Things I'd like to do

Travel to Tuscany

Learn a second language

Get better at using Adobe Software

Travel to Istanbul

Manage my time better

Oh yeah, and I'd like to do the Office Depot guy.

I'd really like to do the Office Depot guy.

Taking Inventory

I was walking down Tremont St. on my way to the train after the gym this morning and I saw a nicely dressed young guy taking inventory. You know what I mean. There is a certain population of guys who just have to touch themselves. I don't know if they are afraid that the boys detached themselves and snuck off while they weren't looking or what.

The guy I noticed was a stealth toucher. He was sort of checking to make sure he was zipped and figured while he was down there he'd make sure he hadn't lost anything he might be able to use later. It got me watching. It's one of those things like nose picking, you don't think about it till you see someone doing it, then you start looking for it.

There seems to be all manners and degrees of this phenomena. Over the years I have seen men who are shameless players of pocket pool who will have their hands jammed in their pockets up to the elbow. Some guys grab, others grab and massage and then there are the yankers, who for some reason grab and then tug ferociously at their nether regions. With these guys, it's almost as if they distrust counting the parts blind and are trying to rip them off so they can hold it up at eye level to do a visual check. Then there are the guys who just stand there with a far away look in their eyes as they palpate themselves for indefinite periods of time. It makes me wonder if they have a hard time counting as high as 3 and just keep loosing count. Obviously none of these guys had parents to tell them to stop playing with themselves in public.

Now I’m not saying that there aren’t time that a man doesn’t need to readjust himself. Those mornings that you put on that pair of drawers that you swore that you’d never wear again because the legs are big enough to accommodate Kate Smith. At least they're to loose right up to the point that your nuts decide to make a break for freedom. Then, panicked by the wayward behavior of your genitals the leg elastic remembers what it’s there for and snaps into a strangle hold on the escapees. That is usually when you see some guy doing a spastic tug and shake maneuver, usually while trying to continue down the street acting as though nothing is wrong. It is just that kind of instance that finally moved me to toss out any defective drawers and just go commando if the lingerie drawer comes up empty

Probably the most agregiuos example are the guys who just stuff their hands down the front of their pants ala Al Bundy. Remember “Married With Children”? Many years before that show hit the air I had a friend, David. Great guy, very funny and fun to be around but you couldn’t trust the guy with any piece of upholstered furniture. All he had to do was park his ass in any chair and the legs would immediately spread in a split that an Olypmic gymnasts could only envy and his hand would fly down the front of his pants. It didn’t matter where he was or what the situation, if he was sitting, he was cradling the boys. After being around David I started to notice this action with other guys. Usually though, it tends to be a behavior associated with spectator activities, if watching something can be considered an activity. Viewing sports seems to go without saying. One hand on beer and the other exploring the mystery that is a mans crotch. I’ve never seen some guy in a tux fondling his nuts while watching Aida at the Met, but who knows what happens when the house lights go down.

A lot has been written on the subject of men and their relationship with their genitals. If we have a relationship with our man parts, then I think that there are some guys out there that just have to learn when to let go.

This was the view this morning looking down Essex Street around 6 this morning

Short on brains

I saw this and felt it explained a lot. I now know that it's not my fault that I'm an idiot. It's because I'm 5'3"! Check this out. I am going to have to start a campaign to see if I can qualify for government assistance. It's not my fault, I'm too short to understand anything more complex than "must eat". It brought to mind a report I read a few years ago about perceptions of short men. According to that study the bias was that men under the mean height lacked desirability as breeding partners, were less attractive, were less likely to be fastidious about personal hygiene, lacked leadership qualities and yes were less intelligent.

I told my friend Mike (6') about this article. I then asked him why if tall people in theory enjoyed better health, why do short people live longer? He told me he was sorry, but I was too short to understand the explanation.

Make Way for Schmucklings

It is only August, but already autumn is in the air. For the past couple of days the temperature has only gone into the 60’s, and it is becoming more and more evident that the days are getting shorter. However an even more concrete sign of immanent change has appeared here on the streets of dear old Boston.

I was going about my lawful occasions yesterday when I had my first sighting. Near the corner of Mass. Ave. and Boylston, the home of Berklee College of Music, there they were, a flock of college freshman being sheparded along under the fretful wings of there cruiseware clad parental units, lumbering down the streets banging into innocent passersby with their instrument cases. This is only the tip of the iceberg, but a sobering reminder of the season that people who actually live here dread. Fall semester.

