I got my first home computer in 1982. It was a present for my ninth birthday. My dad picked it out.

It was not an Apple computer. It was a TI-99/4A, from Texas Instruments.

A few years later, we got a home computer for the entire family.

It was not a Macintosh. It was a PC.

I was never a Mac person. I grew up on PCs. When I went to college, my dad got me a Windows box, a 486. In law school, I got a laptop with Windows 95 on it.

In 1999-2000, I used a Mac while working as an editor. I worked at a very small company — four employees — and my boss was totally a Mac person. The Mac I used at work had OS 8, or maybe it was OS 9. See? I don’t even know which OS it was. I didn’t particularly like using it. I was a PC person.

When OS X came out, it looked really pretty. I started to think I might want to get a Mac someday. But I was a PC person, and it seemed like switching to the Mac would be a pain in the ass. Plus Macs were so expensive.

I didn’t get my first iPod until December 2005 — the 5G, the first video iPod. I got my first iPhone, the 3G, in November 2008.

Finally, just over a year ago, in the summer of 2010, I bought my first Mac — the 21.5-inch iMac.

And I love it.

I wish I’d grown up on Macs. I’m free associating in my head right now: the mid-80s, the Macintosh, the 1984 Summer Olympics in L.A., Diff’rent Strokes and Family Ties, Ronald Reagan, the Star Wars trilogy, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Gremlins, a booming economy, optimism, being a kid, elementary school, computer labs, the Smurfs and the Superfriends on Saturday mornings, G.I. Joe and the Transformers on weekdays after school…

It seemed clear when Steve Jobs stepped down from Apple six weeks ago that the end was near. But it was still a shock to see the headline. Right there on the screen of my iMac, of course.

He was 56? That’s way too young. And yet sometimes I couldn’t believe he was only 56. He’d been around forever, for so long, that he had to be older than 56.

I’m sad that he won’t get to see how technology develops over the next few decades. He should have lived another 20 or 30 years. He should have been part of it, inventing the iTeleporter (nah, too long a name: the iPort?) or something nobody can even think of today.

But then again, he wasn’t an inventor. He didn’t create things out of thin air. He just made certain things the best things they could be.

The future was supposed to be about flying cars, and jet packs, and Dick Tracy-ish wristwatch communicators. Well, we still don’t have flying cars or jet packs. But we do have those crazy futuristic communicators, although we carry them in our pockets, not on our wrists.

I am not in love with my iPhone. But there are times when I use it, or just look at it, and I think: wow. Look at this elegant little device and the dozens of things it can do.

We are totally living in the future.

Thank you, Steve Jobs.

Lately I’ve been nerding out with a terrific book: Watching TV: Six Decades of American Television, by Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik. It’s an incredibly detailed history of American television, organized season by season. The first three chapters cover the invention of TV and the beginnings of TV broadcasting, and after that, each TV season is covered in great, engagingly written detail, one chapter per season, from 1944-45 all the way up through 2009-10. (So far I’m up to 1978-79.) Most chapters are about 7-8 pages long, but the book is 8 1/2″ by 11″ and the text is in two columns per page, so on ordinary-sized book pages, each chapter would probably be about 20 pages long. (The chapters have neat titles, too. Here’s an explanation of each chapter title.)

The season-by-season structure lets you follow the story of TV over the years: the rise of the networks, the completion of the coaxial cable that allowed live TV from coast to coast, the move of TV production from New York to Hollywood. You can follow the flow of broadcasting trends over the years: TV experimentation in the 1940s, variety shows and anthologies and Westerns in the 1950s, action-adventure shows and rural escapist sitcoms in the 1960s, smartly-written CBS sitcoms in the early 1970s, and so on. You can follow the changing fortunes of the big networks: CBS was king for the first few decades of TV, but in the mid-70s ABC suddenly rocketed to number one with entertaining escapism like Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, and Charlie’s Angels. (That’s where I am right now.)

The book also covers government regulation of TV and the rise of public TV and cable TV, and it touches on national and world events when relevant. Did you ever wonder why network prime time runs from 8-11 pm (7-10 pm Central/Mountain), except for Sundays when there’s an extra hour? Did you ever wonder why TVs used to have both VHF and UHF dials? It’s in this book.

Each chapter also has a prime-time grid of the networks’ fall schedules for that season, as well as a sidebar listing some important events from the season.

This will sound silly, but I love this book. I’d always been a TV history nerd, but I didn’t know this book existed until a year ago. (It’s actually an updated edition; it was first published in 1982). I haven’t loved a book so much since The President’s House, a two-volume history of the White House, covered chronologically by presidency, that I read a few years ago. I guess I enjoy incredibly detailed, information-packed, well-written chronological narratives about topics I’m interested in.

Yeah, I’m a nerd, and proud of it.

Just a quick post on politics:

Even though Rick Perry jumped into the presidential race and immediately grabbed the lead for the Republican nomination from Mitt Romney, it seems possible that Romney can regain the lead and get the nomination. The more Perry campaigns and debates, the more he seems to fall in the polls.

