52 posts tagged “jay”

1. I like blackberry cobbler.
2. I'm proud to be from Oklahoma.
3. When I was a kid, my favorite color was purple. Now yellow is.
4. I've never been to Europe.
5. I collect pottery.
6. New Orleans is still my favorite city.
7. My all-time favorite album is Jimmie Dale Gilmore's Braver Newer World.
8. Jody and George were my imaginary childhood friends.
9. I saw Tina Turner at my first "grown-up" concert.
10. I know more about the Eleventh Amendment than you think I do.
11. My grandfathers outlived my grandmothers.
12. My father wrecked my first car, a Dodge Aspen, before I ever even got to drive it. (When he told me, I thought he was joking.)
13. I vividly recall a childhood nightmare about a giant spider in the living room. I rarely remember dreams now.
14. A Merchant-Ivory film, A Room with a View, changed my life.
15. At 21, I was diagnosed with an ulcer.
16. As a kid, I approved of the designated hitter rule; now that I've lived in a National League city for awhile, I'm not so sure.
17. I stretch every day. If I don't, my body punishes me.
18. I think Babbitt is the most underrated American novel of the 20th century. (Kids should be reading it in high school.)
19. I wish that I'd met Allen Ginsberg.
20. I wish I understood e.e. cummings's poetry better.
21. I'd much rather be hot than cold. (In other words, I'll take Florida over Michigan any day.)
22. I'm in love with being in love.
23. My lucky number is 23.
24. I've never been to an opera.
25. If I were an artist, my work would be influenced by Donald Judd and Morris Louis.
26. Nothing turns me off like too much ego.
27. I financed most of my undergraduate education by winning a scholarship exam about Oklahoma history. (Thanks, Oklahoma Heritage Association.)
28. I like magnolia trees.
29. If I weren't in my current profession, I think I'd like to be either an actor or a social studies teacher. (Is that an odd either/or combo or what?)
30. Tulips are my favorite flowers.
31. For my money, The Mary Tyler Moore Show is the best television show ever.
32. I like game shows more than just about any other television genre. (Match Game is my all-time fave.)
33. Asparagus is my favorite vegetable.
34. I'm passionate about lemons.
35. I'd be a captain more like Picard than Kirk. I like Janeway, too.
36. I'm awful about returning email and telephone calls in a timely fashion. Sorry!
37. My dream vacation is to visit Paris for the French Open and then London for Wimbledon. (Maybe I could spend the two weeks between the tournaments in Madrid or Belgium?)
38. At the right university, I might've majored in Canadian Studies.
39. The worst thing that ever happened to me is having my heart broken.
40. I'd make a great judge, but I'll probably never have the chance to prove it.
41. I'm obsessed with the Olympic Games.
42. I was the editor of my high school's newspaper. While in high school, I was a stringer for the local daily, too.
43. After high school, I decided I wasn't outgoing enough to be a good journalist.
44. I get bored easily. (That probably means I'm boring.)
45. If it's not A Room with a View (see #14), Short Cuts is my favorite movie of all time.
46. Even after years of living here, I don't feel like I "belong" in Pennsylvania. And I doubt I ever will.
47. When I was a kid, I was sure I'd find a way to live in Washington, D.C.
48. I like Japanese restaurants.
49. Nothing makes me feel cleaner than having a new, short haircut and freshly trimmed fingernails.
50. I'm afraid of dentists and car salesmen.
51. I've only been in love three times, and I'm not entirely sure one of those should "count."
52. I sort of wish I'd been the punter on my high school's football team.
53. I've never been sexually attracted—even in the least bit—to a woman. (Women are great, of course. I just don't want to sleep with them.)
54. I still have a picture of my ex on my desk at work. (After I wrote this, I put the photo in a drawer.)
55. I don't own a car.
56. One of the first men I had a crush on was tennis superstar Björn Borg. (Later tennis crushes: Boris Becker, Pete Sampras, Albert Costa.)
57. If you're a man with a build like a linebacker, I've probably got a crush on you right now.
58. I'm a Unitarian Universalist (with Humanist, Buddhist, and non-theistic tendencies).
59. I don't have a favorite TV show right now. (Do you?)
60. My 80GB iPod is currently over three-quarters full.
61. Loneliness is something I've struggled with, off and on, since childhood.
62. When I was a kid, I got Sparky Lyle's autograph. (And Crazy Ray's, too.)
63. Two of my best vacations were road trips to Yellowstone National Park.
64. I wonder if you really got the Dorothy Parker reference.
65. When I finally got the Tennis Channel, I did a little dance right there in my apartment.
66. I think I'd like presiding at weddings.
67. If it were track or field instead of track and field, I'd choose field every time. (Hammer throwers are sexy!)
68. I really like diner food. Who wants to split the corned beef hash?
69. I'm attracted to hairy men.
70. In my opinion, Talking Heads was the best rock band ever.
71. The last three plays to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama were Doubt, Rabbit Hole, and August: Osage County, and I saw each one of them on Broadway.
72. As a kid, I read everything I could find about the Faroe Islands.
73. I'm shy around strangers. Sometimes, I even wonder whether I have social anxiety disorder.
74. On the SAT, I scored much better on the math than the verbal section. (So, naturally, I write and edit for a living now.)
75. I wrote a master's thesis on sports sociology. (And I later went back to school for more Sports Studies. Why, oh, why don't I work for the Phillies?)
76. I'd give just about anything for a good massage.
77. I procrastinate.
78. I got the worst sunburn of my life when I was parasailing in Acapulco Harbor.
79. I'm not at all interested in having children.
80. I'm an enormous fan of my mom's pies, especially her coconut cream and lemon meringue pies.
81. I'm concerned you'll think this list is pretty darn self-indulgent.
82. Are you surprised I've made it to No. 82 without mentioning beer? I am.
83. Belgian and Belgian-style beers, particularly Lambic beers, are my favorites.
84. I've never been to New England.
85. I subscribe to more magazines than a person with a full-time job could possibly read.
86. My favorite Iron Chef is Michael Symon.
87. Ice cream usually upsets my stomach. (Sexy, huh?)
88. I enjoy rodeo, particularly steer wrestling.
89. I see Independence Hall nearly every day.
90. I'm interested in vexillology.
91. As a child, I was very, very good at checkers.
92. After 10-plus years of commuting, I still smile when a train—wow, a passenger train!—pulls up to my station each morning.
93. The worst neighbors I ever had (a) exposed me to bedbugs, (b) refused to cooperate with the exterminator, and (c) never said they were sorry. Hmph.
94. According to the Myers-Briggs instrument, I'm an INTP.
95. I'm not wild about peaches.
96. Hot, not merely warm, water is essential for my morning shower.
97. I haven't been camping since I was a child.
98. Jason Bateman could play me in the movie.
99. I once was offered a job in Palau.  I said no.
100. It has literally taken me months and months to think of these 100 things.

