Ponderings and Musings

Here it is Tuesday lunch time and I’m sitting at home without a luncheon date. Earl asked me out to lunch last minute yesterday, so I didn’t get a chance to get home and write a witty entry about my latest observations.

I find it quite amazing how quickly time is passing as we approach the holidays. Yesterday was just chocked full of merriment. After working 7 to 4 I had to go to the health center at college to turn in my health paperwork. Since everyone that has ever pushed, pulled, spindled or fondled my body in a medical capacity has shredded my records, aside from my current doctor, I have to get a measles vaccination. I wonder how long they’ll keep me in pediatrics.

After that glorious news, I headed over to the Adult Education (without accompaniment from Hall and Oates) Department and met with the advisor. I’ve signed up for my courses and have been formally accepted to the school. There’s one more step I need to take before the end of the year, but we’ll save that for a more appropriately timed blog entry.

After school I met up with Earl, we had a quick supper at the local diner, where the Tomato Soup should have been called the Tomato Rinse, since it was the consistency of tap water, and then we headed over to First Earl’s to help him with his computer. That was really wild, as I have not been in First Earl’s house (where I lived at one time) in about ten years. But Earl, Earl and I had a nice visit and I showed First Earl how to efficiently print Christmas labels and secure his network. I also showed him where all the good porn was.

Today it’s another rat race with school after work and then off to bed so I can get up and do it all over again tomorrow.

Dorky Hat Season.

Originally uploaded by DJSuperCub.

I hate wearing hats, but here’s the evidence that it’s officially “Dorky Hat Season”.

It’s that most wonderful time of the year at work. It’s the time when everyone is feverishly working hard to use up their vacation time before the end of year. We have this crazy little “use it or lose it” rule when it comes to our benefit time. I don’t really feel the crunch to do as many of my co-workers do because I happily use vacation time throughout the year. I think it’s one of my shining skills when it comes to my employment. I might even list it first on my resume.

What completely boggles my mind is that some of my co-workers don’t like taking time off from work. When our supervisor is telling us what time we need to use before December 31, they sigh and roll their eyes and say things like “I guess I can take the next three Fridays off.” What? Are you mad? Why the hell wouldn’t you want to take the next three Fridays off. Heck, go crazy and throw in a few Thursday too! I’m considering putting an entry in the dusty suggestion box in the break room: “Employees are free to share their vacation time with other co-workers. It can be used as a bargaining trip for favors such as taking the calls of the more cranky customers or putting the trash cans out in the hall.”

Since it’s mad rush time, everyone that sits near my quarter of a cubicle is off this afternoon. I’m all by myself at our end of the room.

It’s the perfect time to get started on my holiday shopping.

The snow is coming down like crazy as I type this. As I made my way home from school in the Jeep, I trudged through three or four inches of snow on our unplowed roadway. I had to make a quick stop at the gas station to fill up the tank and I noticed that there were several people in and out of the parking lot as I was pumping gas; they were all picking up gallons of milk.

Predictable. I did forgive the hottie that was fueling up at the set of pumps next to mine. Our eyes met, he smiled, I smiled. It was a gay thing. But he still ran in and bought a gallon of milk. The cap color indicated it was whole milk. Perhaps my gaydar is off – what gay man drinks whole milk?

The National Weather Service is predicting possibly a foot of snow or more in selected locales in our region, courtesy of that big snow-maker we call Lake Ontario. I often wonder if my fellow citizens forget that we live on the edge of the Lake Ontario snowbelt and that heavy snow at this time of the year is not uncommon. As I said before, they may be lactose intolerant and on the Atkins diet, but by God they need to stock up on milk and bread!

I’m hoping the snow tapers off and doesn’t bury us tonight. I’m not plowing the driveway before leaving for work tomorrow, regardless of how much snow we get, and with Earl out of town, I won’t have to worry about getting him on his way tomorrow morning. If it does snow a lot, I’ll just shoot out of the garage like the Batmobile. Perhaps our cat Tom can dress up as Robin and sit in the passenger seat.

Earl is out of town on business until Friday night. I think he purposely schedules his business trips to coincide with my on-call weeks so I won’t go traveling after work or something. It’s his way of keeping his eye on me, I suppose. Quite frankly, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I kicked off the night be picking up some Chinese food. I tried to talk myself out of it during my last hour of work by surfing the internet for the caloric stats on my favorite dish, General Tso’s chicken with pork fried rice, but the research information on this dish fit my criteria: the calorie count was less than four digits.

