28 February 2007

Yet another vice

Okay, I admit it. I have an addiction. You would think that with as well as I know myself I would not put myself into situations where vices would develop. But NOOOOO! I sit there and say to myself, "Self. Let's go do this, even though it's the last thing on earth that you know you should be doing right now." I usually respond, "Well, when you put it that way, I'm in!"

By now you have probably already developed in your mind a thought, a preconceived notion as to what it is I'm talking about. Most of you guessed it right. Yes, I have an addiction to Guitar Hero, the Playstation 2 game. I can't help myself! I love to shred that axe like it was private company documents being fed into a paper shredder. The rock. The roll. It's all there. I can't stop. And there scary thing is that I don't want to stop. I want it more and more. When will the beast ever be satisfied!?!?

Man, I'm glad that I finally got that off my chest.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

27 February 2007

Furbies

Sometimes I feel like a Furby.

Now that’s an odd statement, one might say. I don’t
mean that I feel plush, electronic or overpriced. I
mean that I feel like one of those toys that is really
popular for a while, and then all of a sudden people
are asking, “What’s a Furby?”

You have great friends, be they old roommates,
neighbors, or childhood playmates. One day, something
happens and you have to go your separate ways. You say
that you’re going to stay in contact and be BFFs, and
promise to call frequently, email frequently and visit
frequently. But, then the strangest thing happens –
life moves on. You meet new people, you make new
friends, your support structure that at one time
seemed decimated by the separation of you and your
friend is all of a sudden rebuilt. It looks a little
different, and operates differently, but you are
comfortable with it.

Then one day you get a Christmas card from that person
who was such an integral part of your life in the
past, and you realize that you haven’t thought about
that person for a year – since the last Christmas card
you received. And it makes you sad. You have such fond
memories of sitting in their apartment talking the
night away about your roommate who that person was
madly in love with, or her roommate who was madly in
love with you, but absolutely off her rocker. You
think about all the tough times you went through and
supported each other in. You think about how she was
the first person you ever felt comfortable talking to
about SSA. You are sad because you realize you have
forgotten about someone who used to be so important to
you.

But then you think about it from her perspective. She
got married to an awesome guy. You could not be any
happier for her. They have a beautiful 1 year old
baby. She is finally living her lifelong ambition of
being a stay-at-home mother – and according to her
last communication with you, loving every minute of
it. You feel less sad and a lot more happy, especially
for the fact that she has done so well with her life.

Then you come back to thinking of all the other good
friends you have had in your life that have
disappeared for one reason or another. A lot of them
you have lost contact with not because you didn’t try
to stay in touch, but because they neglected to
respond to you. And that’s when you feel like a Furby.
You’re just an old toy, sitting on a shelf that people
have forgotten about.

Fortunately, I feel more like a Furby that has been
sent to the D.I. I’m sitting on a shelf of forgotten
toys, but there are a whole bunch of other forgotten
toys around me, and we’re there to support each other.


I don’t know if this post was happy or sad. It was
more of a reflection on reality than anything else.
Some of the friends you have in life you will always
consider very dear to you even if you don’t
communicate much, and others make you feel like a
Furby.

24 February 2007

Granny-date

So that blind date that I went on last night was the most awkward experience of my whole life. I will try to sum up the facts in an intelligible fashion, although I'm having trouble with it all just in my own head.

My friend recently started dating this girl from Colombia. She is a member of the church and living here in So Cal with a host family while she goes to school and learns the local language (which these days happens to be Spanish, but since she already speaks that one they are teaching her English). She has an uncle, or 2nd cousin, or something like that who lives locally also. He caught wind that she was going out latin dancing last night with my friend, so he somehow gets in touch with my friend (I'm really not sure how that part happened) and says, "Hey, I hear your dating my niece/cousin/whatever and going out dancing this weekend. I know an LDS girl from Spain who is also here learning English, blah, blah, blah. Do you have any friends in their 30s that wouldn't mind taking her out dancing with you guys." So, immediately my friend thinks of me, since I'm in my 30s and will most assuredly not have a date on Friday night (this was all on Thursday). He calls me up, and I agree to go out. I hadn't been latin dancing for a few years, so I thought it would be fun to get back out for a little Salsa and Merengue.

So my friend and his date come by and pick me up last night. I was all stoked to go. First date in a while, a new person I didn't know, got to go dancing with some (hopefully) hot chick from Spain - it was all building up to be a night of great fun. We drive down to go pick up my date. She lives in a gated apartment building, so I didn't actually go to the door to get her, I just called from the gate and she walks down. It was night time. And dark. Very dark. No street lights. So I see this person walking down, she's about the right height for a Spanish girl, she has blond hair (could be a hottie) and appears to be fairly slender (nice). She walks out of the gate and I greet her, and my first thought is, "Hmmm, maybe it's just the low light, but she looks a little older than I was expecting."

