May 2004 Archives
We woke up today anchored off the coast of Martha's Vineyard at a place called Oaks Bluff along the southern part of the island. As it was our first excursion day off the boat and non of us had ever been to MV, we were pretty excited but after walking around the little town square for an hour, using the word "quaint" over and over, it became somewhat less interesting than anything going on back on the ship so we returned and spent the rest of the afternoon laying by the indoor pool and reading. As booze is as easy to get here as writing your name and room number down, lets just say the afternoon was lubricated sufficiently.
We're back out to sea right now, plodding along along back up the East Coast towards our next port of call, Portland, Maine, tomorrow. We're suppose to be renting a car and driving down out of Portland to some gay mecca called Alqonquit tomorrow morning but as we're watching the weather maps, it looks like all the storms that have pummeled the mid-West and points further east is getting ready to crash on down into New England tonight so who knows. Of course the one thing I wanted to do was hook up with J.Go and kidnapped him by putting him in my backpack and bringing him on board because God knows besides Jeff, myself, and Jeff's parents, the fabulous and fun factor is a minimum and if anyone knows how to whip it up, it's J.Go. Unfortunately, we're not going to get a chance to blog-up because of our out of town excursion.
We did hook up with the front desk manager for dinner last night and she gave us the scoop that all the ship fun is really down in the "below decks" with the staff and crew who have two of their own bars and play areas. Of course we're not allowed down there but we're working on it. We pumped her all during dinner for the stories behind the on-board morgue, inter-crew intrique, and other shananigan's which she was more then happy to ply us with. She pulled Jeff and myself aside over dessert and thanked us for being under 35 since this cruise is notoriously over 83. We just accepted the compliment and decided to let the fact that Jeff is a wee-bit over 35 ride. We're hoping to stay awake past 11pm tonight so we can go up to the Crow's Nest Bar and hang with the musical cast though of course Mondays are country-western line dancing. Now if Gatsby's Ghost were here, I know some cast member's who'd be all up in his business and stuff, but since he's not and we are, we're thinking maybe going to bed early and hitting the hang-out tomorrow. Hehehehe, who are we kidding? Everyone knows we're in bed by 10pm, regardless.
I've never been ANYPLACE with as little (as in NONE) eye-candy as there is here. I mean, not even in a fleshy bear-daddy way. It's desert as far as the eye can see, dammit.
Who knew the Rupublican Love Boat had internet access...for a fee, of course, but still. Now I can keep everyone caught up in all my naps and drinks while at sea.
This is our first full day of cruising having left Boston Harbor last evening, sailing through the night and into Martha's Vineyard tomorrow for our first excursion. We've all gotten the eating thing down, as in, you can eat 24-hours a day on the boat without too much trouble but of course no has heard of the Atkin's Diet here so I'm off the wagon for a week.
As we were warned, the average age of the passengers hovers in the post-retirement, lets-re-elect-Bush, range and have cruised steadily over the last few years. But we've met some nice people, though Jeff and I are retracting our want of being The Gays for the cruise because it's just too much effort to get people to buy into our fabulousness. And quite surprisingly, barring some of the staff and maybe one of musical guys last night, we're the only gays on board. Hilarity ensues. And being that it's only 11am and I've burned through my daily ration at the casino, it looks like there will be a lot of alternative activities today.
Speaking of alternative activities: Funny story#1. Jeff and I were having hot monkey love out on our balcony yesterday (more fun that busting a bottle off the stern) after we got into the open ocean only to have Coast Guard helicopter buzz the side of the ship, our side of the ship, as luck would have it and boy, I'm sure they were as suprised as we were. I had to grab Jeff's head and mumble to him to be very still, as if somehow that either made us invisable to the coast guard guys looking out there window at us or made them think there was some really good sculpture being displayed on the port-side Navigation Deck on one of the balconies. I'm waiting for Julie McCoy, our ship's cruise director (who has a set of kankles that would trip a normal person), to make a personal visit to State Room 49 asking us to refrain from putting spooge in the ocean. Will do, Julie...now let's talk about those elephant legs of yours.
Safely arrived in Boston after a lovely trip on I-84 and the Mass Turnpike. You would think Boston would have imploded by the stream of people and cars leaving the city as we were traveling in. Now we're out to find a greasy spoon for dinner and head over to some place called Nathanail Fall or Thanial Tall or some such business. Our boat leaves tomorrow afternoon. I forgot how much I love a guy with a true Boston accent.
The highlight of the trip so far has been watching Jeff's mom get high off her first Ativan(tm) to get her through the commute. It was the most uninvolved episode of back-seat driving I've ever witnessed.
After waiting and waiting for an eternity, I'm officially on vacation today for the next two weeks. As if the timing couldn't be better, I'm also on a two week break between classes at school which makes the time that much sweeter. Because for the last few years we've thrown all our vacation energy and moolah towards the house, this year Jeff and I are going with his parents on a cruise up the East Coast to Halifax, Nova Scotia and St. John. We're all a-skitter about it.
