In Hopes of being a Morning Person

I spent about half this week getting back into schedule and took this opportunity to instead try to become a morning person. Unfortunately even though I succeeded on one day I was unable to do it consistently. I went to bed early at about 7pm right after dinner and woke up at about 5am. I decided that if I slept enough I would be able to wake up and still be vaguely alive. So 5am I was actually up about 5 minutes before the alarm went off. I washed my face and brushed my teeth. I read the news and made myself some tea. Watched some “fun things” and did my usual morning “routine” if you know what I mean. By 6am I was ready to go to the gym. I reached there at about 6:30 and came back home by about 7:30. I had my breakfast, took a bath and went off to work at about 8:30. The perfect start to a day I should say.

The very next day, I woke up late in spite of going to bed early at about 9pm. The next day I slept late and woke up again late. So it didn’t quite work out. But I am not done trying. So I decided that I would wake up early on Monday again.

Friday night came and I had dinner with LordOfHearts at a Tex-mex restaurant. I surprisingly liked it more than I thought I would. I amused myself thinking that I didn’t have tex-mex in texas but instead had Thai. I was coming back home and having tex-mex. Then went bar hopping with a friend of mine from dance class around the downtown area. Her outrageously open talk about her lack of sex with her boyfriend amused LOH very much. We both tried to drink the can of beer that was bought for us without our consent by one of her friends but decided that we just couldn’t finish a whole can of it even if we tried. So we ordered a Cosmo and a Smirnoff lemon and washed the disgusting taste of beer down our throats. Then we went dancing to a Latin club which was more fun. We danced for a long time and finally he dropped me back home at about 1:30 at night.

The next day we all had our company picnic and so LOH and I went with TheRock and his wife to the picnic. LOH’s wife EternalGirlfriend was working today so she couldn’t come. We went and sat down and downed the unlimited lobsters and steaks, followed by chocolate cake and vanilla ice cream. After a few tug of wars and some random games which we didn’t play, we went home. Later in the evening I went to my friend R’s place. We are all gay folks there and about 8 of us hung out, listening to music and talking to each other for a long time and again it was about 1:30 by the time I drove myself back home. Another late night. I am trying to cut down on my late nights and it just doesn’t seem to be happening. They were all planning to go to a nude beach nearby the next day which I wasn’t too comfortable doing.

So I hung out with LOH and EG and we watched the Superman Returns movie. It was ok in my opinion and I longed to be in those string shoulders and arms. But alas, after EG and I signed about him for about 15 minutes after walking about LOH asked us both to shut up about superman and we couldn’t only smile naughtily at each other. We all went and picked up another couple to go raspberry picking after the movie. It was sorta relaxing and we had a whole carton to take back home after we were picking for an hour. Of course this is all not counting the ones that we ate while we picked. All of us had a lot of red stains on our clothes. The lesson learnt was not to wear white when you go raspberry picking. Who knew!

I again went out with LOH and EG and met up with all the gay guys for dinner after we all coul finally agree on a restaurant. After dinner EG and LOH left since she had to wake up at 2am for work while the rest of us folk drove up to this look out point sort of place where we could see the city below us and sat there and talked and laughed loudly. We chased away every other group that was there. After a while we settled down and started singing all the songs we knew. It was quite a nice time. Musicals, English, Hindi, Tamil, pretty much everything. Three of the folks who were in a choir sang a lot better than the rest of us. I am always very self conscious about my singing in front of them.

My head ache was increasing all this while and I started feeling a bit puky. I said good bye about 11pm to the guys and headed towards my house. As soon as I reached home, I puked my guts out and the raspberry seemed to be causing the tummy to be troubled. I went back to bed thinking about the single life and how horrific it was to be single and unwell so far away from your parents. But then I thought about how horrific it would be to be with the wrong person, so far away from your parents and knowing you will never find another person either. The thought somehow brought me calm and took my mind off my throbbing headache. I woke up again at about 2am to puke again and this time downed some peptobismol. Then I got back into bed. At about 5am I was vaguely better so I got up and had a glass of water to drink and found some headache pills. I took two of them and found my daily allergy pill too. After downing these I realised that I was still in my full shirt and jeans from last night. I got rid of them and fell back into bed. I woke up this morning at about 8, feeling much better. My head was clear and the day looked promising. I took bath, got dressed and headed to work. Another day that I missed my 5am routine. Oh well, there is always a tomorrow. There is always hope.

