The Second Moon of Adonis

If I were… (pilfered from James D)

If I were a planet I would be Mercury, because even it never seems to know where it’s going.
If I were a month I would be August, not because I’m blisteringly hot, but because if it wasn’t annoying nobody would notice it was there.
If I were a day of the week I would be Thursday, just a bit too late for the hump.
If I were a time of day I would be 4:00am, storing up energy for a run at the unknown.
If I were a sea animal I would be an urchin, minding my own business until someone stepped on me.
If I were a direction I would be that way. No, the other way.
If I were a piece of furniture I would be a stepladder. Occasionally useful, but hard on the shins when it’s the middle of the night and you stumble into me.
If I were a sin I would be lust.
If I were a historical figure I would be Rasputin.
If I were a liquid I would be that annoying water in your ear after a shower that you just can’t get to come out.
If I were a stone I would be an opal, varying based on where you come at me from.
If I were a tree I would be an old oak with a rotten heart.
If I were a bird I would be a magpie. What out for your shiny stuff.
If I were a tool I would be that screwdriver in the drawer with a tip that works sometimes, but doesn’t really fit anything.
If I were a flower I would be a night-blooming jasmine, and day lilies could kiss my fragrant ass.
If I were a kind of weather I would be freezing rain.
If I were an animal I would be a badger. Not because I am, but because I’d like to be.
If I were a color or shade I would be a shade of green that there’s no Crayola match for, even in the big box with the sharpener on it.
If I were an emotion I would be disbelief.
If I were a vegetable I would be typing this with my tongue.
If I were a sound I would be that strange noise in the distance that was either a dog howling or an escaped animal from the zoo getting its first kill in years.
If I were an element I would be kryptonite.
If I were a car I would be a ‘71 Pinto with a spoiler and nitrous.
If I were a song I would be “Me Myself I” by Joan Armatrading.
If I were a movie I would be directed by Kevin Smith.
If I were a book I would be written by Dr. Seuss.
If I were a food I would be something that didn’t turn out anything like what you thought you’d ordered.
If I were a place I would be overrun with tourists for a season, after which I’d be passed over for newer and more exciting places, though there’d be a small core of visitors who’d love me enough to come back every year.
If I were a material I would be burlap: handy to have around but itchy as hell.
If I were a taste I would be bittersweet, with extra bitter.
If I were a scent I would be that smell that might be someone’s fireplace, or might be the garage burning down.
If I were a word I would be “mutable.”
If I were a body part I would be the left eyebrow.
If I were a facial expression I would be quizzical.
If I were a subject in school I would be creative writing.
If I were a cartoon character I would be L from Death Note.
If I were a shape I would be obtuse.

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Nothing ever goes as planned
It’s a hell of a notion.

- Dennis De Young, Styx

The plan was to update this place at least a few times a week, but I’ve been sidetracked by a few things lately.

The biggest distraction has been a group of security auditors who have monopolized almost all of my time this week, and I’ve been so exhausted by the time I’m done with the daily interrogations that I’ve just got nothing left in me. I’ve been getting home and immediately wanting to do absolutely nothing for the rest of the night until it’s time to go to bed. I’ve been completely drained, and I can’t wait for the ordeal to be over.

I also have a confession to make. Another factor in my not showing up here is a gnome mage by the name of Imtrick, my new alter-ego on the Tichondrius server in World of Warcraft. I’d managed to not get tangled up with WoW for the first few years it was out, but I finally broke down and logged in, and by the second day I’d converted my demo account to a full one.

I’m not sure how far I’ll get with it, being basically too antisocial to group up with strangers most of the time, and that limits my ability to complete a lot of quests. I have, however, made it as far as level 33 so far and I’ve really been on a roll lately.

Unless, of course, I’m collapsed in a heap in the living room because I couldn’t make it upstairs to the bedroom.

Published at blog.Adonis.net. You can comment here or there.

“The stars, I see, will kiss the valleys first: The odds for high and low’s alike”

- William Shakespeare

I had a bit of an epiphany last night. It was one of those moments when a few things I’ve never understood about myself suddenly came into very clear focus, and things just made sense. I’m not sure if I want to go into the details, or if anyone would even want to hear them. To me, though, it was something major. It’s not every day you have the answer to “why the hell do I do that?” handed to you in a way that makes perfect sense. It’s potentially life-changing stuff. We’ll see.

