jimbo.info

Part VII of an 11-part series.

This building is just north of the McMillan Reservoir, west of the U.S. Soldiers and Airmens Home Golf Course somewhat near the Georgia Avenue MetroRail station on the Green Line.

We – well he – had decided to move out of our smaller home on Capitol Hill in 2002. I didn’t have much input in the decision because a good boyfriend does what he’s told and doesn’t argue.

At the time this place was a shell of a building, and huge by DC standards. My ex purchased it, and when I looked around on the inside at the work that needed to be done it was my first inkling that the relationship was over. His grandiose plans and decisions were always made in his manic states, and I was always left to pick up the pieces and maintain all his toys and plans when he crashed. I knew he didn’t really have the time or money to fix it up, and I didn’t have the skill. And I no longer had the strength to be the rock in the relationship. I knew I would end up with the dirty work in fixing this place up, and just couldn’t do it. We did not end up fixing nor living in it in the end and I left him with this shell.

Trouble comes in threes, and a week after I moved out I lost my job. It marked a huge period of upheaval in my life that cost a lot in many ways. In the end it did help me prioritize what I wanted out of a job and in a relationship. Since then I’ve had success with my career path at least.

When this photo was taken in 2008, the new owners were still working on it six years later. I can’t imagine working on a house for six years or more. The place was huge and needed a lot of work. And I just wasn’t up for living the dream of gutting a house together.

This picture is so awesome I had to share. But I’m sure you’ve already seen it all over the place on the Facebooks.

While the President’s statement was not a law enacted, it was still powerful and will have a lasting effect. Sure, other lawmakers may have voiced their support for gay marriage in the past, but this guy said it while he was in office.

I suspect this was fully calculated despite some pundits’ insistence it was a reaction to Biden’s perceived diarrhea of the mouth earlier in the week. Both Biden and a cabinet member spoke in favor of gay marriage beforehand and I believe these statements were strategically placed trial balloons. If the public had freaked out over what Biden and Duncan had said, then Obama wouldn’t have come out publicly like he did so soon.

But the trial balloons did not pop too loudly, and Obama did say it and said it eloquently. Watch the whole interview beyond the major talking points seen on the news if you can. (I’m looking for the entire interview for y’all…)

The most important and lasting effect of his statement was the affirmation for gay youth. To be honest coming out in the early 90s was scary and really sucked, but to have the President’s support today must make the kids who are coming out feel really good. And with such an organized and fanatic opposition today, the kids need every boost they can get. There were anti-gay sentiments in the 90s but they were nowhere near as organized back then as the anti-gay haters are today. These days they are mean and calculated reptiles.

Oh wait I need to correct myself: perhaps the most important thing coming out of this whole discussion is that one day BrettCajun will finally be able to get married to some Southern belle. Then he will finally stop texting me and peeking at my Scruff profile every 4 hours, all thanks to President Obama.

Only then will I truly be free.

The weekend at Darth Jersey’s dacha was fun. We went for a hike on the Delaware & Raritan towpath along a historic canal. It’s much like our Chesapeake & Ohio Canal and towpath and trail in DC. I wonder: one is a state park while the our towpath is a national park. Is the C&O Federal mainly due to its proximity to DC, or does it have some greater historical value? These are the things us bureaucrats in DC think about…

Anyway, the birding was great and I spotted three warblers I hadn’t seen before: the American redstart, yellow-rumped and a possible black-and-white warbler. They are fairly common birds, it’s just that I hadn’t seen them in the wild yet.

Darth Jersey doesn’t post pictures of his beloved on his blog because he says it’s “too technical”, so I have posted a nice picture of their naughty dog Boomer, who eventually peed on my pillow. You can tell he’s naughty even from the photo.

We went to see The Avengers. It was fun. I especially liked the part where Hulk beat the snot out of Loki:

On Saturday we went to Asbury Park, which is considered part of the Jersey Shore. It was just like how they depict people on that MTV show:

And for a moment I pumped my fist too, but now I feel unctuous from parroting their behavior. I still feel like I can’t get all that hair product, tanning oil and sweat off my chakra.

