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So, today was my verbal mock appointment. I ran through an appointment, in theory not doing any of the tests (throat swab, physical exam, testicular exam, blood draw, etc), with one of the people who’s been with the clinic since it began (before I was born). In practice, I did the throat swab & the blood draw. He prompted me numerous times, though I got the hint every time. I didn’t do a very good job on the history taking or the charting, but when it was all over he said I’d done well. I told him I disagreed.

Maybe one day I’ll be a good medic, but at present, I’m still quite wet behind the ears.

Spent the entire shift in lab. Mostly by myself, spinning urine, and examining sediment, staining and rinsing slides, counting blood cells and looking for bacteria. I have a mega headache. I’m not sure if it’s lack of sleep, dehydration, lack of social contact, or spending hours looking through a microscope. Maybe a combo. I was pretty antisocial after shift was over, despite high desire for affection. Oh well. bleh.

Next week is my last weekend of classes. If they aren’t having a training completed partay the weekend after, I want to run away to sacramento. I guess we’ll see what works out. It’ll be strange, and possibly good to have weekends free again.

In my continual quest for something enjoyable to get me out of the house I ran across this (on craigslist, actually). It’s a scrabble club that meets in berkeley on thursday evenings. Hmmmm….

http://solarmuri.ssl.berkeley.edu/~welsch/brian/bsclub.html

Also found
Serious writing group forming, but it may be a little too serious/political for me at the moment.
A running group in the making, might point it out to Rohan.

Sadly, berkeley’s sca does not have an active group of dancers.

Foo.

I made a commitment a couple months ago to get off, and stay off, gay.com and other cruisy chat net sites. I didn’t set a terminating time for this commitment. But I’d kept to it fairly well, until I went back to pittsburgh. While there, I filled much time just fooling around on gay.com, planetout, yahoo, and salon personals. I never went into chat rooms, but I checked out ads, and did use the planetout and gay.com im-style stuff.

So, the reason I quit this whole thing was that it was not returning to me anything worth what I was putting into it. And I felt I had fucked up my relationship with the GMHC, through a relationship that went fucked up places as a result of chat foo (though only a little, and the damage has been totally repaired from what I can tell). And I hold to the former point.

In fact, though, until tonight’s GMHC stuff, I found myself doing the same thing, even after getting back into town. Now, I’m feeling totally uninterested. Yay, gmhc.

the Return of the Ro

Grrr. I left the ac adapter to my laptop in pittsburgh, and Ro’s laptop won’t start for what I suspect are battery reasons. So I will be less netful than usual. Not to mention, incapable of actually coding, and thereby testing, my hypothesis regarding constant velocity observations of a constant, but unknown, velocity target, on a course skew to the observer. Basically, that it falls apart, and you can’t tell dick about it. Hopefully if I let it charge for today, it’ll become happy. If not, I’ll look into replacing the battery and seeing if goodness then happens.

Fortunately, seems to realize the extremity of my plight, and said he’d have my adapter in the mail by now, along with a few other things. Yay, Tom.

There’s who I am, who I see myself as, and who I want to become. There are important, though not really gaping, differences between them.

I have this picture of where I want to be when I’m grey. It involves me being much calmer and much more secure in myself (though arguably not otherwise terribly fundamentally different from who/where/what I am now). I think I want to think of myself as more dynamic than I actually am, because I fear being inadequate to any task, and I’ve wanted to be able to roll out my next version to address prior inadequacy without missing a beat.

The truth is, I haven’t changed so much in the past few years, and that’s really not a bad thing. As I am, I’m pretty adaptable. And I have friends who help cover the inevitable gaps. And if something comes up that I can’t handle, I’ll handle my inability to handle it, and move on. While the unexamined life may not be worth living, the overexamined life isn’t much of a life. Sometimes the best bits of life come from unintended surprises.

That’s probably more ‘chaotic’ anyway. =)

No sleep, early flight, this is going to be fun, fun, fun.

