Category: My Story

What’s So Bad About Being Alone Anyway?

~ riggledo ~ 9 Comments

I had my bi-weekly therapy appointment today.

It never ceases to amaze me how some weeks I feel worse when I leave than I did when I got there.  It’s not always like that, but sometimes it is, and today was one of those times.

Our conversation started out awkward as I told her I wouldn’t be able to pay her until our next visit.  Too many automatic bills on the same payday as my rent is due.  It’s out of my hands… Only it’s not really, but I don’t know how to control it… yet.  I couldn’t help feeling like — I don’t know what, really.  Deb said it was almost like I was afraid I was going to get into trouble.  Maybe she’s right, I don’t know.

It’s not like she has to worry.  She knows I’ll pay her for both sessions next time.  It’s happened a few times before when the timing was bad and I’ve always made good on my bill.  I’ve never given her any reason to worry that I’ll skip out on her.  I feel guilty though, because she’s self-employed and relies on the payments from her– what am I a patient?  A client?  I don’t really even know.  But I can only assume that, unlike me, she is not living paycheck to paycheck.

I don’t know.  Maybe I wanted her to tell me exactly how this would affect her, or more specifically, how it would not affect her.  Maybe I wanted her to let me off the hook when in truth, I’m the one who had me on the hook in the first place.

From there our conversation turned to my relationship with money and what I lacked growing up and my need to fill the void.  I talked for a bit about the financial lack I grew up with and how earlier in my adult life (not so terribly long ago at all, actually) I had a bad habit of frivolously spending money and then not having enough for the things for which I needed it.  I’ve made significant improvements in that respect; thinking carefully about how and on what I’m spending my money and whether or not it’s worth the expense, whether I can truly afford it.  I’ve learned a lot and done a much better job of controlling my finances each pay period and what I’ve learned is that I now need to work on effectively managing my money on a monthly basis, carrying over funds from one pay period to the next as needed to cover expenses that the next check won’t be big enough to cover.

This whole being a grown-up thing kinda sucks.  I really hate “I can’t afford it” being the thing that holds me back, the thing that keeps me from doing what I want to do.  But it is and it does.  Being a grown-up kinda sucks.

Then Deb said she felt like we weren’t just talking about money, lacking material things.  She thinks there’s a relevant connection between the lack of material goods that I’m apparently trying to make up for (or at least I was) and the lack of emotional provisions I grew up with.

This is an old song, and if you’ve heard it before, please forgive me and skip down a few paragraphs.  But here’s the thing.  My parents split up when I was two years old.  I’m the youngest of three with a sister three years older and a brother five years older than I am.  My Father cheated on my Mother and ultimately left us for the other woman.  I saw him on two week-ends a month (sometimes less) and the other two watched him come to the house and take away one of my siblings and leave me behind.  (He thought he was doing a good thing by spending one week-end alone with each of us, and then the fourth one with all three.)

My mother was clinically depressed and had nothing to give her children in the form of emotional support or availability.  She didn’t manage her money well and left her family lacking in material possessions and good food on a regular basis.  She was always “too tired” to deal with her children.  She never helped with homework, she never “played” with her children.  She never even wanted to listen to us.  Oh, I could tell you stories about her inability to be available, but suffice it to say, she wasn’t emotionally available and she wasn’t paying attention enough to know what that was doing to her children.

My brother hated me.  He used to beat me regularly.  The world is a different place now, but if we were kids today, we’d have been separated and taken out of my mother’s home by now.

My sister and I got along OK, but she’s three years older and there came a time when she was more interested in teenager things, and her friends outside of the home, than she was in me.

I was unpopular and relentlessly teased in elementary and middle school.  And in middle and high school, my mother never approved of the people who actually did want to be my friends.  She wouldn’t let me go out with my friends.  She’d yell at me to get off the phone with them after 15-20 minutes. And they couldn’t understand what the situation was.  Eventually, she drove a wedge between me and each of them, until being my friend was just too much trouble for them to go to.

