after celebrity-hunting Italian photographers spotted him hugging a former Miss Bare Breasts of Belgium in a rented villa on the French Riviera.

Hee hee. Those Belgians.

Matt and I have become quite taken with Walter and Perry, characters from Cartoon Network’s TV show, “Home Movies.” Here’s an excerpt from an interview in which creator Brendon Small explains their strangely clingy relationship:

Robot: What’s up with Perry and Walter, who are they, why are they there?

Small: Who are they? What do they actually reflect, sociologically?

Robot: Yeah, who are these two kids who are so funny all the time, who have to be together all the time -

Small: They’re loving, they’re in love. Not necessarly that they’re gay, or in or out of any closet. In a child’s world, if you truly love somebody, it doesn’t matter at all. These two kids, I think would actually die for each other. And I think they’re probably the most happy of any of the other people. These kids are dreadfully honest to each other, which is something you didn’t realize kids are, and adults wish they could be. It’s funny, some people love Walter and Perry, they go crazy for them, but some people fucking hate them, get them off, get onto the next scene as quickly as possible. My dad hates them, he’s absolutely annoyed with them, but my mother loves them. But me and Jon Benjamin do the voices of Walter and Perry and we’ll probably go off for forty minutes in those voices and get the giggles ultimately and not be able to finish.

I’m participating in a Celebrity Death Pool at work. Yesterday each of us turned in a list of 50 people who we are betting will die between now and September 30, plus a $10 contribution to the pool. Scoring is as follows:

125 minus the age at death
+ 25 for exclusives (no one else in the competition has them on the list)
+ 10 for accidental/violent death
+ 5 for Republicans/evil

And wouldn’t you know it? Today someone died whom I almost put on my list: Dale Messick, creator of “Brenda Starr,” at 98. (As the organizer said, I’ll almost get points, then.)

My original plan was to use the first 50 names from this chart. But then I figured that people who are already way above the age of average life expectancy must be particularly hardy and would probably be less likely to die in the next six months than people who are closer to that life expectancy. So off from the list went Dale Messick and some others, in place of some slightly younger people. (I also took her off because I hadn’t heard of her. But duh — now that she’s died, I have heard of her.)

Anyway, here’s my complete list. I was also going to include Michael Schiavo, but I forgot.

Brooke Astor
Peter Jennings
Phyllis A. Whitney
Gerald Ford
Oleg Cassini
Lady Bird Johnson
Norman Mailer
Rosa Parks
Art Linkletter
Milton Friedman
Michelangelo Antonioni
Jane Wyman
Ralph Edwards
Kurt Waldheim (evil)
William Westmoreland
Norman Lloyd
Ruth Hussey
John Kenneth Galbraith
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Simon Wiesenthal
Harry Morgan
Herman Wouk
Ernest Gallo
Yitzhak Shamir
Peter Rodino, Jr.
Phil Rizzuto
Eugene McCarthy
Luise Rainer
Robert McNamara (evil)
Walter Cronkite
C. Everett Koop
Daniel Schorr
Olivia de Havilland
Kitty Carlisle Hart
James Doohan
Beverly Cleary
Paul Harvey
Joseph Barbera
Arthur C. Clarke
Mitch Miller
Gian Carlo Menotti
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Ingmar Bergman
Kirk Douglas
Don Pardo
Sherwood Schwartz
Shelby Foote
Karl Malden
Billy Graham
J.D. Salinger

Congress may extend Daylight Saving Time. “Lawmakers crafting energy legislation approved an amendment Wednesday to extend daylight-saving time by two months, having it start on the first Sunday in March and end on the last Sunday in November.” Yay!

This week I’ve had two similar dreams. The first was several nights ago. I dreamed that my chorus and I were performing our upcoming concert. A few weeks ago, our conductor told us he wants us to do all the songs from memory, which we’ve never done before, and some people are worried about this. In the dream, we began the concert, from memory. But after several measures, we started to forget things. Our conductor waved his arms and we didn’t know what we were supposed to say or sing. As this was happening, a few late straggling chorus members came onto the stage, and then a few more. It was a disaster. Everything was falling apart.

Two nights ago was the second dream. I dreamed that I was performing as Moonface Martin in a production of Anything Goes, a role I played in high school. Several of my fellow cast members from high school were in this production, too. Except I didn’t know my part very well, and I hadn’t rehearsed. Eventually I found myself sitting at the side of the stage with a few other people as the performance continued. With an audience sitting right there! Completely the wrong thing to do.

