may maym

Over the past month or so, several people with whom I am close—either because we were once close and reconnected, or because we are newly close—have remarked on the jewelry I wear. I have five thin chain bracelets; one around each wrist and ankle, and a fifth closely fitted at my neck. I remember the nights Sara put them there.

“You’re still wearing these,” each of these friends said to me as they slipped a finger underneath one of them.

“I know,” I reply each time. “I’m still figuring out how much of them are me, and how much of them are Sara.” Who am I today, without the life I thought I’d have?

New York City has been a difficult place to be in. Instead, I have spent much of my time North, shuffling between Boston and Providence. The “organized” Boston communities are vastly divergent from The Scene that I am used to. I like the differences—I like that they exist, and that one place is different from another—even if I don’t like all the specifics.

In Boston, I attended the second NEPups.org puppy munch. I went with a friend and met a few gay pups and a kitty girl, and I spoke about queer masculinities and how uncomfortable I feel in the gay communities I’ve tentatively explored. I have never been gay, and I still feel a twinge of discomfort “admitting” to bisexuality in such spaces.

I have a growing connection to Providence. In large part, this is due to the people I’m coming to think of as the sun girl and the metal boy. They are young (younger than I am), which for the first time in my life is a notable thing. They live in slow time and enjoy the physical world in ways that are not entirely new yet not entirely familiar to me. There is much of Sara—a goodness and comfort—in each of them.

The metal boy in particular has been a quiet revelation for me. I find myself more unsure around him than I would have thought, as though I am younger, less experienced, more hesitant. I’ve been sexual with other men before but only now, after being with him, can I wholly and without silent reservation answer “Yes” to the still often asked question, “Are you really bi?” The sun girl, for her part, is in many ways a pure blessing. She is magic and warmth and a grounding force that has helped me move forward.

My trip to San Francisco these past five days proved useful but disappointing. It’s now obvious to me that the plan I had conceived before I left Sydney and which I so steadfastly tried to make happen despite the financial and emotional burdens of losing my relationship with Sara will not actually work. I’m thankful that I met with several other friends who have each generously offered support and crash space for my planned arrival time in late June. It may have perhaps been destined for me to be alone (but not isolated) when I arrive in San Francisco; it’s been almost a decade in the making for me by now.

I’ve been to San Francisco twice before this trip, but I’ve never been so happy to leave it before. I am still determined to move there, but as I write this in my airplane seat somewhere over the landlocked middle of the continent, I find myself eagerly awaiting a return to Providence. I can’t stay on the East coast, but I can’t leave. Not yet, not when there is still so much for me to do here.

My thoughts are consistently drawn to productive pursuits; my second CSS book, my sexuality projects (KinkForAll.org and MaleSubmissionArt.com). I feel strong in ways I’ve never felt before: I bend the world. I change reality. I can.

But I’m still so, so sad, and so, so pained. I don’t cry every day anymore, but I do feel overwhelmed by it. I suspect that, in part, Sara left me because I am so driven by the things I need to change rather than the things that work. Some parts of me want to reach a point where I’m no longer fueled by things that way, but other parts of me doesn’t. As one Bostonian friend fondly reminds me, “All progress is the work of unreasonable men.”

I speak about KinkForAll so often everywhere I go that I’m uncertain whether I’ve latched onto it or if it has latched onto me. I fear for it like a father fears for a child growing too fast and yet I keep pushing it out from underneath my own auspice because I know it can’t ever be what I want it to be without experience in the world. The weekend after I was in Boston, KinkForAll Boston was set into motion by the people I spoke with there and now I am determined to be a part of it.

In the mean time, I am also thinking and becoming increasingly excited about the Sex 2.0 presentations I will give on May 9^th. In particular, I’ll get to meet the likes of Sarah Dopp, one of the inspirations for the Gender and Technology presentation that was accepted (and seems to be in increasingly high demand) at the Sex 2.0 conference. I’m just learning to speak with the people I admire to that degree, and in a week and a half I’m going to stand up and present my own version of the very things they inspire me to be. I will feel like I am standing in front of the very giants whose shoulders I stood on when I was across the planet.

So again, I ask myself, who am I? What is my sexual submissiveness without the dominant presence that revived it when I had given it up those four long years ago? What is my career when I have achieved, for me, an unprecedented level of recognition after 8 long years of being in the workforce? What is my contribution to my own future, and to people like me who are still young children today?

