facebook freakouts, gay squeal and spins, and toe bashing

Bid night was stressful for me which really isn't saying much; I stress out every morning when I pick out an outfit. Stress set in a month ago when I realized I had class from 6-9 on bid night. It got worse when I forgot and scheduled an appointment for 9, directly after class. It got even worse when rumors circulated that decisions would be made by 8pm and I would be unavailable. It got slightly better when class got out 40 minutes early and I was back in my car pacing the streets of Ames by 8:50.

I ended up settling in at my apartment watching Rachel Zoe and drinking a beer. Then rumors started circling that nine was the new eight. Ten quickly became the new nine followed quickly by ghastly rumors that eleven was going to replace ten. At approximately 9:50 I received a text message asking where I was. I was at home. On my couch. Watching Rachel Zoe. Drinking a beer.

Meanwhile facebook was busy ruining the secrecy and suspense that I imagine bid nights were back in the day--all the gays were busily messaging back and forth, fingers flying in a frantic rush of questions and support. "You are totally in, there is just no way," was mixed right in with "There is always a chance I rubbed someone the wrong way" and "Knock on wood right now!" Not quite the idealistic picture of deep introspection while waiting for official word.

Eventually I couldn't stand the pressure and my roommate and I descended to the parking lot where I commenced chain smoking. I really did try to pay attention to her recap of her day--reports, an event, a request to organize a meet and greet / fundraiser for a senate campaign--but my mind was running over and over the time that had passed and the signal my phone was getting: "How is it that I only have three bars?! Four is optimum! No 3G?" At one point the gay squeal and spin came out and I got pretty dizzy.

Then a red car pulled up with four guys in it. Four guys never travel together in this town, at least not four guys with FANTASTIC hair. Slowly their faces came into focus and I lost the power of speech. Ben, Darin, Chris and Joe got out of the car and all I could muster was an accusatory, "what are you doing here?" "We are here to offer you a bid to Delta Lambda Phi." That's when all hell broke loose. I moaned as my left hand went up to my face and my right hand went up and dropped my cigarette. "Have you been smoking because of us?" asked Joe. "I have been chain smoking because of you."

To make a ridiculously long story short, they explained my bid papers, invited me to a dinner on Friday and gave me a round of hugs (during which I stepped on Darin--he won't admit it but I totally did...my Kenneth Cole's totally stomped his awesome blue slip-ons). Then they were off to the next house and I was back to the gay squeal and spin.

Meeting these men was awesome. Getting to hang out with them (and do things I never dreamed I would do) was awesome. Realizing that I would be fine with or without a bid was worthwhile. Learning about myself was first rate. Getting a bid was priceless. Trying to calm down is going to be difficult.

the luckiest

Back in the day when my ego and superego were much more at odds with each other than they are mow, I dated women. Not a ton of women--I have always been the kind of guy who wants something serious--but enough for me to finally realize that I wasn't kidding anyone, especially myself. Despite the fact that I have written all the time since I was very young, I have never been very successful at writing what goes on inside my mind. This is also why I will likely never be well-known for my writing. Hence, in order to describe these intangible emotions I would send them through a song, a burnt CD and a note often left on someone's car with a single flower. In hindsight it seems slightly stalker-esque but for the sake of my sanity let's just say it was evidence of my flare for drama and romance.

Looking back on this part of my life I regret what I did. I regret that I wasn't strong enough to tell myself the truth and I regret that my lack of strength hurt people, especially those women. I also regret that I gave some of that music away. I am all for memories--they are a huge part of how I function--but sometimes I get tired of reminding myself constantly that I hurt people, I get tired of walking down the road to self-blame and guilt every time I listen to those songs that I gave away.

And so I am on a mission. I am reclaiming those songs. I won't shy away from them on my iPod anymore, and I will work on forgiving myself. Because one day when I find someone to love I want to be able to give him those songs that describe the way my emotions work and not be sad. I want to be happy.