Mood: I still hope to be a morning person starting tomorrow!

The Turkish Bath House: Steam

Language: Italian + Turkish

Story: An Italian married interior designer in Rome inherits a bath house from his aunt who had moved to Istanbul decades earlier. He is always cold, and reflective to everyone around him. He goes to explore and falls in love with a guy in Istanbul in the process of trying to sell the bath house. He decides to retain the bath house and bring it back to its previous glory. His wife drops by for a visit since she had in the mean time fallen for another person and wants to break it off with him. But she sees him making out with this guy and gets really wild. But in the process, she realises that her husband is no longer the cold perfectly poised person she knew and hated but instead falls in love with him all over again for who he has become in spite of the fact that he is now in love with someone else. She wonders if she is confused or just wants what she cannot have. Then the husband gets knifed by some mafia type guy for not selling the bath house and dies. The wife stays behind in Istanbul where she finds peace in restoring the bath house and she becomes the new Madame of the neighbourhood that the aunt previously was.

What I find interesting about this movie was that, even though it explored sexuality and finding someone to be with, it ended with finding peace in spite of being single. Maybe being single myself, I found that appealing.

Ending: Pensive and positive.

Duncy Does Dallas

I went to the flea market type thing on Friday during a long lunch break with my friend LordOfHearts. We had a nice time roaming around without any aim. he bought some fancy artsy clocks. I bought some cute boxers (they are comfy to sleep in) and a raincoat. Friday evening we all went out to celebrate his birthday on Sunday. We had dinner and went bar hopping trying to get drunk. We had a nice time and listened to some nice songs in the car while another friend was driving. LOH was alone since his wife EternalGirlfriend had to work early at 2am and refused to come out with us. He was feeling really bummed out about that. We heard “Rang De Basanti” I love the song, Roobaroo and the Rang De Bansanti song from the movie. I also heard the song “Bure bure” from Bluffmaster which was good. Also, “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree” and the Romanian “Dragostea Din Tei”. There are all nice songs that I have on my Mp3 player these days.

I don’t know what LOH wants from me since I think he knows that there can be nothing between us. Nothing was explicit but I get the feeling that it’s not all my imagination. I can’t quite put my finger on it though. He kept sitting next to me everywhere. I started to notice this starkly when I was sitting in the corner in the back seat and he sat somewhere in the middle although only the two of us were sitting back. It felt rather weird for me that he kept bumping into me as he swayed to the songs in the car. I wish he wouldn’t tempt me like this. What I regret from the evening is that at almost the end of the night when I was starting to feel just a bit drunk, I turned to LOH and told him that he looked cute when he didn’t gel his hair. It was a rather innocent statement but there was a moment there that I think I looked a little too long into his eyes as I told him that. I think he noticed it quietly but he simply said that he didn’t like his hair and I replied saying that his hair was fine. I don’t think I directly looked at him for the rest of the evening. I was slightly drunk but I think I knew that I had crossed a certain line that I have so long maintained with so much work. I am convicing myself that it was all in my imagination.

