It was the year of the rat. It was the year Tina Fey became famous, again. It was the year Carrie Bradshaw returned. It was the year gas dropped in price. It was the year stocks also dropped. It was the year someone threw a shoe at George Bush. It was the year everyone was happy someone FINALLY threw a shoe at George Bush.
It was the year I fell in love with this song:

And this song:

This song changed my life(and may make me cry EVERYTIME I hear it).

And this song, too.

It was the year I wanted to move to France just for this movie. It was the year I wish I would have wrote this book.
It was the year I had a life changing vacation in Central America with people I respect more and more the older I get– my family. It was the year I went to New York to celebrate my one year of making it through a break-up only realizing I am still going through the break-up… and that that is just fine.
It was the year I learned how to be a bartender and a teacher and a better performer and better writer and met people I’d never thought I’d meet and saw things I never thought I saw and learned things about people I never ever could have learned any other way… including learning things about myself.
It was the year my friendships changed. It was the year I was upset about this. It was the year I was then O.K. with this. It was the year I learned to be happy about changes especially when it makes their lives so much better. It was the year I learned that it’s not the friendships that need to change, it’s you that has to keep evolving with it.
It was the year I learned that I’m pretty damn O.K. on my own. It was the year I learned that you’re never really on your own. It was year that I realized love and relationships and friendships shouldn’t be a crutch. It was the year I realized that some friends will do anything for you… no matter what it takes to see you not down on yourself. It was the year people you thought you were made for only show how unmade they are and how quickly feelings can change.
It was the year I learned that you have to make mistakes on your own so when you look back at a year and add it all up you don’t need to look for the receipts because there isn’t one moment you want to return. There isn’t one second you want to exchange. There isn’t one brief time with any particular person or place that you wish would have never happened.
Because in the end, that’s what years are. They are like life stocks that hold investments that should gain more and more interest as they get older.
Later, 2008.

While indulging myself in free food, free access to a washer and dryer, and to a lot of cable t.v. at my parents’ house over the holiday, I discovered a local Racine public television channel that was airing a city council meeting from a few weeks ago. Now, usually when I see things like this I flip through it to get to the latest Suzie Orman, you know, to catch her telling people what they can’t buy(love IT!).
Anyway, what caught my eye on this channel was a thick eyeglass wearing woman ranting about how bad it would be if Racine allowed a L.G.B.T center for youth. “Ya know that Jeffery Dahmer… that murderer? Yah, ya know he was gay! We could be creating young Jeffery Dahmers! We should be scared of these people wanting to take our kids!” As the baggy sweatshirt woman waddled of the screen and a few selected audience members at the meeting applauded(and after I took my hand to lift my dropped jaw back in to place) I realized what I had just gotten myself in to… an entire hour of watching local Racine citizens step to the podium to scold homosexuality.
“Ya know, I didn’t know what L.G.B.T. stood for until I looked it up on that there internet. It’s just a cute way of saying lesbian, gay, bisexual and tranny!”
OR
“How far low are we gonna go? We can’t even get our streets plowed now we’re gonna get those gays a place to hang out?”
OR (and my personal favorite).
“Now, I am a Christian woman… and I love everyone. I mean it. I love everyone. I’ve never met someone I don’t love. Except gay people. I don’t love gay people.”
This January with mark seven years living in Chicago. Growing up, I always knew I wanted to be in a city. When I’d visit cities as a kid I would walk the sidewalks with my neck craned back looking at the buildings all towering above. My favorite part was the different types of people that lived and worked there. Different colors. Different backgrounds. Different types of jobs. I wanted to be one of those people. I’d imagine myself having friends that weren’t just white(because, hello, Racine) and I’d imagine meeting people from all over the world and hearing their stories and learning from the lives they’d led before they met me. I would be apart of them by living on the tip-top floor of one of the fancy metal skyscrapers.
Now, even though I don’t live in a sky scraper, I’ve pretty much reached my dream of meeting some pretty fucking amazing people. People from all kinds of backgrounds. People who were once prostitutes who are now teachers. People who were once rich with family money, but now disowned for standing up for what they believed in. People who are so completely opposite to me, but who have made me and my life and the things around it so much better.
But the one thing that these people I’ve met have in common? They weren’t scared of change. In fact, they welcomed it.
You can hear it their voices. The people who don’t want this “different” place coming to their small town as they rant about the sin of gay. They way their vocal chords shiver like hands that have been left too long in the cold. The way they lick their lips because they are drying out from within from nerves. The idea that a change could come to a place that has always been so much the same terrifies them. Especially when it’s something so… so foreign. Often, that’s how it feels to visit this city. Like when I went to Germany and all I could do was burp out quick phrases to get a loaf of bread or to catch a train to Munich. I felt so out of place. I felt like I constantly had to apologize for myself… for not belonging.
“These people never needed a place before”, a woman wearing a puffy winter down jacket says in to the podium mic, “what makes them think they need something now? They just don’t belong in Racine.”
I’m often asked by old friends and relatives who still live in Wisconsin or even in Racine: “Would you ever move back?” My answer: “I just don’t think I belong there anymore.”

