myself_i_must_remake

I know this was supposed to be a kind of melancholy, reflective piece, but I just got caught up in the part about wonderful sex. (Been a while since anyone really... did it right for me. Why is a good man so hard to find?) But if you liked Dancer from the Dance, a book that's pretty similar and set around the same time is Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming-Pool Library.

Your attitude is certainly better than mine. I think this election is a test case for a certain question: at what point does respect for the office of the President stop being enough to compensate for the holder of that office? I am glad some people, like yourself, have a positive attitude and are able to put their grievances aside and give him a chance, but for people like me, his chance was during the primaries and the general election season, and he already made so many threats to so many people, that I literally cannot imagine what he could ever possibly do to win back my respect. And I hope no one here finds that unreasonable. We already know who he is.

If there were ever a gay religion, and if its Bible-like text were a collection of stories, this would belong amongst those stories.

yeah!

Haha. So some of the book lists should really include: Hut-building for Dummies and A Field Guild to Plants that Can Kill You.

Nabokov's Pale Fire Coetzee's Disgrace Foucault's History of Madness Joyce's Dubliners Rushdie's The Satanic Verses

vacuous. there are few gays, few places to find gays, and scarcity makes us alternately nasty and needy.

I am speechless.

Ugh. Rewind to 2006. Earlier tonight, I drove to Athens from Painesville in order to pick up my friends Brandy and Steve from Ohio U. Tomorrow I'm getting my black belt, and there's this whole extravaganza about it that I want them to see. As it turns out, a girl, Kaylee, who was a stumbling block to my becoming gay (and who turned out to be a lesbian herself) is also home from college this weekend. Kaylee and Brandy call me, ask me to come out to a gay bar with them. I hesitate and make excuses. "But you could meet a boy." I put on my camo shorts and black poker T-shirt, because unlike most gays I have no fashion sense, and because I don't understand that you don't wear shorts to clubs, at least not unironically. Somewhere we pick up another girl, Cate, who is an established lesbian. I remember seeing her against the wall with any number of genderless humans in high school. Cate drives us to Cleveland, parks us in a lot. Kaylee pulls out a bottle of 99 Bananas. Everyone passes it around. I take a few sips. It tastes foul. Kaylee, whom I'm still in the habit of trying to impress, tells me to drink more. I chug and chug. We get out of the car. During the hundred-foot walk from the lot to the front door of the club, I become extremely drunk. On the outside, the club has old brick and white pillars. "This place looks like Abe Lincoln's house," I say. Inside, we stand in a line where a man asks for our IDs and stamps our hands. The music is loud. Once we've all paid our five dollars, we take to the dance floor. I don't really understand dancing, so I just dry-hump my friends. All of us make out with each other. I use the restroom. I don't know why I am surprised to see girls in the guy's restroom. When I come out again, my friend Brandy tells me not to get mad. "I gave a guy your phone number!" she says. At this point in my life, I still don't have a cell phone, which means he would call my house. I defect from the group, and begin to black out. I stumble around asking guys to make out with me. At some point, I realize I'm making out with someone I don't even find attractive. I stop kissing him. "You're really cute," he says. "How old are you?" "Twenty-four." I walk away without saying anything. I seem to blink again and the bar is closing. I don't know where I've been. My friends usher me into the car. On the way home I vomit repeatedly out the back door, while we're going 70 on the highway. Somewhere, Kaylee has found Doritos and is throwing them everywhere. The next morning we wake up. In my pocket is a napkin. "Look guys, a napkin." The girls start laughing really hard. I flip over the napkin. There's a phone number with too many digits on the back. The girls feed me my night. I was witnessed doing strange Karate dances on a platform, and then running away. At some point, a strange lesbian had come up to them and asked if they were my friends. "Your friend Billy is in the bathroom. I think he needs your help." What I'll never know is 1) how bad I must have looked that a strange lesbian actively searched out my friends for me and 2) how I managed to describe my friends so that she was able to distinguish them from the hundreds of other people there. In short, it was horrible, but that was probably mostly my fault.

get it.

FUCK YEAH ENGLISH!

I just hope you feel like you're being honest to yourself. Fuck audience, man!

As a teenager, I threw boomerangs, did flips, climbed shit, and was whiney and annoying. I -was- Yuffie.

I don't know if I'd throw out being cerebral completely. My favorite authors can be appreciated on multiple levels. You can always take the story straight, but if you did and reread, you notice all these patterns. It depends on your target audience or, if you're like me, whether or not you really even want an audience. I guess I'd say always put your needs as a writer before your audience's needs as readers. But then I'm not a business person, and it shows.

BECAUSE WE ARE TOO MENNY. You have to admit that part gets you.

Nick McCrory has got something tremendous going on in his speedo, and he's rooming with Ipsen. I can't. I just can't.

i do get a high, and like most highs, it is followed by a low. i go from loving it the day i finish it to hating it within the week.

Happy Belated!

This was such a nice surprise! I feel motivated now. Thanks, MJ85.

