Back From the Beach

Just spent a LONG weekend away at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

It was a GREAT trip, and a great start to my birthday week, which for the first time in a long time, I'm looking forward to and wanting to celebrate.

More on the beach and birthdays later. For now here's a turtle graphic by InBloom that I picked up, which I just love

Following Passions

I love you. And not, not in a friendly way, although I think we're great friends. And not in a misplaced affection, puppy-dog way, although I'm sure that's what you'll call it. I love you. Very, very simple, very truly. You are the epitome of everything I have ever looked for in another human being. And I know that you think of me as just a friend, and crossing that line is the furthest thing from an option you would ever consider. But I had to say it. I just, I can't take this anymore. I can't stand next to you without wanting to hold you. I can't, I can't look into your eyes without feeling that, that longing you only read about in trashy romance novels. I can't talk to you without wanting to express my love for everything you are. And I know this will probably queer our friendship - no pun intended - but I had to say it, because I've never felt this way before, and I don't care. I like who I am because of it. And if bringing this to light means we can't hang out anymore, then that hurts me. But God, I just, I couldn't allow another day to go by without just getting it out there, regardless of the outcome, which by the look on your face is to be the inevitable shoot-down. And, you know, I'll accept that. But I know... I know that some part of you is hesitating for a moment, and if there is a moment of hesitation, then that means you feel something too. All I ask, please, is that you just, you just not dismiss that - and try to dwell in it for just ten seconds. Alyssa, there isn't another soul on this fucking planet who has ever made me half the person I am when I'm with you, and I would risk this friendship for the chance to take it to the next plateau. Because it is there between you and me. You can't deny that. Even if, you know, even if we never talk again after tonight, please know that I'm forever changed because of who you are and what you've meant to me, which - while I do appreciate it - I'd never need a painting of birds bought at a diner to remind me of. (Chasing Amy)

Love is passion, obsession, someone you can't live without. If you don't start with that, what are you going to end up with? Fall head over heels. I say find someone you can love like crazy and who'll love you the same way back. And how do you find him? Forget your head and listen to your heart. I'm not hearing any heart. Run the risk, if you get hurt, you'll come back. Because, the truth is there is no sense living your life without this. To make the journey and not fall deeply in love - well, you haven't lived a life at all. You have to try. Because if you haven't tried, you haven't lived. (Meet Joe Black)

There's something that I admire about my roommate because he used these dialogues from Chasing Amy and Meet Joe Black to express his feelings to his latest object of affection.

Here's to following our passions...

I'll be the greatest fan of your life

True to my not-so-inner-dorkiness, despite a very tempting offer to go out dancing with a friend, I decided to spend my Friday night at home alone.

But wait, it gets better...


I watched A Cinderella Story starring Hilary Duff and Chad Michael Murray.

This still photo is from one of my favorite scenes of the film. The two have been communicating on-line, and finally meet in person at their high school Halloween Homecoming dance. They break the ice by playing a game of twenty questions (which is just SO endearing to me), and then the scene culminates in the slow dance pictured here (a desire of mine still unfulfilled).

The song that plays is "I'll Be" by Edwin McCain:

"I'll Be"

The strands in your eyes that color them wonderful
Stop me and steal my breath.
And emeralds from mountains thrust toward the sky
Never revealing their depth.
Tell me that we belong together,
Dress it up with the trappings of love.
I'll be captivated,
I'll hang from your lips,
Instead of the gallows of heartache that hang from above.

[Chorus:]
I'll be your crying shoulder,
I'll be love's suicide
I'll be better when I'm older,
I'll be the greatest fan of your life.

