Ponderings and Musings

I left work early today because I wasn’t feeling well. I wasn’t wrought with coughing or sneezing, though I did have a few spells of each. I felt a little feverish. My stomach was flip flopping around a bit. As I colorfully explained to my supervisor upon my decision to go home today, “I’ve destroyed the bathroom a couple of times this morning.” He chuckled. It wasn’t a laughing matter as I was dead serious.

I came home shortly before lunch and took a long nap. Feeling much better after the apparently needed sleep (though I slept great last night), I kept it low key around the house for the rest of the day; I finished up laundry, I cooked some supper, I washed dishes and I chatted with friends online. I didn’t do anything that really required effort. It was a simple day and I think that’s what the doctor ordered.

Following in the theme of simplicity I deleted a bunch of online accounts I don’t use anymore and moved things off the smattering of computers around here so that I am pretty much using only my MacBook Pro for my day to day stuff. It’s working out better this way. I have finally wrapped my head around this computer and I feel the same way about this computer that I felt about my older PowerBook. We have become friends. It’s taken a while.

In this day and age it can be really tempting and really easy to complicate one’s life to the point of needing ADD to keep up with it all. Luckily I have a good dollop of ADD in my wiring to make good attempts in this arena but in reality I like the simple life. Actually, I like being connected the world in a simple way. I like the quietness of the country, I like the clouds rolling by and I like peering in on The Big Picture from my own private view.

Rest and relaxation today helped with slightly nudging me back on track. Nothing was out of control, nothing had derailed, but I had a little rattle that needed some fine tuning.

I’m ready for the holidays now.

I’m on my lunch hour as I write this. I’m plowing through a plate of leftovers from last night’s BBQ chicken. It’s tasty. I do chicken right.

I keep forgetting what day it is. Having Monday off, working Tuesday and then having Wednesday off gives work a little touch of whimsy and a big helping of disconnection, but coupled with the rapidly shrinking size of the group I work in, there isn’t really anyone around to notice. I have noted that the people that are left are sitting in the old cubicles. The new ones are empty.

On my day off yesterday I spent the day familiarising myself with Windows 7 Ultimate again. At the end of the day was the big announcement from Microsoft that the public beta of Office 2010 was available for immediate download. I installed it last night. I have only messed around with it a very little bit but so far I like what I see. Ironically, I’m typing this blog entry on my MacBook Pro which is running Snow Leopard.

Earl is back from his trip to Arizona, having plopped into bed around 1 a.m. Actually it was a swing and a plop, because he had to move the bed to plug in his CPAP and then swing back into position. Then he plopped into bed. Apparently I slept through all of that.

I’m not quite on my game today as far as feeling good health wise. I’m just a little bit off center. I think that’s why my body is craving extra calories and therefore, I continue to plow through my leftovers.

It’s been over 13 years and I still have a hard time on the nights that Earl is traveling. You would think I’d be used to this by now but I’m not. He doesn’t travel nearly as much as he used to, and I am quite grateful for that, but there is a definite emptiness here at The Manor when he’s not here.

I feel good, just incomplete.

Even though tonight is a bachelor night, I opted to skip the popcorn supper and instead loaded Jamie up in the Jeep and took him out to dinner at one of our favorite haunts: Casa Too Mucha. The food was good as always. Patty with the Voom hairspray and Voom hair greeted us heartily; Linda the server was as courteous, pleasant and efficient as ever. Well, almost. She forgot to bring me my seafood bisque. I didn’t say anything until the bill came and it was on there; she took it off the bill and then put the seafood bisque in a take away container. I’m going to have it for lunch tomorrow.

I am off from work tomorrow. It’s going to be a quiet day. I need the rest to fend off what everyone else is feeling but I refuse to acknowledge (that would be the sniffles). I’ll probably catch up e-mail, read a bit and perhaps write some. I write quite a bit that I don’t share on this blog. It would make many people blush.

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.