As if in answer to my complaint, yesterday, that my sister was having all the fun, mother nature decided fair’s fair at about 11:30 last night.
See that star? Yeah, that’s roughly where my house is.
Now lest ye be worried, this was only a 3.6. Hardly more than a little joy ride!
Weeeeeee!!!!
A few minutes before 11:00 this morning, I’m sitting at my desk doing my daily Fish Wrangler tournament and pretending to work, counting down the minutes until I can leave. I’ll go to the gym, but everyone thinks I’m going to my Therapist (or to my ambiguous bi-tuesday-ly appointment) (Deb is off this month.) Suddenly I receive a text message from my sister who lives in Albany, New York.
“I think we just had an earthquake. How do I find out?”
I refer her to USGS.gov which is where I always go when I think there’s been an earthquake. If you look at the map of the US on that website you’ll see literally hundreds of little colored dots all along the west coast. Depending on the week you might see one or two dots in other parts of the country. (And honestly? The vast majority of those dots on the west coast went unnoticed.)
Anyway, I refer her and then I go to look for myself. Before I even get that far, I see a breaking news e-mail from MSNBC saying “Pentagon and the Capital Evacuated After Apparent Earthquake.” I click on it and sure enough, 5.8 earthquake in Virginia.
I text my sister back:
“5.8 Earthquake in Virginia. You have all the fun. :)”
I start reading the stories, because as we know by now, disaster and mayhem is kind of my thing, (hey did you see that outdoor concert stage collapse?!?) but there wasn’t much to it. The earthquake was shallow so it was felt over a wide area.
I report to my co-workers on this unusual event. Unusual, to us, in that it happened on the other side of the country. Not long after that, K tells me that a friend of hers, who used to live here, but now lives in Philadelphia felt the earthquakes as well. The friend works with another California native and the two sit and watch as their co-workers decry the end of the world…
Later, K and I have this exchange:
K: “OMG! Fox news had a new crawl on ‘No tsunami expected after east coast earthquake.’ Really?”
Me: “Of course! Tsunami’s are all the rage.”
K: “It’s the new black?”
Me: “Tsunami’s are the new black. That’s what I’m going to call my book. I’m sure I won’t get in any trouble with Jen Lancaster.”
And then:
K: “They are cancelling schools tomorrow back east, now.”
Me: “It’s the end of the world you know. Nobody want’s to be in school during Armageddon.”
Later, I discover that in spite of my making light of the situation, there was indeed some devastation back east; showing here:
Photo found here.
Excuse me while I briefly get political here. Someone I don’t know was retreated by Wil Wheaton on twitter today when he wrote:
@markos god is punishing VA for not allowing gay marriage. RT by @wilw
It’s really only funny because, let’s face it. If this had happened in Iowa, Pat Robertson would be saying “God is punishing Iowa for allowing gay marriage.”
I wonder if the rest of the country knows, California is pointing and laughing at them right now?
I’ve struggled greatly with how and whether to write this. I’m still not entirely sure what to say. And I’m truly, if unrealistically concerned that somehow, this will be the post that I write that will be seen by more than the 6 or 8 people who usually read my blog and that somehow my words will be misconstrued as something more than they are.
By now we all know about the number of teens who have committed suicide recently after having been torturously bullied by their classmates for being, or being perceived to be, gay. Most of you are probably aware of the “It Gets Better” campaign and the numerous videos that have been made of people, some in a position to know, some not, telling the youth of this world that life gets better and that they have so much to look forward to and that if they’ll just stick it out until they graduate they can have the life they want, free from bullying and torment, free to live openly and proudly and freely as who or what they determine for themselves that they are.
To that I say, “Don’t bet on it!”
My story is about more than just being a gay kid. Hell, I didn’t even know I was a gay kid! Nevertheless, I was bullied and beaten and name-called; abused by my classmates with words I prefer not to use, even as an example. I didn’t know why they would call me that and I wondered what they thought they saw in me that I didn’t think I saw in myself that would prompt them to be so hurtful.
But it was more. I wasn’t just called names because they perceived me to be gay. I was tormented for many reasons. And when I went home after school into what was supposed to be a safe place of refuge, I was tormented for entirely different reasons in new and terrible ways. I was raised by a single mother. While she was at work, I was at home alone with my older siblings, a brother five years older and a sister three years older. My brother was abusive; he once broke my nose over the use of an alarm clock… MY alarm clock, that I bought, with MY own money. That was the worst, but he abused me often, physically and emotionally.
