In many ways I feel strongly that I have two birthdays. I have my chronological birthday which counts the number of years I’ve been alive. I also have my gay birthday which counts the number of years I have been truly alive.  I think there is a very, very significant difference between the two states.  Before I came out I lived and grew and did a lot of faffing about.  After I came out I had new eyes and built a dramatically different understanding of the world around me  and began to conceptualize who it is I want to be and take action on that.  I became a whole person in the days and weeks following my self-outing and I can’t begin to fathom what life would be like now without that.

A year ago I began a series of posts talking about the process of me coming out.  After a very short period of time I encountered a number of difficulties which I outlined here and stopped writing.  I’m at a point where I think I can pick up on this again.  I am at a point where I have more solid footing and I can write more earnestly about what happened, now five years past.

I’m working on making more time for my writing as well as other hobbies such as photography.  I’ve always loved photography, but haven’t had equipment or drive to do anything about it.  I’ve addressed the equipment side of things.  I have a lovely Canon EOS 20D and hopefully as of tomorrow a fully functional iMac from the latest range.  I just have to get my ass in gear and go.

So there you have it.  It’s May.  It’s spring.  This is my month and it’s time to get up and go.

But more than anything I realized that the biggest issues I have had with Facebook were caused by the ways I was choosing to use it.  It just wasn’t working for me.  I would self-plagiarize and waste material I would have otherwise spun into posts here to create one-liner status updates dedicated to getting responses.  I was allowing myself to become engrossed in the ebb and flow of the updates and posts by my contacts that I was losing track of my own personal communication and life.  I realized I was the defective one in the “relationship”. (Boy, isn’t that always the case!)

I was referred to an interesting article from TIME about, of all things, reality TV by, of all people, Santino Rice on Twitter which I found very interesting:

And the personality becomes the persona. Every time you sign up for a new social-networking service, you make decisions about, literally, who you want to be. You package yourself — choose an avatar, pick a name, state your status — not unlike a storyteller creating a character or a publicist positioning a client. You can be professional on LinkedIn, flippant on Facebook and epigrammatic on Twitter. What’s more, each of these representations can be very different and yet entirely authentic. Like a reality producer in a video bay, you edit yourself to fit the context.

It’s so true and I have to confront the fact that I’m a control freak!  I didn’t like the level of control Facebook was giving me to portray the person I feel I am.  I like to have the ability to pick and choose what I tell people dynamically and not have it expressed through automated scripts or online communal behavior.  This is something we do naturally in the course of a personal conversation.  My hangup is that what happens naturally face to face, melts away in the new world of social networking with these larger “whole life” sites like Facebook.

I had been recently contemplating the decline in my usage of text messaging over the last year.  I used to send and receive in the neighborhood of 6,000 text messages a month.  That number has fallen by two thirds.  I used to very directly communicate with the people who I consider important in my life and have been getting lazy by just browsing status updates and had lost a true dialogue with them.  I need to re-kindle that level of communication with the people I care about.  It takes more effort, but it is worth it.

So is Facebook the evil and awful thing I was unsuccessfully writing about previously?  Yes and no.  They have made choices to strip away layers of privacy, which infuriates me.  However, in light of the Google Buzz debacle, Facebook really aren’t so bad in a lot of ways.  Google, please re-read your own tenets of privacy and kill Buzz.  I have realized that the real problem was the fact that I was having issues with everything.  Facebook may be the facilitator for a lot of those issues, but I was the only one who was being affected, so therefore it was my problem.  It took a small ah-ha moment for me to realize I had the ability to choose to not participate and I’m really okay with that.  Even if all the cool kids are doing it.  And their moms.

The most powerful moment I remember took place on one of my birthdays when I was probably around the age of 10.  Though I don’t remember which birthday it was, I will remember the details forever.  My brother and I have birthdays which fall within two days of one another and for our birthday dinner, my mom took us to Sizzler which was a very special treat at that time.  We had waited in line and made our way to the counter to order when I noticed the boy behind the counter.  This wasn’t the person taking our orders, just an average guy who was filling glasses to take to people’s tables.