And rain falls angry on the tin roof
As we lie awake in my bed.
You're my survival, you're my living proof.
My love is alive -- not dead.
Tell me that we belong together.
Dress it up with the trappings of love.
I'll be captivated,
I'll hang from your lips,
Instead of the gallows of heartache that hang from above

[Chorus]

And I've dropped out, I've burned up, I've fought my way back from the dead.
I've tuned in, turned on, remembered the things that you said

[Chorus:]
I'll be your crying shoulder,
I'll be love's suicide
I'll be better when I'm older,
I'll be the greatest fan of your...
I'll be your crying shoulder,
I'll be love's suicide
I'll be better when I'm older,
I'll be the greatest fan of your life.

The greatest fan of your life.
...greatest fan of your life.

*sigh* oh the resiliency of our hearts in love...

Line Dancing

Took my first line dance lesson tonight at the local country-and-western bar, Remington's. It was a good workout and a lot of fun; something I'll certainly do again.

We learned "Beat it Up"


In the mean time, I wish I knew a nearby arcade with Dance Dance Revolution!

Song Scrabble (#1)

Akin to magnetic poetry sets which supply the words that the user then arranges into original poetry, I've decided to put together my own composition using scrambled song lyrics...(Kudos to you if you can identify the songs & artists)


Good lord I'm focused
No fairy tale conclusion y'all
The impossible is possible tonight
You make me feel like I'm alive
Touch me deep, pure, and true
Your problem is you ain't been loved like you should
And let my open arms take you away
Giving my life to a rainbow like you

Surprises

Children are conservative inasmuch as they require stability in order to feel secure and therefore generally prefer things to stay the same. They need ritual and familiarity.

(Savage, Dan. The Commitment. New York: Plume, 2006. 129)

Okay, so I'm far from being a child these days, but some things have stayed with me since I was.

As far back as I can remember, I have felt the need for ritual, familiarity, and stability. One of the most unsettling things my mom would do when I was a kid was to re-arrange my room while I was at school. I'd come home, and everything would be different, and I hated it. To her credit, my mom was simply trying to re-organize things and freshen the room up, but that didn't affect how I felt about the change.

Ritual and familiarity are immensely comforting to me (it's exactly these elements that are part of why Catholicism remains such a refuge for me).

Surprises, on the other hand, are hit or miss--and more often the latter than the former.

Most people I know love surprises. Surprises make me nervous. Even when I like what the surprise is, that doesn't often act as enough of a mitigating force in relationship to the unsettling process of being surprised.

I know, I know, this makes me kind of boring. Sometimes really boring, in fact. I've been working on being more open to surprises and spontaneity--slowly, but surely.

This summer, one way in which this took form was a trip to Boise, Idaho.


Boise isn't exactly on most people's top five vacation destinations, but I had a wonderfully good time there. It's been the highlight of my summer so far, and a trip I know I'll remember for some time to come.

It's certainly helped me gain a new perspective on surprises and spontaneity.

Armistead Maupin, Michael Tolliver Lives

Back when I was coming out in the early 90’s, I found community online through IRC (internet relay chat for you youngins who aren’t familiar with the precursor of IM). Of course, like many other budding young queers who felt isolated and alone, I found solace in reading books about others like me, and devoured them as fast as I could.

One of the things my IRC community supplied me with were titles of must-read books for queers. I still own every single one of those books today, and look forward to the day when I’ll have a library of my own with all my books (and I do mean ALL of them) out on display in bookcases, instead of safely tucked away in carefully inventoried banker’s boxes as they are now.

Among the authors/books initially recommended to me were Rita Mae Brown (Six of One), Jeanette Winterson (Sexing the Cherry, Oranges are not the Only Fruit), Patricia Nell Warren (The Front Runner), Radclyffe Hall (The Well of Loneliness), and Armistead Maupin (Tales of the City).

When I saw Maupin’s recent publication, Michael Tolliver Lives, I was transported to those early college days in California—riding my bike from my dorm in Irvine to Laguna Beach, where I would pick up a new book at Different Drummer (the then lesbian-owned, independent bookstore) and then spend the rest of the day reading on the beach. I couldn’t think of a better way to spend a weekend day (and still today, that sounds pretty damn good!).

