What New Battlestar Galactica character are you?
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Hooray – the latest issues of my college alumni magazine includes a slew of letters in response to a bigoted anti-gay letter that appeared in the previous issue. They printed an excerpt from my letter – the least inflammatory paragraph, of course.

It’s nice to know that so many UVA alumni, gay and straight, are open-minded and on the right side of history.

“Come on. Let’s go. It’s Dede Harris Night at Splash. If you show up dressed as one of the actors she groped, you get two free drinks. I’m going as Eliza Dushku, and I’ve got to change.”

The Oscars ended almost 48 hours ago and I haven’t blogged about them yet, so:

Crash over Brokeback Mountain: Eh. I found Crash contrived and manipulative, even if it did have interesting things to say about race, i.e. it’s better to acknowledge one’s latent racism than to deny it altogether. Brokeback was a just plain better film. It was beautifully made. I didn’t like it just because it was a “gay movie”; in fact, it didn’t move me like it did some other people. It was unfair for gay people to make the movie carry the weight of the gay rights movement on its back, just as it was unfair for homophobes to accuse the movie of furthering a gay agenda. But peel away all the cultural baggage that has glommed onto the film – take the film as a film – and it was better than Crash.

To be honest, though, I preferred Good Night, and Good Luck to them both. That was a terrific movie. Luscious black and white, beautiful jazz music sung by Dianne Reeves, an economical plot. Loved it.

I still haven’t seen Capote or Munich.

(Strangely, I haven’t yet read any comparisons to 1998/99, when Shakespeare in Love upset Saving Private Ryan for Best Picture. That outcome thrilled me – I thought Shakespeare in Love was brilliant and original and deserved to beat the dutiful, serious Saving Private Ryan. But I’ve come to see them both as terrific films.)

As for other Oscar stuff:

Best moment: Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep introducing Robert Altman. Those two ladies have talent and class. I adore them.

The fake campaign ads were also great and the most Daily-Show-esque parts of the evening, aside from Jon Stewart himself.

Jon Stewart did not do as well as I’d hoped. Or maybe it’s just that the audience didn’t seem to get him. But he made a valiant effort. Later on in the show, he had some good moments, particularly after the Oscar for Best Song was announced. Much of Jon Stewart’s genius lies in his facial expressions. He can do so much without saying a word.

Speaking of best song: “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp”… Huh???

Toby Ziegler’s ex-wife singing in front of burning cars and interpretive dancers: Whaaah?

Aren’t there usually five nominees for best song?

Does Jack Nicholson have a lifetime guarantee of a front-row seat? And what’s with his glasses every year?

Poor Lauren Bacall. She needed glasses, I think.

Montages: oh my god. People do not watch the Oscars for the montages. I love me a good Chuck Workman montage, but four montages? One was enough.

March of the Penguins: I shouldn’t criticize a movie I haven’t seen. So I won’t.

Playing music underneath the acceptance speeches was distracting. We’ve been conditioned to hear the music as the signal to wrap things up, so that was confusing.

Boo on all the co-winners who hogged the microphone without letting their co-winners speak.

All in all, the Oscars came in at a smidge under three and a half hours. They could have been shorter, but at least they weren’t longer.

I think this gets its right about the reviews of Jon Stewart’s turn as Oscar host:

There isn’t really much a host, whether it’s Dave Letterman, Whoopi Goldberg, Steve Martin, or the “gold standards” of hosts — Billy Crystal, Bob Hope, and Johnny Carson — can do to make the show any less of a bloated mess….

[T]hese critics forget one salient fact: this isn’t a fake news show, this is THE OSCARS, a show about entertainment and the movies. It’s not about politics or the media or race relations (to address the critics of Chris Rock). There’s only so much a host can do in that venue, especially a host that’s known for his edginess: if they make safe, funny entertainment-related jokes, they’re perceived as “tanking” (Stewart, Rock), but if they make edgy jokes that don’t land with the crowd in the theater, they’re also perceived as “tanking” (Letterman). It’s a no-win situation.

Just now I was thinking about an obscure TV show that ran on PBS when I was a kid called “Bits and Bytes.” It was about computers and I think it was 15 minutes long. I’d fruitlessly looked it up on Google in the past, but for some reason I never thought to look on IMDB. It was there, of course, and it had the names of the two cast members. So I googled them and found a web page about the show with a bunch of screen captures and the words to the theme song. Turns out it was produced by TV Ontario.

“Bits and Bytes of information… turn darkness… to light…”

Oh, Internet, I love you.

“Which part of New York should I move to? I’ve been on the Upper West side for about two years. I commute to a job in Times Square. I am not happy, but I think the reasons for my unhappiness are not typical for a New Yorker.”

