I kind of feel like posting an entry about gay marriage on the historic day, 17 May 2004, is a bit passé. And I would have completely ignored it had something interesting not happened to me while I was driving to school.

I often find myself pitted against those arguing for marriage (within the community,) not because I don’t think queer folks should get the opportunity to marry their partners, but because I don’t like the nature of the discourse, and because I think there’s a lot more, like employment non-discrimination. Marriage isn’t my issue. And that’s ok; I’m entitled to make that kind of choice.

My problem with the discourse is that it often degenerates onto a religious level, and theological discourses aren’t productive in my mind. The fact of the matter is that, the major western monotheisms, (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) are pretty reactionary, and while I think the efforts of the Unitarians, the United Church of Christ, more or less half of the Episcopal Church, some Jewish Reform Rabbi’s and congregations, are noble and worthwhile, I still think that there isn’t much to be salvaged. And before you, dear reader, start moaning about how the church has strayed, stop; because that’s the way the church has always been, deal with it.

But then that’s my opinion. And while I’d certainly like to remove the religious discourse from all of American socio-political discourses, that’s not a battle I’d like to fight now, and I feel that any other argument misses the point.

But then this morning, I heard a live reporter on the scene at City Hall in Cambridge Massachusetts. And then the reporter said, “I hear cheering upstairs, which probably means the first legally recognized same-sex couple has been married upstairs.” That struck a chord. It really happened, and even though on some level it’s all passé, there’s some value to it, there is something worthwhile about celebrating. So lets not spend too much time putting a damper on this, because it’s still exciting.

The really special thing about the gay movement right now is that, it has a kind of energy, and spirit, that is unfortunately not present in any other movement at this moment. This raw energy is important, and it needn’t stop here. People need to see that the problems go beyond this pitched battle over gay rights, and onto a broader scope, and as much as I want that to happen, I don’t think it will. It’s a shame, because I can see, and feel the potential right now. Sorry to be so cynical.

Here’s to this victory, and many more.

SAM: Hi, my name is Sam. ALL: Hi Sam. SAM: I’ve used Moveable Type. ALL: (gasps) Screw this, we’re leaving.

Yes that’s right, I’ve used Moveable Type. Briefly. It was in-between my usage of Greymatter and my decision to move to the PHP/mySQL goodness of b2. During the CA phase of, “lets get a bunch of people who are interested in writing to write a quick weekly or bi-weekly…

Bi-annually, is twice a year, semi-annually is every other year. But then, bi-weekly is every two weeks. Right? Well that’s what I mean. Or is it semi-annualy? Arrrg. Anyway, you now know what I intended, I’ll get back to the story.

column about something they’re interested in. Graphic Design/3d image modeling, current events, birds, the craft/business of writing, you know, the shtick. Anyway, Greymatter was basically what I needed and I even tried to set it up that way, except Greymatter makes a really horrible multiple site solution, and MT was just beginning to gather steam as a useable decent CMS.

Now I was predisposed to Greymatter, and I really liked the system, so MT wasn’t entering a fair playing field. I should mention that, at the time I switched to MT, I’d already tried to install it a few times, and had a problem with my host not having the right Perl modules. And the time I ended getting it installed successfully, the installation process was far from useful. And the interface was COMPLICATED, like you have no idea. There was only one level off the main Menu in Greymatter, and I couldn’t cope. Lets understand, I was trying to do far too much for any sane website, but it was still a large pain in the ass, and the fast, go in post an entry and leave again philosophy wasn’t applied. So I must say it didn’t do much for me.

At this point I started to read about b2, and was really impressed with all that php and mySQL had to offer. And dynamic page generation seemed like a great idea. This was before MT had mySQL option (which is another reason the installation was so hellish). The truth is that most small sites would benefit from dynamic page generation, flat files only become really necessary for high traffic areas, like the main index page. There is absolutely no reason individual entry and comment pages need flat file generation. Especially when you have hundreds of entries. This remains one of my largest complaints about MT.

So I moved on to the simpler and ultimately more effective b2. Which was just a stone throw from our current Quarto setup.