What my mother did was worse. In the case of all three of her children she “disciplined” us into submission so that long before hitting our teens, or even our “tweens” to use a modern term, there was no longer a need for “discipline.” So instead of physical abuse, I suffered emotional abuse; bullying of its own kind. I wanted to be close to her, she told me I was “in the way”. I wanted to talk to her, she turned up the volume on the television. I told her I was horribly depressed, she told me I wasn’t and “never say that again.” I told her I didn’t have any friends and I was miserable, she told me “Well that’s your problem, isn’t it?”
I was raised in the “Bible Belt” of America where there’s a church on every street corner and if you’re politics aren’t ultra-conservative, you’re a sinner who will burn in hell, or so I was led to believe. In the Bible Belt… where Christianity, acceptance and God’s perfect love abound, right?
I’d be lying if I said I never had feelings and urges I didn’t understand. If I said I never felt desires that I was ashamed of. I was embarrassed by my body and just plain scared of sexuality in general, fearful that I would cross some boundary into sinfulness; more fearful that I’d discover something about myself that I couldn’t handle.
When I was 12, I spent the night at a friend’s house and while he was using the bathroom, with the door open, he asked me if I was in puberty yet. He told me that he had a hair and then he wanted me to come see it. I didn’t want to because I would have to look at his penis to see it.
When I was 17, I was hopelessly in love with my best friend, I just didn’t know it then. I spent the night at his house one time, and more than once during that night, I wished something would “accidentally” happen before immediately catching myself and feeling ashamed, embarrassed to look him in the eye over something he didn’t even know.
My mother told me repeatedly throughout my life that being gay was a sin, it wasn’t something that I could accept about myself. And that belief was only reinforced every Sunday and Wednesday night at church. And do you think that bullying and hateful speech was limited to school? It wasn’t! I got it at church too. At church! Children and teenagers running around a very highly reputed, internationally respected institution yelling “F____t!” at the top of their lungs and aimed at one specific person. Me. Yeah, this was a safe and loving, welcoming environment.
In every circle of my life I was reminded almost daily that to be a Christian, to be acceptable in the eyes of God and man, I had to be straight. I had to grow up and fall in love, and get married (to a woman) and have 2.5 children with a dog and a white picket fence. I could never admit to anyone that I didn’t want any of that.
I was miserable every minute of every day. I wanted to be out of that situation at every turn. I went to bed every night and prayed I would wake up as someone else. I drifted off to sleep at night begging God to let me off the hook and take me in my sleep. I never cried; it wasn’t safe to do so. I still don’t cry.
And if I’m to be completely honest, I tried to kill myself, more than once. I was terrified of pain, and completely unsure of where I believed my soul would go if I killed myself so, no, I didn’t try very hard. I buried my face in my pillow and hoped I’d “accidentally” suffocate in my sleep. I don’t suppose I ever really believed it would work and maybe on some level deep down, I didn’t want it to, but I was sincere in my attempts nonetheless.
The one thing that kept me going, the one hope, the one belief that got me out of bed everyday and kept me moving in my life was that one day life would get better. I would move on from this place. I would live on my own, in my own place with my own feelings and beliefs and the real world of an adult would be a better place. I would be OK. I believed that because I had to believe something would change.
Twelve years ago, I moved to arguably the most liberal, inclusive, welcoming, accepting place in this country. I have lived in the San Francisco Bay Area ever since. I have worked the last eight and a half years for a company with a sterling reputation for diversity, inclusiveness, acceptance and equality. We rate 100% on the Human Rights Campaign’s Buying for Equality Guide which means we have full domestic partner benefits, nondiscrimination practices in hiring and, as a corporation, actively supports public equality. And still “we” are not perfect.
Despite the community in which I live, this is still a nation of in-equality. We are still a discriminating people. Our institutions still bully. Though things are still in a state of flux, as of this moment, I can not get married. Even if I could, I couldn’t reap the federal financial benefits of being married. Up until a week ago, I could serve in the armed forces if I wanted, but I couldn’t tell anybody the truth about myself while I did it. My status as a homosexual man isn’t recognized as a protected minority even though, statistically, the proof is irrefutable, and as such I am not entitled to the protections afforded to minority populations. You can call it what you like; I call it bullying.
Oh sure, some of the circumstances have changed, but many of them have not. I still don’t feel safe to reveal myself to the people around me. I still don’t have the confidence to be open and free in the world I live. Every day there are stories in the news of discrimination in the world.
It’s not fair to say that I’m in this place because I’m gay. And it’s not fair to say that gay teenagers today have everything in their favor except that they happen to be gay. My story is not unique.
