Ponderings and Musings

I have decided that I am no longer going to be part of this trend in speaking in as few words as possible or using abbreviations just so I can fit my thoughts into 140 characters.

I’m looking at your Twitter and I’m looking at you Facebook.

Since I have been actively “tweeting” (I like it better when it’s referred to as “twatting”, actually) my participation here on my blog has been way down. That’s unfortunate. One of the reasons that I have had a blog since August 2001 is because I like to write. My subjects are random, my thoughts are scattered and my style varies wildly but you know what, this is MY space and I can write what I’m thinking, doing or reminiscing about in as many characters as I want.

There are times that I write the beginnings of something brilliant but in the process I end up writing it in a half baked way and posting it on Facebook or Twitter. You know what? That’s not how I operate. In real life I tend to look at all sides of a situation. I consider every angle. I think things through and I have a habit of over-processing things once in a while. Blurting out a comment on any random topic on Twitter doesn’t do my thoughts justice. I’m more complicated than that. I deserve more than that.

I don’t care about comments. I’m always open to input and I’m very happy to read comments and I’m always open to a healthy debate (though I suck at debating) but I’m not looking to be the most popular on a Facebook feed nor do I get breathlessly giddy if my Flickr pictures get more than 20 hits. I suspect this is part of my loner nature and you know what, it’s who I am. I like who I am and I’m proud of who I am and if I’m not in the cool kids crowd anymore then so what, I never really was anyway.

So I’m taking a break from Twitter and Facebook. The accounts are still open and I’ll comment from time to time, but if you want to know what’s going on in this complicated head of mine, you’ll have to either ask me or read about it here.

Screw MySpace, this is My Space.

I was just asked how to spell styrofoam. I responded simply:

“S-T-Y-R-O-F-O-A-M”. STYROFOAM.

I think I expected applause.

It suddenly occurred to me that when someone asks me how to spell something, I suddenly go into this grade school spelling bee mode and I spell out each letter clearly and distinctly, as if I was facing a panel of five or six teachers that were hanging on each letter I blurted out. I then end the spelling by repeating the word I had just been asked to spell.

I don’t recall every being in a spelling bee in elementary school. I played a few tuba recitals and was the narrator of the elementary school production of “Jackie And The Beanstalk” (it was the 70s, it was weird) but a spelling bee? Not so much. I remember scoring a 100% on most every spelling test. Maybe I blocked out the bad parts.

Now that I think about it, I’m pretty definitely sure I wasn’t in a spelling bee. I remember an “enrichment fair”, where my table was devoted to UFO sightings and alien abduction incidents. I remember writing up a narrative about the Betty and Barney Hill abduction on ditto paper with my mother’s manual typewriter and printing off handouts to go along with the models of UFOs I made, based on descriptions from eyewitness accounts. I was the only one in my fourth grade class that was in “Enrichment”, which was the code word for the oddly-whispered “gifted program”. My mother thought I would be ostracized when I was the only one that left the classroom a couple of times a week for Enrichment. I guess the fact that I was already a one-man freak show was the reason I was in Enrichment in the first place. It was worth it. Besides, I got to see hunky Mr. Rayburn. I always liked him. I wanted to marry him but I knew I couldn’t do that back then. Heck, I couldn’t do it now if I wanted to either, come to think about it.

But a spelling bee? Nah. I never had a chance to be in one of those.

Awake

So I should be sleeping right now. But I’m not. Sunday nights are always a rough night for me to sleep. It’s just always been that way. I don’t know why.

I started falling asleep around 10:30. That’s when my pager went off for the first time today. It was a false page: I received notification that a customer’s service was down and then two minutes later I received a notification that it was back up. In the meantime, I checked and saw that the service never went down. How I enjoy false pages. It was just a reminder from the on-call gods that I am still on call and will be for 8 1/2 more hours.

I think that’s why I’m keyed up. I feel great. My body is (seemingly) back in sync with Mother Nature’s clock, courtesy of the end of that damned Daylight Saving Time. I relaxed by going for a spin in the Jacuzzi earlier. Earl made a great Sunday dinner for us and I was able to resurrect an old computer and turned it into an iTunes server for the house. Things are good. I feel like it’s been a good weekend, despite the electronic tethering to the house.