I’ve had a series of recurring dreams along these lines for many years. The general narrative is that I’m in a performance of a show, but the show doesn’t start on time, or people forget their lines or aren’t in costume, or the director has to come onto the stage and fix stuff, and things finally devolve into a lethargic chaos. The fourth wall completely breaks down, we’re totally not showing the audience what they’re supposed to be seeing. My emotional response in these dreams is frustration: we’re supposed to be following the script, but nobody is — not just one person screwing up, but everyone — and it’s completely out of my power to fix it.

In some sense, we write our own dreams. So why am I writing my dreams this way?

I have a profound fear of deviating from the script. We’re all born as ourselves, with nothing but our personalities, but as we’re raised, each of us acquires a certain “script” about how we’re supposed to act in the world. I still have a conflicted relationship with the script that was imposed on me in childhood: impress my teachers, win praise, grow up more quickly, act like an adult (instead of like a child), act like a man (instead of like a woman; no more dabbling in music and theater, stop being so close to your mom). A desire to break away from the script and write my own life, and a fear of doing that. A desire/fear of letting myself be me. A desire to not be afraid of my own voice, to not be afraid of success or self-praise. To take the risks I need to take.

To dream the dreams I want to have, and then to act upon them.

What a gorgeous weekend it’s been. Matt and I walked over to Battery Park City this afternoon and strolled along the promenade overlooking the Hudson River. Deep, clear blue sky; hot, shirtless runners; calves everywhere. (As in legs, not baby cows.) On the way back, we bought some smoothies; mine was banana/mango.

It’s always so surprising when the first beautiful weekend of the spring arrives. It’s like it’s come from a different universe. Was it in this same lifetime that I last lived in a world like this?

The ancients were wrong about history being cyclical. History is linear. The world changes a little bit every day; we grow older and (perhaps) wiser; institutions rise and fall. But within that progression, we do live in cycles. The circadian rhythms of daily life; the circling around of the seasons; the repeating of the days of the week. We live on an upward spiral, always re-encountering the same things on our journey, but each time we’re a little different than we were the last time around, whether it’s a year later, a week or later, or even just the next day. I think this tension between progression and recurrence is why it’s hard for us to make sense of time. Was it really in this lifetime that I could walk outside in a short-sleeve shirt and drink a smoothie?

Yes, it was. It’s just that — whether I realize it or not — I’m a little different now than I was last time.

I’m not sure how recent this is… but the residents of Atwood, a town in Kansas, voted 984 to 113 to deny same-sex couples any protections for their relationships, even such things as hospital visitation rights. The man who set up the town’s website is gay, so in protest, he took down the website and left a long, heartfelt message. My favorite quote:

Why should you care if 2 people next door or 50 miles away want to spend the rest of their lives together and get the same benefits you enjoy, it’s not going to affect you in the least bit, unless you spy on them. If you don’t like what’s on Television, you change the channel, you don’t get the Government to ban the show.

[via]

“Either this guy believes his party is not serious and is totally Machiavellian in its position, or you know, as David Brock said in his great book ‘Blinded by the Right,’ there’s some sort of self-loathing or something. I was more sad for him.”

– Bill Clinton on Arthur Finkelstein, the gay Republican consultant who recently married his male partner and is planning to fund a Swift-Boat-style ad campaign against Hillary Clinton in her 2006 Senate race.

This phrase from Saturday’s New York Times article about the marriage made me ill: “One of Mr. Finkelstein’s associates, who declined to speak on the record, citing Mr. Finkelstein’s desire for privacy, said Mr. Finkelstein did not view his marriage as a political statement…”

Well, no shit. Do people really think that gays want to get married in order to make a political statement? As I’ve said before, this is not about politics. It’s about people.

Now for a geeky post: I’ve been playing around with email today.

I receive email at two addresses: my Yahoo address and my Tinmanic.com address. My Tinmanic.com email automatically forwards to my Yahoo address. But I’ve never been able to send email from my Tinmanic address, because I never set up webmail through my web hosting service. (If you’ve corresponded with me, you’ll notice that my emails have all come from Yahoo, not Tinmanic.) My web host gave me three choices — NeoMail, Horde, and Squirrelmail — and they all look sort of icky. Also, I’m tired of always reading my email via the web. It can be slow.