So when I hear these messages, telling kids “It Gets Better“, I have to ask: Does it? Really?
I don’t have the answers. I wish I did. I know it’s not suicide!
I also know it’s not false hope and unreliable promises of a better tomorrow.
It was another week of stress for me.
After a three-day week-end, I was actually ahead of my reading for about five minutes. I started reading the first of the three chapters for this week, last Tuesday, even though we hadn’t actually tested on, or had class about the last three chapters. I finished reading that first chapter on Wednesday at work and gave myself a break on Wednesday night after class. Thursday, I didn’t have any time to read at work which was fine because I had Thursday night and a good portion of Friday, Saturday and Sunday to finish.
Shortly before I was going to leave on Thursday evening my boss came into my office and in a hurried tone asked me if I had a radio. He had been on the phone with one of the other Facility Managers in town whose office faces west and she told him, “I think I just saw an explosion… Kinda looks like it might’ve been at the airport.” We went to the opposite side of the building, here on the 23rd floor and looked out and sure enough there was a very visible fire raging across the bay. I tried to find out what had happened by way of my usual sources (i.e. Twitter) but there was nothing to be found. The local TV stations websites didn’t have any news yet either. I had to go to the store before going home and by the time I got home (and sat down to eat the Popeye’s Chicken and Biscuits I did not need but didn’t resist) and turned on the television to find out what happened every station was teaming with coverage of this:
“The San Bruno Fire” raged for hours as a 30″ natural gas pipeline, fifteen feet underground ruptured and exploded, blowing an enormous hole in the ground and sending a massive fire-ball more than 100 feet into the air. The flames incinerated a few homes immediately around the rupture and the fire spread out over a ten-acre area burning 38 homes to the ground and damaging 120 more. The number of deaths varies depending on the source of information but I have heard at least 6 people dead either at the scene or in the hospital due to injuries.
I was glued to the television and even as I was telling myself,”They’re not giving out any new information. You’ve got reading to do. You need to turn this off and get busy.” I sat and stared at the television for four hours watching in morbid fascination and with rapt curiosity for any new information that might come. Finally a little after midnight, I gave up, turned off the TV and went to bed having made no additional progress on my reading.
The additional two chapters I needed to read were about Respiratory and Cardiac Emergencies. I did my usual routine of reading the chapters, working through the pages of the workbooks and listening to the Audiobook repeatedly, just hoping to some how osmosize the information contained within and I went into class last night, knowing we would take tests on all three chapters and feeling exceedingly uncertain about my level of knowledge and ability to pass the tests.
With his usual flair of disorganized inadequacy, the instructor arrived at class with not enough copies of the tests for each of us, so he split the room down the middle and told us “everyone on this side” his left “take the chapter 10 test. And everyone on this side” his right, where I was “take the chapter 11 test.” I took the test and pretty well whizzed through it. I left a couple of questions blank because I wasn’t sure of the answers, and wasn’t sure how much time I had to take the tests and didn’t want to spend too much time mulling those over thereby not allowing enough time to answer all the ones I knew for sure. Then I went back and completed the ones I left blank. I didn’t feel like I was absolutely certain of the rightness of my answers, but for the most part I didn’t have to sit and rack my brain for them either. When I finished, I turned in that test and picked up the Chapter 10 test. I went through that one just as quickly and with the same strategy. I finished that test, turned it in and sat down, marveling at the fact that despite my lack of certainty, I seemed to be one of the first people finished and now I could relax.
I pulled out my phone and started looking at Twitter, passing the time, waiting for everyone else to finish and the start of whatever came next. Then I heard the instructor asking one of the other students if she was done or just taking a little break. I realized from their conversation that we did have a test for Chapter 12. I had expected a test for Chapter 12. I thought it was odd that we weren’t taking a test for Chapter 12. I was even a little annoyed that I had bent over backwards to get Chapter 12 studying completed when we weren’t even taking the test this week. BUT no one had said anything about a test for Chapter 12.
I often wonder how these things happen. I am such an auditory person that I actually struggle with tests when people are in the room talking (as frequently happens in this class) so there is no chance that I just missed them talking about it. No one said anything about Chapter 12, yet many of the students had turned in their first two tests and picked up Chapter 12. How does that happen?
Anyway, I picked up Chapter 12 and realized there were 76 questions on this test. The other two had been 25 and 40 questions. So not only did I waste ten minutes of prime test taking time, but I wasted them for the longest test we were taking.
