methodwriter85

JJ has grown up far and away from the 15-year old brat that said he was going to be on the cover of a Wheaties box at 20 and didn't need school. And I loved Will confiding in JJ.

To be fair though, Chicago has a great skyline as well. San Francisco's skyline is pretty cool as well. Los Angeles, San Jose, Phoenix...those are pretty meh.

As Tet said, the teenagers that were here back around 2008-2009 grew up and entered their 20's as teenagers tend to do. The Gay Teen forum was much more active back then- I was in my early 20's and I was part of it to offer advice to kids who were going off to college.

So we're now in 2003...check out this Top 100 Billboard Countdown for 2003: 2003 was a REALLY hip-hop/R&B-heavy year. Luckily there was a lot of great indie rock/pop coming out that same year. However, I'm looking forward to using "Get Busy" by Sean and "Get Low" by Lil' Jon. Crunk n b was pretty fun.

My guess is that he's curious in an intellectual way about being gay- not that he's actually gay, but that he wonders what makes gay men tick. I honestly don't think he's actually gay- I think it's a thought experiment on his part to see how people would react to him if he were indeed gay- but you might as well tell him. At the very least so you can move on when he gently rejects you.

What the hell was with that awful wig they put on Victoria Principal? I remember the first time I saw that movie, I thought there was an earlier draft of the movie where the character she was playing was a street-smart black woman, but they lost the black part but dressed her like Pam Grier in Coffy anyway. I'm kinda surprised they didn't reboot Earthquake, but then again the concept has been done many times over, as seen in the latest effort. I'm kind of surprised that Private Tim didn't defend L.A.'s skyline. I remember his husband Matthew K going on a tear about how Los Angeles is NOT pro-low density and how all these skyscrapers were getting built. LOL. Anyway..check out the gorgeous UCLA Campus in this video: This will apparently be Zach's home for the next four years.

I posted this on Reddit, in a sub that talks about pleasant encounters you've had with people that left a good impression on you. Here's a tale of an platonic stranger encounter I had when I was 21... *** When I was in high school, I was a hormonal gay teenager who had two minute crushes on any cute guy that crossed my path. There was this one guy, I can't even remember his name now, who was a senior when I was a freshmen. He was an artistic type, with auburn hair with sideburns that framed his long face, big brown eyes, fashionably thin, and alabaster skin. Very good-looking. I never really approached him or had any kind of sustained crush on him because we never had any classes together or ever interacted, but I definitely noticed him. About six years later during the start of the 2007-2008 school year, I was a college student hanging out with this group of alternative hipster types, who would throw parties. I went to the house barbeque of one quirky hipster girl that did like me, but the party was about to move over to this one guy's house, who did not like me at all. When that party started breaking up, Jake told me this bullshit story about how they didn't have enough room at his house for me to go. I didn't really make a big deal about it, Some guy who straggled and was kind of sitting outside in a lawn chair basically struck up a conversation with me slightly before Jake came out to talk to me about how "there was no space for me at his house." As dusk turned to night Guy and I talked a bit about our lives. In retrospect this guy was probably very high and very much in need for someone to talk to, which made him way more candid than a young guy usually is to some random dude. Guy told me that he was a struggling heroin addict. He had been dealing with this dramatic relationship with a girl that he was very much in love with, but also using with. Guy told me about how he had a period in his life where he felt very strong, how yoga had made him very muscular and fit, and how much he loved his girlfriend and tried to have a life with her. Guy was also very fascinated by Japanese culture (I think he mentioned doing martial arts), and he wanted to move there someday. But his heroin addiction was destroying him, both physically and emotionally, and he wanted to get out of it but couldn't figure how. When we talked, I realized that Guy was the cute senior guy I remembered crushing on whenever I saw him around the school....he looked a bit different...still beautiful, but his face had become slightly bloated, he was stockier as opposed to rail thin, his hair was much shorter and spiky instead of curling around his ears, and his skin was patchy. Again, this was just a guy I thought had been pretty cute...not any guy I spent more than two seconds thinking about after I saw him walking around the hallways, so it took me awhile to place him. I just listened to Guy talk about his problems, and I shared some of my own. Then Guy listened as Jake went on his b.s. speech to me about not having room at his house. After Jake left, Guy told me, "You know that Jake just doesn't want you there because he doesn't like you, right?" I gave him a "No, duh" face and then he continued telling me about how Jake had told him what an annoying, douchey guy I was. Then Guy said, "But after talking to you...the guy that Jake described, and the guy that I'm talking to right now...you're nothing like that. And whatever beef Jake is having with you, it's not on you. You're not the bad guy here. There is nothing wrong with you." This guy, who was all of about 22 or 23 years old and struggling with some VERY serious demons, took the time out to tell me that he thought I was a quality person, after someone had just Mean-Guyed the hell out of me. The conversation soon broke up and we went our separate ways. I don't remember ever seeing him again...I didn't really hang out that much with that crowd going into that school year because I made a good friend that I hung out with a lot more, and hipsters were not his thing, and Jake continued being adamant about how much he didn't want me around so I stopped getting invited to the parties they threw. Which was fine by me because I had made friends I fit in better with by then. I hope Guy's in a good place. At 21, I thought it was just cool that this guy that I had randomly run into this guy from high school that I had never interacted with before. I had appreciated him thinking that he thought I was cool, as stoned as he was. At 29, and from the perspective of losing a very good friend to a heroin dose, I just hope that Guy found whatever inner peace he was looking for, and he's just another happy 30-ish year old guy...maybe in Japan with a loving wife doing yoga all the time. Guy was just as beautiful on the inside as I thought he was on the outside. He deserves to be living a good life, and I hope he is. As a post-script, Jake came up to me in a bar about five years later to say hi. I was shocked, but then asked him about his life and talked about mine. Then Jake said to me, "Dude, I really just came up to say hi." Then walked away. I thought to myself, "Thank you for reminding me why I hated you so much back then, Jake!"

