May 19, 2013

059.0: My darling.

Dear Linc,

Spencer gave me another talk. This time it was to reassure me.

It has not been a good week for my fandom. On General Hospital, one of my favorite actresses, Kristen Alderson, came back after an unplanned absence. (A bunch of contract drama. You know how it is.) But she’s not playing the same character anymore, and that character was one of my favorites. The new character is disappointingly irritating and so is the new storyline to which she’s attached. In fact, a lot of the young kids on the show are starting to irritate me, and I’m not just saying this as the bitter old man that I have been since taking my first breath in the world.

Usually, I think that the storylines of the younger kids are okay — for example, I like the character Molly, and the gal who plays her. I also like TJ, the guy who is her boyfriend, but I don’t like Molly and TJ together. However, I like the relationship between TJ and Shawn, the man who was appointed TJ’s guardian when TJ lost his parents. I do not like this kid Rafe, because even though it’s cool that he is the son of a vampire — don’t ask — the character himself is kind of a whiny brat, and I hate how he’s coming between TJ and Molly even though I don’t like TJ and Molly together. Are you following any of this? Haha. Probably not, but to me these are very critical distinctions.

I also don’t like the way they brought back Morgan. I hate the way he says “bro” all the time now. When this character was still a child, there was no indication he’d grow up to be such a douche. But I guess the show needed a “good brother, bad brother” pair, since Michael is, mostly, the good brother. I hope that Morgan is quickly redeemed, though, because this is getting old. Fast.

Where is your head these days, Linc? Is it a lady? Of course my head will always go there. I think it’s funny how there are so many fangirls who also wonder about this kind of thing. I guess the world is more accepting about this stuff when it comes to girls. One of my friends always makes me feel better about these letters, for example, because I know for a fact that she spends her spare time actively trying to marry a baseball player — not writing never-to-be-sents, Linc, but pushing herself through autograph lines and conveniently making herself available at bars where ballplayers are hanging out. Hell, even Ray knows where your condo in Seattle is! He has friggen driven by it. I don’t know how he knows — or why — but, um, apparently he does.

I am not that much of a fan — yes, there are these letters, but nothing more. I feel bad even having one too many of your bobbleheads on display. One is on the shelf, another is tucked away behind some books. I only have two. I don’t want my room to look like a creepy shrine.

To be honest, I save the true creepiness for my mind. When Ben Franklin advised against venery, he didn’t specify whether or not it was okay to have pleasurable sex with your spouse — which is what I fantasize about, really. People joke about me “needing to get laid,” and that stupid phrase is a whole separate sociological conversation altogether — but maybe they are right. In that I don’t merely need to get laid, however, but that I need a committed relationship, a family. Lasting love. And yes, to have regular sex with the other half of me, whomever that might be. I’m working on it — by working on myself first. It’s why I’m busting my butt going back to school.

When I saw the lopsided score from yesterday’s game, I knew that it was partly because the team overall has been having problems with this road trip but also because you started that game, and so the focus — and blame — would be on you. This was the second strike against my fanboy heart. The third was finding out that the new Star Trek movie made “only” $70M over the weekend. 

I’ll tell you the truth, Linc. As big of a fan I can be about certain things like Star Trek, if there isn’t some grand gesture involved, like a lot of people being a fan right along there with me, I can get bummed out pretty easily. I know it’s stupid to rely on that kind of validation, but when I read the first box office reports, I immediately whined to Spencer, “WHY ISN’T THE WHOLE WORLD WATCHING THIS MOVIE?!”

To which she said: “Box office profits never correlate to quality.”

That made me feel a little bit better. And it made me feel better to remind myself that in 2016, the Star Trek franchise will be 50-years old, so there is a moral obligation — moral, I tell you! — to release at least one more movie, even if might very well be the close of a singular trilogy.

Maybe they could spice it up by adding a sub-plot about a gay crew member with a low-level, even boring, job on board the Enterprise whose husband is in a senior and much more dangerous position. Heh.