I just think I have had enough of falling for straight guys who get married or already married ones, that it’s not worth the heartbreak. Openly gay guys are much less heartbreak. Anyways, I think I am growing tired of dating non Indian guys and am craving Indian guys! Anybody wanna date me? *my best smile*

Over the weekend, I got to work one day in the Emergency department and one day in the psych ward of the hospital this time in Dallas. It was entertaining as hell. The emergency department had one of the nurses who gave a medication to a patient that he did not have the authorisation to give and then lie about it. So how it typically works apparently is that in the paper world the nurses used to give the medications like pain killers to patients who are in a great deal of pain and then when the doctor walks in they simply get the signature on the paper. But this time the medication was entered into the computer as soon as the pill was removed from the tray automatically which the nurse hadn’t anticipated. So when they called me around to the nurse I asked him if he had any idea who the medication was ordered. But he completely denied the event and so I asked him again if he had any idea about who this medication could have been ordered since his name was the only one that was showing up on the computer. After he refused again, I simply had a closed door meeting with the charge nurses on the floor. She seemed to be of the opinion that the medication was perfectly normal in this case and wondered why the nurse had to lie instead of just admitting that the did. Then drama happened and finally the nurse admitted that he had given the drug and then been nervous about owning up to it and didn’t realise that his name would show up on the computer. It was somewhat disheartening because the nurse in this case was simply trying to alleviate the pain of a patient who was suffering and he had to lie about it.

The next day was spent on the psyche ward of the hospital which was really interesting. It was a teenage facility and what struck me most about this place was these kids all ranging from the 12 to 17 were really polite and well mannered kids from the small snapshot that I got in the 12 hours I spent there. I was expecting really violent kids who were dishevelled. But what I saw was rich kids who were well groomed and were at the best behaviour possible. Mostly were rich girls who all had alcohol problems. The boys were mostly there for drug abuse and ADHD.

There was this one guy who went to Mexico as part of a church retreat and had taken drugs there and had not slept for 5 days. He was apparently completely yelling and screaming when the church people crossed the border into the US and the border guards wouldn’t let them cross since he kept talking about drugs to the immigration folks. The group simply dumped him in Dallas after crossing the border and went back home being very happy to be rid of him I suppose. He looked clean when I was there, but he refused to eat and kept sleeping in his own room. It was a bit sad, but his mom was flying into town the next day to pick him up.

I was surprised by the fact that the docs actually called some of the kids “nuts”. I thought that was hyper un sensitive of them. They were talking about a girl who had been re-admitted after blacking out in some far away place after having a drug overdose. Something about taking half a pill of ecstasy at a time but she taking two whole ones and all her friends abandoning her on the road after she blacked out. After she got back home her mom sent her for a drug test and she was positive. Hence her stay there.

Then there was the kid who had 4 different kinds of drugs in his system. They were all surprised that the well behaved kid who had eloped with his girl friend had all this in his system. But they added that at least he knew all the major drug groups and knew how to take the drugs that make you high with the suppressants and how he controlled what the drugs did and not the other way. He was in the facility with his current girl friend and his ex girl friend had they had all eloped together and tried to cash a check by his parents for some random amount but were too drunk to pull it off successfully.

There was the kid who had tried to kill himself after he could not perform sexually.

So they all had classes for age appropriate behaviour. How to dress, how to express anger, who to deal with drugs and alcohol and who to deal with self image issues. How to deal with intimacy as teens. They also had classes for the parents of the kids here.

I read two things that I found interesting. A book on Dealing with anger, talked about how to its ok to express anger as long as its non confrontational. To frame statements in formats like, “I feel angry when I think you are doing blah blah”. Another book on dealing with perfectionism talked about how you cannot please everybody and that it was futile to try.

It might have simply that the kids were all behaving normally because they were all on anti-depressants and anti-psychosis drugs. They all seemed so normal.

My flight out of Dallas was late and I and a co-worked missed a connecting flight in Chicago. And since were weren’t flying our usual airline, we didn’t get upgrades to first class either, but this airline had Starbucks coffee which according to me compensated for the fact that I wasn’t in first class, since leg room has never been an issue for me but I do like the service.

I normally always feel tired after a trip but today I woke up after about 13 hours of sleep. I feel refreshed and have been very productive today. I talked to my mom out of schedule and she was happy about it.