It seems to me that Romney in 2012 is going to be like Kerry in 2004 and McCain in 2008. Kerry and McCain each had an early lead for their parties’ nominations–not because they were particularly well-liked, but because they seemed electable. Their support started to waver as primary voters began to look for someone who genuinely excited them, rather than someone who just seemed “electable”: Howard Dean in 2004, Mike Huckabee in 2008. But the early front-runner managed to re-grab the lead and win the nomination.

Of course, in each case, the eventual nominee lost the general election.

Last weekend Matt and I were using FaceTime to video chat with my brother, my sister-in-law, and my niece. Matt and I were in front of my iMac, so we were stationary, but my brother was using his iPad, and as he walked around the room, I watched my sister-in-law and my niece playing together. It was just like being there. I marveled that we were having this video conversation. I’m still amazed that this technology exists, something that used to seem straight out of Dick Tracy.

At one point my niece was watching me and Matt. She’s not yet two years old, and I wondered: can she comprehend this? Does she realize that we’re interacting with her, or does she think she’s watching us on TV? Or does she think we’re somehow inside the device? Is she confused by any of this?

And then I realized that she had no problem understanding that she was interacting with us. She didn’t even think about it. After all, when I was little, I watched TV and I didn’t think there were little people inside the box; I just knew that I was watching something on the TV screen. I didn’t think it was weird; I didn’t even question it. I just accepted it as part of the world.

So I’m realizing that my niece is growing up in a world where iPads and video chats and swiping your finger across a glass screen to make things happen is just the norm. To me, it’s this super cool thing that tells me we’re finally living in the future. But to her, it’s just the way the world is and always has been. She’ll grow up in a world where this technology has always existed.

What this shows me is that human beings are amazingly adaptable. In one sense, our natural habitat is the savannah, or the forest; I still feel some primeval connection to the earth when I walk through a tree-filled park. And yet I can totally take something like television, or flying in a big metal tube, or living in a big city, for granted.

If you traveled back in time, say, 10,000 years, and you kidnapped a pregnant woman and brought her back to 2011, and the woman gave birth, the mother would probably remain terrified by everything around her. But her child would grow up totally accustomed to life in the 21st century. Like my niece, this time-traveling ancient child would take iPads for granted.

The human genome is pretty close to what it was several milliennia ago. We are endlessly adaptable. It’s just so bizarre to me.

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

I was living in Jersey City, across the river. But my last day of work had been the previous Friday, and I was taking a two-week break before starting my new job. At one point I was thinking of flying to Europe during the week of September 10, or maybe to San Francisco. Instead I decided to stay local.

The days leading up to it are encased in amber in my memory.

On Friday night, September 7, I had a falling out at the Phoenix with a guy I’d been dating for a month, because he started making moves on a friend of a friend.

On Saturday night, September 8, I had what I still consider, to this day, to be my quintessential Manhattan experience. I impulsively shaved off the goatee I’d had all summer and decided to go back into the city, back to the Phoenix, to replace bad memories with good ones. I struck up a conversation with a stranger, who wound up becoming a good friend. At four in the morning, instead of taking the PATH back home, I decided to pull a Holden Caulfield and go for a long, solitary walk through the streets of Manhattan. I wound up walking all the way up to the Upper East Side, more than 90 blocks. Along the way, I saw a plastic bag floating in the air, just like in American Beauty; I peed in the ornate men’s room in the magnificent lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria; I sat on the deserted steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the break of dawn and suddenly, surreally, saw hundreds of bicyclists ride by; and, for the first and still the only time in my life, I got cruised and picked up by a guy on the sidewalk. After we walked together for five blocks, he said he was too fucked up to do anything, so we parted ways.

I finally got home at 8 a.m., Sunday morning, September 9, exhausted and in love with Manhattan.

On Monday, September 10, I decided to visit Brooklyn Heights. I took the PATH to the World Trade Center concourse, bought a banana, browsed at the WTC branch of Borders, and then took the subway to Brooklyn. In Brooklyn Heights, I came across Plymouth Church, where presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln spoke out against slavery in February 1860. I’m pretty sure I also walked along the Brooklyn promenade and admired the skyline of lower Manhattan. On the way home, I stopped at the Gap in the WTC concourse and bought a t-shirt. Then I went home.

In the normal course of events I would have gone to bed that night and woken up the next morning at home in my apartment in Jersey City. I used to turn my phone’s ringer off when I slept, so I wouldn’t have woken up when my mom called me the next morning sometime after 9:00. Would I have turned the ringer back on and checked for messages? Or would I have heard people in the street, and would I have gone downstairs to Christopher Columbus Drive and stared at the burning towers directly across the river? My street ran east toward the Hudson River, directly toward the World Trade Center, and from the street there was always such a beautiful view of the twin towers: morning, sunset, or night, they always looked stunning, and sometimes I’d think of my friend Doug Ketcham from college who worked there — I was pretty sure he worked somewhere around the 100th floor — and I’d feel bad that we never got together socially.

But the normal course of events didn’t happen. I went online, and I met a guy, and I went back into Manhattan, and I spent the night at his place on West 10th Street, just off Sixth Avenue, near the Jefferson Market Library. The next morning his A/C was on, and it drowned out most outside noise; when I heard screaming from the street, I thought it must have been a rally for one of New York City’s mayoral candidates, since it was primary day.