One of MT’s biggest claims to fame is that it’s the CMS that really can do everything and the kitchen sink. And that’s wonderful, and because of this, it’s become the weblog system of choice for millions of users. The thing is that it’s totally overkill. The flat file complaint is emblematic of the larger problems with the system: it’s designed for situations that 98% of it’s user base will never touch. Before I get further into this, let me give you a basic explanation how a very simple, but exceptionally functional and brilliant, CMS (like the one we’re using) works. A script creates secure user interfaces, which allows users to post, and edit previous posts (and do some other stuff). All information is stored on a database. The output is completely separate and is determined by the user of the CMS, not the coder. It means the user base needs to know some PHP, or use basic templates created by the coder. This means that the user can literally do anything with the content that he/she wants, and it’s as separate from the backend.

B2 and its offspring work the same way, except that the display functions are more solidified. The end result? It’s the same thing, except the b2 creator was being a little nicer to his users.

MT is not like this. At all. I don’t think it’s even intended to be used on personal blogging sites. Or, more properly it shouldn’t.

So this big hubbub about the new licensing scheme and the new version are passé. I mean there are better options out there so I think the whole thing is a non-issue. Now I think the licensing scheme is a pain. They attracted this great following, because they were free, and then they’re throwing commercial-for-profit level prices at a bunch of people who probably aren’t going to pay. Lets look at Trillian, they went to a paid model, but they left the old version up as being free, and honestly the old version was pretty damn good.

That would have been a good option. I think the model they’re using right now is a bit flawed, more because I don’t think there’s a market for an application like MT, no matter how good and kitchen sink-esque it is, in the commercial web design market. But then some people bought Userland Radio, which surprises me. Go figure.

Anyway, I still like the system we have, and while I am dying to get an update that will hopefully have better comments, and track backs, that is on me. All that by way of saying, honestly the plight of Moveable Type and SixApart, doesn’t really bother me terribly, Anyway. I think I’m done here. How’s that for no conclusion?

So, I managed to break the posting system, and Chris seems to have wondered off before he fixed it. So today’s entry isn’t going to happen today, but I will write it for the hell of it.

A while ago, a queer girl, I’m a friend with said (in reference to guy’s impassioned argument for gay marriage). “He’s white, he’s rich, and everyone accepts him. It’s “ok” for him to be gay.” The implication in my mind, that because of his gender, race and class, his orientation choices were some how more acceptable. In a way that, women, people of color, and people from lower classes have a harder time coming out, because they face adversity for being women, of color, and poor.

That’s what she said. And there’s some truth to that somewhere, but let me process this down a bit.

I think this is dangerously close to asserting a “hierarchy of oppression.” But it’s a sneaky way of doing it. Rather than saying, racism is worse than sexism, this basically says that there are quantities of ‘ism’ that can be added to and subtracted from. Which allows us to quantify oppression. And that’s not productive or correct. The only way to work productively is to say, we are all hurt equally by oppression, and reach out in solidarity to everyone. Even though I’m a white male, I would need to “own that” and learn how to work against or with that privilege for progress. Just as being a “gay man” means that I’m subject to oppression that I need to learn how to work with or against, to achieve progress.

But there’s something more in this issue, because, if it were an individual thing, the quantity of out gay people would be incredibly diverse. And it’s not. So there is some sort of additional factor at play.

In my high school there are three out guys—more or less—and seven to ten out girls/transfolks. Two people of color in the above sample. Now I realize that this is hardly the ideal statistical sample, but it does say something. That more girls come out in high schools than guys, and that more white folks come out than people of color.

The people of color thing, is unfortunately understandable, it’s an endemic problem that the entire queer community must deal with. But the male thing is suppressing, because I have a certain feeling that my friend was right, about guys being ‘more accepted/acceptable’. While guys still have to fight against the constructions of masculinity, the gay-male community is really masculine. Lets notice, that all of the queer characters on television are, male. Except for the L-Word, and two characters on Queer as Folk, and Ellen. While clearly not absolute evidence, it has to stand for something.

Women on the other hand seem to come out at a younger age, and come out in greater numbers as kids. Maybe the age-old, “girls are more mature” thing holds up, which I could completely buy. Here’s another theory. Girls are more likely to form meaningful and supportive friendships with their peers, which might make it easier to come out. Guys, on the other hand tend to have friendships with their friends that are more based on parallel play. So guys probably don’t have the same kind of emotional support that girls might have in the same situation at the same time.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that it’s impossible to really generalize that groups of women will react differently than groups of men. The only possible thing I could put forward at this point, is that groups of male friends are more likely to reacact a long the lines of “fine be gay, just don’t be attracted to me,” my current theory on this subject is that sexuality is more fluid that most are willing to admit, and guys are ‘easier’ than girls, and they all know it. So they’re a little defensive, which really needs to be addressed. Not that I have a good way to do that, but I think that’s an underlying theme. I female perspective would be a great addition here.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.