What is this I am hearing about Indian bloggers not being able to blog after the government had blocked the sites? Anybody got any news on that? I haven’t been able to catch up any of the Gay Games VII news. I am still wondering if I should drive down to Chicago for the closing ceremony. It seems like an awful lot of fun!

Mood: Positive. It is the 10050th day of my life.

Art Fair and Pride

It was pride weekend here and a friend just emailed me saying that she saw me on TV!! Yes, its lame to be excited about that but I sort of am excited. I asked her if I had looked dorky on TV and she hasn’t replied yet. So I am left with my thousand possibilities churning away in my head.

I am going to Dallas on some work this weekend. Should be amusing to go down south in this hot summer weather. Since I am going to be there during the weekend I did try to figure out if there are any local clubs around where I was staying and there doesn’t seem to be any.

The weekend started out normally enough. My mom had called on Thursday night and we decided to have our usual chat from Friday right then. She went on and on about how all the neighbours and their kids. I listened. I agreed. I yawned in an effort to let her know I didn’t particularly care if the guy was 31 years old and still happily rejected all the girls he saw. Oh wait, that one seemed interesting. I suggested to my mom that maybe he simply didn’t wish to be married which my mom shot down immediately. It was just outrageous to her. I agreed some more and then I listened more about how some mother in law went back to her mother’s house because she refused to stay in the same house as the daughter in law which I thought was hilarious and my mom thought I was disrespectful to the old lady. I simply said, if the old lady doesn’t like it so much maybe she should move out of the house and give the others some peace. We argued about it and then I changed the topic.

Friday came and dinner with friends at a nice Mexican restaurant happened. The restaurant was named after the Mexican eccentric painter Frida Kahlo. There were some paintings of her on the walls. I looked around for the dance floor where salsa dancing supposedly happened on Friday nights. I didn’t see one. But as we sat chatting away, the lights suddenly dimmed and all the tables and chairs were taken out from the centre as we watched form the first floor. Black lights turned on and the place actually turned into a nightclub in a matter of minutes. A small bar which we hadn’t previously noticed was almost the centre of attention now and disco lights, lasers, false smoke all were giving us a nice feel. We sat there drinking cosmos. The bartender gave a choice of the Cosmo that will give a headache versus one that won’t. For two bucks extra I chose the one that wouldn’t. And sure enough my Saturday was quite nice. I am totally going for that vodka in the future. Unfortunately I only vaguely remember what the bottle looked like and didn’t bother to ask the bartender what he gave me. And hence my exploration of the topic in my previous post.

Saturday was anything but exciting. I woke up and went shopping for groceries and then got back home and watched a lot of TV. I talked to some friends of mine on the phone and then we early to bed. I was woken up by a call which I decided to skip and since I was awake I left a test message for a friend who recently got married to a co-worker of mine and had come here only 6 months back. She called back after a while and was talking about earlier in the evening and suddenly burst out crying. I listened. And then I said that everything was gonna be alright and that she should just go to sleep and she would feel better in the morning. This was about 10 at night and apparently she had had a fight with her husband over a board game. Anyways, now I was fully awake and had told her that if she wanted to talk she could come over and she refused and said that she was on her way to the gym. So we said byes and I sat watching TV until about 1am when she called again and said that she wanted to come over and I merely said ok. Then she called after another 15 minutes and said that she had talked it over with her husband and that she was fine again. I again simply stated that she should go to sleep and everything was going to be alright. I think I am quite sad when trying to comfort somebody. But that’s pretty much all I could think of to say.

At this point I was tired and went to sleep. Weird Saturday.

I woke up early at 8am on Sunday looking forward to the art fair. I met up with C5J at about 10am. And we roamed around the art fair. I was in my judgemental best and went around telling the artists what I liked and why I liked them. Some looked interested and some had looks that pretty much told me to stay away if I wasn’t buying. I ate lunch at some Thai food stand nearby and had cookies and cream flavoured ice cream. My friend TheRock was there too with his wife roaming around somewhere close to us and we kept bumping into them multiple times. Did I ever tell you guys that his wife is also from BITS?

