Bower of Bliss

2005-10-08T09:15:00.000-04:00

I's Married Now!!

SK and I were among a handful of gay/lesbian couples to tie the proverbial knot on October 1st. Now that CT has passed the civil union law, we figured that we had waited long enough (14 years!!) and decided to do the deed right on the day.

It's been a very weird experience because as soon as the media got wind of what we were doing (thanks to giving our names to Love Makes a Family as media contacts), we were assaulted with phone calls. In one day, we were interviewed by the Associated Press, a couple of local newspapers, and were on the local NBC affiliate news last week. We were also interviewed by The Advocate to appear in the next issue, and at the town hall Saturday morning there was a reporter from NPR who interviewed us for the weekend edition of All Things Considered. By the time we were done with the NPR interview, I had really had it with all of the media attention and was really looking forward to slinking back into normalcy, and then during our reception Saturday night we got phone calls from CNN and yet another newspaper. We didn't return these calls. My days of being a media darling were short-lived and somewhat bitter.

The strangest thing about this has been that people at work have been telling me that they saw/heard/read about us in papers and radio programs that we never gave interviews to. We picked up a local weekly publication (Fairfield County Weekly) that had civil unions as the cover story, and I jokingly said, "Oh we'll probably be in this article as well," and sure enough, there was a quote from me, the same quote that everyone has been using!!

The reason we gave all of the interviews is because it is important for people to know that while this is still separate from marriage and hence not equal, I do appreciate the law and honor the fact that we were able to legally protect ourselves and our interests in the same way that married couples do.

We just can't count on that if we leave the state!

2005-06-24T15:45:00.000-04:00

This season of Six Feet Under just isn't doing it for me. The characters seem just very out of character, and not in a natural-course-of-growth way. Claire, who I always found beautiful, seems witchy and haggard, Nate is a pussy now, Ruth is just sad and pitiful, and not in the way she was sad and pitiful in the beginning, David is plastic, and normalct just doesn't work for Brenda. I know it's the last season and all, but I wish they would go out with more of a bang. The characters just don't seem believable anymore. And I can't believe they haven't done anything more with Nate's dead wife's brother-in-law's suicide.

Maybe I'm just bored with it. Maybe they wait so long between seasons that I just don't care anymore. Will I remember that Tony and Carmella are separated the next time the Sopranos comes on?

2005-06-23T17:12:00.000-04:00

Creepy

2005-06-22T16:35:00.000-04:00

Garden Blog

This year, we planted: two kinds of lettuce, two kinds of basil, red cabbage, pole beans, cucmbers, broccoli, eggplant, tomatoes, yellow squash, zucchini, 4 kinds of peppers, horseradish, more strawberries, mint, rosemary, cilantro and curly parsley.

What I learned from last year's garden: I planted the eggplant too late last year, tomatoes need a lot more room than I thought, cucumbers like to climb, I'll invariable end up with more lettuce and squash than two people can possibly eat, which leads to my favorite learned thing from last year's garden: a killer recipe for bread and butter zucchini pickles!! YUMBO!!

Last year we also planted acorn squash and cantaloupe. They were both a disaster. This year it's broccoli and more peppers instead.

2005-06-22T16:11:00.000-04:00

Since I have been forcing my students to blog in my classes now, I am sufficiently guilted in writing my own blog posts again. They have no idea what my non-school blog is, and hopefully they never will, but the guilt alone has brought me back. In my classes, I use the blogs as an exploration of public vs. private writing, how they are different, if there are different, and also as a way to get the students comfortable with a regular writing practice that may not necessarily be private.

I haven't been doing much of my own writing lately. I'm teaching on the night that my writer's group meets, so my weekly forced motivation has been taken away, and I just feel too burnt out, fat and lazy lately to do much of anything other than lounge about and garden. If only gardening were more aerobic! I guess I can start gardening at dusk and make swatting mosquitoes into a workout. But my night class ended this week, and I am determined to get back into my writing group. Unfortunately, my yoga teacher, whom I love and worship as a teacher, is moving to a different part of the state and won't be teaching my class anymore. I feel like I have dropped out of my own life for so long that everyone has been recast in more exciting roles.

2005-05-06T10:44:00.000-04:00

Things that have happened since my last blog post:

> I repainted the upstairs bathroom and discovered that the window is rotting out of the frame and needs to be replaced.

> I hired a shady contractor who did nothing and charged me $180 to incorrectly measure the window.

> I spent an hour and a half in Home Depot trying to figure out if I needed to order a custom-sized window to replace the one the contractor incorrectly measured.

> Magoo killed another chicken.

> Our friends had their first baby.

> SK had a colonoscopy and found out he doesn't have ass cancer.

> We saw Tori Amos (again).

> I drove by myself to and from Kennedy Airport for the first time.

> I didn't get lost or cry.

2005-03-04T15:40:00.000-05:00

What you are.

2005-02-26T11:36:00.000-05:00

Our house is finally back together! All ceiling and walls and painted up in splendor! WAHOO!!!

