Christmas is gay
NOTE: I wrote this post last Christmas season. But since it’s funny and offensive and most of you have never seen it before, I’m running it again.
I was on a forum the other day when someone brought up the inconvenient hypothesis that saying, “That’s gay” might be offensive to gay people.
Typically, I’m a nonconfrontational offender. When I’m alone, I tend to think, “If someone is offended, that’s their problem.” It’s the same philosophy I use when eating meat. I love meat, but I have to pretend it wasn’t at one time frolicking in nature. I’ll let others kill for me, but if the apocalypse came tomorrow and I was suddenly required to kill my own food, I’d become a vegetarian. Same with offense. Once I can put a face together with someone being actually hurt, I often will pussy out and stop. Damn idiotic compassion. Knew I should stop following the Dalai Lama.
“There are worse things,” said my gay friend Nick when I asked his opinion, “but in a perfect world, I kind of wish that expression would just go away.”
Dammit. He was being cool about it, but the handwriting was on the wall. At heart, it bothered him.
He then added that his cousin keeps telling him how gay he is. She’s not doing it on purpose, either.
“She just can’t figure it out,” Nick told me. “Bless her poor, stupid heart.”
You’re probably wondering why I’m sweating any of this, but what you don’t know is that the gay arrow is among the largest and most powerful in my quiver. American Idol is gay, High School Musical is gay, Dancing with the Stars is gay, and the new Ronald McDonald is gay squared. There is no synonym to the way I use “gay.” “Lame” doesn’t cut it. “Dumb” doesn’t cut it. There is a certain particular species of lame/dumb to all of those things that implies that not only do they suck, but that they do so in a Bettie Boop wig, tap-dancing around with their penises tucked back between their legs.
“What if I’m not meaning for it to imply homosexuality in any way?” I begged. “What if it’s just a homonym that is actually an entirely different word, like ‘road’ and ‘rode?’ ”
“But it’s g-a-y, right?” Nick asked.
“A homonym that’s spelled the same way, then. Or maybe it could be g-h-e-y.”
“Look,” he told me, “use it if you want, seriously. Like I said, it’s not a big deal to me. But it will offend some gays, yes.”
Great. That’s like one of my black friends saying, “Well… I guess you could somehow justify referring to that hairstyle as ‘niggery.’ “
I sighed. “Times really do change. It’s funny – it was only 35 years ago that Carly Simon was able to score a major hit with, ‘You’re So Gay.’ “
“I don’t think that’s right,” he said.
“Well, between thirty and forty years, anyway,” I said.
Honestly, I think it’s all kind of unfair. Homosexuals annexed that word without notice. Overnight, it went from referring to a state of happiness and joy to one of wanting to have sex with dudes. Like, Liberace was always so bubbly and happy. In days past, you could have said he was gay. But then all of that changed.
And all of this at the gayest time of year. Revelers are gay. Tidings are gay. Hell, it’s December 6th, so thirty or forty years back, this was all one big gay season. “How are you today, Ted?” a man would ask his neighbor. “Very gay, thank you!” the other would reply. “I’ve never been so gay, in fact! And you, Roger – you’re also looking mightily gay. How’s the family? Gay, I imagine?”
As for us, we put up our Christmas tree today. While we were doing it, I made a point to think about how gay it was. I figured Nick wouldn’t mind. The true holiday spirit is one of universal gayness. This is the time of year that we can all be gay together as a people. We decorated; we hung tinsel; we listened to old music. If we wanted, we could even have roasted nuts over the fire.
I’m working on making peace with all of it. And Nick? He’s happy I’m trying.
“You should be my ambassador to the gay community,” I told him in the spirit of the gay holiday. “You know, help me sell some of my books across the rainbow border.”
“The cover art may need to change if you want me to do that,” he said, having seen the dog I placed on the cover of May Contain Nuts. “As it stands, your title implies an expectation that the book does not meet.”