So, the reason why Los Angeles has such a bland skyline is because in 1974, it was decreed that all new skyscrapers had to have helicopter pads on top, leading to typical boxy, flat-topped skyscrapers. It was repealed in 2014, which means that Los Angelenos might finally someday get a skyline that could rival San Francisco's. (Well, probably not, but still.) Historically, Los Angeles has favored sprawl and low-height buildings. It'll be interesting to see if Los Angeles will make a bold turn towards high-rises and higher-density development, and more creative architecture. It probably won't ever rival New York City, but eh...it could get interesting. Do you guys think that Phoenix's skyline kind of resembles Los Angeles's circa the 1980's? I remember reading somewhere that they filmed a movie set in 80's Los Angeles for that reason- Phoenix resembles 80's Los Angeles.

I cannot get over how real and true-to-life the sex scenes were. I hope Adam doesn't screw this up.

I am really impressed at the level of detail you put into this. I remembered the '06 Election pretty vividly- it was a thorough rejection of the Bush Years.

I went to University of Delaware which was mainly comprised of upper-middle class kids from New Jersey and Long Island, so this stuff about the South is interesting.

Hey, really enjoying this, especially because it's contemporary to my college years- I was in college from '05 to '10. Anyway, you might want to get a little tighter with the editing- I've noticed little typos throughout the first two chapters. Also, in the scene where they talk about gay people and Adam thinks about how it's 2006, not 1986...well, again...it's still 2005 in the story.

I'm pretty sure the Danfields are too busy with their tobacco plantations and setting up Virginia society to show up in the story. They're probably also getting themselves involved with the building of the new District of Columbia.

Mark's never skipped 10 years. The longest gap he's had was between The Landwhore and Be Rad, with six years- 1974 to 1980. I can see Mark maybe skipping over a year (if JJ's not at the Olympics I don't think there's much reason to cover 2006 because that was one boring year) but I don't think we'll ever get a gap like that again. It's funny though-I really thought that JJ and I would both be in our 20's at some point. JJ's barely 17 and I'm 30 in December. LOL. Oh, well. The mid/late 2000's were "my time", so to speak, so I'm excited about seeing how these characters go through it. In any event I'm tickled pink that it's now 2003- that's when the 2000's really started feeling like the 2000's instead of the late 90's. Although I always thought that if/when our CAP characters reach present day (Mark did say he intends to have these characters eventually catch up and hit present day), Mark could always start a new series of prequels that deal with say, the Crampton family establishing Claremont in Ohio in the 1800's, or maybe the history of Wade's family, which you know HAS to be juicy as hell. It was hard to feel outrage, I think, when the people who were there were there by choice. I knew guys/girls in the military back in college, and it was so weird to me that they had gone off into Iraq risking their lives, while most of us were just focused on ragers, updating our phones, and The Hills. (Later, Jersey Shore.) My college was notoriously politically apathetic (which is funny because our current Vice President is an alumni), and the turnouts for the Iraq War protests were pretty small. One year we did a "soldier die in", where we layed down on the Green dressed up as soldiers and played dead, and I think maybe 15 people showed up. Back in high school, right before the war, we did a school walk-out at 9:11 a.m. (the symbolism, right?), and protested at the corner of DuPont Road and Lancaster Ave. We actually started to get a sizeable crowd- maybe 50 students from both Cab Calloway and Charter School of Wilmington- and we were yelling things like "Drop Bush, Not Bombs!" and "Fuck This Oil War Shit!", but then our dean came out and basically threatened to expel us unless we went back to class. We were told before that we'd get a detention, which I was fine with, but expulsion? Nah. Also, some middle school students showed up and they were clearly on there because they wanted to cut class. After I got back to class, my English teacher, a former Black Panther back in the 1960's, minced no words about how she thought we were foolish, disorganized, and didn't even get the media there.