SK's house caught fire when he was a kid, and now that our house had flooded, I sleep easier at night. What are the chances that twice in a lifetime one's house will either burn down or flood?

It's like that scene from Garp when the plane flies into the house.

2005-02-23T16:56:00.000-05:00

We went to see The Gates over the weekend, and I have to say that I just don't get it. I mean, on an intellectual level I understand the man re-creating nature thing, and all that stuff, but as an art experience, it was pretty lame. Maybe it has to do with my frame of mind lately. SK and I have been living for 2 weeks out of our bedroom as they rebuild our lower level (see below for the story of our home disaster). We've literally been going stir crazy and we were really looking forward to getting outside and being in the park and experience some space. But of course, being Saturday, and being that the exhibit is only there until this weekend, the park was crawling with people. It was almost too difficult to experience the art because there were so many people that it was over stimulation. Plus I am crowd-claustrophobic, so it was not very pleasant. Perhaps that was the whole point. To put us in a public space with all of these people who were there for the singular purpose of the experience, albeit as bizarre as it was. They were pretty ugly, those gates.

We did see Mary Tyler Moore's hawk though. It was eating a dead pigeon.

2005-02-11T14:15:00.000-05:00

Watermelon Van Gogh

2005-02-11T09:29:00.000-05:00

Things that, so far, have been found in the ceiling by the plumber:
a box of dried up fire balls
a live banana clip for a rifle
electrical wiring connected to nothing
a small black tool box, empty

2005-02-11T09:23:00.000-05:00

Our house is being torn apart. It started the other morning when the ceiling started raining. Thanks to a burst pipe in the ceiling above the living room, the plumber is in the process of tearing our house apart. Not only does the entire ceiling have to come down to get to the pipes, but two walls as well as he is discovering lots of little surprises, such as a tennis-ball-size hole in the bathoom drainage pipe that surprisingly has nothing to do with the leak that started this whole disaster. You know it's bad when the plumber every ten minutes starts swearing and saying "No fucking way."

I'm dirty, I'm thirsty, and I want to cry.

Serenity now . . . serenity now . . .

2005-02-07T14:21:00.000-05:00

Last year, right around this time, I fell victim to two very strange "conditions." The first was a series of extremely painful hives that started on my palms. I woke one night with my hands literally burning and itchy, and it went away after a few minutes. The next morning, it happened again, and throughout the day it would periodically happen. My hands would start itching and then they would turn all red and blotchy and then they would start burning. By the end of the day, it was happening on the soles of my feet as well. Later that night, SK and I were watching TV and talking, and I went up to go to bed and looked in the mirror and I was COVERED with a rash, all over my face. I literally screamed and ran back downstairs, at which point SK started screaming because it literally popped out in the time it took me to walk upstairs. I took a bunch of benadryl, thinking I was having an allergic reaction, and told SK to rush me to the hospital if I stopped breathing during the night. The next morning, the rash was gone, but I was still having the hive thing. For the next week, they got so bad that there were points where I literally had to crawl around the house because the soles of my feet were so painful. It would pop out suddenly and last for about 15 minutes and then just disappear. Went to the doctor, who did blood tests, and basically had no explanation except stress. It eventually went away after I went to my reiki master, who worked her magic on me and banished the evil hives from my body. About a month later, I got a sore throat on one side of my neck, which traveled up into my ear and eventually started creeping up my scalp. Eventually my whole head on one side was sore, not a pain like a headhache, but a soreness like a bruise. It only hurt when I put pressure on the skin. Very bizarre. It was actually unpleasant to take a shower because every drop of water on my head was like poking a bruise. Again, back to the doctor, who gave me antibiotics and sent me on my way. A week later, nothing was getting better. Long story short, the pain remained for another 3 weeks. It got to the point where I couldn't tell if I was getting better or just accustomed to living with the pain. I went on three courses of antibiotics and steroids, each one stronger than the last until the last group was so strong that they literally got me high. The only explanation the doctor had was that my sinuses had gotten infected and swollen and were not draining the fluid that was accumulating in my head. That was so not an explanation I was willing to get behind, picturing all of those swollen-headed encephylitis babies, but it was better than brain cancer, I suppose. Eventually, this went away as well, but not after literally a month of uncertainty and the feeling that there was something seriously wrong with my brain.

So why am I telling all of this? Because my head is starting to feel that same numb/sore feeling that I had, and no amounts of tylenol are making it go away. So far, no hives though.

2005-01-26T16:48:00.000-05:00

I didn't think it was actually possible to make the swill-we-call-office-coffee any worse than it already tastes.

That is, until I used a packet of Splenda instead of sugar, just for the sheer hell of it.

The back of my throat feels like it is trying to peel away from itself. What kind of twisted mind tries to convince people that this shit actually is edible?

My apologies to the Splenda-converted. But this crap tastes like sugared feet.