Amazing Race
Home Alone
Living With the Tribes
Talk Soup
Naked Science
About A Boy
Flip This House
The City Council Meeting Channel of Racine Wisconsin(which I watched for a full hour because it was about opening a center in Racine for the youth… where a woman said(and I quote) “We can’t have a gay place where kids can go to turn in, well, maybe Jeffery Dahmer… you know he was gay,right?” Uh huh).
The Real Housewives of Orange County
When Harry Met Sally
Lingo
Clean House
The Real Housewives of Atlanta
The Family Stone
Family Guy
Serendipity
True Hollywood Story: Punky Brewster
True Hollywood Story: Tiffany Amber Theissen(Kelly Kapowski!)
Those infomercials about adopting children in third world countries while I cried.

I’m just going to put it out there. Sometimes we pretend that everything is O.K. because you want people to think that everything is O.K. because it’s easier to not have to explain everything that is not O.K. and it’s easier to just be O.K. O.K?
Anyway, Josh and I had lunch together today. I don’t need to even go on the “Josh is the best guy in the world” rant that I tend to do when I mention the great things he does for me. But, while waiting in line for my sandwich, I almost start to cry. I’m not sure if you have those moments when something just sort of clicks(or, ahem, a lot of somethings) and after all the time you’ve been holding it in, it comes out in the wrongest of times. Like in a busy line. At a sandwich joint. In a sandwich joint where there are a lot of big dudes who probably never cry. And just as I was about to bite my lip and hold back a gushing of warm tears, I discovered a framed poster on the wall near the counter. It read:
I Believe-
that sometimes when I’m angry I have the right to be angry but that doesn’t give me the right to be cruel.
I Believe-
that just because someone doesn’t love you the way you want them to doesn’t mean they don’t love you with all they have.
I Believe-
that maturity has more to do with what types of experiences you’ve had and what you’ve learned from them and less to do with how many birthdays you’ve celebrated.
I Believe-
that it isn’t always enough to be forgiven by other. Sometimes you have to learn to forgive yourself.
I Believe-
that no matter how bad your heart is broken that the world doesn’t stop for your grief.
I Believe-
that our background and circumstances may have influenced who we are, but we are responsible for who we become.
I Believe-
that just because two people argue, it doesn’t mean they don’t love each other.
And just because they don’t argue, it doesn’t mean they do.
I Believe-
that you shouldn’t be eager to find out a secret.
It could change your life forever.
I Believe-
that it’s taking me a long time to become the person I want to be.
I Believe-
that you should always leave loved ones with loving well wishes. It may be the last time you see them.
I Believe-
that you can keep going long after you can’t.
I Believe-
that we are responsible for what we do, no matter how we feel.
I Believe-
that we don’t have to change friends, if we understand that friends change.
I Believe-
that no matter how good a friend is, they’re going to hurt you once in a while and you must forgive them for that.
I Believe-
that true friendship continues to grow, even over the longest distance. Same goes for true love.
I Believe-
that you either control your attitude or it controls you.
I Believe-
that regardless of how hot and steamy a relationship is at first, that passion fades and there had better be something else to take its place.
I Believe-
that heroes are the people who do what has to be done when it needs to be done, regardless of the consequences.
I Believe-
that money is a lousy way of keeping score.
I Believe-
that my best friend and I can do anything or nothing and have the best time.
I Believe-
that sometimes the people you expect to kick you when you’re down, will be the ones who help you get back up.
I Believe-
that two people can look at the exact same thing and see something totally different.
I Believe-
that your life can be changed in a matter of hours by people who don’t even know you.
I Believe-
that even when you think you have no more to give, when a friend cries out to you, you will find the strength to help.
I Believe-
that credentials on the wall do not make you a decent human being.
I Believe-
that the people you care about most in life are taken from you too soon.
They say that everything happens for a reason. We do things, see people, go places in the exact precise time. Unnamed forces just push us to these places because these aforementioned unnamed forces just know there is something there for us to realize.
As I took of my heavy winter coat and stepped in to my apartment after walking home from lunch, I found the poster online and printed it to put somewhere I can read it and be reminded that in the end… no matter who breaks our heart a million times or how many bills there are still left to pay or how damn scary a particular health condition is getting… somewhere there is a poster to remind you who you really are:
A guy that has to be and will be O.K.