Listening to this piece of music, I’m reminded of how wonderful Into Darkness was, and that Spencer is right. This piece of music belongs to a part of the movie that is like nothing else I’ve ever seen in Star Trek. The only way I can describe that part of the movie is to say that it feels like a coalescing of many other and different stories that I’ve ever loved — The Fault In Our Stars, Felicity, General Hospital, and yes, Star Trek itself — with seemingly overwhelming disparity between one another, until now. A lot of people saw Into Darkness, but even though I feel spoiled saying it, I wish so many people had watched Into Darkness that it could have broken through the $100M barrier. I will just have to content myself with knowing that it is at least a critical darling.

Joe

12:53pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZzzsLylMbOV9
(Notes: 2)
  
Filed under: Michael Giacchino Star Trek Into Darkness London Calling General Hospital Kristen Alderson Tim Lincecum San Francisco Giants baseball LGBTQ long reads 
May 6, 2013
sfgiants: Happy Birthday to the Greatest of All-Time - Willie Mays #SFGiants #SayHey

sfgiants:

Happy Birthday to the Greatest of All-Time - Willie Mays #SFGiants #SayHey

9:32am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZzzsLykNCdjw
(Notes: 255)
  
Filed under: Willie Mays San Francisco Giants baseball sports 
April 21, 2013

087.0: This one time.

Dear Linc,

Look at you, buddy — lasting six innings and leading a shutout! What is your song these days? I didn’t hear “Electric Feel” at the exhibition game that I went to. I like nostalgia but I don’t think it’s helpful to dwell in it; however, I think reaching back to “Electric Feel” is a good way to celebrate.

Not gonna lie: I didn’t listen to the game. I was tempted to, not just because you were starting, but because I was at home all day after I got home from my short shift and there was really no excuse to not have the radio on in the background — except that I really wanted to concentrate on reading The Brothers K. I spent all day catching up on it and I have made some crazy progress. It’s really good! Like one of the review blurbs says on the back of the book, it really is alternately hilarious and moving. I have been as stricken by breathless convulsions of amusement as I have been silenced into sobriety. There is a good chance that I will finish reading it by Wednesday.

Here’s another Not Gonna Lie moment: you’re my role model. I think I’ve written about this before — not specifically that you are my role model, but that one of the strange consequences of being a late-blooming baseball fan is the astonishment that one can still need role models even at a certain age. It must be some sort of hubris unique to “adulthood” — not necessarily adulthood in terms of maturity but by the sheer number of years alive — to assume that there comes a point in one’s life when one has no need for role models anymore. When one gets to be a certain age, why bother? Right? One already had role models from before, and no man is an island and all that, but in the end it’s you who got to where you are — right? Isn’t that how we adults usually think?

And yet.

In 2009, there was one 28-year old “kid” who suddenly found himself enamored and infatuated, and in the years that followed his crush became a mirror for his own search: he was still in need of a role model.

Maybe I was too hard on Ginuwine — sometimes a guy just can’t make it on his own. I’ll give Ginuwine that, although when he was singing his song, he probably wasn’t talking about role models, or other dudes. From his wife’s Wikipedia entry: “In February 2009, Ginuwine announced he has eight (!) children.” Parenthetical exclamation mine.

I just re-read the never-to-be-sent from yesterday and realized that it sounds like Sheryl Sandberg has displaced you as my role model. On the one hand, something about that notion strikes me as hilarious — a forty-something business powerhouse displacing an athlete barely out of his twenties. Not to mention the fact that I have lusted after the latter but not the former. Although, to be honest, I do keep a running list in my head of women I would like to hook up with if I ever did have to learn what it’s like to be with a woman. Perhaps not surprisingly to anyone who knows me, that list is populated with a slight majority of older women — Annette Bening, Captain Janeway “The Omega Directive” (her hair was especially hot in that episode), et al.