Soon the streets will be teaming with herds of freshmen, traveling in packs, clustering together like some 10 headed, 20 legged beast that upon being returned to the wild is both excited and frightened. A bad combination! Gibbering and squealing they will block sidewalks in their progress, rubber-necking, commenting, gawking and in general making a nuisance of themselves and creating a hazard for anyone who is trying to make any progress down the street. They will shuffle along in a maddening Brownian motion, directionless, yet determined, to explore their new environment.

What is even more amazing and infuriating though is when 2 co-ed’s decide to venture out on their own. I’ve never really run across this problem with guys, but for some reason when two 18 year old girls hit the street, they can manage to take up the entire sidewalk regardless of how wide the thoroughfare and how small the girls in question. It is this sort of vague, directed, directionlessness that is like a homing signal. No matter the position of the co-ed in question and the oncoming traffic they manage to wander straight in front of all oncoming traffic. If you give any indication that you expect them to move out of the way, it is greeted with a combination of exasperated sigh, shrug and eye roll that indicates how hopelessly clueless you are not to realize that they in fact do own the sidewalk and can produce the necessary paperwork to prove it. This technique is lost on me. I survived a teenage daughter, and having been unwilling to put up with that crap from her, I am certainly not going to tolerate it from some complete stranger. I just keep moving and the little dears will just have to move over to their side of the sidewalk. I am experimenting with a technique that my pal Eddy uses. He simply comes to a dead halt, crosses his arms and meets the offender in question with an answering glare. He’s bigger than I am but, though pint sized, I think I might be scarier looking. Occasionally there is something to be said for having a face like a can of worms.

Young males are just as bad in their own gormless way. If they are not being out and out offensive by commenting loudly about fags, old people, or anything else that pops into their otherwise empty heads, then they are blindly lumbering into people like some drugged mastodon. I’m not certain that the Eddy technique is the answer for me in this case, though I may be selling myself short. I managed to scare the shit out of a couple of my daughter’s rather large boyfriends.

It all seems very irritating while it’s going on, but within a couple of months the mobs will thin out as the semester gets underway and the students realize that they are in fact expected to get some work done and this isn’t some extended shopping holiday. The cold days of the New England winter will also drive everyone, myself included, indoors and hibernation mode will take over. Then, finally, the days will once again lengthen, the sun will start doing a decent days work, warming the air and it will drive these migratory visitors back to the mid-west or wherever it is they come from and return the city to it’s resident population, allowing us to enjoy another peaceful summer in the city.

The Naked Truth

I love this. And some of these kids have a point. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060825/od_nm/vermont_nude_dc_1

Don't use that tone with me!

Okay, this country needs to be sent to it's room to think about what it just did. I was in the dentist office today and overheard someone saying that you can get Mel Gibson's rant as a ringtone. Do you really want that coming out of your pants pocket when someone calls you?

Fun for the whole family

My younger sister as a matter of family pride has proven that if common sense and common courtesy ever come calling, they will not find her at home.

Not to be left out of the fun, she called my sister-in-law to let her know that she and my parents would be availing themselves of the block of rooms that have been reserved for guests at the nearby hotel, which offers a shuttle service to the country club where the wedding will be held.

While she had my sister-in-law on the phone, she decided to ascertain whether niece v.2 had been invited. My sister has been working as an understudy to my mother for years now, and has even adopted many of her vocal mannerisms so I can only assume the message was delivered with all of the subtlety of a brick with a note tied to it thrown through a window. Mom has a way of asking a question, especially when it is obviously none of her business and is more than rude to be inquired of in the first place that is at once sneaky and transparent. It has the irritating quality of letting the interigatee know that while she is information mining, she is doing so in such a clever way that they will never suspect that she is pumping them. I think it’s the tone of fatuous smugness that gets to me.

The upshot is that my poor sister-in-law’s feelings have been hurt and it is just throwing another log on the fire. I haven’t spoken to my brother, but I can only imagine that he is fuming by now.

