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![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) rickshaw |
| 2008-07-03 14:49 |
| Arrrrrgh... |
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So, Dennis can't make it up here next weekend. He's got some last minute family plans going on. Oh well.
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HAPPY MINNESOTAVERSARY! Well… it’s been a full year since I departed Sunny California and arrived in Frostbite Falls. It has certainly been challenging, but I can say with equal certainty, that things are much better now than they were a year ago. I am much better than I was a year ago. I am so very grateful. And things have happened, quite recently, to cause my gratitude to magnify. The Promise is being realized and fulfilled. All the ugliness I’ve had to deal with is truly behind me. Now is manifesting in a most beautiful way. I shan’t go on about that. Superstitiously, the last time I so ranted about how good things were, it all unraveled. I shall content myself with the knowing of faith rewarded (finally). Where did you come from, Ti-Ti, and what took you so long? I must, once again, thank all of you Angels who have helped, and continue to help, me through. You show up magically, like Niels or Melinda walking down Market St … Celeb & Nelson – nurturing me at the Center of the Universe… Veronica, Zakiya, Jair, Lil’ Timmy, Dimitri, My Other Brother, Darryl, Ian, Tara, Jade, Christina, Charles, Jonathan, on and on and on – you recognize, and make me feel appreiciated. I’m so very grateful. I love you all. Upcoming Siting Op for Dance Party! Thursday July 10, 2008 10pm Pi Bar
2532 25th Ave South Minneapolis, MN DJ Blowtorch DJ Jamez
$2 PBR Tall Girls
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| rickshaw |
| 2008-07-02 21:19 |
| The new digs... |
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Here are a few photos of the new place...
The Kitchenette
The bed
This is Mr. Frodo. The best roomie I've ever had...
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| rickshaw |
| 2008-07-02 19:32 |
| Shopping for one... |
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Today, I went shopping for stuff for the new place. It felt really different...but I could get anything that I wanted. 45 bucks later, my refrigerator has a few entrees in it as well as a few bottles of soda and some snacks.
Hope everyone has a safe holiday weekend.
XOXO
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| nakednsf |
| 2008-07-01 20:28 |
| My kind of museum!! |
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Museum of the American Cocktail opening in July
As if I needed another reason to go to New Orleans (although this sure doesn't hurt!).
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| rickshaw |
| 2008-07-01 19:52 |
| July 1st... |
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Wow, I can't believe it's July already! For the most part, I got good with putting 7/1 on every document that I had written today, except one. Things have kinda settled down between me and my coworker. He's taking more initiative and responsibility which makes me a happy coworker.
The move went pretty well. Now, it's a matter of putting stuff away and sorting out what I don't want anymore.
Dennis is so cute. We'd been text messaging each other all day. I'm surprised that my battery held out all through the day. I'm trying to fly him up the weekend after next. I really hope he can make it up here. My coworkers still tell me I've got "the glow."
Hope all is well with everyone tonight.
R
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| beg1n |
| 2008-07-01 10:18 |
| This Song Makes Me Smile :) |
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Elbow - One Day Like This Lyrics Drinking in the morning sun
Blinking in the morning sun
Shaking off the heavy one
Heavy like a loaded gun What made me behave that way?
Using words I never say
I can only think it must be love
Oh, anyway, it’s looking like a beautiful day Someone tell me how I feel
It’s silly wrong but vivid right
Oh, kiss me like the final meal
Yeah, kiss me like we die tonight Cause holy cow, I love your eyes
And only now I see the light
Yeah, lying with me half-awake
Oh, anyway, it’s looking like a beautiful day When my face is chamois-creased
If you think I’ll wink, I did
Laugh politely at repeats
Yeah, kiss me when my lips are thin Cause holy cow, I love your eyes
And only now I see you like
Yeah, lying with me half-awake
Stumbling over what to say
Well, anyway, it’s looking like a beautiful day So throw those curtains wide!
One day like this a year’d see me right! ________________________________________ __
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| beg1n |
| 2008-06-30 18:06 |
| The History of My Ankle Tat (not that you were dying to know or anything...) |
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I was playing with stitching my ankle tat shots together,
and I thought I'd upload the results.  The Rabbit In The Moon guy was my first tat; I had it done in Austin. The Radiohead Bears were next. An older fella with a shaky hand (also in Austin) did them, and I didn't notice how bad they were until they had healed. I was so pissed...what a way to learn a lesson! I decided to get them fixed and combine everything into one band, and a fella in Houston helped me conceive the day-to-night design (with the Rabbit In The Moon ironically being the Sun). He also did a great job fixing the bears (he used a thicker needle to redo them), so yay to him! The pictures are not scaled exactly right, but it's a fairly good representation. I, of course, luv my rabbit and bears very much. :)
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| rickshaw |
| 2008-06-29 19:05 |
| Pride Weekend |
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Needless to say, it was an amazing and fantastic Pride experience. Saturday, I didn't really do much because I got pulled into a Safety Monitor training session. I ended up on my back for a while as the "victim" of a fainting in our medical scenario.
