Something Requisitely Witty and Urbane

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Go add yourself to mine.

(seen at Chuck's place)

UPDATE: Bumped to the top, since I put it in on the weekend, and some people might not have seen it.  Plus, the more people who sign up, the bigger the ego stroke, so there's that.

Best. Answer. Ever.

One of my co-managers at the restaurant had his family come in to eat tonight.  His daughter, who is around 14 or 15 I'd say, went to a big concert with some of her friends the night before. When he went into his default dad posture, the conversation went something like this.

Dad: How was the concert?
Daughter: It was great!
Dad: You didn't smoke any pot did you?
Daughter: No, I didn't smoke any pot.  I could smell it, though.
Dad: How do you even know what it smells like?
Daughter: Dad! You were the one who took me to see Santana!

If Only Anyone Were Buying

My blog is worth $58,712.16.
How much is your blog worth?

It's Mornings Like These

... that I'm glad I live 10 minutes from work.

I stayed up way to late last night, trying little CSS tweaks (almost all of which had very little effect, but what can I say? I got hooked), and had to hit the snooze button many, many times this morning.

I have a new alarm clock, which I'm generally happy with, but it allows for very few snoozes before it just randomly shuts itself off.  When this happened this morning, I opened my eyes for a minute, and looked over to see that I had 30 minutes to get to work.

Anyone who's every lived in the DFW area know that everything is basically 30 minutes from everything.  Most people I know, if they woke up with 30 minutes to get to work, they'd be in a panic because they should have been on the road 15 minutes ago.

Not me!

I live close enough to work that, when combined with the fact that I'm a man, 20 minutes allowed me enough time to stop and check my email.

That is all.

How One Night in a Lesbian Bar Changed My Life, or, Dancing, Drinking, and Generally Being Fabulous, or Holy Cow Do Those Gays Know How to Party!

I spent Friday evening at a lesbian bar.

I just wrote that first sentence, a lede, as they call it, and then sat here for a few minutes, read an article or two, and then came back to this post, trying to decide how one night of drunken debauchery became, really, an eye-opening experience that will stick with me for a long time.  Oh, and how to tell all this without seeming like I'm coming out.

My friend, Carly, had her birthday on Friday, and we went out.  There were five of us in the group: She and the girl she's seeing, another one of her good friends and her date, and myself.  We went to one of the locations of my restaurant and had a nice dinner, drank some awesome wine (Etude' Pinot Noir.  If you get a chance, it's highly worth it), and generally had a good time.

Afterwords, Carly wanted to go to Sue Ellen's, which is the most well known lesbian bar in Oak Lawn area, the Castro District of Dallas (although I'm sure there the Dallas version is quite a bit more repressed than San Fran).  We got there, and I just have to say that as bars/clubs go, this is one of the cooler ones I've ever been to.  The layout is great, there's plenty of bar areas, a nice sized, but not too big dance floor, a game room, and then an awesome patio (which was made even more awesome by the incredible weather we've been having around here and the really great cover band that was playing.  The frontman (woman? person? One thing about being a white-bread guy who likes gay people is that the pronoun game becomes a much more difficult dilemma) was awesome.  She was a rock star up there, and it really set the tone for the night).

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Let me take a break, here, to mention a few cool things about going to a gay bar.

• When you are buying a shot for your friend, and she doesn't drink straight liquor shots, going up to the bartender and saying, "I need two shots, but I need them to be fruity" induces an eyeroll from your bartender and an hilarious comedy routine for the rest of your friends.
• At a lesbian bar, the men's room is the cleanest I've ever seen, and never, ever occupied.
• There's no real meat-market vibe.  Well, there is, but as someone told me yesterday, they just weren't interested in my meat.  Consequentially, the strange need to not act like an idiot and to try to appear suave no longer applies.  This leads to (when combined with copious amounts of alcohol), an absolute drop in your inhibitions.