I found your entire post very illuminating, but this paragraph in particular makes it seem as if you've been reading my mind lately. When the shootings happened last year in Arizona, a lot of people pointed at Sarah Palin because on her site she had a map of the United States with what looked like the crosshairs of a gun focused on what her camp considered overly leftist areas. One of those had been on Arizona, and some complained that Palin's map had encouraged the violence. I don't particularly believe that account, but Palin's response to that accusation was, I thought, flawed and symptomatic. I remember she said something to effect of acts of violence "beginning and ending with the perpetrator." To me, that sentence is typical of a lot of right-wing thought: that societal outliers are products of only themselves, and that society can wash their hands of them and disabuse themselves of any evil performed by those outliers. Study after study, of course, indicates otherwise: environment seems to be more powerful than individual agency, especially because it's one of its major constituents. I ask myself, when individuals take violent action, what events sent that person down that road, and often I conclude that the perpetrator was in many ways likely a victim of others, and felt that he only had one available option for recourse against them. You bring up a lot of good points about the sloppiness of my prompt generally. One of the things I was hoping, however, and your response sheds light on this, is that some responses would reveal whether he could adapt to city culture, or whether, as you suggest, we could only expect him to adapt to a rural setting. I disagree about your argument about shared language being an indicator of his culturation. Language does carry a residue, but sometimes people are unaware of it. For example, "sinister" has etymological connections with the Latin for "left," and left-handed people used to be pressured to become right-handed because of Christian mythology's associations with left being evil, but now people use sinister without being aware of the strange cultural history of that word. You made me realize that the prompt I wrote was pretty characteristic of someone who speaks English. Because my language is so widely spoken, I don't tie language to culture the way people who speak other languages might. This is another aspect of the prompt that was designed to see how possible my project was. If you "love" your islander, then you help him grow with something besides just knowledge and information, and I want to know if it's really possible to culture him without that fostering care.

It is and it is not. I didn't want this thread to be just about me, so I broadened so anyone who felt alienated in an extreme way might be able to relate. Obviously I'm dozens of times better off than my hypothetical islander, but I wanted to start with kind of an everyman because I'm sure I'm not the only one having a strange experience of feeling like I was transplanted into a new society whose rules don't make sense to me. Nope. I've never had what I would consider a serious or even semi-serious relationship; only a few long-distance disasters and some colorful affairs. Nice answers, though, everyone! No one half-assed this at all

I have a thought experiment for you guys, and I hope some of you (especially the wiser and older, but of course I believe everyone will have something to offer, and hope to be surprised by incisive young people) answer it seriously and at length. I do have motives for posing this prompt. Some of them are probably obvious, but some definitely are not. So: A young male grows up on an island cut off from civilization. Let's say he had a family who taught him speech, basic mental abilities (math, reasoning, a crude system of ethics), basic food preparation for survival, and some hygiene. Let's say the young man is twenty-four years old (yes, I'm inviting parallels with myself). His family has died several years ago, and for a while he has been without any human contact. He is not a savage, but has no worldly skills. He is discovered and brought to live in a city. Your job is to outfit him with the tools not only to survive in the city, but also to have the potential to thrive. You can only give him directions and information, not friendship. Let's say his intelligence and attractiveness are average, and that he has no outstanding abilities. Your ultimate goal is to make him "pass" as a normal human being, and even to reshape his experience of life so that he thinks of himself as an outsider only when he remembers his past. How do you start training him? What do you expose him to? How do you prioritize his goals? After attaining what skills will he have achieved personhood? What does day one look like? Week one? Month one? Year one? Remember: he has no understanding of what it means to be a person. He does not know how to work, he does not understand human interactions, he has zero supports outside of himself and your direction.

Honestly, it sounds like maybe you should wait before thinking about the next guy, doesn't it? Being needy, overspending, putting up with abuse, having your world torn up, being afraid to be alone, and feeling insecure at social events are all signs of issues that you should resolve before you enter into relationship territory again. It's no coincidence that the last two people you talked to (the one who wasn't interested and the one who stood you up) didn't go so well; for some reason, people can sense when people are needy and insecure and want the relationship more than is healthy, and it repels them. I only say this because I've done similar things in the past, and only now (five years older), am I really learning that as much as I'd like a relationship, and as much as putting lots of effort into it seems like it'd help, I still need to learn to enjoy life without it and feel confident in myself; only then will I have the magnetism that attracts the guys who'll treat me well. So: why not put yourself on lockdown for two of those summer months? It takes a long time to recover from a bad relationship. Just don't be like me and take until twenty-four to learn a lesson you have the opportunity to learn now, at nineteen.

If I hadn't deleted my entire blog about a month ago, you'd be able to dig back through the entries and find one where I made a similar rant, and I was probably even drunk too. My version of it had been not to assume that people who have an enviable relationship have any idea how they got themselves into that position. (What's worse: I'm starting to realize it's even less likely they deserved it.) I find that people tell you essentially to do whatever you're not doing: If you're using online dating, going to bars, asking people out, and mentioning to friends that you're looking, then they say: You're trying too hard. It'll come to you when the time is right. Why just the other day my friend was at the grocery store--of all places!--and met this nice young man... It just happened. It happened because their time was right. And then you'll hate everyone involved because not only are they all retarded, but they have what you want and clearly seem too stupid to appreciate it. If you're focusing on yourself, your career, your hobbies, your friends, and generally not putting forth effort toward romance but remaining open to the possibility, then those same friends will say: Well how do you expect anything to happen if you don't put yourself out there? Oh, I know what we'll do. We'll fix you up. I know a great place where we can go and meet people... And then you've become a charity project. In either case, some well-meaning but essentially unthinking outsider hijacks your life according to principles absorbed from common sense (which isn't sense at all) and television. Why do we ask, then? Well: the dissonance is good, in a way, isn't it? Something about hearing others speak thoughts you've already generated yourself seems to change things. The same is true about writing things out. And occasionally there is that person who does have solid, unobvious, effective advice. Usually it comes from people who have endured a similar problem and crafted a way out. Even then, those people are usually wise enough to provide disclaimers (and that's how you know to trust them). They say: I can't make any promises, but when I was in a situation like yours, I did this, and this is what I got. It isn't exactly what I was shooting for, but it was something... For many gays, however, this person is difficult to find. For me, a lack of role models ranks among the top problems facing gay youth. If there is a positive to asking people for advice, even if they have none of value to offer, it might be that being involved in the solution to the problem makes them listen to it in a way they might not otherwise. From that you get a degree of recognition and understanding, if nothing else.