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At lunch, I also introduced my fellow interns to King Missile’s Gay, Not Gay. They graciously deferred on pressing sexual harrassment charges and were distinctly amused.

Last night, late at night, my roomie buzzed off damn near all my hair. It looks soooo much better.

Standard day at work. Had our weekly intern lunch at the AT&T cafeteria next door. Spotted walking in. Subjected him to mild harrassment. Introduced him to my fellow interns on the way out. It occurred to me later that it’s quite possible Joel isn’t out at work. Hrm. Hope that wasn’t an awkward moment for you.

Then PowerGrid in the evening. I was a little too slow about building the cities, and a little too fast to upgrade the plants. Bit me in the ass in the end. But I played asshole kingmaker anyway. =)

So, there’s a $140 flight to nyc this weekend. I have a day and a half of non-transferrable time off. I’m feeling the urge to travel again. NYC or toronto would be good. In either case, lodging and connecting with people to hang with ahead of time would be the main issues.

But, and are coming in to town this weekend, if I’m not mistaken. And I am going to be gone for traveling for 2 weeks starting on the 23rd. The “work optimal” time to take off would be on either the 8th or the 12th. Because everyone else who is working on this project is on vacation at that time. Ditto for the 17th, but a random wednesday does not make for a good vacation. *shrug*

Apparently Elder Aaron Davis (as played by Steve Sandvoss) has become the voice of my inner queer. Or at least he was the persona lecturing me about how to lead the gay good life in my dream as I woke up. Not clear whether it’s fortunate or unfortunate that I don’t recall the dream and thus the lecture.

Well, my media & public affairs class was canceled. That left me with community economic development, science & state, resource & environmental economics, program evaluation and a dance class which I’m auditing.

Program evaluation is a little too perfect a fit to GAO for me not to at least check out the syllabus. Resource & Environmental economics and science & state are both required for the science & environment focus, plus they’re damn cool. Community economic development, I dunno about, but may be worth checking out. On the other hand, there are a couple of classes that seem very intriguing to me. Specifically intro ecology and intro soil science. I’m sure many of you (other than ) think soil science sounds bizarre. But having read as far as I have into Collapse, Jared Diamond’s successor piece to Guns, Germs, and Steel, I’m starting to see just how significant the soil factor is. And just how much of it I don’t get. It’s something for me to consider, anyway.

Wednesday evening: Hit amitabul (veggie korean joint I was not impressed) with , then hang out at Sidetrack in the nonsmoking part. Grab a drink.

Friday evening: Birthday celebration for coworker at a bar right under the Paulina stop. Pretty snazzy. Didn’t stay long. One beer, one hour. Walk to boystown. Meander a bit. A midori sour at Sidetrack, again with the smokelessness. Mostly no talking. Striking up conversation with an ex-choruster, then a stranger from NYC, who left to chat with someone else who bought him a drink. I say screw it & leave.

Wander over to hydrate, walk past hydrate. Door guy has a shy/friendly demeanor, convinces me to go inside. I arrive just in time for the last minute of lube wrestling. I stay like 2 more minutes, then head out. End up chatting with door man, and giving him my card with contact info on the back.

Saturday. Doorman dude calls. We arrange date (see date planning tool). He texts me with a cancelation two minutes before time of date while I’m half a block away from the meeting point (and thus 25 minutes away from home) to tell me that his sister in law went in to labor and he can’t make it. He calls later in the evening to reschedule. No luck so far, have left a message, but not holding my breath.

Sunday was a lj day.

Last tuesday night, I went out to the burbs for gaming again. But this time it was board gaming, Puerto Rico, to be specific. It’s been so long…

I came in second. If I hadn’t gone all factory-tastic and gone for a wharf or a harbor, I might have come in first. I do not know what my problem is. My obsession with industrialization is clearly unhealthy and counterproductive. Amusingly, the two guys with wharfs came in last and next to last. So much for the power of the wharf.

This week, powergrid. Let’s see if I shoot myself in the foot with the environmentalist streak again.

Given my social distance here (self imposed or not, whatever), I’ve been spending alot of time watching movies & reading books. Shocker here, alot of them are gay oriented. So, here’s a review of some of them, in no particular order.

• Movies
  • Before Stonewall–A documentary produced in 1984. I know alot about homo history, for someone my age, who hasn’t taken any actual classes on it or anything. It intrigues me that so few people know what the stonewall riots were. Well educated homo-friendly people. Well, this one talks about a nonverbal language of the repressed. It talks about military service before people understood that you could come out of the closet. The relatively freewheeling 20’s. The war years. The repressive 50’s. The rebellious 60’s. And a brief moment on stonewall. And it’s all personal stories. A semi-famous person or two (famous enough to show up in the Rent “La Vie Boheme” litany) get interviewed too. It talks about the mattachine society in some detail.

    And seeing it just brings up a keen mourning for the years I lost to guilt, despair, desperate self-loathing, and a feeling of being alone in the universe. I had those years several years after this movie came out. There’s some anger in there, but not nearly as much anger as loss.

