Tag: diary

Don’t really have time for this but…

Will provide more details in a followup post.

Yesterday was fun, I went to swim practice in the morning, chicago diner (funky vegan place) for lunch (it’s too expensive for the food quality), back to joel’s (met him from frontrunners. He introduced me to the chorus, we went out on one date, which didn’t feel right for romance, and is probably my best friend in chicago) to crash for a bit, out for 2 hours with chris (incredibly cute, really swell guy, we dated briefly, he’s now in a long term relationship, actor, auditioned for a play right before I saw him) which was slightly awkward, but fun nonetheless.

Went back, hung out more with Joel, then we went to the cgmc spring show (Sidetrack IV). It was good. This show was intensely visual, and I’m sure it was alot of fun, to be in, but I didn’t have the extreme longing I had during the holiday show to be up there with the guys for this one. There was one sappy song that I really liked, about hidden loves, and not having to hide anymore. And it showed shot after shot of homo love scenes from hollywood, which have convinced me that maybe I should actually see the Celluloid Closet.

Eike Lumma was there. He’s this total sweetheart who was on the chorus the whole time I was (and a long time before to boot). He moved back to Germany around the time I moved back to pittsburgh. It was cool seeing him in part because he’s the member of the chorus (a very touchy feely group) who most gives me the sense that he’s hugging me for me, not for himself.

Went to the after show party, made my traditional cameo, and crashed back at Joel’s place. Now off to Jen & Rob’s in the suburbs, probably going to hit the blind faith cafe afterwards. If I don’t get around to posting anything more before I head back to pittsburgh, you can look forward to a _huge_ slew of posting early next week. (long amtrak rides, with a laptop, and a convenient power outlet, you do the math =)

Time for me to go, later folks.

Must Give Us Pause

So, I had a couple of stop-and-think-about-it moments today.

The first was with someone who works in a different group from me. I really don’t know him, but I was carrying my new cell phone back from the post office (yay new cell phone, yay lower phone bills), and we got on the subject of accidental dialing, (new phone is a flip up, old phone was not). And he said something about accidentally dialing my mother while making out with my girlfriend. I found it amusing on two levels, and I was laughing, and I thought that not so long ago, I would have felt compelled to inform him that girlfriends weren’t likely for me, but this time it didn’t really matter to me. As a point of ettiquette, not sure quite what “the right thing” to do there is, but I don’t regard it as terribly important.

Shortly after this, as I was walking to grab lunch, I heard the annual “X person died, at age Y in year Z, at concentration camp A” litany. I did some quick math, and figured that by now, the people she listed while I was walking past would be 70-odd years old, those that didn’t die in some other way. I’m not saying that this wasn’t important, and hasn’t had important consequences down the line, but will we continue to mourn untimely deaths when the individuals would have died years ago anyway? What about centuries?

When we harbor the memory of a wrong done to us personally, it’s called keeping a grudge. In light of the recent events in the middle east, well, collective keeping of grudges doesn’t strike me as a solution to our ills.

Up too early, go to church?

That’s what I get for sleeping on the office floor I guess. For once I appreciate daylight savings time in the spring.

I’m thinking of going to church for once (it’s a sunday morning, what else am I going to do? Research on my paper? Not likely =) Of course, I’m thinking of a unitarian universalist church (not too many religious groups have an enthusiastic welcome for their gay vegan atheist bretheren). Sadly for today, but happily in general, their services don’t start until 11am.

They do have a 9:45am discussion group, apparently this week’s topic is an international criminal court. Maybe I’ll go to that.

Next week (when I’ll be in Chicago for the CGMC show) is about the ethics of eating (that would have been very interesting, oh well). UUU (unattached unitarian universalists) is meeting on friday, when I’m on the train to chicago, and next sunday is also when Interweave, the church’s gblt{etc} group meets. Similarly for next month, all this fun stuff is happening when I’ll be out of town for Josh’s graduation =)

I guess that there are worse things than having a life =)

Rabid Weasels

Someone must have stuffed rabid weasels in my head, and I think they’re eating their way through to my brain. Today has not been an optimal day. But I did go down to the ACLU, and start the volunteering process. It was chaotic, disorganized, and pretty cool. And I got some tasty baklava.

Must beat on systems people until they break like pinatas, dropping their tidbits of information to share among the partygoers. Must remove rabid weasels. Must talk with real honest-to-goodness-people. Sleep would be nice too.

Sunday Afternoon Nausea (aka, Saturday Night Fever)

So, I went to see Saturday Night Fever this (technically yesterday) afternoon. Free tickets, handed over by someone who had already purchased them but couldn’t make it. It kinda blew. I mean, the dancing was cool to watch, but the backdrop was somewhere between dead boring and actively annoying. Tom and I left during intermission. I intend to thank my benefactor politely, but I don’t know what I was thinking =)

Need for Affirmation

I just got back from San Francisco. I had a great time with some friends out there.

During the trip, I was hanging out with a friend of mine at his place. We were gossipping about what a friend said about a friend, and I brought up a concept bandied about among the local set of friends. This group calls it the matrix (I’ve heard other terms for the same thing from different social circles. I’ve heard it called “the web of shame”, “the snowflake” , and even “the organic molecule”.)

Basically, it’s a way of showing who has slept with whom, blah, blah, blah. On the merest mention of it, my friend, whom I admire greatly, made a noise of disgust. I asked him why, and he said something to the effect of “I’m sure [redacted] is a great guy, but the way some people use this sort of thing to feel better about themselves…” and I can’t remember anything else he said, because that spun my brain off along a totally different avenue.

It’s something I have done, generally decreasingly over the last few years, but it dominated my social interaction with at least three people in the bay area, and influenced several others. It wasn’t about an insatiable sex drive (mine’s actually pretty tame). It’s not about social status, I will talk about it with my friends, but I tell them everything, especially the embarrassing stuff.

I suppose it could be Mark’s boredom theory, but making an ass out myself isn’t terribly entertaining. Especially when it generates all this conflict: I blew a night of sleep, later I all but ran back to the place I was staying where I sat on the floor with my back against the door, in the dark, wracking my brain to figure out what I was doing wrong, where I screwed up, why I am losing a game I care about, a game I’ve been working at and care about, something so many people seem to have working with no such internal conflict.

I feel like most of my life is really pulling together. I’m into my classes. I like my work (not love, but that’s more than I could have said a year ago.) I think public policy is a direction that’ll work for me. I’m healthy. I have great friends. I have a boyfriend, or at least a decent approximation of such, and he’s a great guy, intelligent, attractive, athletic, sweet, and patient. And yet, I’m not really happy. Am I chasing unicorns?

When I was asked by this cute little film student what I needed for a happy life, my answer came with no hesitation. All I needed then, and all I need now is “purpose”. I need something to do. Something with meaning. Something that matters.