I thought that was a funny thing to say, so I laughed and reveled in my holiday spirit of infinite gayness toward all mankind. I guess I can live without saying “that’s gay,” though I will indeed miss it. Perhaps I can find something less offensive, more universal.
But really, when you think about it, the whole situation is pretty retarded.
Hello, I’m five years old
My son Austin just turned five, which is awesome because now he’s finally surpassed my level of maturity and it’s only a matter of time before I can con him into buying me beer.
The thing is, I just wrote two posts about being crazy. One is here, just a few posts back. The other will be on the Project Mojave blog soon if it’s not by the time this runs. (And by the way, you should head over there right now and subscribe to the RSS feed because I’m already PM faculty and as such will be posting there regularly.) But “crazy” has a cool vibe about it. Like that guy on the subway who thinks pulling his pants up over his face makes him invisible? Totally a mover and shaker in the world of cool. So you can say you’re crazy and it’s like saying you’re injured while you show off a scar. It’s like, “I’m wounded, which means I’m tough and dangerous. And I might pull my pants up really high.”
But maybe I’m not crazy. Maybe I’m just… an idiot.
For Austin’s fifth birthday, he got all these new Transformer toys, like this big Leader Class Megatron from the animated series where he transforms into this dual-rotor helicopter. And he got this big Bulkhead, and Bulkhead comes with the Headmaster unit, which everyone knows was created and piloted by this douchebag named Masterson in the cartoon, and the Headmaster unit sits over Bulkhead’s head and makes it so that Bulkhead says, “OWNAGE! TOTAL OWNAGE” in the Headmaster’s voice instead of the Bulkhead expressions. And then he got Lugnut, who is a Decepticon, and with his birthday money, he got Blitzwing, who is like a drunk Nazi with three personalities who is actually a triple-changer, going from robot to tank to jet, and he’s totally badass, and kind of sounds like Colonel Klink.
It’s cool when Austin goes to bed because I’ll sit on the couch and transform his toys from robots and then into planes and shit and I’ll be like, “You know, he really does need a better Optimus Prime. Optimus is the leader of the Autobots for Christ’s sake, and the only one we have has some sort of degenerative joint disease where he can’t stand up and collapses into an amorphous pile.”
My wife Robin will look at me and say, “How old are you?”
“Austin and I were talking, and he wants to get Blurr next, and then Sentinel Prime after that, but I really think our Optimus is pathetic. Like, a disgrace.”
“Ours.”
“Right.”
“Like, ‘Our car’ or ‘Our furnace.’ Optimus Prime as a staple of this family’s existence and keeping up with the Joneses.”
“You know the funny thing about Optimus Prime? He’s a truck, and he has this trailer, like he’s hauling crates of oranges or cigarettes or something. But whenever he has it and then transforms back into a robot, the trailer just kind of skids away and we’re supposed to forget about it. Where does it go? And where does it come from when he transforms into a truck with a trailer again? And most importantly, what’s in it, and why does he need it at all?”
She’ll get this look of mild amusement (or perhaps it’s pity) when I do things like that, but the joke’s on her because she likes the Transformers show too because she’s burned out on SpongeBob SquarePants, which I’ve been watching for eight years. Remember, my oldest child is five. The math does itself.
None of this is helped by the fact that a few years ago, I watched this Dvinsk Clan parkour video and this breakdancing video and decided I wanted to be able to do cool stuff like that. So I tried to learn some rolls on my own and went to the park to learn stuff on the playground equipment, but then I hurt myself and got strange looks from mothers on the playground and decided I should go somewhere with big soft mats and fewer implied pedophile accusations.
So I started calling gymnastics facilities.
Most taught only kids, but it was okay because I wasn’t trying to learn kiddie stuff. I wanted to be Dvinsk! I wanted to learn parkour! I wanted to breakdance! I am manly!
And I finally found one that would teach adults and left a few messages for the instructor and she called me back after some good-natured gameplay wherein she pretended to be ignoring my calls. And she said, “So, I don’t understand. You want your kids to take lessons?”