“On the day I realized I was gay, I threw up.”

After tonight, no new Battlestar Galactica until October???

Oh, crap.

Since I live with a New School staffer in a New School building, I was able to get a New School ID card yesterday. One of the things I can do with this card is get into MoMA for free, so I went there today. I went primarily to experience Janet Cardiff’s “40 Part Motet,” which has been at MoMA for several months but is closing on March 21. It’s a room containing a recorded performance of Thomas Tallis’s Spem in Alium, a choral piece for eight five-person choirs. Each of the 40 vocal parts is different. Cardiff recorded a performance of the piece, and the room contains, in a big circle, 40 speakers on stands, with one vocal part emanating from each speaker. You can either sit in the middle of the room and listen to the piece, hearing different voices come from different parts of the room, or you can walk around the room and listen to individual voices. It’s an 11-minute piece and it’s a great experience.

More about the piece here, here and here.

* * * * *

I also wanted to see a new exhibit on Edvard Munch, the first American exhibition of his work in almost 30 years. It blew me away. “The Scream” is not there, although there are two early lithographs of it, and there are other works that include the same famous setting, with its blood-red sky. It’s strange to see them; it’s like the stage is set for something spectacular but the star hasn’t yet appeared. His work is so emotional.

I like this quote about “The Scream”:

The power of “The Scream,” I think, owes much to an intellectual resistance that it overcame in the artist. A similar resistance explains the popular tendency to treat that icon of unhappy modern consciousness as a joke in cartoons and inflatable toys. Laughter dies in the face of the supremely matter-of-fact original. It is the touchstone of Munch’s definitive quality in his great years: a self-abnegating submission to emotional truth.

The Munch exhibit runs until May.

The Associated Press has issued its new style guidelines on LGBT-related terms. (Is “LGBT” in there?)

The GLAAD page above also includes links to the style guidelines followed by the New York Times and Washington Post and a history of the AP’s LGBT stylebook updates.

One thing that strikes me is a reference to “the pejorative connotations of words like ‘homosexual.'” That’s true, isn’t it? It can seem pejorative. But it’s weird that it can. After all, the word isn’t a slur – it means exactly what it says: “same-sexual.” I guess what makes it sound off-putting is the clinical nature of it. But it all seems arbitrary. “Fag” is right out, unless you’re a gay person talking about another gay person; “queer,” formerly pejorative, has been reclaimed; “gay” is the preferred term, unless it’s being spoken by a middle-schooler as a put-down (“That’s so gay!”).

I think I’ll just go by “Jeff.”

(N.B.: Almost as arbitrary, and yet also true, is the fact that referring to someone as “Jewish” is fine whereas referring to someone as “a Jew” comes off as awkward and possibly quasi-offensive.)

“My wife, Betsey…”

There’s a piece by R.W. Apple in the New York Times today. He obsessively mentions his wife, Betsey, in nearly every piece he writes for the paper.

ObitPage.com. “The obituary: it may be the first thing we read in the news each day… and, for most of us, it likely will be the last word written about our lives. The focus of obitpage.com is the lure of the obituary both as history and as literary art form.”

I’ve been thinking about sex lately. (No surprise; I think about sex a lot.) More specifically, I’ve been thinking about sex in the context of relationships, and about why it’s so important.

I grew up being really afraid of sex. Sex seemed wrong, bad, an act of misbehavior. The idea of sex or sexual desire made me feel incredibly guilty.

Lately I’ve been reading The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy by Bryan Magee, a book about the opera composer Richard Wagner and the various philosophies that influenced him and his work – particularly the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. The other day I came across a sentence in the book describing one of Wagner’s views about his Ring Cycle:

“[Wagner] is saying that sexual intercourse is the highest of all human activities provided it is an act of love embraced freely on both sides.

That left my mind reeling.

Sexual intercourse! The highest of all human activities! Wagner said this! A creator of some of the most sublime and complex operas known to humanity – high art on which countless academic treatises have been written – art which upstanding members of society dress up in their best finery and congregate in ornate, bejeweled opera houses in order to experience – music one can spend a lifetime studying without uncovering all of its secrets – and one of his great themes is sex and how holy it is! Crude, raw, unabashed sex!

The dichotomy between, on the one hand, my deep-seated negative feelings about sex, and on the other, Wagner’s elevation of it to a theme of great art, kind of threw me.