He was skinny, average height, medium length hair and something about him completely entranced me.  I was watching him as he was emptying the dishwasher behind the counter and stacking the glasses, I couldn’t tell if it was how he was moving or looked or what but I couldn’t look away.   I watched him grab the last glass from the dishwasher, setting it under the soda dispenser to fill it and watching the glass suddenly explode.  He apologized to his superior, looking startled and upset, and began cleaning up the mess.  The trance was broken in that moment and I was completely overwhelmed by this unidentified emotional response and a desire to reach out to him.  Not because the incident had been upsetting but because in an unknown way I felt like we shared something in common.

Another strong moment I remember was the first time I watched To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar starring Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze and John Leguizamo.  The characters are men.  Men who like men.  Men who have the audacity to live out their lives the way they see fit in the face of mainstream culture.  The story takes these amazing drag queens (and drag princess), a subset of the gay minority, and throws them into a situation where they couldn’t possibly be any less discordant with their environment.  In spite of that they go on to promote the values of self-worth, strength of character, respect and true compassion.

By looking at them as queens, not just as gay men, it took the concept of being gay and made it appear to be incidental to the process of living a life you are proud of and choosing to be real and true to yourself.  The first time I watched this it took everything in me not to bawl, the whole damn movie was a religious experience for my young teenage self.  I felt this emotional response which told me I was less alone than I felt and that I would be able to find comfort and greater personal understanding if I could only figure out what I was missing.

Later in life I found myself.  I connected with all these feelings which had been laying dormant for all those years.  I can’t describe to you the sense of calm, comfort and strength I felt when I realized I was gay because I knew that I was not alone.  There were real people doing real things in real places who were gay.  There were stories written by and about people like me and people with dreams beyond my own which gave me reason for hope and happiness.  There were a multitude of other emotions and fears and worries that bombarded me in the following days and weeks but in quiet moments I still felt the calm, comfort and strength in understanding that I was not alone.

My life pretty much rebooted four and a half years ago when I came out and the events which took place over those first months left me in a state where I had to start my life over from scratch. I had almost literally nothing. My car was totaled, I had no job or money, I was living in a new and unfamiliar place, and I felt very much alone in this world. All I really had were my laptop, cell phone and a month of rent paid up front. This was the beginning of my very literal renaissance, my rebirth.

Four and a half years later I have a lovely home that is my very own. I have a great job which I’m now beginning to see as a career. I have a reliable car which is something I’ll never take for granted. I have good friends who I love dearly and have been there for me more times than I can count. All of this adds up to make my full and satisfying life which, in many ways, is still just getting started.

Tomorrow I will be 25 years old and as implausible and extraordinary as that seems to me, taken in the context of my implausible and extraordinary life, I suppose it makes sense.

The ability to be reading the thoughts and experiences and day-to-day narratives from regular people out there in the world with such diversity and a dash of bravery for sharing basically melted my brain.  I was hooked.  It was a liberating moment to find ridiculously creative people out there with wit and humor to boot!  And though these voices I kept coming across were older than I was, I felt connected.  I felt like I had found a tiny niche of my own in a world which was hurtling through so much conflict and confusion.

I remember my first recipe site which I was totally just tickled pink with.   Bitchen Kitchen just made my day with its playful colors and retro-influenced design.   It would still look quite snappy if it had survived past late 2005/early 2006.   I going through some crap at the time so I lost track of it and when I remembered it just this last year, it was dead and gone.  Apparently a victim of one of the less awesome parts of the web: the vanishing.  Domains can expire, interest and resources can wane, time moves on and things vanish.

mp3.com.  I found some of my first indie music there, which I loved, by The Secret Band.  The album was called “Special Little Devil” and I downloaded the four tracks that I liked the best with the hope of buying the CD eventually.  mp3.com was purchased by CNET and the catalog was dumped unceremoniously and I couldn’t locate any of their work again.  The Velvet Teen emerged from that group and I contacted a band member for details on where I could get a copy of their earlier work but he said he wasn’t sure they still had it.  My favorite song of theirs, Rivena, has a great sound to it and somehow over the years it was corrupted in the shuffle between computers and is now truncated awkwardly.