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Without giving just a straight narrative of the entire night, let's just say that I drank.  I drank a lot.  Luckily for me, Carly's date doesn't drink, and did the gracious service of making sure that Carly and I got home ok.

Before we go any further, I should mention something:

I don't dance.  And the period is there for a reason.

I'm a typical white boy, and it shows on the dance floor.  But, as alluded to above, inhibitions were in short supply that night, and I danced.  I danced a lot.  I danced with my friends, I danced with other people's friends, I even danced with a drag queen.

And here's where I get to the point. Somehow, over the course of the evening, I began to realize that something more important was happening to me.  I'm not trying to make more of this than there is, but this was, in some way, a life-altering experience for me.

I'm a pretty open-minded guy.  I'm accepting of just about all lifestyles, and as those who've read my blog know, a defender of the gay people.  This doesn't, however, imply that I have any sort of gay street cred.  My pro-gay attitude is largely in theory, with very little experience to back it up.

Here's the point.  It became apparent very quickly that there was a much different vibe going on at Sue Ellen's than I'm used to.  I had an absolutely amazing time, and I think it was because, for the first time in my life (and I mean this seriously.  I've probably never been in a public place that didn't reek of the typical, patriarchal, "Men Want Pussy, Women Have Pussy, Men Try Every Trick in the Book to Get Pussy" mentality that comes with the typical, hetero-night life experience) I was in a place where everyone was happy with who they were and accepting of who everyone else was, and that included the silly straight guy on the dance floor, dancing his ass off and, in general making a fool of himself.  This attitude was pervasive, it was almost tangible in the air and, very quickly, my typical social anxieties and quirky self-esteem issues (the kind we all have) disappeared.

I'm a straight, white male.  Being a Democrat in Texas is the closest thing I've ever had to being a minority.  But, there I was, in all my straightness, and nobody cared.  What I was, how I dressed, and who I wanted to sleep with didn't matter to anyone there.  That was amazingly refreshing.  For the first time I was set free, if only in my own mind, from the need to "project" a certain quality or status.  I was just some guy, having fun just like everyone else.

There is a great debate, even among those who are accepting of gays, about whether someone is born gay, or if they chose to be.  I've always been an advocate of the "born gay" side, though most of us will agree that there are people that choose the lifestyle these days.  On Friday night, I figured out why.  Why WOULDN'T you want to chose a lifestyle in which the community of people is so accepting, so tolerant, and so free of the social complications which bind the heterosexual lifestyle?  I, in one night, have a deeper appreciation for those gay people who live their lives in the manner I saw on Friday night.  A group of people who are so stereotyped (and believe me, I saw all manner of people there that defied any stereotyping), so defiled and so maligned by the rest of the world, and yet they will accept anyone who walks into the room for what they are: That is remarkable.  From now on, when approached with the born as/chose to be question, my new answer is, "Who cares? They are already better people than you and I are."  Hetero's aren't born with that mentality of acceptance, and very few of us chose it.

That is more than just a shame, that is the real sin.

Celebrity Pregnancy

I just wanted to mention that I already feel like plucking out my eyes and sewing my ears shut because of the over-abundance of Katie/Tom pregnancy news.

But, the worst part is, everytime I hear about it, my brain automatically reminds me of the fact that we'll be hearing about it for 9 more months.

This has caused a protracted case of depression, which I contacted a doctor about this week.  I prescribed several mood-altering drugs, the most well-known of which is Paxil.  This has really helped, and I feel much better about myself.

It turns out, however, that Tom Cruise was right all along, however:  After a week's use of Paxil, I have actually developed a severe addiction to several hard street drugs.

That's right.  I'm a crackhead.

Because of this and for the sake of my future mental health, I'm declaring this blog, heretofore, a TomKat free zone.

Line of the Day

Andrew Sullivan:

I'll be on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher tonight. I'm on a panel with Salman Rushdie and Ben Affleck. I'm not making that up.

