Hunter Thomson

Interesting that you think that way MrM. He doesn't seem to be bothered by you flirting with him or even just acknowledging him, and I'm sure if he had a problem he'd act in a way that made it obvious that he wasn't accepting of that kind of attention. Or perhaps he is, I'm a bad judge of people so I don't always know how people are reacting or what they mean unless they outright say what their problem is. Besides, not all gays are into people solely of their own age group. In terms of flirting I'll flirt with anyone, but it's a situational thing where they'll have had to say something to set up the pithy remark I want to make. I don't normally go out of my way to flirt with people, and a lot of that is that I'm a tortured soul who has social anxiety. So I wouldn't know flirting if it walked up and bit me in the face. Having said that, I can turn a phrase when needed, but it's almost always just something I do as a fun thing and not meant to have any serious feelings behind it. If I catch real feelings, I state my mind pretty clearly instead of playing games.

Just call it extra motivation.

Whoa oh! @Drew Espinosa is getting handsy again. Nobody is safe!

No comments on the virgin part?

Are you offering yourself? Should see what @Headstall has to say about that

Any word on a potential new chapter? I miss this story so much!

Too right you are jp. I'm not going to lie and say that this was the result I wanted, but it is worth remembering that we did far better as a team than we thought or had any right to think we would do, and on a personal level my performance was the best I've ever had. It'll take me some time to stew over the loss. In a way it would have been better if we were blown apart, at least then we could say that the truly better team won. But half an inch...there were a half dozen things I could have done differently on our final shot to get us the half inch we needed.

I'm glad I decided to suggest the spiel to the boys. I'll admit that half inch is going to haunt me for a little while.

First off, apologies to everyone who wondered where I wandered off to. I went home this weekend to go curling in a local bonspiel (tournament) with my team from two years ago. We just lost on the A-side semifinals, and it feels bittersweet to me. First the good. I'm so proud of the four of us. We can back together after a season away from each other and we took a perennial provincial qualifier right into the last shot of the extra end. We made the semifinals and to get there we beat a different junior provincial champion. We were under pressure from the other teams right from game one on Friday and we held together and kept each other's spirits up, even in the grim moments we had at different points in the weekend. I've been curling for fifteen years now, and I will never, ever curl as well as I did this weekend ever again. Something changed in me this weekend, and maybe it was the fact that this was supposed to be fun and none of the usual attendant pressure was with me in the competition, but I was utterly at ease and was making shots that world champions hesitate on. I made it look easy this weekend, and for once I didn't get down on myself when I did miss a shot or two. This weekend was a test for me to see if I could honestly compete with people at a provincial championship and who are the top calibre players in the province. The fact that I kept pace with these people made me feel good about myself, and even if it ends up being fleeting and I never get it back, I know that I have that capacity within me to shine and lead the way. As time goes on I'll forget the individual shots that were made or missed, but I won't forget this feeling of being so completely at ease and simply knowing that I could do anything. My team was magnificent, I couldn't ask for three better people to play with again. All three rose to the occasion and being around people who accept me for who I am made all of this worthwhile. My boys are crazy, but playing with them made a good weekend that much better. A special shoutout to my one teammate who hadn't even played since the last time we were all together, and who shook the rust off in plenty of time for us to push towards playoff Sunday. With all of the fun that I had and the memories I made, I'd be remiss unless I reflected on the things that just didn't work out. Losing hurt. Losing by half an inch in the extra end hurt more. The part that kills me is that's on me. A split second lapse in judgment and a second's worth of hesitation cost us a chance at the championship finals. I compounded that error by not pressing the option I had to measure, even though I was pretty sure that we still would have lost. I should have asked for a measure, as it could have given us a win. There were some ugly misses along with my good shotmaking, and it is to my detriment that I wasn't able to correct those mistakes even during the game. It was a consistent inability to read the ice and get a handle on the weight for the shots being called, and it very nearly cost us our early games as well. I was disappointed by the amount of drinking done by my teammates. I don't drink, and while I understand that other younger people like to drink on the weekends and at events like this, we're still also competitors. There's no need to have multiple pitchers of beer in a single night, especially when we've got a game the following morning. That couldn't have benefited their play, and of course we'll never know how things could have gone down if everyone had been completely sober. I'm glad I came down, and I proved a lot to myself this weekend. But I won't deny that this hurt more than I thought it would to get so close and fall short.