I also remember, quite fondly, Beth from Crazy Us and her stories about her sons Kyle and Eli.  I’m dying because I had printed out a short story she posted once regarding a conversation she had with her kids over breakfast which I may have lost in my last move.  The whole thing was just ridiculously amazing, but my two favorite lines which I think I have down to memory verbatim go: “I am a bunny rabbit!  A poisonous bunny rabbit.  I will poisonous you! Hisss!” and “We play animal friends simply every day!”  It was at that point that the concept of having children, which had been totally icky, gross and foreign to me suddenly popped into focus as something I may be interested in doing.  That was a landmark moment for me.

Crazy Us has popped in and out of existence since then.  It wasn’t a daily read for me but I checked it frequently enough to kindof put together that Beth had difficulty dealing with some of the feedback and criticism she would get from visitors to her site.  This particular issue has actually been always there in my mine.  There are the dooce’s of this world who have gone so far as to monetize negativity, but that takes a LOT of energy and a lot of patience and a lot of self-confidence. Then there are really awesome people like Beth who get worn down by it and I don’t blame her one tiny little bit.  I’ve always wondered how I would fare in the same situation.

I guess the moral to this story is that the internet is very much a living, breathing thing in its own way.  It evolves and grows and things are lost in the shuffle.  It’s a double edged sword.  The amazing ease with which content can be shared and people can connect with one another also lends itself to the rather quick loss of that same information if not actively maintained.  I think that is why I love physically published media.  It doesn’t go anywhere for the most part.  It’s a lot harder to delete and repurpose the constituent parts of a book or photo album or a handful of letters than it is to delete a website or flickr profile or email to free up space.  That being said, I love the power of the internet as it enables me to share what I can, unless you know of a publisher who is just dying to deal with me and publish my crap incrementally!

I read PostSecret and I’m amused and shocked and made uncomfortable and moved and, most significantly, I feel connected.  The movie was very much in keeping with this.  We all have secrets, some of which seem more obvious or less secret-ey than others and some which do reveal a darker side to all of our lives.  I share a lot of things here which may at one point or another fallen anywhere on that scale for me.  I don’t think that they necessarily always things that I have thought “Oh! I must keep that a secret and not tell anyone!”  however.  Today I will share a secret though.  One that I’ve had since I started this blog or even the one or two predecessors to this site.

I’m afraid that my writing isn’t good enough and that I won’t achieve what I set out to when I first started writing.  I’m afraid that I won’t be able to express or share the thoughts and experiences and emotions I had when I was coming out.

I definitely have to be level with myself and just say that by not really following through with that goal, I will fail by default.  Pure and simple.  I had a rough start earlier this year which stalled out and died after only a few posts and part of the standstill is this secret fear I’ve held.  Growing up is messy work, coming out is even more difficult.  Combine the two and you get a superfund disaster which, when even I look back on it, makes me cringe and feel critical and criticizing our own work, let alone your own life is ridiculously hard.

Anyhow, that is my secret this week and I may post more or I may not, so there it is.

What this is all leading to is a small part of what he wrote at the very end.  “I’m sure you’ll find what you’ve been blessed to receive.” This is a really welcome sentiment and I greatly appreciate it.  What I say here isn’t to nitpick, deride, or invalidate this well-wishing at all.  The concept of finding existential, emotional or other intangible things has come up in a number of conversations lately and I want to talk about my views on this common phrase and concept.  I don’t believe in finding things.  I believe in making them.

