Ponderings and Musings

Earl and I have needed a little kick in the holiday spirit this evening. With trying to keep up with the rat race, we’ve found little time to just sit down, relax and enjoy a little Christmas joy for ourselves. So tonight we decided to snuggle up to the holiday classic, “White Christmas”.

All proper showings of classic movies deserve a little short to set the mood, so we first watched “A Vision of Sugar Plums”, the Christmas episode from the very first season of Bewitched.

In “Visions…”, Billy Mumy plays Michael, a bully of a boy that lives at the local orphanage that has come home with Darrin and Samantha for Christmas. He doesn’t have a very warm, fuzzy feeling for the holidays, believing its all a bunch of bunk. Samantha decides to convince him otherwise, and whisks him off to the North Pole, along with Darrin riding shotgun on her broom, so he can meet Santa Claus. After meeting Santa Claus, Michael starts feeling the holiday spirit, calms down a little bit and seems to move on to a well-adjusted life with the parents that want to adopt him (the father being Bill Daily, Major Healey from “I Dream of Jeannie”).

After Bewitched it was on to the main feature, “White Christmas”.

This movie is one of our all-time favorites. The cinematography is breathtaking (in Vistavision!). The musical numbers are most enjoyable and words cannot describe the amount of talent found in this movie. Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, Vera-Ellen are all incredible performers. They certainly don’t make movies like “White Christmas” anymore and Hollywood doesn’t seem to have the talent found back in the day. Watching “White Christmas” has inspired me to watch more classic movies this winter and I’m looking forward to snuggling up on cold winter nights to catch on some old chestnuts.

Tonight was just what we needed to fully get into the holiday spirit. Now I’m looking forward to catching “Bell, Book and Candle” sometime next week, another classic (and an inspiration for Bewitched) that takes place at Christmas.

Tomorrow we are off to Pennsylvania to kick off the annual Christmas tour. It’s going to be a grand weekend.

I was looking at old files on our webserver here at jpnearl.com and came across this little blog entry type thingee I wrote back in December 2001. For some bizarre reason, I was writing blog entries outside of my blog. I don’t recall why I was doing that, but nevertheless, if you’d like to take a look, here it is.

12/23/2001. The Chimes.

There are times, usually when the house is clean, that I just like to sit back and feel the ‘vibe’ of our home. (When the house is cluttered, the only vibe I get is the sound of coughing. “Dust me already!”) Being less than 10 years old, our walls don’t contain a lot of stories yet but I like to think there’s an amicable feeling in our home when someone walks in for the first time.

Last night was Earl’s company Christmas party. Like last year, we hosted the festivities again this year and everyone apparently had a delightful time. There was no punching or arguing, just delicious food, good drinks and friendly chit-chat. As my friend Shirley says, “it was dandy.” I got to play the “boss’s spouse” role which is always fun. “You only have to live with him eight hours a day, remember, I get the other 16, plus weekends.” I sometimes wonder if my sense of humor is a little whacked out for social gatherings, but I kept all my clothes on and I didn’t dance on the dining room table so I suppose I’ll be invited back next year.

It’s little gatherings like last night that make me appreciate our home all the more. Earl and I keep to ourselves quite a bit, but it’s nice to welcome others into our home from time to time.

It’s a nice opportunity to give the walls something more to talk about.

A Clean Christmas.

Originally uploaded by macwarriorny.

I thought the holidays were suppose to be a joyous occasion. Whether you’re celebrating the Solstice, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza or just the commercial glee of it all, there is suppose to be a merriment that warms your heart and tickles your soul.

My heart is full of dust and my lungs are full of bleach fumes.

Tomorrow night is Earl’s company Christmas party. And it’s here. In our house. I guess I’ll have to finally pick up the wine glasses scattered about from last year’s Christmas party. Maybe I’ll go crazy and scrape up the petrified chip (complete with dip) that someone tried to hide under the sofa*.

Actually, I’m looking forward to the occasion. It’s not often that we entertain in the house and it gave us an excuse to chase the dust bunnies back under the furniture. It’s just so much work to get ready for the party. The floors need to be polished, the towels need to be fluffed, the toilets need to be scrubbed. I guess we’re going to have to aim better when we pee in the dark from now on.

All this work is because we’ve got everything backwards. We have a lawn service to mow our grass through the summer, but we plow or snowblow the driveway ourselves. When we lived in the small house, we had a cleaning lady that came twice a month to scrub the place from top to bottom. We moved into a house twice the size and we now we hose everything down ourselves and call it “good enough”.

At least our hearts are full of merriment this season. And our merriment is squeaky clean.

* I really had the urge to type ‘davenport’ instead of ‘sofa’ up in that paragraph. I have no idea why, I haven’t heard someone refer to a couch as a davenport since 1993 or so and that was when my grandmother was heading in to senility.

