The United Church of Pescetarians

Spreadsheet Icarus

My previous blog entry has a bland story about a spreadsheet. To recap, I regale readers with a story of me creating a spreadsheet for a work lunch and everyone thinking it was awesome.

Well, the day of the lunch showed up and I sent around the menu again.

“Hey everyone! Put in your orders, because it’s Team Lunch Today!” said my email, dripping with my smug exultation of my own spreadsheet genius.

About 5 minutes later, I get another email:

“Hey everyone, the menu for the restaurant changed. Here’s the update.”

I immediately went online and checked and, sure enough, the menu had changed in the week since I originally sent out the email. This is weird.

Once everyone has entered a meal in the spreadsheet, I had to walk around the room and ask 6 people to update their orders because what they had put in was no longer available.

After this is completed I got our team card and went into an office to order.

“Hello, the number you are trying to reach is disconnected.”

My jaw just kind of hangs there. WTF? What am I supposed to do? If you don’t know me, when I get nervous, I just start to sweat. It’s what I do.

So I’m starting to sweat and run out to my desk and grab my computer. I Google the number again and find that I had everything correct. My other option is to go through Grubhub, which has another number listed for the restaurant. The sweat starts to recede as I dial the number and am connected.

“Thank you for calling Grubhub. Hold one moment.”

Waiting…

“Hello, the number you are trying to reach is disconnected.”

At this point sweating begins double time. I look across the table in shock (I perform very well under pressure.) and whisper at Cindy.

“Hey… Uh… The restaurant doesn’t exist.”

Cindy kind of looks at me. “What?”

I quickly turn away and start typing into Grubhub. There is an order online option, so I click one of the meals that was ordered.

6.95 meal + 89 delivery fee = 97.95

I could have basically gotten out of a pool at this point. There was so much sweat.  Almost 100 bucks for one meal? What?

“Cindy,” I say again, “it doesn’t work… What should I do?”

“Order some place else,” she said.

So I’m panicking, which I believe Cindy is suddenly aware of, and she walks over to me.

“Let’s just order like Mediterranean Grill. It’s the same kind of food.”

“Yeah..uhh…yeah…”

I get online and go through the menu. Rather than having normal food, the only thing you can order online are these bowls.

“How should I handle this?” I ask Cindy.

“Just take your computer around and take orders.”

So I open up my browser and go to my first coworker.

“Hey, Steve. Want to pick an item? The other place was closed.”

Steve looks at the menu. “I want a plate. I don’t want a bowl.”

“Bowls are all they have.”

“I want a plate.”

Remember, I’ve only been working at this place like 3 weeks, so I don’t really want to seem like I’m in charge or anything, so I’m just like,  “Bowls are all they have.”

Steve proceeds to click out of the menu and look for a plate.

At this point, the whole debacle has taken me about 45 minutes.

Steve can’t find the platter, because they only serve bowls, so he gives the computer back and says, “No, I don’t want anything.”

“Uhhh…. Okay…”

This continued through the rest of the 14 orders that I had to take. Surprisingly there are a lot of nuances with bowls and lots of people liked to ask questions to me, the guy with the computer.

“Well, do they put hot sauce on the side?”

“Umm… I don’t know.”

“Because I want hot sauce, but I want it on the side.”

“Uhhhh….”

“Can you ask them to put it on the side?”

“It’s…all electronic.”

“I want it on the side.”

By the time I had all the orders, I kind of wanted to kill myself. Everyone was riled up and the complaints about the menu had turned into complaints about being hungry.

The order was processed, the food turned out great, my sweat dried, and everyone was sitting down and eating. All animosity had left as everyone ate delicious Mediterranean Food.

“Nice work, Tedd!”

“Thanks for the work, buddy!”

Just as I shall never ride Megabus, I hope to never order Team Lunch again. I have also been humbled by the Spreadsheet. I now know that flying to close to the sun just gets you covered in hot sauce and ill will.

The United Church of Pescetarians

One time my friend, Tristan, and I were out. We had been drinking on a weeknight and were interested in pizza. Tristan is the oldest in his family and I am the youngest. Also, in size, Tristan is 6’6”, so in his family and in height, he’s kind of like the big brother in our friendship. We’ve pretty much been best friends since the second time we met. This also means that sometimes Tristan can be a little condescending to me, the little brother.

We were getting pizza and Tristan says, “Oh, I want meat on my pizza, but I can’t because of my diet…” (I would hope this line of dialogue alone would indicate Tristan’s sexual orientation.)

“Why not?” I asked

“Well, I’m actually a pescetarian. You probably don’t know what that is.”

“I know what it is –”

“It means I only eat fish. That’s what it means.”

“I know I –”

“I only eat fish. It’s like kind of a new thing I’m trying – a new diet.”

I’m not like the smartest guy in the world, but I also know enough that if you put pesca- in front of something it means it’s fish-related, unlike putting Presb- in front of something, which means that you like Jesus and may be from Scotland.

Once we had sobered up and I recounted this story, Tristan thought it was hysterical, too. He was totally acting like the goth girl in the back of the room in high school, who is like, “I’m vegan. I couldn’t possible eat anything from the body of a precious animal.” Then three weeks later she is on a carnivore diet because she’s dating a guy in a band called MEAT.