I left his place at about 10:45 in the morning to walk to the 9th Street PATH station and go home. But something seemed weird. There was no traffic moving up Sixth Avenue. I walked to the intersection, and clumps of people were staring south. I looked south and I saw an enormous wall of gray smoke. I assumed a building was on fire. I asked a woman what had happened, and she told me that the World Trade Center had been blown up. (She said it had been done by the Palestinians.)

To this day, I still don’t really know how my brain processed that information. Unlike most people I know, I didn’t experience the events of that morning as a series of unfolding horrors: first plane hits (accident!), second plane hits (no, terrorism!), Pentagon gets hit, first tower falls, second tower falls. Since that morning, I’ve watched the news coverage numerous times, to the point where I sometimes think that I experienced it that way. But I didn’t. For me, it happened all at once. I thought it was a perfectly ordinary day, and then I learned that Hell had occurred.

My parents have sometimes joked with me that I’m oblivious. I was never as oblivious as I was that morning.

As for the rest of the day, I wrote about that ten years ago.

Ten years pass much more quickly than they used to.

I remember talking with my best friend in 1996 on the tenth anniversary of the Challenger explosion. The space shuttle had blown up on his 12th birthday, and we used to joke about what a crappy birthday it turned out to be for him. Ten years later, we were both 22. We couldn’t believe ten years had gone by; it made us feel old. In the previous ten years, I’d moved to Japan, come back to the U.S., gone through four years of college, graduated, and become a working adult. So much had happened in his life, too. We had literally grown up in that time.

It doesn’t feel like ten years have passed since 9/11. Yes, I was just 27 then; I didn’t know Matt; my brother had not yet met his wife; my niece was not even a twinkle in someone’s eye. Nobody had heard of Barack Obama; the iPod had not yet been announced; there was no iPhone, no Facebook, no YouTube; the first “Lord of the Rings” movie had not yet come out.

So much has happened. So why doesn’t it feel like any time has passed? Maybe it’s because we still live in the world that 9/11 created. The Challenger explosion was a single event with few national repercussions besides a temporary setback for the U.S. space program. But 9/11 is with us every day, and the weird thing is, we don’t even realize it. The idea of men standing outside Penn Station wearing fatigues and carrying guns used to seem like something out of a movie, but when it happens today I don’t bat an eye. I don’t even blink when someone at a Broadway theater asks me to open my bag. It doesn’t seem like New York has changed in ten years, but we forget the little ways in which it has changed. It’s comforting how easily human beings adapt, but it’s also unsettling.

My therapist’s office is on West 10th Street, off Sixth Avenue. Once a week I cross Sixth Avenue near Jefferson Market Library and walk through the intersection where I first looked south and learned what had happened. Each year, when I go to therapy on the day closest to September 11, I walk through that intersection and get an eerie feeling.

I remember, back then, thinking that one day it would be ten years since 9/11. I hoped we’d still be around, but I honestly wasn’t sure we would be. I wondered who would be president in 2011. I wondered what the world would be like, someday in the future, when we could look back and think of 9/11 as some distant event.

I’m still wondering when that will happen.

As a followup to my previous post, here’s a New York Times editorial from December 7, 1951, the 10th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. (It starts at the bottom of the left column, so you have to scroll down to begin reading.)

Even though World War II is not morally or legitimately equivalent to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, parts of the editorial feel eerily resonant today. Here are some excerpts.

DECADE OF FAME AND INFAMY

Ten tremendous years have passed since that terrible Sunday of Pearl Harbor which President Roosevelt described as “a day that will live in infamy.” …

When the American people woke up on Dec. 7, 1941, they were living in an age in which there still lingered some of the easy-going optimism of the nineteenth century. They still believed that without too much effort and too much pain things might be made to turn out all right. They knew about Hitler but many of them didn’t quite believe that he existed. They knew about Japanese imperialism but they couldn’t quite get it out of their heads that the Japanese, despite their foul record in China, wouldn’t get far in an up-to-date war.

These illusions perished along with many hundreds of men on Sunday afternoon, Dec. 7. …

… Pearl Harbor signed the death warrant of many thousands of men who did not die that day. It changed the whole lives of countless others. …

…Today we cannot look back to Pearl Harbor as men do “to old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago.” We lack the tranquility that might soften the ten-year-old tragedy. We lack the certainty that such tragedies will not be repeated. People in this city had an air-raid drill a few days ago. The conceivable enemy was not the Japanese and not the Germans. As we commemorate the dead of Pearl Harbor we may hope and pray that no such commemorations of a new Pearl Harbor will be exacted of our descendants or of ourselves grown older. But after ten years the struggle against absolutism is not yet finally won. …

Sunday, of course, is the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and I’ll probably write a more extensive post about it in a couple of days. In the meantime, I was curious to see how the 10th anniversary of JFK’s assassination was covered, so I dug into the New York Times archives and found an editorial dated November 22, 1973, which, in addition to being the 10th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, was also Thanksgiving Day. The nation was deep into Watergate. (And my mom was eight months pregnant with me.)