Starting with this extremely special number by Ben Folds.

The Luckiest

I don't get many things right the first time in fact, I am told that alot
Now I know all the wrong turns and stumbles and falls brought me here
Where was I before the day that I first saw your lovely face, now I see it every day
And I know that I am, I am, I am the luckiest

What if I'd been born fifty years before you in a house on the street where you lived
Maybe I'd be outside as you passed on your, bike would I know?
And in a wide see of eyes, I see one pair that I recognized
And I know that I am, I am, I am the luckiest

I love you more than I have ever felt the way to say to you

Next door there's and old man who lived to his nineties and one day passed away in his sleep
And his wife she stayed for a couple of days and passed away
I'm sorry I know that's a strange way to tell you that I know we belong
That I know that I am, I am, I am the luckiest

my overflowing cup

Tonight was the last rush event for Delta Lambda Phi. We met at the union, ate pizza and socialized. There is something really fun about munching a slice of pizza while sitting next to a bubbling fountain and conversing with all of the people you have grown to love over the course of a few weeks. After the pizza it was time for the main event--a technolatti scavenger hunt around campus. My group didn't win but I did get a few great pictures and laughs out of the deal.

That is what this whole experience has been--great times with great people. I got drunk and laughed my ass off at drag shows; I played kickball for the first time since grade school; I served a volleyball for the first time since high school; I got to mime a peacock and radiation at a game event; I cried on someone's couch about coming out, my mom, and my struggle to accept the world as it is. I started this process with the hopes of finding a niche in the queer community in Ames. I wanted to find a place to be with those like me and a place where I could feel like I was a part of a greater cause. I didn't expect to become so emotionally attached to these people and regardless of what happens on bid night I will still have those people in my life so the fraternity already provided me with one of my goals and for that I am thankful in more ways than I (a writer at heart) can find to express.

As usual the event ended with people sitting around talking to each other. Those who could moved to a cafe in Campus Town. We pulled tables together and bothered the waitress with too many "I'll just have waters" and more than a few moments of confusion. We sat and talked and laughed and joked. The air had a warm yellow-brown tinge to it and outside the plate glass windows, beyond the sidewalk and the trees the cars of Ames slipped by. I couldn't help thinking that three weeks ago I was in one of those cars driving by this cafe caught up in a graduate student's life, completely unaware of the people I was missing out on. As I had these thoughts the night started to wind down. People trickled out with intentions of studying or sleeping or relaxing before a busy Friday. One by one the goodbyes and hugs were shared around the tables and one by one the door swung open and the Fall 2009 Delta Lambda Phi rush process came to an end for me and my fellow rushees. As it does when something ends, my heart became heavy with emotion. I have a hard time moving on from things, even when I know that endings are new beginnings. With both my proverbial cup and my tear ducts running over as they are, I think that's reasonable. When things seem so perfect, why would anyone want to move on to the next step? Life as a whole isn't perfect, so we hold on to the moments when it is.

Thanks guys.

i can

I can successfully balance my workload. I can take three courses, teach three courses, serve as a senator for my department, research for my thesis, and pledge a fraternity all in the same semester. It is possible.

Self, it is time you stopped undercutting your own needs / happiness. You can argue me but it really is time. It was time, like, yesterday.

maybe

I go through phases. I go through phases for many things in my life. These phases usually cycle. I cycle back and forth from being reasonably content about my body / weight to harboring contempt for the thing in the mirror. I go through cycles of fiscal responsibility--these particular cycles are brief, sometime flipping back and forth three times in a twenty-four hour period. I also go in cycles about relationships. Sometimes I feel like I am ready for one, other times I feel like it is the last possible thing I need in my life. Right now I am ready for one.

