Eddie Bauer Man

Let me just say, I love Eddie Bauer. It is, as one friend put it, “like a fifty year old man, who was never particularly outdoorsy to start with, trying to get in touch with nature”. And what a great lifestyle! Handsome -earthy- men (war journalists, rural doctors who help children in Africa, Bush Pilots)  and gorgeous women (they do sexy things as well) all playing the sand, on a boat, eating a romantic lunches on the beach, maybe they are at their summer home in the Andes or on some deserted island. These are the lives that mere mortals, such as myself, fantasize about.

That being said, I have had a taste of the sexy, Eddie Bauer good life. I dated a girl a few years back (a model…no really) with whom we did romantic things. We went away to her cottage (on a lake), we went canoeing, we went on nature walks, we had romantic lunches ( we did not however, go sailing, the ultimate in yuppie activities). And while the whole experience was fun (and romantic) it was not me. It could never be my life.

I was recently helping a friend move his sail boat (a very nice one) from his ex-girlfriend’s beach house (four year relationship ending badly…more like a divorce than a break up) and we talked about “the good life”. She gave him this opportunity to live this sort of fantasy life (sailing, trips to Spain, beach houses) but its not him, its not his life and will never be. Its not that he doesn’t have the money or will never have it (he is very smart and will go far in life) its just that we have have real lives. We are not 2.5 children, a dog, a cat and a Beach house type of people.

Maybe some day we may have beach houses but proper ones, on far away beaches. And not houses that are simply houses that are next to beaches. Proper beach houses with sand on the floor and rough beds. Rustic!

What am I getting at? I’m not entirely sure myself. I was just thinking when I was flipping through Eddie Bauer and moving his boat, “this is not my life and nor would I ever want it to be so”. I love the outdoors but I like the outdoors as it is meant to be appreciated, not the manufactured kind. Not the kind that you can pull out of an Eddie Bauer catalog.

Hey Sweetheart, Guess What?

Guess What?

I kind of have the Clap…and the Herpe….and the Drip. But don’t worry, I have a card to explain it all.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,

I’m not quite sure how to say this but…..

Hillary Plays The Gays!

I know its popular in gay culture (who am I to comment on gay culture?) to support the down trodden women who rise up. Think Tammy Faye Messner (because she didn’t want to slaughter them like her husband did), Hillary Clinton (obvious), Bijork and for some reason, Madonna. But Bill and Hill have hardly been a friend of the gay community. They are opportunists. If they see there might be a gay vote (as Bill did when passing “don’t ask, don’t tell”) they will go for it. Just as he went for the bigot vote when he said in his 1996 campaign ads that he supported DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act).

Yes, I will concede that maybe the Clinton’s do believe in equal rights for homosexuals but not at the cost of losing electoral support. If she thought making out with a woman on stage would win her votes she would do it at every stump speech (I don’t think Bill would mind, he’d be too busy filming with one hand and doing something filthy with the other), just as she would likely burn a lesbian at stake if she thought it would get her the presidency.

If you think this sounds extreme, think again. But think Hillary Health-care and the genocide(or the more gentle term…”ethnic cleansing”. Makes it sound like one mass bathing of an ethnic group) of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians. As was pointed out by Christopher Hitchens in a recent piece in Slate, the Clinton administration held off stopping the genocide because Hillary wanted to get her health care plan passed first. Needless to say it failed.I won’t bother mentioning Rwanda. Rwanda and Uganda and most of Central Africa is of little concern to US interests. Plus there’s a lot of Black people and we all know they are only worth 3/5 of white people, or so says the Constitution.

I have added a link from Americablog and (my favorite blog) The Daily Dish by Andrew Sullivan both of which address Hilary and the Gays. Here’s a video from her recent gay interview (ginterview?).

Check out Mianus!

There are so many great titles with this one!

The real irony is that Mianus is a suburb of Greenwich, CT!

I grabbed these from Google Images, though I did drive through Mianus. I tried to take pictures myself but my camera phone resolution wasn’t very clear.

4 Years Later

So, I have been in town lately (the past 2 months) getting things figured out and whilst doing this I have had a lot of time to talk to people and reflect. I was recently talking to someone who knows an ex-girlfriend of mine (though, only in passing) and this friend(and I use this term very loosely) being perceptive pointed out that my ex was incredibly book smart and had a smoking body (both undeniable) but just seemed vapid and hollow when it came to everything else in life.

At first I vehemently disagreed (though I had been told this by other people) and then I thought, maybe, just maybe, they were right. One always expects people to progress but what if, by an off chance people regress. Not all people, just some. Alright, most. This of course is obvious. Those who we looked at four years ago and said “he (or she) is destined for great things” and those who looked like failure was just around the corner, seemed to have done quite well for themselves. Who would have thought that 4 years later I would be doing critical care medicine and studying economics at a top US university? Sure as hell not me or any of my friends.

This conversation with a friend also got me thinking how we interpret people. How we chose to view them. At funerals, the dead person always looks like a saint. Could my ex really be all that good? Could she be the person I remember her being? Did she change or did I simply never see something? Or maybe I saw something no one else did. Often with ex girlfriends its tough to get an accurate answer. Either you don’t talk to each other anymore or everyone has taken sides and no one can objectively tell you about the other person. I think we often we cling to a past memory of a person or put them on some sort of pedestal, only later realizing that the pedestal never gave you a clear view of the person(up their skirt?). Like that boy at summer camp (not in my case, I never went to summer camp and never had crush on a boy) who you first fell in love with and fantasized all about your freshman year of high school, only to find out the following summer that really, he wasn’t all that cool. But you spent all year infatuated with the concept of him of him and not really him.

