A few weeks back Erik applied to a dozen or so companies to get a feel for what the market looks like.  Yesterday he let me know that a company on Oklahoma City gave him an offer and he's put in motion the steps needed to graduate in December so he can take the job.  He's also planning on moving there soon and finishing up his degree remotely.

Yesterday was also our two year anniversary, at which point I spent two hours above my Coq Au Vin sorting out what my life will look like after this.  I really have no clue, I think my brain's self defense is purposely weaving in every outcome and sad thought with meaningful clarity and dizzying hopelessness.

I do know one thing, and I'm sure as fuck not moving to Oklahoma.  I have friends, family, work, and home all together here, all working like they should.  I can't just drop that for the hat of texas.

Erik's anniversary project is still laying on my kitchen table, all the pieces appropriately a disconnected failure of the half work day I took off to try and finish it.  I'm going to get it done for our probably awkward and sad celebratory weekend, but it just isn't calling me like it was before.  On the plus side it is *super* ugly, so I can at least look forward to the monster I've created.

Anyway, that's that.

-- enough pity party --

BRUNCH WITH DISPLAY TEAS!  on Sunday found us at the Dushanbe Tea House in Boulder with Matt, Clare, Paul, Ellen, Erik, and I (the usual suspects).  They are overpriced and the food is meh, but *but* they have these things called Display Teas.  On a whim I ordered one, half expecting a vase with fireworks and frogs and stuff, and out comes a wine glass filled with hot water to which the water throws in this green ball.  At first I thought "ugh, way to be the gayest person at the table" which was slowly replaced with "OH OH OH OH" as the green ball slowly unfolded to a big blossom of green tea with flower blossoms inside.  It was super awesome.

HALLOWEEN! In which we had the *awesome* idea of combining four of last year's costumes into two for this year.  Erik went as Sad + Sean (complete with blue sad robe, silver frosted hair, and pipe cleaner bandannas and bracelets), I went as Pimp + Stalin (complete with feathered hat, pimp mace, and the army stalin jacket he wore last year).

An unexpected turn of events happened when last year's Stalin (Tyler) decided to go as him again (OR SO WE WERE TOLD), at which point Erik and I were forced to go on a mad scramble to recreate the Stalin costume on our own.  Appropriately, this ended up with sparkly pipe cleaners, 100 sticky gem stones, two sets of glitter scrapbooking letters, and about five pounds of hot glue.  On the back said "The Real STALIN" which was even more awkward when Tyler was actually *not* in his Stalin uniform (he had a last minute change to jumpsuit wearing mobster).

Best quote of the night was the first quote of the night "Sean: Oh, nice, Stalin!  I like the latin flare you gave it"

JAIME! came down last week for a few days, I think being out in Durango alone for long periods of time is driving her crazy so my mom flew her out for a bit (which turned out to be a brilliant idea, as per the three day blizzard which happened immediately afterward).  The whole family got together at my parents' and made dinner, hung out, played with the niece and nephew.  It was fantastic.  I am hoping with fingers crossed like crazy that Jaime can move out to Boulder and work at the hospital here, I miss her a lot.

AND NOW! to do the newsletter, which got conveniently put off this weekend and yesterday by an overwhelming number of things to do.  Last week one of the editors had an issue about me sticking up an article from the newsletter onto the pflag website, stating that she's not comfortable having her information up on the internet where anyone who can search can find.  I was sympathetic to her (she had good cause for wanting such), but at the same time couldn't help but think "Um.. I publicly put up a story of my waking hours into a blog which complete strangers read with a regular basis."  What a weird world we live in.

*chop*

Update schedule is totally fucked as usual.  Monday Kitten Lovers, Tuesday Top Chef, Wednesday Yoga Bingo, Thursday Baglok Parties, Friday-Sunday Erik time.  Add in three workouts and at least one birthday each week.  It's social bliss, but blogging hell.  And such and such!

Anyway, who the fuck gets born in October anyway?  Parent's don't fuck in February, THAT MAKES NO SENSE!

- BIRTHDAY ONE -
Paul's (pseudo) birthday was at a party filled with people in ratty clothes, messed up hair, dirty on their faces, and me in stolen target clothes.  Turns out, even in this economy, there is always time to have a party.  Complements to the chef who bedecked the table in generic brand runts, peanut-butter-and-no-jelly sandwiches, and rock hard vanilla wafers.  The benefits of being wealthy enough to make fun of wealth did not go unnoticed, but you know, getting to say "in this economy" a hundred times an hour was basically the best.

- BURTHDAY TWO -
Patrick's birthday found us a Heaven Star, a golden red chinese (as in china, not mishmash east asian misappropriation) restaurant complete with a multitiered fish and crustacean tank.  All through brunch trays manned by waiters came around, showing off the goods they had for us to purchase and stamping blue circular ink marks on the red crisscrossed money sheet as we filled our tabletop with plates.  Favorite: shrimp, pork, and leek buns.  Least favorite: the two cups of oil left in my gut when we finished.

