Most of the guys I know are great at socializing and making new friends. Scratch that, let us call them acquaintances. They meet new people, gab, chat, swap numbers, hang out, get involved in some light interpersonal drama and all is well in the universe. It seems like most of these connections are somewhat fleeting or lightweight though. While most people seem to water ski or snorkel through the social scene I tend to end up in diving bells way out at sea. It’s rare for me to find or make a new friend but when I do, they are almost always golden and part of my family. This has it’s advantages, lots and lots of them. And, though it is not a disadvantage to be able to forge such lasting bonds, I think it is possible I might be missing out on opportunities with people who are not quite as intense/neurotic/bizarre.

So let’s talk about contributing factors, shall we? Lets throw the two biggies right out there: I am retardedly insecure and I have trust issues. Hmm… it’s no wonder, really, how I could get backed into corners by my own demons of self defeat. I think I do a really good job of getting past them in the opening rounds of exchange, but as I am left to my own devices and my thoughts wander, my internal gaze inevitably falls upon my personal pandora’s box and things go downhill from there.

It really just comes down the qualms we have with various aspects of ourselves which I honestly think we all have deep (or not so deep) inside like weight, style, grooming, presentation, or personality. I think at any given time anyone has had doubts about one or all of these aspects of themselves. I just happen to allow myself to indulge in them quite a bit more often than I should and I don’t really quite know how to stop.

I know I am not alone here, but at the same time it seems like I am the only person who hasn’t figured out how to get past it? I don’t know! Any thoughts? More to come…

It’s officially summer in my book!  Last night went to the Joss Stone concert at Red Butte Gardens above Salt Lake City.  Great music, drinks, company.  I love the concerts at Red Butte, all sorts of people pour in from all over the valley and it’s chill and fun.  If you haven’t gone to one, I suggest you make some time this summer.  Even if it’s for an artist you are not familiar with.

Once upon a time, I uploaded a picture to Flickr.  A really nice guy commented on this crappy camera phone picture and I was so dumbfounded and dumb and didn’t say anything back.  Because I’m socially retarded.  Anyhow, while looking at his photos I kind of come to the conclusion that he is gay which is something I find beautifully reassuring.  Myself, a hulking spaz of a gay man crowing over his new kitchen appliance gets a lovely comment back from a complete stranger online who also happens to be gay and loves the same kitchen appliances.

A handful of things came of this.  I finally figured out how to organically link through to find new photographers on Flickr.  I began browsing through the people he follows and knows and I find that I have been kind of touched by a member of this big’ole group of handsome, rugged, disgustingly talented photographers who happen to be gay.  (Touched in a metaphorical way, not actually touched.  I wish.)  I then became completely overwhelmed by the beauty of the work by some of the photographers on Flickr, as well as the beauty of some of the photographers on Flickr.  (sigh)

Anyhow, one of these photogs is a dashingly handsome man who has recently revealed that he is starting a relationship with someone who lives thousands of miles and an ocean away.  They are using Skype to keep in touch and have plans to spend time together later on in the year.  My head exploded from the adorability of it all.  Ridiculously handsome men finding one another and being all involved with each other on different continents.  Wow.

I learned a lot from this little jaunt into cyberspace:

• I must either figure out how to woo ridiculously handsome men via Skype or move to Canada or the UK or someplace where these ridiculously handsome men live.  (I jest!  Or do I?)
• We are more connected than we can fully comprehend and I’m part of a beautiful extended family of gay men the world over.
• Beautiful and unexpected things can happen in this world for people you have never met and know nothing about.
• Being terrified of playing with photography because there are ridiculously good looking people out there who are ridiculously great artists is understandable, but essentially silly and counterproductive.  (Yeah, I didn’t really tie that one in well with the post, but I’m throwing it in here anyway.)

Lastly, though this is an area in which I have not lost or given up hope:

There is always hope and the possibility of finding a handsome man out there who is will be just as jazzed about me and I will be thrilled about him.  Maybe even I will stumble onto the prince charming of my dreams and we will date via Skype and I will move to whatever foreign land he hails from and we will live happily ever after THE END.  Or maybe he’ll move here and live with me and happily ever after blah, blah…  Or maybe some other fun adventure awaits?!

No matter what, there is an adventure out there to be had, and I will have it!

Really, I could say I was playing with fire for this picture.  A gigantic fiery ball of fusion which sits at the center of this star system.  I took this just a couple days ago.  The sunset was casting very warm light throughout the house and things were almost sepia.  I whipped out the tripod near the end.  This shot is an 8 second exposure.

I know I am an odd duck. In many ways I relish it, but at times I am at odds with it. (At odds with being odd, har har.) I don’t connect well with most of the gay population that I am aware of. I get along with anyone well enough; but as for establishing a lasting social connection, that’s where things deteriorate quickly. I have a circle of golden friends whom I love, but the process of making new contacts is a freaking mess. Don’t even get me started on dating, that’s another beast all together wherein I am a total spaz at best.