I can’t say all of these years later I was ever infatuated with any ex-girlfriend, only that I thought of them as special. They had something that no one else did. Was I wrong the whole time? Or did they just lose “it”?

Hotel Update

So, I just left to get a bag from my truck and I would swear to god that I just heard suppressed gunshots and saw muzzle flashes from down the hall. It wasn’t the lights, I checked.

Also, the elevator just opended but had not finsihed moving and still had to move up six inches

They lock and doors at 11pm and you have to get buzzed in.

I’m now sick after eating a fish burger, fries, a coke and massive bag of peanut m&ms.

To make matters worse, Sex and the City is on TV and I hate that show!

It’s no Mariott…..but

But nothing. Its no Mariott.

I am in DC interviewing for a job and checking out apartments and looking at American University- where I will be going in the fall. I had originally decided to spend the nights at a hostel until I went to the place. Let me say two things first off. Firstly, I know nothing about DC, second, I am no ghetto connoisseur but from my brief experience in Newark and Boston, I know the ghetto when I see it. When all the cars are pieces of shit, except for one, very expensive, very flashy SUV, yep, your in the ghetto.

I drove up to the hostel, only able to identify it by the fading and broken numbers over the door. I suppose I had expected a middle income/upper class area with a large house that just housed a lot of kids. Instead I found the projects (or at least my version of the projects, which may be some people’s middle class- I make no pretense of humility), I expected something closer to The Real World rather than The Wire. Realizing that this residence (if I can call it that) would not meet my needs, I quickly went in search of a proper hotel. Normally, I am a “nothing below a Mariott man”, so I quickly went in search of the nearest Mariott where I could camp out over the next three days. So I punched in ‘Hotels’ into my GPS and it took my straight to the Mariott where I was informed that the starting rate for a room was $500/night. That was even steep for my price range (I usually do around $150/night).

So here I am, in Gaithersburg, Md at another hotel (needless to say, not a Marriott). There is an odd smell in the hallway, like stale Indian food and Mexican and Chinese leftovers and I have a sinister feeling that the fire alarm will go off at least once tonight. The elevator is shaky at best. You have to hit the button for it to come down, again for the door to open, again for the door to close, again for it to move and then again to open the door at your floor. I’ve been in high rise tenements with more reliable transportation. And to make matters worse, when I pulled in, my headlights flashed on two Hispanic men, having sex in the room right in front of my truck. I mean come on, at least close the curtains.

I love Mexican Gay Porn!

Porn! Good or Bad or Just Plain Fun?

Of course there’s no good answer. Like most things in life it is a complex issue and one that I wouldn’t presume to be especially enlightened on. But in recent years we have seen what has been called (and I’m not sure if I agree with this) a “feminist backlash” by women like Maureen Dowd, Ariel Levy, Wendy Shalit against this idea of unbridled femininity. In other words, since “I have established it is my body, I will do what I please it, even if it means destroying it” with sex and drugs.

As a rule, I am not against sex and drugs. Each done at the right time and in moderation(like eating candy….except not). But I feel as if we have lost the ability for moderation and appropriateness. This topic came to me as I was flipping through the non-fiction section at my local book store and came across a book called Pornified: How Pornography is transforming our lives, our relationships, and our families (no need for the second comma). I read a bit of it and found myself in two minds. On the one hand, I agree, I think Porn is out of control and way too public, on the other I frankly enjoy wearing a French maid outfit and being trussed up like a chicken while being beaten(or some variation on that theme). I don’t think pre-marital sex is evil. But I think having 10-15 partners is pushing it. And that’s conservative for a lot of people. I have friends, very decent ones, upstanding, intelligent, all of those things you would expect out of a model citizen, only they’re pushing 30 partners.

Considering the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) just came out with a study saying that 1 in 4 young women (I think the ages are 15-25) have an STD, I think we have a sex problem. First thing is, where did they find these people? Second. EEEWWW!

Where are they finding these girls…? Well, the Ivy Leagues apparently. I started reading a NY Times Magazine article on a debate held at between someone promoting abtsinance and someone promoting (as far as I can tell) an all out Gang Bang. Both attend Ivy League schools.

In a way, its not sex itself that is the problem, I think Ariel Levy nails it in Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and The Rise of Raunch Culture. It is raunch culture and exhibitionism.When I read Levy’s book I found myself nodding throughout, in agreement. Brittney Spears ’sporting beaver’ getting out a car. Paris Hilton….everything. Girls Gone Wild videos….need I say more?

I was recently at a strip club (I was originally told we were going out to dinner and I wasn’t driving) only to find out that it was not in fact a strip club but more of a ‘Go Go Bar’ the women were not the least bit nude (bikinis). My friends were loving it. I found it as erotic as a jar of peanut butter. Nor would I have been any more erotic had they been nude. There was nothing sensual about it, nothing personal. You felt like meat as much as they probably did. I eventually (after assuring my friends -unconvincingly- that I was not gay) called a cab to take me back to the hotel. Sometimes I feel like there is a vast male conspiracy to love porn(porn I understand and yes, some girls do like it), strip clubs and any scantily clad woman. It is a sort of group testosterone mob mentality. Each man is looking at the other one to gauge how to act and no one wants to appear ‘unaroused’. A positive feedback loop (for you scientists out there). Each manly moment encourages a further show of masculinity.

Two Greatest Shows

I’m not a Sci-Fi guy, in fact I tend to avoid fiction altogther but I must say, my two favorite shows these days are Doctor Who and Torchwood (both by the same people)

Kumquats

Let me just say- I love Kumquats. When I get my own kitchen again, I plan to make tons of kumquat dishes.