What caught my attention this week? 

• Shaving is something I just don't do very well.  My dad never taught me how to use a straight (hmm) razor.  And when I've tried on my own, I've left the bathroom bloodied and bandaged.  I surrendered long ago to the electric razor and the imperfect results it provides.  So this Philadelphia Inquirer article on shaving as "the new hot skin-care market" caught my eye.  And having read it, I think I'll be scheduling an appointment soon at Shaving Grace Barbers:
  
  

  "Most guys don't prepare their face at all," said Michael Sgarra, a co-owner and barber at Shaving Grace in Exton, which offers beer on tap, a pool table, and professional shaves and haircuts (way more than two bits.) "Some are dry-shaving in the shower. Some just use soap. It's pretty horrible."

  At Sgarra's shop, the process begins with a series of hot towels to open the pores and soften the hair. Then they put on a pre-shave oil, another series of hot towels, hot foam and shave twice."

  Shaving Grace sounds like the best place on Earth.  Beer, pool, and getting a shave?  I'm in.  And according to Shaving Grace's website, I can even get a massage there.
  
  
• This isn't entirely shocking for me, but a NYT article notes that same-sex relationships are more egalitarian than opposite-sex relationships.  Notably, "[t]he egalitarian nature of same-sex relationships appears to spill over into how those couples resolve conflict....  [According to one study, same-sex couples] tended to fight more fairly than heterosexual couples, making fewer verbal attacks and more of an effort to defuse the confrontation."  Also, belligerence and domineering were less common in same-sex relationships.
  
  Cool!  Now just exactly how do I get myself one of those relationships?!
  
