Archive for April, 2001
Picket Fences
18 April 2001Quick note: Picket Fences is like one of the greatest shows of all time!
Though set in a town as seemingly homey as Springfield or Mayberry, it deals with issues more complicated than any show I’ve ever seen… issues deeper than most politicians even pretend to resolve. I wish I had been old enough to appreciate it when it was new. Reruns will do for now, though.
What the heck is Digital Rice?
18 April 2001The new host of Thom’s World, that’s what. My old free web provider started popping ads up and wanted to charge me for FTP usage, so I essentially flipped them the virtual bird and moved on. So, here we are! Same great site, different host. Enjoy!
Silenced, my ass!
18 April 2001Oh, I declare! At risk of sounding too conservative, god forbid maybe even Republican… (Anyone who knows me knows I do not conform to either major party, or any existing third party for that matter…) The sexual preference issue is really starting to annoy me! At first today, I was trying to be sympathetic. I picked up the State Press (the school paper) and the front picture was of a few protesters sitting around. The caption said that it was a group holding a “silent protest of the Memorial Union to recognize the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people who have ben silenced by hatred, oppression,” and so on. I thought of the irony of that statement. A silent protest to recognize silenced people. Is that really effective? I actually had the thought, trying to sympathize to their position, that maybe a silent protest isn’t the best way to let people be heard, and that they might want to be more vocal about it.
But, like I said, silenced my ass!
No more than two minutes later, as I was walking to my dorm, I get the wonderful pleasure of watching two guys walk up to each other and kiss. Silenced? Not here. If anything, I’d say it’s the people who disagree with the “lifestyle” who are silenced here. Silenced? Not any more than blacks are still slaves. The past eight years, in my opinion, have more than taken care of the silence. It’s not that I even really care what people want to do as long as it isn’t affecting others. The fact of the matter is that I don’t care to hear about it. It’s not my business, and the fact that they consider themselves some sort of minority doesn’t make it any more my business than a straight person’s sex life. I think society’s overemphasis of sex is to blame. When people let themselves be known so primarily for being either gay, lesbian, bi, or even straight, what kind of shallow self-description is that? I’m straight, sure. But I can think of a lot of words I’d use to describe myself before I’d use “straight”. Friendly, artistic, easy-going, individualistic, etc. And with perhaps one exception, I wouldn’t use sexual orientation to describe any of my friends, either.
Despised? By some. Frowned upon? By many. But silenced? That’s political propaganda. Many of the same people who complain of being silenced are people who try to silence others, like liberals wanting to shut up “those NRA nuts.” Silenced? My ass.
Thank God They Don’t…
17 April 2001…delete LiveJournals after two months of inactivity. Actually about ten weeks. Ok, seventy-one days. 1,706 hours… 102,340 minutes… Well, now it seems obvious I don’t have anything to write about.
But that’s not true.
In the past month, I’ve to some degree or another gotten in touch with every good friend I’ve made since moving to Arizona. So, I’ve been realizing through some of these old memories that I follow an explicit pattern that I’d only implicitly realized in the past. I really am the “Friend”. I knew that. But what I hadn’t realized is that I was only the friend for someone when they needed the support, in tragic or confusing times, and after their recovery the friendship would… not really deteriorate, that implies negativity… they would dissolve.
I don’t blame my old friends. Well, not completely. Some of them did seem more than able to forget about me. I know at least one of them, though, just lost touch because of circumstance. (Yeah, Kaleena, that would be my moving out of the complex.) And for all of them, I think I was just as much at blame. I wouldn’t really forget about them, but I would let them move on. I guess because at the point they reached I felt I’d only hold them back. But, regardless, I need to rethink my long-term friendship idea or something.
Oh, and then Danté pissed me off tonight. Essentially he has been letting some really foolish ideas linger in his head, and I decided tonight to try to help him make sense of the stuff. Of course, though, he has to get all defensive and take my advice as criticism or insult. He just wants me to support whatever he thinks is right. Well, I’m not going to do that, and the jackass knows I’m not. I thought he’d grown to appreciate that as a quality of mine as a friend, but I guess not… I guess the few incidents of my successful advice-giving were just a result of being too lax at other times. So tonight, I just decided not to back down. When he started pulling the “I just need a friend who’ll bla-bla-bla and you’re not it” I turned right around and told him that he was a lousy friend. He tried getting all defensive like saying “Well, at least I’m not heartless” or something, so I pointed out an example of his own pitiful, shallow, hedonistic, and… yes, sometimes even heartless… friendship qualities. Well, he didn’t seem to like that, and he gave the totally wrong response, one that insulted not only me but also my best friend… Yes, Danté, my best friend, which you no longer are… Even if you didn’t piss me off, I don’t have enough respect to consider you my best friend anymore. And news flash, you lost that a long time ago… So, when he did that, I told him off, and logged out. He’s blocked now, and will be for quite some time at least. In fact, I’m not even going to bother. If he wants any shot at redeeming himself, he’ll have to make the effort.
So anyhow, once again, my outlook on friendships challenged. I used to think friendships were blessings because they were without BS. The past couple of weeks, and especially the past… oh… night have shown me just how chock full of BS they can be.
But I still have faith. I know they aren’t always like that. After Danté’s crap, I talked to Jeanette for a long time… she’s the best friend… And she in all honesty was more pissed about his crap than I was. I was flustered, but she was enraged. Thus, we ended up getting in at least an hour-long talk, probably more. She said things I disagreed with, and I said some she didn’t agree to either, but most of what was said made too much sense. How I allow my friendships to be too one-sided, essentially. And I realize it; it’s just that I almost do it out of habit, from having it be that way so often. But in the conversation itself, I kinda found proof to the contrary. I know our friendship isn’t flawless. I think too much like a guy for that. And there’s so many small circumstances of the past that complication. But tonight there was definitely a good example of friendship. There she was, telling me stuff I probably didn’t want to hear, but needed to. Doing the exact same thing I’d done for Danté, or more importantly, had done for her in the past. Reciprocation. Haven’t really felt that in two years at least (credit to you again, Kaleena), and have probably never felt reciprocation on an even level. It isn’t a matter of demanding another’s effort, right? Just an acknowledgement that reciprocity is an important part of friendship. And not even give-and-take; that’s too shallow. Jeez, it’s like my old bandmate Dan Wenzel once told me, even though I thought it was stupid at the time… Relationships aren’t a 50/50 deal, they’re 100/100, both parties committed all the way, no strings attached. He was talking about romantic relationships, but I see now that it is not only true for that but for an ideal friendship as well. Reciprocity. All right.
Wow, I’ve been typing for over nearly 3/4 hour… 41 minutes… 2460 seconds…. Well, if I want to get more specific, I have to go metric, so I guess I’ll stop. :-) Ooh, look at the time, it’s been, 2520 seconds.