I don’t know about the rest of the American public, but I’m really, really, really tired of product placements in television shows and life in general. I think what finally made me snap was the “Memoirs of a Geisha” movie mentions/product placement peppered through a recent episode of “Medium”.

“Hey do you want to see Memoirs of a Geisha”, he asked as he held up a full-page ad in the newspaper, “You really enjoyed the book, I heard the movie is just as good.”

Then later…

“What are you guys here to see?” “Memoirs of a Geisha”. “Oh we just saw it, and it was a very good movie, you’ll really enjoy it.”

Since the lead character is a psychic, she already knows if she’ll enjoy the movie or not, why waste time talking about it? Oh, because at the commercial break there was an ad for, wait for it, “Memoirs of a Geisha”.

I started getting ticked off at the product placements during an episode of The West Wing when Donna walked down a hotel hallway carrying a FedEx tube by the end so she wouldn’t block the FedEx logo, then Josh made coffee in the complimentary coffee maker from Holiday Inn, which had a logo larger than the coffee maker itself, then Will went to get an ice cream sandwich type thing which was two seconds away from star billing for the show when they lingered on the “Nestle” logo for an uncomfortably long amount of time.

Why are we allowing these product placements and rampant commercialism to take over the country? First it started with the stadiums. Syracuse had MacArthur Stadium. Folks called it Big Mac. Then they ripped it down and built a new one. “P & C Stadium”. Of course P & C went bankrupt so now it’s “Alliance Bank Stadium”. Oy. Was Mac Arthur a bad boy and had to have his stadium taken away from him? It was built in the same spot, it should still be Mac Arthur Stadium. “Mile High Stadium” in Denver, even though it’s not the original, should still be called “Mile High Stadium”, not “Revolving Name Bank After Latest Merger Stadium”.

DisneyWorld is not better. Planet Earth, brought to you by AT&T. It’s A Small, Small, Small World brought to you by Infiniti.

The New York State Fair? “The Verizon Center of Progress Building.” Like Verizon has ever been in the center of progress.

What’s next, freeway signs? “Next Rest Area brought to you by Ex-Lax.”

At least there’s a rumbling out there of people fighting back. Take a peek at Jerri Manthey’s Survivor Outtakes. It shows how ridiculous this all has really has become.

I sit here writing my blog entry, one hand on my work supplied Dell keyboard in front of my Dell monitor. I’m drinking a Diet Pepsi and I have my hand on my chin. I then notice how smooth my skin is after shaving this morning. I’m so glad I used Barbasol.

Time, keeps flowing like a river
To the sea

Whomever sang that song in the 70s was a nut. Time does not flow like a river. Time flows like raging rapids with the waterfalls just ahead and no life jacket in sight. But would we rather have it any other way? Sometimes I feel like you just need to grab on and go for the bumpy, twisty, intense ride that we call life. Where does the time go? It seems like it was just yesterday that I spotted a very attractive man staring at me from across the bar. The was back late in 1995. Why it feels like we just moved into this house. That was December 2003. Tom is just a kitten. He’s tipping 12.

Where does the time go?

Because of my fascination with time; my collection of synchronized school clocks, my internal clock constantly reminding me of upcoming events (i.e. “only 2 3/4 hours left in the workday today!”), the fact that I have a clock within eyeshot at all times, it feels like time is just speeding along at an outrageous pace. Am I really 37 years old? I certainly don’t feel 37, I feel like the young man that was ready to take on the world who decided college wasn’t really right for him. In fact, I feel younger now than I did three or four years ago. All my body parts are working properly and aside from my constant mixing up of words punctuated with my usual stammering and stuttering, my mind doesn’t feel cluttered. I feel like I’m on my game right now. I don’t want that feeling to end. I refuse to let time take over.

But where does the time go? It seems like yesterday that Earl and I were looking at the holiday season with lots of time to do everything we need to do. Now he’s trotting around the eastern seaboard on business and I’m dreading that one last trip to the mall to pick up last minute Christmas gifts. On Saturday we’re sitting down to send out our Christmas cards, going grocery shopping for the party we’re hosting on Wednesday for Earl’s co-workers and clean the house from top to bottom, in between the two Christmas parties were are attending this weekend.

When do we get to sit down and catch our breath?

I was recently asked why I feel the need to have a blog. Why do I basically live my life out loud on the internet, eternally framed in bits and bytes forever and ever amen. I couldn’t come up with a definitive reason when I was asked this question, but the various reasons have been among the multitude of thoughts jumping around my head as of late, so I thought I would write it all down.

One of the reasons I have a blog is because I enjoy telling a good tale and I enjoy writing. I’m not the world’s best writer by any stretch of the imagination (perhaps I could win a junior high writing contest by a slim margin), but I feel that I make up for it with proper capitalization, enhancing adjective use and a judicious use of commas. One of my favorite writers of all time was humorist Erma Bombeck. She always had a unique flair to her words and a quick wit to act as the cherry on top of a delightfully delicious novel or newspaper column sundae. If I was a stay at home lazy bear, with lots of time to do housework, I would probably aspire to be the gay male version of Erma. I’d also probably clean the living room drapes by setting fire to them.