  
• What a great gig!  Peter Meehan, who usually writes the "$25 and Under" reviews for the NYT's Dining Section, traveled to 12 ballparks around the country to sample the food.  And it sounds like a lot of it was pretty darn good.  Meehan really liked the offerings at our very own Citizens Bank Park, especially Chickie & Pete’s crab fries, already my favorite; Tony Luke's roasted pork; and the Schmitter—a sandwich built with cheese, salami, cheese, beef, and more cheese.  I have to remember to get a Schmitter at some point this season....
  
  And if I'm ever in Seattle's Safeco Field, I'm going to have an Ichiroll, a spicy tuna roll named (duh) after the veteran centerfielder.
  
  
• This week, I particularly enjoyed Sushicam's photographs of a commuter train and some big fish.  And Daily Dose of Imagery showed us the smart, apt advertising used on the streets by Toronto's World Wild Short Film Festival.  Ha!
  
  
• And, of course, it makes sense to end with A Cheese Map of Canada.  Enjoy.

Gosh, it's been awhile since I posted. I need to do better. But I've been busy with the usual things—work [insert eye roll here], Phillies games, beer, rooting my Fly-boys into the next round of the NHL playoffs, and spending way, way, way too many hours working on [dang, this is kind of embarrassing] my fantasy tennis games.

On Tuesday, I caught my second game of the baseball season from my perch in Citizens Bank Park's Section 211, accompanied this time by a different co-worker. Yes, the plan to use my season tickets as a man trap is still a work-in-progress. Instead, I keep inviting colleagues—men, mostly straight, who are sports fans but not a single one who's likely to evolve into the beer-drinking, baseball-addicted boy toy of my dreams. It is good to spend time at the ballpark with a friend, though. And since it's not a date, I don't have to worry too much about how my hair looks.... [That was a joke. Really.]

Anyway, Tuesday night's game was a chilly affair, but the hometown fans who stuck it out were rewarded with an almost unbelievable, come-from-behind victory in the bottom of the ninth. Trailing 3-0 to the Astros, the Phils strung together a comeback with an improbable home run from a just-added player; a hit batsman; a homer from hunky [see, it's always gay when I'm at the ballpark] Pat Burrell; a stolen first base after a strikeout by Geoff Jenkins; and a probably unwise trip home by Jenkins, who missed the third base coach's stop sign after Pedro Feliz's game-winning double. Wow. After all that, the teeth-chattering I'd suffered for the last half of the game suddenly didn't matter so much.

Yesterday afternoon, I was back at the ballpark, catching my first Phillies-Mets game of the season. I met yet another colleague [this one gay, if not at all a likely candidate for the man trap]. It was a gorgeous day for a game, springlike and sunny, and I even broken open the sunscreen for the first time this year. The Phillies' offense was pretty lackluster, though. Half the team, it seems, is injured. And Chase Utley, who went two-for-four and homered, just can't carry the whole team. The Evil Mets won, 4-2. Bummer, huh?

What else did I do this week? Well, there was some beer—not all of it at the ballpark. [<Digression>The beer selection at the ballpark is better than you'd think, but it's not superb. I usually stick to Victory's HopDevil. I normally rail against hops-heavy American craft beers, but HopDevil is good—and it's one of the best things I'm going to find at Citizens Bank Park.</Digression>] On Monday night, I was at another beer-tasting at Tria's Fermentation School. The session was devoted to La Trappe Brewery, one of the seven remaining Trappist breweries in the world and the only one in the Netherlands. [The rest are in Belgium, of course.] In the States, La Trappe beers are sold as Koningshoeven beers for reasons attributable to church politics.... I was smitten with the Koningshoeven Bock, the Koningshoeven Tripel, and the Koningshoeven Quadrupel—which was my favorite of the night, all caramel and goodness. I was also smitten with one of the brewers [not a monk, Mom!], Gijs Swinkels, but even the slightly buzzed me recognized the futility of making a pass at a straight man from another continent.

So that's pretty much what I've been spending my time on. Baseball and beer. And, well, perfecting my entries in Tennis Channel and ATP fantasy games. [Hmmm, this could explain why I'm still single.] My picks for this week's U.S. Men's Clay Court Championship were, I thought, stunningly good. I even correctly put the way unheralded Marcel Granollers Pujol into the final on my bracket. [I did not have him upsetting James Blake to take the title, however.] And despite this prescience, I still only barely finished in the Top 200 [190th out of 1733 entries]. How good do I have to be, anyway?

