Boystown

This weekend I had been thinking of driving down to boystown in Chicago. For the uninitiated, Boystown is the gay neighbourhood in Chicago and I absolutely love going there whenever I can. I have been trying to get people to go there for sometime now but it never worked out. Chicago is a very glamorous city in my opinion. As long as you stay on the northern suburbs that is.

Since I was bored out of my wits and all my friends were doing something or the other, I decided that this was the perfect time for me to go down to Chicago by myself. Friday evening came, and I told LOH of my plans. I told him that I would drive there and then dance till 4am and then drive back home. He laughed. He pretty much told me I was being stupid and I promised him that I wouldn’t have any alcohol. He told me that that wasn’t the problem but that I would be sleepy on my drive back. So he made me promise to book a room in Chicago and stay the night. I have to say that that was some pretty good advice.

So just before I left home I went online and booked a hotel room about 30 minutes from downtown. I left home at 7pm on Friday evening. I stopped in between at one of those awesome rest areas in Chicago which are almost like tiny food courts. I had some dinner and then went off on my way to the hotel. I reached the hotel at around 10:30pm. Left all my belongings and changed into a nice colourful shirt and was on my way to Boystown. I got lost. Well more like a detour since I missed an exit. But it cost me about 2 bucks more in tolls and about 15 minutes extra. And then I hit the congestion. Chicago had traffic jams at 11:30 at night. Seriously. That’s irritating.

I finally drove down to downtown Chicago and drove up Halstead. All I knew was the you keep driving north for about 15 minutes and you will hit boystown. I’ve been there a couples times but each time I go there i am still not that familiar with the area. But when you enter boystown you always know you are there due to the hundreds of guys walking topless going from bar to bar or standing in queue to get into clubs. There was a guy hanging off the fence and making out with another guy. Yup. I was definitely in boystown. The best way to describe the feeling I get when I go to the boystown is that I feel like a jigsaw piece puzzle that fits right in there.

I drove around till 12:30 and finally found a car leaving. I parked there and walked up to Hydrate. Hydrate is not my most favourite club but it always has a lot of hard bodied, gym going, topless white guys swaying in one sweaty dark dance floor. The music is not the most dancy but had a stead heavy rhythm that you can sway to. I was there dancing and looking around for about 30 hour and then it got too hot on the small dance floor and so I went outside.

I then walked around the few blocks. All the gay guys in boystown are just so well dressed. They don’t care about who sees them dress with such abandon and each one trying to out do the others. In a sort of way I feel that all this is so superficial, but in yet another way, they are so happy being their bitchy selves. I love people watching in boystown because it always makes me wonder that my city may be so progressive in its thinking but the gay people are not so ready to express themselves openly with what they wear. They want to try to fit in. They want to be “normal” except that they are gay. I can’t help wonder if the guys in boystown are not just a tiny bit “free-er” in how they express themselves without inhibition. There are so many pockets in the US where such freedom exists and there are so many other places that are the exact opposites. Such contrasts.

Anyways, at about 2am, I went around boystown trying to find club circuit. I always have a hard time finding it but once I entered, everything was so familiar again. I love the music there because it is very dancy. It is a fag and fag hag type setting. The music is more top 40s and had some meringue and reggaetton. I was surprised to hear so much Spanish music in both the clubs I went to. Are the gay clubs finally accepting their predominant latin minority? Hm… it’s a thought.

I think not every gay person likes clubbing but off late with all the smoking bans, the clubs have really cleaned up and you don’t have to smell like smoke when you come out. I think this has brought out a lot more people and the latinos are really showing up more and more since clubbing and dancing is part of the culture. Somewhat like it is between south India and north India where South Indians politely refuse to dance and say, it’s not our culture.

