Guilt!

I’m excited about my high school reunion that starts tonight. I look good. Last night I sat in bed, going through my high school yearbooks, looking at the pictures, reading what people wrote to me when they signed inside. I have to say that I sure did have a lot of hair on my head back then. Jeez! Why didn’t anyone ever tell me to get a haircut? I had such an afro.

It was touching to read what people wrote to me. Things like “don’t worry so much” and “the people at UVA don’t know what they’re in for” and “I’m sure you’ll be a success at whatever you choose to do.”

Whatever I choose to do. God, things seemed so simple back then!

This morning I was reading an article in the New Yorker — unfortunately, it’s not on their website — about Bruce Pandolfini, a man who makes a living giving private chess lessons to gifted children. He was apparently the model for the teacher in the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer (which I haven’t seen). He’s lived in the same little one-room apartment in the East Village since 1976. Twenty-five years in one place! His stove is blocked by stacks and stacks of books and magazines and so on and so forth that reach three-quarters of the way to the ceiling. And he makes a very good living going from home to home, helping these child prodigies improve their chess.

I’m fascinated by the roads people take to get places, especially when they wind up doing something they love, and even more so when it’s not something that would show up on a career placement test. If Bruce Pandolfini had taken such a test, would it have told him that he should become a “private instructor of chess prodigies”?

Or look at Will Shortz, the New York Times’s crossword puzzle editor. Like me, he received a law degree from the University of Virginia. But instead of becoming a lawyer, he went to work for a puzzle magazine publisher. He even designed his own major as an undergrad at Indiana University; he is the only person in the world with a degree in enigmatology.

God, wouldn’t it be so nice to just blindly follow my interests and see where they lead me? But that’s so scary. I worry so much about coloring within the lines, and I worry about dying if I don’t.

Even debt makes me worry about dying. I have lots of debt right now — law school debt, and also credit card debt that seems only to be growing. But I desperately needed new pants, so last night I went to the Gap and bought a pair of jeans and two pairs of slacks. Charged $112 to my card. It was my first credit card charge in a month or so, but it still made me feel guilty.

Afterward I talked to a friend on the phone. “I feel like I should be punished for going into debt,” I said. “You are being punished,” he replied. “It’s called interest.”

True, true.

But I meant morally punished. Or mortally. I feel like my debt is going to make me die. I don’t know why I feel that way. But there’s got to be some incentive not to increase my debt, right? There’s always payback, right? Why not death?

I began law school with zero debt. I finished law school with thousands in loans, but no credit card debt. It was only about a year ago that I really started to carry a credit card balance.

I just want to be punished. Or I don’t want to be punished, but I fear I’ll be punished. Why, why, why? I’m torn between two philosophies — one is that I shouldn’t be so hard on myself and I should enjoy life as much as I can, and the other is that I need to be responsible and not do anything unhealthy such as carry debt. I always need some force to struggle against. I’m very good at creating obstacles for myself, real or imagined. Because without obstacles — well, what fun would success be?

Why do I feel like my imperfections are going to kill me when rationally I know they won’t? Maybe I want them to. Maybe I want to go through a purifying fire to kill off all my imperfections. Maybe that sometimes feels easier than having to deal with imperfections and shortcomings and shortfalls day after day.

Really, how do we cut ourselves so much slack and still feel able to live with ourselves?

What I mean is, how can you cut me so much slack and still like me? What have I done to deserve it, really? I wrote a couple of e-mails to Blogstalker the other day, trying to pep him up, and yet here I am feeling some similar feelings. The guilt I’m feeling right now at living in a too-expensive apartment and at carrying debt, the dissatisfaction with my neighborhood and with the fact that I haven’t eaten enough fruit lately, that I’ve been too lazy to go grocery shopping and so have been buying cheap dinners, the dissatisfaction with my job — why do I feel all this guilt?

I can understand feeling guilty about murdering a fellow human being or about cheating someone out of millions of dollars. But none of the things I’ve done have any negative impact on anyone else. So why the guilt?