Well, the other weekend I was visiting my friend at IU in Bloomington, IN. Bloomington is this weird, wonderful nexus of farm folks, frat brothers, and super liberal hippies. Everyone lives together in peace in harmony. At the center of this ecosystem is the beautiful IU campus with its castle-like architecture and leaves that seem to be perpetually in that perfect, fall color schema.

My friend, Marlene, who I was visiting, had just got a new roommate, Troy. Troy is 23 and an absolutely beautiful homosexual. He is studying some sort of environmental policy and is brand new to Bloomington, so he hasn’t yet made enough friends to have better things to do than hang out with Marlene, me, and my other friend, Alice.

Our last morning in town we went to brunch, and Alice, Marlene, and I, being good Midwesterners, ordered what might as well have been called The Fatty Fatty Fat Fat breakfast. It had eggs, bacon, and two giant pancakes. Troy ordered something with crab(?) in it. Is that a food?

So we were discussing food and Troy mentioned that there are a lot of options for vegetarians in Bloomington, and it being the Frat-Liberal-Country-Nexus that it is, I really believed it. This kind of turned into the talk where everyone says that they, “don’t mind vegetarians, but…oh brother, vegans!”

This reminded me of Tristan and his pescetarianism. So, I tell the story and say something like, “Yeah, my friend Tristan can be really pretentious sometimes and so he… [story]”

Marlene kind of looks at me like, “You stupid moron. We’re eating with an attractive homosexual, what do you think you’re doing?”

I had a split of second to think, “Blaaarrrggghhhh…” before Troy is like, “Oh. I’m a pescetarian.”

Luckily for all of us, we’re so much older than Troy, he was obligated to chalk it up to my old-tymey ignorance, rather than any animosity toward pescetarianism in general.

The rest of brunch continued and I ate most of my Fatty Fatty Fat Fat breakfast. I devoured my bacon.

And I don’t care what anyone thinks.

The Wedding Planner with Slightly Less Jennifer Lopez

The Spreadsheet

I just started a new job a few weeks ago. Higher education turned out to not be my thing, so I returned to corporate America, where I can type emails to business owners and get unlimited snacks. I’ll work super hard for them as long as they keep replacing the chocolate-covered almonds and La Croux in the fridge.

            Since I’m new, I’m trying to really impress people. I’ve been working hard, taking notes, staying late. My team is an exceptional group of peeps, so this is kind of the norm, but I’ve been keeping up with them and trying to contribute as much as possible in as quick amount of time as possible.

            Well, about a week ago I get an email about our team lunch. My coworker, Cindy, came over to me and says, “Tedd, we do a lunch every month, and everyone decided that you should pick our restaurant this month! This means you get to take everyone’s order, too!”

            In my mind this was, “Tedd, you’re new, so hopefully you’ll pick something different because we’re sick of everything around us. Oh, and taking orders is kind of annoying, so you’re in charge of coordinating that, too. Kthanksloveyou!bye!”

            I was kind of bored last week right after lunch, so I picked a restaurant and then sent an email to everyone. In my last job, whenever we had a department-wide lunch, we always used Google to create a joint spreadsheet. Everyone put what they wanted on it so everything was in one central place. You can update your orders anytime you want, and no one has to figure out all 15 email chains for what is wanted.

            We didn’t have anything like this in the shared drive, so I created the spreadsheet and sent it out to everyone with the menu.

            5 minutes later I have three emails.

            “Wow, Tedd. You’re really on top of this.”

            On my way to the bathroom one of the guys on my team was like, “Man, a spreadsheet , you take this seriously, dude.”

            I chatted my good friend and said, “Everyone’s really impressed with the spreadsheet…” She responded, “Taking orders was a nightmare. I don’t think you realized how much easier you made lunches.”

            My neighbor exclaimed, “Tedd just completely changed the game!”

            Wait, what?

            Of course it would be lunch that gets me attention, not my actual work. It’s like being a banker and then getting employee of the month for cubical cleanliness.

            I’m still in the stage of work where I’m sure I’m screwing everything completely up. Today, during week 3, I had that moment where 5 things went wrong and I’m like, “Oops… Yeah, that was my fault.”

            But at least I have the lunch spreadsheet. Should I get canned tomorrow, I’ll leave that legacy behind. And probably take about 15 La Croux on my way out.

The Wedding Planner (and some tangents…)

One of my best friends on the planet, Courtney, got married this past weekend. We have been friends since high school and even when I was in Korea we’d talk at least every week or two through Facebook or phone. Because I’m cheap, I got tickets on the Megabus to go down to STL for the nuptials.  

           

Tangent #1

While taking seats on the Megabus this middle-aged woman clambored on the bus. Where she spawned from is beyond me, because she evidently had never ridden in a motor vehicle before.

“Oh my god!” she wailed. “Oh my god! I’m just – I’m sorry! I don’t know--- I don’t know where to sit!”

Megabus is open seating. You can sit ANYWHERE. At the time of her entry, literally every other seat was open.  The attendant, bless his heart, took the time to take her by the hand and lead her down the aisle.