It was a big thing to me, and coming on the heels of my Burning Man trip I think my nerves were a bit more exposed today than usual, but in a curiously good way. I’m prone to long periods of numbness, and today I let it drop a little. The end result was that today’s high spots were a bit higher than usual, and the low spots a bit lower. One of the things I realized last night, though, is that those lows are the price of feeling. To reach the highs, I’ve got to be willing to endure the lows.

Over the years, I’ve put a lot of effort into avoiding those lows, and today I feel like I finally know why. A feels like a first step in letting go of that.

Published at blog.Adonis.net. You can comment here or there.

Kris and I had another talk yesterday. Actually, it was several short talks interspersed with a lot of silence.

He’s pretty serious about his move to Palm Springs. At one point, he’d told me his brother is coming in from Paris in October to help him move, and that we need to talk to what to do about the house here in El Sobrante.

I was hoping I’d understood his intentions wrong, but I didn’t. His plan is for us to sell the house, in the currently decimated housing market, so that I can afford to rent him a house there in Palm Springs. Why? Because we live in the middle of nowhere, and he’s lonely.

I tried to gently point out that we’re not in the middle of nowhere, situated as we are 20 minutes outside San Francisco, which last time I checked was a major metropolis. I also mentioned that, in the 10 years I’ve known him, I’ve never once heard him speak to anyone in Palm Springs. Reality, however, doesn’t seem to be a factor in this decision.

Eventually, I had to walk away. I don’t get angry easily, but I’ve been seething since yesterday. I’m not sure what to do about it, so I’ve just kept my mouth shut.

I’m no math whiz, but from where I’m sitting losing a ton of money and my home, and then continuing to pay for a house I’ll probably never see, just isn’t adding up for me. I supported him for a decade: if he wanted anything, he got it, and I never held that against him. What he wants now, though, is just too much.

Now I just need to figure out how to explain that to him in a way that won’t turn things really ugly.

Published at blog.Adonis.net. You can comment here or there.

I’ve been back home now for a couple weeks now. Things have been civil, if not warm. It almost feels like we’re living in two different dimensions; we rarely cross paths, and when we do it’s a bit like the other one of us doesn’t exist.

When we have talked, it’s been mainly about how Kris wants to move to Palm Springs. For those of you not familiar with Southern California geography, that’s a little spot in the desert about a couple hours from Los Angeles where rich people go to die, circuit queens go to get fucked up, and lesbians go to play golf, all on a fairly regularly rotating schedule that I’m sure they’ve spent a lot of time working out with each other so they’d never need to meet each other again.

I really don’t like the place, but Kris thinks it’d be good for his jewelry business. He also feels isolated here in the suburbs 20 minutes outside San Francisco, and has decided that moving to a speck of a town in the middle of the desert will fix that problem. I’d chuckle at the irony of it if not for the part of his plan that involves me renting him a house with a pool (he was very specific about the pool) in a place I’d never want to go.

What I really think I need is a pair of balls big enough to tell him to just go and get it over with, but I haven’t been able to. I’m not sure why.

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I haven’t been home since Monday morning. I’m staying with a friend in a little room with a twin bed, and making the trek into work from Concord to downtown every day, so I’m spending a bit more time on the road.

I’m holding up better than i thought I would. I miss the dogs, and the desktop computer (my God, I haven’t synced the iPod since Monday), and the California King, but other than that I can’t say the last few days have been too awful.

There has been one phone call, about mid-week, that ended when I was hung up on, and one phone call yesterday because Vonage wasn’t working at home, but other than that I haven’t spoken with Kris. I’m not sure if it’s over or we’re just at an impasse, and I’m wondering how long it will go on like this. I do know that, even though Kris shouted something about packing up and leaving just before he slammed down the phone, the eBay notification about auctions he’s won would seem to indicate he’s planning on sticking around at least long enough for a few weeks’ worth of jewelry deliveries.

I also know that I don’t want to just go back to how things have been recently, with Kris being in a perpetual state of pissed off, and me feeling like I’m not welcome in my own home. It’s just not healthy for either of us, and by all indications all it does is get worse.

On a totally unrelated note, the guys at work have me playing around with Brightkite and Twitter. If you find me fascinating in any way, the banality and repetition that is my life is laid out in excruciating detail between those two, and they should cure you of any misconceptions you may have that I’m at all interesting.