On the other hand, the displacement is not true. I just express my admiration in different ways. There may be some vague sexism involved. Concurrently with The Brothers K, I have been reading Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling and it too is just the best. However at work the other day I had to shelve a copy of Eddie Huang’s memoir and I realized something. Eddie Huang, if you don’t know, is one of these “food personalities” or whatever who are so popular today, like Rachael Ray and Gordon Ramsay. Food celebrities are, I think, the fault of the Food Network, but for me the original food personalities will always be Julia Child, Martha Stewart and, now that I think about it, that Yan Can Cook guy. (I have to admit, though, that I enjoy Gordon Ramsay’s bitchiness quite a bit.) Anyway, the packaging and marketing for Eddie Huang’s book struck me as interesting because it seems to me like it is being promoted not as a foodie memoir but a laugh-riot-good-time similar to Mindy Kaling’s book; when I realized this, I was… disgusted. I thought to myself that it’s not going to be as funny and awesome as Mindy’s book. And you know why I thought this, Linc? Because Eddie Huang’s a dude.

I haven’t been with another dude in a long time. Actualy, Linc, the only dude I’ve ever been with is Adae, who I think about from time to time. I deleted his cell phone number a long time ago but it wouldn’t be too difficult to get my hands on it again, and I could likely remember it if I think about it long enough. Actually, Linc, there’s also this: Adae’s the only person I’ve ever been with. I think that I’ve written about this before but it’s been on my mind a lot lately — not Adae, exactly, but just how I… well, how do I put this? Speaking of wells, there we go. That’s it. The well is dry, Linc. The well was filled exactly once in my whole life and now it’s been empty for so long that they had to put one of those huge slabs on top to close it up so that bird poop, rain, and mosquito carcasses don’t accumulate inside.

I don’t know what I’m waiting for. In this town, it’s easy enough for me to get, ahem, water. But I think the answer is in this recent experience: I was watching a dirty movie (which is easy enough to get online) and it did absolutely nothing for me. I think that I am now at a point in my life in which I have gotten over porn altogether but sometimes I do resort to it, with mixed results. The setting for this particular movie was an office and the, ahem, action took place on a copy machine — and you know what my takeaway from this movie was, Linc? Nothing that needed cleanup, that’s for sure. Instead, my takeaway was, That copy machine was never going to be used for actual copying.

Sometimes it’s very frustrating to have reached the conclusion that both porn and casual sex are not the ways that I want to fulfill the very human needs that I have. Like most guys, I started watching porn as a teenager; as for casual sex, well, like I said, I’ve only done that the one time— yet as solutions to my problem, both leave me exhausted to a degree of boredom. This is frustrating because I want something meaningful. I want to have sex with my husband and only my husband, and I don’t know if he’s out there. Do you have any leads on this, Linc? I know you know a lot of people. There must be at least one gay guy in the bunch. And don’t toy with me by doing that weird macho buddy-buddy thing guys like to do by jokingly offering up one of their straight friends as a gay possibility. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Everyone was making a big deal about how your start fell on 4/20; I didn’t say anything because, well, I knew that everyone else would. And when last night’s game turned out the way that it did, everyone was making a big deal about it all over again. But who knows? In one of the many daydreams I have had about finally meeting you, you confess to me that although you are not the big pothead that your fanbase chatters on and on about, you admit that you do spend sometimes inordinate amounts of your free time toking up. I am not sure how I would react to this. I would probably laugh. (The imaginary conversation goes something like this with you saying: “I’m afraid I do enjoy getting high quite a bit, Joe.” Beats me if you even talk like that.)

It took a while to get home from work yesterday. I happen to live off of the train line that goes by Golden Gate Park and Haight-Ashbury, which as everyone who knows about these things knows are the two prime spots that one wants to go to when one wants to celebrate 4/20. It was annoying to have to wait so long for a train that had space. It was annoying that so many of those packed trains were packed with folks who don’t even live here and were just descending here for one day of mayhem and would leave behind a cloud of marijuana and unpaid taxes. But my annoyance wasn’t really of the #getoffmylawn variety. Certainly, a lot of these folks were in their early twenties or younger and, to tell you the truth, the real annoyance was in seeing that many of them constitute a reflection of myself: really, that used to be me. Not necessarily getting high (which I’ve done, but never in such a massively communal way, and I don’t remember ever “celebrating” 4/20). But the youthful carelessness of boarding a crowded train and saying and doing things without regard for everyone else, of generally not having a care in the world — I imagined most of these kids had little to worry about beyond their classes, and that this was their one day of fun, and that my life used to be that way, too. I’m beginning to realize that city life is for the young. This isn’t a bad thing. I am not as opposed to moving out of the city as I used to be. I don’t see myself moving anytime soon, but if I do, it will be okay.