"Because a Great Nation Deserves the Truth"

AmericaBlog is an indispensable resource for political blogtopia.  They and Josh Marshall continuously battle it out for the best sourced, most informative blogs out there, and AmericaBlog may be the best resource we have, when it comes to organizing around certain stories and making our voices heard.

But, every once in a while they post something like this, and it just strains credibility and harms our side:

A source in the media, who has the opportunity to see the president in person regularly, has pointed out to me that Bush appears to be uncontrollably grinding his teeth, or having a jaw spasm, when he speaks.
[...]
I'm told by folks who know that this is something that happens when people do too much cocaine. I've also heard that alcohol abuse can do the same.

I'm just saying, you've gotta have a whole lot more proof that the President is drinking and doing cocaine again than a video of the President grinding his teeth.

I know one of the great things about the blogs is that they'll touch things that the mainstream media won't, but sometimes, the worst thing about the blogs is that they'll touch things that the mainstream media won't.  It's instances like this one that discredit what we are all doing.

Cold

Huzzah! Gloria in Excelsis Deo! Chim-Chimminy, Chim-Chim Charoo!

Summer is over in Dallas!

I woke up this morning, and got ready to walk my dog.  I put on some shorts, a tee-shirt, and my sandals, and then walked outside, only to be met by 50 degree weather.  I had to go inside and put on some pants!

This is tremendous news for someone who really dislikes summer, but lives in Dallas.

What I Did On My Vacation

Last Sunday, my sister and I left Kansas where we visited our Dad.  I had a whole week, after that day, of vacation.  A week where I could do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted.  Here is a brief summary of what I did.

• Got a video game injury.  I bought a Nascar game.  To accelerate, you have to hold down the right trigger.  The first day, I played it for many, many hours.  The next morning I woke up and couldn't feel the tip of my finger.
• Ate.  A lot.
• Went to the movies.  I won't write a review of all of these films, but here are some mini-reviews:
  • Flight Plan - Decent, tight thriller.  It keeps you guessing, and doesn't have too many plot wholes.
  • Lord of War - Nick Cage is great, as always, but this is a re-hashing of Goodfellas, if Goodfellas had been about the international weapons trade.
  • A History of Violence - Viggo's great, the tone of this film is just comic book enough to keep the heightened reality present without ever feeling inauthentic (unauthentic?).  I'm also learning that he's a bit of a nerd.  Watch the interviews on the Lord of the Rings discs, and then track down the Daily Show interview with him from last week.  He said barely three words, and spent the whole time doing magic tricks.  Seriously.  Magic.
• Hurt my ankle.  Here is the sequence of events:  A friend says, "Hey, anyone wanna toss the football around?"  Dylan jumps up, and immediately takes off on, what would have been, a textbook fade route.  Friend says, "Wait, wait... let's warm up first."  At precisely that moment, I take a step and find myself standing on the top of my left foot.  I crumble to the ground like I've been shot, and then hobble around the rest of the day.  It was the first play.  I'm a loser.
• Grew a beard.  Not really.  I can't grow a beard.  I have patches of facial hair that grow at such a slow rate that I only have to shave once every 3 days or so.  I let it grow out for 6 days, then shaved everything but the hairs on my chinny-chin-chin.   Went with that look for a few days, before looking in a mirror and realizing that half of my chin grows more hair than the other, and then shaved it off.
• Went to the State Fair of Texshssh.  Ate too much, drank too much, got terribly sunburnt.  All in all a successful State Fair experience.

So, that was it.  I did, really very little.  I was lazy, and it was good.

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I should take this time to mention that I didn't intend my vacation to also be a blog vacation, but that's how it ended up.  I had actually planned to do quite a bit of writing during the week off, but recharging the batteries ended up meaning taking some time off the blog, too.  My schedule is getting back to normal, though, and I'm sure my blogging schedule will fall right back in line.

Happy October, everybody.