Uncategorized

Way to go, State Board of Community Colleges (along with both NC gubernatorial candidates). Let’s make sure we do all we can to guarantee there will be a persistent, dependent underclass in North Carolina for years to come.

Denying undocumented immigrants a means of getting an education that might help them support themselves is probably not the most efficient way to avoid having your tax dollars support them. Keep in mind that these people were paying out of state tuition rates which covered more than the cost of their education, so they weren’t exactly suckling at the public teat to begin with. However, without access to job training, it’s pretty much a given that they (or their children) will eventually be doing so.

Picture it. Greensboro NC. Sometime in the vicinity of 1992.

Yer humble host was a long-haired homo misfit in a place that was having none of it. He had a few friends scattered between there and Charlotte to the south, and he relied on their tolerance to make life liveable. Generally, though, he hated everyone else he came in contact with, particularly his fellow homos, most of whom were just as happy as could be dancing around in their acid-washed jeans in the city’s collection of generic queer bars, immersed in the same bland “not quite disco, not quite house, not quite techno” musical sludge southern queer bars have relying on seemingly since the dawn of time.

So I visited my friend Jeff T., a co-worker and a recently uncloseted deadhead turned rave child, one night before drining heavily, as was my custom at the time. I met his new squeeze that night. He seemed a rather nice sort, and I had the vague feeling I’d met him once before, many years in the past, but that we hadn’t really gotten to know each other.

Mark G. Harris, 1992. (Ballpoint) ink on (notebook) paper.

This tme around, we actually did get to know each other, and Mark turned out to be one of the only people I manged not only to tolerate, but actually even to like during my last few months in Greensboro. He evetually broke up with Jeff (who later developed a rather unhealthy obsession with another of my friends) and Mark and I got to spend time lurking around dark bars, movie theatres, and the occasional Denny’s. I was sort of obsessed with Denny’s at the time. And then there was the famed 1992 Color Copy Tour of South Carolina, which I may dicsuss some day. This is not that day.

He was on an extended trip to Los Angeles when I moved to San Francisco in October 1992, but had returned to Greensboro by my first visit home the following year, which is when this picture was taken:

Actually, I think it was the Denny’s in Greensboro.

That was probably the last time we saw each other face to face. As often happens when people are preoccupied with life, the letters and calls just sort of stopped. And we both had fairly eventful lives from that point on, in San Francisco for me and in New York for Mark, as it turns out. I often wondered where he’d ended up and what had happened to him, and if he still hated pickles and flossed regularly and wrote really well.

Guess what. He does.

And after all this time, damned if we didn’t land about 2 1/2 hours from each other, back in North Carolina, which must say something about our home state, even though I’m not sure just what it is.

Now that we’ve run across each other again after fifteen years, I’m ready to admit that I’ve still never seen Heathers and still don’t quite get that reference in that letter from 1993. I’ll have to rectify that situation.

Mark’s back in San Francisco now, and I’m all by myself again, wishing we could enjoy the rain and the gloom together. Over the weekend, there was pizza in High Point on Saturday (about which I had an interesting post written before it got destroyed), grilled pork on Sunday, and the traditional Monday morning breakfast at the Lighthouse. Mark has also now joined me in PHP-dom following his disgust with iWeb. It’s sad that Apple is doing such a sloppy job with what should be its showcase applications.

I’m pretty impressed that I’ve already migrated over all my journal entries dating back to 2006. I still have some cleanup to do, fixing internal links, etc., but it’s not taking nearly as long as I expected. I should have done this a long time ago.

Of course, things are starting to get a little crazy again now that classes have started. I’m doing the big graduate assistant thing, and have assumed control of the department’s website. I may also take another job working on a digitization project for the university archives if I can get permission. It should be interesting, even if it doesn’t pay much. Slave labor is, of course, the most efficient way to build one’s resume, right?

Speaking of the resume, a quick update this morning before I went to the dentist was apparently enough to secure me this extra position, despite my misgivings. It’s amazing how excited librarians and archivists get when you mention that you have web design experience. Maybe I will end up getting a decent job once all this is done.

Back to work now. The defintion of work gets hazy when you do 90% of it home.

It was six years ago today that the boy who had already moved into my life also moved into my home. Suddenly, it became our home, which was a pretty wonderful thing once we got all our stuff consolidated and all the boxes unpacked. And it’s been a pretty wonderful thing ever since, as well.

Right now, we don’t get to spend a lot of time together. Mark’s job has him in San Francisco more than he’s in Winston-Salem by a factor of something like three-to-one. That’s hard, especially for him, and maybe that’s why I find myself thinking of this particular anniversary so intently tonight. Of the three days we recognize as part of our “anniversary trilogy” (the others being the day we met and the day we got hitched at City Hall in 2004), we probably give this one the least attention. Yet it’s possibly the most important one of all in some ways, since it really sort of marks the specific moment when we started living our lives together.

Tonight, we’re three time zones apart, but I’m thinking of him, and remembering that day when we moved all his furniture into my already crowded hovel in San Francisco. I’m remembering dinner with his sister and brother-in-law at The Dead Fish (and developing a craving for scallops) and how completely worn out we were afterward. I’m pondering how nervous I was at the prospect of having my first “live-in”, but also how excited I was at the thought of waking up next to him every morning.

Tonight, we’re at opposite ends of the country, and I’ll be waking up alone tomorrow morning. But the thought that we’ll be together again, even if only for a few days, at the end of the week still gets me all giddy and excited. And it allows me, once again, to experience the anticipation of being able to do it every day again soon.

I love my boy, and I wouldn’t want to spend my life with anyone else. Heck, I wouldn’t even consider it.

Don’t you hate it when the damned dog won’t get off the bed?

Should you be getting bored with the lack of any meaningful commentary here lately maybe you should visit the hubby’s nicely-remodeled site. He’s saying more than I am these days…