And do I have to be that good to get a date, too?

A few months ago, I hatched a plan to, well, trap myself a man. The plan was to buy season tickets to Something or Other—and invite dashing, eligible men to go with me. That way, I'd have an "excuse" to ask them out ("hey, I have this extra ticket that's going to waste"), and I'd be hanging out with guys with similar interests.

I didn't get my act together early enough to buy more than a handful of Flyers tickets, but I'm now the proud owner of a pair of tickets to 17 Phillies games this year. Actually, I'm now the owner of tickets to 16 games, as I used the first pair last Thursday (for an exciting, if chilly, come-from-behind victory over the Nationals). If you're looking for me, that's me in Section 211, hoping, desperately, that no one too tall will be sitting in Row 5, Seat 6, directly in my line of sight.

So now comes the hard part. How do I actually use this Man Trap? To meet men, I mean. I really don't have a clue.

So far, I've been inviting dashing, eligible—but presumptively straight—men to hang out with me. I'm asking friends, or acquaintances, and that's really not the point of the Man Trap. For Friday night's Flyers game, for instance, I asked a former colleague. True, I've had a crush on him since about 15 minutes after we met, but surely I'd know by now if he might be interested in me. And for my first Phillies game of the season, I asked an absolutely cool current colleague. (P.S. If either of these men is not 100% straight, please let me know. ASAP.)

Now, of course, I had fun hanging out with these guys. They're friends, after all. And I suppose I should just be happy to have good friends to hang out with. It's better than sitting home alone. Or going everywhere by myself.

I just haven't figured out how to meet dashing, eligible, gay men who might be interested in Flyers or Phillies games, or avant garde music, or bluegrass music, or any of the other events I'm likely carrying tickets for these days. Do I take out a personals ad, highlighting my Phillies fandom? I'm already on all the usual gay dating sites, and that hasn't gotten me anywhere. My friends aren't any help, either. Doesn't anybody fix their friends up anymore? Because, God knows, I obviously need the help.

Now that I have the bait, I don't know where to set the Man Trap.

Aargh.

About three-and-a-half years ago, I followed Larry Lessig's lead and declared email bankruptcy. I'd gotten so far behind on my email that I couldn't see any way out. Unless I spent a two-week vacation getting caught up, those emails just weren't going to get answered. What I needed was a fresh start. So I put up a little note on the, er, then-blog and announced—apologetically, of course—that if I hadn't already responded to an email, I wasn't going to. It was about self-preservation. It had to be done.

I'm going to try a variation of that now, and I hope you'll let me get away with it. Obviously, I haven't blogged here since November. There's no particularly good reason for that. At first, I didn't have much to say. Then I was busy. Then I took a vacation in Las Vegas (for the National Finals Rodeo). Then it was the holidays. And then and then and then.

At some point, I didn't know how I was going to get the blog caught up. I had all these things to blog about—events I'd attended, people I'd met, exotic beer I'd drunk—but I didn't know how I'd find the time to actually do the writing. I needed to just admit that I was in too deep and start over. It took me awhile to concede that, but I'm at peace with it now.

So, I'm hereby declaring blog bankruptcy. I haven't written here since November, and now it's March. There's no good way to get you caught up, and I'm not really going to try. I need a fresh start.

The first thing I'm going to do is purge my desk of the dozens of pieces of paper I deposited in a pile—in a "to do" pile—as little reminders to blog. The November 20 ticket from the Youssou N'Dour concert at the Kimmel Center? I'm throwing it away right now. I had fun that night, but I just can't tell you about it now. I saw a group called So Percussion at the Kimmel, too, but I won't be blogging about that, either. The same goes for at least three Flyers games (November 15, November 23, and February 9). I'm throwing those tickets away at this very instant. The same goes for my ticket to the 2007 iteration of Terror Behind the Walls, the Halloween show put on at Philly's Eastern State Penitentiary. And my receipt for a November 16 trip to World Cafe Live to see The Gourds? I won't be saying more than that I had fun. My trip to New York last month to see the Kronos Quartet at Carnegie Hall? Well, I went, ok?