  • Yossi and Jagger–A military gay love story/tragedy from Israel from 2002. In Hebrew, I guess. Definitely not english. The subtitling on the version I have is awful. Clearly done by someone who doesn’t know english very well. But it’s a touching story. Short (about an hour) and very simple but not badly done for all of it. It has a video that has this dude that I swear looks like singing in hebrew. I knew he was living a double life from the heartland men’s chorus thing, but I had no idea he was a pop star in a different country.
  • Rites of Passage–A gay thriller/family drama from 1999. Some of the stereotypes are a bit grating. Excessively butch dad with a burst of rage (which happens sometimes, see also the what was it, three year old that was recently beaten to death by his father?). Sulky, rebellious, athletically disinclined (yet still buff!) gay son, with strong artistic ability even as a kid. But, on the upside, it is a movie with major gay themes where the central conflicts don’t revolve around AIDS or broad social acceptance issues. It’s not terribly well done. And, as in most thriller movies, they killed off one of the characters I liked the most (for a thriller, it has a low body count, but it has a small cast, too). The character in question is kinda likeable, and rather unconventionally cute.
  • Bear Cub–A pure family drama from Spain from 2004. The subtitles on this one ZOOM by. Often way too fast to catch. That’s a problem; it makes it impossible to keep up with both the acting and the dialogue, unless one is a native speaker of spanish. But that having been said, it’s a pretty good movie. Not dramatic, not a rollercoaster, but good. Everyone’s human and understandable. A widowed, aging, hippy mother and her boyfriend leave her son with the bear gay uncle for “just 15 days” while she travels to India. The 15 days are dramatically extended. The kid’s paternal grandmother shows up, and she’s a stone cold bitch about wanting to see her grandson, who wants nothing to do with her. The story flows naturally, the characters are solid and believable. It’s one of the most realistic gay movies I’ve ever seen. I really like the son, who is, perhaps, a little too perfect a kid, but so it goes.
  • Sordid Lives–A mockery of southern living. It’s worth noting how this ties into an nytimes article I was reading on the subject of a movie about the south and about movies of that class in general. This is a caricature of the south. As such, it has a number of features that are real and true, and distorted out of perspective in relation to the rest. The story is about a funeral for a woman who died under less than respectable circumstances, her family dealing with it, and the many outcasts coming home (specifically the old drag queen, and the same beautiful gay actor son living in LA archetype from Rites of Passage, Latter Days, and god alone knows how many other fictional representations). It’s a mean little comedy, good for a laugh, but the yankees in the crowd (like myself) should not take it seriously.
• Books (is there an internet book database other than amazon?)
  • Out of the Bishop’s Closet–After watching Latter Days for the first time, I wanted to get the book. So, on that same trip to washington (where I saw Sordid Lives, I think) I headed off to Lambda Rising. They were out of that one. But the guy behind the desk (who, tells me is the owner of the establishment, and a bit of a community figure) recommended this one to me. It’s the memoirs of a gay ex-mormon Bishop (approximate equivalent of ‘priest’ in the catholic church) who had climbed fairly high into the administrative ranks of the church before coming out. Alot of the book is theology and somewhat annoying to me. But there are alot of people I’d recommend it to. It is about a search for meaning. And the author is earnest*, in spades. It was interesting to me as an introduction to the mormon church’s workings and history, a story of the 80’s as a gay man, as well as a story of one man’s inner struggle with himself and search for meaning. It’s a good book if you (like me) are into that sort of thing.
  • All American Boy–A fiction piece that is like the dark version of Sordid Lives. It’s much more detailed. It talks about intergenerational sexual contact as not the worst thing ever. It talks about the small town spot, and its local geography, but never what state or part of the country it’s in. (it does have swamps, though, so that kind of narrows it down). It only ever refers to the city as “The City”, never by any name. This one has HIV, a suicide or two, a possible murder, several tragic deaths (mostly in the past), lots of retrospective sequences, the same quasi-successful-gay-boy-actor-in-big-city archetype, an older man sent to prison for molesting a gay kid (now gay-stereotype-man, our protagonist) who approached him in the first place. A big part of it is about gay-stereotype-man feeling angst about his past. It was pretty well written, but the material of it didn’t engage me too much.

I saw Charlie & the Chocolate Factory with & on thursday. It was good. I don’t have the sentimental attachment to it that I do to Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. The stories are quite similar, but also quite noticably different. The real difference those is the tonality. C&tCF is very burton-esque and Depp does “maladjusted creepy” well. W&tCF has a much more upbeat feel to it. I like them both for different reasons. I probably prefer W&tCF. Look, ma. No spoilers. =)

*=”earnest” has developed a special meaning for me, which I’ll get to in a later post.

I have a few news links that I harvested while screwing around at work that seemed interesting:

• Old News
  • A washington post article on the effectiveness of aid to the poor and other programs.
    old nytimes content, subscription required

Well, it seems like my weeknights are getting busy. And I, like many of my fellow feds, know that my urls are being monitored, so I don’t do lj from work. Occasionally over lunch I grab some wireless time and chat with people, but that’s pretty minor. Sadly, this puts my schedule in opposition to that of most other livejournalers, who seem to be predominantly journaling during weekday working hours. Ah well. But that’s why the weekend posting sprees. I’m sure my schedule will be different over the next 9 months, and who knows what will be born after that gestation period. =)