In the fashion of such people as my life coach, I attempt to be logical about these things. While logic and reason don't always work in the real world when faced with real pressures and fears this logical life-plan has been rather successful. One thing it has taught me is that I don't logically need a boyfriend. I have the oxygen I need to breathe and a book to keep me occupied, what could I possibly do with a boyfriend? Boyfriends aren't practical. I am a narcissist--who isn't these days?--and narcissists don't get along well with people who demand things of them. Boyfriends demand things of people and that's not nice. Letting someone in requires that I become "okay" with that person asking for time, time to be together and time to be apart. The real problem is that his demands might not match up with what I am willing to give. It gets complicated, and it would likely get ugly more than once.

This unorganized list of reasons not to let someone into my life doesn't keep me from wanting one. My heart aches with desire sometimes. I have never had a "boyfriend." I went about things all wrong a few years ago and that probably left me more damaged than the actual coming out process--that was easy. What is not easy is giving yourself over to be a sex-object in someone else's passion play. Here tonight, gone in the morning, please don't contact me. Talk about contributing negativity to my self-worth. I decided to stop doing that and in a way I decided not to let anyone in. I needed time to process who I was. But now I might be ready. I might already be in love but like Kate Winslet's character in The Holiday this love is unrequited and I don't always know that I know (or he knows) why. But that's fine. I made the decision long ago to keep him as a friend and nothing more. But he will always be some milestone on my road to emotional recovery--the first time love--yes, even unrequited love--came knocking and I didn't run away from it.

My heart is just so heavy. Maybe I don't want to be a self-centered narcissist all my life. Maybe I need someone to care for just a little bit. Maybe someone out there appreciates getting flowers every once in a while. Maybe someone out there still likes mixed CDs and hand-written letters. Maybe someone out there won't mind my head on his shoulders while we watch a romantic comedy. Maybe someone out there...

adult sized swing sets

My roommate and I have taken up walking.  Both of us come from central Illinois where snow isn't a guarantee during the Winter season.  Okay, so it will snow at some point, probably at a few different points.  And it will be cold and wet.  White snow, though, isn't exactly as constant as muddy brown.  Having both moved to central Iowa and having both survived the first Iowan winter (not as bad as Minnesota, worse than central Illinois) we decided that we should enjoy the months where we aren't snowbound even if it makes us sweat a little.  Plus, it's a nice change from the elliptical at the gym.

We have also discovered it is nice to walk through a town that is unfamiliar or rather, to discover a town previously though of as familiar only to discover a different pace of life.  There is a big difference when you walk by the same landmark for the first time as opposed to driving by it twice a day for ten months.  There is also a whole new dimension to getting lost.  In a car the moments between street signs or recognizable points of interest are quite quick--you never feel the lost sensation for more than a minute--two at most.  Walking however ups the level of discomfort and unease between not knowing and knowing where you are--the pace is just that slow.  This isn't helped by our geographic location in Ames:  we are on the very outskirts of the new construction that happened in the last five to seven years.  We have seen newish looking maps where our road doesn't exist.  Directly across the street is suburbia world where the roads twist and turn and dead end and circle around and are dotted with cud-de-sacs.  The only chance at maintaining some sense of your relative location depends on your ability to look for the water tower over and / or around the two story houses set in a rolling landscape.  That plan is inherently flawed as the water tower is circular and you never really know from which angle you are looking.

There are also fun moments to walking.  On day two of our walking escapades Jordan mentioned that she remembered a sign for a bike path about three blocks from us, so away we went.  We discovered a path that leads away from the  road, through some trees, up a hill, eventually letting out on a street initially unfamiliar to us both.  We eventually figured out where we were and decided to loop around and make a circle testing out my theory that a "dead end" street a few blocks from us was not actually a dead end but rather hadn't yet been connected to another dead end street near my friend Paul's house.  Mind you, this discovery would mean significantly shorter drunk walks home; it was fairly important.  My theory was proven correct--the two roads are connected by a gravel-ish path through some prairie grass and next to a frog-filled pond.  We took the connection and looped our way back home.