The cruise was advertised as, "If you like all-night dancing and the singles scene then this cruise isn't for you, but if you like ball-room dancing and bridge, then come aboard!!!" Seriously. Three exclamation points as if to underscore the AWESOME fun of ball-room dancing and bridge. Thankfully there will be casinos out of port. We know going in the average age of the passengers is somewhat beyond honkin’ old and that we're very likely to be the youngest ones on board...and undoubtedly the gayest, which is fine because you know, everyone likes the gays so we're setting out to be the most popular "fella's" on the boat this time. We're hoping some of the people go home to their families and mention they met the nicest boys on the boat thereby allowing Jeff and me to do our small part in winning over the morals of mainstream, Middle America without really having to go get married as a political statement…which we’re not, even though we’re going to trolling through Boston. Thanks Mit!!!
Of course even though it's Memorial Day weekend and June is almost here (see: Summer), because we're going north into Canada country, it's going to be a chilly 10-degrees celcius (F = [1.8888 x C] + 32), meaning I'm packing sweaters, if it can be believed while the "Crack Whore" t-shirt I received as a gift from a friend who picked one up at "Jerry Springer: The Opera" in London is being left behind as I'm trying to tone down that rah-rah-rah-party boy image. AS IF. That's an "as if" as in, "AS IF I WAS EVER THE KIND OF PARTY BOY WHO COULD WHERE A CRACK WHORE T-SHIRT." No need to stroke out the senior citizens this go-round, I think.
Anyway, I'm going to try to film kibbles-n-bits of the trip to splice together one of those shorty movies for the website that all the cool kids are doing these days so we'll see. In the meantime, all bloggers passing through our verdant hamlet this week are welcome to use the hot-tub as it'll just be sitting there begging for bodies. Just remember, please no spooge in the tub and you KNOW what I’m sayin’; that's why we're having the deck built up around it. Enjoy.
There’s been a large contingent of my co-workers, all women I adore, who have recently been reiterating their belief Jeff and I should really, REALLY think about having a child. We’d be so good and loving and blahbiddy, blah, blah, blah. They just don’t get the meaning of, “we’re selfish, SELFISH bastards” and what that would mean for some poor, unsuspecting child. We ARE selfish in sort of a not-for-parenting kind of way but I appreciate the vote of confidence from the gals. My real response, after the selfish admission, was that we have our kitties and as seriously wrong as it is, they’re the loves of our lives. I’m talking SERIOUS.
This is how serious. Jeff and I are taking a cruise up the East Coast to Nova Scotia next week with his parents (which is a whole other post from the boat, I hope), and leaving the kitties for the longest we’ve ever been apart. On the drive home from work tonight, I turned to Jeff and finally had to admit I was about an inch away from being physically sick at the thought of our kitties being left by themselves for a week. It doesn’t make it better that we have the sweetest local lady coming in every day who is allergic to cats, but who loves our dears so much that she’s willing to spend large amounts of time with them to keep them company. It only serves to show how wrongly attached we are to Tink and Ding but as God is my witness, I could care less. I’m completely, hopelessly the person I always made fun of my Mom over. I’m a crazy cat person. So in a way, we’re not completely, hell-bound selfish because the love of our little ones, but still, selfish in a, “let’s not put the safety locks on the hot-tub cover because we don’t have to because there aren’t any kids around” sort of way. I can live with it.
Though I don't have it posted anywhere on the site, I know I've talked about it over and over and over again about my favorite movie, “Bladerunner”. I'm a sci-fi geek of sorts though I can never stand up to the comparisons to the die-hard Trekkies and trekkers. I appreciate a good sci-fi tale for the science and whiz-bang of the gadgetry but that's about as far as it goes. That's why "Bladerunner" has always been so much more to me. Film noir at its very best and I'll go out on a limb to say that there has not been a better sci-fi movie made before or after. "2001" comes close, of course, but really what other movie can reach out and touch someone on so many different, deeper levels and wrestle with the questions of mortality and reality and humanity and do it with the most amazing music score ever? All that in one perfect film, seriously.
I can tell you without question my two favorite categories of movies: drag queen movies and existential science fiction. The newest member of the later category is “Solaris”. I finally just saw it and while not as good as "Bladerunner" (because nothing ever can be), it had all the elements I love in existential sci-fi: moodiness, melancholy, noirish cinematography, hosts of challenging, difficult questions about our lives and their meanings and what comes after. The music adds just the right tone to the movie as does the ethereally illuminated shots of the planet, Solaris. What is it? Is it alive? Why does it call the dead back?