I found this, here:

I remember the first time I believed this. I was a kid. I was probably fourteen. It was when I realized I wouldn’t be able to have REAL kids of my own. You know, the ones that were made by me.
Because at that time, I didn’t know that you could have kids with someone unless you were really with them. Because at that time no one ever talked about people having babies for other people. Or people being in other relationships and not having to adopt. Because that time was a different time. It was a time where it was wrong for gay couples to have kids. It was a time where marriage between two men was insanely controversial.
Huh.
My last name comes with a lot of stories. There are generations and generations of my German blood doing anything in their power to get what they wanted out of life. I have family members who suffered through war. My grandma (God, this story breaks my heart) learned what loss was when her house was burned down by Nazi’s or when she lost her brother to Tetanus or when her family stopped talking to her when she moved to America because she believed her life was her own and she could do what she wanted. She feared failure. She feared judgment. But she did it.
I can’t stop thinking about Proposition 8. Not just the political aspect. Not just how stupid some people can be to believe in things they don’t truly understand. What I really can’t stop thinking about is my last name and how I want to share it. How I will share it. How it’s been almost fifteen years later when I first thought that my life HAD to be so much different from other people’s lives because I was wrong in my feelings and beliefs. Yet, I still believe my life is my own and that I will do what I want. I fear failure. I fear judgment. But I will do it.
Because it runs in my blood.
It will run in my children’s blood.

It kicks in during that first snap of cold weather. Like an animal’s instinct to hibernate, it surfaces from a hidden part of us. “It” is that need for closeness, someone to stay warm with, someone to spoon us while watching the entirety of our Netflix queue engulfed by the darkness of winter. What do you do, though, if you’re single and there’s no serious relationship in sight?
Read the rest here!

It started with this:

Aside from the fact that Charlize Theron looks fricken hot and that this commercial could possibly turn this gay guy in to a drooling straight dude, when I first saw it I couldn’t figure out the song in the background. It was sexy like the commercial. It was old school like sexy music should be. After seeing the commercial a billion times in between the marathon of cable watching I indulged in this past weekend, I became obsessed with the song.
Google, of course, gave me the answer: Marvin Gaye’s ” Funky Space Reincarnation”.
I found it and downloaded it.
Then tonight (while scrubbing my bathtub and cleaning the corners of my bathroom– the luxurious life of this single guy) I was listening to the song a bit more closely.
“two thousand and seventy three , two thousand and eighty four , two thousand and ninety three , light years ahead you and me gone be getting down on a space bed…..we gone get married in June….we gonna be getting down on the moon, light years interplanetary forms on the get down star wars interplanetary funk……still getting down ……music won’t have no race only face… peaceful face…. all the time on this trip stuck inside my mothership.”
“Two thousand and seventy three? TWO THOUSAND AND SEVENTY THREE? How old will… I’ll be ninety one. NINETY ONE!” I screamed to myself with a wet sponge in my hand.
I don’t know if it was the fumes from my organic green-friendly bathtub cleaner or if I was just light headed from the three cups of coffee I had had on an empty stomach, but I started thinking how it’s going to be two thousand and nine in, like, a month. A MONTH! Then what comes after two-thousand and nine? Yes, two thousand ten.
And then, just like that, it’s two thousand and seventy three and I’m ninety one.
Byron, get to your point, right? My point IS sometimes we get so distracted. Like, OK, how I got distracted by how hot Theron looks in that video to not really notice the song at first. Then how I was just attracted to sound of the song and then how it took me to scrub the bathtub on a Tuesday night to hear the words. Then after I heard the words and thought about being ninety one, I couldn’t help but think: Slow. DOWN.
You wouldn’t believe the conversations I’ve been having with some of my friends and family lately. Everyone wants everything right now. Not just stuff, but feelings and enlightenment and answers. I’m just as guilty. I’m all over the place trying to accomplish this or feel that.
But it goes like this: When I was eight, I wanted to drive. When I could drive at sixteen, I wanted to move out. When I moved out at eighteen, I wanted to be able to drink. We think older means more.
But this evening, on the coolness of my bathroom tile, I just wanted to be twenty-six. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Like the sexy beat of Gaye’s song, I just need to learn how slow. it. all. down.

Sure. There were days where I barely squeaked by. But, HEY! I. DID. IT.