Gay.

With the New Year well underway I am proud to say that I have been working out again on a more regular basis and I’m starting to feel the results of my hard work. I don’t know if you can see any changes yet but I certainly feel better and that’s what’s most important to me.

The increase in gym time has created a little bit of a dilemna. Being a kid at heart, I was watching episodes of “Josie and the Pussycats” on my iPhone while doing cardio. I love the show and it’s probably one of my favorite cartoons of all time. Unfortunately, not that many episodes were made and I have a hard time with “Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space” so I found myself without any episodes to watch. I decided to go campy and last night I started watching the first season of “Alice”. Tonight I watched the second episode of season one, “Alice Gets A Pass”.

I don’t remember this episode from when I was a kid.

In this episode, Alice starts to date an old college friend of Mel’s. Said friend is a pro-football player turned actor. He’s good looking in a mid 1970s way (the episode originally aired 9/29/1976) and I remember the actor from being a thug on that Wonder Woman episode with the mean flute player played by Martin Mull. He also played a football player on “I Dream of Jeannie” towards the very end of the series.

Anyways, Alice goes out with this guy a couple of times and tries really hard in a tame-1976 way to get him to get more romantic with her when he tells her something she didn’t expect: he’s gay. Her first reaction is “Are you sure you’re not just jolly?” He assures her that he’s not and that he’s really gay and he’s happy that they can be friends. The big dilemma of the episode is that Alice had asked him to take Tommy on a fishing trip and now she’s not sure if she should let Tommy go with the gay guy. Again, you can tell that it’s from the mid 1970s with some of the gay jokes and the whole “will he be inappropriate with Tommy” thing that is briefly touched upon but on the whole I think the episode was sort of groundbreaking for it’s day. I have always thought that Linda Lavin was cool with the whole gay thing, being that she got her start and continued to be in theatre and all, so in a way I’m not surprised that the subject was explored on the series but I have to admit that I was surprised that it was explored in the *second* episode of the entire show (and the first episode for Philip McKeon to play Tommy).

All in all I found the episode to make my cardio workout fly right by. Naturally the ending credits theme song is a good way to finish up, especially when you sing along with the “fa fa fa fa fa” so all in all I’m happy that I jumped onto Alice to be my next short-cardio workout series1.

It’s a shame that only season one is on iTunes. And believe it or not, whilst Linda Lavin sang nearly 10 versions of the theme song over the years, there is a specific version from the second season that I like best. I’m trying to find it but I haven’t been successfully lately. It’s buried on YouTube somewhere.

1 For longer cardio workouts, I prefer “Xena: Warrior Princess”, in case you’re wondering.

14 January 2010 by Fitness. Gayish. Geek 1

Errands.

So yesterday I took the afternoon off from work to catch up on some errands that were neglected during my recent bout of on-call. Oddly, I found relaxation in this.

First on the list was the chore of picking up some needed non-food items. I hate going to the grocery store and I wasn’t in the mood to wrestle my way into the mall to visit our only Target, so I decided to honor my childhood and venture a visit to K-mart. I had my new Sears/K-mart rewards card and everything. As a quick aside, I think the new card should be blue, but it is not.

K-mart, alas poor K-mart, what has happened to thee?

Before the big store of Ames moved into our little farm town in 1978, we would go shopping at one of two K-marts near Syracuse. The primary choice was K-mart across from the “Northern Lights” shopping center. Said store is still there today and she’s holding up pretty good. If we didn’t go to the Northern Lights store we went to the Western Lights (such a copy cat) store on the west side of the city. That store was a little bigger than the Northern Lights store and for some reason I remember eating in that cafeteria in the back of the store but I don’t remember eating in the cafeteria in the Northern Lights store. As a K-mart kid (we didn’t have the money to afford Sears or anything like that), I found some comfort in the old fashioned green and orange “SSK” stacked logo in the back of the store where it said “S.S. Kresge Corp”.

Back to yesterday. I went to our local K-mart (ahem, it’s a Big “K”) and joined the four other people that were milling around the vast emptiness of the store. Two of the seven checkouts (numbered two through eight) were open. The cafeteria is long gone and I noticed that the K-mart Cafe at front, where you would find nachos, popcorn and pretzels has been boarded up as well. The Pharmacy in the corner is gone. On a bright note, the Christmas Tree decorations display is still up and fully functional. In between these observations is vast, open space with empty shelves. I thought the store was going out of business. I even checked at the service desk. It’s not going out of business, it’s just business as usual.