Meanwhile, my niece has her own cross to bear. She had been asked to make hotel reservations for her parents. (Actually, for her dad, the rest of this one is a story in itself.) She made the reservations, and then changed them when she found out about the reserved block of rooms. This lead to a rather heated discussion with her folks, because the rooms at the hotel with the shuttle service cost $50 more. My niece tried to point out that the extra cost was cheaper than getting picked up for DUI, but this argument fell on deaf ears. My brother and his wife are nice people but simply saying that they are cheap really falls pretty wide of the mark. They would never dream of pinching pennies, because that might wear valuable copper off the pennies.

After what was a fairly long harangue over the phone, my niece finally quieted them down by assuring them that the reservation at the less expensive hotel was still in place. So much for being helpful!

The niece and I have formed a sanity pact. We are now going to actively avoid any interaction with our family before the event that can be avoided. I think we should just build a blind and observe the behavior of the monkey troop from a safe distance. The question now is what to wear for camouflage?

More wedding drama

There is nothing like a joyous occasion to knock the scab off the festering dysfunction in our family. The wedding plans for my younger brothers daughter are progressing, and with it, all of the ax grinding that passes for family life with us.

Enter my niece’s sister, niece v.2. Niece v.2 has not received her invitation yet, and has been convinced by grandma that she has been ruthlessly excluded. The reason for this conviction on dear old mom’s part is because when my younger brother and his wife got married 26 years ago, the mother of the bride had decided that there would be no children at the wedding with the exception of the ring bearer and the flower girl. In this instance the flower girl of choice was my niece who was about 5 at the time. Niece v.2 was about 2 and therefore has vivid personal memories of this traumatic occasion.

To enter the realm of reality once more, there is a fairly simple explanation for niece v.2’s invitation going astray. Her current living situation is a bit on the peripatetic side and she is, to the best of my knowledge, in a peculiar housing situation. She has some sort of time share arrangement in the house she had purchased with her erstwhile fiancé. Niece v.2 has the house for a month, then, ex-fiancé and his new girlfriend have it for a month while niece v.2 stays with a friend. I am inclined to think it is a small wonder that her mail may occasionally go astray. But let's not allow common sense to get in the way of a good grudge!

The upshot of all of this is that my poor niece was subjected to the high pitched whining of her sister. (A sound that can only be heard by dogs and relatives.) The refrain was “They don’t want me there, anyway!” supported by the Greek chorus of her parents, (who it turns out are still pissed off after 26 years, over having to shell out for a baby sitter.) her idiot aunt (my 38 year old sister who still lives with my parents) and of course my mother.

The punch line is that niece v.2 had no intention of attending the wedding in the first place. My niece and her boyfriend had already offered to fly her up and put her up with them. She doesn’t want to take the time off from work and she doesn’t want to spend the money. All with the constant refrain of “They don’t want me there anyway.”

I was on the phone the other night with my friend Clint, making plans for the weekend and gossiping. I started to fill him in on the wedding/grudge match. He started laughing and paraphrased Terry Pratchett. “Oh, you mean it’s about, “what their Darryl said about our Sean at cousin Diana's wedding!” I couldn’t put it better.

Read any good books lately?

I am currently re-reading “The Wind in the Willows”. It is one of my favorite books from childhood and every time I read it I just seem to love it more, always for different reasons. I am doling it out one chapter a night like a bedtime story and get to travel to a distant time and place that only ever existed in Kenneth Grahame’s lyrical and elegant prose.

My friend Bev is an avid reader, but once she has read a book, she is done with it and never goes back to the book. Once when I mentioned that I was re-reading something she asked my why. At the time I couldn’t give her an answer other than “I like the book.”

Last night after I had seen Ratty and Mole safely off to bed, and I was turning out the light, it came to me. It’s because of my Gramma Brown.

Gramma taught me a number of things over the years of my childhood and one of them was that a good book, like a good friend and is always worth visiting. She loved Shakespeare and Dickens, but she also loved Zane Grey and any gory murder mystery that the library had in stock.

We saw Gramma year round, mowing her lawn in the summer and shoveling snow for her in the winter, but now when I think of her it’s always summer. Long sunny days, having tea and homemade molasses cookies with Grandma in the cool of her kitchen, or in the darkened parlor reading out of an old anthology of poetry to her. Out in the sun, helping Gramma in her garden. I learned a lot of the practicalities of gardening from my father, with my brothers in the thankless task of helping the old man keep up with his garden, but I learned to love growing things from Gramma. She was still in awe at the wonder of a plant growing from a tiny seed, and she was able to convey that wonder to a child.