The next night Jordan suggested we try to follow the same path in reverse and away we went.  Everything was going fine until we diverted from the original path to explore an interesting neighborhood--a row of new houses that sprung up in the middle of an otherwise empty new development.  We thought we could simply hop back on the grid and let it take us back.  I was convinced however, that on the first night we had walked two blocks too far on the grid and therefore directed us to where I thought the roads met up with the hilly, wooded bike path.  I was wrong and we ended up on a street that ended in a double cul-de-sac.  I was annoyed until we discovered an odd sidewalk leading into the woods from the tip of one of the cul-de-sacs.  (We had previously discovered one such sidewalk in suburbia world and had significant reason to believe that it a.) was a public sidewalk, and b.) that it led somewhere.)  We took it and had to walk over some weeds and through some grass down a tunnel-like section of woods.  Then we rounded the corner and we were in a park--a two acre ridge of grass overlooking the hospice and the road we drive on every day.  The best part of this park is the playground.

Being the giant eight year olds that we are, we immediately hopped on the swings.  They fit Jordan better than they do me because I am built like the Jolly Green Giant but I made them work and was soon flying so high that I lost tension in the chains and experienced a moment of free-fall.  The experience made us both laugh.  Once I recovered I started building up speed again.  This cycle went on a few times until I realized how exhausting swinging is.  My hands hurt, and arms, legs, and abs were all sore.  I kept going though, because it was that gosh-darn fun.

It made me think, though, about growing up.  I live directly across from a fitness center and every day I see everyone from eighteen years to sixty years entering and leaving.  There are no children.  The children are too busy running the streets like they own them, finding pools to swim in and, yes, swinging on swing sets in public parks all across the city.  Doesn't it sound like more fun to be doing what they are doing than hanging out on an elliptical?  Personally, I vote for swinging.

puckered lips

I was seventeen and gearing up for another school year--I always got impatient with summer and the heat and the listlessness.  I spent my time designing web sites, reading, and manufacturing blizzards for the masses.  Meanwhile, my mother was in the guest room dying of cancer.

There were many difficult conversations and I say difficult because, looking back, they were so exhausting that I avoided them.  One conversation I remember in particular.  My mother had decided that she was going to clean out her sewing room.  It was a large corner of the laundry room that for twenty years had accumulated fabric remnants, cases of thread, several sewing machines, and a few plastic and concrete geese for good measure.  When my dad told her she didn't have to worry about that mess she replied, "Terry, you didn't make the mess, I'm not going to make you clean it up."  And that was that.  For a day, my brother, sister, and I carried box after box--her life in sewing--from the basement up to the guest room where we would sit as she sifted and sorted each one.  Fabric was sent to the neighbor who quilts, thread was organized into cases, some things went directly to the trash.  As I sat perched on the edge of her hospital bed holding a box she sat directly across from me in a green wingback chair directing me.  I pulled out a few pictures of young women on a catwalk with feathered hair and crazy outfits.  My mother, without aplomb, told me that she had put on a fashion show while she was teaching home economics in Canada.  I was amazed at the idea that her life extended further into the past than my seventeen years.

In a rubbermaid tub I discovered the pillow my mother had sewn for me.  It was my day care pillow and I remember the pillow case being somewhat thin with a blue and red cartoon pattern.  I was surprised to see it--I had forgotten it existed.  All I could think about then was that one day my mother had sat down to sew me a pillow and a pillowcase and the amount of love evident in that simple small pillow sent tears slipping down my cheeks.  My mother said, "Marc, I would like to stay around longer, but I just can't."

