Left turn

Once one is old, birthdays are celebrated semi-decadally. And with my 35th coming up soon, I thought a party might be in order.

I used to like parties: having them or attending them. But really the days of good parties are behind me. The purpose of a party, at least when you are in your twenties, is to forget your problems and goof around. And having a good party was easy enough: alcohol, tunes, and an appropriate number of single women.

I'm panicking about the idea of throwing a party.

• I live in a "worse" neighborhood than anyone else I know. Houses here cost less than $500k, and there are no white people.
• My house is a deathtrap for babies: nothing is child proof and there is no fence to keep them from running into the street.
• There is nothing to do here: no LAN parties, no pool table, nothing.
• I can't really cook.
• I live farther west than everyone I know save Bao and my brothers.

I feel that I'm just opening myself up to ridicule by asking people I know to drive a million miles with babies in tow to be bored and eat bad food in an ugly house in a crappy part of town .

Now, reflecting on my feelings, a couple of things are plain. One, I've lost some of my backbone. I used to be a little better at saying, "this is my life, and fuck you if you can't deal with it." After all, most of what I do for housing is based on an attempt to make solid financial decisions. I've got to live within my means.

Two, life is harder for me because I'm single, and in some sense, self-made. I don't want to downplay the fact that Mom provided a nice, clean, rent-free home for me when I was in school and undergrad. Dad helped out some when I was in high school as well. Rent-free living is a massive bonus. But since then, I've led a financially independent life. Most of my friends that live in nice places either started with family money or have two incomes. I'm remarkably bitter about this, which is pointless.

Three, I've lost all sense of proportion. To think that my place is not nice when I lived in a tin-roofed shack in Costa Rica demonstrates that my thinking has become provincial.

I know why I'm here. The decisions I've made that led me here were not ill-considered. The shame I sometimes feel is just a part of the fact that I'm walking a different path from my friends.

I need friends that are walking the same path as I am, so I don't feel alone.

And I need a pool table.

The Morality Project

I've had an idea kicking around in my head for a while: an online project that explores morality in action.

Morality is an interesting question for me. Ever since I left the organized church, I have definitely becore more flexible in my moral decision-making. While I was fairly black and white before, I've become more morally relativist and pragmatic. Some might say I've become more lost.

What if I were to choose one of my beliefs, and then focus on putting it into practice for a month? It would be something like a lenten vow, only with a focus on pragmatic action.

It would work something like this: I would make a moral statement that I believe but don't usually put into practice. Here's one: I believe that casual sex is wrong. And then for a month, I'd try to live with that belief.

Hey, wait! I haven't had sex in a month. Maybe this is easier than I thought.

But the next most obvious question would be this: what do I believe? Certainly I left any biblical literalism behind when I decided that being gay is okay. I don't keep the sabbath. I forsake the assembling together as Christians. I haven't really helped any widows or orphans lately. And certainly I haven't done anything to spread the word of God. How could I? I'm not even sure how much of it I actually believe.

Okay, here are some things I believe in that I violate all the time.

• Sex without love is wrong, because it cheapens love.
• Commuting alone in a car is wrong: pollution, waste of resources, puts our soldiers at risk.
• Wasting time at work when there is still work to do is wrong.
• One should strive never to break bread alone.
• Neighbors need to be be as important as friends. The physical community needs to be as imporant as friendships of association.

Okay. Where do I start?

Bike Lust

AIDS Lifecycle sent me an application for the 2005 ride, and I'm considering signing up.

Were I to do it again, I'd like to have a better result that this year. This year was fairly painful, and I didn't complete every mile. I would like to actually have a bike before the ride and perhaps do some training, neither of which I did this year.

I really would like a Cannondale Sport Road 800. Really. A lot.

Trees, those useless trees

With a goal of having a BBQ for my 35th birthday, I've been working on bringing order to the Ranch.

The front lawn, now that the dandilions have been poisoned to death, is a brown graveyard. Small, incongruous patches of grass are surrounded by greater swaths of browned stems.

The back yard, once a grassy trench, has been flattened and weeded, but remains new, amaturish hardscape and naked clay soil.

One goal for the back yard was to have no turf grass. I'm determined to find another possibility among the whole of the world's flora. Easier said than done, as it turns out. Manzanita and coyote brush aren't going to cut it when trying to fill in between the paving stones or add some green to the narrow strips of brownfield.

The work progresses slowly. Each week I hack away until my green trashcans (the trash cans that are supposed to contain plant waste) are full, and then I have to stop. It doesn't take much brush to fill them completely.

So much to do.

Suburban Mania

It is easy to be drawn into the sickness that is "keeping up with the Joneses"