Actually, some of you may have noticed that TealArt has been down a little bit. I wrote most of this entry while I was waiting to get that fixed. It was a really stupid mistake. But, it’s fixed now. And I found another reason why I have to write and post entries all in one sitting, which usually means I don’t proofread. My attention span for the kind of writing I’m trying to do here, just doesn’t stretch from session to session, in a logically, or what passes for logic in my mind, coherent method.

I was listening to a radio show a few nights ago, as I was driving home The Connection with Dick Gordon, I’d link to it for you, except I don’t feel like googling it to find it. Just think of it like NPR’s Talk of the Nation, or the Diane Rehm Show. Same expert and call in format, and it works. I’d listen to music, if the tape player worked or I had a CD player, but NPR is ok, it keeps me awake and thinking. Actually, of those three shows, The Connection is really the best. “This American Life” is my favorite NPR show, even though I never listen to it. How gay is that? Anyway, back to the point.

Right. So they were talking about the impact of blogs on journalism, and how the “blogoshpere” works kind of like a single unity. If gender and psych weren’t so interesting, I’d probably want to study social psychology in cyber-culture. Sigh. Why can’t you do everything?

Anyway, it was really interesting and the guy Dick had on was really good. Even though he was critical of bloggers, I really liked him. Though the kind of bloggers he was talking about almost seem to have a community more like a message board, but they get some kind of added validity because they “publish” their own work, so it’s not just a message board. Except that you have to think of it like a message board.

So I guess I’m not really a bloggers, I mean, I work in a community with other bloggers, and I’ve been at it for a long time, but I only occasionally comment on current events. If I wanted to read the news, I’d look at the news. I read blogs to know people, even if it’s a blog that’s about tech stuff or knitting you start to learn something essential about a person. And that’s really cool.

Having said that, I come from a different generation of blogging. I remember when moveable type was just a bunch of hype and all the cool people used Greymatter. When the only PHP mySQL options were PHP-Nuke, which wasn’t (and as far as I know still isn’t) not set up for the kind of one or two person writing teams that I was always interested in. Before Noah moved to California. Hell, I even remember Noah’s first (I think) post-MSSAF site.

I remember when Greylogs was the place to be, I remember when PixelPile started. Back then I thought that I was totally the new kid on the block, and in many ways I’m still an outsider, but I’ve seen a lot.

I started work on the original Collective Arts more than four years ago, (about March). I come from a different age of bloggers I feel some times. If I started CA four years ago, it means Chris and I have known each other for five years. There are really only two people I go to school with who I’ve known longer and still see and talk to regularly, and a couple that I’ve known, but don’t really talk to. But I digress.

This brings me to the other big accomplishment that’s looming large in my future. I turn eighteen in six days. I don’t have an Amazon wish list, and I’m not going to link to one even if I did. How’s that for bucking from tradition.

Eighteen. I just thought I’d mention it because it’s not really real for me yet. I’ve been so busy. I’m even telling my family and friends to postpone my birthday until the 24th. I’m in a play, and I have a crap load of things to do from my birthday until the 24th.

Anyway, as I was writing this entry I realized that, again, I kind of keep forgetting it. I need to work on that. Back to the entry about metablogging.

So having said that I’m playing with two schools of blogging methodology, if you will. The quick, easy painless method, which blogspot, Type Pad, Live Journal, etc. and hordes of other services now offered. Then there is my own somewhat rambling style, borne partially out of the old school blogs I know and love, and partially out of my own twisted mind. If I’m interested in a subject I can really write forever about it. This entry is now at 720 words. It’s the third similarly lengthed entry I’ve written today. Last weakened, on a whim in a couple of slow hours I wrote 4,500 words about how to manipulate knitting patterns, and associated mathematical conversions. Anyway I digress.

And I don’t proof read. In part because my computer would be full of posts that I wrote like this one and then proof read and decide that I didn’t like any more. I’ve done that a lot.

The other thing that I’ve learned from doing this play, about my writing style, is that I can write colloquially, in a manner similar to the way I talk, and but if I proof read it, I can make anything sound like a history lesson. I get to essayish. Which given that I’m a student and that most of my writing energies are spent writing essays, this is probably an asset. Except that the key to writing an essay isn’t sounding like your writing an essay, it’s being lively, which most essayists forget, but again I digress.

