New York Erratic Archives - Page 2 of 4

May Rambling #2: New Zealand music

I rant about the JEOPARDY! Million-Dollar Tournament.

Descendants of Solomon Northup, who recounted his story in a memoir, 12 Years A Slave.

The Real Origins of the Religious Right. “They’ll tell you it was abortion. Sorry, the historical record’s clear: It was segregation.”

Dustbury points to an article about how the ineptitude of the Department of Veterans Affairs, and its predecessors, go back nearly a century.

The Worst Argument Ever Made Against Gay Marriage.

Amy Biancolli’s book: To plunge is to live. Also, her parents in love.

Judy Sanders, a former local news reporter and photographer, is dying of ovarian cancer. Confronting the long goodbye from Paul Grondahl, and a piece by her former colleague, Ken Screven.

Diane Cameron’s blog Love in the Time of Cancer has been going on since 2008, but I just discovered it.

Getting kicked out of the prom.

New York Erratic asked: “Have you ever dated anyone who turned out to be gay?” I had a serious relationship with a woman who left me for another woman, with whom she stayed for some time. About 20 years later, she married a man, an old friend of hers.

Dan writes about The Casino And All The Promises, which is both a local issue and a cautionary narrative if casinos are offered to your town.

Lisa has been having the same blog problems I have

Mr. Frog on meeting celebrities

The Good Wife is my favorite TV show. Here’s why I love it, and why I have a difficult time explaining it to others.

Dustbury reminds me why I love word processing, and wish I had a goat.

A great interview with Mel Brooks, who’s promoting the rerelease of Blazing Saddles.

Dead Man Walking, and Burying the Bentley.

Mark Evanier’s childhood, and the color orange. Sweet story of coincidence.

New Paltz Students Find $40K in a Couch; NP is my alma mater, BTW.

Luckiest Unlucky Man or Unluckiest Lucky Man?

You’re Not Here. Abbott and Costello with the famed movie tough guy, Mike Mazurki.

How did Fred Astaire literally dance on the ceiling in the movie Royal Wedding?
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The Oatmeal cartoon about irony. Is it ironic that the song Ironic is not about being ironic?

LYNDA BARRY SELLS OUT. I love her work.

Irene Vartanoff writes about Marvel Comics’ original artwork in the 1960s. And she would know.

Drawn Out: The 50 Best Non-Superhero Graphic Novels.

The Documentary “Stripped” shows the past and future of comic strips. I supported Kickstarter for this.

Arthur celebrates NZMM: New Zealand Music Month. Lots of good stuff, but I must note #14, “New Zealand’s First Record.”

Tosy: U2 – Ranked 80-71 and 70-61.

Another great review of the niece’s album: Rebecca Jade & the Cold Fact. (Hey, it’s good!)

Pantheon Songs remembers Marvin Gaye.

Muppet section: Joe Raposo and Roosevelt Franklin and Time In A Bottle. “Today me will live in the moment unless it’s unpleasant, in which case me will eat a cookie.” – Cookie Monster.

What IS a photocopier?

How do you spell the color: grey or gray?
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The local Jewish Community Center had an ad campaign many found offensive. Several others thought it was poor because they couldn’t even read what it said. In any case, the ad is gone, and a couple of people suggested my blog post on the topic may have helped.

SamuraiFrog said ‘Why Not Ask Me Anything?’ and ~~blames~~credits me for him doing so. He answers my questions about music, and specifically about Billy Joel.

Likewise, Arthur’s Internet wading was my fault, or suggestion.

I rant about the JEOPARDY! Million-Dollar Tournament.

Romance redux (because I love the word redux)

“You were comfortable to be around, smart, funny, not bad looking and there was great chemistry.”

So I answer New York Erratic’s question about romance, about me being a good listener. Yet I seem to have disappointed: “That wasn’t the answer I was expecting for the ‘getting girls’ question, but it makes tremendous sense when I think about it.” But I wasn’t some smooth talkin’ dude.

Still, I wrote, in an e-mail titled I’ll take another shot if you give me parameters: “Not sure what kind of answer I could give you about romance. Among other things, I hardly ever pursued a woman, because I’m painfully shy. So she had to be a friend at some level first…” (Indeed, Dustbury speaks well of the anxiety guys like me experienced all the time.)

The reply: “I think you gave a great answer, but I was thinking more like skills or knowledge. Music always thrills me, as does trivia and poetry. 🙂 I know you don’t write poetry, but hasn’t any girl ever said ‘Wow, I love your ___________’ or ‘I think it’s so cool you know _________’?”

Well, not to my recollection. Although “OK. But the air guitar really did lead me to one girlfriend!”

“:-) Humor counts.”

So I asked my wife. She said it was because I was (and apparently still am) so expressive when I sing in the church choir, and that was what made her first notice me.

Then I asked an ex. She wrote: “You grew on me over time. Not very much time, it is true, but sometimes. You were comfortable to be around, smart, funny, not bad looking and there was great chemistry.” She later added: “It wasn’t really a conscious process. I just fell in love.”