There was always something good to eat, always a cup of tea. Always a safe place with someone to listen, or to tell me about what it was like to be a child in rural Vermont at the turn of the century.

She had had a hard life, with more than her share of tragedy. She raised 4 children alone in the depression, in a house with no plumbing or electricity. She saw both of her sons go off to the Second World War, which seems to have been the catalyst for a long and difficult mental illness, which ultimately institutionalized her for 14 years. Like all of the other difficulties in her life she overcame that as well.

This happened before I knew her. So the person I knew was someone who was the one reliable safe place I had in my own difficult childhood. She was the one who showed me that books could be another safe place for me to hide when things got to be too much, and that like an old friend, a well loved book can be a safe harbor. That the miraculous is around us every day and we need look no further than a small dried seed, which can grow into a beautiful plant, to appreciate the wonder that surrounds us on a daily basis. I don’t remember this every day. I live in a larger, busier, world than Gramma, or Kenneth Grahame did. But like an old friend, occasionally Gramma comes and reminds me. I just wish she could bring the molasses cookies and the tea.

Hair today

When did it become chic to be bald? As someone who now sports a shiny dome, rather than a heavy thatch of curls I haven’t been able to help but notice there are a lot more bald guys around. I admit there are a lot of guys who just shave their heads, but I am noticing that more men, and more young men are loosing their hair.

While both of my brothers have classic male pattern baldness, I have overall thinning hair. What this means is that if I didn’t shave in the morning what I would wind up with is the type of hair that regardless of length would give the most casual observer a slightly obscured view of my scalp. It lacks the pathetic nature of the comb over, but really isn’t any more attractive. So every morning I get out the Norelco and do my hair. It’s a pragmatic approach to dealing with the problem and fortunately I don’t have a misshapen head, so it doesn’t look that bad.

What puzzles me is why all of the escapees from Hair Club for Men? Come on, there has always been a small portion of the gay population who’ve sported a gleaming pate, and it works. But until the past few years there has been a much larger population of men out there that has been willing to do anything, no matter how humiliating, to have a “natural looking” head of hair. They were fooling no one but themselves, but it was pretty harmless and allowed me and some of my friends to play such fun games as spot the worst toupee of the day or how much has he spent so far on hair plugs? It's not just me thinking this either. I did a quick poll among friends and they all remarked after I pointed out the chrome dome phenomena to them that they are not seeing as much advertisement for weaves or hair transplants.

The death of the rug shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. I think that a good toupee is an oxymoron. However it’s amazing what people can convince themselves of. SUV’s are safe and standardized testing in schools improves the quality of education are just a couple. If someone wants to think that no one can tell that the dead raccoon they have tied to their head isn't their own hair, there is no way they are going to be convinced otherwise. So why the sudden group urge to go natural?

I am leaning towards the idea that it was Capt. Picard. Let’s face it, if anyone could convince you that some short, bald, older man can be a hotty, Patrick Stewart is that man.

The problem with this theory is that the show has been off the air for 10 years. Did it take that long for the idea to trickle down, or is it that a new generation of men had to see Jean-Luc in syndication before they threw off the shackles of the personal care industry and decided to bare it all. I’m going to have to do some more research into the phenomena and get back to you.

In the mean time I’m going to head down the street to my favorite taqueria, El Pelon. You know, they really should give discounts to us baldies.

Gay fat

In the afternoons we have an undergradute that comes in to help out with the office. He's a nice straight kid, who has come from a fairly conservative, and sheltered background. Buttermonkey and I consequently are treating him to insights into what goes on in other parts of the culture.

The other day we got into a discussion about weight. Finally, the student said to Buttermonkey,
"Your just one of those skinny guys who thinks their fat."

Buttermonkey: "You don't get it. I'm gay fat!"

Me: After a moment, "Yeah, I know what you mean. I'm gay fat too."

Buttermonkey: "OMG! That means I'm really gay obese. Maybe gay morbidly obese.... no wait that's like one step below being a bear."

It makes me feel all warm inside to know I'm helping, in my small way, to form the minds of the young and impressionable.