So today I downloaded Thunderbird and managed to set it up so that I can send and receive my Tinmanic.com email from there. I’ve removed the forwarding, so my Tinmanic.com email won’t go to my Yahoo account anymore. (It doesn’t seem to have kicked in yet, though, because I’m still getting Tinmanic email there.)

But then I thought, it’s cumbersome to use two email programs, my Yahoo webmail and my Thunderbird/Tinmanic mail. So I downloaded YPOPs!, which allows you to use your Yahoo mail account through a reader like Thunderbird. That way I’ll be able to do all my emailing via Thunderbird.

I don’t know if this Yahoo thing will totally work. I wonder if I’ll miss using the regular Yahoo web interface or if something will fall through the cracks by my accessing Yahoo mail through Thunderbird.

Also, I’ll now have to set up Thunderbird on the two other computers I use — my home computer and Matt’s computer. And if I’m at a different computer altogether, I won’t be able to access my Tinmanic email.

I wonder if this will be more trouble than it’s worth, all so that I can send out emails that say they’re from “Tin Man” at Tinmanic.com.

Well, I wrote up a column-length piece and emailed it to Gay City News a week and a half ago.

I haven’t received any response.

Also, I made a new friend, a playwright who wrote a play I admire and who enjoys my blog. He said he’d love to get me connected with people in the business and stuff. Matt and I met up with him and his boyfriend a week ago, last Thursday night, and at his request, the next day I emailed him a copy of my screenplay. Also a short email saying it was nice to meet him.

I haven’t received any response.

This is all enough to leave a would-be writer dejected. And it’s working.

Perhaps I will just be blogging for the rest of my life.

This is the first season of “American Idol” that I’ve been watching regularly. (Chalk it up to more of Matt’s TV-watching influence.) I really have only one comment:

I am so fucking sick of melisma.

I fucking hate it.

Melisma, if you don’t know, is the overused singing practice of taking a one-note syllable and stretching that syllable out to several notes. It’s very R&B-ish and happens all the time on “American Idol,” even for songs that totally don’t need it.

I know I’m late to the “American Idol” bandwagon, and its main fault has been widely documented elsewhere (most recently by Ben Brantley) – namely, that the audience rewards those contestants who sap the most individuality from their performances. Why Scott Savol is still around is beyond me. (At least the sappy Anthony Federov is cute.) At one point last night, Scott was singing a song and went needlessly melismatic, and I screamed and swore at the TV. Matt practically had to keep me from throwing it out the window. Could someone please tell that guy that not every song is an R&B song?

My favorite performers this go-round are Bo and Constantine, because they have the most individuality of anyone up there. I hope one of them wins. (Lately I’ve been leaning towards Constantine.)

Stephen Holden writes today about Barbara Cook’s recent cabaret performance, “Tribute”:

While watching “Tribute,” I thought back to the Broadway anthology unleashed on the April 5 edition of “American Idol,” whose nine contestants struggled to articulate fragments of songs like “The Impossible Dream,” “People,” “My Funny Valentine” and “Hello, Young Lovers.” The paradox of this toxic singing contest, which is the rough equivalent of the old “Ed Sullivan Show” in suggesting the median level of mass musical taste, is that it has the power to canonize songs, which its clueless judges then go on to treat as stunts in a gymnastic competition that rewards crude physical prowess. …

The contestants are urged not to be “pitchy” (the program’s favorite pseudo-technical word for off-pitch, which they usually are), and are congratulated for their high notes and telegenic appeal. …

Let’s not kid ourselves: the ascendance of “American Idol,” and its turning of music into sports, signals the end of American popular song as we know it. Its ritual slaughter of songs allows no message to be carried, no wisdom to be communicated, other than the screamed and belted song of the self.

Ms. Cook, who gives master classes in how to sing and tell the truth, could talk herself blue in the face to these people and never be understood. What a stunning loss we face.

I hope it’s kosher to link to this, since it’s officially a “preview” page, but here are last month’s WYSIWYG videos. [link updated: that's the link to the real page] The complete performances in their entirety, including mine.

Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin, who star in the new Broadway production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, were interviewed on Theater Talk on Friday night. I’d been meaning to see the play since it opened to excellent reviews last month, and after watching Turner and Irwin on TV, I decided to get my ass in gear and get a ticket. So I went to BroadwayBox.com yesterday afternoon and managed to find a great seat for today’s matinee: fifth row center. (Someone must have cancelled.) Matt had a meeting, but he said he wouldn’t mind if I went by myself.