I should be sleepy now. But I’m not. I have Lady Antebellum’s “Lookin’ For A Good Time” running through my head. Perhaps I’ll look up the video on YouTube and see if watching the video will stop the music playing through my head.

Yay! I found the video on YouTube, even though embedding is disabled by request.

So it’s Halloween 2009. Since I’m on call for this momentous occasion I really don’t have a photo of a snappy costume to show off this year. This will probably lose me some gay points but I can deal with the pressure. Since I’m home tonight no one will point and stare. There might be some whispering but that’s fine by me.

I am proud to say that Earl and I are maintaining our record of the number of trick or treaters with the festivities this year. We are maintaining having ONE trick or treater in the past 13 years. One apartment and two houses; doesn’t matter, we’ve had one beggar bang on our door and that was the son of one of Earl’s employees who was brown-nosing. Lit up carved pumpkins be damned, no one treads on our door step. We didn’t even bother to buy candy this year. I figured if someone knocked on our door we’d poor some cake batter or kitty litter into their bag. That’d certainly get the neighborhood talking.

Earl and Jamie are off to the bowling alley for some cosmic bowling. I considered joining them but that would be way too tempting for the On Call Gods of all things Pager and some telecommunications catastrophe would have happened, so here I sit typing in my blog, burning CDs for the car and watching reruns of “Reba” (great show, by the way). To spice things up a little bit I am looking forward to the school clock collection shutting itself off for an hour so that the end of Daylight Saving Time can be captured properly.

I mentioned last week that on my way back home from Virginia that I had rediscovered country music. The trend has continued for the past 10 days; the presets are still under their new programming in the car and in the Jeep, my Pandora stations have been changed and I am finding myself thoroughly enjoying country music again. I find the music to help when I am working on various projects on the computer; the real musicality of country music doesn’t distract from what I’m doing. This is a good thing. I often find Top 40 and Adult Contemporary/Easy-Listening music to be distracting. Country is helping me process my thoughts.

One of the reasons for my return to country music is my discovery of Lady Antebellum¹, a group formed in 2006. They are pictured above. If you want a closer look you can click on the picture to make it bigger. I mentioned in my post last week that I loved the song “Need You Now”. This is the first single from their second album coming out in January 2010. I have already downloaded the first album. It resides on my iPhone and in the car CD player.

Now here’s where I get a little deep.

I have written before that I grew up in rural Upstate New York². Conversely, I have talked about living in big cities such as Toronto, Dublin, Oklahoma City, Denver and the like, heck, I even lived in suburban Boston for three years. While I really enjoy the idea of having so much available to me while living in a big city, I suspect that there’s a part of me that wouldn’t be overly happy for the long term while living in such an environment. I need open space, I need lots of wild flowers, fields and clear views of the horizon. Last night Earl and I were casually discussing the future and where he could go in his career and how it might involve a move. As we mentioned various places where we could live, I found myself saying that I would want to live outside of the mentioned metropolitan area: he’d mention Buffalo, I’d counter with Batavia or Medina; he’d mention Albany, I’d suggest one of the rural towns outside of the Capital District. I think that’s why Oklahoma City and St. Louis are high on my “preferred cities” list; they are good-sized cities that have more of a rural vibe about them. I like that. A relatively short drive out of the city and you’re back in the heartland.

As a gay man I was always hesitant to mention where I grew up, especially when hanging with the gays from the big cities. I always felt that I didn’t fit in. It was very rare that I would talk about the fact that I spent my single-digit years growing up in a 10’x50’ (with 8’x40’ addition my father built) mobile home that was surrounded on two sides by an electric fence (to keep the cattle and horses off the lawn). Sunday mornings were spent with my cousins racing through barns in wild games, after-school time was spent hiking in the woods and jumping in and out of the cow pasture (and once in a while being chased by an ornery bull). When Dad got home from work we’d do the chores and supper was served promptly at 6. You know what? I really like the smell of “fresh country air”. Was I embarrassed by these things when I was hanging with the urban gays? No. I just didn’t think that it made me gay enough (whatever that meant) and it made me feel like more of an outsider.

This runs contrary for a person that doesn’t even look at the same wall when everyone else is looking at the ‘big picture’.