What kind of man am I if so much of the world I live in refuses to see manliness in what I am? Because today, having considered the possibility that I was perhaps a woman at earlier stages of my life, it turns out I am a man. And I am going to make the world know it is good to be the kind of man I am.

Immediately after arriving in New York City, I turned myself into a tornado of work and worry in order to make sure KinkForAll was the success I desperately needed it to be. To my indescribable relief and happiness, KFANYC wasn’t just a success, it smashed through even my wildest expectations, topping at 45 presentations with well over 100 participants physically present and countless others watching the online feeds. (I was so worried about presentation shortage, I prepared 4, but only ended up needing to present 1. Likewise, I originally thought we’d top off at maybe 35–45 participants, and in the end one of our biggest problems was simply lack of physical space!)

On that front, I’m now looking at the amazing possibility of helping people in sexuality communities who have contacted me from Washington DC, Toronto, and San Francisco emulate the success of New York City’s event in their own hometowns. But not yet…. Not quite.

As the unconference ended, Sara and I were joined by a group of over 20 friends (and friendly acquaintances) for dinner at a nearby Asian restaurant. Despite my hunger (I only ate at the behest of my concerned friends during the day ’cause I was so busy), I didn’t want to finish my meal; I knew that would be the end of dinner, and the day. Nevertheless, day turned to night and as Sara and I walked around the corner for a modicum of privacy, excitement gave way to sadness and we said (temporary) goodbyes in tears.

I retreated from the city then, headed towards Providence, Rhode Island to stay with close friends who generously offered me the opportunity to create a small sanctuary in their spare room. This has been helpful, and I can begin to feel myself recovering, but I’m still having trouble grounding myself in the here and now or focusing on the new tasks at hand. For one thing, there are so many, and for another thing, they are so vastly different from what I’ve just done that mentally changing gears so radically, so quickly, under so much pressure, is actually painful.

When I moved my self and my life half way around the globe to Sydney last year, I felt optimistic about what I would find. Sadly, I didn’t find what I wanted. Now, having moved myself and my life all the way back across the planet and then some, I’m determined to make what I want—because it doesn’t exist yet, and no one knows what it’s going to look like…except me.

My hosts, Emms and Zac, are nothing short of a godsend. They are literally a healing warmth of a magnitude I could not possibly express adequately in words. Unfortunately, shortly after arriving in their home, I fell ill. Of course, this is not at all a surprise considering my physiological history for exactly such mind-body connection.

My attempts to focus on my writing (for my second and much more advanced web development book on CSS I’m authoring; my first book was much more 101-level) have been only partially successful, but I’m encouraged by this anyway. As Emms told me last night while cooking a pasta dinner for us all, “Comfort yourself with the standards of the world,” a piece of advice she wisely preceded with, “Now’s the time to focus on only the most important parts of your chapters.” This, all while taking my hand every time my eyes unexpectedly overflow with the salt water I feel like I’ve been storing up in them.

I’m a little…not annoyed…chagrined at the admission that yesterday was the first full day in more than 4 weeks that I didn’t cry at all. Not only this, but earlier today while my hosts were at their day jobs and I mainlined enormous quantities of tea as though it were a blood transfusion, I couldn’t stop myself from crawling backwards in time towards happier memories. I cried again, embarrassingly loudly since no one was home, and resigned to let my head rest for a while instead of forcing it further into failing attempts to create reusable patterns of CSS code for styling semantic markup.

To help with the memories, I’ve been playing MGMT’s Kids on repeat for what must be an hour or more now. I first heard it on Australia Day (apparently Australia’s almost-equivalent of America’s Columbus Day), which Sara and I spent with Janek and company at his house on a tropical, warm, rainy day in Sydney. The radio was playing all day but the only song I remember was this one because, somehow, it stood out like a spotlight. I remember laying on the couch in the living room with my head in Sara’s lap, eyes closed, as she pet my head and I purred along with the kittens in the far corner of the room. The memory is emblazoned in my mind’s eye as a vivid still frame.

When Zac came home and gave me a hug to comfort my tears, he remarked on the song. “It’s always weird to hear this song,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because Emms and I went to college with them—the band.”