I was up on our roof with my landlord* fixing stuff this weekend and while I was up there I took a picture of the construction around the Shaw/Howard Metrorail station. The yellowish building is the newly renovated Howard Theatre, expected to host a grand opening on April 12. You can see some damage to the red brick house on the right from the August 2011 earthquake:

Here’s a closer look at the damage to the neighbor’s house from the earthquake. Some of the chimney has already been repaired, but much of it had fallen in August. Granted, these chimneys probably hadn’t been maintained in decades but the quake did wreck a few things in the area.

This morning on my way to the Shaw/Howard MetroRail station to work I saw that they were preparing to put up the marquee sign for the newly refurbished Howard Theatre.

It’s been fascinating to watch the repair work progress and nice to see the city putting work into a historic place. It was a dump and an eyesore for far too long.

* You may wonder why I was up on the roof with my landlord or why should I care about the place when the landlord should be doing maintenance? Well I have a fairly good deal on the rent, and the landlord likes it that I take good care of the place so it’s an arrangement of sorts. Plus in all the rental places I’ve lived I’ve picked up a lot of homeowner tips, tricks and things to watch out for should I ever own a home. So I pay attention to what needs to be done when I can. I’ve learned a lot about termites, crappy on-demand water heaters, mold, and other things that can go wrong with an old house should I ever grasp the American Dream of home ownership. But alas with the high cost of living and my bloated (not) Federal government salary it will be a long time until I build up a sizeable down payment for my own house.

Pardon the blogging absence – I’ll make it up by recycling something I wrote around Christmas but never posted, which you can read in the paragraphs following this one. I think I’m in a winter k-hole [again]. I realized my condition yesterday after I resolved to get outside for a jog, and I perked right up after the run. I need to keep that up – outdoor aerobic activity keeps me happy. For a while there I was worried because I didn’t even have an ounce of motivation to pick on my ex-husBear Brett (which takes no effort) but fortunately TJ was there to pick up the slack.

Over the Christmas break I officially retired my old North Face tadpole backpacking tent (shown at right at Red Creek in West Virginia). I believe I’ve had it since at least 1990. I purchased it one summer in Alaska along with my backpack which I will also soon retire. It ostensibly fit two people, but the occupants had to be very intimate as it was a tight fit for two. The waterproofing and rainfly were finally starting to degrade and I wanted a bigger tent anyway.

I offered the old tent to coworkers with kids who might want a backyard adventure tent but nobody took up the offer. I wondered if the Occupy DC people camped out in MacPherson Square might want a tent so I dropped it off there on Christmas day. They were very thankful and gracious about the donation. They told me the tent will house a single lady protester who was eager to move out of her communal tent for some privacy. I guess she wasn’t one of the Occupy DC tent city residents in a blossoming relationship.

Even though it went to a good cause I was a little sad breaking ways with my tent. I have camped in many sites over the past 20 years with that thing, including many Alaskan and West Virginia wilderness areas. ~sob!~

Aside from performing random acts of kindness for anarchists, over the Christmas holiday week I went to a lot of extremely gay Gay GAY holiday parties the week before Christmas, some of them actually recognizing the birth of Baby Jesus. Yes folks gays do have souls and some of us are even spiritual. You wouldn’t think that considering the rhetoric thrown at us on a regular basis but it’s true. When I ran support group meetings back in college I noticed the three main concerns for gay people coming into their own were the “Three Fs” – family, friends and faith. Basically gays coming out are concerned with losing one or all of the above 3 Fs.

And despite Andrew Sullivan’s continual assurance that we’re all so “post-gay” (written from the protective bubble of a gay theme park and fantasyland known as Provincetown) I keep hearing stories about holiday tales of woe and rejection from my people. Told in hushed tones in the kitchen or over by the bar, despite all our progess I still hear tales about how this couple couldn’t go visit one of their families because the parents don’t know he’s gay, and so on. My roomate’s 19 year-old son still won’t talk to him since he came out. Another friend still hasn’t met his live-in partner’s parents, I’m guessing because the partner is not yet out to them. We are most certainly not “post-gay” quite yet – all Andrew needs to do is to check things out in between coasts once in a while. I don’t know if it’s mostly because of anti-gay families or whether it’s the gays who are too fearful to come out (thus exacerbating the problem) but we are clearly not all out and/or accepted by our families quite yet.