This is a hard one for me.  It’s not something I want to seem like I’m being preachy as it is a life lesson I’m still working on.  A lot of people communicate that “I need to find myself” or that “I’m looking for happiness.”  I really strongly believe that this will only set the stage for invalid findings and fruitless searches.  It seems like it’s one of those lazy/hard things we do to procrastinate or avoid more daunting ideas or situations.  Those actions which look or seem easier as they are less complex, but in the grand scheme of things just increase the sheer volume of work in the end.

If I were to seek out who I am, I will find a great many things that resonate or reflect what I am and even more that I am not.  The problem is that this really only creates a great Venn diagram of things which coincide with the best impression I have of myself.  It isn’t a one-to-one expression of exactly who I want to be and much more importantly who I am willing to be.  Sitting down and deciding who I am and making that a reality through my actions is a far more daunting task than mapping out which circles out there coincide with who I think I might be.  I think too many people settle for a pattern circles which are beneath them, which I don’t think is necessarily weakness so a simple failure to harness their own potential and unique opportunities.

That one I think I have down well enough, things get tricky when it comes to stuff like “looking for happiness”-type situations.  I lose track of that CONSTANTLY and must remind myself of time and again.  Happiness is an emotional state which comes from within myself.  Very often we are inclined to look to external factors as a barometer of our happiness which is one of the most sad mass-delusions in human history.

Of course there are many raw emotional states which are triggered by outside sources.  If a stranger were to walk up to me off the street and kicks me in the shins I would immediately feel anger, confusion, and hostility.  What happens next is usually the product of habit and conditioning, though anything I feel or do at that point is actually a choice.  The trick is breaking that down the facts of the situation and choosing what I want to do.  I could choose to feel vengeful and react with further aggression.  I could chose to feel hurt and mope about it all day.  I could even chose to feel special for having the unique experience of this very bizarre event and laugh about it the rest of the day sharing the absurdity with my friends.

The lazy/hard way to handle this is to just live with the conditioned responses I have built up and accept the consequences as fate.  The harder path is choosing to stop and make choices about how I will feel and respond to situations in life.  It’s not hard because you have to stop and think, that is quite easy once you figure it out.  The hard part is remembering to keep it up.  It’s easy to get lax and start to let things slide.  My recent conversations have reminded me of this and it’s time to get back at it.

This photo is straight out of the camera from my iPhone, no editing or tweaking. I just love how vibrant and diverse the colors are of the leaves. Simply wonderful! I’d love to say I’m done going on and on about how much I love fall, but I can’t make any promises. The colors this year are just too beautiful.

Fall has to be my favorite season of all.  In talking with a couple friends I’ve found that this sentiment is not shared by all.  Some see it as the throes of death before the dark, cold slumber of winter.  When this was explained to me today it made complete sense to me how people could see it as such.  I hadn’t ever thought of it in that manner but it does make sense.  In fact that description helped me to distill a description for the way I have felt about autumn.  I’ve seen it as a time of intense color and beauty as nature prepares itself for the reincarnation of spring after the still and calm rest of winter.  I don’t see it as death so much as I see it as a time of celebrating life, even more so than spring.

Autumn is a magical time of golden radiance.  The sun is starting to hang lower in the sky and the light is sharper and warmer.  It is a perpetual golden hour, that time in the morning or evening when you can point your eyes or camera at almost anything and capture images of clarity and beauty.  I love the drama of the change, positive and ultimately constructive change, in nature which is immersive of all the senses.  The light and color, the earthy smell of the ground and the rain, the crisp crunching of the leaves, the colder air carries sound clearly, and the abundant tastes of the harvest.

After the frozen, brisk, intimate solitude of winter, nature stretches to wake once more making the world lush, fresh and free.  The summer months then bring radiance, energy.  Autumn brings the diversity and gifts of the other three seasons together, nature’s magnum opus, for the most stunning performance of the year.  There is a new sense of intimacy and stillness along with refreshing cool air and earthiness with vibrance and light.  An additional intangible element, one of maturity and majesty, makes autumn to preside over all the other seasons, bringing them into its court and commanding the finest qualities.