So I’m enjoying my combination platter number 19 and catching up on my blogs and other sites I keep an eye on. I feel like this holiday season has been especially busy but I have nothing to prove for it. Oh well, I still have 19 days to find the perfect gifts.

Since Earl is out of town for two nights in a row this week, I’ve already planned my special meal for tomorrow night and that would be a bowl of popcorn. Now I’m not referring to this insta-radarange crap in a bag but rather real popcorn, popped in oil and prepared perfectly in our West Bend drip-a-fat classic popcorn popper. Outside of the movie theatre, that’s the only real way to make popcorn. As a connoisseur of this delicacy, I can assure you that popcorn prepared by pushing buttons and flapping a bag is like whipping through a burger bomb drive thru for prime rib.

Other than my planned meal excursions, I have no other plans for the next two nights. Perhaps I’ll do some Christmas shopping online. Watch my credit card for burn marks.

I was chatting with my friend Sean in Albany via e-mail this morning and the subject of one of our mutual friends, a fine woman named Pat, came up. Sean was commenting that while he keeps in touch with Pat, he and Jeffrey haven’t been out to visit her in quite a while. Earl and I are guilty of the same exact scenario, which reminds me, I need to write a letter to her.

Anyway, Sean made the remark that during their last visit, his lover Jeffrey found some of Pat’s pictures decorating her apartment to be rather amusing. It all boils down to algebra.

J.P. + Tom D (eeks, that just makes me kvetch to see that since I’m not referring to our cat) = 1987
Tom D – J.P. = 1989
J.P. + Derek = Reboundish fling + “what the fuck was I thinking”
J.P. – Derek = Tom D + Derek * (nickname of “Durweed”)
J.P. = Not Amused
Tom D – Derek = end of J.P.’s glaring
If Tom E + Sean != “yes” then Tom D + Sean = 1990 * (J.P.’s washer + dryer)
Tom D – Sean = Tom E + Tom D
Tom D – Tom E = loss of interest on all spectators involved

Apparently Pat has some of this progression of boyfriend swap documented in photos posted about her apartment, with a picture of Tom and Sean and then Tom and Tom and most likely a picture of Tom and myself and then a photo Earl and I. I hope she has them in the right order. Nothing says “reminder of your foolish years” like photos posted in glorious technicolor.

I’m just happy it all got sorted out and Sean and Jeffrey got together in Albany and Earl and I got together back when we did and everything makes sense now, because the math just makes my head swim.

By the way, Pat has written two books, “Blooming Is Tricky Business” and “The Present Is A Gift”. Both are a collection of her short stories from her time in a mental institution and the recovery since. I find her writing to be very optimistic and inspiring.

I’m very excited by the winter like weather that has arrived. Imagine this, winter like weather on December 4th! The nerve of Mother Nature. We have a total of two inches of snow on the ground. Naturally, motorists are disregarding all traffic laws and citizens are flocking to the grocery store to pick up milk and bread, despite their history of lactose intolerance and the Atkins diet.

While I find all this needless mayhem amusing, I’m rather excited because it’s Dorky Hat Season. Around this time every year, those of us that choose to be bald find the need to adorn our freshly shaven scalps with a wool hat. I’ve never been able to wear a winter hat well. When I was very young I secretly wanted one of those hats with a long tail and a ball on the end but that wasn’t very farm boy like. I was usually given a hat by my grandmother who with all her love and care knitted or crocheted something out of yarn found at the bargain bin at Switz’s, a virtually sea of craftiness that would be today’s “Michael’s” or “AC Moore” to shame. Even though I appreciated the love and care that went into the creation of these hats, I never felt confident wearing them. Despite the red, white and blue yarn I didn’t feel patriotic nor did I feel comfortable in the orange and green hat that matched our shag carpeting.

A couple of years ago I decided to brave winter’s worst without a hat while we were in Times Square. Earl and I made a spectacle of ourselves as he chipped the ice off my skin. At least it matched the icicles hanging off my mustache. I did learn a lesson from that experience though: thaw before chipping.