2005-01-25T17:02:00.000-05:00

SK and I recently got TiVO, actually our cable company's version of TiVO, and I cannot express how lame regular TV seems to me now. I can leave the room at any point and either pause live TV or come back and rewind what I missed. Plus I can record things while I watch other channels and then watch these things at a later time and fast forward through the commercials at 5 times the speed of VCR fast forwarding. Did you know that you can watch a whole week's worth of Oprah in about an hour and half? Especially if you skip her interviews with media skanks like Amber Frey.

The downside is we spend all weekend watching things we never get to see during the week, mostly because things are on way past my early bedtime. But now, because of digital video recording, my new obsessions are: The Daily Show, Drawn Together, and Reno 911, and I think I may start recording 360 With Anderson Cooper.

2004-12-30T16:54:00.000-05:00

Before Tsunami

After Tsunami

2004-12-16T08:03:00.000-05:00

Jury duty is perhaps one of the most foul experiences I've ever had the pleasure of being a part of. I may as well have just opened my mouth and asked a room full of homeless people to spit down my throat. I went home after leaving court and wanted to give myself the Karen Silkwood wire brush scrubdown. Why do people who spew phlegm always want to sit next to me?

2004-12-15T19:06:00.000-05:00

pierced eyeglasses, a Christmahanukwanzaka gift for the body-modder who has everything.

2004-12-15T17:31:00.000-05:00

Sunday night we went to see the Pixies in NYC. Despite being extremely excited, I was a bit apprehensive because these were, after all, my idols for a significant portion of my formative years. There is no band I love more than the Pixies, and that includes Stereolab. I never saw them when they were still together. I remember passing up the chance to see them back when I was in college because, well I don't remember why, but I remember thinking back then that I would have another chance to see them. Who knew that chance would come almsot 20 years later! I almost wet my pants when I found out that they were reuniting for a tour, and I hurried online to get the tickets.

As a sign of how old I am getting, I purposely got balcony seats so I wouldn't have to stand up in general admission in get sucked into a mosh pit or something (which it turns out was never an issue as the crowd, being all old like me, was not interested in mosh pits).

After the first couple of songs, I was getting upset because they really sounded terrible at first. I was regretting getting the tickets as I had no desire to see my idols so terribly fallen, and old and fat and bald and sloth-like. I get enough of that from the mirror. Despite them looking like a bunch of high school teachers (Kim Deal in dockers and a v-neck sweater is still punk rock, I suppose) they kicked in after the first couple of songs and really put on a show I was glad to have waited droolingly for. I can die a happy man now, and take solace in the addage, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Pixies, you still rock my world. And I feel old even writing that.

2004-12-08T09:43:00.000-05:00

I am so tired today. Last night, SK and all three dogs were snoring at the same time. I almost had to go sleep on the couch. I'm a pretty heavy sleeper, and I just happened to wake up to pee, and once I was up I couldn't get back to sleep, listening to all four distinct wheezing sounds in harmony.

2004-11-27T13:43:00.000-05:00

This year, SweetieKins and I chose a family-free Thanksgiving, and it was one of the best ones I've ever had. We spent the day with friends, and aside from an exploding sink emergency, the day was completely relaxing and anxiety-free. Now, if I can only do the same for Christmas, I'll be a very happy person this winter.

2004-11-19T10:01:00.000-05:00

Not only have I not been writing on my blog, but I haven't even been reading all of my usual favorite blogs lately. I guess that is what happens when you go from a job with almost nothing to do to a job with too much to do. I don't miss the old job though.

I also feel like I haven't been paying much attention to the world around me lately. I used to be so up on the latest breaking news, and now all I can tell someone is that Sears is merging with KMart and some white people are getting married on some island somewhere with Matt Lauer and Katie Couric presiding over the ceremony, which I am sure is one of the signs of the Apocalypse.

I'm looking forward to the new year. A few years ago we had a party on New Year's Eve and everyone wrote down things they wanted to purge and then threw their pieces of paper into our chiminea to burn away the old baggage. If I am anywhere near fire this New Year's Eve, I will be burning all of my jobs until I get down to only one. After this semester, I will have only the one job, which is pretty much what is keeping a smile on my face at this moment: the thought that my life will be so much simpler and I will have more free time to spend at home come January.

2004-11-02T17:16:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow I get a new country.

ihopeihopeihopeihopeihopeihope

2004-10-30T08:57:00.000-04:00

The virtual jack o' lantern.

2004-10-28T18:41:00.000-04:00

This blog has become a graveyard.

I can't believe that I haven't written on it in so long. I can't believe how busy I have been at the new job. I literally go nonstop all day long. SO different than before when I was sitting at a computer all day and writing and staring at a screen and being ignored.

I'm finally at a point in the new job that I can stop and breathe and read my email and start paying attention again to the things that are going on around me.

As busy as it is, I really love my new job. Unfortunately, I had to give up a really great teaching gig at another school starting next semester because I just can't be so busy in the future. This job is intense and I need the weekends to relax, and I have been teaching on the weekends at this school. I'm sad that I have to give it up, and I've met a lot of really awesome people there, but something had to go, and that was my only option at the moment. I envision a time when I go back there to teach. But I am really looking forward to starting the new year with only one job, not the 7 I usually have.

Yay for change!!!