Here’s the text of the editorial (PDF here):

Ten Years Later

The shot that claimed the life of John F. Kennedy shortly after noon in Dallas ten years ago today will be remembered for more than the murder of a charismatic and promising young president; it marked the beginning of the end of an era filled with the ebullient optimism and confidence identified throughout the world with the spirit of America.

In retrospect, as remembrance of that tragedy coincides with Thanksgiving 1973, some of the Kennedy glitter may have been naively exuberant. The upbeat certainty that “we shall pay any price … to assure the survival and the success of liberty” around the globe seems extravagant today. A sadder but more realistic people has learned to question whether the world will ever again be this, or any, nation’s oyster – or can be made to conform to man’s noblest ideals and aspirations.

“The world is very different now,” John Kennedy said in his inaugural address. “For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.”

More than a decade seems to separate John F. Kennedy’s world from today’s realities. The nuclear threat remains as great as he perceived it then, but to it have been added more subtle threats of an environment abused by man’s thoughtlessness and greed. The abolition of human poverty is a goal as elusive as ever.

* * *

This is not to say that the idealism with which a young President captured the imagination of so many young Americans failed to leave its imprint on national policies and individual lives. Many seeds of racial justice planted during the short Kennedy years were brought to fruition by Lyndon Johnson’s landmark civil rights legislation. When President Kennedy refused to surrender to Governor Wallace’s defiant stand in the schoolhouse door, he could hardly have envisioned last week’s ceremony during which Mr. Wallace presided over the coronation of Alabama’s first black homecoming queen.

Progress toward racial equality at home has been matched by dramatic changes in America’s posture abroad. President Nixon has removed the diplomatic blindfold that for so long ignored the existence of 800 million Chinese. A constructive new pragmatism governs relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. These are no small accomplishments to mark on this Thanksgiving Day.

* * *

It would nevertheless be hypocritical to fail to recognize the deeply disturbing changes that have reshaped this country in the post-Kennedy decade. The brutal gunfire in Dallas was to become symbolic of an increasing resort to violence. Riots and fire ravaged urban ghettos. Political appeals to ignorance and selfishness needlessly divided the nation and substituted neglect for compassion.

If America is different now, the change needs to be measured and defined in terms of mood rather than of specific events and policies. Some of the exuberance has drained away. Years of a debilitating war have sapped American self-confidence and even self-respect. No nation is likely soon again to dominate the world’s economic scene or to hold out a credible promise to make the world safe for an ideal.

Americans have come up hard against inevitable limits. Even more jolting than the limits of power are the suddenly discovered limits of resources – energy, food, raw materials, everything. Americans face for the first time the possibility of an end to growth and expansion.

America is confronted, worst of all, by a debilitating loss of confidence in its institutions. The descent from the idealism and, perhaps, the euphoria of Camelot, gradual at first, has gathered precipitous momentum. The recent political scandals have shaken the country’s faith in itself.

John F. Kennedy could still call for “a grand and global alliance” in the “struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.” The nation’s mood now calls for a more limited goal – a return to its basic principles. There are special grounds for thanksgiving today in the fact that the search for the road back has at least begun.

I think it’s neat when you get to know a certain writer’s style so well that you can recognize that writer’s work without even looking at the byline.

It just happened to me. I just knew this piece about blackberry cobbler (can’t link to it directly; it’s piece #2) was written by Sam Sifton, and when I got to the bottom I realized I was right.

I know it’s not nice to say things like this, but: I can’t stand Sam Sifton’s writing. His prose is so fucking purple.

Apparently I’m not the first person to feel this way. And I found a Facebook group devoted to hating his writing.

I don’t read his restaurant reviews, but I do see his food column in the New York Times Magazine every few weeks. He’s been writing there for several months, and I’ve come to recognize a couple of his tics.

One, he uses the word “with” in an annoying precious way, usually (but not always) in the form [adjective] with [noun]:

• a honeyed glaze made piquant with vinegar
• a cool minted yogurt sauce that flashes with citrus and fire
• fat brioche croutons glistening with butter and woodsy with thyme
• oxtail stew, brown and steaming, light with ginger and thyme, pungent with allspice and soy
• Thick with onions and scallions and garlic
• romaine, coated thick with emulsified oil that is bright with garlic and acidity, nutty with cheese and has some kind of salt-fish pong in it to bind the whole

He also likes the phrase “tastes of”:

• It tastes of the best parts of summer in Manhattan
• It will taste of summer itself
• poultry that looked like pork and tasted of fish

Twenty years ago today I moved into my first-year college dorm at UVa.

A couple of weeks ago it was my 20th anniversary of leaving Japan for good. From Japan, my family flew to Hawaii for a week, and then we flew home to the NYC area and lived in a company-provided apartment in midtown Manhattan for a week before driving down to UVa to move me into my dorm.

Things I remember happening during that last week before college — 20 years ago this past week:

• watching one of the special summer episodes of 90210 (it must have been a repeat, according to this episode guide)
• the Crown Heights riots
• Hurricane Bob
• the failed coup d’état in the Soviet Union
• writing “I am gay” in my diary for the first time

(Also, my mom saw Jerry Orbach in the laundry room of the apartment building we were staying in.)