I will always be the first person to acknowledge the fact that I am a headstrong spaz and total dork more often than not. My goal in life is to live with as much honesty, grace and humor as possible as I think those are the qualities I can most benefit from. I do sometimes wonder if that is the best approach or best set of ideals as I never seem to gain much ground in the socialization department. Maybe there is some area which I have yet to recognize or understand. This wouldn’t be the first time.

I guess for now, I will take comfort in knowing that so far I have made a life which I am proud of. I may not understand all of it, and I doubt I ever fully will. My friend-making process, though quite slow and semi-retarded, will continue to work as it has. I carry the hope that at some point, what and who I am will be enough for some special guy who will be willing and want to sweep me off my feet. I really do enjoy and am very happy with where I am at in my life right now, earlier grumblings included. However, finding the Petruchio to my Katherine or Katherine to my Petruchio would be such an exciting adventure.

It has been three years since my last relationship. It may yet be another three years before I find my next. Or it could be thee months, who knows! I just hope that it will happen at some point and that I will be able to recognize it and dive in if and when it does.

Yes, it is supposed to look like that.  It’s saturated and contrasty and rather awful.  I blame it on the MacBook I was using at the time.  And exhaustion.  I had originally mutilated this image in January/February of last year to to showcase the logo which I proudly made for this site.  The outcome was this:

Apparently I cut back on the blur, but spared no contrast or saturation.  This remained my masthead for quite some time until I grew to hate the template I was using.  It was too dark and didn’t feel very welcoming so I updated the template to the lovely and more sparse one you can see here now.  After getting the new theme up and running I ran out of steam.  By the time I got around to updating the default masthead with my logo I had upgraded my OS which caused me to lose compatibility with several older programs I was using and had loved.

(The theme you see now may or may not be the one I’m talking about here for those of you reading this post in the future.  For those of you who travel about in blue boxes which are bigger on the inside, you also may see something dramatically different.  If you are viewing this at a time/place/dimension where I’ve made some very different stylistic choices, please just imagine a very simple white background with black and greyish-blue sans-serif typefaces.)

This week I finally started to get set up on my iMac and quickly mashed together the red thing you see at the top of the page.  I took that picture with my iPhone and Hipstamatic a while ago and I liked the red color.  I’m not totally sold on it for the long-term but we shall see what happens.  Any thoughts on the one below?  Do you like it better or worse than the current spicy red thing?

As you can see, I’ve already cooked up a new masthead. I’m ashamed to have left the last one up for so long, especially considering the fact that it was the default theme image. I purchased a copy of Aperture 3 which I’m really excited to get started with and yesterday I picked up a copy of Pixelmator for half price. I’m more than thrilled to pay just $30 for something that does pretty much every single one of the basic Photoshop functions. Not only that, but Pixelmator does it all following the standardized user interface guidelines for Mac and isn’t bloaty. (Imagine that, software that just works with both a streamlined price and hardware requirements list. Get your crap together Adobe.) For now this will more than sufficient to get me going.

I downloaded Steam for the Mac which was one of the reasons I wanted to get the iMac. I’m able to play mainstream games on my computer now! Woot! They were giving away Portal for free which I snapped up and have played and it is really fun. I was surprised how well Apple’s buttonless Magic Mouse performed while gaming. Right and left clicks registered perfectly and it tracked well. I look forward to pickup up Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. I remember playing that game as a kid on my family’s old 386, crammed in the office nook next to the washer and dryer. That game totally rocked!

This will be the beginning of a new era for me, creatively. Though notebooks have the upper hand with portability, they just don’t work for me when I’m trying to get a creative workflow going. Since 2001 I’ve been using notebooks. There was a brief three month stint where I used the iMac G5 when it first came out. (That was a ridiculously sexy machine back when it was introduced.) Unfortunately, at that time I just couldn’t use a computer which wasn’t mobile and immediately switched back to notebooks. With the introduction of the iPad I had a strong feeling I could finally move to a desktop machine again and I was right. The iPad takes care of my casual computing needs effortlessly.

The problem with notebooks isn’t power, it’s form-factor. At the ripe old age of 25 I now have severe RSD issues with my right wrist and some nasty tendonitis in both arms. I think that heavy computer use in general had a lot to do with that, but I honestly don’t think that notebooks helped. I’m a big guy and having to curl up into a hunched ball over a laptop was definitely not the most elegant ergonomic situation. Now that I’m all set up with my pretty new computer I’m really excited to be able to dig into a lot of projects and really work on some of my hobbies a lot more effortlessly. I’m already starting to see the fruits of this strategy and I’m really pleased.