There was a cute couple who was trying to pick me up. They even bought me a drink of vodka cranberry after finding out that I was finishing mine. I wasn’t sure whether I should drink it or not for fear that it might be drugged. It would have been fine if they had asked me and then taken me out to the bar and bought me the drink. It was shady in the fact that he just showed up with a vodka cranberry and I had no idea if he had mixed anything with it or not. Anyways, after they found out that I wasn’t going to sleep with them their interest in me diminished rather quickly. Don’t get me wrong, I actually did consider it, but I have a simple rule for hookups. If someone approaches you, then they are probably promiscuous and if someone is really shy then they probably are not. So the chanced of getting an STD given all the protection you wear is still lower and so I simply avoid people who are too forward in a bar or a club. I would totally make out with them though. I just love making out. And I have no standards when it comes to making out. I decided not to have any more alcohol so that I would be sober by the time I had to drive back.

After a lot of dancing and a lot of songs, at about 4am or so the club finally kicked us all out. I bid my adieus to the few people I had met. I walked back to where my car was parked. I just didn’t want to leave, but my legs were aching and my shirt was soaked. I turned up the music and drove back to the hotel room which suddenly seemed to be so far away. I was glad that I didn’t have to drive back home. I got to the room and was completely zonked out. I woke up about 10am and then finally had the energy to drive back home. I reached home about 2pm. The rest of the day was uneventful. LOH called me up on Sunday evening to ask about my trip. He and his wife EG were planning a Summer party for some Sunday in the coming weeks and wanted to now if I was going to be in town. I accepted.

I chatted a bit on gay.com’s India room this weekend. I found a nice guy and ended up talking to him on the phone for about 4 hours. I guess I had a lot of time on my hands.

This is my last day in my corner office with two windows. I have to move at the end of the day and share an office with another guy. The guy is someone I do know. He is a very nice guy and he is supposed to help me get set up and tell me what classes to take. I stopped by today at his office and talked to him for a few minutes. He gave me this huge book on Linux to read up and said that a Unix box has already been set up for me to use in my new office.

But even as my new tasks are increasing, my old tasks seem to have suddenly come into full flow again. I was again trying to help my old team figure something out the whole of today. I don’t realistically expect the my old team to stop calling. I am already in a design meeting next week. And I suspect that I will be called at least twice a day for quick questions. Last time I moved teams about 2 years back I was getting calls for a whole 6 months after I had moved.

I have to pack. Its always a good opportunity to go through your stuff and throw out all the things you don’t need and think about all the things you did with them.

Planning for the short and long term

I got locked out of my personal yahoo account and I feel rather silly about the whole thing. There was some sort of a temporary access problem during which I tried too many times to log in and it simply said that I was locked out and that was that. I waited another 12 hours and it was still locked out. So next I plan to try after 24 hours of not trying. This sucks! I want to send so many emails to people but all of them are in my yahoo address book and I have no idea how to mail them.

Lessons learnt from this are two fold. One that I should back up my address book regularly about every 6 months into some excel spreadsheet just in case so that I can contact people. And secondly, that I should keep my personal info updated in the email accounts that I use regularly so that I can answer the secret question to retrieve my password. It seems like my secret question of what my pet is something that confounds the hell out of me. I have tried so many of my pets’ names but I am really not sure what the answer is. Oh by the way, if you want me to send you a yahoo offline message when I blog, please let me know. My yahoo ID is duncehappy. I’ll send you a message each time I blog. I have very few people who have requested this so far but I thought I should let you other folks know as well.

This week has been rather slow. I am going to start training for my new designation next week and I am sort of excited about that. I am trying to read a book on Perl to start me off but after the first 50 pages I haven’t made much progress. Anytime I have something to read my attendance at the gym seems higher. It seems like I would rather go to the gym regularly than read something academic. I think I will have to do some All-nighters before I finish that book. Somehow, reading in the quiet of the night has always had better results for me. Way more productive than anything in the day time for me.