And now I have two memories.

A few minutes ago I awoke in a friend’s bed in their apartment in Harlem. I wanted to do nothing but stay there and not get up. I feel like there is too much to take care of, way too much to handle.

My flight from Sydney to New York City was less than good, better than terrible. I already knew I hated United Airlines, now I’m just more committed never to flying with them again. More than that, I’m frustrated that my flight was so dependent on choices Sara’s family made for her without consideration for me. If little else, I’m happy to be finally out of reach of their influence.

It’s been weeks, literally, since I haven’t cried at one point or another, usually multiple, in the day. I’ve been falling asleep in either tears or unmatched stress and restlessness—each has benefits over the other. Last night was no different.

Today I have errands to run for the KinkForAll New York City event I’m helping to run tomorrow. I’m extremely proud of the work Sara and I have managed to accomplish on it not only for the first time ever in our lives but also literally from the other side of the planet.

Simultaneously, I’ve been chasing and feeling continually frustrated by failing to make significant-enough progress on writing my book on CSS. My co-author Joe has been fantastic, and one particular employee, Clay, from the publisher has also been equally supportive. However, the rest of this project feels extremely precarious and that is endlessly aggravating.

It’s aggravating because it was a project I sincerely wanted to see done well, and have been working toward for a long time. I quit my day job something like 6 months ago now in order to focus on getting it accomplished successfully, but I am now further behind than I was then. Despite my best efforts, life kept throwing me curveballs to the point where I already know it’s not going to be the book I wanted it to be. I’m extremely angry at…everything…for that.

As if that weren’t enough, as many already know by now, Sara and I are no longer together, for reasons I’d rather not discuss quite yet. As painful as this would be in general, this is even more painful when seen in light of the fact that it’s one of the reasons my book has suffered. The book isn’t some great money-maker for me, but rather an opportunity for professional exposure and recognition that I’ve been working towards for 8 years—that’s how long I’ve been making money in the web development industry. To have that opportunity suffer pours salt into wounds that moving to Sydney in the first place had already re-opened and which the loss of this relationship is a 3^rd degree burn.

All in all, I’m struggling to keep professional commitments afloat, organizing a first-of-its-kind unconference for the sexuality communities in New York City, ending a 4-year relationship (with the person I’m organizing the unconference with), and moving across the planet. All. At. Once.

I want to change the channel off of this ridiculous soap opera, but can’t. Instead, I keep playing everything in fast-forward in my head until I can again see a point somewhere in the hopefully not too distant future where everything I’ve worked on is successful and I’m peaceful once again. Please let that day be soon.

By way of example, I am being completely devoured by mosquitos sitting on a bench somewhere in Newtown, a suburb of Sydney. I’m leeching wifi in quite literally the only freely open, non-commercial wifi spot I’ve been able to find in the entire city after searching for such a spot for more than a week. Turns out, Internet access here is obscenely expensive—even by American standards—which partially explains the lack of free, open Wi-Fi.

Leeching this wifi is incredibly uncouth, I know, but I justify my behavior with the fact that I absolutely must ensure that my finances are in order in time for things like rent payments and every other opportunity to use the Internet—my only means of banking at this point—have been unavailable. Indeed, even the most common “free hotspot” service in this city, uConnect, provided by Unwired, shuts off at 7 PM. In fact, most of the city shuts off relatively early, save for nightspots and pubs.

The University of Sydney campus is, for the most part, closed on weekends. Those of you familiar with New York’s collegiate services would be appalled at the notion of something like your college library being closed at anything other than normal 9-5 business hours, but that seems the norm here. Similarly, back to the Internet access frustrations, all (and I mean every) bit of bandwidth you use on the University’s network is monitored and, ultimately, limited. The University has a Squid HTTP proxy set up which you must use to get anywhere on the Internet, but each account has a bandwidth cap of 2 MB per day, barring cache hits, of course. Beyond that, and you pay by the megabyte.

All Internet access, it seems, has bandwidth caps like this. There’s a veritable alphabet soup of ISPs that provide similar services, most over ADSL technology, since cable is hard to come by. Very frustrating, as I’ve never before had to think about how and where my bandwidth is being spent.

In any event, aside from the Internet access woes which were sadly unexpected, there are a number of other things about Sydney that are very different that New York City.