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.

I haven’t been very up front with myself about a lot of things and the other day I sat down to get some work done on The Project and I started writing a down some points on what I wanted to accomplish. I do this when I’m having a mental block and low on inspiration or direction. The writing didn’t stay on topic for long and I ended up writing a ton of crap which came completely out of left field. Some of this stuff was very striking as it was on a couple subjects in my personal life I wasn’t wanting to acknowledge or had been avoiding. I realized it had been a very long time since I had written as candidly as that even for myself.

I am returning my iMac this week. That has turned out to be somewhat of a severely disappointing situation and I will say this to you, my gentle readers, and to any people random search engines throw my way:

The current revision of the iMac line (the late 2009 revision) is not to be purchased lightly. Do not buy one of these machines casually and expect for everything to be great. Though they are the most beautiful and refined desktop computers ever crafted in history in terms of design, their internals are the rotted spawn of satan.

Here are the issues I had with mine when I first received it:

• Yellow/jaundiced screen
• Extended boot times
• Failure to start from external drive
• Inconsistent wireless networking

I dropped it off at my local Apple Store on a Friday and received some awesome, top-notch assistance in reviewing the problems. I never heard back from the Apple Store. The next Thursday I called and was informed it had been ready for several days already and that they were unsuccessful in reaching me to let me know. I was irritated by that as the ONE feature I have come to find reliable from AT&T is the voice messaging system. I would know because I get more voice messages than I do successful phone calls. I went in to pick up the accursed machine on Friday after work and received excellent assistance from the people in the store.

The problems started when I got to my car. I noticed that the stand for the machine seemed a little scuffed up, but it looked like this was not permanent. I got it home and found that the new LCD panel they installed was still yellowed and to my dismay there were now dust and smudges in-between the outer glass and the LCD panel itself. At this point I was getting wary and was giving the machine a lot more scrutiny and I found that the glass on the display hadn’t been mounted correctly, leaving it skewed and off center and that the aluminum casing had been scuffed and damaged in several locations on the corners. It was at this point that I became furious.

It was irritating that I got a machine which was not in working order. It perturbed me to take the iMac in for repair less than 72 hours after I took receipt of it. It irked that the repair personnel didn’t bother to call and then lied about it. I was now mad that the display still was not fixed, infuriated that the repair personnel didn’t bother to complete the repair properly, and incensed that the manner in which they handled my computer SCRAPED AND GOUGED THE SOLID ALUMINUM CASE!

Dear person(s) responsible for the piss-poor work on my iMac,

If I ever meet you I may feel the need to scrape and gouge your face with the same force it took you to mar SOLID ALUMINUM. Alternatively I may feel inclined put contacts in your eyes containing dust, fibers and fingerprints. When you break something while doing your job, you report it and take corrective action. That was a dick move and karma will kick your ass up around your ears for being a douche.

XOXO,
Eli

I called Apple the next morning and very politely informed them that I was having problems and to see what could be done for the situation The guy on the phone was nice enough but clearly not listening as he kept trying to have me describe where on my laptop the damage was. I had to explain and then re-explain several times that I was using an iMac. He kept speaking over me trying to pawn me back off on the Apple Store. I had to stop him and just lay it all out and the more I talked about it the more upset I was beginning to feel about the situation.

I did not just spend my own hard-earned cash to buy an expensive new computer just to become Apple’s bitch and jump through hoops to somehow magically earn a fully-functional computer. That is not how this business/customer relationship works. You ship me a shit product, you make it go away. I very politely informed him that I was done and that I wanted to return the machine, the end. He woke up from autopilot, stopped feeding me crap lines and shut up for a moment and got me in touch with a product specialist who had his shit together.

I was informed that they wanted to “capture this unit for technical analysis and review” which sounds fancy. I gently informed him that I don’t care what they do with it, I just no longer want to see this stupid crap machine in my home anymore. He offered to replace the computer with a brand new one and I agreed. As sick to death of this whole process as I may be, I still need a new computer and I’m not yet at the point where I’m willing to spend any amount of money on a PC as a primary computing device.

At this point in time I’m now waiting for magical things to happen inside the walls of Apple so that my iMac is taken away and a new one is custom configured and shipped to me directly. If this new one is not in good order there will be much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. As it is, I’m really hoping that Apple will be kind enough to provide me with AppleCare as a result of all this crap to cover the new iMac once it arrives. Considering how much effort has gone into it so far, I think it would be the least they could do.

Seconds after taking this picture, the very young manager of Pier 1 came over to see what I was so amused with. He smiled wanly, obviously assessing damage, wondering how long it had been there, and debating whether it should be fixed immediately or if it could wait. Five seconds later he was calling associates over and tring to fix the new decorative labels before going to get a wet cloth to finish the job.