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It’s been quiet around the house for a little over a week now. Not a peaceful kind of quiet, but a heavy, emotionally-charged, oppressive sort of silence, of the “I’m not speaking to you” variety.

It happens a lot around this place, though as time goes by it’s been happening a lot more frequently.  This is also the longest it’s ever lasted; except for one quick five-word blast of anger last Sunday, Kris hasn’t spoken to me since last Thursday.

I won’t go into what prompted it, but I assure you that the reaction I’ve gotten to what triggered this is obscenely overblown and bordering on irrational. He’s essentially locked himself away upstairs for the last week, and has told the counselor we’ve been seeing to schedule a final appointment. I think I may have been broken up with, but since he won’t say anything I really can’t be sure.

I should feel worse about it, I suppose, but it’s hard to work up a lot of sorrow over losing a relationship with someone who has obviously lost his mind.

Published at blog.Adonis.net. You can comment here or there.

All About You
A survey that covers just about any question you could be asked about yourself. Very lengthy.
This survey has been taken 59 times so far.
General
What\’s your age?	41
Height?	5′8or9″
Weight?	180ish
Birthday?	June 7
Birthplace?	Los Angeles
Natural Hair Color?	Dark brown/light gray
Eye Color?	Hazel and/or Red
Race?	Mutt
Religion?	No thanks.
Medical
Have you had any surgeries?	Just tonsils.
Any allergies?	To everything.
Injuries?	I run into things constantly.
Do you currently have an illnesses?	Nothing major.
Personality
How would you describe yourself?	Intelligent, funny, flirtacious, obsessive, sarcastic, ambivalent
What\’s your favorite food?	My lasagna
Drink?	Chocolate chocolate chip milkshakes.
Color?	Something in a green.
Place?	Somewhere remote and tropical.
What\’s your style of clothing?	Jeans and a t-shirt when I can swing it.
What kind of music do you listen to?	Almost anything that isn’t played in a dance club.
What do you like to do?	Answer surveys with impossibly vague questions.
In your Partner
What is your ideal mate\’s hair color?	A very specific shade of light brown.
Skin tone?	Pale
Eye color?	Green.
Height?	My height or shorter.
Weight?	Not too skinny. Wouldn’t want to break him.
Would you like him/her physically fit?	Able to get himself out of bed is fine.
You like \’em smart?	It’s a requirement.
Is your ideal partner tough or sweet?	Somewhere in between
Does it matter if they\’re good in bed?	If he’s ideal otherwise, he will be.
Girl or guy?	Guy, with ~90% certainty.
Do you want to get married?	I waffle on that one.
How about kids, and if so, how many?	2 or 3.
Sex
What\’s your orientation?	Homostly.
You like naughty or nice?	Both
Slow or fast?	Both, please.
Hard or gentle?	Depends on the situation.
Does BDMS turn you on or off?	On, with limits.
Do you prefer pain or pleasure?	At the more extreme ranges, pleasure definitely wins.
Do you masturbate?	Yes.
If so, how often?	Varies. Quite a bit recently.
Do you enjoy it, and if so, how do you do it?	Yes, I do. I use a hand, usually.
Do you have a favorite toy?	No.
Favorite position?	No.
In condoms and lubricants, flavored or no?	No.
How often would you like to get busy?	Don’t have a good answer for that one.
Business Life
What\’s your job or what would you like to do?	Network/Security Geek
Why?	Why? I was born for this.
Is money more important then enjoying the job?	No.
How much would you like to earn?	I’m doing OK, but I accept raises.
Do you prefer group enviornments?	Yes.
Would you like to work from home?	Yes.
In Death
Who would you leave your possessions to?	Whoever can use ‘em.
What do you want done to your body?	Bury me in an old cemetery with a real headstone — the kind that’s hard to mow around.
Do you have any regrets?	Tons.
Take this Survey!
Powered by ThatSurveySite.

Originally published at blog.Adonis.net. You can comment here or there.