It got really difficult for my mother to move.  Formerly a large woman, her body was literally withering away leaving large flaps of skin and weakened muscles and bones.  It got to the point she couldn't do stairs anymore and so one day my grandpa--her father--showed up and built a wheelchair ramp off the back deck.  It probably wasn't at all connected but I remember telling her about my upcoming choir class.  I got into choir.  The director practically begged me to be in the group--my audition was incredibly quick.  We are singing the national anthem at some event the first week of school.  Can you come and hear me sing?  In my memory I picture her standing where she used to leaned against the door frame between kitchen and dining room but I know she couldn't have been there; she was sick, dying.  I do remember her face and her hands.  Her elbows were resting against her stomach and her hands were up in front of her face, fingers touching in the "this is a church, this is a steeple" pose.  Her eyes expressed serious doubt when she said, "I can try."  The realization that she was dying washed over me yet again and I felt shamed that I had asked her to do something she deeply wanted to do but seriously doubted she would be able to.

My mother loved food and she particularly loved steak.  During the last few months of her life she couldn't eat--the cancer had blocked her intestines and so once or twice or three times a day I can't remember we hauled out a one pound bag of refrigerated milky white nutrients that we plugged into the port on her chest.  She was strong though, and was I think still holding out hope that she would pull through.  She didn't mind that we ate around her.  Sometime before she received her death sentence my dad grilled her favorite cut of steak--New York strip he has since hypothesized--and we were eating as a family on the deck.  My mother was watching television in the living room and I decided I would eat with her--I didn't want her to be alone, but maybe I was getting an inkling that I might not have too much more time with her.  There was something about watching me eat, or something about the smell of the steak wafting through the house but I looked up from taking a bite and her head was turned away from the set, her left hand covering her lips, tears sliding down her face.  I felt embarrassed.  I was young and fit and eating a dead cow in front of her when she would never eat again.  I put my plate down and gave her a hug whispering into her ear, "Sweetie your life isn't very great right now but if anyone can take it you can."

As the youngest child I probably got the most alone time with my mom.  Twice a year her hometown throws a celebration called Spoon River Scenic Drive--a glorified craft fair with fantastic fattening food.  Twice a year she would pick me up from school and we would drive two hours up to the festival.  We always stopped at the gas station on Main and Walnut and bought a bag of Chili Cheese Dorritos and munched on them the whole way there.

My mom died the first week of my senior year.  On the first day of gym class, we filled out the emergency contact cards and naturally I listed both parents.  These cards also served as a record of what units--badminton, tennis, basketball, walking for fitness, bowling--we selected throughout the semester.  As I was in fitness phys. ed. I didn't get to switch units but they still passed the cards back for us to sign each time the other students were switching.  A couple of weeks after my mom died there was a unit change and there, in my own writing, was my mother's name:  Carolyn Malone.  I was late starting the activity that day.  I couldn't get off the floor.

When my mother learned she was had cancer she decided to cut her hair.  For many years she had rocked what she called the "I have two kids in college" haircut but staring down chemotherapy and probable hair loss she decided to get it cut.  Her stylist was located downtown right next to the Illinois Theatre.  There was some sort of a street fair that day and I remember very clearly the irony of the sunshine while my sister and I hovered near a sandstone building trying to come to grips with our new situation in life.  My sister was on the phone with a coworker when my mother walked out.  Birkenstock sandals, khaki pants, grey blouse tucked in with a brown belt, trademark glasses, sophisticated new haircut.  She looked strong and confident.

She died four years later.  Sometimes I want to ask her things.  I am writing ten pages of my autobiography for an American Autobiography / Memoir course and I am trying to describe my neighborhood--modest homes with flat backyard boxes.  Then I realized that my backyard slopes downhill and borders on a field instead of someone else's backyard.  I remembered all of the sudden that the backyard was a selling point for my mother and I wondered, while smoking a cigarette in the humid parking lot, what did it feel like for her to move in to that house, go to sleep, wake up, and look out that back door on that view that was hers for the first time?  I want to ask her that, but I can't.

I miss sugar lips (my nickname for my mother to which she would always reply, "Oh stop!" and hit me with whatever piece of paper she was currently holding), my momma, my constant champion.