Wow, if I could have predicted how much would happen in the subsequent 20 years…

So we had a little earthquake yesterday on the East Coast, eh?

Out in the New Jersey suburbs, toward the end of our lunch hour, a work friend and I had just sat down on a couple of stone benches on a patio next to our office building. He started bobbing his leg up and down, and then I started to feel my bench shaking. Well that’s weird, I thought. I asked him if he felt something shaking – he said no. So I figured our benches must have been resting on some loose tiles, and that’s why I could feel my bench shake while he was bobbing his leg up and down on his own bench. I felt another shake, but he was still bobbing his leg. So I didn’t think anything of it.

A couple of minutes later, a group of people started streaming out of the building. We thought maybe they were all planning to have a meeting out on the patio. Then one of them came up to us and said, “Did you guys feel any shaking out here?” I said that as a matter of fact, I had. He said they all felt the building shake and decided to come outside because it might have been an earthquake.

An earthquake! Of course, I immediately took out my phone and did a Twitter search for “earthquake.” People had felt it in New York! And in Washington! And in New England!

I had the same weird feeling I had during the 2003 blackout: slowly realizing that what you thought was a local phenomenon is being experienced by people across SEVERAL STATES.

I’m glad nobody was hurt, especially near the epicenter — which is not far from Charlottesville, my one-time home. Sounds like they felt it pretty hard at UVa, though.

It’s human to want to make predictions about the future, but at this point, I really have no idea whether Obama will be reelected next year. Sometimes I think he will, and sometimes I think he won’t.

And I wasn’t too worried about the Republicans until Rick Perry entered the race.

Mitt Romney? On the one hand, I think Romney is beatable in the general election. He’s like the Republicans’ John Kerry. On the other hand, if Romney did become president, I don’t think he’d be as much of a disaster as some of the other Republicans, because I don’t think deep down he’s as conservative as some of the others. (And yet, any Republican president will be beholden to the crazy Republican base and will be inevitably pulled rightward. Still, at least there’d be a chance of less insane policies from him than from most other Republican candidates.)

Michelle Bachmann? I can’t really see her getting the nomination. She’s a general election loser, and I think enough people would come out in the primaries to stop her.

But Rick Perry? I can certainly see him winning the nomination. And while part of me thinks the American people will not elect another idiotic fundamentalist Christian Republican Texas governor so soon after the last one, another part of me has zero faith in the intelligence or memory of the American people.

I mean, cripes, tons of people out there still don’t understand that raising the debt ceiling was NOT ABOUT NEW SPENDING, it was about paying back what we borrowed for already-approved spending. Which I think speaks to an enormous media failure. As great as it was to see David Gregory relentlessly press Michele Bachmann on her anti-gay bigotry yesterday, he totally let it slide when she lied about the debt ceiling.

I do have hope, though. One, the election is still more than a year away. Two, unlike one-term presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, Barack Obama is a damn good campaigner and debater.

Still, any predictions at this point would be fruitless.

I bought a scanner this week, and I’ve begun scanning my journals into digital format.

I’ve been keeping diaries and journals since January 2, 1987, shortly after my 13th birthday. Earlier that year I’d read The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4, a British work of fiction in the form of a boy’s diary, and I decided I wanted to keep my own. For Hanukkah that year, my parents bought me a blank diary, and I’ve been writing down my thoughts ever since. Sometimes I go weeks or months without writing, and for a while my journal writing was replaced by some very intense blogging, but I’ve since returned to writing most of my stuff in my own private journal, and I’ve always held on to my journals. Lately I’ve decided I want to have backups, just in case something happens to the originals; also,  converting them to digital format will make it easier to skim through all of them someday. So I bought a scanner through Amazon and I’ve started scanning them.

I’ve already scanned everything up through the middle of my second year of college, and it’s been fun glancing at the pages and seeing how I’ve evolved as a person.

After the first couple of pages in my first diary, there are some pages missing. I tore them out a long, long time ago. They spanned most of 1987. In middle school, I wrote a lot about a crush I had on a classmate. A year or two later, I was ashamed of what I’d written, so I tore out the pages and threw them away. I regret throwing them out. I wish I still had those pages.

And there’s another page missing from my diary. I visited Israel when I was 18 years old, and in Jerusalem I planned to do what many people do: write a prayer on a piece of paper, roll it up, and stick it in a crack in the Western Wall. I decided that no piece of paper would be more sacred to me than a piece of paper from my own diary, so the night before we visited the Western Wall, I wrote a prayer on a blank page of my diary and tore it out.

If I remember correctly, my prayer was something like this: I don’t know what I want in life, so please, God, just let me be happy. The biggest issue in my life at the time was that I was totally confused by my sexuality, and I had no idea how I wanted it to be resolved. I figured if I asked for some specific outcome, it might not be what I wanted. You know those stories where someone asks a genie for a wish, and the wish turns out to be not at all what the person wanted? Well, I figured I would work the system. When you wish for something, you’re really saying, “Please — if you grant me this wish, I will be happy.” So I decided to cut out the intermediate steps and just ask for happiness. Since I had no idea what would make me happy, I decided to leave it up to a higher power.