Honestly, I know any movie that talks about bringing the return of the dead perks me up because it's not to hard for my imagination to start romping around and saying "what if". It didn't take me long at all to feel the impact of imagining myself on the orbiting ship around Solaris and waking up to find my Mom there and not caring why or how but just taking in the shear relief of it and the respite from the longing and grief.
I'm a firm, die-hard believer in the cliché that the easiest way to change a room around is to repaint it. I am living proof of this particular assertion because Jeff and I have repainted our bedroom now three times in the three years of owning our home. The first time was to tear down some horrible blue-delft-ish wall paper thoughtless left by the previous owners which we stripped, swearing to God and all applicable deities that we'd both be buried and rotting before we even considered wall paper as a interior decorating option. Of course the carpet was blue and we were pretty limited in our color palette so we painted the walls a medium bluish color and the already-painted trim white. Well, it was like sleeping in a Prozac haze...it was so damn HAPPY and BLUE. I hated it immediately and started picking away at Jeff and his annoying resolve to change it over to something more appropriate to my growing morose, complex thinking-feeling cycle. Either I'm a pro or just too fucking annoying after awhile because Jeff finally consented to my next hair-brained scheme: darken the walls to a dusk blue and paint the trim chocolate brown to imitate that nature wood look. In all fairness, I'd actually suggested either stripping and staining the existing trim or putting up new but in any relationship there is compromise and Jeff made it clear that there was no shittin' way he was stripping anything at any time so we settled on toning the trim down with dark brown and leaving it at that. Jeff's beef with my design sense is that I always want to go darker in a room (which is true) and for Jeff, anything beyond beige is a real challenge for him so I have to continually remind myself that any room that isn't beige or lighter is a win for me.
So the bedroom was lovely for a year in a rich deep-ocean blue and we had pleasing Lorenco prints on the wall to compliment our developing tastes. Then I became bored again and issued the command: it was time to toss out the gross bedroom carpet and get something new which of course opened all kinds of questions regarding color. We decided to move away from blue and while I was whole-heartedly negotiating and advocating for a more modern, sophisticated palette in mushroom and moss with stained trim (because I can beat a dead horse just about better than anyone I know), Jeff was whole-heartedly negotiating and advocating for beige, beige, beige which then evolved into some horrible orangey-beige which I’ve come to know as the color puce. I was obviously not being heard loud enough and over the course of several weeks, the growing pile of paint chips from Lowe’s could be easily separated into the brownish-greens or the imminently-dying skin tone colors of yellow and beige. Every time I thought I had him tricked into one of my paint chips, he’s end up “losing it” only to find one of his he really liked. It was obvious there was no middle ground and so, quite reasonably, instead of canceling the bedroom project, we just ignored the wall-color situation and ordered the carpet. We could both agree on a mottled brown carpet because in the back of both our minds, it was going to match whichever color group won out in the final decision. We’re just that ding-dang stupid sometimes.
Fast forward a few weeks and I’ve been so worn down over the color of the bedroom, I throw some cockamamie suggestion about faux-finishing one whole wall in the bedroom to offset the bleak, boring beige color I might agree too and Jeff goes for it. I’ve never faux’ed anything in my LIFE but we buy a book and find a style we like and actually agree on the colors (though in my mind, I’m changing the colors several shades darker) and then it’s today and we’re painting. The faux’ed wall now looks like the simmering, foggy dusk of Armageddon, all blazing reddish-oranges and yellows and it actually works well with the darkish, beige walls of the bedroom, otherwise know as The Great Compromise of 2004. Of course as soon as we were done, I knew that, should we ever sell the house, the new buyers will come up and see the bedroom and think we have the worst taste in decorating and color-sense in the history of Homo-dom but I’m actually OK with that; the rite of passage for any new home owner is to bad-mouth the previous owner’s and their amazing lack of taste.
The new deal after the carpet arrives in June is that we’re now officially done with the bedroom for years and years. I believe Jeff tried to get me to agree to 2010 which of course is ridiculous but I find that it’s better just to not mentioning my bubbling cauldron of home decorating plans for a while and then surprise him when he least expects it. I’m just saying, I can love my art as much as the next guy but I’m the FIRST one to get really tired of it and faux-finished walls is about as timeless as parachute pants and sequined gloves as far as I’m concerned.
The deep peacock-blue flecks of stone don't really show unless you're in the right light and the ivy crawling over the sides isn't easy to see in the shot, but this is the stone for my Mom. It's hard to get a good sense of the stone but it finally got ordered and finally got delievered. There was drama at the end of the week last week as to whether it would or not, but it did and it was perfect.
The first name only was sort of a nod to Mom's last request since she'd gone through so many married names, the last time she became single, she comtemplated just going by her first name. For the first time in all her years of crazy ideas, I thought it was SO perfect. So I thought it would be fun to honor that wish and only put her name on the front. Of course, to appease the more traditional family, I had the last name inscribed on the back which faces the entrace to the cemetary but I think my brothers and I did OK by her this one last time.
