Alone and Unobserved

So I said there might be photos and MAYBE even video of the drunken YouTube karaoke party, but I was drunk so there’s pretty much just a vid of TJ singing Brown-Eyed Girl.

Right now we’re watching Chris Isaak musik videos and arguing over whether or not he actually is (or was) hot. (The answer is yes, Chris Isaak is/was fucking smoldering.)

I may post the video of TJ to the Internet at some point. I’ll keep you guys posted.

And now Blake is singing the praises of Dr. Laura and Levi Johnston. I think it’s time for the night to end.

Cheers, everyone!

I know you all have been really, really worried about my social life, and/or the lack thereof, and/or that all I seem to do lately is hole up in my basement apartment with my Netflix Streaming account and watch Futurama and drink gin and/or bourbon.

What can I say? Bender understands me, man, he GETS me.

On the other hand, I swear I’m not (yet) an alcoholic. Um. Probably.

Which is why I’m so excited to go hang out at my friend Nick’s house tonight and get drunk! Because I definitely don’t do that often enough!

(I may have started on the gin a bit early today. Like, say, at 3:30 pm. But not continuously!)

What were we talking about? Oh, right. Futurama. So it has always been in the back of my mind that I love Futurama, BUT I’ve hardly ever seen any of it. A crime, right? Prosecutable, even. Yes. So I’ve always intended to do a marathon. I figured it would be easy: there are only four seasons and four films.

So then Comedy Central has to pick the series back up again and here I am, caught with my pants down, a virtual Futurama novice, and I’ve got to get caught up so I can enjoy the full, subtle brilliance of the new episodes.

And then the Netflix app for iPhone came out! And I could watch Futurama WHEREVER I HAPPENED TO BE STANDING OR SITTING OR RECLINING.

So that’s what I’m doing. Getting caught up on Futurama. And drinking delicious gin and/or bourbon mixed with various delectable mixers. As one does.

What were we talking about? Oh, right. My social life. So yeah, I’ll be out of the house tonight—well, out of my house, at least—singing along amateurishly to amateurish YouTube karaoke videos, and getting smashed. Um, smashed-er.

There may be pictures.

There may be video.

Stay tuned.

Linda over on All & Sundry wrote a post about how hard it is for her to make and keep friends. The paragraphs that really hit me were numbers 2 and 3:

I don’t have many friends, really. I am shy and reserved and I find it hard to accept the inherent vulnerability that comes with friendships and I’m not good at maintaining them and I’m terrible at reaching out and sometimes I wonder there’s something fundamentally broken in me in this regard.

I fill this friend-shaped void with the internet and I don’t really know if that’s sad or sensible, if I’m a pathological dork or someone who’s just making connections where she can.

Judging by how many friends I currently have, and by the fact that I don’t spend every weekend lost and lonely, I must not be as bad at making friends as I think (although it does seem to me that my friends work harder at being friends with me than I do at being friends with them). And I have enough friends of different kinds in this area that I probably don’t need to spend any weekend alone, if I’d just send a few texts or make a few phone calls.

But, haha! that’s where the “I may be broken” part comes in. I’ve mentioned this before: when I go out and do things, it never occurs to me to invite other people. Sometimes (a lot of the time, actually) I want to be alone, but if one of my friends calls me when I’m feeling introverted, I have no problem saying I’m not up to it, call me next time. And yet somehow I assume my calling and suggesting activities, or asking if anything’s going on, is a tremendous imposition to my friends.

I’m not sure how to get over this. One problem is that I don’t understand social cues. People don’t say what they mean, you guys. I certainly don’t! But I know when I’m lying to be polite, and I’m never certain if the “Call me soon so we can hang out!” coming from someone else is the literal truth, a polite lie, or is true now but won’t be true next weekend.

Also, I don’t understand “hanging out.” I don’t understand “getting together.” I don’t understand “let’s get lunch.” These are all completely foreign concepts to me. Because, you know, they involve other people, and their schedules, and their dietary restrictions, and their interests, and their personalities.

Hanging out and getting lunch with myself (and the internet!) is just so much easier.

In case you haven’t been following along, I just finished participating in a week-long daily creativity experiment with several other readers, writers and frequenters of the Mind on Fire blog. (The original invitation to participate is here. I know, I know, I should’ve posted about it immediately.) Every day, John Remy at MoF drew a different tarot card, and we participants used that card (directly or tangentially, concretely or abstractly) to spark our imaginations and inspire some sort of creation. The experiment ended yesterday, and I would call it a success. There were enough submissions, and enough different genres, media and styles represented that John still hasn’t finished compiling galleries for the last two days.