Wow. So sad. I still say that K-mart started dying when they did that whole crazy “Big K” thing and they should have stayed familiar (yet attempted to update their stores) with the American public by just modernizing the old red and turquoise logo like Australia did.

Old logo
Kmart19631990Logo.PNG.png

Australia logo
kmart.jpg

K-mart didn’t have half of what I was looking for so I stopped at a local Walgreens and found everything else. After Walgreens I went to the local Army Navy store with the intent of buying a new pair of black combat boots. My current boots are tipping six years old and have little in the way of support in them. Browsing through the shoe department I found the perfect pair of combat boots. Then I found an awesome pair of logger boots. And THEN I found a pair of military style dress shoes. I asked for all three in the same size and tried them on.

All three fit like a glove. They were wonderful.

“Which ones are you buying?”, asked the relatively helpful salesperson.

I thought for a moment and said “all of them”. You see, earlier in the day I had picked up the Jeep from getting four new tires, so I figured if the Jeep had new treads I should have new treads too. I risked the chance that Earl would kill me for spending the money; he opted to just glare instead of draw blood.

There’s my spending for the year.

13 January 2010 by Geek Ponderings and Musings 1

Reaching Out.

Courtesy of my dear friend Christine via Twitter:

Text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to @RedCross relief efforts in #Haiti.

Screen shot 2010-01-13 at 12.54.19 PM.png

It adds the donation to your cell phone bill.

13 January 2010 by Ponderings and Musings 0

Sliced.

When I spin at clubs I tend to play older dance music from the 70s, 80s and 90s in the early part of the evening. I have a rock solid memory when it comes to the dance music charts, especially from 1983 or so until the early 2000s and I pride myself on being able to play those tracks that fill the floor because they haven’t been heard in a long while. This is all dependent on the crowd, of course, but back in the day I always knew I was doing a good job with the early night music when Brad, a tall, stately old queen of a man would throw his hand up in the air in a very stage commanding way as he mouthed the words to the song whilst sipping his very metropolitan looking drink and chatting with his friends.

One of the things I used to enjoy doing in radio was making station exclusive edits of popular tracks and putting them into the music rotation. This was accomplished by literally splicing tape; I would use a four track, a grease pencil, a razor blade and special tape to rearrange, remove or double up the verses of select tracks. I wasn’t really interested in remixing the song to the point of non-recognition but rather I liked extending the track a little bit or doing what I could to make the song sound familiar yet different in a way.

When I put the studio back together a couple of weeks ago I came up with some ideas to freshen up some old tracks once again using the more modern methods I have available to me now. Tonight I returned to the realm of the “Cub Slice” and freshened up a dance floor staple.

For your enjoyment, from 1983 here is “Borderline (Cub Slice Re-Edit)” by Madonna.

Click on the “MP3 icon” to listen.Click on this link to listen. Right-click on this link to download.

The track is for promo use only.

10 January 2010 by DJ 0

Hard Wired.

So I have been on call for work this week. This in itself is a regular occurrence and something I knew fully well that I would be doing on a regular basis at my current job. It’s not the most pleasant time of my life but it’s bearable. There are some aspects I really enjoy about on call; mostly because it keeps me at home and I do stuff around the house but also because I feel like there’s an extra boost in the team camaraderie department when all of us on call folks are working together (one of us from each relevant department). I get a better sense of teamwork with those I don’t work closely with during the normal workday. It’s not a bad feeling.

One of the things that on call does is make for some irregular sleep patterns. I opt to sleep in the boys’ room when I’m on call because I occasionally have to get up in the night and I don’t want to disturb Earl with my trips back and forth to my office. I sleep on top of my pager, which has been set to vibrate, because the dinging of the pager makes me insane to the point of a rabid response: I foam at the mouth, spout out obscenities that would make a person with tourettes blush and then I throw something. I am not wired to handle the wide variety of the pseudo friendly beeps from the pager but I can easily handle something vibrating under me in bed. Go figure.