“You want to sit here, ma’am?”

“God… I’m sorry! I don’t know!”

You would have thought he was leading her around and asking her which of her children she wanted to murder. It was that painful for her.

After 3 seats of “Ma’am would you like to sit here?” she finally settled on a seat that she wanted… Of course, it was occupied by another passenger.

“Can I sit here? Can I sit here?”

The guy in the seat was a well-dressed, middle-aged man, probably on the bus for business or something.

(^I just typed the above sentence and laughed upon re-reading it… What business would put someone on Megabus? Gurl needs to find a place that at least uses Amtrak.)

“You can sit on the inside,” he said.

This did not satisfy the woman. “Oh… I want to sit on the outside. Here.” She pointed to the seat.

The man said, “I’m sitting here and I want to sit here. You can sit on the inside.”

“Oh… oh, okay. Well, thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”

I don’ t even know… The Megabus probably won’t be happening in my life ever again.

#backontrack

Because I took the Megabus I was picked up by my friend Lana and taken to her place for the night. She is actually in the wedding, so I knew that I would have to get to the vineyard for the ceremony really early. I had no problem with this and assumed I could help set up or something,

Upon getting to the vineyard, I said hi to Courtney and then was sent to look for Donna, the manager of the winery, to help with the set up.

The main office is in the building with the bar and the kitchen, so I had to ask the bartender where Donna was. She led me to an oddly pretentious office covered in wood paneling, where Donna was seated going over a pile of papers.

“Donna? I’m Tedd, I’m here with Courtney. She needed to get more chairs for the bride’s side.”

“Well, hello, Tedd! You like wine?!”

Before I knew it, Donna had given me a class of wine, popped open a bottle, and had me carrying a bunch of glasses.

“Share it with your friends!”

I don’t think Donna realized that I was alone and probably shouldn’t be trusted with a giant bottle of wine.

Well, we got to the back shed and get more chairs and take them and put them in Courtney’s dressing room. Upon setting down the chairs, Donna looks at Courtney and says, “We like Tedd! He’s a charmer!”

It took me a bit to realize that “Charmer” in Northern Missouri is pretty much synonymous with homosexual.

Once the chairs are down, I go and sit outside in the party tent, thinking my time on the clock is done. Pretty soon, however, Courtney, Lana and the rest of the bridal party are carrying all the chairs from the dressing room down to the main ceremony area.

“We meant the chairs need to go where the ceremony is going to be.” Courtney doesn’t get upset easily, so she didn’t care that Donna and I had our head up our asses and were carrying around chairs to random locations. It was also at this point that Courtney told me to help with the candy table.

I picked up the boxes of candy and walked into the gazebo that had the cake table and the empty table for the candy. Donna was running around and had somehow found another glass of wine to give me.

“We don’t want you without a glass! Not people we like, anyway!”

At this point another woman carrying a box barged into the gazebo and said, “Donna! Where these go?”

“Put them over there. Oh, and Christine, this is Tedd.”

Christine and I shook hands. Little did I know it was going to be the most meaningful relationship I would build that day.

I help Donna finish setting up the candy table, somehow managing to spill Jolly Ranchers all over and rip open a bag of M&M’s in the wrong way, so we couldn’t actually access the resealable top. By the end of this debacle, I was 3 glasses of wine in and had been solidified in Donna’s mind as the wedding planner.

This was also the point when Donna felt the need to tell me this anecdote:

“The cake lady, Barbara, called. She said she was going to bring the cake later. I asked her to bring it at 5, but she said, ‘Gurl! That cakes gonna be all kinds of a mess!’”

It was at this point that I realized Donna was a Friend of Dorothy and was thrilled Courtney had a “charmer” friend to help organize the wedding.

Tangent #2

I’m a really bad homosexual. Like I’m terrible at gay things.

At my new job, the other gay who works there came over to me and asked me to go shopping with him. I mean, I would love to, but I think he is expecting someone with good taste who knows brands and wants to spend 2 hours trying things on.

This isn’t me.

I ran into this same confusion when I was on a trip with my family. My sisters-in-law went shopping and when they came back were like, “Tedd! You should have come! We went to *insert name of fancy purse store here*!” They expected me to give some airsnaps and be like, “Whatchoo get, girlfriend?!” But I didn’t know if that was a clothing store, a book store, or a cholatier. So I said, “Ooohhhhh!!”

#backontrack

I came out of the gazebo, my candy table set up and saw that my friend was starting to take pictures. Courtney grabbed me and said just to come along with them. The rest of the winery staff had gotten there and were setting up the tables.

I proceed to carry a bunch of parasols and Lana’s wine glass (sometimes I am a good homosexual) to a spot in the wine growing area for some pictures. They are in the middle of snapping photos when we hear:

“TEDD! TEDD! We’ve got some questions!”

Christine is barreling toward us waving.

“We need to know about the table arrangements,” she said.

Courtney, Lana, and the other bridesmaid were giggling like crazy.

“I really have no idea about the table arrangements,” I said. “You should ask Courtney.”

