overdue papers and upcoming travel plans and chicago roommates

Today, WAA got a letter saying “talk to Stephen about his incompletes.” As in, part of my permanent record type letter. She was concerned, and … energetic. She’s always energetic, and friendly at the same time. It got to the point where I had to say “Thank you for your suggestions, I appreciate your concern,” at which point she backed off, gracefully. She said her goal was for me to graduate cleanly at the end of the semester. A goal I devoutly share. Anyway, she got me to commit to doing the shorter paper over this upcoming weekend. Oh fuck, I’m going out of town this upcoming weekend to go campingcabining. I knew there was a reason for my reluctance. Oh well. Commitment made, plan continues.

I think I’ll make it on the quantification of benefits related to improving air quality. Whether to limit that to health benefits or include property value as well (and mention the potential double counting) is another question…

She also persuaded me that I should have at the very least a rough draft of the 10 pager from last spring done by the end of spring break. I didn’t quite promise her that I’d finish it over spring break, but I think I heavily implied I would. Le sigh.

Okay, so, the cheap flight to europe over spring break plan may still be within the realm of possibility. But I haven’t purchased a ticket yet, so I think I may defer.

Travel Plans. The part some of you might actually care about. =)

2nd half of the semester I want to make a trip to the bay area, because I love it there, and post-rains-pre-brownness is my favorite time of year in the bay area. I’m definitely going to Spring Carnival in pittsburgh. I should talk to rak about housing. I mentioned it last year over SC, but haven’t followed up. On top of this, I want to make at least one trip to chicago to case out potential residences & roommates.

Which reminds me. How many of y’all know any low key, not-socially-maladroit, at-least-semi-sociable, preferably borderline asexual (homo or hetero/male or female, it doesn’t matter), hardcore gaming geeks (comic book would be cool too), living in chicagoland, looking for a roomie, and willing to pay for a place somewhere near the L between boystown and downtown? (bueller, bueller)

But if not 2nd week in march, definitely right after I graduate, I’m traveling to europe. Probable destinations include amsterdam, maybe northern germany if there are crazy folk from here who want to meet me, and copenhagen.

Not sick, just bad habits

I am not sick, to the best of my ability to determine. It was just a long day, and dehydration getting to me. And wearing long underwear and insulating socks on a day that I needed neither (and in fact, spent most of the day indoors). It was a long day.

But after my day was over, I got home and sought out gay.com. Why? In retrospect, I’d like to feign ignorance, but really it gets down to a point I was trying to hash out with , and a few other qgpa’ers over vietnamese after seeing Transamerica. The point was about Brokeback Mountain. I vehemently reject that it was a love story. It was a story about denial, repression, intolerance, as well as internalized and external homophobia. It’s not just the absence of happily ever after, it’s the absence of happy from that movie. After their first summer, they never spent more than a weekend together, and never more than a handful of weekends per year (that’s my understanding). Habit and longing, yes. Lust, absolutely. Repression induced obsession, sure. Love, no. (Of course, for similar reasons, I’d say Moulin Rouge, and a host of other hollywood “love stories” aren’t love stories).

So, longing. Gay chat media parade a cornucopia of possibilities in front of a willing participant. If it’s sex you’re after, here’s an array of naked men in various states of arousal, just standing around, or occassionally engaged in this, that, or the other sex act. And you might just be able to meet them. Very democratic that way. If you’re looking for a deeper connection, people will try to bare their hearts in text (though more frequently, they just vent their frustrations, or their disdain for others’ open sexualities, sometimes denying their own in the process). And it all seems like the possibility is at hand. It’s the Tantalus principle: look, you’re so close, you just have to reach out and grab it, just a little bit further. And sometimes it works out for folks. Plenty of guys met the love of their life on gay.com or the like. But, truth be told, the outcomes have rarely been terribly satisfying for me.

I think there were some skinner box experiments with uncertain rewards. As I recall, the animal in the box (a bird? a rat? It doesn’t really matter), was presented with a button and a dispenser. In some boxes, pushing the button always gave a food pellet, and the animals ate normally. In another, the button was deliberately unreliable. Sometimes it gave a food pellet, sometimes not. The animals in that box kept pressing and pressing and gorged themselves.