I don’t believe in God anymore. And I can’t say that I’ve found true happiness. Maybe human beings aren’t meant to be truly happy, or maybe something in my makeup just keeps me from it. I’m not depressed; I’m just constantly yearning for something I don’t have. And if I ever get what I hope for, I worry that I’ll just wind up wanting something else.

I sometimes wonder what will happen to all my diaries after I die. Oddly, I’ve always kind of thought that after I died, I would want my mother to keep them and read them. But of course, in the normal scheme of things, my parents will be long gone by the time I die. I don’t know if it’s that I can’t conceive of my living a long life, or that I can’t conceive of my parents dying, or – most likely – that I just really want my parents to get me.

But other than family, I can’t imagine who would ever want to read everything I’ve written. I’m not a significant person – I’m just an ordinary human being who will be forgotten after my death, just like everyone else. And I shouldn’t really care what happens to my diaries after I die, since there will no longer be a me to care about them.

Diaries serve two purposes that I can think of: (1) writing down your thoughts, and (2) reading your own thoughts several years after the fact in order to reminisce or keep track of your personal growth. What my diaries will mean to other people, I have no idea.

But at least by scanning them, I can preserve and maybe prolong their existence.

One night last week on my trip, I was walking near the Santa Fe Plaza after dinner. It was pretty quiet and there were only a few people walking around.

In the distance, I saw two men holding hands walking along the street toward me. “Aw, how sweet,” I thought. “It’s nice to see a same-sex couple around here not afraid to hold hands.”

As they got closer to me, two things happened.

One, the men stopped holding hands.

Two, I realized that one of them was Jesse Tyler Ferguson.

(I feel ok writing about this, since he’s totally out.)

Now, I’ve been a fan of Jesse Tyler Ferguson for a few years. I first saw him in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee on Broadway in 2005 as the adorkable Leaf Coneybear. Then he was on this short-lived CBS sitcom called The Class. And then, of course, came Modern Family, and now he’s nationally famous.

So, I suddenly realized that Jesse Tyler Ferguson and his boyfriend were walking toward me. And then right past me.

I quickly turned around and said, “Are you Jesse Tyler Ferguson?”

He said, “Yeah… hi…” without stopping or really turning around, and they continued on walking.

“Sorry, I won’t bother you,” I said, and I kept on in my direction.

I immediately felt so stupid and rude and mortified. I hadn’t even said “excuse me” first. I’d just blurted out “Are you Jesse Tyler Ferguson?” like some pushy idiot.

I wish I’d said, “I loved you in ‘Spelling Bee,’” or something like that, to show that I wasn’t some random yokel who knew him only from TV. It would have been even better if I’d seen him in “On the Town” 12 years ago.

I totally felt like I’d invaded his privacy. I imagined that he and his boyfriend had come to Santa Fe to get away from L.A. for a few days. I wondered if Santa Fe was one of those places where L.A. people go to get away from it all, like when New Yorkers go to Maine or something. Afterward I looked him up and it turns out that he actually grew up in Albuquerque, which is about an hour away from Santa Fe. But I still felt like I’d intruded.

I don’t know what it is about certain celebrities. Even though I’m a New Yorker, I still always feel like famous people are imaginary people made of stardust. I’m in awe of them, and I want to talk to them, and I want them to like me. It’s like they’ll suddenly recognize something special in me, and they’ll sprinkle me with stardust and initiate me into their tribe.

It’s totally ridiculous, because of course I’m nobody. They don’t know me from Adam. The same thing happened when I saw Michael Urie in the audience of Angels in America a few months ago; I went up and said hi to him and felt totally stupid afterwards.

I guess in some way, I want to be more than I am. I want to be special and charmed and famous. I don’t feel that desire as much as I used to; years of therapy have helped me realize that just being me is good enough.

But famous people still have this hold over me.

If you follow my Twitter feed, you know that I was in Santa Fe last week. I was there for a work conference and I annoyingly Foursquared and tweeted my way through everything.

I get romantic and wistful when I fly on airplanes. I get daydreamy and introspective as I fly above the earth and look down at the vast landscape beneath me. I love sitting at the window and staring down at everything. On this trip I flew through Dallas, so part of my trip was Dallas< -->Santa Fe. The plane flew over numerous crop irrigation circles and isolated north Texas towns, and I imagined all the people living in those little places. People I will never meet, towns I will never visit. It makes me sad that I’ll never meet them. I spot what is probably a high school football field, and I imagine everyone from the town and the nearby farms getting together there on Friday nights for high school football games. They live in these self-contained places where everyone knows who everyone else is. I wouldn’t really want to live there. But it still makes me wistful.

I see a small town, and then a long, straight road that must go on for a couple of miles, and then at the end of the road I see another small town. I’ll never know what towns they were.

But no. The thing is, with the internet, I really can see those places again. I can see the flight path I took, and I can click on the Google Earth link and see my flight path in Google Earth and zoom in on the towns I probably flew over. Maybe I was looking at Tulia, Texas, and Happy, Texas?