Joe

8:46am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZzzsLyjCfgeY
Filed under: Electric Feel MGMT LGBTQ Tim Lincecum San Francisco Giants baseball Long Reads Sheryl Sandberg Captain Janeway Kate Mulgrew Annette Bening Mindy Kaling Eddie Huang Yan Can Cook Gordon Ramsay Rachael Ray Martha Stewart Julia Child 
April 20, 2013

088.0: The brothers.

Dear Linc,

Um, that was an accident.

What I mean is this: this morning, I had just gotten out of the shower. I was putting the finishing touches on putting on my face — yes, besides genetics, there’s a whole regimen involved with looking this young — when I sat down at my computer to pass the time away while my face, you know, also sat with all the stuff that I had applied to it. Also, I was having a lazy, idle moment, and I wanted to browse the web just a short while longer before I needed to get the rest of the day started.

I hit some random button on my keyboard to switch off the screen saver; it turns out that the last thing I was looking at on the web was Facebook, which I didn’t click off before taking my shower.

So, there’s my Facebook news feed, and it’s the first thing that I see when the screensaver goes away — and then suddenly on the news feed a new item materializes from your Facebook page. It’s one of those parenthetical posts that is accompanied by the attribution “Posted By Team Lincecum.” (Assuming that you, yourself, are not involved in this function of your promotion, I have not discerned whether or not there is a pattern or otherwise some methodology involved with what constitutes a “Team Lincecum” post and what does not.) The posting is a link to an article about how the Giants could gain some ground in their shaky season performance thus far because of this series against the Padres, who have, it seems, not been doing well thus far this season. The link was accompanied by the comment: “Tim takes the hill today against the Padres!”

I hit ‘Like’.

Just like that. It took me all of a handful of seconds to read the comment and what the link was about (without actually clicking on the link) and then, nearly within the same breath, I clicked on ‘Like’.

It made me crack up, at myself.

That posting had been published only “a few seconds ago” according to Facebook’s own time stamp and already I had hit ‘Like’!

I felt vaguely stalkerish and, still chuckling to myself, I sheepishly muttered, “That was an accident,” as if I had to explain to someone my seemingly instinctual Facebook-liking of a post from your page — and then, still embarrassed, I thought about un-Liking it. I started moving the cursor over to ‘Unlike’ and then… changed my mind because I thought, What the hell, who cares? No one will know unless I say anything, which, I suppose, I now am in this-never-to-be-sent.

It’s going to be four years since I became a baseball fan and there are still many dynamics about this plane of reality I am trying to understand. That’s why I keep making what Ray calls mistakes, like listening to baseball gossip that doesn’t really have anything to do with baseball itself. That’s why I am still reading lots of books about baseball. When something is interesting to me, I let it pull me into its orbit; willingly, I follow its energy. In 2009, I decamped from my plane of reality at that time and started to follow baseball. I’m still following.

I work a short shift today and I have been tempted to see if I can score a cheap seat at your start tonight. But I have this enormous mountain of laundry to do and I’m about to run out of underwear. Also, I have to read The Brothers K by David James Duncan for a book club meeting on Wednesday night. I have had two friggin months to read this book, which is so dense that the book club leader let us all skip last month’s meeting so we could have more time to read. For two reasons I am not going to say where in the book I am because 1) I lobbied hard for this to be the book selection that opened our spring season, so it’s a little unfortunate and disappointing that I am so behind as I am on a book that I was initially very passionate about and 2) I think they sometimes read these never-to-be-sents.

To tell you the truth, I’ve kind of lost the will and the rush to go through The Brothers K, but I am sure that everything will be OK when I pick it up again. I am sometimes stubborn like that in how it takes me a while to do something that I ought to be doing anyway, and then when I finally do the thing, it turns out that I really wanted to be doing it all along. Anyway, finishing The Brothers K will at least liberate me to continue along my reading queue. I really want to get started on Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. I’m still following baseball, but now the new thing to which I have let myself be pulled along for the ride is the world of business, for which I am going back to school. One of the methods I am employing to motivate myself is the cheesy but nevertheless tried and true method of seeing How Others Do It. I’m even going to hang up a Sheryl Sandberg poster in my room — no, really, there is such a thing. We have this really great-quality promotional poster in the store and I have already asked our merchandising supervisor if I can have it when we’re done displaying it.