SF has very strict building codes and an oppositions towards building super-tall skyscrapers like Manhattan, which is why housing is so expensive there- there's a very limited stock, especially in protected historic districts. On one hand it's cool to see to see skyline pictures of all these beautiful 1920's/1930's houses; but the drawback is that people are pretty cramped and they can't build up because again, San Francisco doesn't want to be Manhattan. Mark said that in retrospect, he thinks he might have massively slowed down the timeline after Bloodlines (this was the last book where years passed between books) because he knew 9/11 was coming, and he was putting it off. I do think the pace has picked up somewhat after 9/11 (2001 and 2002 were covered by three books and the last chapter of Paternity, while 1999 and 2000 took four books). I think there's a lot of interesting historical stuff to cover for 2003 and 2004, but I do hope a time jump does come in. I don't want to age in real-time to see these characters deal with the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. And I don't want to wait until 2027 to see what adorable teenaged shenanigans Riley and Maddy get into. (I really hope they won't consider themselves brother and sister because man I want to ship them.) The other reason why I think time jumps are needed is that it starts to become kind of ridiculous that all of these things happen to people within a very constrained period in their lives. It also gives us a chance to see the different places people are with their lives, and then kind of explain how they got there, like we ended CAP with Jeff being this promising college baseball player, to him in 1967 being a drop-out junkie. Connecting the dots was always interesting, but we kind of lost that because the family never really gets much "off time", where big chunks of their life aren't documented to us. On the other hand, this IS a pretty fascinating decade with a lot of dramatic material. As Times put it, "The 2000's- the Worst Decade Ever?" There was 9/11, the Iraq War, the Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, Virginia Tech, etc etc. JJ is just one of those guys who can't ever seem to catch a break. I still think it's hilarious that he wins the U.S. Championships- but the one that is remembered for how mediocre the guys skated.

Happy birthday!

Hey Mark, in honor of it being your birthday, I thought it might be cool for you to check out this clip that depicts High School Life, Circa 1980 at a California High School. I hope that brought back a lot of flashbacks of fun high school memories. Similar in vein...check out this video of a 1981 Gunn High School basketball game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRW_x6grZdw Damn, you can just FEEL the money in that program. As an aside, I'm glad feathered hair wings on guys made a comeback during my late adolescence. It looked good in 1980, and it looked good in 2005. Did you ever wear your hair like that, Mark?

I do think a generic v-neck, skinny or regular jeans, and converses will look good on almost any guy without looking too dated. Just be glad neither of us had our childhood in the 1970's: I've always joked that the reason people had such good music and films in the 1970's was to cope with how hideous-looking the polyester clothing and color palettes were. Harvest gold and avocado green and ugly earth tones, ugh.

Not that this is much better: I wasn't really a 90's teenager...more like a early/mid-2000's teenager...we dressed more like this: I really miss being able to pop my collar and not look dumb. LOL. I can't wait for that look to come back in when I'm in my 40's.