All About You
A survey that covers just about any question you could be asked about yourself. Very lengthy.
This survey has been taken 59 times so far.
General
What\’s your age?	41
Height?	5′8or9″
Weight?	180ish
Birthday?	June 7
Birthplace?	Los Angeles
Natural Hair Color?	Dark brown/light gray
Eye Color?	Hazel and/or Red
Race?	Mutt
Religion?	No thanks.
Medical
Have you had any surgeries?	Just tonsils.
Any allergies?	To everything.
Injuries?	I run into things constantly.
Do you currently have an illnesses?	Nothing major.
Personality
How would you describe yourself?	Intelligent, funny, flirtacious, obsessive, sarcastic, ambivalent
What\’s your favorite food?	My lasagna
Drink?	Chocolate chocolate chip milkshakes.
Color?	Something in a green.
Place?	Somewhere remote and tropical.
What\’s your style of clothing?	Jeans and a t-shirt when I can swing it.
What kind of music do you listen to?	Almost anything that isn’t played in a dance club.
What do you like to do?	Answer surveys with impossibly vague questions.
In your Partner
What is your ideal mate\’s hair color?	A very specific shade of light brown.
Skin tone?	Pale
Eye color?	Green.
Height?	My height or shorter.
Weight?	Not too skinny. Wouldn’t want to break him.
Would you like him/her physically fit?	Able to get himself out of bed is fine.
You like \’em smart?	It’s a requirement.
Is your ideal partner tough or sweet?	Somewhere in between
Does it matter if they\’re good in bed?	If he’s ideal otherwise, he will be.
Girl or guy?	Guy, with ~90% certainty.
Do you want to get married?	I waffle on that one.
How about kids, and if so, how many?	2 or 3.
Sex
What\’s your orientation?	Homostly.
You like naughty or nice?	Both
Slow or fast?	Both, please.
Hard or gentle?	Depends on the situation.
Does BDMS turn you on or off?	On, with limits.
Do you prefer pain or pleasure?	At the more extreme ranges, pleasure definitely wins.
Do you masturbate?	Yes.
If so, how often?	Varies. Quite a bit recently.
Do you enjoy it, and if so, how do you do it?	Yes, I do. I use a hand, usually.
Do you have a favorite toy?	No.
Favorite position?	No.
In condoms and lubricants, flavored or no?	No.
How often would you like to get busy?	Don’t have a good answer for that one.
Business Life
What\’s your job or what would you like to do?	Network/Security Geek
Why?	Why? I was born for this.
Is money more important then enjoying the job?	No.
How much would you like to earn?	I’m doing OK, but I accept raises.
Do you prefer group enviornments?	Yes.
Would you like to work from home?	Yes.
In Death
Who would you leave your possessions to?	Whoever can use ‘em.
What do you want done to your body?	Bury me in an old cemetery with a real headstone — the kind that’s hard to mow around.
Do you have any regrets?	Tons.
Take this Survey!
Powered by ThatSurveySite.

Published at blog.Adonis.net. You can comment here or there.

$3140.00The Cadaver Calculator - Find out how much your body is worth. From Mingle2 - Free Online Dating

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90% Geek

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Summer is officially here. I just came back into the house after completing what’s become a summer ritual around here: rounding up the first batch of ripe plums from the tree in the backyard and getting them all washed and ready to be brought into the office tomorrow.

That tree is one of the reasons I decided I wanted to buy my house. They are, with no exaggeration, the best plums ever grown. If the offer on this place hadn’t been accepted, I was fully prepared to sneak back in the middle of the night with a U-Haul to steal the tree.

So, now that the time has arrived, I will be climbing the hill in the backyard every night when I get home for the next couple weeks or so collecting the ripest ones before they fall off. They’re so good, I’m sure that for every one that falls from the tree and doesn’t get eaten, a baby angel has its wings ripped out of their sockets.

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I have occasional periods where I become a little withdrawn. I seem to be in the middle of one of them. I’ve been told by friends (the ones who put up with me and are still around) that it can be very frustrating. I tend to just disappear.

It’s not a conscious thing; I just go through stretches where all I want to do when I get home is escape. Fairly often that means I throw on a pair of headphones and try out a game that I’ve been meaning to look at for months. When pressed, I can’t really come up with a reason for it, other than that it happens on occasion, and it will eventually pass.

I realize it’s purely selfish. I go off into my own world (or, in the latest case, one of BioWare’s) and I don’t come out until I’m damned good and ready. That return may be happening already, actually, considering I’m finally making an appearance here again after neglecting the place for a while.

“What about the fact that posting these pictures to the internet is just plain wrong?”