It’s so cool that with the internet, we can capture these moments and memories and places that used to just flow through our fingers like sand before disappearing forever. Now we can revisit them. I love it.

There have been gay characters on soap operas for a few years now. But this time it’s different, because now my soap, Days of our Lives, finally has its first gay characters. I’m so psyched.

Even though I rarely watch Days anymore, it’s still my soap. My mom has watched it almost since the beginning, and I picked up the habit from her when I was 11 or 12. I’ve been following the Hortons and the Bradys on and off for 25 years. (Holy crap, it’s been that long?) I know, most soaps have mediocre acting and writing; whenever I watch Days and Matt happens to be in the room, he rolls his eyes. But I can’t help it. These people are like family to me.

So, here’s the deal: the show recently introduced a new character, Sonny Kiriakis (played by Freddie Smith), who’s the son of Justin and Adrienne Kiriakis. (Justin and Adrienne were on the show in the late ’80s and early ’90s and then disappeared for a long time until returning a year or so ago. We’d never seen their son until now – he was “traveling the world.”) Sonny’s first appearance was June 23, and the audience learned that he was gay just two days ago, when he came out to his great-uncle Victor. His parents already knew and were already supportive, which is so refreshing to see. (This scene, where they talk about how they first reacted, is touching and seems pretty realistic to me. And I like the line about the cowboys.)

The writers are setting Sonny up for some sort of somethin’ with Will Horton (played by Chandler Massey). Will is both a Brady and a Horton: he’s the son of Sami Brady and Lucas Horton, and he’s the grandson of Roman and Marlena, one of the most legendary couples in the show’s history, so his character has deep roots. (Will has been on the show since the mid-90s, but Chandler Massey just started playing him last year.) Will just graduated from high school, and lately he’s been acting kind of awkward around his girlfriend, as if something’s going on with him that he doesn’t want to talk about…

Sonny and Will met each other on Sonny’s first episode on June 23. Take a look: chemistry?

A few YouTubers are archiving the whole story. Because it just began and because most characters only show up a couple of times a week, it doesn’t take long to catch up. Start here.

I will be following excitedly.

You know what’s weird? The Casey Anthony trial is a case that has apparently transfixed America for three years. You know when I first heard about it? Two or three weeks ago. And that’s only because I decided to record The Today Show a few weeks ago so I could watch Meredith Vieira’s last episode and Ann Curry’s first episode as host. (I’ve long been interested in The Today Show as an institution even though I don’t watch it regularly anymore.) They did a report on “the Casey Anthony trial” and I had no idea what they were talking about. I figured it was another one of those sensationalistic “missing white girl” stories that I have no interest in. I barely gave it a further moment’s thought until the verdict was announced yesterday. I was working from home, and I saw online that she’d just been found not guilty. I went to the TV, where the previous half hour of MSNBC was in the TiVo buffer, and I rewound it and watched the announcement of the verdict.

I’m baffled as to how I’d heard so little about this case. I guess it’s because most of the news I follow is from politics websites and the New York Times, and if there was any coverage of it in the Times until yesterday, I missed it. We also watch NBC Nightly News almost every night, but Brian Williams has barely covered it there.

After watching the verdict, I went to Wikipedia to read up on the history and details of the case, so I’ve caught up a bit.

Again, it’s weird, because when all the O.J. stuff was going on in the ’90s, I generally knew what was going on, even if I still didn’t really obsess over it or anything. But this case? I hadn’t even realized it existed.

I’m not disappointed that I missed most of this. On the contrary. But I’m still just… baffled that I did.

Today Lambda Legal filed a lawsuit in New Jersey seeking marriage equality. Here’s the complaint.

In 2006, in response to a previous lawsuit, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the state had to provide equal treatment to gay and straight couples, but it left it up to the state legislature to decide whether this would come in the form of civil unions or marriage. The legislature chose civil unions. Now Lambda has sued the state, arguing that civil unions are not good enough and that only marriage will provide equality.

The complaint sets forth the reasons why civil unions aren’t good enough. Skip ahead to page 16 (paragraph 30) for some specific ways in which gay New Jersey couples in civil unions have experienced inequality even though civil unions supposedly provide equality. Complications have come up in hospital emergencies, in funeral homes, in the context of insurance benefits, and in other areas.

It’s interesting: right now, New Jersey treats gay couples better than New York does, but in a few weeks, New York will leap ahead of New Jersey, and New Jersey will be the inferior state.

Here’s hoping New Jersey follows New York’s lead.

I’ve been debating marriage equality today on a conservative website during some free moments. There was a time when I used to do more of this, but I gave up a long time ago, because (1) life is too short for the unpleasantness and stress that comes from experiencing the vitriol of people who don’t want you to have equal rights; (2) I got tired of saying the same things over and over again to different people; and (3) our side started winning in the court of public opinion. Still, for some reason I felt like doing it today.

There are many problems with trying to debate people online. The biggest problem is that you’re arguing with a disembodied entity. People who engage in online debates tend to forget that they’re arguing with fellow human beings, so there’s a certain amount of empathy and politeness missing. It’s easy to be nasty when you forget that the person you’re arguing with is an actual person.