Early afternoon time at the aclu, attempting to debug an irreproducible crashing Access problem. Can you understand my frustration? Lunch with Trevor, where I made some comment about not hanging out with bowtie scott (a pittsburghian, recentish transplant that probably none of you have met, really nice guy, enjoyable to spend time with) and feeling bad about it, and thinking it was partially because he was in a committed relationship. The problem here is that I often fail to initiate friendships with people who are not romantic/sexual opportunities. But some of my best friends are people I would never sleep with. Hmmm. Then fun and games with & at their place, over to ‘s place to hang out. Before dinner with greg, regan, laura & nat.

So, I had one of the frankest, most involved discussions about my sexuality, and my relationship with my extended family that I’ve ever had with any family member. I was talking with a cousin of mine, whom I don’t see very often, but did see this weekend in Kentucky. He im’d & email’d me out of the blue. It was a bit of cognitive dissonance. I honestly associate my laptop and my doings there with my gay life, and my geek life, but definitely not with my family life. When my family life is conducted, it’s generally face to face or over the phone.

I don’t see my extended family much. On my father’s side, it’s a fairly tight nit group. And I always saw myself more as an interloper. Many of them (including my father) grew up in the same rural section of southern illinios, for a few generations, living next to one another, obviously knowing one another pretty well. I still have to listen carefully, think, and work to remember which one is Brian, which one is Brad, and which one is Bruce, though I am getting better about it (they being 3 out of the 20ish cousins I have on that side, and not identical twins. I’m almost as good at distinguishing Laura’s brothers, which is kinda sad, given relative duration of relationships, but anyway.), and I still can’t name all 9 of my dad’s siblings, I’m one shy, and I have no idea who I’m missing. We were a 10 hour drive from them and saw them once a year or so as we were growing up. I saw them less after I moved off to college. I never told any of them I was gay. Well, that’s not true. A few years ago, I screwed up my courage and emailed my grandmother to let her know (I’m so skilled with this stuff). After I’d heard that my dad had told one of my bachelor uncles as part of his coping with it. Said uncle reacted well. We got along pretty well to begin with.

I im’d back, and we eventually caught one another for a bit. He said that he found my icq # on my homepage. Any of you who have read my homepage know my sexuality is far from hidden on it. So in my usual round-about-up-front-ness, I told him I didn’t know how much of the extended family knew about “certain aspects of my personal life.” In conversation that followed, he said he’d known for 1.5-2 years, and always felt kinda awkward about knowing and not talking, and that he figured that was probably going on with the rest of the family. And it’s a relief to me. A big one.

I blathered on for quite some time. Including the following gem, after I mentioned what I wore in the chicago pride parade a year and a half ago, and he expressed amused curiosity: “I am not sending pictures of me in speedos to any cousins of mine, no matter how cute they are. 😉 Besides, you’ve already seen me at the lake”. I think I was a little hyper. I was definitely a little something. =)

It’s only a matter of time before they all find the livejournal. _That_ should give the family rumor mill p l e n t y of material for a little while. =)

But we eventually got down to discussing appropriately geeky things like trillian.

Then I bailed listening to the sweet, sweet lure of video game geekage with . Made it to the planet’s surface on Metroid Prime. It’s not a bad game, though the UI gives me screaming nightmares. There are two joy sticks on a controller. Make one translation, the other rotation. It’s not that hard. Halo did it right. Learn from them.

Chat with Josh.

Earlier tonight on the drive back from a dinner at la feria with , , , , and , we started discussing men giving birth. This led to my proposal of a “disposable [implantable] womb”. said this was silly, and that external artificial wombs were a much better idea. This led to the notion of using the artificial womb as a centerpiece. This also led me to the notion of routine hystorectomies (not knowing that the ovaries usually went with the uterus), which I was repeatedly told was a Bad Idea and why. I am now convinced. These are the sorts of conversations I miss in the bay area.

Reading “Guns, Germs, and Steel”, there is a theme which seems particularly relevant. I believe firmly in the macrocosm and microcosm being reflections of one another, and for individual humans being the cells of humanity. That’s background, not the point.