So I went, and I had a great time. There was a man sitting right in front of me with a big head, but it didn’t block much; I rarely had to tilt my head to look around him. Turner and Irwin were both terrific, and the two supporting cast members were great, too (particularly Mireille Enos as Honey). And what a fantastic set.

Just last year I saw the movie for the first time, but the movie cuts a lot from the play. Today was the first time I’d seen the play, and I prefer the play. My favorite plays are those with a small number of characters — I just find them more efficient, and you get to know the characters better. And this is a real writer’s play. Such wonderful dialogue.

There appear to be tickets available on TKTS. If you love a good play, see this one.

I took the day off from work today, and among other things I gathered all my change from Matt’s place, came back to Jersey City and gathered all the change from the top of my dresser, and took it all to the local Coinstar machine. I took a wild stab and guessed (overly optimistically, I thought) that I had 30 bucks in change. When the machine was done counting everything, it turned out I had nearly 38 bucks in change. Thirty-eight dollars in change! After the 8.9% fee, my take was $34.69.

Coinstar is such a brilliant business idea. Who wants to count all their change, then take it to the bank and organize it into rolls of coins? The 8.9% fee isn’t bad when you realize that your change is going to sit around if you don’t do anything with it. So in a sense, you get “found money” for a small fee. I just got $34.69 in found money for the price of about $3.40. Not bad at all.

Pope Benedict? Anyone else craving eggs and hollandaise now?

As a patriot and a staunch opponent of Nazism in all its forms, I will hereafter refer to said delicious dish as “freedom eggs.”

Sometimes I love Metafilter.

Recent reading:

- Finished A History of the Jews by Paul Johnson. I hadn’t known much about the history of my own people, so I decided to read this. It covers approximately 4,000 years of Jewish history. I’d taken it out of the library, and it was hardcover, so it weighed down my messenger bag a lot.

- Currently reading The System of the World, by Neal Stephenson, the third chapter of his Baroque Cycle trilogy. I read the first 80 pages about six months ago and had been meaning to get back to it. I’m glad I have. Fun fun fun. But this one weighs a lot, too.

Recent doings:

- Friday night: Matt and I saw Jere in his production of My Favorite Year. I saw this on Broadway 12 years ago. It’s a flawed but fun show. Jere was great to watch in a bunch of different roles.

- Saturday night: We went to a small birthday party for Matt Jacobs at his place in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. Matt’s a very nice guy, and there was lots of ice cream.

- Sunday: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, as mentioned earlier.

- Monday night: Trivia. Our team, Hello Kitty Genovese, came in fifth place (out of 14 teams), which is far from our best showing. We recently won twice in a row. Still, trivia’s always fun, and it’s a good opportunity for us to see Mike (and sometimes Matt P.).

- Last night: Chorus rehearsal. Our concert, much of which is in German or Italian, has to be memorized. Yikes. We’ve got two months to go; I guess we can do it. Also, I got to display my newly-clean-shaven face to everyone. (I shaved off the goatee last week.)

- Tonight: Sweet Charity, starring Christina Applegate. I’m not particularly looking forward to this, but hey, it’s theater.

It’s odd that despite all these happenings, I’m feeling restless lately. I might need sex, or a vacation, or exercise, or some quiet time by myself. I don’t know. I’m just… out of whack.

So I have this friend, my best, oldest friend in the world, who’s currently living at the South Pole. He’s doing construction work there. It’s his third time in Antarctica. We were born a month apart, and when we met at age three, it turned out that our Hebrew names were the reverse of each other. Sometimes I consider him my alter ego, because we have very opposite personalities. He’s outgoing and adventurous, and he doesn’t seem to worry about the future or about having his life “mean” something, like I do. Rather than worrying about the significance of everything, he just lives life and seems to enjoy it. I wish I could be more like him.

I was talking about him with my therapist last week, about how envious I am of his ability to not dwell on that stuff like I do. I tend to live a lot from fear — not overtly, but deep down. She asked me what I would be like if I were more like him. One thing I said is that I would stop worrying about dying. I’ve told her that I sometimes wish I believed in an afterlife, because I’d worry less about death. She responded that there are lots of people who don’t believe in an afterlife and yet don’t worry about dying. They realize that all you have is what you have here on earth.

I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to live like that. Me, I worry about making the wrong choices and majorly fucking up my life beyond repair.