I’m feeling pretty ADD tonight, can’t you tell. Really ADD.

So in case all of you were wondering these are things I’m currently working on in my TealArt writing. This is the point I was setting out to write 950 words ago. deep breath Chris and I have talked about the tone of TealArt a lot, and we seem to have some problems just opening up and talking about stuff, (the day, what’s on my mind, etc.) kind of like I’ve tried to do with this post. The feeling just isn’t right. Part of us wants to adapt to modern trends in the blogoshpere (isn’t that just a horrible word), and part of us wants to stick to our guns.

Also the fact that we have this bad habit of posting a spurt of message once or twice a month, tends to kind of crimp our the flexibility of the tone. So how to fix this. Unlike my recent bout with Post-modern Stress syndrome. There is quite clearly a possible solution. I’m going to believe that the “just do it, damnit” will work in this case. That is, that if I want the tone and mood to shift so that TealArt relaxes and starts covering a greater variety of subjects, I should just hunker down and start writing more for this.

While I’m at it, it might be interesting to apply this philosophy to a postmodern discourse.

I’ve talked about this before, but it seems like a perfect explanation for my recent absence from the pages of TealArt.com.

My good blogging friend and often-mentor, Amy, said this thing a while ago that really stuck: Live first, first blog second. Sure it’s not original, but I really liked the way she said it. Something about not writing about what might be, or what could be, what’s going to be. Not jinxing things. That blogging in the way she (and TealArt does occasionally) does it is about recording things after they happen, not while they happen.

The kind of content that TealArt presents doesn’t exploit the instant kind of media that most blogs are known for. While we may not proofread, or plan or rhetoric extensively, this isn’t a blog the current construction of that term, it’s more like some of the sites that were around a few years ago (like Amy, and an earlier incarnation of Noah’s work.) I have to keep reminding myself, that although TealArt hasn’t “made it big” in the blog world, Chris and I have been at this for a long time.

While I didn’t quite set out to write a ‘history of blogging essay’ or a commentary on the current state of TealArt I guess I have one more point about this. I know that the categories system needs some serious revision. The comments only work sporadically, I’ve found. And there’s a new design desperately needed. And the links/quote blogs need better integration with the main log. And, probably most importantly, we’re going to try and play with the template to lighten/soften the tone/mood. But… My recent computer problems haven’t completely resolved. I’m using an old iMac with OS 8.1 on it. So until I get a real working computer that will allow me to do the work that I need, things are going to stay the way they are. Sorry about this.

But what I started writing this post about:

Today I took the second to last test for my International Baccalaureate Diploma. There are two papers (technically two tests), back to back in a week. So I’m basically done. Yes. You heard that right. Wow. I thought it was weird to be “almost done” well actually being done is even weirder. Despite the fact that I’m dead tired and my brain feels completely fried I feel inexplicably liberated. It’s awesome. It’s also the story of my life, and while I just thought about saying “Given the choice, I’ll never do something like that again.”

And then I realized, that of course I’d do something like that in an instant. That’s part of my personality and who I am. Lets hope, I’ll get better at managing my resources and my life. I can only hope.

In any case, that’s what I’ve been doing for the past month. Living, perhaps not what I’d ideally like to spending my life doing, but defiantly something that I needed to just live through. So I’m done with that, and while there’s always next time, I’m hoping I got some time before next time gets here.

In slightly other news, there’s queer stuff happening at school. It’s a good thing I think, predicted, and a bit old. I’m not totally sure of what to make of it just now, but I think I’ll probably (you had to expect it) muse a bit about this, I want to see if I can get into some more stuff soon. Stay tuned.

This is really rough. It’s also really blabbery. Yes: blabbery. Deal with it, or skip over it. Enjoy.

I really hate postmodernists.

It makes so much sense, it works, and it’s a really attractive model, but it makes further work and development difficult if not impossible. Postmodernism drives people to running in little circles around what they really want to talk about. Or maybe it’s just deconstructionist that do that. Lets make sure I have this all clear.

Modernists took knowledge as it existed and said, “simplify,” “get back to essential meanings” and from this we got. “Modern Art,” which took the tradition of visual art and simplified it so that rather than paint realistic looking vistas that captured the emotions and feelings of their time, painters just painted their feelings. Which is essentially what Picasso tried to do, and Jackson Pollack embodied this to the end example of this movement.