I donned my Mickey Mouse aviator hat, which, like all my other hats, pales in comparison to the viking helmet that I wore a few years ago. Since there were two "Safety Ricks" out on the parade route, I became known as "Safety Mickey"
Today was one of the best pride experiences I have ever had. The crowd was freezing, but they were very energetic and responsive...and they loved me.
There were two or three points where they had huge gaps in between contingents. Of course, I couldn't leave the crowd without any form of entertainment so I did a cartwheel at the corner of 3rd and Market...after three attempts and telling myself not to. That was fun...and not as painful as I would have imagined.
The parade was great. I saw lots of my friends marching...including a few that I hadn't seen in ages. There was this one really cute boy that I had been trying to say hi to out and about, but I had always gotten shy and tongue-tied around him. Today, when I saw him, I wasted no time and went up to him and said hi.
So that brings me to Dennis. Dennis sent me a private message right when I was about to log off early this morning. He's from SoCal, but we didn't meet last weekend. He said he wanted to meet in the celebration area today, but with him roaming around with his friends and me moving around with volunteering, it didn't happen. Every half hour, we would call each other or text and not be able to sync up.
It finally got to the point where we both decided that we had enough of the parade so we were both heading to The Castro. I sat and people-watched a little bit and before long, he showed up. We chatted for a little bit, but he was on his way to meet a friend of his at Moby and that he would check in later. Well, I didn't want to let him get away before I could do it, so I gave him the kiss that I had promised and went home to shower and relax. Before long, he called me so I made my way back down to The Castro. We hung out at Moby's for a few hours and chatted. Very nice guy.
Marcello's Pizza....mmmmmm
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| nakednsf |
| 2008-06-29 03:08 |
| Happy Pride Bitches!! |
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Just in time for Pride.
Courtesy of Joe.My.God:
Watching The Defectives
Gentle readers, I'm rerunning my annual Pride rant for the fourth year. I wrote this post in 2005 a couple of days after attending Pride here in NYC. In the following years I've reposted it in advance of the day in the hope of encouraging you to attend. My apologies to those that have read it before. Have a wonderful weekend. Love each other.
Watching The Defectives
Last Sunday, at 12:30pm, I was in position on Christopher Street with Terrence, his glamour boys, and touring UK bloggers Dave and Darren. The Pride parade was due to round the corner any minute, but I tore off in search of a bodega, crossing my fingers that my desperate need for a soda wouldn't cause me to miss Dykes On Bikes. Half a block away, I found a little place and ducked in, weaving thru the customers clogging the aisles on rushed missions like mine. I was third in line, two bottles of Sprite under my arm, when the man in front of me spotted a friend entering the store.
"David! Sweetie! Where are you watching from? Come hang out with us on Allen's balcony!"
David, a bookish looking middle-aged man, destroyed the festive mood in the little store in an instant. "Absolutely not. Those defectives and freaks?" he spat, indicating the colorful crowd outside the store, "They have nothing to do with MY life, thank you very much. This parade has as much dignity as a carnival freak show. It's no wonder the whole country hates us."
Luckily for David, the Asshole Killer mind ray I've been working on is not yet operational. I settled for pushing him a little, just a tiny bit, just to get by him in that narrow aisle, of course. I returned to my sweaty little group and tried to put what I'd heard out of my mind for the remainder of the day, because I knew that by the next morning, the thousands of Davids of the world, the ones who have media access anyway, would all issue their now familiar day-after-Pride rant. The one where they decry the drag queens on all those newspaper front pages. The one where they beat their chests and lament, "Why don't the papers ever show the NORMAL gay people? Where are the bankers and lawyers? Why must all the coverage be drag queens and leather freaks in assless chaps?"
And every year, the logical answer is that bankers and lawyers are boring to look at and that pictures of marching Gap employees don't sell newspapers. There's no sinister media agenda intent on making gay people look ridiculous, no fag-hating cabal behind the annual front page explosion of sequins and feathers. It's just good copy. Drag queens are interesting. Even the bad ones. Especially the bad ones.
