Role Models

"Well, obviously we're not supposed to buttfuck these kids." -- Wheeler

Earlier today, I was sitting with a friend in his attic bedroom discussing life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Really, we were discussing drugs, alcohol, anonymous sex, and the price of tea in China, but life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness just sounded like a better way to start out a post about being a role model and specifically growing up gay in Omaha, Nebraska without any real male role model to speak of, and especially no gay role model. This came up because while discussing the less-than-savory aspects of my life with this friend, he brought up setting a good example for our younger siblings. He was speaking metaphorically because he has no younger siblings as of now, and it got us to thinking about how we grew up, and how we learned to be the us that we are today, and I thought it would make a good blog post. I should mention as a preemptive warning that I haven't really slept, and I'm running on caffeine so this post may suck monumental

Dungeons & Dragons (2000)

"I'd have to put a 'feeble-mind'spell on myself to make me want to take *you* home" -- Marina Pretensa

Dear Blogbuddy,

Let me tell you a tale about my day so far. Keep in mind that as of typing these words, it is only 9:30 in the morning. Waking up at 1:30 on Tuesdays has its benefits, among them would be the opportunity to experience outrageousness early and frequently, which will only become more entertaining and outrageous as the day progresses, I assure you. I should explain that Tuesdays are an extra-long day for me. Specifically, because I need to be at the warehouse by 2am in order to process your DVDs that you send in on Saturday, because as Harry would say, "There's no post on Sunday." HP reference FTW. I wonder if I can make that a new thing, in addition to only using movie titles as the titles of my posts, I can sneak in an HP reference every blog post, I'd say I'd try, but I would no doubt fail, so I won't even think about it anymore.

At any rate, I never get enough sleep on Monday night, so I set aside a couple dollars every week to stop by the gas station and pick up a soda before work on Tuesdays. Lately, this has been ... rough. As I'm sure you read in [Katrina's Previous Post] we have some interesting characters to spend time at this gas station. If you ever want to meet them, it's the one on the corner of 84^th(Washington) and Cedardale Road. Luckily, Katrina only has to deal with crazed customers. I get to deal with the person who is so socially inept that he is banished to working the overnight shift at a gas station rather than hold down a real job. To describe this man as any one of the characters from 'Freaks n' Geeks' would be inadequate. Thankfully, my experiences with him have always involved a third person wanting desperately to get through the line and on with their life, and they've always been far less patient and infinitely less polite than myself. Regrettably, today, while already ten minutes behind schedule, was not so lucky.

I entered the empty gas station. I immediately bolted to the coolers to get my Mountain Dew, also known as the drink of the Gods, and grabbed the breakfast meat of champions, a slim jim. Placing my items on the counter and preemptively handing him my cash to speed the process, I tried to muster all of the non-eye-contacty-silent-urgency that I possible could, when he asked, "How's the weather."

How's the weather. HOW'S THE WEATHER?! It's 2 am on a Tuesday and you ask me, "How's the weather?"?!?!?!

"Cold," I respond.

"Lol," yes, he said those three letters, "Well, at least you get a few seconds to warm up."

He rings up my items and gives me a total and while holding my change he says, "I got accused of God-modding in my RPG group last night."

PAUSE. Feel that? That sinking shit feeling you just got. That overwhelming rush of sympathy? Yeah. Yeah. That's the feeling I would have liked to get. Instead, I went into panic mode. Let me make something very clear, I have played DnD. I still do sometimes. Not with any frequency to call myself a gamer, but enough to understand core rule sets, and to grasp the concept of the words he just spoke. Before I can stop him by exiting smoothly, he goes into a 15 minute diatribe about his character in ... wait for it ... a Star Wars Pen & Paper RPG. DnD is bad enough, but now you have to add a whole new level of geek to it by incorporating Star Wars, the next thing I know he's going to have his Magic: The Gathering cards and I'll be in high school all over again.

I strain to act interested, my soul dying bit by bit inside, when he finally says, "Oh geez, it's been a while. You have a nice day, buddy."

So, I go to work. You know. No. Star Wars PnP RPG is enough outrageousness for one post. I at least know that I am never going to that gas station overnight again. nope. No way. Not gonna happen. I'll never leave. I'll be stuck forever listening to him talk about his 'friends' and his character sheets. *shudder* I'll say this much, my shift at the warehouse, which normally lasts 5 hours went for 7.5 today. I nearly cried by the time I left. I've got shit to do.

Pi π

"Personal note: When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once when I was six I did."

I like math. It's not like I'm Asian or anything. I don't spend my weekends memorizing the digits of π in an effort to compete with Lu Chao, and take the world record. I don't send emails to math professors asking for unsolved equations to toy with when I'm bored. I'm not Will Hunting, I just like math. I think it's interesting. Surprising, when you consider that the furthest I ever bothered to go with math was Calc/Trig (I list them together because I took them in the same semester) I understand the basics of almost all well-known collective mathematical theorems. I tend to stay away from things that only an engineer would need, but I've been known to secretly read a text book when nobody is looking just to learn something outrageous and new.