“No,” I told her. “I want to take lessons.”
“Oh. How old are you?”
At the time, I was 31 and told her so.
“Oh.”
“I’m not really a typical gymnast, either. I’m six feet tall and weigh 205 pounds.”
“Oh. And you want to learn with your kids?”
“No,” I told her. “Just me.”
“Oh.”
So I’m sure she had a bet that it was a practical joke, but after a few lessons I was still refusing to go away and so she merged my “class” with the “class” of another singleton she had — a 9-year-old girl named Nicole. It became harder to convince myself that I was being manly, especially when Nicole’s parents showed up one day to watch.
“I’m not a creep,” I told them. “Honest.”
Luckily, the gym hired a male instructor shortly thereafter — a guy knowledgeable about the rings, the pommel horse, and all the other manly stuff. However, all hope for redemption died when his students showed up — a large group of high school girls who were clearly stronger than I was (bodyweight-wise, anyway, but can any of them deadlift 475? I THOUGHT not) and who kept looking at me with what I pretended was infatuation but which was actually probably closer to the way convenience store clerks are trained to study the defining characteristics of armed gunmen.
But if they had seen how quickly I can transform Megatron, they might have changed their minds about me. Like, he’s not a creep. He’s just a manchild, like Lenny from Of Mice and Men.
Sometimes I’ll be on a call with a client or something and Austin will poke his head into my office, asking me to transform Blitzwing into a tank. I can totally do it while conducting business. There are a lot of people out there who have been advised by a guy who knows that Shockwave actually infiltrated Autobot command by posing as a different bot by the name of Longarm. And a guy who, despite the suspicions of high school girls, can do an aerial and a back flip.
If that’s not a Renaissance man, I don’t know what is. Can Seth Godin make the claims I can? What about Frank Kern?
I have a 17-month-old daughter, too. She’s quite girly. I don’t think I’ll take up ballet, but I also used to laugh at grown men who knew so much about Transformers.
This could get interesting.
Reunions: Not just about unions anymore
NOTE: If you’re reading this in Facebook, you’re probably doing it because I tagged you, which means that you don’t normally read my notes, you big asshole. That probably also means that you don’t know that these notes are actually a feed from my blog, and probably further haven’t realized that I’m a famous blogger now, which is kind of like being a famous janitor except that the janitor gets more chicks and has access to stronger chemicals.
So if that’s you, you need to head over to my blog and read it so that there will hopefully be more chicks and stronger chemicals waiting for me at the next high school reunion, as I’m entitled to.
By the way, I totally read italics like I’m whispering. It’s all like, “Psst! Read this! You big asshole!”
There’s a line from the Stephen King book On Writing (which isn’t about evil C.H.U.D.s but is nonfiction, strangely enough, on writing) that says something like, “When you’re in the middle of it, high school seems like the most serious thing in the world. It’s not until the second or third reunion that you start to realize just how bizarre the whole thing was.”
Well, last weekend, I went to my 15-year high school reunion.
And King is totally right.
Now that I’m a parent, I’m all suspicious of schooling. (Although I think this is a product of my generation, which, keeping with the grand tradition of generations, is completely and totally certain that we’ve got it all figured out and that those before us fucked up big time.) I don’t know if I totally trust school. Today, looking back, I think about the process behind it and I think:
1. From my current perspective as a 33-year-old guy, I actually think I enjoyed those years, but
2. What a conformity factory. I mean, damn.
I’ve got two kids now, and they’re all free-spiritied to the point that I get migraines and it keeps dawning on me that in another year, I’ll be sending Austin off to school for the first time. Part of me fears for the school. But another part of me is bothered by the fact that he’ll be required to sit down, stop playing, and learn about Alexander the Great.