I am totally not living up to the ambitions I once set for myself. Or that were set for me. Kindergarten, in retrospect, screwed me up. I know this sounds ridiculous, to have been screwed up by kindergarten, but there you have it. I was the king of my kindergarten class. I was the smartest kid in it. My teacher and her aides adored me and gave me special attention. Remember how Mr. Rogers used to put on an opera in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe every so often? Like Bubble-Land and stuff like that? Well, I had seen one of those, and I told my teacher about it, and I decided that I wanted to write songs. So at one point they let me work with some of the students and help them write songs. I was allowed to sit just outside the classroom door with a student and some sheets of paper and help them write songs. It didn’t go anywhere, though. Nobody could think of any lyrics, including me.

Then there was the time that I got to take over for a week the part of the classroom that had these big wooden blocks. I was allowed to make a fort out of them, and during the rest period I was allowed to nap in the fort with some other kids. It started a trend, and the next week some of the kids got to use the blocks and turn them into a restaurant, and our class had the parents come in and we served them hamburgers.

Kindergarten really fucked me up. I was only five/six years old, and for an entire year I got treated like royalty. It had actually started the year before in pre-K, when I had been allowed to read a book to the class. (It was a Golden Book – I can’t remember which one – but I remember that I kept trying to show the pictures only to the boy I had a crush on until the other kids started to complain.) A year is a long time when you’re five or six; it’s nearly a fifth of your life thus far; and I guessed this was what life was supposed to be like for me. I never really knew what normal was.

But then there was the other side of kindergarten. It was June, around Father’s Day, and we sat in a circle on the floor. Each of us had an opportunity to say what our favorite thing was that we liked to do with our dad. When it came to my turn, I was shy and reluctant to give my answer, “I like to go to stores with my dad.” Why was I reluctant? Because someone had already said that one. I thought that we weren’t allowed to repeat answers, and when I said so, I was told that of course we could. Silly, huh? I was confining myself by rules that were totally needless.

First grade was where things started to go downhill. That was the year I realized I was not so unique. That year I met three other smart kids. There were four of us, three boys and a girl. From then on, I had competition — I was no longer special.

So anyway, I was raised to think I was better than everyone else, or at least was supposed to be. I felt burdened with a greater responsibility than other people to Be Something (and sometimes I was explicitly told this – “I would hate to see you throw away your talents!”). In some sense, ever since first grade I’ve been wondering what went wrong.

I wonder what I’d be like if I’d grown up thinking I was a normal kid, an average kid – if less pressure had been put on me, if I’d expected less of life.

At any rate, none of this is explaining my blahs. But I’ve spent so much time writing it, I may as well post it.

How to get out of a life rut. [via kottke]

It’s much cooler out today, and I’m feeling better. I don’t know whether there’s a connection. The temperature definitely threw me off, though; April is too early for 80-degree-plus weather.

My hormones were raging last night. In the evening, Matt and I had dinner at an outdoor table at Zen Palate on 46th and 9th, then saw Sweet Charity, and then took the subway home, and all evening long I kept seeing hot guys in short-sleeve shirts or tanktops. Walking down the street. In the audience. On the subway. Men everywhere. I felt kind of guilty for staring at guy after guy, and I hoped it wasn’t bothering Matt. (I have a much higher libido than he does – he’s told me it’s okay if I mention that.) When I told him, he said he hadn’t even noticed I’d been staring.

At least we both agreed that the men in suits and mascara during “Rich Man’s Frug” (one of the dance numbers from last night’s show) were hot.

Anyway, Christina Applegate was a lot better than either of us had expected. She’s got spunk and character; she’s so damn cute. I cringed almost every time she began to dance, because I was afraid she was going to break her foot again, but she survived. We gave her a standing ovation at the end (along with most of the audience), not because it was a stellar performance but because we felt happy for her, and because she’s a real trooper for going through with it.

As for the rest of the show: I’ve wanted to marry Denis O’Hare ever since I saw Take Me Out. And there are a couple of great, mod 1960s-ish dance numbers, “Rich Man’s Frug” and “The Rhythm of Life.” Before last night, the title “Rich Man’s Frug” irritated the hell out of me, because it seemed like a stupid name for a dance number and I had no idea what a frug was. But it was sexy and fun.

So… another show seen, another Playbill to add to my collection.

And now that the weather’s cooled down again, maybe my hormones can get a respite.

As of October 1, 2005, gay civil unions will be legal in Connecticut.