I think one of the reasons I’m enjoying country music again is because it touches my rural roots and helps me remember and connect to the person that I really am, which is buried under layers of who I thought I was suppose to be. Others have talked about trying to fit into a pre-conceived stereotype of how they were suppose to act as a gay man. I’m guilty of that, especially back in the mid and late 1980s when I was first getting my bearings on the whole gay thing. And some of these things have stuck with me throughout my adult life.

I have mentioned before that I never thought that I would figure out this whole life thing, even at the age of 41. I don’t think that we ever truly get it figured out before it all ends, but you know what, I really think that I’m on the right track again. The high I felt after returning from my vacation last week has continued to linger. There has been no post-vacation crash, and aside from a few minor bumps here and there at work (that were really not a big deal once they were put into perspective in my head), I still feel amazing.

And I’m more proud than ever to say that I really am a country boy at heart.

¹ It did not escape my notice that all three members of Lady Antebellum are incredibly hot.

² By ‘Upstate New York’ I am not referring to Yonkers, Westchester County or even Poughkeepsie, but what I consider to be the true ‘Upstate New York’, the heartland of The Empire State, far away from the Big Apple.

Before I get into today’s blog entry, I’d like to thank the anonymous folks with the wifi network called “Belkin” in their home. I am sitting in a parking lot outside of the baseball field and the aforementioned wifi network is BLAZINGLY fast. I am impressed. I can only imagine how fast it would be if I were actually inside the house.

I am enjoying some of the gray October day during my lunch hour, opting to let the cleaning crew at home do their thing uninterrupted. I am listening to NPR (it’s not a ‘news’ broadcast right now, so it’s safe for me to listen to); Diane Rehm is conducting an interview with the author of “Public Produce: The New Urban Agriculture” by Darrin Nordahl. The interview is quite interesting as the author is discussing the reasoning as to why the “urban poor” are getting fatter in this fine 21st century; he believe it’s because of the lack of quality produce in larger urban areas. I guess this is something I never really thought about. I understand that there is a tendency for those less fortunate to rely on fast- and convenience food because it’s cheaper to buy but I never really associated it with just a lack of produce in urban areas. I’m finding the interview to be quite interesting as they are discussing the concept of edible landscaping in public areas (fruit trees, vegetable plants, etc). This makes sense to me. I don’t know why we didn’t think of this before.

I guess I find it surprising that shortly after World War II the United States had nearly six million farms and now we have around two million, with a larger population of course. The small family farm has given way to the corporate machine, it’s a little disturbing. I suddenly feel the need to engage in a Green Acres experience, or at the very least visit Homer and Henny Penny or Brett and his family.

So I am back from my vacation week and fully in the swing of things. I have the luxury of not returning from vacation to an on-call week so the high I’m feeling continues. Work was good today. I did a lot of thinking on my trip and my career path was part of my thoughts. Wheels are turning.

I decided that I would get things accomplished today, what with this new spring in my step and all, and so I did a load of laundry before work, another during lunch, a third after dinner, made supper, mowed the lawn and caught up on my e-mail. I feel like I have accomplished quite a bit. This is always good. When you’re stagnant you’re not really living, so it’s good to feel like I’m living.

Making supper was very important to me. Back when I was in school I made supper every night. Then I got wound up in the whole work thing and stopped making supper. I miss it. Making supper tonight was a way of getting back into the swing of things.

The momentum is back. I’m going to strive to keep it up.

So I am on-call this week, hence the reason for my lack of blog updates over the past couple of days. On-call week is going as expected when the weather forecast calls for rain, rain, thunderstorms, wind and more rain. I’m not swamped at the moment but I have been busy right along.

Being on-call for this job is so much different than being on-call for the radio station gig. At the radio station I was on-call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This would mean that I would get called once in a while by anyone at the radio station with any given crisis: “I’ve plugged the vacuum cleaner into the server rack and everything went dark and the radio stopped playing”, “Why are we playing ‘Oops I Did It Again’ by Britney Spears?” or “The computer in the studio has gone crazy and keeps playing the weather forecast over and over again!”