I can guess another ex was taken by my love for the Academy Awards and the soap opera Another World. But maybe humor, too, although I cannot give you details. (I DO have some limits.)

I got nothing else, short of asking more exes, and I’m kind of disinclined to do that.
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On a related topic, NYE: I overheard this conversation in the work cafeteria. The young woman broke up with her girlfriend, who had seemed to be devoted to her, perhaps overly so. She was telling her friend how unnerved by the fact that her ex was now seeing someone else. I restrained myself from telling her that I knew EXACTLY how she felt because I HAVE been there.

Stress, and time management: related

No, I don’t like doing things at the last minute. Don’t like rushing to the airport, to the train or the bus, or to get to the movies on time.

New York Erratic, who needs to blog more – just noting – wrote on March 20, 2014, at 7:29 am:

What was the greatest job stress in the last year?

And the answer had I written it at that moment would have been: “IT’S RIGHT NOW!”

I’ve alluded to The Daughter’s mysterious ailments, which have been largely mitigated and only partially explained, and would take a lot more detail to discuss, involving talks not only with doctors but with school officials about making accommodations for the fact that she missed so much classwork.

The math and spelling homework she kept up with, in large part, because I was writing it for her; she was doing the intellectual work, but the pain in her upper arm made her handwriting/printing totally illegible.

As if my concern about her were not enough, I had my own stuff to do. Let’s throw in another NYE question here:

What do you do about time management issues?

In general, I like to do things early. If I have a deadline of a month, I like to do it as soon as possible. There are two basic reasons: 1) I’m enthusiastic about it in the beginning; later, as I muddle through it, I get bored and unfocused. 2) I get stressed about approaching deadlines. It weighs me down.

I had three specific things I needed to do in the month of March. In the usual course of going to work, doing some of it at lunchtime, or after work, it all would have been completed weeks earlier. But the last week in February, I missed at least two days of work. There were 21 workdays in March; I went to work all day only five of them, taking a total of 7.5 sick days (only 0.5 related to me, the rest to The Daughter), and two vacation days, neither of which were purely used to vacay.

Item #1: I had agreed to take the minutes of the February 24 meeting of the Friends of the Albany Public Library. If you’ve ever taken minutes for a meeting, you recognize that that the sooner they are done, the better. I could not pawn them off on someone else because of my cryptic shorthand. On March 17, I’m being asked for them, and I just throw up both my hands in despair. Not having a usable computer at home at the time, and not having time to go to the library to use a public machine, I had no real options.

I FINALLY finish them on March 29, just before the March 31 meeting, too late for anyone to actually review and read, or to act on the items that minutes remind people they’ve agreed to do. Not incidentally, the minutes I took for the March 31 meeting were done on April 2.

Item #2: I had agreed to give a talk at the Community Loan Fund on March 27 about business reference resources that are free or cheap. I so infrequently get out of the office that I was really looking forward to this. The talking part was not the issue; it was putting together the handout sheet. We had one from about three years ago, but some sources had changed, and new ones needed to be added. On March 24, I’m STILL working on the sheet. If it wasn’t for my colleague Alexis, I never would have finished it.

Sometime around March 18, one of my sisters called me, and I was telling her about all of this stuff. She said, unhelpfully, “Why don’t you postpone some things?” I obviously had not made clear that ALL I HAD BEEN DOING was postponing things for – at that point – the past three weeks. She thought I should reschedule my dental appointment the next day; I thought that was a terrible idea; by not taking care of myself, I’d be unable to take care of my daughter.

One of the things I HAD postponed, from February 24, ostensibly a vacation day that began The Daughter’s ailments, was getting a haircut. I FINALLY got one on March 22, so that when I went to my March 27 gig, I didn’t look like Grizzly Adams anymore.

Item #3: I had this reimbursement program for medical expenses in 2013. I had put in $2500 because we kept thinking The Daughter was going to get braces, but she didn’t. So we had to get reimbursed whatever receipts we could find. We also had $1800 for the afterschool money to get back. I mailed it on March 27, and it was received on March 31, the very last day of eligibility, or we would have been out all of that money.

No, I don’t like doing things at the last minute. Don’t like rushing to the airport; the debacle of June 2009 STILL rankles me. Geez, I just reread what I wrote there, and I left out what inane thing we were talking about; I wrote about THAT months earlier. Don’t like rushing to the train or the bus, or getting to the movies on time.

I should make the distinction here between avoidable and unavoidable problems. I’m OK with the stuff you wouldn’t reasonably anticipate; things happen. Tree falls in a storm, blocks the road: unavoidable. Someone gets sick: unavoidable. Power outage: unavoidable. Trying to squeeze in one more task that makes everyone late: totally avoidable.

Are there some non-work activities that take precedence, and, if so, which ones and why?

I check my e-mail. I get blog comment notices that needs approval, bills that need to be paid, my sisters’ and nieces’ posts to Facebook, news and weather and traffic bulletins, info from the Daughter’s school district, ideas for my work blog.