This space also serves as a way for others to know what’s going on with the both of us. Earl and I like to think we live life as an adventure, whether we’re exploring a new diner, throwing some bucks around an out of the way mall or walking up to the edge of Area 51 in Nevada. I like to share our experiences with the world.

I like to think that those that read this blog find Earl and I to be two guys that are very, very much in love, committed to one another in every possible sense and are as close to married as the current laws will allow two men to be. I don’t want our relationship to be a role model, as every relationship is unique in it’s own way, but I do like to demonstrate that there are gay couples out there that stand the test of time and really mean it when we say “it’s forever”.

You may have noticed that the world map/reader counter that was in the sidebar is gone. It was a little trinket I had added to the site for a couple of months. Initially I was curious as to how many people actually visited the site on a daily basis. The number was never consistent and quite frankly, I don’t really care how many people stop by. It’s not that I don’t care. I just don’t have to be at the top of the charts. There are some wonderful, engaging bloggers out there that have hundreds or thousands of readers a day. These folks win prestigious blogging awards and have comment lists longer than our grocery list and computer inventory list combined. And I’m very happy for them. They are great writers and have very interesting blogs. But I’m content to have my little corner of the internet here and whomever stops by does and those who pass me by do.

I could go on and on and on but then it would get boring to read this and you’d invariably click the back button. I’d just like to thank you for stopping by my little corner here. I hope it didn’t scare you too much.

One of the most challenging things I find about your typical work week is the need to fall asleep when I’m not really that tired. I’m proud to proclaim that I am a “night owl”. I burn the midnight oil. I could work all night on an any given adventure, while others are in bed dreaming of their next adventure. On my ideal schedule, I’m awake until 3:30 a.m. or so and then sleep ’til noon. It just the way I’m wired.

Tomorrow is a vacation day, so normally I would indulge myself in my natural sleeping habits, but I need to head up to my grandparents’ house early in the morning to meet the movers to move my grandparents’ piano down to our house.

I just tried to force myself to sleep with no such luck. Usually I can lie in bed and sort of imagine myself someplace else; another city, another time, another outfit, and then I’ll eventually fall asleep with my recent imagination segueing into my dreams.

Tonight I had the urge to shake Earl awake and discuss a myriad of topics with him. I didn’t do that of course, as he was snoring loud enough to make the cattle in the barns two towns over restless. (“Elsie, what the hell is that noise? Is your milker clogged up again?” “No, it’s Earl snoring again.”) Normally Earl’s sounds of slumber are like music to my ears. Well, at least the noise masks the constant ringing in my ears that I have from too many ears wearing headphones as a DJ.

It’s not easy to carry on a conversation with someone that snores.

“We should talk about the Christmas shopping we have left.”

“honk honk gurgle gurgle honk honk [sound of sucking up pillow off the bed].”

I love him with all my heart but what kind of conversation is that?

So I’ll try to tire myself by surfing the internet and working on my little road geek projects and what not. Thank the Universe everything in the computer room is bolted down.

There’s nothing more important, actually more satisfying, then getting through the stack of paperwork on your desk and finding the bottom of the frivolity. Of course I’m referring to the stacks of rebate submission forms and lottery tickets stacked next to my computer.

I go crazy over rebates. I don’t know why. I find they’re more satisfying than coupons because you get something back several weeks after the purchase. Often you completely forget the arrival of your rebate check so it’s like a little bonus on a dreary day. So you had to buy an overpriced laser printer that was completely out of your budget. Big deal. You’re getting a free toner cartridge in the mail simply because you took the time to make a photocopy of your receipt, circle the item you are referencing, cut the UPC code out of the bottom of the box (complete with packing staple that was in your scissoring path), recorded the serial number of the actual printer, completed the form in impossibly legible, yet tiny letters across the thermally printed form that is no larger than 2 3/4-inches across and stuffed all that fun into a business sized envelope with made out to a business address that contains seven lines and a just a few words short of a novel.

After all the fun with the rebates, I came across the lottery tickets that haven’t been checked. Why, Earl and I could be millionaires right now and paying someone union wages to fill out our rebate forms! So off to the New York Lottery website we go, comparing and cross checking our lottery numbers with the numbers listed on the tickets. No luck though, we’re still your average bears.

Better increase our wealth with more rebates.

I was settling down during my lunch to write a clever, witty and stimulating blog entry. I was interrupted by the unmistakeable sounds of purring and the eyes of a cat who was looking for a clear landing path to my lap.

The blog entry loses. The cat wins.

I’ll write tonight.