And it’s not just that people forget they’re arguing with human beings; they forget that they’re arguing about human beings. It’s a lot easier to make silly arguments that gay people are trying to bring down society and are just being selfish little pricks when you don’t know any actual gay people. Human beings are not abstractions; we have desires, and interests, and hobbies, and friends, and hopes, and dreams, and thoughts, and feelings, and pasts.

And the problem works both ways. Sometimes no amount of logical argument will change someone’s mind. Sometimes it helps to try and understand where the other person is coming from and why they feel a certain way rather than fruitlessly try and “win the argument” right now. But on the internet, you have no idea whether you’re arguing with a 55-year-old guy with lots of life experience or a snotty college student who’s not as smart or worldly as he thinks he is. I might use different tactics with each person. But on the internet, that’s usually not possible. This is still one of my most fulfilling moments in more than 10 years of blogging, but it’s very rare.

So why bother? Well, maybe other people are lurking, and maybe they’ll be convinced by what you say. Or maybe those lurkers agree with you and they can use your arguments in other places.

Generally I find it’s not worth it. On rare occasions, like today, I just feel like it. But often I’d much rather have a discussion than a debate, and that’s not really possible in many places online.

It’s been a long road to marriage equality in New York State.

Five years ago next month, the New York Court of Appeals ruled in Hernandez v. Robles that the state constitution didn’t give same-sex couples the right to get married. I remember the anger, sadness and frustration I felt that day. The decision came out in the morning; in the evening, we went to a rally in Sheridan Square. Later that night, I wrote the following:

This decision is as insulting as Bowers v. Hardwick, the 1986 anti-sodomy decision that was eventually sent to history’s dustbin by Lawrence v. Texas. Rallies were held in Sheridan Square on the sad day that Bowers was decided and again on the happy day 17 years later when Lawrence reversed it. I look forward to the day when a rally is held in celebration of New York State’s allowing its gay citizens to get married, a day when Hernandez v. Robles itself is relegated to the dustbin of history.

And we’d damn well better not have to wait 17 years for it.

It turns out it took just five years, not 17. The depressing 38-24 Senate vote two years ago was just a bump along the road, but an important one; without it, we wouldn’t have seen where senators stood and known who needed to be lobbied, and we might not have ultimately achieved victory this past Friday.

These last two weeks were excruciating. The Senate seemed stalled at 31 votes for, 31 against. It didn’t even seem clear that there’d be a vote. It felt like Groundhog Day, waiting and waiting and waiting day after day for the Senate to act. But part of me knew it would happen; it just didn’t seem possible that we would come this far, only to have the Senate not vote, or worse, reach a tie vote. There was a rumor that a 32nd vote had been found, but it didn’t seem to be sourced.

Some of Matt’s family was visiting this weekend, and as we traipsed around the city on Thursday night and Friday, doing touristy things with them, we both kept obsessively checking Twitter to see if there were any developments. Frustration began to set in as the process dragged out longer and longer. It started to seem like maybe the Senate session would end without a vote.

But then suddenly the dam broke. Things seemed to happen so quickly: they’ve agreed on amended language! The Assembly has voted on it! And then… the Senate will vote on it tonight!

On Friday night, Matt and I sat at home, watching the vote live on TV and following our Twitter feeds. And then Stephen Saland, a Republican who had remained publicly undecided, announced on the floor of the Senate that he was a yes. That was it: this was really going to happen. At one point I was afraid that that bigot Ruben Diaz was going to drag things out and that somehow there wouldn’t actually be a vote. But it happened. 33-29! It was done! All the frustration and anxiety melted away so quickly that for a while I almost forgot I’d spent the last two weeks feeling it. It wasn’t until I remembered the anxiety and realized I didn’t need to feel it anymore that it really began to hit me.

This new law obviously has very personal implications. Matt and I have been together for seven and a half years, and we’ve discussed getting married, but it’s always been a necessarily hypothetical discussion. Now the possibility is real. Whatever we decide, I’m thrilled that my state now treats me as an equal citizen and that we’re allowed to make the choice for ourselves.

I’ve been so proud and happy to be a gay New Yorker this weekend.

Last week I finished reading a long book, and I’m trying to find a new one. So far, no luck.

I’ve got several dozen book samples on my Kindle, but none of them seems to be grabbing me. I keep switching back and forth between different books until my interest latches onto it. I guess that’s the nice thing about the Kindle, though: I can carry more than one book with me at a time.

I’m switching back and forth among Diarmaid McCulloch’s Christianity (a history book), Richard Evans’s The Third Reich in Power (I read the first book in his trilogy, The Coming of the Third Reich, a few years ago), and Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts, also about Nazi Germany. But I’ve reached the end of the sample of that last one, and I can’t seem to get myself interested enough to pay for the whole book.

Why such depressing subject matter? I don’t know. I just find it interesting. But apparently not interesting enough to latch onto right now for a full read.

Maybe I need a break from reading the Kindle screen? Maybe I miss old-fashioned paper books?

I don’t know. I’m sure some book will call out to me soon enough.