Obviously, taking care of The Daughter trumped work in March.

I TRY to take off one day a month for mental health, but that’s not always been the case. February 24, as noted, I tended to The Daughter. March 31, I went to work to fax the last of those reimbursement forms.

Art, science, Bible, baseball

You have this +1 sodium just hanging out when it hooks up with the -1 chloride.

More from New York Erratic:

Who is your favorite visual artist? Favorite director?

I tend to be rather catholic about these things. Here’s the best way to recognize the artist of paintings, BTW.

My church has Tiffany windows, which I like; the one above is one of them. Gordon Parks is a favorite photographer. Always though Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings were interesting, if not always practical. Van Gogh I enjoy, but there are so many more; I love going to the house in the Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, NY because it’s so eclectic. Did one of those Facebook things where you should live, and it came up with French Polynesia, which reminded me that I like Gauguin too.

But I guess my favorite visual artist is Rodin, whose work I find sensual as all get out, even if it isn’t all his work.

I took this list of a list of the 50 greatest directors of all time. Of all the directors whose films I’ve seen more that three Continue reading “Art, science, Bible, baseball”

Growing up gay (as it were)

I have only smidgen of understanding what it must have been like to be gay in the 1960s and 1970s.

From New York Erratic:

How do you think growing up gay today is different than growing up gay in the past?

Well, since I never grew up gay, it’s kind of tricky to say. But I’ll try.

In my collective of high school cohorts, the politically involved, left-of-center, antiwar demonstrating, civil rights supporting folks, we formed a club called the Community Action Forum. But outside of school, we were friends called Holiday Unlimited, and our motto was “a splendid time is guaranteed for all, stolen from the Sgt. Pepper album.

In our group of maybe a dozen and a half people, at least three of them were gay, but I only knew about one of them, Vito Mastrogiovanni, at the time, and mostly because my sister had such a crush on him that he, or someone, let her know. She was sad because she thought he was so beautiful, and he was. He died of AIDS in May 1991, and you can find his square on the AIDS quilt.

The others who were gay, though, I had no idea. I felt a tad sad that they didn’t feel comfortable telling me, yet I understood.

I go to college, and my next room neighbor, who was gay, was openly hostile to me. I think it was a preemptive strike. Blacks were considered threatening to gay males in 1971, or so I was told. But I had a couple of lesbian friends; in fact, one, Alice, with whom I was once arrested at an antiwar demonstration, was roommates with the Okie for a time before the Okie and I got married.

Alice and I hitchhiked across New York State, trying to get to some friends who had been injured in a fatal car accident. One guy picked us up west of Binghamton, then gave us a lecture about the sins of race-mixing, assuming us to be a couple. I could only imagine what he might have said if he had known of her sexual orientation.

I dropped out of college in 1975 and lived in Binghamton for several months. The Civic Theater was doing a production of Boys in the Band, a 1968 play, but radical for upstate New York. The cast hung out together, and I discovered there was a gay bar in Binghamton; I had no idea. We got to be a tight-knit group for that period.

The review of the production made it sound as though the whole cast was gay, which frankly didn’t bother me, but it upset one of my high school friends, who said to another, “Too bad about Roger!” “What about Roger?” “He’s gay!” “He’s not gay!”

So I have only a smidgen of understanding what it must have been like to be gay in the 1960s and 1970s.

Because gays weren’t invented until 1969, or so you were supposed to believe. And it was only a handful of “them” so it was somehow OK to discriminate against gays, threaten them, use terms about them as barbs even against people who were not gay. And AIDS was “God’s scourge” against gays, though there were plenty of straight people getting the disease too.

So how we went from having a whole lot of closeted gay folks, for understandable reasons, to legal marriage for gay people in about a dozen and a half states in the last decade or two is remarkable. I was in a discussion with a blogger who is gay (not Arthur) back in 2006 or 2007, and he didn’t think the issue of marriage equality was that big a deal, quite probably because he had had a bad breakup. But marriage IS a big deal. It’s a fundamental ceremony of society. The POPE is considering the acceptance of civil unions, for crying out loud. Oh, here’s a joke about marriage equality that I actually found to be clever.

Rewatched the Oprah Winfrey Show episode recently in which Ellen Degeneres talked about coming out in 1997, and I was reminded how it was a BFD. Now she’s a popular talk show host, Oscars host, Twitter breaker, and dancing fool.

I think this article about Fred Phelps is true. When the hatemonger first started his picketing, few opposed his poison. But over time, the crowds against the Westboro Baptist Church grew and grew, people standing up and saying we’re not all like that. This is why I say, all the time because I’m a boring guy, that gays need straight allies in the struggle for equality, just as blacks need whites, etc. The “gay agenda” I keep reading about, a lot, is the very freedom everyone wants.

So while there is still plenty of things to overcome – check out the Human Right Campaign, e.g. – today’s LGBT teens must have it a sea change easier than gay kids in decades past.

PS: Boycott Mississippi.
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Those HoneyMaid ads.

Amy’s How to “Recruit” Straight People: A Guide