A reintroduction
Livejournal is calling me back. I think I will write in here again. Blogging has moved on and Livejournal has not kept up. Now it's a barren place with little interaction, choked with ads for those who don't pay. It doesn't play nicely with web standards and I find it difficult to search.
That said, Livejournal feels cozy for writing about personal events in life, and it is formatted to allow long rants, instead of just Facebook or Twitter updates that are meaningless. Even if only a few close friends read this site, it is more meaningful than 300 glances elsewhere. It's also a good way to keep a record of what happens in one's life.
Paul stopped writing in his Livejournal for a while, but has returned to it and it has continued to improve with practice. He's currently completing a meme to write essays on a wide range of life-topics that is interesting to me and likely to his close friends, but otherwise won't be covered by "The Wall Street Journal". I'm happy that there's a place for this in the long-form online.
It's Fall and it's gorgeous out. I'm living in the "Bumblebee House" in Corktown, so-called because it is yellow and black on the exterior. Paul writes extensively about this house in his journal, but my history here so far is that I moved here in January 2010 with five other people. The roommate thing didn't work, and so most everyone moved out except for Matt and I. Meanwhile, Paul has been fixing up the house around us in a heroic battle against entropy.
I live with my boyfriend Matt, the veterinarian. He works all the time and, since it's an emergency clinic, often has an upside-down schedule. The schedule can be stressful for both of us, but it's also kind of exciting. Matt loves crazy music and is a nerd and a hottie, just like me! Matt has three pet ferrets that are adorable. I clean up their poop while he is at work. Even their poop is adorable. Did you know that ferrets have one of the highest ratios of poop production to body size of any mammal?
Meanwhile, I am a mostly unsuccessful artist of some variety. I work in music and film sometimes, and for my family sometimes, and partly mind the gap with money that was intended-for-university-but-I-went-to-a-much-cheaper-university-than-everyone-expected. I aspire to produce progressively more ambitious creative projects across all media, and assume that this will get me through life even though it's a terrible plan from the perspective of a career path. So far, this non-career plan has lead to paying gigs on accident half a dozen times in the last year or two. I should just tell people that I'm a consultant and maybe they'll stop asking me what I do for a living all the time. Today I made $50 selling stickers of the first and fourth amendments to the constitution and $14.45 from a snack vending machine that I bought on Craigslist.
I have a genetic condition known as Stargardt's Disease. It is symptomatically similar to age-onset macular degeneration, but its symptoms appear in youth. I was not diagnosed until I was halfway through my 20s, so there is some solace that it is progressing slowly in me. Despite that, the prognosis isn't very heartening. Someday, it is likely that I will be legally blind and only my peripheral vision will remain, and I may lose color vision before that. At its current state, I read slowly, magnify my computer screen and can't always immediately recognize faces or pick up on social cues because I'm simply not seeing the whole face or body at once. If you wink at me while I'm looking at your nose, I might miss it. I don't dwell on this much because I can still function normally today, it's something beyond my control, and there are millions of people in the world with worse problems. I am, however, glad that I like music and sound more than visual arts.
I've been vegetarian for a decade thanks to the influence of Paul and others in our circle. Six or more of those years I was vegan. I'm off the ball on veganism, but I am still solidly committed to not consuming animal flesh. It's the way to go. Veganism, really, is even better. I'm just a horrible jerk who isn't living up to the highest ethical standard possible.
I haven't ever really written about my love of bodybuilding, largely because, as a homo, I fetishize it and certainly one person's fetish is not another's. Also because although I am in better shape than years back, I don't feel that I am a bodybuilder. But aside from that stuff, I think it is amazing that the body is something that can respond so dramatically to acts of will through work and diet. Bodybuilding is also something athletic that avoids most of the things I dislike or find boring about organized sports. There are very few drunken, cheering fans. Cars don't clog downtown to go to stadiums to see it, and though competitions exist (usually with unfortunate skin-bronzing and music choices) there is really no need for them in order to continue the "sport". It is mostly a solitary pursuit. The art of ancient Greeks and Romans, as well as the current issue of ESPN Magazine, are in my view on to something with their idealization of the human form for its own sake. Notice I didn't say "male form", either. They may have been raging homos, but there are lots of boobies in that art, too.