Yet right on cue, the day after Pride, the Davids of the blogosphere dished out their heavy-handed dissections of parades around the country. Only this year, there was a palpably nastier tone to an already traditionally nasty annual debate. Blame the election, blame the recent avalanche of anti-gay legislation, but this year, the usual assimilationist arguments went beyond the hypothetical speculations that maybe our Pride parades were too outlandish, that maybe we weren't doing the movement any favors by showing the country a face that happened to be wearing 6-inch long false eyelashes. This year there was some actual discussion about HOW we were going to "fix" Pride parades. Of how we might go about "discouraging" certain "elements" from taking part in the parades.
This is the part of the story where I have my annual post-Pride apoplectic attack. This is the part of the story where the swelling volume of Nazi analogies overwhelm my ability to speak and all I can do is twitch and bark out little nonsensical bits. This is where I always forget the name given to the Jews who went to work for the Nazis, helping load the trains. "Because that's what you are asking us to do, you assholes!" Then I always ask, "Who are we going to sacrifice to 'save' ourselves? Which child will it be, Sophie?" And this is the part of the story where my friends accuse me of being a hyperbole-laden drama queen, wasting spiritual energy on a non-crisis, and of co-opting the Holocaust as well. More on that later.
These people that want to "fix" Pride don't understand the role that Pride parades have come to play. Initially, the gay parade was about visibility. It was about safety in numbers, and more importantly, "normalcy" in numbers. It was about the idea that if only straight America could see us, could just SEE US, that they'd love us. And accept us. That if we'd mass and march by the righteous millions, the sheer unstoppable force of our collective image would topple bigotry. Would right wrongs. Would stop hate.
Of course, that didn't happen then and it doesn't happen now.
What DOES happen, is that Pride parades, at least in the big cities, have become nothing more significant to straight America than an annual traffic nightmare. As a tool of the gay movement, the Pride parade is now merely a walking photo op for politicians and perhaps not much more. A couple of years ago, the ultimate arbiter of America's cultural zeitgeist, The Simpsons, made note of this:
(The gay pride parade is going past the Simpson house.)
Chanting marchers: "We're here! We're queer! Get used to it!"
Lisa Simpson: "You're here every year. We ARE used to it."
What does all of this mean to the Davids of the world, the gay assimilationists that want to, wish they could, somebody do something, there's gotta be a way we can, Dignify This Parade? The ones begging: "Can't we get our people to at least DRESS respectfully for one lousy day? Is that too much to ask of our people? "
Yes, yes it is.
Because you are kidding yourself if you think Pride parades, in any form, will EVER change the minds of homophobes. The straight people who show up to see Pride parades are already largely convinced. We're parading to the choir, Jesse. Those straight people love our freaks, bless them.
Oh, you could test run a "defective" free parade. You could form urban anti-tranny squads and go around to all the gayborhoods on the morning of the parade and give all the drag queens 50% off coupons for Loehmann's, offer good during the parade only. And they'd GO, of course, cuz hey, those girls love a bargain. But the resultant bland, humorless, "normal" gay parade wouldn't change the course of the gay movement one bit. The part of straight America that is repulsed by drag queens is quite possibly even more terrified by the so-called "normal" gays, because "those clever calculating creatures look JUST LIKE US, and can infiltrate and get access to our precious children. And that's been their disgusting plan all along, of course."
So where does that leave us? Are we post-Pride? Is the parade just a colossally long waste of a miserably hot summer day? Is the Pride parade just an event that does a better job of moving chicken-on-a-stick than it does of moving hearts? I'd say that, yes, as an effective tool of the gay movement, Pride's usefulness has largely waned in many U.S. cities. So do we even need to keep having these parades, since they no longer seem to have much of an impact on the state of the movement? No, we don't.
But...YES, WE DO.
Because even if Pride doesn't change many minds in the outside world, it's our PARTY, darlings. It's our Christmas, our New Year's, our Carnival. It's the one day of the year that all the crazy contingents of the gay world actually come face to face on the street and blow each other air kisses. And wish each other "Happy Pride!" Saying "Happy Pride!" is really just a shorter, easier way of saying "Congratulations on not being driven completely batshit insane! Way to go for not taking a rifle into a tower and taking out half the town! Well done, being YOURSELF!"
I'm not worried what the outside world thinks about the drag queens, the topless bulldaggers, or the nearly naked leatherfolk. It's OUR party, bitches. If you think that straight America would finally pull its homokinder to its star-spangled bosom once we put down that glitter gun, then you are seriously deluding yourself. Next year, if one of the Christian camera crews that show up to film our "debauched" celebrations happen to train their cameras on you, stop dancing. And start PRANCING.