Christine looked actually upset that I didn’t know what was going on, me being homosexual and all, so she asked Courtney who let her know what the arrangement was.

As Christine sprinted away, Courtney looked at me, laughing, and said, “I guess you’re my wedding planner now?”

The rest of the afternoon went by without incident. I hung out with the ladies until people I knew started showing up. By people I knew, I mean Courtney’s family, who I annoyed the crap out of because I had nowhere else to go.

The highlight of this experience was seeing Courtney’s brother, Rob, and his wife, Shelly.  Remember, I am 3 or 4 glasses of wine in and am high on power being the newly proclaimed wedding planner.

“Everyone keeps asking me questions,” I said. “I have no idea what’s going on, but everyone thinks I do.”

Shelly says, “Well, they probably think you know since you’re officiating the ceremony.”

“Wait,” I said, “What?”

I suddenly panicked for a split second before Rob broke in, laughing. “Yeah, no. Tedd’s not doing that. They hired a pastor.”

Phew.

I ended up sitting with Louise’s parents, and three of my good friends and one of their moms. The wedding was staged so that the main ceremony was celebrated a level below the reception tent near this fountain. The audio was broadcast into the tent to the people not in the immediate family who didn’t get to sit close. We were listening to what we could of the poor audio, when this gem happened:

“Courtney and John, as you come together in marriage, let’s not forget that this isn’t a union of two. This is a union between, you, as a couple, and Scott.”

I immediately looked around the table. Who was Scott? I knew Courtney wasn’t religious, but what kind of weird cult did she get the preacher from? Was he online certified? The 5^th United Church of Scott?

It only took about 1 more minute before the pastor started saying “God” over and over and I realized that the poor audio had just made God sound like Scott. During dinner I said something and Lana’s dad laughed. “I thought the same thing! What kind of weird religious stuff are Courtney and John into?”

“Praise be to Scott!” I said.

The rest of the evening was a lot of fun. We danced and I had a few more glasses of wine and then called it. I could tell I was having a lot of fun because Christine saw me dancing and yelled, “Thatta boy, Teddy!”

When we got back to Lana’s house, I passed out cold on the couch. I didn’t even have enough energy to watch an episode of It’s Always Sunny. My friends made fun of me, but they don’t even know. It’s tough being in charge of a wedding.

Tangent #3

I’m finishing up writing this on the Megabus. I’m behind a 5’4” man who has his chair complete shoved backwards so that I literally can’t fit in my seat. I have to sit sidesaddle to even be able to fit. Somehow, he is also managing to sit with his elbows back so that he keeps slamming up against my laptop.

#Megabus #neveragain

The Fame Monster

A few months ago there was a gay guy who became a huge celebrity on the Internet because he released a song about liking a guy who didn’t like him back. It’s kind of catchy, but its importance was derived from the fact that it was a pop, love song about being gay.

I found the song entertaining, and when the guy was coming to Chicago to perform, I thought it would be fun to see him. A number of people on the Internet wrote things like, “See him in an intimate setting before he’s too famous!!” Gay men everywhere thought this was our big break. Finally there would be a mainstream singer/songwriter who wasn’t just gay, but WROTE about it and SANG about it. Not only would we be allowed to get married, but the song we homos dance to at the wedding reception would be about being gay!! Lesbians have had Melissa Ethridge for years, but now it was our time!! The guy, Steve Grand, was a hero, a trailblazer for us who have been marginalized and cornered by gender specific pronouns in pop music.

My friend Alex and I went to the concert, which was held at a jazz club in downtown Chicago. The setting was filled with really attractive homosexual men drinking expensive drinks and waiting for Steve to light up the stage.

If I forgot to mention it, Steve Grand is gorgeous. Like carved from marble gorgeous. I got in trouble with my gay friends by referring to him as a butter face, but he is cute, and his cute face sits on top of a thick, carved slab of muscle. In the video he goes after an equally gorgeous guy who is also carved from marble, cute, et. al. 

Alex and I kind of hung around the bar. While the rest of the atmosphere was a buzz of anticipation, we just kind of sat there and talked about what had been going on with our friends. Neither one of us really thought that Steve Grand mattered. He was a guy who sang a song that was kind of catchy and we were gay, so… Why not support him in his quest for crossover Internet to real fame? Our misunderstanding of the greatness of Steve couldn’t have been made any clearer than on my trip to the bathroom.

I open the door and hear this conversation between the bathroom attendant and a young man washing his hands.

“I just feel like if I talk to him… You know, he gets it! He gets what it’s like.”
“Well, you gotta go for it, man. You gotta give it a shot!”

“If I could just meet him! I know -”

It was at this point that Tedd walked between the attendant and the kid and awkwardly washed his hands.

“It could be destiny, right?!” The bathroom attendant stared at me.

My only response was, “Uh… Yeah!”

I don’t really believe in destiny, fate, etc. And I don’t really get starstruck. Maybe by an author, but not by a guy who sings a 6/10 pop song and has a lot of abs. That’s cool and all, but my knees get weak for intellect over brawn.