Why do we feel guilty about things we shouldn’t feel guilty about?

Who appointed me moral exemplar? I never asked for this job!

High School Reunion

This weekend is my ten-year high school reunion. I’ve been psyched about it for the last two weeks. Until recently, everything I knew about high school reunions came from TV sitcoms. But this is for real!

I went to high school in Tokyo, Japan, but it was an American school, and when we voted on the reunion location, New York City won. Obviously that makes it easy for me to attend. My graduating class was about 100 people, and I think about 25 are showing up; it’s going to be a pretty informal, weekend-long affair. Friday evening we’re meeting up at a bar; Saturday afternoon is a picnic in Central Park; Saturday night is the big dinner, and then Sunday morning are the goodbyes.

I’m excited about it, and at the same time I’m feeling very self-conscious about how I come across. I’m not worried so much as just really curious to see what people will think of me.

When I was in high school my big activity was theater. I was always acting in a show. My social crowd was a strange combination of theater people and computer geeks. Junior year was the highlight — there were probably about 20 of us that ate lunch and hung out together, an equal number of guys and girls, some of whom were dating, and it was just so much fun. But a couple of the “cool” people referred to us as the “nerd herd.” So what did we do? A couple of us made up blue t-shirts that said “ASIJ Nerd Herd,” listing all of our names, in two columns, one in English and the other in Japanese. And I actually wore this thing sometimes. Jeez, what a dork.

Things got worse at the beginning of senior year. Most of the females and romantic couples in our group had graduated, so we were mostly left with a bunch of computer geeks and just a few random theater folks. The computer people included two guys who ran around all day in gray trenchcoats. (This was pre-Columbine, of course.)

To top it off, after two years of being cast in every show, including some major parts, in the fall of my senior year my friend Rob and I didn’t get cast in the fall play. So I couldn’t even balance my geeky social circle by interacting with those theater people who happened to be outside that circle. The fall of my senior year really sucked ass. I wasn’t that much of a computer geek, but these people were my friends, so I had to hang out with them. I just wasn’t as enthusiastic about D&D as they were.

Secretly I always wanted to hang out with the cool people. The “cool people” were actually a combination of intelligent sports players and fashionable smart people — sort of similar to the “preppy” group you always see in those 1980’s high school movies. They were all pretty social and had fashion sense. Being a smart person, I could connect with some of them; we knew each other and we seemed to like each other, and had in common both intelligence and a strong work ethic. We could talk about the latest calculus test, but then we’d go back to our own social groups. I never actually socialized with them. And yet paradoxically, some of my geeky friends were more comfortable talking with them than I was.

I really wanted the cool people to notice me and to like me. I wasn’t comfortable hanging out with the geeky people, and I didn’t want the cool people to think I was comfortable with it, so I tried to cast myself as this independent-minded eclectic guy who wasn’t beholden to any particular social group. But that didn’t work too well, because I still had more in common with the geeky people and I could never pass as one of the cool types. Yet at the same time, I didn’t fully enjoy hanging out with the geeky people. I worried that they were holding me back. I didn’t want to be typecast. I was so conscious of how I appeared to others.

I was voted Most Intellectual of my high school graduating class. I was president of the Thespian Society and I was the head of the yearbook’s writing staff. And I had my geeky social crowd. Did people typecast me? I don’t know. I don’t really know what people thought of me back then.

Anyway, here I am in June 2001. Today I have a goatee and a sharp pair of glasses and a little bit better fashion sense than I used to. And I’m an uncloseted gay man. When I graduated, in June 1991, I hadn’t told a single person about my sexual attraction to guys or about my numerous male crushes and obsessions. Not a single person. After I came out a few years ago, I decided to out myself in the annual class newsletter. Each year you send in a little blurb about yourself, and two years ago I finally decided it was time to say something.