Despite all the amazing progressive advances in laws and recognition across the country lately there is still a lot of work to be done. And I think a lot of this work has to do with our personal selves and in our relationships with our families.

Happy New Year! Woo! I spent New Year’s Eve dining on roast boar and drinking from a large stein at Cafe Berlin with friends. It was good times.

Requisite year-in-review post with a link to the most interesting post (or two) from each month. Here are my best photos from 2011 on Flickr as well. I’ll call 2011 “The Year of the Robyn,” because I saw her live three times, even flying out to see her (and Dingo) in Los Angeles.

Mega Python vs. Gatroid: the war with Big Fem Crocosaurus BrettCajun begins. Juvenile red-tailed hawk eating a rat in my backyard. Snowboarding in Vail, Colorado. I went snowboarding three times last year which is a record. I’m very proud of the Easter CenterPeep I made. Trip back home to Wisconsin. I invented beet cake and it was a success. I saw the final launch of space shuttle Atlantis and went to Darth Jersey’s Dacha. I saw Kylie live and when I opened the box containing her CDs the earth shook. And that was after an awful heat wave but before Hurricane Irene. I still play rugby. I want potsmoking Bears to use mouthwash before going out. I had a great trip to Los Angeles. Hellfest rugby tournament in Dallas. Blogger wedding of the century followed by our ugly breakup 72 hours later.

After our prenup is signed I will be spending the Christmas weekend down south at BrettCajun’s family swamp shack. According to our prenuptual agreements I am to present myself in a prescribed manner to the parental units. I quote section 7.1 of the prenup here:

“…no queening out or nelly hand gestures in their presence.”

Whatever that means. I see the first encounter with the in-laws going more like this:

Mama BrettCajun: “Good to meet you Jim!”
Me: “HEY LADY WHAT’S SHAKIN’ GURRRRLFRIEND! WHERE ARE THE COCKTAILS?! I HEAR YOU SOUTHERN FOLK LIKE TO DRINK? AM I TALKING RIGHT? ANYWAY WHERE DO Y’ALL HIDE THE MARTNI GLASSSSESSSS!”

Brett then introduces me to his dad and it goes like this:

Me: “HEY BUBBA! WOOF! BRETT DIDN’T TELL ME YOU WERE A DADDY BEAR! LIKE FATHER LIKE SON I GUESS HA HA ! HEY I BROUGHT SEASON 1 & 2 OF GLEE, RuPAUL’S DRAG RACE AND A-LIST NEW YORK AND DALLAS ON DVD WANNA WATCH?!”

3 hours later….

Papa BrettCajun: “Brett why aren’t you a fun gay like that Kurt Hummel guy on Glee?”
Me: “Cuz she’s got more issues than National Geographic magazine. Anyway, who’s up for season 3 of Project Runway?”
Mama BrettCajun: “OMG SKWEE!”

I’ve been totally busy planning the May 17, 2012 wedding with my future ex-husband BrettCajun. TJ has already kindly volunteered to organize the bridesmaid’s party. Masc/musc/mil ONLY!

And all our guests will get a mixtape (an actual cassette, not like a fancy CD)!
We’ve already started on the track list, which will feature the following:

“20 Seconds” by The Young Professionals, because that’s how long our sex life will last:

Robyn – “Don’t Fucking Tell Me What To Do” because we’ll be screaming that at each other after one day together.

And of course Rihanna “We Found Love” to keep all our gay guests happy:

Anyway, will the person who supplied all my coworkers with cocaine this week please come forward? Seriously though, I think everyone is checking their to-do lists and noticing they have things they wanted to accomplish before the new year and are trying to get all that crap done at the last minute. I swear people have been totally hysterical. Chill out people!