Married Gay Man

October 23, 2014

A Week Away

It’s quickly winding down and by in a weeks time I will be on my way to London. As my husband pointed out last night we have planned nothing. That’s right, Charles, we have not. I have set certain things I want to do, but otherwise I’m not creating an agenda for myself. The only thing I want to do is on my birthday and that’s to be in Oxford to visit the grave of C. S. Lewis. (The man is my idol, despite our very contrary dogmatic views.)

While I am so excited to return to (so far) my most favorite city in the world, I am equally as scared. Yeah, the ten hour flight has me sweating, but my fear stems primarily from that fact that we are Broke. I sold my stocks today to get a little bit of cash and let me give you a tip, don’t keep looking after you’ve sold whatever you own. Trust me. I have a couple new credit cards to bridge a little bit of the gap but that makes it to where I have a grand total of $4,000 USD to play with. At this point I don’t know what my husband is bringing to the table. He doesn’t want to admit it but he’s cagey about money. Don’t let him lie to you and say he’s not. And I feel I should note that it’s $4,000 considering that I max out my new credit card which Capital One stupidly gave to me. (Suckers!)

October 20, 2014

Unusually Complimentary

There has been a strange tide of events these past few days, my husband has shown interest in my want to be a published writer. I know! I am just as shocked as you.  Don’t get me wrong, he is … “supportive” to a degree.  He’s just a realist when it comes to dreams.  If he cannot see a hard path, he is not taking it.  Does that make sense?  Well, anyway, since I told him my plans to document our trip to London on the cheap and possibly write a book he is on-board.  He even called me on Friday and started pouring compliments over me; my body was in shock.  It is not accustomed to such gushing, but I’m not one to turn it down.

My husband told me that he thinks I would make a good travel writer because I can tell a story and I am humorous.  Which, that sentence in itself shows my humor, because the man has never thought that I’m out-right funny prior to last Friday or at least expressed any similar sentiment in our 11 years together.  It has not been until the past few years, hanging around our friends, that he sees I can be a downright riot.  If he and I are talking I can’t crack a joke and make him laugh.  He only finds me entertaining when I say or do something stupid and he can point it out.  And like the true attention whore that I am, I play right into it, developing a whole “persona” to go along with my flustered awareness.  We just have different styles of humor with only a portion of overlap.  The most ridiculous scenarios easily amuse me.  To be a little more precise: give me a cat video any day and I will laugh so hard I will cry.  He will not.

I don’t mean to discourage him or his compliments in any way. He is an amazing man and honest.  That’s why I always go to him for an opinion.  He will not sugar coat it.  If I wasn’t good in a play or in what I’m writing he will tell me.  Which is a double edged sword, for him and me.  The fact of the matter is that if he says I’m good at something he truly means it, and with that I am energized.  So,  during our trip I’m going to be extra-observant and take copious notes, and when I get back I can write a book proposal.

March 25, 2014

Thoughts are buzzards and my brain a carcass

Obsession fuels my every thought.  Any and all action I do comes from the constant nagging at the back of my mind about some topic.  For instance, recently, I have been obsessed on the decision of whether to ditch my iPhone and get the Nokia 1520.  After some repetitive thoughts and madness I have finally concluded that I will move on to the Nokia.  I’ve had the iPhone for so long and I just want a change. 

I used to be a nokia only man.  I had the 3300 back in the day.  You know, the big grey bar thing with the green lit screen?  Yeah, that one.  Fucking loved the thing.  The first time I ever ventured out of the nokia realm was to attempt a go at the Pink Motorolla phone and that lasted about a day before I ditched it altogether.  I may be proud of my gay agenda but I do draw a line.  Plus it didn’t really fit me.  So I returned the phone and back into the arms of my Finish company.  I thought they made a good product.  It wasn’t until the iPhone came along that I dropped nokia and went over to apple.  And I was happy.  Still am as a matter of fact. I don’t see anything wrong with the iPhone.  It does what it’s meant to do. Well.

Besides annoying myself with my own obsessive thoughts I’ve dragged my husband into them also.  He doesn’t quite understand where this obsession stems from, other than the fact that I invested in Microsoft stock and since have been hitching my horse to their wagon; besides that I have come to the conclusion that if I happen to have the Nokia 1520, that comes with office preinstalled, I will have no more excuses to why my novel isn’t finished or even being worked on.  The hubby doesn’t seem to buy it and doesn’t think I’ll use it for that at all.  And he may be right, but then again he may be wrong. 

Speaking of writing, I don’t know if I blogged it here or not (I have so many different sites for expression) but I came up with a new plan of attack for my novel.  Because as I thought of my inactivity and fear I worked backward to see where they stemmed from and discovered it could just be due to the fact that I am overwhelmed with the size of the project.  It’s a huge undertaking.  As of right now my manuscript (untouched of course) stands at a little over 60,000 words.  That’s a lot.  And when I sit to begin editing I think of how huge the document is and panic.  Then I have a nervous breakdown and stop working on it completely.  (No me gusta.)  So I have resolved to work on a single chapter at a time.  I’m not going to worry about what comes after, or what follows in the next 20 chapters.  Oh no.  I am going to work on one at a time to reignite the fire.  And the beauty of my plan is that I have attempted to work on it from the start multiple times and have gotten to the point that the first few chapters are rather smooth going.  (It’ll just be a pain in the later scenes.)