The problem with modern art is that after Jackson Pollack, you can’t really get any further with that motion methodology. You can toy with the ideas a little by doing multi/cross-media experimentations, but that stops being “modernist” really quick, so at least in visual art, there’s a dead end.

In literature, we see the rise of academicization of creative writing, and New Criticism. Which I’ve ranted about before, but New Criticism basically says: “Context is irrelevant. Meaning is irrelevant. Read “good literature,” and bash anything that isn’t Faulkner, Pond, or Donne.” In less harsh terms, New Criticism chose to look beyond meaning, and context in order to more objectively judge the quality of the work. Except in the mind of the Princeton College Board, and some moldy English teachers, this methodology is dead. I mean not only is it racist, homophobic, and sexist, it just doesn’t make sense.

Before I get onto Post-Modernism, one more modernist example. Feminism. While modernism did it’s best to squish out feminism as “context.” During the Modern period, feminism tended towards essentialism, which argued that there were essential differences between men and women, and that gender was a function of sex. (I’m not really sure about this but it makes sense, correct me if I’m wrong.) While second wave feminism was the product of the very end of Modernism, (I think) it was the whole essentialism that causes second wave feminism to flounder. I don’t like essentialism.

In any case, I’m just reviewing what I know and what I’m thinking, so correct me if I get something wrong, or don’t interpret things correctly. I’m not totally sure of everything here.

The main lingering effect of Modernism in Literature and art in general, is that it’s created a schism in the creation of new art. There’s the stuff that “the people” create and like, which is full of spirit and emotion, but in a technical sense is rather crappy. Think angst-y poetry, slam poetry, spoken word, and some performance stuff. Then there’s the stuff that’s technically very good, but devoid of spirit. Open any high-brow University Literature journal, and the content is very good, but it’s not really great. This art isn’t modernist, but this schism I feel is very much a result of the problems and intellectual precedents that Modernism set for the future.

This brings us to Post-Modernism. Yay. Ultimately, Post-Modernism is deconstructionist. And after the euphoria, or whatever the modernists had, of the Modern Period, things were too constructed. So they started to break down the boundaries that insulated the disciplines. That’s a good thing; it gives us the ability to look at history and context of what we’re studying. The sciences and math are still fairly stuck in the modern age, and there’s a certain degree to which that’ll probably always be the case, but that’ll change too.

In art and literature, creators started mixing genres. Look at some of Ginsberg’s poetry. It’s almost prose. Performance art is like this too, it combines theater with dance and poetry and visual artifacts to create the same thing that art’s been trying to create forever anyway. Postmodernism is about combining and mixing things. Interdisciplinary studies are really great and important for making progress. Because everything had more or less hit a brick wall, this kind of synthesis was and continues to be necessary for new and fresh kinds of art.

But this article/entry wouldn’t be called “Post Modern Stress” if I thought Post Modernism was the best thing since sliced bread. So here’s the criticism.

Post-Modernism says, everything, including post-modernism is a discourse. Knowledge is a discourse. Marxism is a discourse. Literary Criticism is a discourse. etc. This makes the world really argumentative, and the problem with discourses is that there is no end to them. One discourse leads into another, so you get stuck in a recursive discourse, and nothing ever gets done. Ever. And the best way to survive post modernism is to become content with what is, and hope that through discourse, the world will change.

Fat chance.

On the one hand, the synthetic aspect of post-modernism is wonderful and while still in progress, I think the discourse of synthesis is productive, the rest of it isn’t.

And just as the rest of my intellectual philosophy postings end, this ends on a “And knowing this, where am I left?” Which I feel is basically, the anti-post-modern question. I want to escape this paradigm and work under some model that’s more productive, that doesn’t rely on recursive discourses, that frees the creative process without deconstructing it.

Well there isn’t one out there that I know about, (feel free to suggest your favorite intellectual paradigm) and I don’t exactly know how to go about making a new one. Or that I’d even be able to make a new one. Or even that, considering my goals, that I should make a new one. There’s the cursed discourse again. Anyway. Stuff to chew over.

I came across this article today, which raises an interesting historagraphical question. But seeing that TealArt too easily descends into philosophical blathering, I’ll just throw this one out.there.

How appropriate is the queer theory historical search for likely homosexuals? And is “outing” famous historical (regardless of other judgments) a productive practice.

Lets first remember that the term “homosexual” dates to the 1890s and while there were certainly people who were homosexual before 1890, the idea of categorizing individuals based on affectional orientation didn’t really exist before that. Having said that, “homosexuals” did face suppression and any number of torments, it was just produced on a different level.