What else is in the pile? Well, I guess I can give you a very short tour. Apparently, I wanted to tell you about my visit to Las Vegas's Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, right there at the Venetian Resort-Hotel-Casino, for its "Modern Masters" exhibit. (Short report: Weird.) At about the same time, I was probably going to blog about the 2007 National Finals Rodeo, my stay at the beautiful Mandalay Bay Hotel & Casino (especially getting cruised, oh, so mightily, in the hotel spa), and meeting a handsome man at a hotel bar.

And, of course, I've still been investigating beer. It looks like I've got eight scraps of paper here from various beer and cheese tastings at Tria's Fermentation School. Wow! What did I like at those events? Who can remember now? My notes do seem to contain the names of a lot of Belgian beers: Cantillon's Broucsella 1900 Grand Cru; Duvel; the champagne-y Deus from Brouwerij Bosteels; Hanssens Kriek; an Imperial stout, Brasserie des Legendes Hercule Stout; St. Bernardus Abt 12, a delicious quadrupel; another Cantillon beer, the Cuvée des Champions 2003-2004 ; and a Flemish sour, Duchesse de Bourgogne. I even liked an Italian(!) craft beer, Birrificio Barley's BB10, which my notes suggest is a hoppy, molasses-y barleywine. Yum.

According to these beer-soaked notes, I also liked several cheeses: Beaufort d'Alpage, which I described as a sort of King of the Gruyéres; a fresh goat cheese from Westfield Farm; an aged goat cheese, Bittersweet Plantation Dairy's Evangeline; and Split Creek's Marinated Feta, yet another goat cheese.

Tria even turned me onto a wine, the 2004 Muscat de Rivesaltes from Clos des Camuzeilles, but I don't have time anymore to explain why. So be it.

So that's all the blog's getting about my last few months. I'm sure I'll return once in awhile to something that occurred in the fall and winter of 2007-08.... But I make no promises. I need a fresh start. From this point on, I'm looking to the future.

What a relief!

Whew.

The Ex and I separated in October 2004. I haven't written much about him here, and that probably seems odd. It seems odd to me. After all, we were together for six-and-a-half years. Plus, I've posted repeatedly about the Soulmate-Who-Got-Away (SWGA), the man I fell for twice—once before I ever met the Ex and once after our separation.

But SWGA is probably the man I'll always think of as the love of my life. He's been the "problem" I needed to resolve for the past couple of years, so I've written about him. I haven't had the same need to write about the Ex, I guess.

That said, I absolutely loved the Ex, too. (And I still do.) It was a different kind of love, of course—a more adult, less dizzying kind of love. When I was with SWGA, I always felt like I was under the influence of some powerful chemical. With the Ex, it seemed like we'd used our brains and decided to be together. Unfortunately, it just didn't always seem like we'd necessarily made a good decision....

Anyway, a year ago this past Wednesday (yup, on Halloween), the Ex got married. To a woman. I passed through some of the usual your-ex-is-moving-on feelings when he told me. I was jealous that he'd found someone else, and so easily. I was miffed that I hadn't found someone else. I knew it meant he'd never play a large role in my life again. Ever.

I also passed through some fairly unusual your-ex-is-moving-on feelings. Was the Ex straight? Had he been straight when we were together? Had I been an experiment? Did his new life cast our six-plus years in a different light?

I eventually got a grip, though. Although the Ex had self-identified as gay when we met, I knew he'd dated women—and not all that long ago. So he probably wasn't 100% gay. But he definitely wasn't 100% straight, either. When I really thought about our time together, I knew we'd had something. I knew he'd been attracted to me. I knew he'd loved me. I was no experiment.

I wasn't invited to the wedding, and I definitely wouldn't have wanted to go. The Ex and I were right, I suppose, to separate. But it just made no sense to me that he'd moved on so quickly. And I certainly didn't think he should spend the rest of his life as a straight man. I hoped he hadn't trapped himself in a miserable life. I wanted him to be happy, but I just didn't see how this marriage would work for a lifetime.

A year later, I feel pretty much the same.