Later in the book I came across this passage, which absolutely floored me:

It is not given to many people to be mystics… there are other ways in which it may be possible for the rest of us, says Schopenhauer, to see into the heart of things, if only momentarily. These are, to state the matter baldly, sex and art…

Schopenhauer was puzzled that philosophers had given so little consideration to sex… philosophers have thought and written endlessly about death, yet they have given scarcely any consideration to conception – which is even more important to us than death, surely, and every bit as mysterious. Each human being who has ever lived was created by an act of sexual intercourse. There must be, so to speak, a metaphysics of this… [Schopenhauer] thought that for most of us the sex drive is the strongest impulse after those whose concern is the self-preservation of the individual, and that awareness of sex is ever-present, albeit subliminally, in our minds – which is why any allusion to it, however oblique, or any double meaning, however accidental, is picked up instantly. Decades before Freud, he regarded sexuality as something that tinges the whole human personality, and he perceived an element of sexual motivation as ever-present in human behavior. So he believed that understanding an individual’s sexuality was essential to understanding that individual. The fullest expression of the individual personality is in a loving sexual relationship, in which, perhaps paradoxically, the barriers and limitations of selfhood are transcended, the individual loses his sense of self and experiences oneness with the other person in the sexual act. [Schopenhauer said:] “If I am asked where the most intimate knowledge of that inner essence of the world, of that thing in itself which I have called the will to live, is to be found, or where that essence enters most clearly into our consciousness, or where it achieves the purest revelation of itself, then I must point to ecstasy in the act of copulation. That is it! That is the true essence and core of all things, the aim and purpose of all existence.”

I didn’t really have sex until I was 24. I was terrified of it, and it certainly didn’t help that the sex I was thinking about was gay sex. But what we fear is what we crave. And once I came out at 24, everything changed. Not right away – my first few sexual escapades left me terrified, for no good reason, that I might have caught a disease (a fear that’s never really gone away). But once I accepted myself and my sexuality, I felt a change within myself. Up to that point, I’d been a divided person. I’d had an internal barrier. I was my own enemy. But once I came to accept who I was, everything inside me unified. I became a whole person. And part of that was an enjoyment – no, a love – of sex.

What I love about sex is what I used to fear most about it. At its best, sex makes you step outside yourself. Well, that’s not really accurate: what I mean is that it makes you step outside the self that you present to the rest of the world. But what I really mean is that at its best, sex makes you become yourself. To have really great sex, you have to let yourself be taken over by, you have to give in completely to – not merely the other person, but the act itself, and the emotions, the sense of being, the sense of you, that it creates. In the best sex, all the barriers you normally put up against the rest of the world are stripped away, and there you are, in all your raw, chaotic self-ness. You’re completely vulnerable.

And since sex is something you have with another person, the best sex necessarily requires you to open yourself up to that other person. It requires letting that other person see you in all your vulnerability, all your rawness. Letting that other person see you.

When you have sex with someone for the first time, whether you’ve known that person for minutes or years, you’re really encountering that person for the first time again. You see the real self inside that person, unmediated by any social niceties or civilizing influences. You see into that person’s inner depths. You see, finally, the person.

That’s why sex is such a necessary part of a loving relationship. If people in a loving relationship are not having, do not have, sex, they’re withholding essential truths about themselves from each other. They’re withholding themselves from each other. There’s not a real trust. It might be there on a conscious level, but not on a deeper level. Something is missing. It’s not complete.

That’s why sex is necessary. So you can be who you really are.

So you can be real. Together.

Following up on our successful stint last month as audience members for a taping of The Colbert Report, tonight Matt and I will be in the studio audience for The Daily Show. The guest: actor Clive Owen. It should be fun.

Never mind what I said about seeing The Daily Show tonight. They overbooked, which we knew they would, and we didn’t get there early enough to make the cut. On the upside, we’re guaranteed admission at a future taping.

Grr. I’m stagnating at the gym. I’ve been using the weight machines, and my biceps seem to be stuck at five or six reps of 60 pounds each. The goal is to do 12 reps of something for motion, or fewer reps if you’re going for muscle size. I’d been slowly progressing since January, but for the past two-plus weeks, I’ve been unable to lift more than the above amount for the above number of reps.

I want muscles, dammit.

Tonight, while watching Pretty in Pink, during a particular scene:

Me (ironically): Oooh, it’s an ’80s party.

Michael: Back then, they just called them “parties.”

We watched a movie on Saturday night and another one yesterday. Saturday night was a very cute coming-out and coming-of-age movie called Dorian Blues. Better than your average such movie. I recommend it as a rental.

Yesterday was Walk the Line, which I liked more than I thought I would. The difference between Walk the Line and Brokeback Mountain is that in Walk the Line, the lovers actually use the fishing gear they bought.