Just before noon C5J and I left for the gay pride parade. We walked about half hour and go there just before it started. It started. And then it was over. All in like 20 minutes. Completely over. It felt kind of short in spite of all the low expectations I had from it. Anyways, I recognised quite a few faces and I thought that was rather cool. After the parade there was a rally. I found a few friends of mine there. I felt that it being election year it made the whole thing really political and I wasn’t happy about that. But it is kind of cool that all of our elected representatives are progressive and support gay rights. We have the first openly gay congresswomen from here. She is pretty sweet. She finished her speech in 5 minutes and people around me were so awed by her that I felt somewhat strange. You could tell that all the gay people absolutely adored her. Since I can’t vote, I couldn’t have cared less but it was an experience nevertheless. A little too political for me but it wasn’t long so it felt ok. And in all this, they caught me on TV apparently while I was sitting with about 8 or 9 of my friends and chatting away in the dead centre really close to the stage. Now, I haven’t seen this video so I can’t tell you much of it but I was excited about it.

I was so tired by the end of the day that I just went home and slept the rest of the evening. It made for a very tiring weekend.

Little Water

I would like to impart my wisdom to you lovely folks who haven’t taken the time to explore alcohol, headaches and vodka in detail.

Chance of headache:
High : Red wine and Brandy.
Medium : Rum and Whisky (dark liquors in general)
Low : Scotch, Vodka/Gin (clear liquors), and Sauterne or Riesling wines

Now, vodka or little water(vod is water in Russian) is a very very purified form of alcohol and has little or no taste of alcohol typically. So it tends to be distilled a lot of times and hence avoids most impurities and also taste.

Headaches after a night out on the town is not only because of the impurities (congeners/sulphide preservatives or whatever else) but also because of dehydration caused by alcohol. So it is essential to drink water to avoid the dehydration part of it. In fact each time I go to pee which is normally a couple times, I drink one glass of water at a bar. I always get back home and down at least a sandwich at a minimum in addition to the water intake. A diet gone off a bit is any day better than a headache.

Some of the interesting cures that I have read about for headaches related to alcohol intake include more alcohol and sex. Apparently sex can release chemicals to vaguely counteract the effect or at least distract you a bit.

I drink mostly Vodka based drinks since I can't stand the taste of alcohol and vodka and gin both work well for that.

Popular drinks that I like:
Vodka cranberry
Cosmo(politan) – I think its vodka, cranberry, orange and lime juice.
Apple martini – vodka plus apple of some sort maybe.

So my choice comes down now to the brands of vodka available on the market now.

Skyy – claims to be the purest and hence best for concerns of headaches, American.
Grey Goose – expensive, smooth taste, French.
Absolute – Swedish
Smirnoff -
Stolichnaya - Russian

So from next time on I am gonna ask for Skyy!

Beautiful Thing

Language: British English

Story: Two young school going kids fall in love after one of their fathers beats them and comes to live in the others house and they have to share a bed. They care for each other and yet dread being openly gay. Finally the mom finds a gay magazine under his bed and follows them to a gay pub and asks him about it. He tells her and they cry together. Everything becomes ok.

I think the way the coming out to the mother was portrayed was very tender though emotionally charged. I half expected the guys to run off from home and become hustlers like every other gay teen movie ever but they were still at home and happy about coming out at the end of it. So it was a good movie just for that.

End: Sort of premature ending since I wasnt sure if it ended or not but it was a happy and romantic ending. It’s hard to say happily ever after when they are fourteen, I suppose.

My Other Gay Themed Movie Reviews

Dinner, Fireworks and a date

It’s the long weekend here for the July fourth holidays. Unfortunately, since the fourth falls on a Tuesday it’s an interrupted long weekend. The fireworks show that I am so proud of was postponed from Saturday to Sunday. I did absolutely nothing on Saturday but was looking forward to the dinner on Sunday. So there is this desi girl who grew up in the US and she is a total sweetheart. Complete gudiya she is. Petite, short, sad puppy like eyes and she is the perfect fag hag. She always hangs out with gay people for some reason.

