Category: Other People

When I was in 10th grade I was required to take a religion class. At some point the teacher had this whole explanation about how there were two sources of rules for life, the written law (the bible) and the natural law (the world). And since homosexuality wasn’t in either, it was wrong.

At that point I raised my hand and tried to point out that there were gay monkeys, and he said, well, we can leave Aaron to talk about the sex lives of monkeys, and everyone laughed, and he went on to the next part of the class.

Well, fine. Let’s leave me to talk about gay penguins and how they successfully raised an adopted chick.

Also can I mention the Times’ URL naming conventions? Very sensible: date, section, and then a number and a word designating the topic: this article’s file name is 2004/02/07/arts/07GAY.html. Giggle.

Peter Gomes, Harvard prof and Baptist Minister, with a brilliant editorial on the division between church and state, the nature of civil marriage and civil law, and why gay marriage is necessary and just. Listen to the man, will you?

I know this is an unaccustomed bit of sincerity here, but this is actually important.

If you had a gay child, would you love that child as much as a straight child? If you’re a decent human being you would. And you’d want that child to have the same rights and responsibilities as any other child. So if you live in Massachusetts call your legislator and demand that they do what the court says: grant equal rights to same-sex couples.

The Catholic church ’round here is fulminating against it, and I’m almost glad: the more they do, the more apparent it is that their objections are inherently religious, and therefore should be discounted by civil law.

Learn to use it responsibly, or log the hell off, say tech-savvy people surrounded by people who refuse to learn how computers work.

I’ve been invited to join Orkut, and although it’s cool, I guess, it’s still very obviously beta: I can’t quite get the “friend rating” and “fandom” thing to work, nor is it obvious how to write testimonials to people. Aside from the fact that it’s still new, and therefore only has cool people in it, it’s basically Friendster, which is to say, it’s a huge popularity contest with message boards.

I’m home visitng my uncle this weekend, while he’s still visitable. At this point he’s pretty jaundiced, and he feels nauseous all the time. His inability to eat much and his illness have meant that he’s lost a lot of muscle mass, although apparently swelling and water retention to keep his weight about the same. And he’s tired more, which I think affects his ability to keep his eyelid over the false eye open, or maybe it’s the weight loss that made it droop like that. Anyway, he looked pretty close to normal, or at least he didn’t look terribly sick. He looked like he was just recovering from the flu, say. Kind of yellow-green, and a little thinner around the face, and a little unsteady, and not as funny, but overall he looks about ok. And he ate plenty at dinner tonight, which was good, although I couldn’t tell if he was doing it just to make us happy or because the acupuncture actually started helping make things palatable again.

I’ve always admired my uncle. When I was little I thought he was cool because he was a race car driver. When I was older and understood the difference between running a race-car team and being a driver, I admired him for his leadership, his incredibly sarcastic wit, and his incredibly deep knowledge of odd subjects: military history, auto racing, economics, dogs, money laundering (as a retailer of extremely-high-end auto parts, he had occasional clients who came to him with bags of cash). I admired him for having dropped out of college and taught himself everything he knew, and for starting two successful businesses, and did I mention the incredibly sarcastic wit? He and my father were quite a pair in a political discussion, burning everything that came into view.

I can tell how bad things are by the way my grandmother acts– if I call and she’s off the phone in under fifteen minutes, she’s really feeling poorly. If you get her going, she’ll usually take you on a random walk through the mid-20th-century, with detours through fifteenth and sixteenth century printmaking, colonial-period philosophy, and University of Virginia interdepartmental politics. But these days it’s “I’m busy I’m tired I gotta run.” And that worries me.

The super bowl should be amusing, anyway. By which I mean, it’ll be more fodder for that ongoing essay I’ve been meaning to write on the nature of masculinity, suffering, and family.

Nat writes “And whenever someone else sleeps in my bed, if I wake up first, I’m briefly convinced that they’re dead and have to shake them awake before I’m reassured. This is irrational, this is stupid, but there it is.”

I have the same feeling– the other day I went to visit a friend who was having a dinner party, and I was one of the first to arrive; I knocked on her door and she didn’t answer, because she was in the kitchen making dinner for everyone. For the thirty or forty seconds of slightly louder knocking, trying the door, realizing it was unlocked, going back, seeing her alive… I was … well, not convinced. But the thought crossed my mind.

On one of my first visits home from Boston, shortly after a minor scale-and-plane at the dentist and a moderately painful episode of back pain involving lots of advil and lying on the floor during meetings, I told my father, well, it looks like I’ve inherited your back and your gums (both of which give him endless trouble). I meant it as a joke but I think it was one of the most hurtful things I ever said to him.

I have never seen him look so crushed: he has worked so hard all his life to do great things, for humanity and for his family and for himself, but he hasn’t beaten genetics and he hasn’t beaten the fact that human spines and teeth aren’t evolved to last us much beyond reproductive age before they start to wear out.

It’s enough to make me wonder if my retirement fund will pay for all that HGH and titanium exoskeleton I’m going to want. You know, maybe I’m not a cheapskate– maybe I’m just saving my pennies for that new spine and pelvis I’m sure they’ll invent, at some point.

Get cracking, future! I’m continually disappointed in the future. It’s just not as cool as I thought it would be. I remember reading in Discover Magazine in the late 80s that there would be personal aircraft that got 100 miles to the gallon and went 400 miles an hour and would be the size of small cars. And could hover.

Instead we get giant station wagons. Dammit. Where did my train of thought go? Maybe I need new brain equipment too.

Sometimes, on weekend afternoons, when Megan’s out at the movies with her friends, I really enjoy having the house to myself. I used to get lonely, but now being alone is just a time for reflection. I’ve got all the cleaning done and now, as Nana used to say, “the sun is below the yardarm, why don’t you fix me a highball?”

My favorite drink right now is Old Rip Van Winkle rye. They make an excellent bourbon too, but the ryle is amazing: it’s softened with age like bourbon does, but it’s still a richer flavor. I use a less expensive whiskey if I’m mixing Manhattans, but this is perfect neat.

NYT article on sports and doping:

Ultimately, the debate over athletic doping extends beyond sport. ”The current doping agony,” says John Hoberman, a University of Texas at Austin professor who has written extensively on performance drugs, ”is a kind of very confused referendum on the future of human enhancement.”

First the athletes, then the rest of us mortals.

In addition to the various details of the dopnig world — the way legit science filters into the supplements, the fact that there’s an international trade in urine samples, and that urine-sample-couriers are routinely bribed — they note that the word “doping” has been in use since about 1900 and apparently is related to the Dutch word “dop” which referred to the pre-battle booze Zulu warriors drank.

After work I trudged through the cold and went home and had hot soup and some whiskey and played some video games with my girl (how lucky am I to find a girlfriend who will play video games with me?) and went to bed and it was all good.

Today, I am listening repeatedly to “Sleep the Clock Around.” I used to listen to it when I was really low– I’d get in the tub and put it on repeat and lie there trying to relax from an incredibly long day of back pain and stress and deadlines and loneliness. And today it seems like a happy song, not a sad one. Not sure why.

I may actually get this article done on time, which will be good. I’m at around 2000 of the 3000 words required, and about 2/3 through with what I have to say, so that’s a good sign. On a tight schedule because it has to go out for Brainshare. Exciting!