Grrrr....

I am blowing off the gym with a clear conscience this morning. I put in a 14 hour day yesterday and being overtired couldn't get to sleep last night. My usual waking hour of 4:30 rolled around and I just kept my eyes closed after a quick deco at the alarm clock, but Alice decided it was time for Dad to get up and started running back and forth across the bed. After about 15 minutes of this I finally dropped the old size 11's on the floor and headed for the catfood bowl.

In cat fashion once she had finished the contents of the bowl, Alice came over to see if there was anymore coming. Once we had gone through the morning ritual of "you're just gonna' have to wait till dinner time", she rolled around on the carpet for a few minutes just to imbed some more hair in it. Happy in the knowledge that her work for the morning was done, she trotted off to my bed, where she curled up dead center and is now happily snoozing.

I am working my way through a pot of coffee and scratching. Skeeter season seems to be in full swing and the lace effect screens in my apartment are letting the little devils in, in droves. I was apparently the buffet for the evening. Naturally, among the top stories in the news this morning are reports of cases of West Nile virus and Eastern Equine encephalitis! If I was awake enough I'm sure I could work my way into a frantic state of hypochondria, but it seems like to much effort right now. Maybe later.

It is time to head off to the shower and work, no doubt with hilarious results.

I'm not sure who's scripting my life but I suspect it's one of those hacks who write teen comedies for Disney. You know, the ones that are are suppose to be hilarious, but are merely lame. I'm going to send off a memo to the script dept. and have the bastard fired. As soon as I can find a pen that doesn't leak.

Change on the way

I have been noticing for the past couple of weeks that the sun is arriving later. A couple of months ago the sun was well up as I headed off to the gym, now I am being greeted by the sunrise. I know it's only the middle of August, but it's a reminder that autumn is on the way. Photo taken at 5:30 this morning. (I'm not sure why, but my entries keep resetting to Pacific time.)

I love my job

I was sitting at my desk a few days ago, and my buddy and co-worker Buttermonkey stopped to pass the time of day. I had worn a tight t-shirt into the office and he said, "You must be feeling better about your work out. You're wearing a Red Riding Hood shirt." I just looked at him, and finally, I said, "Okay, I give. What's a Red Riding Hood shirt?" I was treated to the Buttermonkey grin, which usually means there is a good one on the way, "My Grandpa, what big tits you have."

I love this job! Okay, the twins aren't that big, but hell, I love this job!

Change is good

I am trying out a new workout routine. It calls for working out until every muscle in your body aches on one day then taking a day off. Rinse and repeat. As someone who, in the words of H.H. Munro, shall never see 40 again, it is a real challenge to try and make some sort of muscle gain. Not that I am planning on ever getting to the point of being mistaken for a body builder, but I have determined that I would like to, if not defy gravity, at least put up a spirited fight. The fly in the ointment is that I have my routine and it just grates to have to change the way I have been doing things on auto pilot for the past several months. The fact is that, as much as we might complain about being in a rut, we like our ruts. They are a comfortable place, and offer us reassurance that each day is going to be a safe place that is pretty much the same as yesterday was.

The reason I am boring people with the details of my workout is that it is bringing to the fore, for me, how much people are creatures of habit. A good example is that when I walk to the gym in the morning I take a straight shot up Boylston St. Currently, they are constructing the new Mandarin Hotel at the Prudential Center. For months I have been walking up that side of the street. For the past few weeks I have had to cross the street for that block. It just gets on my last gay nerve. It doesn't take any more time, or in any way effect my walk, it's just not "my" route. I mentioned this to one of the professors I work for. He laughed, because he has his own mindless routines and then told me that he is in the habit now of observing his students from day one of class. Apparently, the kids will file in on the first day of class, choose a seat, and from then on, for the rest of the semester, that is "their" seat.

Maybe that is how we make the remarkable normal so that we can keep moving on with our lives. ATM's, cell phones, the internet, home computing, digital cameras are all the type of technological wonders that were, when I was a kid, the pipe dreams of sci-fi. Now, they are the common place. Like I said, reducing these things to the mundane makes them manageable so that we are not overwhelmed and it clears the way for whatever comes next down the pike.