In restaurants, water is either self-serve or comes in bottles instead of being poured into glasses. This is a great idea, because it means I’m much more likely to actually have water when I want it. Also, waiters and waitresses expect no tip, so your bill is all you pay. This has two side effects, one rather nifty, and the other very uncool.

First, because your waiter isn’t your personal server for the meal, any and all waiters will wait on you at your behest. None of this, “I’ll call your waiter” non-sense. Makes restaurants seem much more cohesive, egalitarian—a theme in this country. Secondly, because wait staff get no tips, they get paid much better than they do in the states, which in turn raises prices for the meals. This goes so far as to change the prices on menus during “public holidays,” when—presumably—wait staff get paid time and a half. Menus often say “surcharge applies on public holidays and weekends” to indicate this.

And speaking of menus, there’s a whole different language for coffee here than in the states. Regular coffees as we know them in NYC are called “long blacks” here. Contrast this with a “short black,” or single espresso. “Flat whites” are lattes served in coffee cups, whereas “lattes” are lattes served in regular water glasses. Why the distinction? I have no idea.

Some things are the same. Mochas, for instance, are coffee with chocolate. (So are the “stop” buttons on the public transit busses, but I digress.) Other coffee slang bits sound way too Starbucks-ese for me to like them, such as “Vienna long black,” which just means a long black (regular) coffee with whip cream on top.

If you order any coffee, don’t expect a refill—there’s no such thing as free refills here. In fact, everything, even the tiniest bit of luxury, is charged here. It costs you 10 cents per printed (B&W) page at the University of Sydney computer labs to print anything (but pages here are not the normal 8-and-a-half-by-11 that you’re used to in the States). If you want hot water at the showers after taking a swim at Bondi Beach, for example, then you drop a 20 cent coin into the shower stall. Say you want some condiments for your fish and chips, like ketchup? That’ll cost you 80 cents in addition to the price of your food. Tartar sauce is more expensive, at $1.10 per several-ounce dish.

Food in general is obscenely expensive, and at first I thought it was just me, but after talking to locals it seems everyone’s noticed the price increase. The past 7 summers in Australia have been very dry, so dry that the drought caused harvest yields to decrease dramatically, raising food prices by more than 30% in the past several years. Couple this rising inflation concerns, weakening U.S. Dollar strength, and what I’m left with as an International traveller is the grim prospect of paying almost $15.00 (USD!) for a bacon and egg breakfast with a single, non-refillable coffee at any decent café.

Similarly expensive are spirits and liquor, which in addition to being taxed at 10% like everything else under Australia’s national “Goods and Services Tax” (GST), have an additional tax associated with them dependent on their alcohol content. This means my favorite liquor, Tequila, costs about $70 AUD for a 750 ml bottle of Cuervo. Forget the really good stuff like 1800 Resposado or Patron, which are upwards of $100 for the same amount. Sigh.

As a result of all of this, my money is not going nearly as far as I would have hoped. I am looking forward to having an actual apartment—with an actual kitchen—because at least when that happens I can stop paying exorbitant prices for food. It’s nearly impossible to cook in the hostels Sara and I have been staying at because they’re simply uncomfortable, not private, and not very well-equipped. And to top it all off, I think my hostel’s bed is giving me allergies.

I have a job offer, assuming I can get permission to work from the New South Wales government. Ironically, permission to work is also something I have to pay for—how crazy is that?—so I’ve had to rush to set up bank accounts as soon as I got into the country. The banks, for what it’s worth, are surprisingly good even though everyone here says they are terrible thieves. This makes me think no one from this country would be able to put up with any bank from the States.

The best thing about my bank is that it has CSV, QIF, and MNX download options for every single data table presented on their web site. This is, interestingly, the biggest selling point for me but something no one at the bank had any clue about. It’s not mentioned in their marketing material, their sales staff had never heard of it, and the only reason I knew it existed was because I saw a screenshot with the words “export data” on the corner. I took a chance and set up my account with them based on this screen shot and it looks like it payed off. Machine-readable financial interchange, baby!