Erratic sleep schedules make for some interesting dreams. If I sleep for an hour or two, get called for work for an hour or so, go back to sleep for another hour or two, rinse and repeat a couple of times, by the last sleep cycle before morning I usually am in the midst of intense, whacky dreams. Such a thing was happening this morning around 7:45. I was in the middle of a very vivid, engaging dream that was taking place in a palace of some sort. Smells, sounds and color by technicolor was involved and quite frankly I was enjoying the experience immensely. I was in some sort of third person role and simply observing the action taking place in the dream when everything just froze with the “freeze” sound effect from “Bewitched” (you’d know it if you heard it). From here I walked around my surroundings a little bit a looked at everything frozen when I heard another “ding”. With the sound a Windows XP dialog appeared right in the middle of this frozen scene in my dream. Still fully asleep and dreaming, I was standing in the middle of a palace with all action frozen and a three dimensional Windows XP dialog box in the middle of it all. I walked all the way around the Windows XP dialog box that hung in mid air and then read the contents:

Wake Up And Look At Your Pager
[OK]

I remember reading this message in my dream, musing to myself about the contents of it and then I awoke with a start. Next to me, my pager had accumulated 20 pages in about three minutes and I had slept through the vibrations because the pager was lying on the bed next to me. My subconscious found a creative way to communicate to me and proved one thing to me at the same time.

I’m odd.

9 January 2010 by Geek 4

Repeat.

I’m in the mood to do some groovy line dancing. Care to join me?

Here’s “Second Time Around” by Shalamar.

9 January 2010 by Fun and Games Dept 0

Memories.

My mind has been wandering this evening. I have been dreaming about the days when I used to be able to sit down with a boatload of collected thoughts and write something cohesive, inspiring and touching, all laced with a touch of whimsy.

This week has been all about one thing: go go go.

Earl, Jamie and I had a houseguest from Sunday until this morning. One of our dear friends was in town recovering from a nasty cold; since he’s a flight attendant he can plop down any ol’ place he chooses and he chose The Manor, so we fed him chicken soup and a good helping of this life of control chaos around here and this morning I took him back to Albany so he could leave on a jet plane for his next adventure. He was well rested when he left.

I have been on call, which has been hot and cold as far as intensity goes this week. Tonight has been very busy and I can hear the sounds of an overtime cash register ringing up a big paycheck to be delivered in a couple of weeks.

The year has started on a good note: today the group I work with received two letters of accolades from customers that were impressed with our performance. It was good to hear a “hooray” or two in a society of mostly “boos”. I work with a good group of people. I have always known that.

My personal goals are all off to a good start for the new year aside from one thing…

I’m not writing enough. I hope to fix that as soon as on call is over this weekend.

7 January 2010 by Ponderings and Musings 1

Interactive.

So yesterday we headed to the big city, in these parts it’s called ‘Syracuse’, and went to the movies for the afternoon. The movie of choice was “Up In The Air” with George Clooney and a bunch of other people.

The movie was showing at the theatre in the someday-will-be-the biggest mall in the U.S., so naturally the auditorium held only 59 people. Why 59 and not 60 I’ll never know, but a woman in a wheelchair came in to enjoy the movie and she chose to get out of her wheelchair and sit in a regular seat, which threw off the ticket counts apparently because two people stared at the filled auditorium, poised with popcorn and pop in the hands and mouths agape, well into the previews before they realised that no one would levitate from their seat. They apparently left and found something else to watch. Perhaps the theatre company was celebrating that this movie had a lot of airlines in it and oversold the auditorium.

Before we get to the main feature, I have to say that this growing trend of showing 10 minutes of commercials before the 15 minutes of previews, but after the 20 minutes of pre-show excitement called “First Look” or “The 20”, is getting tedious. Yes, I know I’m drinking a cup full of something that rhymes with Hoca-Hola. It’s printed on the cup, it’s printed on my popcorn and it’s displayed on the LED flat panel televisions that now serve their lives as menu display boards. Said logo even dances for me now. There is no reason to show lots of commercials about this said product beforehand. I get it.

One last thing before I get to the actual movie: to the woman that sat to the front and right of me, do not start checking your e-mail on your ruby studded non-iPhone device when the very persistent, annoying announcement proclaims that cell phones should be turned off and stowed away. And yes, it was noted that your accent was not a Central New York one, though I suspect you still have “NY” in your address. Thank you.

I enjoyed this movie very much. First all I felt like I was watching something real in that my brain wasn’t in overdrive looking for evidence of a green-screen or CGI. I recognised airports, I recognised hotels and Earl and I are able to proclaim that we have been in every city that was emblazoned across the screen, well, except Miami. I found the story to be very engaging, real and subtle enough in tone to make me feel like I wasn’t being banged over the head with some sort of message.