I realize that I made a similar post last year, it just goes to show how much I love this season.  This autumn had a very strong beginning which quickly gave way to harsher winter conditions for a brief time which then melted away for warmer, almost summer-like weather.  I’m hoping fall will be extended this year for additional enjoyment.  With luck, I will be able to get out and take more photos and soak up the last traces of color and warmth before winter sets in for good.

This post, oddly enough, isn’t about the interview or the suit so much as a conversation these two things led to.  A coworker asked me how the interview had gone and the conversation touched on how out of place the suit felt which led to some very unexpected and very stirring comments of praise which I was not expecting.  These comments, these very specifically worded comments, were not so much about my performance at work so much as about the person I am.  Now, I don’t know about everyone else, but I tend to thrive on feedback and validation.  I have frequently stated that I am a feedback-based life form.  It is just one of the things that makes me tick.  It may seem weak or strange or any number of things, but feedback – especially positive feedback – really makes me happy.  This particular set of comments were very noteworthy for me though.

This year has been a very tumultuous one.  I’ve left my comfort zone a great deal this year to get out and try new things, meet people and have fun in ways I haven’t tried before.  I was met with a lot of successes and have made some new friends, rejoined with old ones, gained a roommate, and had fun outside of my normal activities and learned a lot.  I was also met with a lot of failures.  I lost a close friendship of mine, I managed to completely lose my nerve and creative drive behind sharing my coming out story, not to mention the fact that this was The Year of a Million First Dates.  The successes have dramatically outweighed what I perceive as failures and really, most of these failures are not failures so much as negative experiences.

I’ve been very careful in not talking about dating here because the last thing anyone needs (including myself) is some god-awful, self-aggrandizing dialogue to pop up here after bad dates which is unflattering for every party involved.  I will, however, take a moment to comment on The Year of a Million First Dates.  This year I went on numerous first dates, almost all of which I considered to be very good dates with very promising people.

The problem is that in spite of the fact the other people involved would claim they also enjoyed the date, they would become very remarkably busy after having a reasonable surplus of time.  Words like “soon” or even “very soon” would be used to describe when they would next be free to go out.  The conversation would then peter and they would generally disappear.  For people who went so far as to set a second date, an overwhelming trend of severe and debilitating stomach disorders kicked in.  It was frustrating at first, then dependable, and ultimately quite humorous.  I can confirm that one person did, in fact, contract a very dangerous and very real case of food poisoning but he was one of two people who made the second date.  Twelve months and only two second dates.

I had been more than willing, almost eager, to try and find fault with myself for all of this.  I very logically turned to the scientific method which would suggest that after so many failures and the one easily identifiable constant variable being myself, I was to blame.  That was the simplest answer I could come up with.  It was either that or being more of a homebody was saving me from getting the widespread radiation poisoning.  (Homebodies FTW!)  This isn’t a very healthy train of logic though.  It’s the kind of thinking that starts to chip away at self-esteem and makes people begin to think very little of themselves.  A couple months ago I determined that there was another simple answer which fit the situation better.  There is something wrong with all of them, or to be more fair, some thing in each of them made them for a bad fit with me.

The people who matter in my life, the friends and people who remain constant and genuine, serve as a constant silent validation that I am a good person.  I am thankful for them every day and relish the opportunities I get to spend time with them and speak to them.  A couple of them give me very direct validation (both for feelings and my parking) when I’m down and need it the most.  But yesterday, unbidden, this relatively new person in my life helped me put all the pieces together.  He complimented me for being me, not compromising that in an attempt please others, and that being me was a good thing…  What an awesome concept, one which can be forgotten all too easily.  One that I must strive to never forget again.