Another wonderful feature of gay.com is the spambot. Basically, these are automated accounts which advertise pay porn sites. Selling more teases, essentially. When they first showed up they were pretty direct, now they’re a bit more circuitous (still only marginally harder to specify their behavior than a “hello world” program). And so, countermeasures arise, and there are ignore lists and spambot blockers. The blockers reply to any opening message with a request for some word or phrase, usually found in the profile or byline. After which your message is transmitted.

Now, for a more concrete story. I have a silly picture of me that took at market days, I think. Possibly pride. Some point in time when I was shirtless on halsted. (I’d say a plurality of the pics on there are probably fully clothed, with shirtless followed shortly by no pic at all, followed by more revealing pics). I have a bizarre look on my face. But it does show a rather flattering view of my chest, or at least the part of it that shows. Up until this morning, it was my default gay.com pic. Partly whimsy, because so many people put faceless, bland, or model-perfect shots up, and I felt like it would be contrast, and partly because I felt it showed a bit of character or at least a sense of humor about myself. I recognized that it might give the “sex now please” message, and figured I should probably get around to changing it, but that was more of an investment of effort than I cared to make.

So, some dude from CA (in his byline) pops on. I figure enh, what the heck, let’s chat. I ask him what someone from CA is doing in an MN chat room. I get past his spamblocker, and the first words he sends back are “A better question is what someone out of shape is doing with a shirtless pic in his profile.” What a charmer. I only said “goodbye”. I then promptly changed my pic to something much blander and more fully clothed. I was thinking “I bet I know which part of CA you’re from.” Assuming I was right, it wouldn’t have left us much to talk about anyway. I then logged the fuck off and reminded myself that these are the wages of online chat, and I should know better by now.

Transamerica

So, I saw the movie “Transamerica” with QGPA on friday. Good movie, I recommend it.

I found it touching, particularly its portrayal of the main character. She’s not a soldier’s boy transsexual. She doesn’t want attention, in fact she’d rather avoid it. She just wants her body to match her sense of self, and she is willing to do whatever it takes in order to get there. She loathes the bureaucracy and the way her sense of self has been medicalized. I found one of her lines very interesting and fairly compelling: micro-spoiler cut

abuse of academic work

As part of my survey course, we have to conduct a survey in a group. 10 questions, 10 respondents. I picked the bus stop. People were quite willing to answer, til their bus got there, at which point I lost them. I only lost 4 out of 13. Yay for talking fast.

However, the final respondent was an attractive gentleman I noticed sitting in the area of a campus tearoom. I was just passing through, we did the eye contact thing, whatever, I went to the bus stop and did 4 surveys. Then I came back, like 10-15 minutes later, just to see if he was there. He was. I spent some time goofing around on the net (yay wireless), ignoring his existence, or at least pretending to. He seemed to return the favor. I decided “what the hell” and went over and gave my patented perky routine.

“Excuse me, are you a student?”
“Yes.” He wasn’t put off, good.
“I’m taking a survey course, and for this course, we have to conduct a survey, could I have a minute of your time?”
“Sure, why don’t you take a seat?” He cleared his stuff on the bench next to him. Score!
We ran through the survey pretty quickly. I thanked him. And then we started talking.

It turns out he lives nearby and alone. He’s been a vegetarian for several years, and he gets around by bike. He’s an RN going for his landscape architecture degree, nearly done. I put my sexuality out there, in my usual style (mentioned the berkeley free clinic gay men’s health collective and the upcoming qgpa event, as well as my past “leadership” experience with cmuOUT). He didn’t respond in kind, but he did smile alot. We talked about the overlap between our programs (3 or 4 people, one of whom I know), financing grad school, etc.

I had a few more surveys to complete, so I left to catch my bus, and gave him my card. I said we should grab tea sometime, he made interested affirming noises.

Even without that particular element, I kinda enjoyed giving the survey. I seem to enjoy interacting with strangers in a structured way. There’s definitely more extrovert in me than anyone who knew me as a teen would have guessed.

Environmental op-ed

So, this is for my writing course, but I’m intending it for a general audience, so it’s not going into my academia filter. That’ll be for my memo discussing agenda setting as applied to the gay marriage debate. Buzzwords will abound.

This is not my final draft. Even as I was posting this, I identified an element I dropped between the free-writing and second edition that really ought to stay in there. But here is my revised brainstorming:

As neighbors, as Minnesotans, and as United States citizens, we have a duty to reduce our own emissions and to lead others to follow our example.