I am still contemplating going to India by the end of the year. I really want to go but I really don’t want to go. I am trying to get my parents to commit to a week off in Kerala or something, but they aren’t so keen. They’d rather have me come and do nothing at home in Chennai where I get really bored and fat at the same time from all the eating. Now, if I knew of clubs in Chennai it would be a different story but I don’t. So I am not sure what I should do. Maybe I should go over to Bombay where I can go clubbing but then I have to make arrangements. So much thinking involved. I have 4 weeks off by the end of the year and I’m afraid that I will not have the opportunity to get 4 weeks off at a time. Maybe Mexico will be cheaper and a better trip. Who knows? Even vacations seem so rather complex. All of this in spite of the fact that I have no other people to plan this and complicate matters. Taking vacations on my own makes me feel really good actually, but I always feel like it gets too expensive for one person.

I have also been thinking recently about moving to New York or Northern California. I looked at some job websites but they all seem like so much work to find a job and then move all your stuff to a new city and set up your bank accounts and everything else. Moreover big cities are so expensive that you have to spend a lot more to get a lot less. Work seems so stressful.

I have recently written down stuff for things that I want done when I become incapacitated or die. I need to convert these into legalese but that can wait. I have been simply meaning to come up with some sort of document so that I can know what I want done to me. So finally I wrote it down after the longest time of thinking about it. I mentioned this to LOH and he was a bit concerned about whether I had gotten suicidal when I gave him a list of contacts if something happens to me. I simply want to get this thing done and put this "unpleasant" task behind me so I wont have to deal with it in the near future.

Mood: I am in a planning mood but not much of a doing mood. Rather somber.

Old Friends

As I was saying, my hopes of becoming a morning person have been consistently dashed against the bed post. The warm feeling under the sheets and fluffy pillows are something that I just can’t seem to give up at 5am.

This weekend an old friend of ours was in town. She had moved back to Hong Kong about two and half years back to take care of her parents who were undergoing medical procedures and her brothers back home were not being of much help to them. She herself seemed to be doing well. She was here for a conference in Chicago and decided to come up here to say hi to us folks.

She was staying the night in my place on Sunday and I gave her a free run of the town in my car on monday. After I picked up her up from the bus station, we went to her favourite Laotian restaurant in town. She didn’t even have to order since TheRock and I knew her favourite dish and we still remembered it. We all went out for drinks on Sunday night after dinner.

We came back home and we talked till 2am. She told me that now that I had come out, I wasn’t uptight anymore and that I looked really free and happy and talked without any reservations. She described me from before as someone who was always alone in the middle of a crowd. Someone who didnt drink alcohol and someone who had something to hide and felt guilty. I wasnt any of that anymore. We talked about the last two years and all the changes that I have done in my life. I told her that I remember her being the first person to take me to a gay club. One of the small things that eventually precipitated into something huge.

She in turned revealed to me the secret that the first person she fell in love in fact was a woman. I told her that I had always known that she had a certain tendency and she simply smiled. She told me that she had never spoken to anyone else about being in love with a woman. “First love”, she sighed. She said that she would like to come back to the US eventually and settle down here again, but she corrected herself as she realised that that was probably never going to happen.

We turned our chat to a more gossipy mode and talked about another guy in the old gang who we both knew was totally gay and had just gotten married. I guess he just doesnt know it yet is all we could say and we smiled.

The next day I took her to work so she can meet all the others she knew. By the end of the day I dropped her off at the bus station and she was gone.

I think I Do

Language: English

Story: A bunch of friends who were previously in college together get together 5 years later for a friends wedding and all the college romances are briefly lit up again. The centre of the story is about two guys who used to be best friends. One of them comes out in college and is a self described “walking train wreck”. The other is secretly in love with this one but has not got the courage is come out yet and so says things in front of other people which leaves this guy scarred.

They connect after 5 years and the second guy tell the first one of the love he has carried with him for so long and eventually after a lot of grovelling they manage to get together.

The favourite part of the movie for me is the very end when the second guy tells the first guy who much he wants to be with him and the first guy tells him that they will try to work it out and not to worry. At this point, the first guy asks the second guy if he is ok and the second guy says, “I don’t think so”. It’s a powerful moment.

I think it also was interesting to me in the whole falling in love with your best friend concept.

End: Happy.