I’ve posted my own wrapup below. Each day is represented, with its card, some keywords commonly associated with the card, and a link to an explanation of the card’s symbolism on Joan Bunning’s Learn Tarot site. I’ve also included a link to my own contribution for each of the days, as well as links to the card drawing posts and the existing submission galleries.

Day One: Knight of Swords

Keywords:

• direct/blunt
• authoritative/overbearing
• incisive/cutting
• knowledgeable/opinionated
• logical/unfeeling

(More symbolism)

Day One on Mind on Fire: Card drawing | Gallery

Day Two: The Hermit

Keywords:

• introspection
• searching
• guidance
• solitude

More symbolism

Day Two on Mind on Fire: Card drawing | Gallery

Day Three: Two of Pentacles

Keywords:

• juggling
• flexibility
• fun

More symbolism

Day Three on Mind on Fire: Card drawing | Gallery

Day Four: The Devil

Keywords:

• bondage
• materialism
• ignorance
• hopelessness

More symbolism

Day Four on Mind on Fire: Card drawing | Gallery

Day Five: Nine of Swords

Keywords:

• worry
• guilt
• anguish

More symbolism

Day Five on Mind on Fire: Card drawing | Gallery

Day Six: Two of Cups

Keywords:

• connection
• truce
• attraction

More symbolism

Day Six on Mind on Fire: Card drawing | Gallery (coming soon)

Day Seven: Six of Pentacles

Keywords:
Having/Not having:

• resources
• knowledge
• power

More symbolism

Day Seven on Mind on Fire: Card drawing (featuring CatGirl!) | Gallery (coming soon)

In conclusion: I’ve felt recently that I was stagnating creatively, but this week I somehow managed to create something new every day for six days. It’s a good feeling, and not one I feel often enough.

From John (of Mind on Fire):

“Just because you were tagged, you so do not need to follow this. I am interested to see what books you all come up with, though.

“Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Copy the instructions into your own note, and be sure to tag the person who tagged you.”

I was tagged (on Facebook) by Chandelle of Conscious Intention.

• Tender Morsels, by Margo Lanagan
• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
• Swordspoint, by Ellen Kushner
• The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson
• Se questo è un uomo, by Primo Levi
• The Dosadi Experiment, by Frank Herbert
• Troll: A Love Story, by Joanna Sinisalo
• The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury
• Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
• Misquoting Jesus, by Bart Ehrman
• The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle
• The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson
• Huis clos, by Jean-Paul Sartre

I’m going to tag Craig of yes, I am, Miss Nem of Voice of Reason, chosha of a little east of reality, alea at All My Gettings, Petullant at a girl who wears glasses, Kerry at Windmill Watching, and anyone else who wants to play. I’m also gonna tag a few people on Facebook, I think.

If you want to play, either post your own fifteen books in the comments here, or post them on your own blog and leave a comment here with the link. There’s also my Facebook Note. It’s fun!

Sat down in the stylist’s chair on Friday and asked for something different. After a bit of discussion, two pots of color and a lot of razorwork, this is the result.

Last night Craig and I had our Winter Solstice Party. Sorry there are no pictures. You’ll just have to take my word for it that it was lots of fun. Gallons of eggnog and mulled wine and cider and punch were made and consumed. Cheeses of all descriptions were devoured. Bacon-wrapped water chestnuts were also featured. And of course batch after batch of holiday cookies and treats.

There are lots of leftovers. My coworkers are about to receive a bonanza in the form of cookies, bars, cake, tarts and such. Lucky them!

Craig‘s birthday was yesterday, so Sunday we went out and go our eyebrows pierced.

Sunday night we had a Wonderfalls marathon. I love Wonderfalls. I think that has been firmly established on this blog. And now Craig loves it, too! I love infecting others with my media addictions. That is why I am a librarian.

The Wonderfalls Cast

Yesterday, Craig and I went to The Happy Sumo for sushi, and I had a delicious—to die for—veggie tempura roll with avocado, sriracha sauce and fresh mayonnaise. OMG so delicious.

Then we went back to my place and finished watching Wonderfalls (see above), drank a bottle of dry Riesling and downed several cups of sambuca. Liquorice-flavored magic!

Happy birthday yesterday, Craig! I hope you had as good a time as I did. (I also hope you aren’t suffering from a sambuca-induced hangover the way I am.)

That I’m in contact with any of my old friends is a miracle—specifically a Facebook miracle. It’s thanks to Facebook that I’m still in touch with former roommates, former BYU friends, former dance partners, former fellow grad students, former coworkers, former professors and former boyfriends, as well as cousins, aunts, online acquaintances, fellow atheists, fellow ex-Mormons, fellow gays and so on and so forth.