So for any number of reasons, there is a certain movement to reclaim the gay history. Because there are tons of historical figures who were almost certainly gay, but that gets lost. It was also probably lost in the moment, but it’s equally important to remember now.

If Hitler was gay, as the article suggests, is there a responsibility to reclaim that as well. Just yesterday there was a bit about a respected statesman and President. This guy, was a southerner, and not surprisingly pro-slavery. So I guess one of the questions, is “Do we have a responsibility to reclaim all of the gay history that we find, or just the parts that suit us. And I guess I’d say, we should reclaim it, if only to show a kind of diversity. There are queers everywhere, and I think that’s an important lesson. You can go anywhere and find gay people; they exist outside of the hip coffee shops, the left bank of the Seine, Men’s Express, Abercrombie and Fitch, and so forth. The one down side is, of course, that homophobes will inevitably take revelations that condemnable characters like Hitler are endemic of homosexual culture, but then those same individuals will look at the guys on the left bank wearing shirts from Express, and talking about “Art”, and categorical label all queer’s as pansies. There are some fights you just can’t win.

On the other hand, this is ultimately a form of outing. Clearly it’s not the same as outing contemporary figures, but to some degree. I agree with Armested Maupin et al. that outing people will show that queers can be successful; that queers really are everywhere, and that the world hasn’t ended yet. History is perhaps the ultimate venue for this, as we are able to avoid the serious ethical dilemma that prevents or should prevent outing of contemporary figures.

So here’s the second question that this raises (and I’ll leave you with this): Where is the line between outing contemporary figures, and reclaiming a gay history?

Cheers!

Borrowing an entry writing style from two of my favorite siblings/friends I’m going to write about a recently rediscovered old friend.

Once upon a time, there was this kid, who was really bright and loved to write. He was also the biggest geek and was fascinated by the quickly developing pace of mobile technology, PalmOS, PocketPCs, WindowsCE, wireless communications, digital intellectual property, mobile writing, and a host of other things. He read Jeff Kirvin’s Writing on Your Palm, and it wasn’t long before he scraped his pennies together to buy a Handspring Visor with one of those nifty folding keyboards.

Being a Visor fanatic, he quickly joined the ranks of VisorCentral users and became an avid supporter of that device and a prominent member of the community. But as you can imagine, there weren’t many other young teenagers/pre-teens involved in the PalmOS community. Because doncha know, most teenagers have better things to do then organize their schedule and contact information on a dinky little computer with a resolution of 60 pixels by 60 pixels.

But there was another.

And they became attached, IM-ed eachother daily. But like all good things, it was a finite affair.

Our protagonist moved on to other fancier devices and loved it, and took a different track. During this phase of his life this kid did lots of cool stuff for someone who was 14. Like, be an executive editor for a radical ebook publishing company called Free-ePress. Contribute to the website that started it all Writing on your Palm, Various freelance articles for places like, Suite101, PalmPower Magazine, and the gem of the bunchPocketPC Thoughts.

But these two young characters still talked occasionally, but as they had ideological differences they started to fall out of contact.

One of our protagonist’s editor’s, told him that he needed people who could dedicate more time to the site, basically that he needed people who could be in front of their computer during the day, which virtually obliviated the need for a mobile computing solution. When this editor also told him that there was no way he could compensate our protagonist for any of his work, our protagonist finally bowed out, realized the idiocy of having a mobile computing device and sold his HP Jordana, bought a cellulose based calendar book, and at the ripe old age of 15 retired from the field of mobile computing.

He used what he had leared to develop an awesome website, and he wrote a book, and generally enjoyed life.

But he hadn’t forgotten his partner in crime, who still clung to the vestiges of their former commonality. Despite the growing rift between them they still talked but one day something happened.

They talked about sex, as adolescent males are prone to. It was awkward. Our protagonist had very little (nothing to boast of, as someone who was still very much discovering his sexual orientation) and his friend somehow was able to boast of something. Trivial really. After this event which our protagonist probably has logged somewhere, he mostly lost interest. They completely stopped talking and went about their lives.

Then, just recently, our protagonist, got bored and opened an unused corner of his buddy list, found his old friend online and said, innocently enough “Hello”.

And guess what. His friend turned out to be gay too. And doing the same academic program (IB). And interested in a school in his area. And they have similar interests that don’t involve visors. And similar life experiences that despite the disconnect in their communication.

Isn’t life just funny like that sometimes?