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I fear I may have developed a dreaded summer cold. Granted, summer in San Francisco is a relative thing, but that makes me no less phlegmy and my throat no less scratchy. Other than that, though, I don’t feel particularly sick. Maybe it’s just allergies, but I don’t think so. Either way, if this screws up my weekend, I’m gonna be pissed and I even know exactly which co-worker to be pissed AT…

A good chunk of Sunday is dedicated to email, I’ve decided. I had two friends mail me today asking if I was OK because they hadn’t heard from me in a bit. I need to be a tad more attentive, I guess. But for some reason, I’ve been even worse than usual with the electronic correspondence lately…

For the record, I’m fine, thanks. Had birthday dinners with Dan on Thursday (his official gathering) and Friday (his actual birthday). Jamie came over tonight for pizza and Earthquake (we cheered when Charlton Heston was swept away to his death). And I still may make a quickie road trip to Sacramento tomorrow, assuming I get an early enough start. It’s only supposed to be 81 there; this may be the best time all summer to do it…

Now, however, I’m gonna sleep. It’s rather comforting to know that people would clue in pretty quickly if something horrible ever happened to me…

Warning: mushiness alert…

I’m spending one of my last weekends as a bachelor. In a little more than a month, the boy of my dreams will be living with me. Who could’ve seen that coming a year ago?

This is a pretty significant thing for me. I’ve gone nearly 38 years without so much as thinking about moving in with someone (“moving in” being a euphemism for a situation unlike the standard roommate arrangement). I’d pretty much figured I’d spend the rest of my life in a sort of hermit-like bliss, never allowing another person to get quite close to me to justify waking up together every morning.

I was not looking for a relationship, much less a rather permanent one with a cohabitation component. It’s been the farthest thing from my mind for many years. Some people have suggested it’s even completely foreign to my nature.

So what happened? How did things change so drastically? And why am I so absolutely sure I’m doing the right thing? Why was there essentially no hesitation on my part as this whole situation unfolded?

It’s very simple, actually. I went down to Fresno one weekend last fall with two goals in mind: to do research and take pictures of supermarkets and to meet this rather interesting individual who’d been emailing me for a month or two and had recently answered my personal ad with one of his own. He seemed like someone I wanted to meet, and I figured we might hit it off well and even engage in some carnal pursuits.

We met on a Friday night at Club Fred. The first time I saw him was when I realized I was behind him in line at the bar. As he turned around, I realized he was about the cutest boy I’d ever seen and I knew that it would be an aesthetically-pleasing way to spend an evening at any rate. But then we started talking. And I was hooked.

For me, it was as if we’d been friends for years. Everything was natural and informal, nothing was uncomfortable, and I realized from the very first night that this would last a lot longer than one night. Mark had an amazing intelligence and maturity about him; he talked about things I was actually interested in and talked about them in a way which showed he was informed and had an appealing intellectual curiosity.

After that first night, I returned to the Motel 6 and wrote in my trip notebook the words “My God. I’m in love.” I was sort of joking and overstating, but the words had a certain ring of truth. And they turned out to be prophetic.

Over the next few months, as we got to know each other even better, I felt no sense of pressure and no sense of impending doom. It was so unlike any other “relationship” I’d experienced. I never felt that I had to pretend to be anything other than what I was. I didn’t need to “hide anything” lest I “blow it”. Maybe it was the distance factor, but I think most of it had to do with the fact that we both tend to be strong individuals, and that neither of us was comfortable with sacrificing any of that individuality to the “greater goal” of relationship-building or whatever.

By New Year’s, we’d declared our love for each other (and yes, the first time was under mildly amusing circumstances which didn’t involve sex, thanks). This was, at least for me, a few weeks after the actual realization had hit. Also, by this time he’d met most of my friends and even my mom, and we were more or less spending every weekend together (and annoying everyone we knew by whining about it on those weekends we were apart).

The idea of our spending a lot more time together had already crossed my mind. I’d never met anyone like Mark before; with past boyfriends, I’d always felt a little relieved when they went home and I could be on my own again. With Mark, though, I just wanted to spend more and more time with him. I still valued my solitude and my “personal space”, but I was pretty damned comfortable with the idea of spending most minutes of most days with him.

It works because we really don’t have too many expectations of each other. We’re together because we want to be, not because we’re “supposed to be”. We love each other as individuals, not as “relationship units”. We’re mushy and romantic because we really feel it, and not because we need constant reassuring. I still wake up in the middle of the night, watch him sleeping next to me, and feel the most amazing sense of contentment and marvel at my good luck.

And, contrary to what I’d always believed, the sex does get better and better when you keep practicing it on the same person. So does the pillow talk.

I have no reservations about sharing my life with Mark. I’d probably have no reservations even if we hadn’t been romantically involved more or less from the start. He’d be one of the best friends I’ve ever had, and I’d want to be with him even if we weren’t pursuing carnality with relish. That said, though, I can’t imagine that we ever wouldn’t be doing so.