Lately though, when showcasing my math-knowledge, I've been poked at. You'd be surprised how intimidating math is. Some people have gotten downright mean with me in fact. Surprisingly, not even as a result of especially rare, or complex math. For instance, while working on my post about how I hate Netflix customers, I was doing head math to calculate how many DVDs we process on a given day for the sake of said post. I was talking to myself trying to memorize the numbers, during a break, and my coworkers started commenting on my math skills, and asking me if I'm some sort of freakish Asian calculator. This of course led to the sense of ostracism that I had in elementary and high school when I knew how to spell the words that other kids had nightmares about. Asian-hating aside, it seems a bit silly that grown men and women are so willing to ignore, fear or outright hate knowledge.  

When did knowledge become something to fear as an adult? You'd be amazed at how quickly somebody will jump on the offensive or go to their, 'kill-it-with-fire' place because you've given them a piece of information, or provided them with knowledge they didn't know before. God forbid you tell a 'Wiccan' that they're using the word incorrectly, or God super-forbid you mention that the religion itself was developed and formalized in the 1930s and most scholars agree that it has nothing to do with prior anthropological evidence about duotheistic religions. I'll admit it, I can be confrontational at times, but I never pass on knowledge in an effort to make people feel smaller than me, and in fact, encourage people to give me new information to fill up my head. I figure I'm not using all of the memory space in my brainputer, so why not learn more. What better place to learn more than from other human beings? 

I have lived by,and celebrate the fact that I know a little about a lot, and a lot about a little. The areas where I perform highest are in Music, Math, Language, Psychology, and Religion. These are the five areas that I have put huge amounts of time into, and really they're all tied back to the fact that music is my life. I find lately though, that the more people I meet, the more I realize that most people don't even know a little about a lot. Most people know almost nothing. 

The old adage that knowledge is power, seems to be considerably less prevalent. When did high school, or college, mean the end of education? Are Katrina and I the only people I know who read for the sake of knowledge, and engage in wiki-suck purely for the sense of joy it fills us with to know that the unused space in our minds has been filled with newness? I sure hope not, because if we are, then I'm pretty sure than things are going to get really ugly really fast. 

I sure hope that my friends, the people that I entrust with my future, are worthy of such trust. Here's to hoping that we aren't alone in our never-ending quest for knowledge. Let me be the first to say that if you ever need to learn something new, I am always available to give you a drop of knowledge. likewise, if you ever learn something fascinating, and feel like sharing, my brainbanks will gladly take your deposit. 

Edge of Seventeen

"It hurts"

 This is the first of a series of posts I intend to make. The series theme? Things I Have Learned from Boys I Have Kissed. Please note the distinction that I have made here, a kiss does not imply dating, and specifically, I mention boys, as the bulk of these will have taken place prior to my triumphant return to Omaha in 2008. I started thinking of this about a week ago while I was sorting DVDs, the movie, Edge of Seventeen showed up and it intrigued me, because the only people who watch films like this are gay kids who are sick and tired of John Hughes being such a douche bag. Well, and creepy straight girls who spend their lives attached to gay men an can't find any real passion in their own lives. 

I'll admit that being the only out guy in high school meant that I got a lot of play from young men who would later become the proud homosexuals of Omaha North High School. It got me a lot more play from boys who would never come out ever in their entire life, and to this day will probably deny that they ever did anything with a man. I've been the tester for numerous guys and I think I'm kind of satisfied with that. Each experience taught me a lot about who I am, what I like, and what my limits, standards and expectations are. Aside from being an introductory post, this is also about one of the first boys I kissed. I'm pretty sure he falls into the second category of toe-dipper, but I'll freely admit, he had the biggest impact on my development as a man. 

His name was Zach. He wasn't the first boy I kissed, not by a longshot. He was actually somewhere in the middle. It was my senior year of high school, and I couldn't tell you what grade he was in if I tried. I do know that we only started talking via email at school. He was dating an obnoxious little mousey girl with an attitude. I asked him to homecoming. When he said he had a date already, I was disappointed, but we kept talking, and actually became pretty good friends. It wasn't until a few weeks later, via phone-call that he asked me to be his boyfriend. It was cute. This was important because up until this moment, I had always been the aggressor in any sort of interaction with men. He was a pretty fantastic guy, one of the few that I continued to talk to after departing Nebraska for Arizona. He loves ducks. He's a whole lotta punk-rock. He bites when he kisses, which has stuck with me ever since. He came to my school play on opening night and brought me a carnation, something nobody has ever done since. He would walk me from class to class and we'd sneak a kiss before disappearing into our classrooms. He wore black lipstick that left cute little marks that I wore with pride. 

I haven't spoken to him directly since 2005. We're friends on facebook, but I never know what to say to him to let him know just how formative he was in my youth. I won't go so far as to say I love him, but I definitely enjoyed him and adore the parts of him I find in others I meet on a daily basis. There is rarely a day that passes that I don't meet somebody who reminds me of him in some way, shape or form.