Even though I discovered that brilliant plan it has, of course, languished.  I don’t know what it is but the moment I get home I am EXHAUSTED.  I have next to no motivation (despite my burning desire to be published) and instead watch television or something equally as dumb. So I looked at the problem and attempted to fix it.  My next plan, to benefit the first, is to return to the days of when I spent my lunch hour working on my novel.  I would sit at some corner of the Carl’s Jr. around the corner off my office and perfect my writing.  It was nice to be out of an area that doesn’t offer wi-fi thus decreasing my chances of distractions. Plus, the fast food joint is no real hot-bed of activity so no one goes there.  It works for me and says so much of my personality.  Everyone does the coffee house.  And I find that they’re even more distracting.  The grinding of the coffee, people constantly coming in and out, or the loud conversation.  How anyone writes in a Starbucks or it’s equivalent is beyond me. 

SO! Tomorrow I will be getting up early, to get to work on time, so that I can take a lunch and work on my novel.  I will do this.  I can do this. The only one holding me back is me.   And if that doesn’t work I have my upgrade to the Nokia 1520 to look forward to at the end of April.  And maybe then I’ll stop talking about it and do it.

P.S. how is it that wordpress has an effing blackberry app but not a windows phone app?  I mean… talk about a waste of time… No one uses a blackberry anymore.  Get on it WordPress!

March 3, 2014

From the Ashes

When I was in the 10th grade we were required to do this assignment in English class called the “Sophomore Project.”  It was meant to be a way to highlight who we were and who we wanted to be in that space of time.  Basically teaching us that nothing is certain and we all grow into new people.  Plus, it’s always fun to look back and see our own growth.  The times I’ve perused mine, I  see a few things that concern me.  The first, which hasn’t changed, I am one lazy bitch.  I half-assed that project to death.  I shouldn’t have even gotten a C.  That was my teacher being generous.  Truly.  Most of my pieces were on notebook paper that I inserted, the night before, into a binder that I had just glued on a piece of paper, to the front, that said “My Sophomore Project” in bold Arial type. For being as imaginative as I was it lacked all qualities of creativity.  My mind was on other things, I guess.

The second thing that sticks out is how as jaded as I am now I am not nearly as angry as I was then.  Jesus, I was one cranky son of a bitch.  I have come to the conclusion it was due to my overwhelming sense of self loathing.  At the time I was very, VERY, religious and I was battling my sexual identity.  I was also a pimply faced, greasy haired, fat, kid.  No one liked me and I didn’t like myself.  So I became bitter.  I was, shall we say, jaded. It was then that I turned into writing.  I took my observations of my surroundings and angst and turned it into words and pumped out a piece of writing I am, to this day, very proud to call my own.  It was filled with so much personality that I still canot quite capture.  I was on fire.  And it was a beautiful thing artistically.

The final thing, and this is the one that worries me the most, was how completely unrealistic I was with planning my life goals and the expectations and my limitations.  I had no clue how the outside world worked or how what I wanted out of life (getting a manuscript published or acting in film) was 10% talent 90% luck and just being in the right place at the right time.  So for a list of the ten items of “where I saw myself in ten years” one of them was to have finished 10 novels.  Bitch, I haven’t even finished-finished half of that, let alone one.  Sure I have written one novel length work of fiction but that’s just from sitting down at a keyboard and banging out whatever popped into my head to move the story forward.  And even that was a journey.  It’s strange how I could, in one hand, hold so much optimism for my future but in the other so much hatred and cynicsm.  One obviously cancels the other out, or one could say that they actually balance each other out.

Dreaming is what keeps us going.  Giving ourselves something to wish and hope for gives us a goal.  We need a rainbow to keep chasing to make life bearable, even if it is unrealistic.  In the moment it is exactly what we need.  And as I age, the reality of life starts taking those dreams away, but it does not seem to take the same amount of angst.  In fact it seems to take one out of one into the other, throwing me off balance.  To be brutally honest, throwing me into crazy spirals.  In fact I have gone into two.  Being out of them I can look at them objectively.  I am absolutely embarrassed by them because they were so public, as all crazy spirals are.  I made such broad statements by quitting my job and wanting to go to school to study biology to become a C.S.I. technician.  Or… becoming a geologist.  I mean… These were 100% out of left field.  In the moment they seemed to fit.  They made perfect sense.  Now… Well, I see the truth in my insanity.  Which is why my newest thoughts have me leery.

As I sit poised at the cliff, looking down into the jagged canyon of my 30’s, I contemplate going back to school.  I had attempted it once back when I was just out of high school but I lacked any real motivation and didn’t quite grasp the “I’m here by choice” concept that comes with going to college.  Like many that failed to grasp that, I failed and didn’t attempt it again.  Although, I want to return and get a BA in Journalism.  But unlike before (when I wanted to be a CSI) I’m not quitting my job.  In fact, I’m doubling down and taking further education to get my trainee license for real estate appraisal. (Just in case my enthusiasm somehow peters out, you know?) This would be in the mean time while I wait for the summer semester to begin.  Then upon that time I will register for two classes and continue with that pattern every semester until spring of 2017 where I HOPE to graduate with an AA and then move to Long Beach to continue my education for my BA.  This is all tentative.

My biggest fears are as follows: 1) that my enthusiasm will lessen or extinguish before I can register for the summer semester or 2)this is just another moment of crazy.  The only piece of evidence against number two is that my doctor just put me on mood stabilizers and coupled with the anti-depressants I am currently taking that should put me in a clearer head space. (Shouldn’t it?)

This is the start of a new life.  I can feel it in my core.