We now have three states in this country that grant gay couples all the rights and responsibilities of marriage. From the border with Canada at the north, to the Long Island Sound to the south, there’s now a contiguous area in this country in which gay couples have access to all the state-granted protections that marriage can offer.

And in Connecticut, it was done by the legislature and the governor, not by the courts.

But that doesn’t seem to mollify those who are supposedly opposed to so-called “activist judges.”

Brian Brown, executive director of the Family Institute of Connecticut, said Wednesday was “a sad day for the state of Connecticut.”

Brown, whose group is hosting a major rally against gay marriage Sunday on the grounds of the state Capitol, criticized both the legislature and Rell for “fast-tracking” the measure. There will be repercussions when lawmakers run for re-election in 2006, he said.

“This vote will not be forgotten,” Brown vowed. “If the goal was to push this through in a non-election year, they were 100 percent wrong.”

So there you have it. Here’s a gay-marriage opponent who has a problem not just with “activist judges” but also with an “activist legislature” and an “activist governor.” In your face, Brian Brown. Your popularly-elected legislature just passed a civil unions bill – not at the behest of any court – and your governor just signed it into law. Your problem was never with “activist judges” (’cause guess what – conservatives are activists, too) but with judges who disagree with you. It’s just like Tom DeLay’s rant against the Schiavo judges, many of whom were (a) Republicans who (b) actually exercised judicial restraint in reaching a decision DeLay and his ilk were against.

There’s a lesson here. You can never believe someone who says he’s arguing for political/legal/judicial process unless he trusts that process even if it leads to a result that person doesn’t like. If you’re going to make an argument, at least be honest about your reasons for doing so.

Congratulations, Connecticut gays.

Connecticut Approves Civil Unions for Gays

Conn. approves gay civil unions

Connecticut governor signs civil unions bill

Rell signs same-sex union bill

Bells Peal For Landmark Law (editorial)

So I was thinking about this last night as Matt and I were falling asleep, and I would appreciate anyone’s input.

When you’re in a relationship and you get into bed together at night, what do you usually wear to bed? Underwear, or nothing, or what?

Someone tells me my blog is mentioned in this week’s Advocate.

With my full name.

First, um, wow?

And second, aw, crap. So much for being Google-proof.

Dear James Dobson and Bill Frist:

Sorry I couldn’t make your “Justice Sunday” televised rally last night, in which you said that filibusters against a small percentage of Bush’s judicial nominees are attacks against “people of faith.” Like millions of “people of faith,” I was too busy participating in a Passover seder.

“Filibuster Against People of Faith” my ass. Fucktards.

I haven’t seen the print version of this week’s Advocate yet, but I saw the online version of the piece where my blog is listed. Wow – I’m in a list with Atrios? Of course, the list is totally subjective, and there are tons of great blogs out there. Take a look at the list of blogs on my sidebar, for starters.

Anyway, if you’re visiting my site for the first time, here are some highlights (some of them highly solipsistic):

- My favorite entries from my first year of blogging

- The Ten Most Memorable Events of My Twenties

- A bunch of my non-blog writings (anyone wanna hire a columnist?)

- A story I read last month

- The video of me reading said story (ok, that’s not technically located on my site)

More as I think of them.

And I may as well take advantage of this publicity. I’m trying to get my name out there as a a writer, so if anyone wants to help me out, I would be ever so grateful.

Of course I had to be listed in the Advocate during a week when I have entirely nothing to say.

Last night on Veronica Mars, someone mentioned GHB. Later, while asleep, I had a dream about GHB. I’ve never seen it in real life, but in my dream it was this enormous red and yellow capsule, maybe four inches long. I was relieved that it was so easy to recognize, because that meant I wouldn’t have to worry about accidentally taking it.

I had another drug-type dream last week, but that one involved smoking. I’ve smoked a grand total of half a cigarette in my life. It was at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, during Beach Week when I was a law student. I was hanging out with an undergrad on a condominium balcony. He was smoking, and I was drunk, and in my tipsiness I decided I wanted to try smoking. So he gave me a cigarette and taught me how to smoke. Although he was straight, I had a crush on him, and there was something sexy about being alone with him and having him teach me how to drag on a cigarette. But after it was only half gone, I tossed it over the balcony, down onto the sand below.

That’s the extent of my smoking experience.

I’m terrified of addiction. I don’t know why. My parents both smoked when I was a little kid, but they quit long ago, thank goodness. I think my fear is twofold. One, the consequences of addiction – lung cancer (smoking), cirrhosis (alcoholism), general life-down-the-toilet-ness (drugs). Two, the state of addiction – being enslaved to something, lacking control over your own body and actions. It’s just creepy to me.