Probably you are wondering why of all people I want to have an enormous photo of Sheryl Sandberg on my wall. (By comparison, one of your bobbleheads is displayed, prominently, on the bookshelf — in a corner — and another of your bobbleheads is tucked away, because of convenience or lack of space or laziness, behind some books.) For starters, I don’t know much about her — other than that she seems very cool. They say that she is second-in-command, after only Mark Zuckerberg, at Facebook. She also has kids — it just seems awesome and impressive to me that she is such an important business leader and that she is a family woman, and I want to read about how she does it. Her book is aimed mostly at women but one of the stereotypes about us gay men that is nevertheless true is that women have been better role models, at least for me. Look, I love Pop, but the first people in life that I looked up to as role models were Ma and Grandma. Pop was and is a hard worker but I didn’t really know him in those days. Ma and Grandma were the ones most often in my life. I looked to Ma as a role model because of how hard she worked in her professional life, and I looked to Grandma as role model because of the hard work that she took on with family life in terms of helping raise me and helping Pop and Ma keep house and home. From there, it all spiraled — the first fan letter that I ever sent was when I was, like, six or seven, and it was to Chelsea Clinton. (All right, I was really only writing to her to get to Socks, but that’s beside the point.)

Good luck with your start tonight, Timmy! (Yes, I like to sometimes cross over the hazy patina that divides these never-to-be-sents between an imaginary boyfriend and the actual person from whom he is derived.) After four years, to tell you the truth, my fandom for you has shifted from what was at first the simultaneous and breathless admiration for your athletic ability and hotness. I never truly believed that we would ever meet, but if we did, it would be very interesting to be your brother. I truly wonder what it would be like to shake your hand and discuss these letters. I also still wonder what it would be like to kiss you. Ew, well.. thank goodness that we’re not actual brothers.

Joe

8:43am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZzzsLyj7TCkH
Filed under: LGBTQ long reads Tim Lincecum The Brothers K David James Duncan lit Bruno Mars Just the Way You Are The Piano Guys baseball San Francisco Giants Sheryl Sandberg Chelsea Clinton Socks the cat 
April 19, 2013

089.0: Here come the dreams of you and me.

Dear Linc,

Leave it to Tegan and Sara to come up with a fun song about romance — none of this pour the wine and you made me grow up heart-on-sleeve nonsense that men are so good at. Relax, fellas. Can’t you just let your hair down every once in a while?

Also, I really like the two songs that I referenced up there just now, but the one by Ginuwine has always struck me as a little troubling — really, man? You couldn’t grow up all by yourself? I think there’s a character deficiency there that we’re conveniently overlooking. When it comes to relationships, I believe in equal opportunity. I suspect that when I was growing up, Pop might have had some personal issues with Ma being the breadwinner, but that’s just the way it turned out: her career went one way, his career went another way, and both of them had good careers but Ma’s was (and still is) crazy successful. If Pop had, you know, manly man issues about this, then he never communicated that to me — although, to tell you the truth, I wonder how many of the arguments that they had about money were less about the money and were more about who was wearing the pants in the family.

Me? I’m the kind of guy who will always need a man. I understand men, Linc. I know they like to be needed, and I am the kind of guy who will always make a man feel needed. (Interpret that as you will, but for the purpose of this never-to-be-sent, I’m referring to emotional needs, dork.)  I’m independent and all but I’m also operating as an incomplete whole here. You know what I’m saying? When I finally meet the right guy, he’s going to be my other half, and he should expect that I will always need him. Conversely, he should also expect that I’m my own person with my own hopes and dreams and goals — probably he should expect to have a little Hillary Clinton thrown in. No, make that a lot of Hillary Clinton (which, I should emphasize, is not a license for him to go to town with all the Monica Lewinskys of the world — I am the first and last Hillary and Monica that my husband will ever, ever be with. You can quote me on that.)