When I think about the Ex's wedding—and I guess I'll think about it every Halloween now—I think of "Your Sister Cried," a song written by Fred Eaglesmith (and covered beautifully by Mary Gauthier). I follow along with the song, imagining that I went to the Halloween wedding, with the Ex's sister, both of us knowing that something terribly wrong had happened:

Well, I stared out of the windshield into the rain so light
And I turned on my dims, and somebody flashed me their brights
And I reached over and turned the radio way down low
Your sister cried all the way home

Lightning crashed, and the road shone like a mirror
A dog came out of the ditch, then he disappeared
And I remembered a conversation we once had on the phone
Your sister cried all the way home

I'll never know how you got into such a mess
Why do the bridesmaids all have to wear the same dress?
Everybody said you looked real good
But I think you looked stoned

Your sister cried all the way home
Your sister cried all the way home
Your sister cried all the way home
Your sister cried all the way home

Tonight, I miss the Ex.

I've been sick for several days now—since Thursday, I guess. And I know what to blame: autumn. I get sick about this time every year. Actually, I usually get sick a couple of weeks earlier, but autumn started out pretty warm this year in Philly. I've finally succumbed. I've got the congestion, the sore throat, the fever and chills, the all-out exhaustion. Egad.

So, no, I'm not a fan of autumn. You shouldn't be, either.

My October illness isn't my only tradition for early autumn. Another tradition is that I reprint the grumpy memo to autumn that I first wrote several years ago. It pretty much sums up what I'm thinking today.

TO: Autumn Lovers
FROM: Jay
RE: Getting (you) in touch with reality
DATE: October 30, 2007

It has come to my attention that many of you claim that autumn is the best time of year. Every day, it seems, I hear co-workers or fellow commuters saying that autumn is their favorite season. A common theme of your comments is that you thrilled to summer as a kid but that you love fall more and more as you get older. You go on and on about football, the new chill in the air, the yellows and the rusts in the leaves, and Thanksgiving.

I want to call your attention to some other things, though. There’s that tickle in the back of your throat. The way you’re so congested that you can only breathe through your open mouth. There’s that cough that makes you sound like Typhoid Mary. The way you can’t decide whether to turn the air conditioner or the heater on. I want to call your attention to the way you’re feeling right now. To the way you’re alternately chilled and feverish. I want to call your attention to your sudden need to have cough syrup right there on your desk.

Yes, friends, I want you to realize that the congestion and the horrible, unending hack-ack-acking cough (and, really, can you just keep that away from me, please?), well, they go right along with those rusty leaves and that chill in the air. The reason you feel so crappy right now is directly attributable to the change in the season. Your body is trying to figure out how to cope, but the weather just won’t cooperate. It’s warm one day, cold the next. It’s cool in the morning, almost downright hot in the afternoon.

Your so-called favorite season is making you sick.

P.S. If there’s any justice, I’ll win the lottery soon and move to New Orleans or Key West or San Diego or Honolulu. There, I’ll enjoy the sameness of all those warm days strung one against the other, from January to December. You’ll be welcome to visit, so long as you promise not to go on and on about how you enjoy that chill in the October air. Ugh.

Please send NyQuil.

As my last post indicated, I'm back in Philly after spending the week with family. After flying into Oklahoma, I spent much of the week with my parents and sister in a condo in the Missouri Ozarks.

Does that sound bad? Well, it was definitely a little bit bad. I didn't entirely enjoy chaperoning my elderly parents as they (and I!) attended my dad's Navy reunion. For one thing, the reunion's organizers tapped the nearby talent pool in Branson for several courses of uplifting, patriotic music. Now, I'm as patriotic as the next guy, probably more so, but how many Tributes to the States can a guy be expected to endure in a week? I sat through three. (There are only a couple of really good state songs, one of them being "Oklahoma!," of course, and I heard it every time.) That's at least two too many.

My Dad is a WWII veteran, and—as you can imagine—he and his shipmates are showing some age. Traveling each day on a tour bus with all those bad knees and walkers tested my patience at times. That said, most of the guys were pretty cool. I could pretty much imagine them as 18- and 19-year-olds on a ship in the Pacific. (And that was before my dad told a sexually explicit joke to all the guys and their wives and families on the bus.) I adopted a new family, too, a sweet vet from Oregon and his lady-friend, and I just generally played the good son. So it wasn't all bad, and it was certainly nice to be able to spend some time with my parents and sister (who, unfairly, didn't have to attend the reunion events with her brother).