Anyways, I knew Desi guy’s mom was going to be there and was getting ready for an absolute fun evening. Desi boy and mom showed up after going to all the thrift stores for shopping. His boyfriend showed up with a bunch of guys later. They actually smiled at each other this time. And she made jokes about how he looked familiar and stuff. That was definitely a change. I think their main problem is language. The aunty is completely sindhi and Hindi and does only a smattering for nouns in English. Sort of a very amitabh bachan like English in “Amar Akbar Anthony”.

Anyways, I “came out to her” when she asked me when I was going to get married and I replied that “Aunty, mujhe ladkiyan pasand nahi hain” (I don’t like girls). This made me feel really awkward and felt like I was in second grade and saying I don’t like girls or something. Anyways, she joked about how I had just spared some girl of the horror of having to live with me. I smiled awkwardly. Then after a while I was looking at some desi program on TV and was looking at priyanka chopra and saying something about her dress and aunty said, “I thought you didn’t like girls” and I replied, “Are, what’s wrong in looking?” and she laughed. And then I laughed.

We had a long conversation after that in which she basically said that we desis in the US spend more time pandering to the needs of others than of our own back in India to which I replied that she was the only one in the room that thinks of Americans as others and that the rest of us thought of Americans as our own as we did with Indians. At which point I think the score was her 20 and me 1.

Then she got tired and went back to her home and I went with the rest of the folks to see the fireworks which were awesome as usual. There is something about feeling loud bangs and colourful lights in the sky with classical music reaching a fevered pitch towards the finale or climax of the fireworks. A very moving experience every time.

A crowd of 150,000 people all heading home after the fireworks seemed to be rather chaotic for some reason. So we to a nearby home of someone we knew. We sat and chatted with some them until the traffic cleared up. They were basically white folks but they had an Indian girl child apparently adopted from somewhere back in Chennai and when they learnt I was from there, I was bombarded with questions about traditions like naming ceremony for Priya. I very frankly told them that I had no idea about such things and that they were better off asking the priest at the nearby temple. But by then I already knew that they were hardcode PeaceCore activists and had perfect disdain for anything that resembled organised religion. With such force they shot down the idea, and I didn’t try suggesting anything quite as ridiculous after that. Perfect heathen. The only thing I could mumble back was that if they wanted to bring up children in a non religious way, then they should be made aware of why they reject religion or else they might fall easy prey to missionaries of one kind or the other. Jehovah’s witness, mormons, plain old Baptists, Hare Krishnas. The world is full of them.

We returned home late at night and I had a working day Monday. I could hardly keep awake until I had my cup of coffee at work. Monday went on by really quick. Tuesday was a longer day. I had another date. Blond, not very tall, overweight, sort of a nice guy, simple expectations, makes out well, makes good money and has a very similar degree and job as mine; he can’t drive at night, since he has awful night vision apparently. We went out for dinner and came back to my place to watch a movie after which we made out for a bit before I dropped him back home. I am still contemplative about a second date with him. I can’t say sparks flew or anything. But seemed like a rather stable chap.

I have another guy I have lined up but I get emails from him once a week and arranging a date with him has been a hassle over emails at that rate. Even if I did date that guy, god knows that I might get to see him like once a month or something probably. What’s the point in that? Oh well, life goes on.

Pavitra asked if we should form our own South Asian gay part of the pride parade this week. Somehow I am not very comfortable with that idea. I still haven’t figured out why. I am writing it off to fear of the unknown for now and I will come back to re-visit that topic later sometime. I guess baby steps are better than no steps. The Sri lankan guy seems to be doing some OutReach Booth in a park nearby.

Remember I told you guys that the sibling order matters in guys turning out to be gay? Well, it’s the title page of the time magazine this time around. I thought it was worth mentioning.


Mood: Work, sleep, play, eat. It’s a good mix. What next? Looking forward to the pride weekend.