So, I have now gone on for hundreds of words without a website telling me I have reached the maximum number of characters. I turn 30 in five days, so there's a glimpse of where I am at 29. Hello again, Livejournal.
That said, Livejournal feels cozy for writing about personal events in life, and it is formatted to allow long rants, instead of just Facebook or Twitter updates that are meaningless. Even if only a few close friends read this site, it is more meaningful than 300 glances elsewhere. It's also a good way to keep a record of what happens in one's life.
Paul stopped writing in his Livejournal for a while, but has returned to it and it has continued to improve with practice. He's currently completing a meme to write essays on a wide range of life-topics that is interesting to me and likely to his close friends, but otherwise won't be covered by "The Wall Street Journal". I'm happy that there's a place for this in the long-form online.
It's Fall and it's gorgeous out. I'm living in the "Bumblebee House" in Corktown, so-called because it is yellow and black on the exterior. Paul writes extensively about this house in his journal, but my history here so far is that I moved here in January 2010 with five other people. The roommate thing didn't work, and so most everyone moved out except for Matt and I. Meanwhile, Paul has been fixing up the house around us in a heroic battle against entropy.
I live with my boyfriend Matt, the veterinarian. He works all the time and, since it's an emergency clinic, often has an upside-down schedule. The schedule can be stressful for both of us, but it's also kind of exciting. Matt loves crazy music and is a nerd and a hottie, just like me! Matt has three pet ferrets that are adorable. I clean up their poop while he is at work. Even their poop is adorable. Did you know that ferrets have one of the highest ratios of poop production to body size of any mammal?
Meanwhile, I am a mostly unsuccessful artist of some variety. I work in music and film sometimes, and for my family sometimes, and partly mind the gap with money that was intended-for-university-but-I-went-to-a-much-cheaper-university-than-everyone-expected. I aspire to produce progressively more ambitious creative projects across all media, and assume that this will get me through life even though it's a terrible plan from the perspective of a career path. So far, this non-career plan has lead to paying gigs on accident half a dozen times in the last year or two. I should just tell people that I'm a consultant and maybe they'll stop asking me what I do for a living all the time. Today I made $50 selling stickers of the first and fourth amendments to the constitution and $14.45 from a snack vending machine that I bought on Craigslist.
I have a genetic condition known as Stargardt's Disease. It is symptomatically similar to age-onset macular degeneration, but its symptoms appear in youth. I was not diagnosed until I was halfway through my 20s, so there is some solace that it is progressing slowly in me. Despite that, the prognosis isn't very heartening. Someday, it is likely that I will be legally blind and only my peripheral vision will remain, and I may lose color vision before that. At its current state, I read slowly, magnify my computer screen and can't always immediately recognize faces or pick up on social cues because I'm simply not seeing the whole face or body at once. If you wink at me while I'm looking at your nose, I might miss it. I don't dwell on this much because I can still function normally today, it's something beyond my control, and there are millions of people in the world with worse problems. I am, however, glad that I like music and sound more than visual arts.
I've been vegetarian for a decade thanks to the influence of Paul and others in our circle. Six or more of those years I was vegan. I'm off the ball on veganism, but I am still solidly committed to not consuming animal flesh. It's the way to go. Veganism, really, is even better. I'm just a horrible jerk who isn't living up to the highest ethical standard possible.
I haven't ever really written about my love of bodybuilding, largely because, as a homo, I fetishize it and certainly one person's fetish is not another's. Also because although I am in better shape than years back, I don't feel that I am a bodybuilder. But aside from that stuff, I think it is amazing that the body is something that can respond so dramatically to acts of will through work and diet. Bodybuilding is also something athletic that avoids most of the things I dislike or find boring about organized sports. There are very few drunken, cheering fans. Cars don't clog downtown to go to stadiums to see it, and though competitions exist (usually with unfortunate skin-bronzing and music choices) there is really no need for them in order to continue the "sport". It is mostly a solitary pursuit. The art of ancient Greeks and Romans, as well as the current issue of ESPN Magazine, are in my view on to something with their idealization of the human form for its own sake. Notice I didn't say "male form", either. They may have been raging homos, but there are lots of boobies in that art, too.
So, I have now gone on for hundreds of words without a website telling me I have reached the maximum number of characters. I turn 30 in five days, so there's a glimpse of where I am at 29. Hello again, Livejournal.