The downside of this is that we are also willing to simply accept more insidious trends that start seeping into our common experience. Allowing the government to invade our privacy to fight the war on terrorism. Electing a president who said the constitution is just a damned piece of paper. Accepting the idea that we have some sort of divine right of kings to impose our ideas on the rest of the world, and if they don't like it too bad about 'em. Will we accept that here in the land of the free that what we will be free to do is, to do as we are told by our government without question?

I am shaking up my routines. I am changing my workout to see if I can make some type of physical change. I am shaking up my walking route, to see if even in a small way I can start looking at my city from a different perspective. Election season is coming up, maybe we should all see if we can shake up the way that those we entrust with our civic and national well being can do things differently, and possibly better for us all. Hey, change is good!

Common knowledge

I was listening to NPR this morning before heading off to the gym. It seems that more Americans can name the 3 Stooges (Larry, Curly and Moe) than can name the 3 branches of government. (Executive, Judicial and Legislative) I felt very ill informed. I thought the stooges were Dick, Don and Dubyah.

Are you a Stoogite or a Marxist? I never got the 3 Stooges, but I've always loved Groucho, Chico and Harpo.

Urban development

I was walking down Boylston Street yesterday and walked by the Pru, where they are putting up the new Mandarin Hotel. As far as I can tell they are being very hush hush about what the new building is going to look like. I only hope it looks better than its neighbor, the Hynes Convention Center. Is it just me or does this building look like some sort of correctional facility?

day one in the blog world

A gentleman friend and I were dining at the Ritz last evening and he said that if I took a pencil and a paper and put down all of my thoughts it would make a book . This almost made me smile as what it would really make would be a whole row of encyclopediacs.

"Gentlemen Prefer Blondes"
Anita Loos

So I get a call from my niece last night. The big news is that her cousin Heather is getting married. This is not a big surprise, since Heather and the boyfriend/fiancée have been an item for a while. It was just a question of time.

The fly in the ointment of this joyous occasion was that neither of us has been invited. Or rather, no invitation has yet arrived. Never one to miss an opportunity to be offended, my sweet little gray-haired mother was launching a preemptive strike down the warpath. The idea that our ever efficient postal system might be falling down on the job had never crossed the old dears mind. If she had her invitation, then everyone else must have theirs!

It might be instructive at this point to give the reader some insights into my mother’s character.

As some people collect string, my mom collects grudges. It has been 75 years, but she is still out of charity with her best friend from childhood for some slight suffered when she was 5. I should also point out that no one is immune. I have been reminded of trespasses that I committed at the tender age of 8, as though they had occurred moments ago. I know that the time my older brother broke her favorite lamp is still waiting in the wings for an appropriate moment to come forward. Barring the appropriate moment, she will drag it up, non sequitur, when she needs to vent and it pops into her mind. As you may imagine, daughter-in-law’s were grudges just waiting to happen. My younger brother’s wife just happens to be a favorite target, so the lack of an invitation was simply one more proof of my sister-in-laws horrible character which was being prepared to be laid at the poor woman’s feet.

Today I got an email from the niece. It would seem that the invitations all wound up being sent to my older brother. (?)
I don’t get it either, but hey, it came. Armed with this news, I called the maternal unit. Not in any real hope of defusing the situation completely, while the old girl was in full battle mode, but I hoped to head off any truly embarrassing repercussions for my sister-in-law. She’s a very nice woman, and honestly, no one deserves the wrath of mom.

It went about as well as could be hoped, though not until mom had made sure to let me know that if we hadn’t been invited it would have been at the instigation of my sister-in-law and her dreadful family, and that she would have had to say something at the wedding. (I case you aren’t getting the picture, my nieces wedding is not about my niece. It is about my mother. Everything that has occurred over the past 80 years as a matter of fact has been, somehow, about mom. Man on the moon, mom’s idea, Viet Nam, because they didn’t listen to mom. Pretty much everything from the great depression, through the Second World War, down to the present day has been about mom.)

As an old queen who has quietly ticked past the half century mark, my goal in life is to live in a drama free zone. This plan is doomed. If it isn’t bad enough that I seem to spend way too much time doing the equivalent of emptying an Ouzi into my own foot, there always seems to be someone out there willing to lend a helping hand.

You gotta’ laugh!

I will update on the wedding folly’s as things transpire.