I open the car door for her, and she gets in. I introduce her to everyone, shut the door and walk around to get in my side. I open my door, and this time I can clearly see her from the overhead light. No! It couldn't be! Are you kidding me!?!? This person was no girl, it was a lady. A much older lady. I never got her age, but judging from her appearance she was pushing 50 and may very well have crossed that threshold a few years ago. So it's my 30 year-old friend and his 25 year-old date. Then it's me, 34, and my 50+ year-old granny-date. Uuuuuugh! The pain! The pain!!!

What would you do in a situation like that? The guy that had set this all up had told her we were going dancing and everything, but I don't think he had told her that it was a church-sponsored dance. My thought process completely froze. All I could muster up was "let's go eat." We had dinner, which was okay but not great. It was a restaurant near her house. The whole time we were eating I was trying to come down with an acute case of food poisoning, but to no avail. Dinner slowly passed. Conversation was painful. What do you talk about with a 50 year-old that isn't a relative? I mean, I could take my grandma out to dinner and talk her ear off. But a blind date?

Dinner eventually comes to a close, but still no food poisoning. Drat. Looks like we have to go dancing now. So we drive for half an hour up to the place where the dance is being held. The whole drive up there was surreal. The other two were having this great "we're newly dating and in love" conversation, and I was sitting there making the worst small-talk ever with granny-date. And, quite frankly, I hate the Spain accent now (I speak Mexican Spanish). I discovered last night that the "th" lisp that they talk with annoys the hell out of me - well, at least from this person. So, on top of not having anything interesting to talk about, the very act of her speaking was annoying to me.

We get to the dance and walk in. Granny-date surveys the crowd and realizes that there has not only been an age mismatch between her and me, but that she should actually be chaperoning this dance, given the fact that I was probably the oldest of the younger people there. Everyone else looked early 20s. So, granny-date turns to me and says, "Umm. You should feel free to go out and dance with anyone out there you want to. I'm just going to sit here." And, well, since we all drove together and I couldn't take her home because the other two wanted to stay and dance, I took her up on that offer and headed out to the dance floor. I had a fun time dancing. I had forgotten how much I loved to shake my hips to a syncopated beat. We weren't there too long, maybe an hour and a half, before it ended.

Then we drove back. That was the longest half hour of my life. We didn't speak once during the trip. I was driving, and we progressively drove faster and faster. I just wanted the suffering to end. We finally got back to her place. She thanks us all for the evening and apologizes because she thinks there "may have been a bit of a misunderstanding." You think!?!? A "bit"!?!? So, I waved goodbye and off we went.

My friend's date said she was going to rip her uncle a new one. I hope she follows through with that.

23 February 2007

Got a little time

It's Friday night, and I have a little time before I head out for the evening, so I thought I would post a little bit more.

So I talked about how I've always had same-sex attraction. Let me talk about my testimony. I've always had a testimony of the church. I was born into an active LDS family. We were active growing up. My dad was in a couple of bishoprics and served as the bishop. Mom was always in Relief Society or Primary or something. I always liked church. I always liked going to it. I felt a tremendous respect and responsibility towards handling the sacrament when I was made a Deacon. I never really fit in with most of the other guys, in that they were pretty normal teenagers and didn't pay much attention or reverence to church. I had one really great friend in the ward that was very much like me - except for the SSA part.

I always felt like I knew the church was true, and went on a mission without ever really questioning anything. When I got into the MTC all of the other Elders were always talking about these great conversion stories of theirs. I was worried, because I didn't have one. I began to doubt, but I also began to desire an experience that would be burned into my soul to keep me from ever being able to deny the truth of it all. I got that, sort of. After a week of low productivity because I had given into this peer pressure of needing a grand testimony experience, I was sitting in the Tuesday night fireside. Elder Marvin J Ashton was speaking that night - and he will forever be one of my favorites Apostles because of this - and he related the experience of how he obtained his testimony. He was a young man, on a mission, who had been in the church his whole life. He had been faithful his whole life and had always strived to do what was right (this all started to sound familiar to me). He was worried that he had never received this grand "burning in the bosom" and began to doubt (hmmm, just like me). After much fasting, study and prayer, one night he was on his knees pleading with the Lord to grant him this burning testimony. While he was praying an audible voice said to him, "You know it's true, now get off you knees and get back to work." Hooo-leeeee-cow!!! When he said those words it was as if I had been hit in the head with a sledgehammer. Never before had words come to me with such force as those did to me at that time. It was amazing. From that point on, I have never doubted.

So that was one of my first great realizations that the church really was true. It was great and I will never forget it. Heck, here we are almost 16 years later and I still can remember it as if it was yesterday. That experience has helped me more than once when I have began to falter due to SSA. Those words frequently return to my mind "You know it's true."

Well, off to my blind date. Hope it works out well. Moreso, I hope she's one of those 1 in 100 girls that I am attracted to.

21 February 2007

And then

So I just spent the last hour reading through other gay Mormon blogs. It has been an awesome experience. It is so comforting to finally find other people who have the exact same issues that I do.