Online reviews on Amazon were more mixed than I expected, and almost deterred me from purchasing it sight-unseen. But, since I was shopping with “free” money in the form of a gift certificate my boss gave me, I decided to take the chance.

I can’t say how glad I am I did.

Despite some reviewers’ unwillingness to accept Michael Tolliver Lives as a stand-alone novel as opposed to a continuation of Maupin’s Tales of the City, and their disappointment with it in that context, I found it to be a very satisfying read and am proud to have it as an addition to my collection.

At the same time that it was a comforting familiarity to read about Michael Tolliver, it was also interesting to see him in different contexts than 28 Barbary Lane. I appreciated that Maupin took us on a journey into his life decades later to contemporary day, complete with acknowledgements of how things have changed (or not changed) with time.

I especially appreciated Maupin’s addressing the issue of FTM gay male sex and sexuality. While no one fictional character (or even real-life individual) could ever represent the wide diversity of men who were assigned female at birth, it was nice to see the issue raised, not only in Maupin’s character of Jake, but also in including a reference to real-life FTM porn star Buck Angel.

As he acknowledges in his video, “Hey, Buck #1” he certainly isn’t heralded as a role model by transmen everywhere, but I’m sure that he certainly is by some.

(Transmasculine sexuality is something I’d definitely love to discuss more, maybe more posts on this later.)

Another element about Michael Tolliver Lives that I really liked was the different ways in which “family” was played out.

And, of course, I’m a sucker for the sappy romantic moments of the book, showing love in a variety of ways.

As usual, my favorite passages:

Maupin, Armistead. Michael Tolliver Lives. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007.

(201) This was all I needed for my heart to swell: a plan for the future, the promise of new memories, one more shot at the pipe dream of forever.

(206) “It’s good to be a tourist,” Anna said at last. “We joke about them, but it’s quite a worthwhile thing. To…appreciate…deliberately.”

(208-209) “You know. It’s mostly the unspoken things that always [end page 208] cause trouble later. They find their way out of us one way or the other.”

Unlearning

Just got this from a friend and had to share, because it's too damn true not to spread the word...(although I did take poetic license along with some Photoshop editing to make it genderqueer and trans-friendly!)



More on unlearning later...

Dan Savage, The Commitment

I was spending a leisurely weekday afternoon with a friend in Dupont Circle earlier this summer when he suggested we head to Lambda Rising. Being the book-hound that I am, I was more than happy to oblige (although if he twisted my arm, I would have liked that, too!)

Despite the number of books that we have shared with one another in our time as friends, up to that point we had never gone to a bookstore together. It’s not as small as some bookstores I’ve been to, but I’ve certainly been to larger as well (one thing I miss about not having visited San Francisco in the past year is my usual sojourn to A Different Light bookstore).

In any case, Dan Savage’s book The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family caught his eye (as did another text, which for the sake of privacy will remain nameless here). Sufficed to say, he went home with that latter text, while I went home with The Commitment. (I figured I could read it and then pass it on.)

I wasn’t really sure what about The Commitment caught his eye, he wasn’t actually familiar with Dan Savage, and had never even read a “Savage Love” column before. Still, something pulled him to the book, and brought it into my/our lives.

I certainly don’t think I would have picked it from the shelves myself—there’s been so much same-sex marriage talk of late that I’ve been feeling burned out on the topic (especially since so many conversations about it just don’t seem to reflect half the nuances I think are involved). In the end, though, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much the book has gotten me thinking...

Non-monogamy, promises, actions, negotiating in order to make a life together, politics, family, religion, tradition, and of course, CAKE—these are just some of the rich fillings in The Commitment. There is so much in this book, in fact, that I still haven’t been able to really get a grasp of the thing as a whole. In the mean time, thought I’d share some of my favorite passages:

Savage, Dan. The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family. New York: Plume, 2006.

(49) When your life is going along nicely, when things are looking good, the correct posture to assume is one of gratitude, absent of any hint that you expect your good fortune to last.