I do drink, although I started late. When I was 14, I wrote in my diary that I was never, ever going to drink. “There’s just no compromising that for me,” I wrote. A couple of years later I did start drinking, a little bit, but I didn’t actually get drunk until the beginning of my second year of college. I realized I was not prone to alcoholism, and no worries from then on.

As for smoking or drugs, though, forget it – addiction to them seems to be much easier, and they can mess up a person’s life. I really don’t want to give them a shot.

Well! Not exactly an uplifting topic, but at least it’s writing.

I couldn’t sleep, so I was thinking about the rules of succession to the British throne. Why? Because I’m currently reading The System of the World, Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, and part of the plot involves British succession circa 1714. Also because I’m a dork.

Anyway, I found the general algorithm for succession to the British throne:

The procedure is roughly as follows. If individual A is dead or ineligible:

1. look for A’s eldest-born male B (if none were born, go to 3).

2. If B is dead or ineligible, go to 1 with “B” instead of “A”.

3. If no candidate meeting the criteria is found, return to A, find the the next eldest-born male C; repeat steps 1-3 with “C” instead of “A”, until a candidate is found or all of A’s male children are exhausted.

4. Repeat steps 1-3 with “female” instead of “male”.

5. If no candidate has been found yet, go to A’s royal parent D and look for D’s next eldest-born male, repeating steps 1-4 with “D” instead of “A”.

6. If no candidate has been found, go to D’s royal parent E and repeat steps 1-5.

7. Keep going climbing up the royal genealogy. If you reach step 6 with D = Electress Sophia, there are no candidates left (this will take a while, because there are about 4360 individuals descended from her: see the list).

Also, you have to have been born in wedlock and you can’t ever have been Catholic. (Those picky Anglicans.)

So, yeah, there are more than 4,000 individuals in line to the throne. So much for King Ralph.

The more specific reason I looked this up is because I was wondering if Prince William would still be in line to the throne if Prince Charles died, or if the next eldest son of Queen Elizabeth would then become heir. It turns out that William’s place in line is secure. Once the heir (Charles) has a son (William), that can’t be broken. Britain follows primogeniture, i.e., “male heirs take precedence over female, with children representing their deceased ancestors; and under the rule of primogeniture, the older son precedes the younger.”

Anyway, maybe I can fall asleep now.

Hello Jeff,

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Well, fuck.

I’ve decided it’s time to travel again. Matt and I need to go somewhere. I’m ashamed of how long it’s been since I last left the country – my last trip was to Jamaica, in December 1996/January 1997, and if the Caribbean doesn’t count (which I don’t think it does), I haven’t really travelled outside the country since I returned from Amsterdam in January 1994. More than 11 years ago!

This is quite a turnaround for me. My family and I lived in Japan for three years when I was in high school. During that time we visited Hong Kong, Thailand, and Australia. I spent a summer in the U.K. and Ireland and a couple of weeks in Israel. I’ve also been to Paris and Amsterdam. But for the last ten years I’ve led a domestic life, like Cincinnatus cultivating his farm after grand adventures.

It’s time to venture forth again. There are so many places I want to see, and Matt’s never left the country. I want to go to Rome, Berlin, Vienna. Maybe Florence and Venice. And Prague. And Paris again. Not all at once. But yes, I feel like going somewhere in Europe. And I love cities.

My passport expired two years ago, so I’ve printed out the renewal form. I’ll need to get some passport photos. I also need to set aside a little bit more money than I’ve currently got set aside. And maybe this weekend I’ll go to a bookstore and browse the travel guides.

Travel is good for you. It breaks up your routine. It gives you new experiences and perspectives. At its best, it shifts the trajectory of your life, even if just a little.

So that’s it. We need to go somewhere.

Interesting piece on the intricacies of pre-empting network TV programming for a live presidential news conference.

I have to say, there’s not quite as much happening as a result of the Advocate thing as I’d expected. Nothing’s happening, actually, other than an uptick in my daily hit count. At the very least I was expecting people from my past to crawl out of the woodwork and e-mail me with things like, “Hey, Jeff, remember me from way back when? I saw your name in the Advocate!” and possibly, “I didn’t know you were gay. Guess what? I am, too.”

But it hasn’t happened yet.

Oh, well.