This morning this unattached Clinton wannabe had the most hideous senior moment ever. I was in the shower and suddenly I was stricken with the fear that I hadn’t washed my body. I was washing my face, which is the last step of my showering regimen, and I stopped cold (under the hot shower, thankfully) because it seemed that I had gone from washing my hair to washing my face without washing my body. I had to do a double take at the bottle of body wash to remind myself whether or not I had actually used it. In the end, I decided that yes, I had washed my body, but so quickly that it seemed like an afterthought. (I used to take much inefficiently longer showers until I realized that, number one, it’s hell on both the environment and the water bill and, B, it’s inconsiderate to roommates if you happen to live with roommates.)

Speaking of relaxing, I should really take my own advice and do just that — at least when it comes to baseball. I’ve already calmed down about worrying about whether or not you’re going to be playing for us next season because, well, quite frankly we still have to get through this season. (I had to take a step back and breathe a little before I finally came to that conclusion — but I did.) I’m also dealing more calmly and reasonably with the road trip that I will probably keep referring to as the Midwestern Drama or something not-very-witty like that. After all, it’s only April.

Tonight is the first night of Orange Friday in the 2013 season and boy do I wish that I could go! But I’m hanging out with Spencer, Clara, and the gang at this crazy triple feature playing at the Castro Theatre. Have you ever hung out in the Castro, Linc? You should try it sometime. Might give some of us Tegan and Sara-types a thrill…

Joe 

7:58am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZzzsLyj2Ob4r
Filed under: Tegan and Sara - Closer LGBTQ San Francisco Giants Tim Lincecum Boyz II Men Ginuwine Hillary Clinton 
April 18, 2013

090.0: The classics.

Dear Linc,

Spencer and I were recently talking about Michael Fassbender because apparently he dated Nicole Beharie, the actress who plays Rachel Robinson in 42. I told Clara that for a while it seemed like Michael Fassbender was the hottest guy to come since Robert Downey, Jr.

“I never got into him,” I confessed. “Maybe I though he was kind of hot after X-Men: First Class. And then, I dunno, that was it.”

“Well, I admit that I fell into the craze,” Spencer began, “until the domestic violence rumors started to come out.”

“Hm,” I said with a chuckle. Sensing that something snarky or otherwise tangential was about to emerge, Spencer poked me.

“What?” she asked.

“I hope Timmy’s not a wifebeater,” I said.

Spencer smirked at that. “I doubt that. But you probably think he looks good in the shirt, huh?”

My mind drifted away for a few moments.

“Besides, I hear he goes from girl to girl a lot,” Spencer said. “He’ll probably end up a confirmed bachelor.”

Suddenly, we both cracked up as we realized we were thinking the same thing.

“Funny how that used to be code for ‘gay’,” Spencer said, giving voice to our shared thought.

I wonder if you are still paired up with that blonde who was with you during the World Series. I have not kept up with the latest gossip. That’s not the pertinent baseball news that I should be keeping up with anyway. Ray’s always giving me a hard time about that. He does have a point. There are bigger fish to fry. Last night, I walked into the corner market down the street and they happened to be showing the game right when the Brewers won. I’m told by Selma’s fiancé — they both live in Wisconsin — that these last two games have been shocking because the Brewers have not been doing so well so far. When I think about how you guys barely escaped the Cubs — who barely escapes the Cubs?! — that’s where I start to smell fried fish.

* * *



I guess it’s OK to admit this dream now because a long time has passed since I first dreamed it; maybe it’s time to let it go and have someone else have a go at it.

One of my dreams about my dream wedding proposal takes place at the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library, downtown. A towering staircase is the centerpiece of the beaux arts edifice at the centrality of the Market and Grove Street borderlands. In my daydream, I would be spending a casual afternoon lazily traipsing betwixt the stacks with my beloved, who had wandered off some place and I didn’t care, not because I didn’t care about him, but because I cared enough to know that he was all right doing his own thing and I was all right doing mine. In this daydream, I never seem to know what kind of book I’m looking for; what I do know for sure is that I’m just very glad to be in one of my favorite places in the world, with one of my favorite people.