It's an interesting topic, so thank you for writing about it since we all have very different ways of coping with addiction. It's funny for me since I tend to use one of the addictions you highlighted as a replacement for one of the other ones, so I'll go on a binge for one or try to go on a binge for one, and then realize I'm going overboard and then go in a totally different direction to alleviate the stress of that for me. For clarity, I'm a pretty big gamer and I pride myself on being pretty good at what games I do play, but every so often I'll realize I'm getting too into my games, and then historically I'd go trolling on grindr for sex. But then I'd go overboard on that and spend all my time on social media talking to people because I don't want to see them in person because that takes away from gaming and grindr time, so at that point I was doing all three at once which I can tell you is a real talent for multitasking when you're playing guild wars PvP, maintaining a grindr conversation and trying to keep up with the Joneses via social media. All of which I tend to do as a direct response to my graduate studies and before that my teaching job, which caused me significant amounts of stress. My preferred form of stress relief and stress outlet is unavailable to me right now, and that's to sing. But I have three roommates who would most definitely would not appreciate me singing at the top of my lungs for hours each day. I'm a decent singer, but we're all graduate students trying to study for final papers and other school things, and an impromptu daily concert is not conducive to good study habits. So I rely on those other forms of stress relief instead. Which reminds me, I haven't logged onto my games at all today...

I'm not even going to pretend to deny this. Yes, thank you. This was my first time moving out and living semi-independently, so there was a measure of stress involved. But I've settled into my new environment quite well, and I'm less stressed now that I've talked to my professors about how I'm doing in class so far.

If only you'd seen the things I'd written and he'd written. You'd be embarrassed for us both, but only because of how bad our writing was. Worst quality sexting ever.

I always enjoyed the fact that coming out actually did shock most of the people I've told. Sure, there were always the jokes and gossip that I was gay that I fought back against before I accepted myself, but when I told those same people that I was gay it threw them for quite the loop. There's something very satisfying about being called a gay slur, acknowledging it as true and breaking that person's brain because they thought they were just being a tease and now they realize they used a slur against someone they cared about in a way that could actually be construed as hurtful. Life gets better. It gets better to get older and to come out and escape the stress of it all. I won't trade those memories for anything, except a chance to repeat those memories, because some of those coming out moments were glorious.

Lol no I was 12. Still act 12 sometimes too 😛 I got caught sexting. Enough said. Zero regrets now though.

It’s been a little less than 15 years since my parents forced my closet door open. Good times, bad times, unforgettably hilarious times... I’d have missed them all if I hadn’t learned to embrace myself. I only wish I had done so earlier.

I don't remember if I said anything, but congratulations Gary! This is well-deserved.

I was around six years old when I realized that I wanted to do things with the other boys. I didn't know what it was we were supposed to do exactly, but I got one of my classmates to sleep over and we did a comparison of things. We got caught, obviously, since the plans of six year olds are not very sophisticated, and we weren't quiet about it at all. I ended up being teased really badly for it, and he didn't stay friends with me in an attempt to protect his reputation. So for a long time I felt pretty bad about my same-sex attractions, and was terrified that he'd tell teachers or other students about what we did. I'm over all that now, and I'm happy to pursue whatever I think is best for me, but that was a seriously big concern way back when I was a small child.

Happy birthday, wonderful!

I can't imagine the pain of that kind of loss @Dennis191. I am truly sorry to hear that the ending was as tragic as it was.