I was alone all the time, even in a room full of people.  It sucked, but I got used to it.

I truly believe I have worked through most of the anger and pain that I felt for so long over the lack of emotional connections growing up.  But despite working through those things, I don’t know how to “undo” the damage.  I’m working from a deficit, here.  I don’t know how to do emotional connections and I’m not at all convinced that it’s worth learning, even if I could.

I told Deb, “I don’t know how to fix that ‘lack.’  I don’t have any control over that, so I just focus on what I can control; money, things.”

And then we stared at each other for several agonizing seconds, like we were in some sort of Mexican stand-off.  Maybe I was trying to convince her, maybe she was waiting for me to reconsider.

People are so afraid of being alone.  They’re so afraid to be alone that they’ll stay in bad relationships, years after they’ve stopped being any value at all.  People hop into bed with the first person who shows interest in them, all in the name of emotional connection; trying to fill the void of love left by their parents or other significant figures.  Only it never works and people hop out of that bed and into the next one, over and over, just trying to find something that can’t be found in the first place, and for what?  So that they won’t be alone?

But I’m used to being alone and it’s not so bad.  I’ve got no one to answer to. No one to fight for the remote, or argue over what shows to watch.  No one to clean up after.  No one to be dissatisfied with how much, or how well, I clean up after myself.  No one to hog the covers at night or squirm in the bed while I’m trying to sleep.  No one taking up space in the closet or dresser.  I go where I want to go, do what I want to do, watch what I want to watch, listen to what I want to listen to.  I deal with my own problems and I don’t have to listen to anyone else’s.

So really!  What’s so bad about being alone, anyway?

Riggledo’s Story: A Question of A Fire Fighter

~ riggledo ~ 10 Comments

The next question to be answered is brought to you by my friend and reader Jody and has to do with an old post.

Jody asked:

“Did you see the fireman again? The one who thought you had pretty eyes?”

Unfortunately, I have not… Well, I guess that’s unfortunate.  The truth is I don’t feel any more prepared to deal with that situation now than I did six months ago.  It’s been a year  since I met Jesse and honestly, I wouldn’t know him if I saw him, now.

We’re conducting fire drills in the building over the next two days.  There are 25 floors in  my building and we drill three floors at a time so it takes a couple hours each day to do.

To tell the truth, I’m really not looking forward to it.  It’s important and not difficult to do, but for those of us who are observing the drills and not just participating when the alarm  sounds on our own floor it’s actually a lot of physical work.  Running around the floors to  make sure that everyone is doing what they’re  supposed to be doing and fill out the evaluation  sheet, trotting down four flights of stairs to the  relocation floor to await the all clear and herd the  staff toward the elevators to return to their offices before moving on to my next floor assignment to do the whole thing again three more  times.  It may not sound like much, but trust me it’s exhausting.  Problem is I’m already exhausted – have been for weeks.  I’m not really up for the fire drills.

We always have fire fighters on site while we do the drills and usually my boss will assign  one fire fighter to each of his staff and have them trail us around.  This is how I met Jesse.

So who knows…? Maybe the drills won’t be so bad after all.

Riggledo’s Story: The “Have You Had Any Dates” Question

~ riggledo ~ 3 Comments

Children are cruel.  I don’t think this comes as surprise to most of us in our no-longer-children years, but just in case you don’t know this already, children are cruel!

We go through so much as children.  Our bodies are constantly growing and changing, and people tend to focus on that when talking about how cruel children can be.  But what we tend to forget is that children’s minds are changing as well.  I wish I was prepared with research documents to cite, I’m not.  But I learned in the special training I went to a couple weeks ago for Big Brothers and Big Sisters that scientists are learning more about the cognitive and intellectual development of children and finding that their brains literally  do not function in the same way an adults brain functions.  It’s an extreme example to be sure, but one example they gave us was a kid who steals his dad’s car to go for a joy ride and gets in trouble.  Dad asks the boy, “What were you thinking?  What did you think  was going to happen when you stole my car and went for a drive?”  The answer, it seems, is frequently that the boy wasn’t thinking,  or at least wasn’t thinking of consequences.  Dad gets angry when the boy won’t answer, or doesn’t give a satisfactory answer, when  the truth is, the boy really doesn’t know what he thought would happen.  This is not the point of this post, and I’ll get to the point  shortly, but I do want to say, that while the boy’s actions should not be excused based on this information and should be punished so that he may learn consequences, Dad should be certain to express that the punishment is because he loves the boy and wants him to  learn from his mistakes and that how Dad feels about the boy, how much he loves him, is not going to change because of this!