It's so beautiful in the Ozarks. When I was a kid, we used to spend some of our vacation time in the area (frequently at my sister's condo). I loved Silver Dollar City, the area lakes, the country music (but only the good stuff), and the pine trees. In fact, I can imagine renting a cabin there for a vacation now. But, then, all the local entertainers feel like they have to pander to the most conservative, most religious elements in the audience. That's how one guy ends up in three Tributes to the States in a week.... Ugh.

What the Ozarks need—actually, what Branson needs—is a Queer touch. It needs a little more "Harper Valley PTA" and fewer Lee Greenwood wannabes. It needs a little more upscale food and a little less, um, fudge and pecan logs. More galleries, fewer buildings shaped like the Titanic. More bed-and-breakfasts, fewer cheap motels. My people can help, I'm telling you.

And, for that matter, I'm sure there a lots of gay people in Branson already. Several of the entertainers who performed for my dad's reunion, well, set off my gaydar. But Gay Branson is just too subterranean (in the closet?) to be palpable, it seems. If there were some organized gay tourism in Branson, some good things would follow. Unfortunately, until there's a little bit more going for it as a gay vacation spot, the bland magic shows and bad flea markets are going to win.

Maybe I should start my own tour company.... Any investors out there?

I'm celebrating my 41st birthday today. And I'm doing it from Oklahoma. Yup, yesterday, I poured myself into one train, then another, then an airplane, then another, to arrive at Tulsa International Airport to find my parents waiting for me. Unfortunately, there was still an hour's drive to my parent's house—and I was pretty much bushed by then. Traveling is hard work.

But I woke up this morning in my hometown, just a short distance from the hospital where my mom and I spent some fairly eventful time 41 years ago.

As much as I've become attached to Philly, and I have, I love being from Oklahoma. It's a cool place. Really! The drive south from Tulsa yesterday evening was gorgeous. Miraculously, it's still green here—it has apparently been a rainy late summer—and there was lots of baled hay and happy-looking cattle in fields. The accents sounded right, too. I moved to Philly in 1996, but I'm still taken by surprise sometimes by what words sound like. Here, they sound different, of course, and in a way that sounds right to me. When an Oklahoman struck up a conversation on the plane ride from Dallas, she sounded country, and—somehow or other—I relaxed.

And as much as I hate to say it, men might even be handsomer here. To my eye, anyway. I've spent significant chunks of my adult life in Philly, New Orleans, northwest Ohio, and Oklahoma. In each of those places, it seemed to me that the men were just built differently. There were lots of fit, tall, clean-shaven, muscular farm boys (and grown-up farm boys, too) in Ohio. In New Orleans, my 5'7" frame seemed a lot more normal. And in Philly, men frequently have a more obviously, um, ethnic look than anywhere I've lived before. (When I first moved to Philly, I'd be completely puzzled when someone asked me about my background. "No, I'm not Italian," I'd say, once they explained their question. "I'm not Polish. I'm not Irish. I'm from the South. We stopped being ethnic a long time ago.")

In the other places I've lived, it has taken me awhile to adjust my taste in men to the local flavors. (Recently, for instance, I realized that I'm now truly into Philly guys. Of course, that could just be Middle Age talking.) In Oklahoma, though, the guys have always just generally looked good to me. Whether they're country ranchers, or Tulsa businessmen, or the Muscogee man who sat near me at the airport yesterday, I'm interested. I guess that's not all that surprising; Oklahoma's where I developed my Queer Country™ aesthetic.

Gosh, that was quite a digression. Anyway, so I'm in Oklahoma.... I don't expect much fuss to be made over my 41st birthday. That's just not the way my parents roll. I used to wish they'd make a bigger fuss, but I know better than to expect it. I will see my sister today, though, and there's a fair chance I might get some birthday cake from her.

I probably won't do any blogging for two or three days, so don't worry about me. My family and I and going to head off on a little adventure in the Ozarks. (I still can't believe I'm doing it.) I imagine I'll have lots to blog about when I get back.

I'm back from the conference, which was in New Orleans.  (Yes, New Orleans in August!  Great scheduling, huh?  Air conditioning is our friend.)  If I ever actually finish unpacking, I'll probably have something to say about what it was like to be back in the city.  The conference was good, though.  Being so close to the Soulmate-Who-Got-Away and the places we used to hang out?  Well, all that was a little bit complicated.