(58) “Leave space in your relationships so the angels have room to play.”

(63) “Everyone told me I was a dumb fuck and they were right, you know. I am a dumb fuck. But it was something I did [got a tattoo of a woman’s name] when I loved somebody, so I’m not ashamed of it. I don’t regret it. It was a good time in my life, and I like to be reminded of it.”

(65-66) “Well, sure. That emotional and physical response must have some basis or the myth would not have come into being. By ‘myth’ I don’t mean ‘lie,’ I mean a story a culture uses to explain itself to itself. At the same time, this myth of true love, of this other half that completes you, it’s only in the last couple of centuries that the marriage [end page 65] contract and the completion of the self with another have become one and the same thing. For the ancient Greeks, it was often a boy, or another male, that was your other half. But men didn’t marry boys. The other half was about romantic love, and marriage wasn’t a romance. Until modern times, marriage was an economic contract.”

(129) Children are conservative inasmuch as they require stability in order to feel secure and therefore generally prefer things to stay the same. They need ritual and familiarity. One of the most underrated virtues—one I’d like to see virtuecrats promote to parents everywhere, and a virtue many homos have a problem with—is constancy.

(134) When people have to pretend that they find no one else attractive, they have to suppress a large part of their sex drive, and that means suppressing (unconsciously, sure, but definitely) their sexual feelings about their partner.

(137) It’s impossible for two people to be all things to each other sexually, and the expectation that two people must be all things to each other sexually—that they should never find another person attractive or act on that attraction—does a great deal of harm…If we want to promote stable, lasting relationships—particularly for all those naturally conservative kids out there—we shouldn’t encourage people to have unrealistic expectations about sex, love, and desire.

(140-141) “It’s not enough to make a commitment,” the room murmured. “People won’t take your commitment seriously if you just run down to city hall or fly off to [end page 140] Vegas. If you want people to take your relationship seriously, if you want them to believe you’re really in love, then you need to marry in the presence of Gay, friends, family, ministers, caterers, waiters, banquet hall managers, bakers, bartenders, disc jockeys, jewelers, florists, wedding consultants, limo drivers, photographers, videographers, and Web designers. Oh, and ice sculptors—don’t forget the ice sculptors.”

(145-146) Nontraditional weddings can never really free themselves from the specter of a traditional wedding. When straight couples promise to “love and honor” each other, everyone in the pews immediately things, “Hey, they dropped ‘obey.’” If the bride walks down the aisle in a hula skirt, it only draws attention to the fact that she opted not to wear a traditional wedding gown. The sole measure of a nontraditional wedding cake is its distance from a traditional wedding cake, and to calculate that distance, you have to call up a mental image of a traditional wedding cake. So [end page 145] powerful are wedding rituals and symbols that even their absence evokes them!

(147) So we can have our weddings and our dignity, too, but only if we mock the traditions we want to borrow?
Precisely.

(195) There has to be a cake. I want cake. I require cake.

(213) I’m probably not doing Terry’s position justice—he’ll have to write his own book if he wants to see his point of view accurately portrayed.

(241) For children, promises are a deadly serious business because it’s all they really have. They don’t own anything, they don’t control anything. The promises their parents make them are all they’ve got. And while no parent can keep every promise he makes—no child can either—your credibility as a parent rests on a promises-kept-to-promises-broken ranking that your child carries around in his head. Keep more than you break, and you’re a parent in good standing. Break more than you keep and you’re in trouble.

(243) “Jerry and I didn’t have to get married either. We both knew the downside,” Mom said. “We were both divorced after long marriages, and despite the trauma, we both learned to trust again, and that was very difficult. It wasn’t easy to say ‘I trust you’ after what we had been through, believe me. We really knew what it meant the second time around. It felt risky and we didn’t want to look foolish. We had to trust each other and that was hard. And trust is what marriage really means.”