Suddenly, I hear violins in the distance. This provokes in me a smile but I make no other reaction other than to tilt my head toward the music, which at this point seems far away but close enough for me to realize how out of tune it is. The reason why I don’t initially make an effort to move from the shelf I am standing in front of is because weird things happen all the time at the main branch, which is located in what is politically marketed as a “developing corridor,” if you get what I mean. One of the main branch’s neighbors is a dingy Burger King; down the street, panhandlers hawk stolen wares like DVDs, clothes, and books that were probably lifted from even my own store; conversely, the Orpheum is just around the corner, and you can skip to the Asian Art Museum and City Hall. (I haven’t gone skipping in a very long time, but it’s something nice to think about.)

I’m about to pull a book that catches my eye when the violins start to come together as an actual piece — at last, music is being played. A concert, maybe? I am provoked by just enough curiosity that I abandon the book and, still without much urgency — this is a lazy afternoon, after all — I wander over to the nearest railing and peer over it at the two floors down to the atrium where I suspect the music is playing.

And there he is: my wandering boyfriend, flanked by a quartet, staring up at me with a bouquet of roses in his hands.

My first thought is that, like skipping, I think that the idea of flowers I nice but that I don’t actually like flowers because of how, one time a long time ago, I had heard that the flowering of a plant is actually the final stage of its life cycle. When a plant gets to be that beautiful, that means it is dying. I don’t know if this is entirely true, and even with Google and Wikipedia at our fingertips, I have not bothered to do more research. So, the notion has stuck.

But the roses, and the fact that my boyfriend is holding them, are still undeniably breathtaking. I don’t know what’s going on. Surging from curiosity and what feels like a vague panic, I hustle over to the nearest flight of stairs and then make my way downward. I have to hold onto the railing because I am both too excited and naturally clumsy — regardless of whether or not a marriage proposal is indeed unfolding, I might have tumbled down the stairs anyway.

Which I very nearly do because as I am rounding the corner down to the final flight of stairs, there he is coming up for me with those roses. For a moment the sight of him strikes me as hilarious because the combination of his modest height, the roses partially obscuring his face, and the fact that he is on a lower flight of stairs makes it look like he his kind of hiding. Maybe this is hide and seek. I have been looking for him my whole life. The quarter is playing Peter Gabriel’s version of “The Book of Love.”

This daydream is inspired by a scene from Shall We Dance. My friends who are film purists like to make fun of me because they all prefer the Japanese original from which that movie is made. It is not especially sophisticated to think it is a classic movie moment when Richard Gere goes up a department store escalator in a tuxedo to give Susan Sarandon flowers. I have had the same argument before with friends who can’t understand why I like the Sydney Pollack version of Sabrina so much. I don’t mean to rag on the source material, which I certainly consider a classic, but unlike Audrey Hepburn’s Sabrina, at least Julia Ormond’s Sabrina doesn’t friggin try to gas herself in the garage. And Sydney Pollack has a great sense of humor: I like when Greg Kinnear is raced to the ER for sitting on wine glasses; or when Julia Ormond takes a fashion assistant job in Paris and one of her menial tasks is to hunt for a missing contact lens — one lens! Remember, this is pre-Devil Wears Prada.

So, my movie tastes are not as classic as some would approve of. But I am old-fashioned. I still care about the marriage proposal. I want the wedding to be a celebration filled with family and friends and none of the excess. As for the institution of marriage, I believe in being in it for the long haul — yes, in sickness and in health, etc. Even though I have yet to be in a long-term pairing, I still know that marriage isn’t always about roses and Peter Gabriel covers. I know that love is always there even when it is covered up by anger or when one or the other spouse feels like they are drifting away. I know that love can be flowers and songs, that it can be a feeling and a moment, but I also know that love is hard work. There is room for all of those things in love and when you are in love. And don’t we always feel better when we know we’ve worked for something?

Joe

12:13pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZzzsLyi_Xk-Z
Filed under: LGBTQ OTP Long Reads Peter Gabriel The Book of Love Sabrina Shall We Dance San Francisco Public Library marriage equality wedding proposal weddings Michael Fassbender Nicole Beharie 42 Tim Lincecum baseball San Francisco Giants 
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