Nurse: How old are you?
Me: Twenty-seven.
Nurse: Well, now you're old enough to not hate shots.
Me: Do you like shots?
Nurse: Well, no. No one likes shots.

I have this problem with spiders.
I don't like them.

Here's the deal: I also don't like to kill them. I'm not sure why. I just feel bad about wrapping the little guys in toilet paper and flushing them to a swirling death down the toilet. It just seems like bad karma. It just seems so cruel. The other problem: they keep popping up through the window, making webs, and arriving uninvited in my shower.

"Maybe you're a Buddhist. Buddhists don't like killing living things," my friend Mark jokes with me while we're sharing a soft pretzel at a street fair. I'm telling him about my spider predicament while walking through the throngs of fall-dressed patrons.

Read the rest of the this column, here.

"Do you think our kids will ask us why it was a big deal for two men to get married one day?"

Nate asks me this a few nights ago while we're watching a news clip of anti-gay marriage after running out of tivo-ed episodes of the shows we're addicted to.

"Yes."

I instantly respond not peeling my eyes off the television screen where a powder-white- haired man spits and fusses about gay people ruining what marriage is and what marriage does and blah... blah... blah. I've been seeing so much of this lately. I mean, everyone has. But something about it doesn't just get me upset it makes me feel incredibly fortunate. My mom and I had this conversation the other day (We have these conversations like how friends have conversations. See, that was something no one ever told me. Your parents sort of become your friends as you get older. They aren't the ones that remind you how much you cost them to raise or how often you don't make it home. They become really great and have conversations that remind you that getting older(aside from the wrinkles and falling apart thing) is pretty awesome.) where she told me that I've always been the one that's taken the long way. "But that's what makes you interesting. That's what makes you exciting. That's what makes me proud of you."

She not so much talking about the long road of getting what, you know, anyone deserves(ahem, cough...rights). She talking about the stories and the experiences that have taught me all the stuff that some people never learn... or, in the future, some people may never understand.

Maybe that's why I'm a writer. A storyteller. A teacher. A gay man.

I'm living in one of the biggest historical movements, currently, in my lifetime. There are people trying to change the constitution. There are people dedicating their lives to allow me to marry another man. There are people doing everything possible so that one day I can experience that moment my kid to comes up to me and says: Dad, why was it such a big deal to for you to marry Dad?

I'll explain to my kid (while he or she plays on a hover-craft) the story of the how some people chose to take a really long road in life and on October 11th, 2009 in Washington D.C.

Equality Across America

So I was invited to this dinner party at an Indian family's house. I'm at their front door knocking and wondering what to expect. I mean, I've never been to a dinner party at an Indian family's house. Their house was tucked in a subdivision in some suburb and their front yard looked like my parent's front hard except there were more rose bushes and less grass to mow. The door opened and it was this beautiful Indian woman. She was wearing a Sari and had a bindi on her forehead and she smiled. She was smiling at me until she looked at my pants. No! No! No! She screams in a thick accent. I look down at my pants and they're these dark pairs of jeans I love because they fit me really well and they go with everything and someone(I'm remembering in the moment of being yelled at even said they were the best jeans I even own!). "I'm sorry!" I keep saying. And all of the sudden she started speaking in a language I didn't understand and threw me her car keys and pushed me out the door and somehow without speaking the language I totally understood what she was saying. "Buy a new pair of pants, now!"

I panic because I don't know how to drive stick shift in her car that I think is a Lexus. I'm pretty sure it was a Lexus. I mean, I didn't have a chance to look because the Indian woman was still yelling at me from her front door. Then the panic started setting in. "I don't know where I am!" I started yelping while making a right turn. "I don't know what city I'm in!" I started shaking. The wheel is sort of jiggling. One turn looked like a street in Chicago. Another turn looked like I was in my grandma's neck of the woods. I looked at my jeans. "I love these jeans!" I kept saying. "Why can't I wear jeans to a Indian dinner party!" I kept stuttering. "I hate showing up to a party under-dressed!" I said trying to look for the nearest mall. "I hate the mall" I remember saying when I realized that's where I had to go to get new pants. " I hate shopping for pants!" I said crying.

Nate shakes me awake.

"What's wrong! You were having a nightmare!" He yelps in the dark. "Are you OK?" He asks rubbing my arm.

"It was the worse! An Indian woman told me she didn't like my jeans and I had to find a pair at the mall!"

Nate sighs then kisses me on my head falling back to sleep. No questions asked.

He thanks me when I had him the metal canister.
I thank him because he reminded me that sometimes we need to ask for help when we can't see what we need is right in front of us.