Yesterday I also had a training session at my gym. My trainer has been teaching me how to use free weights, and this week I’ll start a new workout routine incorporating them. He also gave me a boost of encouragement: he told me that shorter guys can build muscle easier than some other people can. That was good to hear.

On Saturday night, Matt and I had dinner at the Waverly Restaurant (our local neighborhood diner – it’s always nice to have a local neighborhood diner) and discussed what we’ll do about housing and whatnot as of next summer. We’re likely staying in our free housing (which we get from Matt’s job) at least through then. After that point, we may actually need to (gasp) pay rent. What will we be able to afford? Will we have to move to another neighborhood in the city? Oddly, almost all our friends live in the triple digits, but I really really like living where we do. Will I have to get a higher-paying job? And what do I really want to do with my life? Am I satisfied with it right now? Do I expect too much out of life?

Saturday night’s restaurant talk led into the usual Sunday blues, which I’m pretty sure I wrote about recently. I think I need to start planning a Sunday activity ahead of time, so I have something to do. I thought about going to a concert at Avery Fisher Hall yesterday, but for some reason I didn’t. I can never figure out what I want to do on Sundays, because I worry too much about trying to fill the time in the most enjoyable way possible before beginning the five-day work week again. But maybe if I do something that will let me experience flow, I won’t experience the Sunday blues as much.

I did feel better late yesterday afternoon once I sat down and put Walk the Line into the DVD player. Sitting around watching a movie seems like such a lazy activity. But it worked. I felt better.

I need to not be so hard on myself.

The other night, I used the word “ridonkulous.” Matt was struck by this, because he’d heard someone else use it earlier that day, and now here I was using it as well, but he’d never heard it before. So of course I had to go look it up.

See also.

I still like this word better.

Okay, lifting free weights is definitely harder than using the machines…

Ow ow ow. Okay, maybe not ow ow ow, but sore sore sore.

This evening was my first time doing the free weights on my own. Now that I’m at the other end of the floor, I’m a bit more intimidated than I was when I was on the machines. The guys have bigger muscles and there’s more grunting. And I don’t feel like I totally have the hang of it yet.

But my body got a good workout tonight, so I guess that’s a good sign.

The weather is so nice today. It’s in the 60s. I needed to wear a suit today but I didn’t have to wear an outdoor jacket over it. And tomorrow it’s supposed to be even warmer. Looks like March will indeed go out like a lamb. Might we actually have a real spring this year? Finally?

I wish we’d had more snow this winter. I know, we broke the record for a single snowfall. But I like being stuck inside watching the snow fall, the world completely quiet. I love spring, but sometimes the weather evokes the times my dad used to pressure me to go outside and play with the other kids on our block. I preferred staying inside, and I liked having an excuse to do so. These days I don’t mind being outside when the weather is nice – no more intimidating neighborhood kids to worry about. Just traffic and more and more boarded-up shoestores.

This spring I resolve to spend plenty of time in Washington Square Park, since it’s so close. You have to take advantage of what’s around you. You have to appreciate it.

I also resolve to go to Shake Shack again. More than once.

Ahh, spring. Mmm, spring.

Last night we watched National Treasure on DVD, and I have a new crush: Justin Bartha, who plays Nicolas Cage’s nerdy, quippy sidekick. He’s especially cute in glasses. I’d never heard of or seen him before, but I’m going to have to keep an eye out for him in the future.

Oh yeah – the movie was better than I expected, a very entertaining popcorn flick, even if it strained credulity many times over.

[Update: turns out Justin Bartha stars in a new NBC sitcom, Teachers, which just began airing last week.]

Websites of all U.S. embassies, plus consulates and diplomatic missions.

I got laid off from my job today.

Statewide budget cuts.

So much for my cushy government lawyer job. According to page 67 of this, my division’s budget is getting cut by one of the largest percentages of all state agencies – a 40.5 percent cut.

I’ve been given six weeks’ notice. (My last day is May 12.) And I’ll get paid for my unused vacation time. And fortunately Matt and I are currently living rent-free.

The silver lining is that maybe I’ll finally find something I really enjoy doing. Maybe, maybe not. (I’ve been looking for that grail since college and haven’t found it – why would I find it now?)

Maybe now I can find a job in Manhattan and have a shorter commute.

Maybe I can find a job with a higher salary.

Still, this sucks. Now my life gets to be turned upside down for a bit. I hope it’s not for too long. And my self-esteem isn’t doing too well right now, either.

I’m still kind of in shock and don’t really know what my next step is, or even what I want that next step to be. But if anyone has any advice or job leads or whatever, I’ll listen to anything.