I also am not of the ilk that believes that true love or magic happens. Yes, I believe I’ll find a great guy, who I have a lot in common with, who I will spend my adult life with, but I don’t believe our coupling is written in the stars. It’s a nice sentiment, but I’ve lived through enough to know that life is generally a crapshoot and you make the most of it.

At a certain point a few months ago, my friend, Paul, asked me and my friend, Jody, if we believed in true love. Our response was to roar with laughter and then, after we composed ourselves enough to wipe the tears from our eyes, ask politely, “Oh… You were serious?”

Upon exiting the bathroom, I met back up with Alex and we got in the queue for the concert. To my surprise the Destiny Guy from the bathroom was behind me.

“Hey,” he said.

“Uh, hey,” I said.

Destiny Guy is adorable: cute face, nice body, well-dressed, amazing smile. He looks at me and says, “Would you guys mind if I snuck into the concert with you?”

Alex and I kind of stared. “That’s fine… It’s not really sneaking in, its open seating.”

“Yeah, but I went to the show before this. I don’t want them to kick me out. Can you tell the bouncer I’m with you?”

Alex and I agreed.

What followed was one of the most bizarre conversations I have ever had with an adult male. Destiny Guy was an engineer. He’d gone to a top 25 university and had recently secured a job with GE in Wisconsin. He had driven 4 hours on a Saturday night to see this Steve Grand concert.

“You know I just feel like he gets me. He knows what it’s like to be in love, you know?”

I’m really glad I couldn’t see my face, because I’m pretty sure it was a mixture of shock, sadness, and confusion. And this look was staring right into Destiny’s Guy face. I couldn’t say ANYTHING to him. I had no words for his blind faith in the gospel of Grand. It was his obsession in light of the following that just confused the hell out of me:

1.     The song is about unrequited love. My first impulse was to ask Destiny Guy if he had ever read…anything. Like… Anything. The Inferno? Rome and Juliet? Homeward Bound? These are all stories of being separated by something that is loved and having to overcome obstacles to get it. Or, of course, not being loved in return. It’s…not…new. Remember Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” music video? It’s about this. This right here. She likes members of the opposite sex but she can’t get him, either.

2.     Destiny Guy was one of the best looking guys in the room. Easy peasy, one of the best looking guys in the room. As I mentioned before, Steve Grand is a handsome individual, but… I mean… Destiny Guy could have picked up almost ANYONE else at the bar. Instead, he chose to stand next to Alex and I and pine for Steve because, “he gets it. We just have this connection.”

3.     Had he talked to 85% of gay guys in the room… We could have shared similar experiences. Growing up gay in a small town sucks. There’s no way to really even know your gay because NO ONE else is. Then, of course, when you get to college all those guys that never had girlfriends come out. But in the meantime, you just kind of stare at each other and pretend to like girls because there are no other options. Stevie boy isn’t the only one to experience this. Gurl, we’ve all been there.

The more I talked to Destiny Guy, the more I became unsettled, almost to the point of wanting to leave. As we drew closer to the front of the line, I began to get more and more into my own head. Watching other guys around us, I realized that it just wasn’t Destiny Guy that was obsessed with Steve – it was a large number. In the minds of these men, Steve was a chosen one, a messianic figure, rising above heteronormative pop culture and creating a haven of gay, candy-coated, pop music glory.

            I don’t know whether I had never been this close to fame, or just never been in this particular kind of situation, but I had never had it hit so close to home. As we shuffled inside to the small venue, I looked around at the host of gays, staring eagerly at the stage. In my mind, this act of performance, this rise to fame that Steve Grand was on, was best represented by a dual host–parasite relationship.  In a sense the crowd was feeding Steve, adulation and appreciation streaming from his rapt audience to feed his ego, his talent, his performance.

On the other hand, I thought, in a much darker sense, there was something Steve was taking from us, something that had been taken from Destiny Guy. It is amorphous, something I can’t really describe, but if I could say it is anything, it is a sense of self. In his rise, the collective deification of Mr. Grand, people like Destiny Guy suddenly demeaned themselves, became lesser in his presence. Destiny Guy’s strivings and ambitions, turned toward an ideal now represented by a white, heteronormative, man with a perfect body. In a sense, Steve gave gays what perhaps had been lacking in a pop culture sense, a figure, a man who is like them, who represents them. Celebrity, in general, represents an idealization of characteristics that society wants us to have: sex, beauty, strength, ambition.  What saddened me about Steve emerging as a gay icon, however, is that it represents an end to gayness as radical. Whereas mainstream gays may not have had an image in the past, gay culture being relegated to drag, kitsch, and flamboyance, Steve represented to me, the end of the radical era.

The gay men around me had found their mainstream icon, a man who had the ideal body and voice, but who also represented something ultimately very white and normal. While gay culture still celebrates the Ru Paul’s, the Steve Grands are coming to take their place. In a sense this is fantastic: young boys and girls in middle America will have their icons who look and sound like them; in another sense, and I think I represent a slim, radical minority, the demolition of the radicalness of homosexuality abolishes difference and understanding. As white, middle-class gays get their marriage security, the marginalized of the marginalized, the low-income African-American and Latino LGBT populations become a peripheral item. Mainstream culture accepts homosexuality, as long as it fits into boxes that society has decided to accept. Pride weekend becomes a party, a celebration of wearing little clothing and drinking too much. We forget about the Stonewall Riots, we forget where we have come from and that there are others, left behind who need someone to fight for them.

