Author Archives: Tin Man

Being Erica

Posted on by

My new favorite TV show is a Canadian series called Being Erica. We just finished watching the first three seasons, and I adore it.

It involves two topics I’m interested in: time travel and therapy. The main character is Erica Strange, a 32-year-old Jewish woman in Toronto who, one day when everything in her life is going wrong, meets a mysterious man who offers to be her therapist. He has Erica write a list of all the regrets from her past, and in each episode he sends her back in time to relive — and try to change — one of those regrets, which usually has some connection or parallel to what’s currently going on in her life. It’s sort of like Quantum Leap meets My Name is Earl.

The show is more than a wish-fulfillment fantasy, though. Erica doesn’t always succeed in changing her past. Sometimes the thing she regrets winds up happening to her in a different way, and sometimes she’s compelled to act the same way she did originally just because of who she is, and sometimes changing the regret leads to unexpected consequences.

Almost every episode makes me think about my own life. I have a few things I really regret, and it’s nice to have the fantasy of being able to go back and change them. But you can’t really change your past. You couldn’t have done things differently than you did: you were who you were at the time, and you had no way of knowing how things would unfold. I wish I hadn’t come out to my parents when I was 19, because they reacted terribly, and I wasn’t prepared to deal with that, and I wound up going back in the closet until I was 24 and wasting the prime sexual years of my life. But there’s no other way it could have happened. My intentions were good: to be open and honest with my parents about something in my life that was important to me. I just had no idea that I was so psychologically ill-equipped to deal with the consequences of telling them.

Anyway…

Being Erica is a terrific show that slowly expands on its premise over three seasons, plays around with its own formula, and goes in unexpected directions.

Erica is played by the immensely appealing Erin Karpluk. The show’s also got a great supporting cast, including the adorable Tyron Leitso, who played the bartender on the unjustifiably short-lived Wonderfalls and who reminds me of a young Matthew Fox.

If you’re interested in time travel, therapy, Canada, Judaism, hot guys, whatever, I totally recommend this show. I hope there’s a fourth season.

Brooks on Lieberman

Posted on by

David Brooks unsurprisingly praises Joe Lieberman in his column this morning, and it’s a mess of muddled thinking.

He lauds Lieberman as a man of courage, independence, and integrity. But then he says that if the Senate Democrats had taken away his chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee, he might have left the Democratic caucus and voted different on a whole host of issues.

If Lieberman had not been welcomed back by the Democrats, there might not have been a 60th vote for health care reform, and it would have failed.

There certainly would have been no victory for “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal without Lieberman’s tireless work and hawkish credentials. The Kerry-Lieberman climate bill came closer to passage than any other energy bill. Lieberman also provided crucial support or a swing vote for the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the stimulus bill, the banking bill, the unemployment extension and several other measures.

So, wait. Joe Lieberman is a man of “courageous independence of mind.” Except that if he hadn’t gotten his way, he apparently would have voted against health care reform, don’t ask, don’t tell, the Lilly Ledbetter Act, the stimulus bill, the banking bill, and unemployment benefits extensions.

Wait, but Brooks also says there’s no evidence that Lieberman’s voting record since 2006 has been based on bitterness at being rejected by liberal voters in 2006.

So Joe Lieberman is a man of courage and independence and there’s no evidence that his voting record since 2006 has been based on bitterness. But if the Democrats had stripped him of his chairmanship, he would have voted opposite the way he really believes, out of pettiness and bitterness.

So which is it?

It’s too bad David Brooks never responds to any of his critics.

Ten Years of the Tin Man

Posted on by

Ten years ago today, I started this blog.

A year later, I wrote a first-anniversary post in which I went into detail about how and why I started blogging, how my blog got its name, how blogging had changed me, and a list of my favorite entries from that first year. If you’re interested in any of that, it’s all there.

Blogging has changed a lot in ten years. At the beginning of 2001, blogging was still pretty new — except to some people — and most blogs were either linkblogs, personal journals, or a combination of the two, like this one. Then 9/11 happened, and blogging went mainstream — but it came to be epitomized in the public mind by warbloggers and political bloggers.

There are a couple of reasons for this. One, the news media started to care about blogs only when blogs started to cover their territory — the news — so that’s how most of the general public was introduced to blogging. Two, the news media didn’t really care about other types of blogs; how do you explain to the masses such blogs as those by Jason Kottke or Matt Haughey or Anil Dash?

Then blogging became monetized, and most new blogs were launched with a focus on just one topic: politics, or home design, or being a mom, or making one’s way through Julia Child’s cookbook. Many of the personal blogs like mine started to fade away.

And then Facebook and Twitter appeared, and now nobody blogs anymore.

I miss the days when lots of gay guys blogged. We had our own homo blog community that spanned the nation and even the world. I made some good friends that way, and I even found my partner. There were lots of bloggers I never even met, and I miss them: bloggers like Closet Boy (what ever happened to him? I hope he’s out of the closet and living a happy life) and the Daily Dean (who, according to the photo on his faculty page, is as hunky as ever).

I really don’t understand why so many people stopped blogging. People claim to be too busy or too lazy or to have run out of things to say. That’s too bad, because I can learn so much more about people through a couple of paragraphs they’ve written than through their 140-character tweets. Reading a blog entry is like catching up with a friend; reading Twitter is like speed dating. When I post a new blog entry, I feel like I’m inviting you into my home, even if you’re reading this through an RSS reader. But when I tweet, I feel like I’m just throwing it out there into the agora where there’s nothing to distinguish it from anyone else’s tweets. It’s just noise — a stream of pithy data coming at you.

But I must confess: I myself once quit blogging. I had let my blog take over my life, and I needed to stop. A year later, I came back, after realizing that I could blog without baring my entire soul, that I could make my blog whatever I wanted it to be instead of letting it or its readers control me. Ever since then, my blog and I have had an understanding: I’m the boss.

You know what, though? I recently went back and skimmed through those highlights from my first year of blogging, and there were several incredibly soul-baring posts in there. There were times when I really lay myself out on a table for everyone to see. In some ways I feel I was a better writer back then, or at least a more interesting one.

Such is the price of stability, I guess.

Oh, one last thing: after I got to the end of writing this, I was curious to know what the traditional tenth anniversary gift is.

You know what it is?

Tin.

I think that’s funny.

Or aluminum, I guess, but “The Aluminum Man” doesn’t have quite the same ring.

Happy tenth anniversary, blog.

real tin man
(Explanation of photo here.)