Gratitude

When your life is going along nicely, when things are looking good, the correct posture to assume is one of gratitude, absent of any hint that you expect your good fortune to last.

(Savage, Dan. The Commitment. New York: Plume, 2006. 49)

Along with forgiveness, gratitude is another Christian value that I've been working to better emulate. Especially now because my life is going along very nicely right now, and things are looking very good, but hopefully always, too.

I was traveling earlier in the month and wasn't able to go to my usual service held by Dignity Washington, and then last week went to a DC Area Transmasculine Society (DCATS) meeting and missed my Dignity service once again. I did, however, get to the 9am Metropolitan Community Church service in DC, where I pleasantly ran into a couple of folks who made me feel welcomed and part of the community.

Clearly, forgivenss and gratitude are not Christian values exclusively, and going to church certainly isn't necessary to practice forgiveness and gratitude; Catholicism, however, is precisely the way in which I have been moving towards them both. It's been a great journey so far...

Thanks to Savage for reminding me of the importance of gratitude.

Room to play

Leave space in your relationships so the angels have room to play.

(Dan Savage, The Commitment. New York: Plume, 2006. 58)

I just finished reading Savage's book, The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family, and it has certainly has my thoughts going. So much so, in fact, that I need some time to properly mull over all the swirling thoughts and feelings. In the mean time, though, thought I'd share one of the quotations that resonated with me.

Taking a Stand (epigraph 1)

Maybe we have to take a stand. Maybe that’s what it means to get involved in politics. You have to declare. You have to talk about what people should do.

(Robinson, Kim Stanley. Fifty Degrees Below. New York: Random House, 2005. 249)

I picked up this postcard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum some time ago. Between my recent visit to the Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial and coming across this quotation in Fifty Degrees Below, now felt like just the right time to share it.

I hope that I remember to take away from this all that it's not enough to "think" or "feel" a certain way if those are accompanied by ACTION. As The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force says, "ACTION is HOT." But really, it's more than just that, it's the only thing that can bring about change.

Bent Objects

Blogger highlighted "Bent Objects" as a "Blog of Note" today, and I was so amused, I wanted to share...

People who read, rock!

I’ve always appreciated being in the company of other “readers.” Perhaps not surprisingly, working at Starbucks gives me regular contact with such folks, sometimes in the form of fellow co-workers (or partners, as we’re called), but more often than not, in the form of customers.

I can’t recall what exactly I was talking about with one customer in particular, but the conversation ended with her passing along to me a copy of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel, Forty Signs of Rain. It’s the first in a trilogy of books about the fallout of global warming set in Washington DC.

I’ve really enjoyed the first two books so far, and can’t wait until I get my hands on the third…

As usual, some of my favorite passages:


Robinson, Kim Stanley. Forty Signs of Rain. New York: Bantam Books, 2004.

(79) “The only things people understand are sensory,” Frank insisted. “We’re hard-wired to understand life on the savannah. Someone gives you mean, they’re your friend. Someone takes your meat, they’re your enemy. Abstract concepts like surplus value, or statistics on the value of a year’s work, these just aren’t as real as what you see and touch. People are only good at what they can think out in terms of their senses. That’s just the way we evolved.”

(109-110) Sucandra saw this and continued, “So, if curiosity is a value—a quality to be treasured—a form of contemplation, or prayer—they you must reduce suffering to reach [end 109] that state. So, in Buddhism, understanding works to reduce suffering, and by reduction of suffering gains more knowledge. Just like science.”

(265) “But, when we come to what we should do, it returns to the simplest of words. Compassion. Right action. Helping others. It always stays that simple. Reduce suffering. There is something…reassuring in this. Greatest complexity of what is, greatest simplicity in what we should do. Much preferable to the reverse situation.”

(269) There were nods, little smiles. Even that one word, often the highest expression of praise in the scientific tongue, was against type for him. He was making a fool of himself. His group expected him to conform to his persona. That was how group dynamics worked. Surprising people was an unusual thing, faintly unwelcome. Except was it? People certainly paid to be surprised; that was comedy; that was art. It could be proved by analysis. Right now he wasn’t sure of anything.

