It’s 10:20 on Christmas morning and everyone’s emergimg after a late night last night. My mother walked into where I was sleeping to greet me but, having woken up earlier to put out stockings, I was exhausted.
My state of awareness is only notable because I was reeling from the horrific and bloody nightmare I was waking up from.
And the nightmare was so clear and real that for a moment, my fake smile, my fake happiness was the best I could muster. And this on Christmas morning.
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Sent from my Treo
I have been and will be in Bath for the past few days and the next few days. In case you don’t know, Bath is a little city in the Ssouth of England, about an hour and a half by train from Central London. It’s the playtoy of the quietly wealthy from the Greater London region. Think of the Hamptons but a city. And tall thin houses made of sandstone. The man behind the name, Manolo Blahnik, lives here. It’s that kind of place; the boys all have trust funds and the girls all have rhinoplastys.
Since all the well-to-do boys and girls of the town have more money than they know what’s good for them, they were out in force today, whilst I wandered about from shop to shop, meandering home from the hospital. What eye candy. The boys in GAP prescribed v-neck layering with chunky scarves, and the girls in uber low cut jeans and gilets. It was a television commercial shoot but without the campy director or the go-go girls making a mess in the distance.
The one thought that struck me was, with they waxed eyebrow, cropped hair, modelled wardrobe and textbook girlfriend, all these boys want now is to be gay. It’s the ultimate status symbol of the times - though they’d have a bit of trrouble explaining it to mommy, it’d fit in with their continual grooming and the pretty boy look. Because they are pretty, don’t get me wrong, but switching teams, batting ‘for the other side’ would really make them complete, would circle the square and would make their whole existance finally make some sense!
So I decide not to leave this mind-dump of mine alone for a few days, I decide to update and keep with it. I wish I hadn’t - now I know of a problem I was unaware of before, a problem I didn’t want to know about.
All day today I’ve been fixing my grandfather’s computer, and in my boredom I decided to look at what the blog appears like for everyone else. Egads! Not nice - my whole sidebar which looks beautiful and ‘together’ in my Safari browser, looks great on my 21″ at home and looks fine everywhere else I’ve ever look at the site, looks terrible here. It’s all squished down the bottom of the page. I’ll have to look at the code when I get home.
I’ll be there for all of eight hours before heading off to France so I don’t have a huge amount of hope for any improvement.
I can only say sorry to you if it’s looked this bad all the time! Sorry.
They’re still fighting to have a human in office to lead Washington state.
The Governor battle has taken an ever-more dramatic turn after the lead in the vote re-count has swapped party sides and has gone to the Democrats, with a miniscule ten vote lead. Whilst the ‘final’ result from this round of recounts will certainly not be accepted outright, this remains an important development if only for the psychological boost it will provide for the Democrats.
from the NY Times: “After a bitter and protracted recount fight in the Washington state governor’s race, elections officials announced today that the Democratic candidate, Christine O. Gregoire, was now leading her Republican opponent by a miniscule margin of only 10 votes, a stunning reversal of the Nov. 2 election results.
The days events were a serious blow to Dino Rossi, 45, a real estate executive and former state senator, who had been certified the winner of the Nov. 2 vote, after eking out a margin of 261 votes out of almost 3 million cast. He later won a machine recount by only 42 votes. “
link
I’m at my cousins house, in the lead up to Christmas, and for the first time ever really, we’re hanging out. We’re doing the ‘male bonding’ thing that so many straight guys seem to accomplish without feeling self-conscious, without self analysis. I in turn, can’t do it without analyzing the situation, but that doesn’t forgo my enjoyment of it.
We’re just kicking around whilst my cousins, who like to be cool whilst I relish in being decidedly uncool, smoke cigarettes from their window ledge and yet allow most of the smoke straight back inside. We listen to bad music from our laptops and lounge around in front of the space heater that blows a stream of hot air across the room, just like the hot air I’m blowing…
I’m having a whale of a time!
Trying on all the assorted skiing stuff that I’ve managed to collect over the last couple days, I being to realise that my appearance is taking on the impression of a blimp. I’m going to have to slim down on the bulk - I’m skiing, not rolling down a scree slope without any protection.
Plus, my sisters were commenting the other day, saying how with my ‘tiny ass’ I’l have to gain weight for the trip - otherwise I’ll come out in bruising from falling down all the time. I refrained from the “honey, there’s nothing this ass hasn’t taken” comment because, well there’s a lot this ass hasn’t taken; if that’s not going to far.
See the line, watch the line, just go right over the line. Yes, that was too far. Look, that’s the line way behind you, far in the distance only barely visible on the horizon.
My Grandmother went into hospital again last Wednesday, and since it’s the runup to Christmas and I have time to spare before jetting off to the Alps for a week of skiing, I’m going down to help out. It doesn’t sound so good when you say it like that - that one is going to help before holidaying.
But she’s in hospital with Bronchitis and at her age that’s really not good. So I’m going to go and hang out with my Grandfather and attempt to occupy his time. We’ll obsess about his windows XP machine that has post it notes stuck all around the edge of the screen telling him passwords and links and instructions. We’ll lay a carpet from their home in Worcester 20 years ago and we’ll move furniture around in an attempt to make sure I can’t move my back at all for skiing during the following week.
It’ll be amusing.
And of course, there’ll be Christmas.
I don’t expect many people to read about the randomness that interests me, the news and reviews that I find intriguing, and as a result, few do. To my great dismay, whilst going trough my out of date posts that my RSS reader collects, I find that I was mentioned on a massive site. Not by URL, but by name. Not by URL because that would be weird and would drive traffic away from the original site, and since it’s commercial that’s bad. Although I did laugh, quite literally, out loud when I saw the post because I knew it had to be me that he read it from, and yet the lack of the “a href” code made sense. I understood the psychology and it cracked me up.
Just so you know, thanks Joel.
Frank Kolodziej, a big shot in Yahoo, has a website that documents a load of the photos he takes seemingly just ‘around’. There’s nothing else on the site, but because the images are large and detailed, it’s an engrossing viewing. Head on down, the link below is deep into the site - to some images from the MoMA in NYC, but it’s all good.
link
In a piece for The Stranger, Nate Lippens reveals, with numerous hard-hitting, terrifying and poignant comments, how the with the demise of the AIDS awareness of the 80’s, the spread of HIV is being truly allowed by older generations’ reluctance to get involved, to get in the way and to get hurt.
With the pain of losing friends to the virus still clear, it’s easier to step back and be silently disapproving, but this doesn’t help those on the receiving end of the dangerous diseases, the unsafe practices and the ‘you’re positive’ diagnosis. Now is the time to stand up once more and be loud, be offensive but be heard.
“Over the last half decade my exasperation with gay culture made me finally turn away. My friendships had become based more in common interests and cocksucking didn’t rank high on that list. But as friends and acquaintances started testing positive again I realized that my post-gay stance was postmortem.
Maybe it was like the mob: You try to get out but they pull you back in. I realized that telling people that unsafe sex is careless and stupid isn’t being moralistic; it’s being realistic.”
link