My current on-call gig is a whole ‘nother bunch of wires; I basically do my job 24 hours a day seven days a week for a week on an as needed basis. Last night I dealt with a power outage, a very surly Verizon technician who couldn’t be bothered to put the food he was eating down to speak to me, multiple broken DSL connections and an ornery Outlook Express inbox that kept hiding an AARP newsletter. I’m not complaining as I’ll be quite happy with my choice of extra days off or the overtime in return, but nevertheless it does like I put my life on hold for a week whilst I do the on-call thing.

It’s sort of like sitting at a traffic light that has just turned red. I have to wait until it turns green (at least in theory). While I wait at the light, I can’t do much but look around and see what’s going on around me. I’ll answer a text message or phone call or I’ll busy myself by picking up the stray fries that are wedged under the stick shift.

But until that light turns green, I’m just sitting there idling.

I was tested for HIV last week. There was no specific reason that prompted me to be tested; it had been a year or so and I felt it was the right thing to do. I believe everyone should be tested on a regular basis, regardless of your sexual orientation or the type of activity you engage in. It’s probably easiest when the test is integrated into your yearly physical. This time mine was not.

When I was tested last year, the test was included in the blood tests associated with my physical. The doctor didn’t prompt me to be tested for HIV or anything so I specifically requested it because it had been a long time and while I don’t engage in any sort of dangerous sexual activity, I know in the back of my mind that sex isn’t the only way of contracting HIV. So my doctor included the test in the whole screening thing; I had blood drawn and then had to wait 10 days for the results. To obtain my status I had to report to the doctor’s office for the news. This is a customary procedure. It was much easier than the first time I was tested back in 1990. Then I had to wait three weeks for my results (and several hours in the waiting room at the Chautauqua County health clinic).

This time I decided to go to the local health clinic for my test. I hadn’t been to this county clinic for an HIV test since the mid 1990s but the procedure is somewhat the same: you walk in during a certain time frame on a certain day, take a number, speak to no one about anything and then sit in the waiting room amongst all the others that have just taken a number. There is a wide smattering of people usually found in the waiting room; this time there were people of varying races, colours, sexual orientations and one woman that was having difficulty reading the word “vaginal” from a pamphlet about STDs. She chose to sound the word out aloud by saying “vag”, “vajuh”, “vajunohl” and then she finally got it. I’m glad she did because I wanted to stand up and help her by yelling “vaginal”, “vaginal”, “it’s vaginal!” but I refrained from this. She was ticking off the STD tests she was going to get as if she was going through the drive-thru and yelling into a speaker. It was shortly afterwards that a woman came out of one of the exam rooms and barked my number: “5”!

I was asked why I was there and then shuffled to a counselor that specialises in HIV counseling and testing. She explained that the new test now takes just 10 minutes. She would prick my finger as if I were doing a daily diabetes/blood sugar test, put it on the special stick and then talk to me whilst we waited for the results. She would only do this if I signed a form stating that I would not commit suicide if the results were positive because if that were the case, they would then do the older style test with the tube of blood and send it off to the state for more testing. I signed the consent form, provided some further information and then she did the finger prick.

She talked about safer sex, I talked about safer sex and she seemed slightly uncomfortable with my frankness on the subject but remained entirely professional. She was only concerned about my sexual activity for the past six months so I couldn’t regale her with my colourful history of trapezes, summer breezes and other adventures from days gone by (sorry, Mom). Before I knew it she declared 10 minutes were up and gave me my results.

People may wonder why I am being tested for HIV or why I feel it’s an important thing for everyone to do. I have dear friends that I love and others folks that I know that are HIV positive and while they live a healthy existence courtesy of modern science and will most likely continue to do so, I can guarantee that they will tell you that their life is more complicated, more costly and that they would probably rather be HIV negative instead of HIV positive. Being HIV positive does not take the worry of unsafe sex practices away. I knew a person that contracted HIV through a blood transfusion; I know others that didn’t practice safer sex and was infected by someone that didn’t share their status with them beforehand. I know one that just didn’t give a damn and was infected. While HIV can be mostly controlled these days, it can not be eradicated (though there are promising strides being made).

I believe that living my life honestly and striving to set a good example by contributing to the world I am making a difference somehow, somewhere. And I believe by sharing the fact that I was tested for HIV in an hour’s time at a local clinic and received my results the very same day, that I will make a difference in someone’s life with this information.