(269) The elevator door opened; Frank saw it was his floor. He got out and went to his office. He stood there in the doorway looking at all his stuff, scattered about for disposal or for packing to be mailed back west. Piles of books, periodicals, offprints, Xeroxed sheets of stapled or loose paper, folded or rolled graphs and charts and tables and spreadsheets. His exteriorized memory, the paper trail of his life. An excess of reason.

(270) He could see how this might be what Buddhists called a koan, a riddle without an answer, which if pondered long enough might cause the thinking mind to balk, and give up thinking. Give up thinking! That was crazy. And yet, in that moment, perhaps the sensory world would come pouring in. Experience of the present, unmediated by language. Unspeakable by definition. Just felt. Experienced in mentation of a different sort, languageless, or language-transcendent. Something other.

(273-274) “Frank almost ran into a woman walking the other direction, almost said, “Sorry ma’am, I’m in the midst of a paradigm shift.” He was disoriented. He saw that moving from one paradigm to the next was not like moving from one skyscraper to another, as in the diagrams he had once seen in a philosophy of [end 273] science book. It was more like being inside a kaleidoscope, where he had gotten used to the pattern, and now the tube was twisting and he was falling and every aspect of what he saw was clicking to something different, click after click: colors, patterns, everything awash. Like dying and being reborn. Altruism, compassion, simple goddamned foolishness, loyalty to people who were not loyal to you, playing the sap for the defectors to take advantage of, competition, adaptation, displaced self-interest—or else something real, a real force in the world, a kind of physical constant, like gravity, or a basic attribute of life, like the drive to propagate one’s DNA to subsequent generations. A reason for being. Something beyond DNA. A rage to live, and urge to goodness. Love. A green force, élan vital, that was a metaphysics, that was bad, but how else were you going to explain the data?

(353) Roy laughed heartily. “Dreams are so funny.”
“Yeah, but bold. So bold. Sometimes I wake up and wonder why I’m not as bold as that all the time. I mean, what have we got to lose?”

Robinson, Kim Stanley. Fifty Degrees Below. New York: Random House, 2005.

(22) If you don’t act on it, it wasn’t a true feeling.

(87-88) The thing is, he thought as he waited, nobody knows you. No one can. Even if you spent almost the entirety of every day with someone, and there were people like that—even then, no. Everyone lived alone in the end, not just in their heads but even in their physical routines. Human contacts were parcellated, to use a term from brain science or systems theory; parceled out. There were:

1. the people you lived with, if you did; that was about a hundred hours a week, half of them asleep;
2. the people you work with, that was forty hours a week, give or take;
3. the people you played with, that would be some portion of the thirty or so hours left in a week;
4. then there were the strangers you spent time with in transport, or eating out or so on. This would be added to an already full [end page 87] calendar according to Frank’s calculations so far, suggesting they were all living more hours a week than actually existed, which felt right. In any case, a normal life was split out into different groups that never met; and so no one knew you in your entirety, except you yourself.

(117) But the sad part is that the corruption doesn’t just happen to the people with power. It spreads from them. They spread it around.

(213-214) For a while they talked in a different way than they usually did, about how things felt; and they agreed that lives were not easily told to others. Frank speculated that many life stories consisted precisely of a search for a reiterated pattern, for habits. Thus, one’s set of habits was somehow unsatisfactory, and you needed to change them, and were thereby thrown into a plot, which was the hunt for new habits, or even, but exceptionally, the story of the giving up of such a hunt in favor of sticking with what you have, or remaining chaotically in the existential moment (not adaptive if reproductive [end page 213] success were the goal, he noted under his breath). Thus Frank was living a plot while Anna was living a life, and when they talked about personal matters he had news while she had the “same old same old,” which was understood by both to be the desired state, irritating and difficult though it might be to maintain.

