Author Archives: Tin Man

On Rick Perry

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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.

Scanning My Diaries

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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.

Santa Fe Celebrity Sighting

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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.