The thing about problems in your life is the whole empathy/sympathy thing. You can talk to people about your problems, but if they can only sympathize, they can never really help you. They can "be there for you" or be a shoulder for you to cry on, but they can't really do anything other than feel sorry for you. They don't understand. On the other hand, the empathizers (according to the spell checker I just made that word up) know all about your problems because they've been through it too. It's not like they can do much more than feel sorry for you, like the sympathizers, but there is something comforting in knowing that the person feeling sorry for you is doing it because they have gone through the same thing.

Anyway, so I should probably continue on a little bit of the story of my life up to this point. I grew up in Provo, or Happy Valley as us locals call it, graduated from Provo High, served a mission, went to BYU, went to grad school elsewhere and eventually landed in Southern California where I have lived for the last 6.5 years.

I've been gay my whole life. As far back as I can remember I have been attracted to boys. I remember being a kid in elementary school and watching that PBS show The Electric Company and thinking how cute some of the boys were on there. I was born this way. On the other hand, I have an out-of-the-closet cousin who the whole family claims is gay because he was molested when he was a kid, blah, blah, blah. Not me. I have a good relationship with my parents, I was never molested. I was just born with my brain wired up a little different than most guys.

I'm not sure if this is the proper way to express this, but I'm not 100% SSA. Every once in a while there is a girl that crosses my path that floats my boat. Granted, these girls have been few and far between, but there have been a few through my 34 trips around the sun. Unfortunately, relationships with those girls have never worked out, and Kristin Kreuk (the girl who plans Lana Lang on Smallville) has never returned my calls. But I did get this court order to stop stalking her....

So, now I'm one of the evil, 30+ single Mormons who is going straight to hell because they aren't married with a minimum of 3 kids. It's difficult. It's very difficult sometimes. Every several months I go through these bouts of depression where I get these overwhelming urges to just pack it up and hit up the gay bars. This last one happened over the last couple of weeks. Usually the depression only lasts a few days, or a week at most, but this time it went on for nearly two weeks. I'm feeling great today, and have since this past weekend, but I honestly didn't think the depression was going to end this time. It got to the point where I had to come out to a friend of mine just so I would have someone to talk to. She was super-awesome about it. I love friends like that. I wish that I had physical attraction to her, because she is a quality girl. But, as much as I've tried to "force" myself to like her, I get repulsed at the thought of intimacy with her. Sad, huh?

What else to say in this one? I've come out to 7 people total. Four bishops, and three very close friends - all girls. Unfortunately, I'm starting to get to the point in my life where I've run out of excuses for being single and I almost think it would be easier to just run up to the pulpit during testimony meeting and spill the beans. I am way too chicken to ever do anything like that - at least for now. Not to sound like a conceited retard, but I'm an above-average looking guy. In those little polls you take of the girls in the ward, I consistently rank in the top-3 best looking guys in the ward. That really makes it hard to fend off the inquiries as to why I'm not dating and such. Maybe I should just come out the next time I teach EQ. That would at least wake everyone up.

I'm beginning to doubt the cohesiveness of this post, so I should probably stop the verbal diarrhea now before it gets too messy.

Keep the faith.

20 February 2007

This is a test

This is only a test. Please don't be alarmed. The fire alarms aren't really going off, it's just your imagination. So, please stay at your desk playing Freecell while the building burns down around you. This is only a test.

That's kind of the message that came over the intercom system today at work. I swear that the city fire department comes to test out our system every 2 weeks. And since I work a slightly later shift than most, I get to sit and listen to the alarms more frequently than I care to.

Anyway, that was probably the lamest way to start out a blog. Allow myself to introduce myself. I am a single, thirtysomething guy living in Southern California. I'm a Mormon, and I love my religion. I have had so many incredible experiences throughout my life that have helped me to know that God is real and that He loves all of us, his children, very much. I've also learned that like any other good parent, he doesn't always give his children what they want - he gives them what is good for them and what will help them to grow while in this mortal existance.

This is where the conundrum begins, for I am gay. I'm not the type of gay guy that is one of those feminine, flamboyant types. No sir. Those type of gay guys annoy the crap out of me. I'm a pretty normal guy that likes guy-type things: cars, outdoor activities, and the likes. I just happen to have a like that most other guys don't, and that is I like other guys. Now, I wouldn't call my attraction to other men 100%, meaning that every once in a while I do meet a girl that can float my boat. But, the vast majority of my sexual attraction is for guys. In the 20 years since I hit puberty, I'd have to say that there have only been 4 or 5 girls that have really done it for me.

Okay, so that is my opening introduction. I'm a devout, conservative Mormon who is missing out on the biggest of all Mormon commandments, which is to get married and raise a family. It's quite the inner struggle.

I'm going to stop there for now. I don't want to write everything all at once and then have a blog so long nobody will stop to read it. But, bit by bit I hope to unravel this mystery. I'm grateful for the pseudo-anonymity that is offered through the blogoshpere, because it's going to allow me the chance to have open conversations that I probably couldn't have otherwise.

Talk to you soon.