It’s fun to see what folks are wearing on their heads to fend off Mother Nature’s chill. Why it was just this morning that I saw a hat on a woman that would have made Little House on the Prairie’s Mrs. Olsen very proud. There were many feathers on this red and purple hat. I even waved to the peacock that was looking back at me. He didn’t look happy as he sat up there, trying to look dignified.

I haven’t chosen my hat for this winter season. The temperature needs to drop a few more degrees for me to sucumb to the need for cranial adornment. I’ll be sure to post a picture when I’m ready for show and tell.

I have several random thoughts I’d like to share.

1. I find Christmas shopping more pleasant when it involves a few clicks of the mouse and the depressing of the key ENTER.
2. Kaufmann’s is still Kaufmann’s even though they try to ghetto it down with the name Macy’s.
3. Weathermen need to calm the hell down and stop trying to go for ratings. This wild winter weather that was going to change life as we know it amounted to a bunch of wind and mild temperatures.
4. Two beers in a queer on a Friday night at Tully’s does not a driver make. I’m going to bed.

Getting all this paperwork ready for college is a tedious chore! This week’s focus has been getting together the necessary medical paperwork so that they’re sure that I’m not going to infect the student population with some sort of plague or something. So they need to see my medical records.

My childhood doctor died a few years ago and apparently he took the location of his medical records to the grave with him. I did have a few emergency visits to the village health center as a kid so I thought that perhaps they may have exchanged words with my regular doctor and perhaps exchanged records along with the conversation. So I called them up, asking for a copy of my records and immunizations.

“Oh, we shredded you years ago,” said the friendly woman on the other end of the phone. Knowing that I haven’t done anything too scandalous in my hometown over the past decade or two, I deduced that she was talking about my medical records and not of a recent catty conversation. So there was strike one.

I then called SUNY Fredonia, where I went to college for a year, figuring they had to have had my immunizations on record since they were required for my entrance as a freshman back in 1986. “Oh, we shred records after eight years.” Shredded again, strike two. I replied, “Oh, I would think you’d enjoy a bonfire or something like that.” She didn’t find humor in that.

Luckily, the folks at my high school keep everything for one hundred years, so they sent me a copy of my “permanent record”, including a transcript and my health reports. Hopefully I have enough documentation for me to get into school without having to have a blood test and a new round of immunizations. Glancing at my transcript, Earl couldn’t believe that I wasn’t an “exceptional” student, clocking in with grades of a B+ or so. I told him my high school philosophy: why kill myself over something I wasn’t going to use again when “good enough” would get me through. I had better things to do.

Last night between work and school, Earl and I followed our normal routine: a little din din, some conversation about the day’s events and then a quick check of e-mail and whatnot before I flew out the door for my CAD class. (I need to learn how to be a cad, I guess).

While online I went to one of my favorite bear sites and did a quick search to see who was currently logged in. Normally I get all sorts of invites and quick little chats from men in the Big Apple, as they think that because I live Upstate I must be in Yonkers. They’re disappointed when they find out that a. I’m just chatting and not looking for a quick hookup and b. I live about four and a half hours away. Nosing around a bit, I stumbled across a guy from nearby Albany that had very similar interests as mine and was hot hot hot. Earl agreed with me, letting out a hearty “woof” when I showed him the picture.

As Earl was woofing I then realized that I knew this guy. Back in the late 1980s I went out with Tom, a fellow music education major a couple of years older than me. He had never reached his educational goals and had set up house for himself not far from where he had both gone to college. He was quirky in his own way that was relatively compatible with my eccentricities. Long story short, he dumped me after two states and two and a half years, saying that I was changing in ways that he couldn’t keep up with. Thank goodness for evolution. Anyways, we lived together for awhile after the breakup. To keep it all interesting, we dated other people while still living together and I eventually moved into my own apartment while he set up house with his new found love. I had the opportunity to meet his new boyfriend before moving to another part of the state. He was handsome, extremely talented in the world of art and seemed like an all around nice guy. In any other situation, I would have found him likeable and would have liked to hang out with him.

Sixteen years later, we run into each other online and start chatting. I followed his homepage link and started reading his blog and confirmed what I suspected – he’s very handsome, extremely talented in the world of art and seems like an all around nice guy. We have similar interests (aside from our common ex) and have curiously evolved in relatively the same direction.

I look forward to chatting with him again.