Dammit, he’s absolutely perfect for me, from his obsession with diner food and somewhat bleak cityscapes to his love of Cops and Teamo Supremo, and from his capacity for critical thinking and “intellectual stonewashing” to his distaste for trendy jargon and cute, gentrified neighborhoods. He has (and can express) his emotions, but he doesn’t let them cloud his overall view of the world. He can hold his own in arguments ranging from music to bad TV to city planning to Constitutional rights. We don’t always think alike, but we share thought processes. We don’t share every interest, but we do share surprisingly many, and we’re not repulsed by any of the ones we don’t share.

I didn’t think such a person existed, and I’m so amazingly glad I met him. And I’m excited about that next step. I’m looking forward to being with him for the long haul.

I love my boy…

Had the big conversation with my mom tonight about Mark moving in. She seemed genuinely pleased, and she even laughed at my joke about we both own toaster ovens and won’t be needing another one, thanks. I think she’s happy. She seems to like Mark. That’s a good thing…

I would’ve had this conversation a bit earlier, had not technology been a factor. My dad is hard of hearing, so when I call the parents or they call me, it invariably means that both of them are on the phone at the same time, using a speaker phone. It’s the only way my dad can realy hear everything, but it makes having any sort of substantial conversation a little difficult. Thus, our talks turn out a little superficial, and it’s sometimes hard to break big news…

Of course, I also have this bad habit of not talking to my parents about big things until they’re either already settled or over and done with anyway. It seems to work for us, so don’t criticize…

But tonight, she answered the regular phone in the kitchen, so we could actually talk for a few minutes. Which was good, as I didn’t really want to email her the news and I thought it might be nice to let her know what was going on before Mark started answering the phone here next month…

It’s miserably hot and I’m draggy. That will be all for tonight. But I do love my sane parents…

Oleene was the stereotype of a middle-aged Southern woman in the 1970s. Born in 1925, she’d worked briefly at an insurance agency when she was very young, but had spent most of her adult life as a housewife. She had three children, and supplemented her husband’s income by watching the neighborhood children while their parents were at work. I was one of those children…

Oleene’s family owned a spotless three-bedroom ranch house and two older Dodges. They attended church, ummm, religiously. Southern Baptist, of course. She made many of her own clothes, which tended toward polyester pant suits, and on dressier occasions, she wore a semi-bouffant wiglet she kept on a styrofoam head. She always complained about the moral transgressions portrayed on her afternoon “stories”, but never enough so to stop watching them every day…

Oleene was all in all a very sweet and kind woman, very moral (if often a bit judgmental) and loving. She considered herself a good Christian, she valued education and manners, and she held the kids to very high standards…

And she was one of the most horribly vile racists I’ve ever known…

Oleene constantly said the most awful things about “niggers” and “jiggerboos”, not only within earshot of the kids, but even when conversing with us. She declined to associate with African Americans in any way, even refusing to eat in restaurants because one might have washed the dishes or touched her food. The comments which came out of this woman’s mouth were completely out of character with the “Christian love” she preached. Even at seven or eight years old, I had a hard time listening to her…

This was really not an uncommon thing in the south in those days, and I still see it on visits home among women (and men) of a certain age: a tendency for nice, loving, moral people to lose these qualities completely when faced with someone of another race. One of my favorite aunts was the same way, and it disappointed me terribly that an otherwise wonderful person could be so ignorant and downright nasty about such an insignificant issue as skin color…

I always tried, with some success, to blame it on their upbringing or on the peculiar and change-filled times they’d lived through. But it was still impossible to ignore, and it shaped many of my attitudes on race and religion and other differences among individuals. For the better, I hope…

I was lucky. I came home to relatively sane parents who helped me “deprogram”, both from racist comments by an otherwise very nice woman, and from the fundamentalist dogma presented by my private elementary school. To their everlasting credit, they always encouraged me to think for myself rather than to parrot someone else’s opinion…

I’m not sure why exactly my parents subjected me to such radically different worlds during the day (although the lack of choices at the time may have played into it), but in many ways, I’m glad they did. It taught me to be skeptical of questionable teachings and dogma — whether from the left or from the right — at an early age. I also learned to spot hypocrisy and inconsistencies between expressed beliefs and observed actions…

I think my elementary school years were more important to the development of my critical thinking skills than any university course I ever took. And I think that a lot of younger people today, growing up in an educational system where revisionism and “newspeak” guarantee they are rarely confronted with any alternatives to the “correct” opinions, are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to these very same critical thinking skills…

It’s all well and good to teach that racism is bad and that adversity must be overcome. But when the school library bans all references to what racism really IS (except in the most simplistic and cartoonish terms) and when some vague notion of “building self-esteem” negates the concept of any actual adversity (such as getting a grade which corresponds with the quality of the work done), students are doing little but reciting a memorized set of “principles” which have no real meaning to them. And they question nothing…

Oleene taught me to question lots of things, even if she did so unintentionally…