(245-246) What was worry, after all, but a kind of fear? It was fear for the future. And in fact the future was bound to bring its share of bad things, there was no avoiding that. So worry was really a hopeless enterprise, in that it could not [end page 245] do anything. In was an anticipation of grief, a nightmare of the future. A species of fear; and she was determined not to be afraid.

(249) Maybe we have to take a stand. Maybe that’s what it means to get involved in politics. You have to declare. You have to talk about what people should do.

(287) How you think about what you’re doing makes a huge difference.

(385-386) Now he saw a frightened person. Well, he had seen that before. It was not so very unfamiliar. He had never been [end page 385] so sure of himself when he was young. When had certainty arrived? Was it not a kind of hardening of the imagination, a dulling? Had he fallen asleep as the years passed?

(448) Life was feeling one’s way toward a goal which ultimately equated to achieving and maintaining certain feelings.

(459) We love the art that tells our story.

(554) It occurred to him that maybe this was what conversation always was, two people talking to themselves in different languages, mostly in order to clarify themselves to themselves.

(602-603) Rudra shook his head. “No one can see inside you. So no matter what they see, they don’t know. Everyone only judges themself.”
“That’s not good!” Frank said. “I need someone more generous than that!”
“Ha ha. You are funny.”
“I’m serious!”
“A good thing to know, then. You are the judge. A place to start.”
Frank shuddered, rubbed his face. Cold hands, cold face; and dead behind the nose. “I don’t see how I can. I’m so different in these different situations. It’s like living multiple lives. I mean I just act the parts. People believe me. But I don’t know what I feel. I don’t know what I mean.”
“Of course. This is always true. To some you are like this, to others like that. Sometimes a spirit comes down. Voices take over inside you. People take away what they [end page 602] see, they think that is all there is. And sometimes you want to fool them in just that way. But want to or not, you fool them. And they fool you! And on it goes—everyone in their own life, everyone fooling all the others—No! It is easy to live multiple lives! What is hard is to be a whole person.”

One of the things I especially appreciate about books and music lyrics are the ways in which they are food for my own thoughts. I could use each and every one of these quotations as an epigraph to a blog post (which I will hopefully do, eventually)…

Boys at Home

So, after being on vacation for a long week, I got back into town earlier this week just in time for the 4th of July.


It was fun to be away, and I’m glad to say that it’s been almost as much fun to be back (the sign of a good vacation!).

My first morning back was the 4th, so my roommate had the day off and was relaxing at home. It was good to sit in the living room, hanging out with him and catching up on the recent dramas of our lives.

My standard line is that I probably don’t spend as much time in our house’s “common areas” or “hanging out” as he’d like. It’s totally true, I tend to be a hermit in my own corner (floor) of the house. But, having just gotten back into town, and it being a holiday and all, I was feeling in the mood to hang out. So glad I did, too—it was a blast.

And then what did we do afterwards?

Shined our shoes!

Ha, boys at home on a holiday…

Love as an action

Ran across this the other day on my Starbucks cup...

What would you do for someone you love?
Would you lie, cheat, steal?
Break the law and call it justice?
Would you say yes? Scream no?
Would you kill? Would you give up your own life?
Would you move mountains, swallow fire, keep a promise?
Would you change the world?
Would you change yourself?
What would you do for someone you love?

- Jodi Picoult
The Way I See It #214

One of the things that strikes me about this quotation is the way in which it explicitly posits love as an action.

Admittedly, in my past, I have measured my love (or lack thereof) for a person according to things I would (or would not) do for that person.

What I've done for love:

Lied
Slept less
Shared secrets
Gotten drunk
Driven more
Flown thousands of miles
Said yes
Gotten tattooed
Spent thousands of hours on the phone
Eaten less
Kept secrets
Stayed sober
Written long emails
Said no
Told the truth

But I wonder...what ever happend to love being a feeling?

(Or, is it that feelings and actions are not as separate as they might seem to be?)