I’m beginning to wonder if this is really a good thing. I just lost a friend, primarily because of what each of us has posted openly online (see the comments on this post). She is a practicing, faithful Mormon who supported Prop 8 and who opposes same-sex marriage because she believes homosexual sex is a sin. In fact, like many other Mormons and many fundamentalist Christians, she doesn’t even believe homosexuality exists, per se. She has written a great deal about her views on her blog.

I, on the other hand, am a confirmed atheist ex-Mormon gay man who believes the Mormon church is a man-made organization that is characterized by bigotry, lies and self-righteousness. I believe Proposition 8 was motivated by intolerance and deception and homophobia, and that the Mormon church bears a great deal of the blame for its passing. Just last weekend I participated in a protest against the Mormon church’s opposition to gay rights and support of Prop 8. I have also made no secret of any of these things on my blog.

So she found my blog and was horrified and upset by what she found here, and I found her blog and was horrified and upset in my turn. I wrote a blog post in which I speculated cynically about the true reasons behind the Mormon church and its members’ opposition to gay marriage. She wrote a hurtful comment in response, in which she questioned my integrity and called me bitter and closed-minded. I wrote a cold rebuttal, which I closed by stating that I didn’t feel much friendship for her anymore. She agreed.

Are there some former acquaintanceships that are worth preserving, at least for nostalgia’s sake, but which are too fragile to handle the constant barrage of truth and stream-of-consciousness honesty that accompany an online relationship? Would Summer and I still consider ourselves “friends” if neither of us had a blog and neither of us was on Facebook? Is it possible to preserve a friendship by willfully refusing to know the truth about another person?

Just a few years ago, Summer’s devotion to the Mormon church and opposition to same-sex marriage would have been things we had in common, not things that drove us apart or set us at odds. People change. Our ideas of what friendship is also change.

And then there is my family. I don’t really discuss these subjects with them, but I’m Facebook friends with several of my siblings, and I’ve seen their status updates and the causes they’ve joined. And I’m sure they’ve seen my statuses and notes and causes. How is it possible to preserve a relationship, knowing what we know about each other?

My online friend Misty (Hi, Misty!) introduced me to DailyLit a week or so ago, and since then I’ve been soaking up Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, delivered via RSS feed in easily digestible chunks to my Google Reader inbox every morning. This is obviously a sign of things to come: books will soon go the way of the dodo and everyone will read only ebooks or e-audiobooks. Libraries will be a thing of the past, but I won’t mind, or even notice, because I will be in my living room, taking in information through a cannula wired into my skull. NO ONE WILL EVER LEAVE THEIR HOUSE AGAIN.

Well, I don’t really believe that. But DailyLit is still a nice way to fit classic, open-domain literature into my day. I can even read it on my phone, on the go. (Maybe that cannula really isn’t that far off after all.) Thanks, Misty!

I just watched the best Doctor Who ever, where the Doctor inadvertently becomes Madame de Pompadour’s lifelong protector, secret friend and secret love, all over the course of a single episode. It was fantastic. I think David Tennant is a fine Doctor after all, despite my initial nostalgia for Christopher Eccleston, and the second series is actually better than the first. I know, it sounds impossible! But it’s true.

Last Friday, due to poor planning on my part, I found myself in a truly unfortunate situation: I was alone in the middle of downtown Salt Lake City, a long-ish journey on TRAX ahead of me, and I had forgotten to put a book in my backpack. As I contemplated the endless, dreary minutes of public transportation that stretched before me, without hope even of a magazine to keep me company, I looked up and saw my salvation: Sam Weller’s Zion Bookstore.

I hadn’t been in a real, live bookstore in quite some time, partly because I work in a library and get to read for free, and partly because I’m lazy and Amazon.com is just a click away. But I’ve always wanted to visit the celebrated Zion Bookstore, and that seemed like the perfect opportunity. Despite the name, this is no Deseret Book; Sam Weller’s does have a large selection of LDS titles, but it rises above that to be a full-service bookstore in the old tradition.

As soon as I stepped in, I knew I was in the right place. The walls are lined floor to ceiling with books—new titles, first editions and rarities—with those cool rolling ladders to provide access to the higher shelves. The air is redolent of paper and coffee. The staff is helpful, friendly and knowledgeable. After the bookless wasteland of the train platform, it was like coming home.

An hour later, I left the store with two books I didn’t know I wanted but had to have as soon as I saw them. Today I went back and got a third. This “paying for books” habit might get expensive fast, especially with the way I read.

[This post is dedicated to a certain private bookseller, whose head will explode when she reads my confession about Amazon.com, and whose Breaking Dawn release party is coming up on August 1, if y'all are anywhere near Easley, SC.]