Hey, I came across this Young Adult book that Adam Phillips recommended to me a year or two ago, called Openly Straight by Bill Konigsberg. I was in Barnes and Nobles, and I basically devoured the book in about two hours. I honestly loved the story. It's the story of a guy, named Rafe, who after being Mr. Openly Gay Guy, decides to get a new fresh start by going off to boarding school and just being regular. Because of his resemblance to a very former popular student, he's embraced by the jock crowd, and he manages his way around friendships with macho jock types, while dealing with his growing feelings for his new friend who doesn't know he's not straight. I loved it. Because I was just there, in so many ways. I've grown up in very gay tolerant environments, but at the same time, didn't tell everybody I ran across that I was gay because I knew that if I did I would be expected to be Mr. Fabulous Queer Eye for the Straight Girl...that's what you were expected to be if you were openly gay at my school- a fabulous diva or a cool raver club kid. And plain shirt, cargo shorts wearing me just didn't have it in me. It's kind of funny- I didn't grow up with the fear that I'd be gaybashed for being gay; just that people would expect me to turn into Carson Kressley. It annoyed Teenaged Me when girls would say that they wanted a gay guy for a friend because it was a cool thing to have. And then I related to the other part of the story- Rafe trying to fit in with macho frat-boys-in-training, and finding in the end it just wasn't really a fit. Freshmen year of college, I tried to hang with them. There was one particular group of guys, with a leader named Kurt, who basically treated me like their mascot and I took it because I thought it was cool to hang out with guys who looked like they belonged to the jock crowds I'd seen on T.V. (Again, my high school didn't have sports, and the school that we could play sports for had guys that were insanely intelligent and not like the dumb jock stereotype on T.V.) And fuck, I'll admit that I was totally lusting after Kurt, who sent all kinds of confusing signals to me such as calling me up randomly over summer '06 and telling me that he missed me. (Who dropped me as a friend as soon as I told him over an AOL chat that I was gay in '07, but whatever.) I moved on to try and hang out with the hipsters my sophomore year, and then during junior year 1/junior year 2, I kind of realized that it wasn't really me, either. I just kind of became a Goddamned Independent (G.D.I) and met my friends that way, regardless of their labels. And it was a relief to be finally just be myself, and not have to put on any masks or ways of selling myself. It set me up for my Grad School Years, where I was just completely and totally myself, and I made some of my best friends that way. Another thing that the book touched on, that I ran into during my Grad School Years, were people treating being openly Gay like a brave thing. I didn't think of it a brave thing. It just was who I was. One woman who bartended at this bar I went to actually gave me a hug and told me how great and brave it was that I was openly gay. Of course the context was that this was a very conservative area we were in (Western P.A.), and people had stories that floored me like a guy who told me that his roommate bitched online about how his gay roommate should die, etc etc. But it was like, "Why does this matter? Why can't I just be a guy who happens to be gay?" I've always gone with the mindset that if you don't treat it like a big deal, others won't do so, and it's like people found that my being so casual about being gay made me stand out like a sore thumb in that charged environment. Anyway, if you like YA novels and happen across the book, give it a read. It really made me think about my Younger Self and His Search for Identity, and also begs an interesting question- what happens if you can pass for something you're not? Do the guys who can fit in really have it easier as opposed to the ones who have been flamboyant since birth? A lot of interesting thoughts and tangents you can go here with this book.

Tom Brady has been suspended for 4 games in the NFL. This can only be good for Joe Flacco and the Ravens!

Chapter 48 -When JJ and MaryEllen dance together at the wedding, and she flat out tells JJ that he and Alex are done in June. "The Skater's Waltz" -When Will and JP leave the San Francisco anti-war protest, and JP deflates Will's optimism. "San Francisco" by Me First And the Gimme Gimmes (A Cover) -When JJ sets up for a big quad, and then splats with a big injury. "Get Free" by The Vines (reprise) -When JJ learns that his injury will take six months to heal, which means he will not go to Worlds. "Landslide" by the Dixie Chicks I really do wonder what country music would have looked like if they hadn't been cast out because of that one anti-Bush comment. Blue grass is so popular right now, too.

Well, that just about ends JJ's championship 2002-2003 season. Poor dude. At least it's not a hip problem. I think those are a lot harder to come back from for skaters. If I were JJ, I'd take this time to go back to school and spend the summer of '03 in summer school to get his diploma as soon as possible. If he kept up with his independent studies he should be a junior right about now with Marie and Will. JJ could actually be a semester ahead, if he was taking courses during the summer with his tutor. In any event, though he's going to miss Worlds, he should be ready right in time for the 2003-2004 season. As for Mary Ellen, she was a bitch but it's also true that an arrangement like this can't work if the wife doesn't want it. I think Mary Ellen would be okay with Alex having affairs on the side with men, but she knows that Alex really has feelings for him, and she's probably sensed that JJ is good at manipulating Alex and she's not having that as "the other woman."

Well, that just about ends JJ's 2002-2003 season. Poor dude. At least it's not a hip problem. I think those are a lot harder to come back from for skaters. If I were JJ, I'd take this time to go back to school and spend the summer of '03 in summer school to get his diploma as soon as possible. If he kept up with his independent studies he should be a junior right about now with Marie and Will.