- “P Man,” June 26, 2007

“This country really needs to lighten up.”

- “Dan,” June 27, 2007

In other news, I was recently invited to join a Yahoo group dedicated to discussing “encounters and commuter stories” experienced on the BART system, after someone there posted a link to Trainstalking. That started a thread on the ethics and legalities of posting candid shots of people without their permission, and I now seem to be in the center of a minor shitstorm.

I’m not complaining, mind you. I love a good shitstorm.

Published at blog.Adonis.net. You can comment here or there.

Forgive my silence recently. I’ve been a busy guy, between work, my mom being in town for a couple weekends, and various other stuff that’s been keeping me away from this place (among others).

You’d think after all this time away I’d have something particularly witty or insightful to say, but it’s still early here, and my brain’s not due to kick in for at least another hour. The mental transmission’s also been jammed in “annoyed” since last night.

It’s a small thing, really. I’ve got a guy who shows up once a week and mows the lawn. He doesn’t do much else; it’s a pretty cushy gig for him, really. He could probably even skip the mowing every couple weeks and I’d never notice. This last week, though, he showed up, mowed the lawn, and then hacked up one of my boysenberry bushes before heading out. Why? I have no idea. He left the weeds next to the bush alone — he just mowed, hacked off everything that was going to become next year’s berry crop, and took off.

It’s not so much the butchery and the fact that it took me years to get to my first crop of berries this summer, and that I’ll now have a lot less next year, that has me ticked off. It’s that I can’t wrap my head around why he did it. The guy doesn’t trim bushes, ever. I’ve told him not to touch the berries before. Still, he felt the need to chop up the only thing in the backyard that I could possibly get worked up over.

I suppose I should be glad that the things I have to be upset over are so small, but that’s not going to stop me from making sure I’ve rehearsed every Spanish insult I know before he shows up next week.

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The interview with the AASK social worker started at 3:00pm yesterday, and lasted two hours. It was even more thorough than I'd expected: she asked about everything from felony convictions, to what kind of child we'd be interested in, to what our own childhoods were like.

I think it went fairly well. Other than my pager going nuts halfway through (which I quickly switched from vibrate to off so I wouldn't be distracted by it -- I figured one of the other guys could handle the storage outage that it was telling me was happening), the whole thing was relatively relaxed, at least as much as someone grilling you about every detail of your personal life and history can be.

We have, however, reached our first official snag in the process. It's an issue Kris needs to deal with before things can go forward, and I'd rather not talk about it any more detail than that since it's Kris's thing and not mine. I'll just say it's something of some importance that he's been putting off for a very long time, and that I will be constantly reminding him to take care of it until it's handled.

A few things that we were afraid might turn out to be problems turned out not to be, though, which was good news. So now, assuming I can get Kris's butt in gear and get this thing resolved, we should be ready to go on to the next step. That step would probably be a parental training session that's coming up in July; we should know more about the specifics of that when the social worker calls us back next week after the team there has gone over our interview notes and, with luck, doesn't deem us completely unfit to be parents.

It’s a rainy day in San Francisco today, which under normal circumstances would mean one thing: an even-more-liberal-than-usual application of hair product before leaving the house. Today, however, the unthinkable happened: I squeezed the tube of my latest favorite — a thick white goop that calls itself “hair glue” — and got nothing but air.

I like to think I’m a pretty atypical homo, but when it comes to the hair, I’m 100% screamingly queer. As if I wasn’t already stressed out enough that it’s been long enough since my last dye job that the roots are dark and the gray is showing, now I have to deal with a poofy coif all day. Thank God I’m not famous, or I’d be all over the front pages of the tabloids with a giant “Don’t” over my style-impaired head.

With my luck, this’ll be the day Ryan Phillipe, on the rebound after his breakup with Reese Witherspoon and desperate for sympathetic companionship, runs into me on the street — and because of my hair, doesn’t give me a second look.

I’m running to Walgreen’s.

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If you ask someone to do something for you as a favor, and you know he hates doing it, don’t be surprised if he acts like he’s not having a good time.

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I’ve been feeling more deeply this last week or so than usual. It’s a little disconcerting. Other people’s problems are evoking a lot more sympathy from me. My own problems are slightly more depressing. My friends are just a little more dear to me then they would be normally. Minor annoyances are more irritating.

Strange though it may be, I think I’d like to stay in this place for a while.

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