This is perhaps all too much and too theoretical for a concert for a guy who wrote a song that is about a boy liking a boy and drinking whiskey, but in the eyes of Destiny Guy, as he stared up at the stage at the bulging biceps of Steve, I couldn’t help but think the deification of this figure, Destiny Guy’s complete investment of faith in love in this pop singer, was a willing sacrifice of his difference, of his ability to think about his marginalization and his value as an outsider.

“Thank god,” I imagined him saying to himself, “he’s like me. I’m normal. He gets it – this is his life, my life. This is normal.”

And, I know I’m an odd duck, but that statement, that deification of normalcy, in my mind, is monstrous. The striving for complacency, for thoughtlessness, for security in hegemony, frightens and terrifies me. The LGBT community is rapidly moving to the mainstream, but at what cost?

Somehow, Alex, Destiny Guy, and I ended up in the front row, about five feet from Steve. As the show played on, I looked at the men seated. Perfectly manicured and quaffed, they looked up to the stage as Steve, very beautifully, sang a list of covers and new songs.

Steve is just a guy following his own ambition. As he left the stage, he was surrounded by a group of people from the bar. In that tiny venue he was a god. He raised his hands and waived good-bye as the crowd cheered loudly.

I leaned over into Alex’s ear, “I have to get out of here,” I said. “You don’t have to follow.”

As quickly as I could, I followed Steve’s entourage. I squeezed past them, climbed the stairs, and began moving out of the bar. As Alex and I walked past the entrance, a group of women in their fifties were on the dance floor. They didn’t care what people thought, they weren’t thinking about the men and women staring at them as they shook their aged booties to the thump-thump of the Jackson 5.

“We should have just stayed out here with them,” Alex said as we came out of the bar and into the night.

“That one lady was my spirit animal,” I said. Referring to a woman, roughly fifty pounds overweight, and close to forty-five, who had been twerking as we left.

Destiny Guy and the others can have Steve. He’s a talented guy and I hope he does well for himself, but I think I’ll look elsewhere for my hero. Right now I’ll settle for the middle-aged lady with the mean twerk. She wouldn’t call herself normal, and she wasn’t perfect, but she was celebrating that night as if it was her absolute last. I hope in the future she is the deity our collective society chooses – until then, I’ll put on the Jackson 5 and try to be as different as I can. I won’t be Steve’s “All-American Boy” but I’ll try to remember that I’m different – that I’m proud – that those things that separate me from the world around me, make me more valuable to it.

Tragi-Doodle

My boss has been giving me more responsibility at work. This includes projects and things that I wasn't responsible for my first couple months. Generally these are self-run activities - compiling reports, spreadsheets, creating presentations, etc. Overall I've really enjoyed working on this stuff - it's a nice break from the doc and credential review I spend most of my time doing.

 

One project I didn't like so much was organizing a joint department meeting. I work with the business school and we do a lot of joint programs with other departments. Most of this is pretty easily run because other departments use our in-house application system, so we just share the applications and make decisions based on the documents submitted for one application.

 

Enter School X and their joint degree. This involves different parts of the application, so we don't share the decision system. This makes my life a living nightmare. It means that we have like 3 applications with different numbers that have to be consolidated in the end. It causes trouble with admission letter printing, visa documentation, and registration for classes. It's the hydra monster of my life. Get the application in and then twenty new problems pop up because NOTHING is being done correctly. Yay!

 

Well, after a few months of this, the admission season ended and we lost a bunch of applicants because it took us 1000 years to process an application correctly. Oops! We tried!

 

I made it a top priority to get this system consolidated because every time these apps came through it knocked out a 3 hour chunk of my day making phone calls, sending emails, scanning documents, etc.

 

But summer was nigh and my boss told me it would be a good time to organize the meeting. Just like I had done with other departments, I created a Doodle poll.

 

A Doodle poll is very simple. It lists dates and times and you check mark which times you are available! Like... hypothetically, say I sent you a Doodle poll with this Friday on it. It would have four boxes for 9, 10, 11, and 12. You can PICK what time you're free! Then other people do it! Then you KNOW when to have a meeting! It takes roughly 2 minutes out of your day and helps organize everything.

 

Well, I created a Doodle for the joint meeting. I thought there were only four of us that needed to be there, but lo and behold, it turned into this big fustercluck of 8 people, who all have to be present to figure out what the eff is going on with these applications.

 

So, I send the Doodle. Within minutes I get 10 messages of people commenting and complaining because the times don't work. So I adjust the times. Then adjust again. Then more complaining. Then another adjustment.

 

Finally, it's already mid-July when I'm trying to schedule this meeting. I send out the email and wait.

 

And Wait.

 

And Wait.

 

And Wait.

 

Every Wednesday for three weeks I re-sent the Doodle out and reminded everyone passive aggressively that they need to take the EFFING poll.

 

"Hey Guys! It's Tedd! This is just a friendly reminder that we need to find a time to meet. Please take the poll so we can match up availability!"