- BURTHDAY THREE -
Alex, my super awesome and deadly nephew, had his follow up pirates party on Sunday.  Erik and I knowingly nodded each other as we got to relax on the couch, watching him cut up and slash all his other little friends instead of us.  Perhaps the most telling situation was us shopping for his present at Target and, upon seeing the biggest sword we've ever seen, decided to hit each other with it as hard as we could to test the pain factor of the sword.  Outcome: way too painful.  My mom made the cake and my dad decorated it with pirates, it makes me feel so good when they do really cute stuff together.

- MORE BURTHDAZE -
Two more birthdays left this month, one a secret, one a slumber party.  It makes me sad that I'm at the point where birthday presents are more or less a formality, reserved for family and super close friends.  Such is life.

- FUCKING BLIZZARDS YA'LL -
We had our first two-day-blizzard-followed-by-eighty-degree-weather bout last week, so good to have our beautiful state be it's normal erratic self.  Apparently, however, it made pumpkins everywhere mushy like your mother's ass.  Good for me: I fucking hate carving pumpkins.  Something about cutting up my hands on a spoon while they are scooping out the freezing shit goop insides, and then having a great idea in your head which gets all butchered and fucked up because your knife-into-pumpkin skills are lacking.  Fuck this time of year.

- HALLOWEEN PEENS YA'LL -
Speaking of this time of year, in general jeff fashion, I am still without costume.  Leading ideas are "Other People's Costumes From Last Year," "Pinata," and "Golden Girls Reunion (with possible zombie fetish")  I am totally clueless.  It's so hard coming up with the most awesome costume ever that will blow people's pants off, I blame Christ Jesus Lord of Anus for this assfuck of a holiday.

- LAYOFFS MAKE ME MAD-OFFS -
Also today I learned that our company is laying off 15 more people, "streamlining and optimizing."  Aparently it takes three years to figure out that you have redundant positions in newly acquired companies, but whatever, I don't blame them for putting off shitty descisions until the timing is right (ie: you can't afford it anymore).  Hopefully this is not a sign of things to come, I think that my job is relatively safe though, thankfully.

- MAGIC MAGIC MAGIC: or, why I'll be a virgin forever -
And, last but not least, MAGIC MAGIC MAGIC.  Saturday was magic from noon to midnight, and it was incredible.  Jared gave me the harshest beating I have ever had at the hands of cardboard spell mastery and Paul, Erik, and I all tied (again) for second place.  Afterward we took out our Elder Dragon Highlander decks (as masturbatory acne high pitched laugh nerdy as it sounds) and spend three hours casting thirteen damage meteors at everyone, soliciting our generals from the grave, caving in skulls with thirty-five damage attacks, and watching erik blow up all the lands and everything we loved in life.  Absolute best moment ever: Amanda getting two lands for roughly twenty turns, only getting the third after Jared forced her two.

- DENOUEMENT -
And that's it!

Often times when I'm sitting at work singing to myself and typing away, or perusing whatever random link from a link from a link I find myself at, I'll get a sudden flash into my brain of something I have a craving to write about but don't have the immediate time.  So it goes onto my google-mail task list and waits and wait and waits until the day arrives when it gets converted into a horrific xanga baby.  It's essentially the only thing I use it for anymore (that and my need to get my rotors fixed on my car so it stops giving me vagina orgasms from the wheel vibrations)

Anyway, the list keeps getting bigger and more ignored so, in the spirit of fall cleaning, I'm gonna clear out a few topics that are just sitting there lonely and orphaned.

AND THUS

Blog Idea: Roman Polanski is a rapist, duh.

At the time of writing this entry I was completely bored with all the coverage of the Roman Polanski Phenomenon, and by now I'm even 100% more bored with the subject.  My take on the matter is here we have some rich famous and talented guy who, back in the day (when he was a spry 44), drugged, raped, and stole the life from a person.  A person who, on top of all things, was fucking thirteen.  This guy should have gone to jail at the time in the hopes of preventing this from happening again, in addition to (hopefully, but probably not) preventing others from following a similar course of action.

Such is the way of the rich, however, when he left the country on a whim and evaded capture (and inspired two nations, wow!) for thirty odd years.  As I left on Dimitri's wall, I don't have any misconceptions about the roll that a sentence will play on his life and those he has affected.  To my knowledge he never committed the act again, and by all means has already learned from it.  To put him in jail is not going to change him significantly, and it's probably not going to save any other thirteen year olds from being sexually assaulted.  But the guy did something horrible, and for want of making sure that this act does not get trivialized I think he should be punished for it.  End story, I suppose.