To keep it short and sweet, George Clooney plays a guy that fires people for a living and lives around 320 days a year on the road, er, rather in the air. We meet his family, he finds a relationship, he mentors a young one and he deals with his company’s cost cutting methods of using technology to essentially ground him. I won’t spoil the movie by giving further details than that, but I will say that George plays the part well, as does the rest of the cast. The movie went by quickly for me and I didn’t feel like I had wasted a good chunk of change. I will say that I fully know that his character prefers American Airlines, Hertz and Hilton, as this was dwelled on. A lot. But I like those companies too so I didn’t really mind, contrary to the constant product advertisements before the movie.

Directly in front of me sat a woman who came in alone and was wearing some clothes that could be described as “eccentric”. She had big black glasses and a “flashdance” sweatband on her head. I think she had Christmas tree ornaments for earrings and she had a bedazzled sweater on. Halfway through the movie she started talking back to the movie screen, usually when George Clooney’s character was terminating someone. “Fuck you!” “Go to hell!” “Right on, sistah!” She wasn’t overly loud, but in an auditorium of 59 people you definitely knew she was there. By the end of the movie she was worked up in such a state that she was poised in her chair like she was going to leap up and wring someone’s neck. When the credits rolled she leapt over the woman’s empty wheelchair and headed for the exit. She was singing some weird song when she did it.

On the way out of the theatre I mentioned to Earl that I REALLY liked the travel that the main character did in that movie and I really wished I could do more travel like that. Not only does it appeal to my loner tendencies but the idea of seeing the country in that manner is very enticing to me. I really wish my work took me places. Now I’m not saying that I don’t want to be home or I want to be away from Earl and my family or anything like that or that I don’t like the people I work with; what I’m saying is that I have always found the thought of not knowing what city I’m in when I wake up, flying from one three-lettered destination to another and exploring the world from that vantage point is something that I have always wanted to do. Always. It’s sexy to me. That type of travel is very freeing for me; working at the same desk day in and day out is very confining. At my age I should probably want (and be grateful that I have) stability, but I still want to soar. Earl says I’d last a year at most but I disagree.

3 January 2010 by Fun and Games Dept 3

Lyrical.

When I first got started in radio the song in the video below was a very popular dance track. I have never seen the video before tonight. I never realised that the chorus is:

“Happy is, happy is, we’re happy is what we are, happy is what we are when we’re together.”

Of course, we used to play the faster dance version (127 beats per minute versus 120 BPM here).

From 1993, here’s Legacy of Sound featuring Meja with “Happy”.

2 January 2010 by DJ 0

Rebooted.

So here it is 2010. Most people are saying it’s the beginning of a new decade but I’m one of those oddballs that start counts from 1 to 10 and then starts over again, so in my head the new decade will start in 2011. That being said, I feel like something new and fresh started last night at midnight and all is well with the world.

It was a low-key New Year’s Eve here at The Manor. After last year’s excitement of my last DJ gig at the local bar, deflated balloons and plastic champagne glasses, we decided to stay low key by taking in a movie (“Sherlock Holmes”, great movie), a no-frills dinner at the local Pizzeria Uno and then we did something we have never done before. We skipped the Seacrest/Clark dropping of the ball opted to go with Kathy Griffin and Anderson Cooper on CNN instead. They were a hoot. They had a Twitter and text messaging crawl going along the bottom of the screen and try as I might I couldn’t get mine to appear on there. It was easier a couple of years ago to text a message to the jumbotron at Toronto gay pride. I’ll stick with that in 2010. After the ball dropped I flicked the porch lights on and off twice, declared “Happy New Year”, kissed all those involved, sent text messages to those that I couldn’t reach (said messages failed because AT&T’s network crapped out at midnight) and then declared I was going to bed. I’m such a ball of energy.

This morning I bounded out of bed with a new outlook on life. I have to admit that 2009 was a bit of a bummer in many ways for me, though I can’t put my finger on a specific reason. I’m determined to not have 2010 be an encore of 2009. I think I gave up some things I shouldn’t have and did some things that I should continue to do. I spent a good chunk of the day working the studio and basically keeping it off the grid; the relaxation was a nice change of pace. Oh, and the 60 day beard plan came to an end early to the relief of many.

So tonight as I lay in bed with the laptop and get ready to call an end to the first day of 2010, I can say without hesitation that the year is off to a good start.

Happy New Year!

1 January 2010 by Ponderings and Musings 1

About J.P.

Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 28 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.

Weird? Eccentric!

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