All you suburban, lawn mowing, corpo-droid homos out there, hiding behind your picket fences, the ones wringing your hands and worrying that Pride ruins YOUR personal rep, listen up. Do you think that straight Americans worry that Mardi Gras damages international perception of American culture? America, land of the free, home of "Show Us Your Tits!"? They don't and neither should we. Our Pride celebrations are just our own unique version of Mardi Gras, only instead of throwing beads, we throw shade. No one has to ask US to show our tits. We've already got 'em out there, baby. And some of them are real.
A co-worker of mine heard me discussing my Pride plans last weekend and said, "I really don't understand what it is you are proud about. I mean, you all say that you are born that way, so it's not like you accomplished anything." She wasn't being mean, just genuinely curious, and I think that a lot of gay people probably feel the same way. On this subject, I can only speak for myself.
I'm proud because I'm a middle-aged gay man who has more dead friends than living ones and yet I'm not completely insane. I've lived through a personal Holocaust (here we go again) in which my friends and lovers have been mowed down as thoroughly and randomly as the S.S guards moved down the line of Jews. You, dead. You, to the factory. And you, you, you, and you, dead. I am inexplicably alive and I am proud that I keep the memories of my friends alive. I am proud of my people, the ACT-UPers, the Quilt makers, the Larry Kramers, the Harvey Fiersteins. I'm proud that I'm not constantly curled up into a ball on my bed, clutching photo albums and sobbing. And that happens sometimes, believe it.
And outside of my personal experiences, I am proud of my tribe as a group. Sometimes I think that gay people are more creative, more empathic, more intuitive, more generous, and more selfless than anybody else on the planet. Sometimes I think that if an alien culture were surveying our planet from light years away, they might classify gay people as an entirely separate species of humans. It's easy to spot us because of our better haircuts.
But sometimes I think we are the worst people in the entire world when it comes to standing up for each other. The gay people who'd like to soothe their personal image problems by selectively culling some of our children from Pride events? They disgust me. They appall me. They embarrass me. To them I say: the very road that YOU now have the privilege of swaggering upon was paved by those very queens and leather freaks that you complain about,as you practice your "masculine" and give us butch face. If you want to live in the house that THEY BUILT, you better act like you fucking know it. United we stand, you snide bitches. America's kulturkampf ain't gonna be solved by making flamboyant people go away.
I'll end this by making one final Jewish reference. Possibly you've heard the Jewish in-joke that sums up the meaning of all Jewish holidays? "They tried to kill us. We won. Let's eat." My Pride version?
They wish we were invisible.
We're not.
Let's dance.
(And may I add - VOTE THIS NOVEMBER!)
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| rickshaw |
| 2008-06-29 01:17 |
| Okay... |
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...so I just got home...and I got home right around this time the night before...and my volunteer shift starts at 7:30-ish.
All I can say is...that I can't say anything, but names will be changed to protect the satisfied.
I'll leave you with that.
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| rickshaw |
| 2008-06-28 06:07 |
| What the deuce? |
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So much for sleeping in!
[ busy day ]
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| rickshaw |
| 2008-06-27 22:28 |
| Wall-E and other stuff... |
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Today we had a celebration at work. I wanted to show my appreciation for the support that my coworkers gave me the last few weeks, so I ordered pizza for our group and the receptionists. So that was my gift to them. I also noticed that one of my cubemates was working almost until about 8:30 one night. He crunches endless numbers at work as it is, but to see him still working that late at night was a little un-nerving.
On Wednesday, I picked up a Jamba gift card for him. I thought that would be a good way for him to start at least one day out right. I left him a little note saying that I noticed all the effort he's been putting into his work and that, even though I don't work in his department, the work that he was doing is being recognized and appreciated. That made his day...as well as mine.
So, Wall-E was such a cute movie. I watched it with two good friends. Heath, I've known for a few years now and Ryan, who I just met last week in LA. You have to go see it!
I will never live this down but: At one point, I was laughing so hard during the movie that I flung popcorn onto the guy sitting in front of me. I wasn't even aware of what I had done. I felt bad when I saw him wiping the salty butter out of his hair.
But anyway, after the movie, Ryan and I walked down to Union Square. It wasn't particularly chilly tonight, but we walked around and admired the scenery. We hopped on a train back toward The Castro and I walked him to his apartment. I was going to catch a bus to get back home, but I decided to walk. It felt good.
Tomorrow, the fun starts. I love volunteering for Pride. See you sometime this weekend.
Oh yeah. To close this posting...a thousand words...
Me and Ryan
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shocked
curious
goofy