I may still be intellectual, but I don’t really feel like a success (which is okay, because I didn’t get voted Most Likely to Succeed). I’m really really curious to see what people will think of me. I’m hoping that the gayness and the goatee will make me seem more interesting than I used to feel. I still have these lingering social insecurities from high school. I still want the cool people to like me. This weekend I want to be able to socialize with them as equals. I want people to see me as relaxed. I want people to see me holding a bottle of beer. And I’m curious to see if Mr. Attractive Jockboy, who now works in Manhattan as an investment banker or something, will notice me, not that it’s likely and not that it matters.

There will be plenty of people there, of course, and everyone’s going to be curious about everyone else. It’s not like I’m going to be special. Also, as my dad once said to me, “People don’t care about you as much as you think they do.” I think he meant that in a good way. People will probably be wondering too much about how they’re coming across themselves to notice all the subtle changes in my personality and demeanor over the past ten years.

If there are any. I hope there are. Yet at the same time, I see that these fears and insecurities and desires and this deep consciousness of how I’m being perceived — these things I had back in high school — seem to be coming back in full force as the weekend approaches. And yet I’m probably just chasing ghosts.

Wax On, Wax Off

Okay, you and you and you and you. So I guess there are plenty of guys out there who don’t mind hairy chests after all. So, no, I don’t think I’m going to get my upper body waxed. I guess I really don’t mind my hairy chest. But I’m still curious to see if it would look more defined were it smooth.

We homosexuals evaluate our own bodies differently than heterosexuals do. After all, when a gay man looks in the mirror, he’s looking at a potential object of his own desire; if you know what you want in a guy, then you know what you want in yourself, right? Men know men’s bodies. That’s why guys give better blowjobs.

From whence this aversion to body hair? I’d like to blame Hollywood and Calvin Klein and Bruce Weber and so on. But would they not have perpetuated the smooth body image if smooth bodies weren’t inherently better-looking to begin with? Or have we just been inculcated with that belief? Have we just been led to believe that everyone wants a smooth man? Have we leafed through so many catalogs and seen so many movies or gone to so many clubs where we’ve seen smooth shirtless guys dancing together and kissing each other that we think that that’s what everyone wants? Do we think that if you don’t fit that ideal, then nobody will want you?

What about goatees? Nobody in an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue ever has a goatee. Some of the guys in the boy bands have goatees, but they’re the “dangerous” ones. We want the thirteen-year-old girls of America to swoon and scream over the baby-faced and wholesome Lance Bass and and Nick Carter; if they start dreaming about Howie D or Joey Fatone, well then, moms and dads of America, you’d better lock up your daughters, because the next thing you know they’ll be dropping out of school and shooting up with heroin. American pop culture today hates anything edgy. If it’s not straightforward and unironic and squeaky clean, if it has any subtle shades of meaning or any hidden mysterious depths, we don’t want it. Go back to Europe.

Hairless equals youth. We are obsessed with youth. When I was 25, I dated an 18 year old. I dug younger guys, and because I did, I thought everyone else dug only younger guys too. I thought nobody younger than me would want me. And when you go into chat rooms and you see some guy whose profile says he’s “looking for dudes 25 and under,” that reinforces the stigma. I still dig younger guys. But now I also dig guys who are a little older than me, and I didn’t used to, so for me that’s progress.

We reminisce about our youth and we fear the future. We want no hidden depths, we want everything to be out there in the open. We want to be able to see all the rocky outcroppings and slopes and depressions and curves. Plain. Shiny. Squeaky clean. The past is known; the future is a fog, a mystery, unknowable.

The next time I go to a club — if I go — all the shirtless guys will be smooth. But that’s okay. Because who the hell cares what they think? Screw ’em. By this point I’ve had enough people tell me that they like hairy chests or that they like my body for me to realize that it’s okay.

Of course, look what I just wrote: that I’ve realized my body is okay because other people have told me it is.

Well, okay. And you know what? Somebody likes your body, too. If you’ve got acne, if you’ve got a little too much hair, if you’ve got a little paunch, that’s okay. And anyway, if someone likes you, they like you, and it won’t matter if you don’t meet the impossible Queerasfolkian standards of the modern gay world.

Remember the wise words of Mr. Rogers.