Also, the actors who are defending him are just fucking stupid hypocrites, point blank.

Blog Idea: Stereotypes ala Bruno

A while back I got into a conversation with my Aunt (indirectly spawned by her husband) about gay pride parades.  It's an old discussion, one taken on many times, and came down to the classic "If you want people to accept you, why do you flaunt your extremes in the public sphere?"  My short response was "these aren't really our extremes, these are actual people" followed by my long answer of "these parades aren't for you."

Another discussion with a straight friend had to do with their disgust at the stereotype of the gay character being portrayed in Bruno.  They thought it stupid to put up some a strongly negative stereotype of a vapid obsessed gay man and didn't find the humor at all funny.  My short response was "well.. I wasn't actually offended, in a way I was proud."

I suppose all of this spawns from a seeming paradox; I am deeply offended when I see "the gay best friend" in a TV show, passed off as a stereotypical token queen because the producers are idiots.  On the other hand, I am deeply excited when I see that same token queen as the main character with an actual dynamic personality.  ie: I want people to know that we're not all queens, while at the same time making sure that people know that the gay people who are queens are awesome.

I think it's really easy to get into the "Stereotypes are bad => People who fit the stereotype are bad" conundrum, and explains why people who are closeted so often attempt to distance themselves from the stereotype (often times by denegrating people who fit the stereotype).  But the stereotypes exist because that person exists, and people who fit do not deserve to be labeled as any less part of the group than those who do not.

So, flamey gays are cool and actually exist as real people, okay?

Blog Idea: White Woman's Tears

This was actually an offshoot from a blog I read on Alas (I can't find the link, doh) that has to do with the situation of a person of color describing something terrible which happened to them at which point the white woman in the room breaks down into tears, wailing about how she is so ashamed that this happened and then moving discussion into how much pain *she* is in having to hear this story.

Never having heard of this expression myself, I immediately found it hilarious (which, you know, shame on me).  After actually processing the idea, however, the actual substance behind the saying starting to pop out, particularly as it applied to me and situations I have been in.

When I went to see Crash I went with my ex, Jessie, and our mutual friend Donovan.  Throughout the movie I was crying pretty hard, and at the climax where the father believes his daughter to be shot I was completely beside myself.  For about half an hour afterward I was literally shaking and sobbing in the Barnes and Noble, my salty tears leaking all over my java chip frappuchino.  Across the table were Jessie and Donovan (both identifying as chicano/latino) actually pulling apart the movie and making meaningful discussion about it's portrayal of racism and here I am, mindblown by a star studded glimpse into what shittiness racism can actually play in real people's lives.  Ignorant little me going "oh my god, this actually happens, what the fuck!"

In the end I don't think I derailed their discussion with my wide eyed ignorant sobbing too much (hopefully), but I definitely took away just how fucking blind I am to the actual world around me.  That a stylized version of fictitious events having to do with racism would shake me so hard was a wake up call that the blinders I view the world through have some serious flaws.  If this is stylized racism, real racism must be fucking atrocious.  My pain and shock are so insulting to anyone who actually experiences these issues, my hurt based solely in the privilege I had to the actual world.  Anyway, I identified with these white woman tears and rightfully should have been put in my place.

(Last) Blog Idea (because this is already WAY TOO GIGANTIC!): Fast Food Fiasco!

A few weeks ago Erik and I went on a fast food binge and ordered not only a bunch of shit food from taco bell, but also happy meals for both of us.  As we sit there in our cars, giggling at the horrific processed hyper-fatty hyper-sodiumed foodstuffs we were eating, I realized just how long it had been since I had actually eating this crap.  In college I would do it without even thinking (wendy's was a regular food staple) but since growing up I have grown into the thinking of "fast food: fucking yuck"

I'm not sure how much of this is me actually having an income to spend on real food, and how much of it is me being more aware of my own body and what I put into it, but in any case I'm really really glad I don't eat it anymore.  The "whee whee WHEE" pleasure only lasted like ten minutes until my stomach started screaming 'what the fuck' at me and the nasty aftersmell and fifteen extra pieces of trash we had just created were gross.

Plus: when did they stop giving happy meals in cool cardboard cubes!??!  Ain't nothing happy about some boring ass, shift-printed, three-toned bag.  "Back when I was a kid" the cardboard box used to transform into slides and little doors and had pop out windows for your toys to go through.  The bags totally sucked.

AND: how sick are gendered mcdonalds toys.  "For Girls: A Ring Holder!  For Boys: A Car!"  just.. idiotic.  They even asked if the meals were for boys or girls, we (embarrassingly because we weren't sure if they had age limits on the things) said one of both.  The next time someone at work says "but girls and boys are just different!" I'm going to give them these gender training tools and say "fuck you."

== BLOG DONE, JESUS ==