Conclusions? This country is in what I consider to be the bronze age when it comes to technology. Only the elite technophiles—looked down upon as “tall poppies” here, rather a bad thing what with the whole egalitarian society thing—even know their way about anything other than a web browser or Microsoft Office. That being said, everyone knows how to lock their wifi, even if they don’t know how to change the channel so that they can actually broadcast that signal more than 10 feet in any direction.

Tonight’s my first of a little over a week’s worth of nights alone. When this ends, I’ll be on the other side of the planet. I’ve turned out the lights maybe four times already, trying to get ready for bed, but my body just won’t shut down despite its utter exhaustion. I really hate this feeling of waiting—having at once nothing and everything to do. I really hope I get some rest.

I’ve slept most of the day. I haven’t even really slept, but I’ve been in bed and haven’t gotten up. I woke up at 9 AM at first, feeling full of energy but wanting nothing more than to go back to sleep. I woke up again, finally, at 2 PM or so after tossing and turning for hours.

In less than two hours of being awake, I was crying in fits and starts on my bed again. I wanted to tire myself out again so I would go back to sleep. I just want to go away and hide.

This video, which is one of the recent TED Talk videos, is of Steven Pinker’s talk called The Stuff of Thought. This is simply brilliant. So brilliant, in fact, that those who know me well are about to be utterly astounded by what I am going to say:

I now understand the value of indirect communication. And it is immense.

I also understand why I never saw it before: the benefits are reaped solely through language’s social applications, not its analytical ones. See for yourself by watching the video.

Time is a limited resource. That’s why patience is a virtue.

If

By Rudyard Kipling

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Augh. Today is not the day I want to be an adult. Or have to go down to the courthouse. Or deal with law things and governments. Or go run errands before I can do that. Or stress about all sorts of future plans stuff. Or….

Bah. I want to crawl back into bed and stay there until Spring comes.

My mind is in Schrödinger’s box.

Am I asking too much? Why can’t I just go to parties and have a good time?

Baby steps have always been really hard for me to take. I am defined by extremes, my life a struggle to find a balance between two opposing influences on more scales than I could count.

Today, I resolved to clean. It was not easy, but I succeeded a little bit. I cleaned the floor of my kitchen and the living room, removed clutter from the coffee and kitchen tables, washed the dishes, cleaned the stove, and even folded a few clothes.

This makes me feel at least a little better.

In my inbox I see a confirmation from Amazon.com informing me that my order of “What Color is Your Parachute?” a book recommended to me by Kate Bornstein, is on its way (as are How to Write a Book Proposal and When Someone You Love is Kinky).

One step at a time, right?

From the everything-you-say-can-and-will-be-used-against-you department:

• Computer scientists will almost always be able to de-anonymize “anonymous” data, in this case thanks to movie ratings,
• Google offers users another way to store personal data,
• and all of this is old news

I’ve been doing this for years, and my solution is pretty simple: no regrets.

As an aside, these days when you punch in “privacy concern” into Googlepedia, you get the Wikipedia entry for Facebook. I was kind of expecting the entry for “US Government,” but whatever.

One of the patterns that has always been supremely obvious in my life (to anyone who has bothered to look) is that when I am depressed or upset I will often withdraw towards the things that give me comfort and that these things have typically fallen into one of two categories:

• Creative but non-technical pursuits (e.g., writing, philosophy, social theory)
• Knowledge-seeking activities, typically very techical ones (e.g., computer skills of various kinds, histories or scientific studies)

What is amazing to me is the sheer enormity of the number of people who have (or have had) authoritarian figures in my life in some capacity or another (e.g., parents, school teachers, employers, administrative personnel) who have completely missed this whole point and, associatively, everything it explicitly means and implies.

This makes those observant enough to notice it that much more valuable, and, sadly, makes me that much more upset when I fail to take advantage of such valuable resources in my life.

This is neat. My photo of Bridal Veil Falls in Yosemite National Park was selected for inclusion in the Schmap Yosemite trail guide. Now I get to say I’m a “published photographer” with at least some credence.

Something from tonight that I said that I want to remember:

The thing about being strong is that being strong means not getting what you want or what you need and yet being okay anyway. When I was young and, of course, even these days, I don’t always get what I want or need. I can do it, but I don’t like it. When I was young, my father would regularly tell me to be generous. The thing about being generous is that it makes it easier to be strong. That’s what my father was trying to teach me, I think. That’s really a very smart thing to teach a child.