 

"Hey Team! Another friendly reminder that we need to get a jump on these joint applications! Please put your availability on the Doodle poll!"

 

By the third one, I wanted to write:

 

"Listen, you bunch of lazy turd hats. I need you to go in, click your index finger a few times and tell me when you're available. This isn't rocket science, and it's no wonder this is messed up because y'all can't figure out how to take a FRICKIN" poll. XOXO Tedd"

 

But instead it read something like this: "Hey All! If you can, please fill out the Doodle poll so we can get a jump on these applications!"

 

I told my boss what was going on and she did send an email that read something like, "We need to get this done. Fill out the poll."

 

About the same time that went out, I got an email from this lady in School X. She said, "Tedd, we are all available on Wednesday at 10 for a meeting.

My boss's email and this ladies email were caught in cyberspace, so that they were both delivered at the same time.

I started to write an email telling everyone what time the meeting was, just as I get another email from the lady responding to Maya's email.

Maya, I have told Tedd MULTIPLE times that we are available on Wednesday at 10.

This is when Tedd's hand goes up in the air with a,"Bitch, please" expression on his face. It also, ironically, was the time when I started getting emails from Doodle.

Chuck has taken the Doodle poll.

Chuck has altered his Doodle results.

Chuck has changed his Doodle results.

Chuck works for School X. And despite the fact that I had (evidently?) been told multiple times about their availability, Chuck was going like gangbusters, clicking and unclicking boxes in the poll.

So I log into the poll and, I decide to be my caddy gay self.

I write an email to the woman who had called me out in front of my boss and said,

Hey! You had told me 10 on Wednesday, but it looks like Chuck isn't available at all on Wednesday. Is he not participating?

About 10 seconds later I get a phone call.

"Tedd, this is School X, we think this would be best to do over the phone."

"Sure thing!" (Overly nice, Tedd exclaims!)

"It looks like there was an error and none of us are available on Wednesday at 10."

An error? An error from the heavens that somehow changed your availability in 10 minutes? Are you sure you meant, "I screwed up, Tedd. Sorry, we can't do Wednesday.'

"The only time we can all get together," she continued, "Is Friday at 1."

"Sure thing!" 

"Phew, okay. I'm glad this was settled." She is about to hang up but hesitates. "You know," she goes on, "I just wish there was a way to sync our schedules so we all knew if we could go to the meeting or not."

Click. The phone is dead.

You wish....you...what?...you?...wh-... You wish there was a thing, like a POLL, where we could all put our AVAILABILITY DOWN?!! I literally banged the phone on my desk and immediately went into my coworkers office.

"Annie," I said, "You have got to hear about the Doodle Debacle." 

The Craigslist Strangler

Recently I got this online dating app for my phone. My phone is a C-level cell phone that is so old it may have been used as a prop in the Great Gatsby movie. Needless to say it struggled to support the app that has pictures and messaging. I had started chatting with this one guy and we went back and forth a bit. I had to shut down the app because my phone kept crashing, but the guy said he wanted to keep in touch, so I gave him my email. Roughly 10 messages later I proposed we meet and he never responded again.

Gay T Swift, ladies and gentleman. Cue guitar chords for the new hit, "Online D8er H8er."

The funny part is, that the night before the day that I had asked him to meet, my mind, in a refusal to accept this rejection, created this elaborate fantasy dream sequence. It started with me dreaming that I got a message from the guy with a girl CC'd on it. I asked my friend why he would do this and she was like, "Well, we all have to take precautions with the Craigslist Strangler out there..." She then went into gruesome detail about how the Strangler meets people online, asks them to meet, then draw and quarters them, and sets their head on a pike in a public place. According to my dream friend, all the meetings take place in broad daylight. Most of this gruesome detail was probably due to the fact that I read about the public murder of the Brazilian soccer referee... If you haven't seen this story, and enjoy morbid non-fiction, I would heartily suggest looking it up. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/early-lead/wp/2013/07/07/soccer-referee-beheaded-after-stabbing-player-to-death-in-brazil/)

There are a number of dream-problems with this, like A) How this guys is able to draw and quarter someone in daylight in a public place? and B) Why he is called a Strangler in the first place when he clearly doesn't strangle at all?

This also marked the first time I woke up. A lot of rational feelings flooded me in my half-awake state, like how hurt I was that this guy thought I was a killer who operated on Craigslist, and also, at this point we had become Facebook friends, so I had questioned how he could see my Facebook profile and think "murderer." 

Well, I go back to sleep and dream that I receive another message from the guy - no CC this time - and he asks me to meet him at 1 p.m. at the local park. I immediately start freaking out because meeting in broad daylight in a park is just how the Strangler picks his victims. I confer with my dream-friend, who is immediately suspicious about this sudden change, and suggests that the CC email was a front to make me think that he thought that I was the Strangler, when in reality, HE was the Strangler. 

I woke up a second time in a panic that I was going to be murdered in the park and also pondered whether I should, in fact, risk a horribly gruesome and public death in order to meet a guy that I thought was really cute.