Eventually students began finishing with and turning in the last test and things were getting a little more disorganized. The instructor told us when we finished with all three tests to go take a break so he could tell who was still testing.
My strategy unchanged, I finished the test fairly quickly and with only a modicum of confidence; confident I had passed every test, less confident that I did “well” on them. After a time, all the students were in the hall and the instructor came out of the classroom. He called us all together and told us that for the tests that had already been graded by his TA’s (Chapters 10 and 11) our scores had pretty much sucked. That’s a quote. “You guys pretty much sucked. The scores sucked. They were bad.” He said he was forced to conclude that either the instruction was bad (Ya Think!?!) or the students were bad. But to his credit he claimed to assume that it was the instruction. He also said that it seemed clear that many students weren’t reading their books.
He said we were going to go back in the room and go through the Chapters 10 and 11 tests and we’d go over the chapter 12 test on Wednesday if there was time. I was glad for this because we haven’t gotten any feed-back or scores from him to date and I wanted to know how I did. Plus if I “sucked” I wanted to know how badly and on which questions or points.
So we sat down and he re-distributed chapter 10 so we could go through it in class. Because of his disorganized inadequacy we only got through one of the tests and it took more than an hour (making us 30 minutes late getting out of class, again!) I pulled out a piece of paper and wrote down “Chapter 10” so that I could make note of what I missed since I knew we weren’t going to get our answer sheets back. When we were finally finished going through the test I wadded that piece of paper up and threw it away. Why? Because the only thing I had written on it was “Chapter 10”.
I was so stressed all week studying for this class. I was anxious all day and during class about the tests and hoping that I could remember the right information when it mattered because I couldn’t think straight about any of it…
And I aced the test. 100%.
OK, that’s technically not true. There was one question in the “Critical Thinking” section that I officially got wrong. I got it wrong because answers B, C and D were all correct so I wrote all three down. I knew that he was probably looking for answer B, but in my “critical thinking” answers C and D came before answer B and I would have completed the steps in that order in the real world. I wanted to show that I understood the whole process and that I would have done them in that order. And, in my stressed state, I wasn’t 100% sure I wasn’t over-analyzing what he wanted and that in fact C or D were the correct answer. I fully expected to have that question marked wrong because I gave three answers. And I know it was marked wrong because the TA questioned me about it.
But! The instructor says he likes it when his students challenge him because “it means you’re trying to learn”. I told him, I was only challenging this because it’s the only one that was marked wrong, therefore if he gives me credit than I’ll get 100% (which will probably never happen again) and since it is the “Critical Thinking” section it’s somewhat subjective. He told me to come see him “during office hours” on Wednesday, the hour before class starts, and we can talk about it.
So, yes, officially I missed one question out of 76, so I got a –what?– 97%? 98%, but in my thinking that answer was correct and I aced the test.
Of course how did on the other two I have no idea, but if the first one is any indication, I did better than I thought.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get home, and get started on Chapter 13. I’ve only got six days to learn three new chapters of information and time’s awastin!
It was never my intention for this blog to become a place for political ravings or even social commentary on the world around me, but sometimes things drop into my lap that just blow me away and I can’t seem to help myself; I must comment.
Yesterday I posted the new story about the twenty million dollar settlement that was reached between the hopelessly, cripplingly broke state of California and the family of a woman who was the unfortunate victim of a deranged sexual molester after she was taken from her family at the age of 12 and held captive for 18 years by a man who was neither the owner of, nor an employee of the hopelessly, cripplingly broke state of California.
Not one hour after I posted that unsolicited rant to my blog, this came to my attention:
Now, I can understand the thinking behind lowering employees salaries, temporarily, in the midst of a budgetary crisis. I know it would suck, a lot, to be one of those 200,000 workers whose salary was suddenly and without warning cut by more than 75%, but I can understand the reasoning behind it. But get this, Governor Schwarzenegger isn’t just cutting people’s salaries to minimum wage; oh no, he’s cutting it to the Federal Minimum Wage. The Federal Minimum Wage is $7.25 an hour. In California, the state minimum wage is $8.00 an hour and there are many counties with a cost of living differential where the minimum wage is even higher.
This means that not only will we be paying our valuable state workers minimum wage, but we’ll be paying them even less money than the pimply faced teenagers sacking their groceries down at the Piggly Wiggly. And if that weren’t insult enough, this news was announced on the same day that it was announced that the state is just going to hand over a $20,000,000 check to one individual who was victimized by one individual who was not acting on behalf of the state in any way!
Riggledo 