Not that Alexander the Great isn’t worth learning about. I mean, he’s great. But when I was learning about Alexander the Great, I was not digging it. I only know one guy who dug learning about Alexander the Great, and he’s British and ordered some pink shoes from the U.S. and had me relay them to him, and when I opened the box, I was all, “Wow, these shoes are really fucked up,” and then I packed them in a box and shipped them off and marveled at the fact that in England, apparently young male history buffs who aren’t even gay are into pink shoes, and that struck me more as a serious fashion faux pas than as a statement of diminished masculinity, and then I thought of Austin starting to learn about history and being like, “Dad, I need these giant retarded shoes” and then I’d have to climb a bell tower with a rifle or something because that’s only one step away from thinking that Maroon 5 is the height of good music.
The problem with school is that it has to impart a very specific volume of knowledge in a very structured timeframe. Which means that kids have to sit down, shut up, and learn to retain stuff long enough to repeat it back at test time.
This isn’t a social statement. I don’t make many of those. It’s just that at the time, learning that specific stuff in that specific time — not to mention keeping up with social hierarchies — seems like the most serious thing in the world. And after 15 years, you still end up as a bunch of 33-year-olds standing around and talking about where you live and how many kids you have, and suddenly nobody’s giving you demerits for running in the hallway.
You’re like, “Dude. Detention holds no power over me anymore. I am free. I am super saiyan. My power level is over nine thousaaaaaaaaaand!”
You realize that the principal was just a person.
You realize that your teachers went home at night and watched shitty TV like you do now, that they laughed at coarse jokes as you do now, and if you’re a parent, you’re now the one in position to give demerits and detentions and to force people to learn about Alexander the Great. And if you want to buy your boys pink shoes? Totally your right.
You realize that class hierarchy means nothing, that it was all sort of a game.
You go back to a reunion, and if you’re confident enough to drop your guard, you’ll realize that you’re all just a bunch of adults with the same challenges and opportunities. You realize that you don’t have to just talk to your same old group. It’s okay now to chat with the former jocks, the former nerds, the former weirdoes, the former cool kids, the former foreign exchange student who you always liked anyway but whose first name is actually impossible to pronounce, and even if you try, he’ll tell you that you’re fucking it up and someone (possibly named Mark) can even be standing RIGHT NEXT TO YOU and he’ll say that there is NO DIFFERENCE between what you’re saying and what the Norwegian doctor is saying, even though said Norwegian is like, “That’s not even close,” and you’re all like, “My roommate in college was Norwegian and his name is Tim. Knock it off or I’m sending you pink shoes.”
I wrote on Twitter that I had gone to my reunion, and people joked that I was a masochist. There’s this impression floating around that unless you were on the pep squad, reunions are torture. I wasn’t cool back then, you think, so I’m not going to talk to anyone now.
I had a lot of friends across a lot of groups in high school, but I kind of don’t think I’d come close to saying I was cool.
But you know what? I enjoyed the hell out of my reunion.
What’s not to enjoy? You learn things about people and how they developed. It’s like a human time capsule.
Sarah had two kids. Dane is still ridiculously tall. Nancy’s a photographer. Reggie is willing to put up with the white-kids dance if someone would just play Michael Jackson. Jeff is a lot more tan than I remember. Ryan is willing to fight if anyone disagrees that the Class of ‘94 song was “Runaway Train.” Andy, the Chinese guy who once told a student teacher, “Your hairs looks funky,” was nowhere to be found but appeared as a Facebook friend suggestion the very next day.
A room full of people. Just people. Cool people.
Those of you who refuse to go to your reunions, just fucking go already. Stop being a dick. High school is over, and like it or not, these are your peeps. They’re raising the kids who will work with, befriend, and marry your kids. At the time, it all seemed like the most serious thing in the world, but after the second or third reunion, you start to realize how bizarre it all was.
“Kjetil.” Starts with a breathy almost-H sound. I think he was fucking with me. Crazy Norwegians.
Happy Fathers’ Day, gentlemen
Happy Fathers’ Day to everyone… from an unemployed guy, apparently.
JT