Sadly, there was no follow up dream. My final dream of the night saw me as the personal assistant to a famous Cat named Ginger. I was upset because Ginger was being a diva and should know better after being a well-established SAG cat actor.

I wish any of this was fiction, but it all came up in dreamland. And yes, this was written at 8 a.m. on a Sunday in case I would forget any of these bizarre details.

Bacon

I started using this new dating service called Coffee Meets Bagel. You basically get shown a profile and then if you both click "like" then you get connected in an open text communication, where you can trade info and set up a date.

Well, I liked this guy and we started talking. 

I think I should preface this with the fact that certain sects of gay men are purdy shallow. Like, your personality can be non-existent to bland, but if you have a six-pack and some on-hand shirtless pics, you can probably at least get to date #3 with some people. Just like the Strangler from above, this Coffee/Bagel guy asked to share my Facebook information so that they could see more pics and... He had lots of shirtless selfies and insanely groomed eyebrows, so I think pictures of me with my mouth open completely clothed, were not especially impressive.

Anyhoo, before Coffee/Bagel guy and I became Facebook friends, he had asked for more pictures, most likely because he didn't think I was attractive enough and wanted to vet me with more pics. So, I acquiesced and sent him a picture of my face only.

I went to the gym and came back and in response to my picture, I got the following:

"I love bacon :)"

Eerrrrmmm what? I immediately call one of my besties and start asking questions.

"Is bacon a gay thing? Like... Is it...?"

"Are you sunburnt?" my friend, Ryan, asked.

"Not really... I mean my skin is kind of pink."

Then the guy wasn't from the US, so I thought it was maybe an international slang term for white people? Like, pork is the other white meat...so...?

I almost texted one of my friends with family abroad to be like, "If you saw a white guy walking around... Would you ever call him bacon?"

The guy and I text back and forth a few more times before it finally comes out that he never got the picture I sent.

"You sent pics?"

"Uhhh... Why'd you say I love bacon?"

"Because it was in your profile."

That's when I remembered that in my profile, I specifically say that I won't date a guy that will not eat bacon. 

I feel that there is no need to even say how this played out, because all my dating stories end the same:

We scheduled a date.

30 minutes before he canceled.

This is fine because I now make plans during my dates with the assumption that there won't be a date. This is exactly what happened, I ended up meeting a group of friends at another bar.

"Bacon!" Ryan called across the bar, "no date?"

"Nope," I said. "Facebook got me again."

I think it's safe to say that anyone who I meet, who first asks for more pictures is a waste of time. 

"Can we be Facebook friends? I want to see more pics ;)"

My response will now be:

"I'll just route out the rest of this exchange for us. I friend you. You accept. You look at the pics. You're unimpressed. You don't want to seem shallow, so you'll keep talking to me. We set up a date. 30 minutes before the date an emergency will come up and you will cancel. We will never speak again. Approximately 3 days after our last exchange, I will defriend you. Let's cut out the middle man. XOXO."

Evangelical Magnet

For some reason lots of evangelical Christians hang out on the campus of the university I work for. How do I know? 

Because they ALL talk to me.

On my way into the office at 8:30 am a guy and girl team stopped me.

Them: "Do you believe in Jesus Christ?"

Me: "Yes...but it's 8 am..."

I actually classify myself as Christian, but my belief system is based on liberal interpretations of the Bible and in looking at general Christian themes rather than picking on the few things that tend to cause division, like abortion and (obviously) homosexuality.

At one point (this time in the cafeteria) this team of 3 evangelical boys, with multiple stages of hip, trendy, evangie beard growth, accosted me.

Evangies: "Do you have time for a survey?"

Me: "Sure."

Evangies: "Cool. Question #1: Should you die tonight, what would be your greatest regret?"

Me: "That's pretty heavy..."

The guys were nice, but I tend to recoil and be terrified of anyone who believes in God and looks like they may play the guitar. I grew up in a church with people like this, who were nice to everyone, but then wanted to send gays and single, pregnant mothers to hell. So, I started sweating and just prayed that it would end quickly.

I didn't want to engage these 19 year old kids in religious debate, because I would destroy them, and oddly enough, it is my Christian upbringing, which makes me recoil at the thought of denouncing the beliefs of wide-eyed, enthusiastic Christians with guitar-playing skills.

Evangies: "You should join us at church sometime."

Me: "Thanks for the invite, but I choose churches selectively. I've been burned before."

Evangies: "That's too bad, man. Give our church a chance."

The church they were inviting me to is this super, mega church in downtown Chicago, one which has literally ostracized and cast out a number of my gay friends. At this point in my life, I find it odd when people don't immediately peg me as gay. I mean, since I was 14 I have been getting mocked for it at some level or another, so it seems like it should just be OBVIOUS.

But these kids didn't pick up on it, so I just let it go. 

Me: "Maybe I'll go sometime..."

Some of my friends suggested that I should have laid into them about their beliefs and what the church has done, but really, it's not these kids. They're doing the best they can and I don't really want to yell at them - doing so is the equivalent of screaming at a customer service representative when your cable goes out. So I was polite and went on my way. If I see any of the playing the guitar on the quad, however, it will be all out war.