In discussing the birth of agriculture and the domestication of plants, the author makes the point that while “domestication” sounds very deliberate, it was nothing of the sort. It was, in all likelihood, in almost all cases, a combination of small steps, with individual goals, that all happened to add up to domestication, without any intent for the ‘ultimate’ outcome. When people with more experience talk about the development of people in their late teens and early twenties, and how these people are even now finding themselves, I think something very similar is occuring with many of them.

And on a completely different note… Jack L Chalker’s “Dancing Gods” series reminds me a great deal of Piers Anthony’s Xanth series, though a little darker/more serious. Both mock the heroic fantasy genre, the archetypes substituted for characters, etc, etc, yet both also get something of value out of it. Anyway, there is a species of fairy in that world called a Kauri. They are female sex sprites that take away the misery and suffering, and general mental damage of men. Eventually, they get overloaded with the yuck, and have to go burn it off by bathing in lava. A progressive imbalance, which is periodically reset.

A few years ago, when I first read it, I saw myself as a gay male version of that. I now think that was fairly crackheaded of me. But it does occur to me that it’s a pretty good model for me and emotional disturbance from other people. Involvement with other people around me alters my internal flows, and sooner or later creates disturbances. Solitude allows the channels to clear (assuming I let them, cultivate the calm, whatever). The deeper the contact, the more people involved, the greater the alteration/disturbance. Will not get better without navelgazing time. Both are necessary to a happy/healthy existence. Insufficient people time, no flow. Insufficient me time, and it’s a river overflowing its banks and cutting a swath of destruction. Big duh. But that’s what’s on my mind.

After anti-social day spent in room, I went out to dinner with Conrad at Lucky Creation prior to a ride to the airport. This is vaguely reminiscent of the last time I saw him in March of last year when we grabbed lunch at the little grocery store near the bagdad cafe before he drove me off to the airport. He expressed pleasant surprise over some of the food, though the lemon ‘chicken’ is entirely too sweet. I’m surprised my teeth are still in my head. We seem to readily fall into a comfortable low intensity dynamic. A pleasant contrast to my weekend. Pity our interactions are so brief and intermittant. He’ll be leaving for two and a half weeks in Egypt and Tunisia the day I get back to SF. I also feel vaguely guilty about two interactions in a row, spaced 8 months apart, where I’m mooching a ride to the airport. Next time will have to be different.

I am pleased to see that on some terrorism related front we’re evincing sense, in that we no longer have camo-wearing, assault-rifle-toting guards. Got to the gate more than an hour before boarding. Listened to mp3’s on my laptop, noted the distinctly cracked nature of the case of my laptop, poor battered thing that it is. Read more of Nickel and Dimed, which is intellectually unsurprising, but emotionally unsettling all the same. I’ve seen some of the lower income, single mother, etc survival tactics first hand. I’ve seen them done with people who had familial support. And a couple who hadn’t. I was surprised at how well they seemed to be doing, while simultaneously saddened by the conditions they were living in. I haven’t seen most of them in years though, and I still worry a bit about them.

Had one of my more neutral flights, probably in part because I was so drained of emotional energy. Finished Nickel and Dimed. Good book. Strongly recommended to anyone with the least interest in politics, economics, and/or inequality.

Grab the 28X back to cmu, where Jane picks me up and takes me to the phillips house, to which, I am pleased to discover, I still have a key. Don’t need to wake people up. It’s cool that I surprise Brian by being on his couch when he came downstairs. Then I went downstairs and slept on the guest bed, woke up to find Ken sorta staring at me in shockish stuff. Explained the situation, went back to sleep. Seems like the hinge on my laptop is getting even more cracked. Not good.

Talked on the phone with Ro. He’s handling the direct deposit stuff, and I should be getting dd on friday. Yay able to pay the rent and bills. Very happy.

Chatted with Tom for a bit. TV, SSX Tricky, Brian’s Birthday dinner at Fuel & Fuddle. Home where Nat played through a Link to the past in one sitting, one life. (I didn’t stay up for it).

And it started to snow! I made snowballs, and threw them at the porch awning. It made me so happy. It’s the little things, really. And the layer of white on top of everything. It just warms my heart. I need to snap a few pictures of this.