It's cheesy to say it but right now I'm in love with my best friend. But for the purposes of this story I want to drag myself through memory lane, and see if I can put some very old feelings to rest. Names are, of course, edited to protect everyone involved. I was four years old, and I'd never had a friend before. Hell. I was four years old and hadn't really done much in the way of socializing before. Most of my time was spent with family before I went to preschool, and the preschool itself was an attempt by my parents to try and socialize me a bit before lugging me off to school every day for the next 22 years of their lives. Tai was different. Although I guess so am I, so it was already a good match. He's Japanese, I'm half-Chinese. We were in a sea of mostly white faces and we recognized in each other people who were similar to ourselves and not similar to those around us. We started to hang out all the time, closer than friends should be and encouraged through it all by our far too permissive parents. Showering with Tai (and to this day I don't know why that happened) when we were both four years old has to qualify as one of the weirdest bonding moments ever, or perhaps it's just a figment of my messed up memories that doesn't actually exist. But we were inseparable. We looked out for each other in class the years we were housed together, and we found each other in the years that we weren't together. Of course, things weren't as they seemed, and he had to move. He moved a lot. I didn't know why he had to move, but even as a young boy I knew I wasn't going to let a half hour drive stop me from seeing my friend. School nights weren't going to happen, especially when he moved further away again into a bigger house. So we did sleepovers instead. We were getting into our preteen years and more weekends than not one of us would be at the other's house from Friday night until Sunday afternoon. We made sure to get our school work done early so that we wouldn't have to panic and waste our time together. And what glorious times they were. Swimming in his backyard pool, barbeques on my patio, and without fail we would spend the night sharing everything about ourselves with each other. By the time I was eleven years old, I swore that I would tell him how I felt. By then I knew I was gay, and I knew what it meant to be gay. I wanted to share that part of myself with him, even knowing that he would never, ever feel the same way. It might have had something to do with the drive to his birthday party, where he, myself and a mutual friend played 'grab crotch' for the whole trip. As luck would have it, fate intervened. The summer I was planning on telling him was the summer that the government finally caught up with his parents. The reasons for their constant moving became clear; it was to avoid legal and financial trouble, and the family was quickly deported back to Japan. On the way to the airport, he took the time to say a last goodbye. I gave him a hug in my bedroom and made him swear that he wouldn't forget me, that we'd write and phone and email (this was in the dial-up internet days), and do whatever it took to make sure that time zones wouldn't ruin our close, special friendship. I never saw him again. The first couple years after were the hardest part. I'd often find myself staring off into the western horizon, wondering if he was still thinking about me. His emails became less frequent as time went on, and the phone calls never came. As he suffered family tragedy after another, I became an afterthought in his life and we just...we outgrew each other and moved on with our lives. By the dumbest stroke of luck I was able to find him again on Facebook, and we reconnected a few years ago. He's married now. Doesn't even live in Japan anymore. He's changed so much, and the shy, goofy kid I used to know doesn't seem to be there anymore. It shamed me to tell him over a message, but I did finally get to come out to my old friend, and while I was right to assume that he wouldn't feel for me what I felt for him back then, I was touched by the fact that his only concern was that I was happy with who I am and where I was in my life. Things will never be the same; we're both too different to go back, and in truth most of the things that bound us together as children would be meaningless to us as adults. I know within my heart and soul that I will never see him again, and all that means to me is that he's making space in my heart for someone new. I'm going to miss him something fierce. And then one day I'm going to find that I don't miss him anymore, I don't think about him anymore, and that I don't wonder how he's doing anymore. That's a bittersweet day, but I know that the memories I have of him, and of us, will last longer than the sweet touch I never had to begin with. And I'll face that day with the person who I'm now blessed to stand beside, my best friend and my lover, and my testament to the power that friendship brings to love.

A very hearty congratulations!

It will take some doing to not implode my life the way I did down south. Here's hoping I manage to keep my mouth shut.

Schteve! I'll never forget my GA friends and family, even if I don't show up as much anymore.

I shan't be doing any grocery shopping. I bought myself an unlimited pass to the school cafeteria, so I'll indulge in their unending food tomorrow when I actually arrive. I have been using the grindr app to question campus gays about life in the area. I am pleased that they are capable of coherent conversation instead of simply assaulting me with unsolicited photos.

This is a good start. It's raining.