Children go through so many changes as they grow up, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally as well and for the most  part children are not equipped to deal with the changes.  They need to make sense of their existence and they need to feel like they  have some sort of control over their lives and one of the ways children try to do that is by being cruel and hurtful to others.  Most of  the time the reasoning is not thought out, I’m sure, but the idea is that “If I can make that kid feel bad, like they are somehow less  than I, then I will feel better about me.”  Children are cruel.

I don’t know, and I hope it’s no longer true, but when I was a child at least, there was a societal stigma against homosexuality.  There  were no gay characters on television, there were no openly gay public figures and the public stereotype of a gay man was of a very  effeminate, weak, joke of a man.  Gay men were undeserving of respect and courtesy.  Being gay and having anyone know it was just about the worst thing that could possibly happen to a guy and so it made for excellent fodder for school yard bullies.

When I was in elementary school, I was a damaged and confused kid.  My parents split when I was two years old because my father  had an affair with a woman who worked for him and my mother kicked him out of the house.  My mother was depressed and she  wasn’t emotionally available to her children at a time when they needed her to tell them everything was going to be OK.  I was the  youngest of three kids, three years younger than my nearest sibling and my brother and sister were more interested in their friends their ages, than they were in spending time with their “baby brother”.  I was socially awkward (still am) and always on the defensive.  I was overweight and had a double cowlick and freckles.  I was highly self-conscious.  Oh, and have I mentioned that children are cruel?

The kids in my school tormented me relentlessly.  They made fun of how I looked, they made fun of how my hair stuck up funny on  the crown of my head and when they made me cry they called me names, which only made me cry more.  And this was just about the  parts of me they could see.  I couldn’t imagine what they would do with the parts they couldn’t see.  I didn’t want to find out.  I hid myself as much as I could.  I wore long pants and long sleeved shirts, even on triple digit days of summer.  When I was forced to take gym class, I dawdled around as long as I could before changing my clothes, just hoping no one would see me and when I did change  my clothes, I did it as fast as possible.  When I was in elementary school, the school I attended didn’t have individual urinals in the  boys’ bathrooms, they had urinal troughs, and the boys would gather around the troughs during recess and lunch breaks to relieve themselves and it was all a big game.  They’d cross streams, they’d bump and nudge shoulders, and they’d jostle each other.  And when they weren’t playing at these games, they’d talk about what they saw.  Those boys, stood around that disgusting trough looking at each others twigs and berries.  Those boys, stood around that disgusting trough, completely free (or so it seemed to me) of shame or embarrassment, taking care of their business and talking to each other and about each others bait and tackle!

I used the stalls, every time.

And the boys noticed and made fun.

I had a high pitched voice when I was a child, when people would call the house and I would answer the phone they often thought I  was my sister, and by “people”, I mean my parents.  I sang alto in the choir until the 8th grade, the only boy in the whole of the  regional competitions singing the alto part.

Children are cruel, and when they find something that works they stick with it and so the first time someone called me the F word, and it got the reaction they wanted, it stuck.  Being the F word was out of the question for me.  First, I could tell by the tone of their  voices that the children though of it as an insult, as a derogatory thing to say, and if it was an insult, a derogatory thing to say, then it  must be a terrible thing to be.  More importantly, though, I learned from a very young age that to be gay, means to spend eternity in  hell and I sure didn’t want that.  I had to do whatever I possibly could, not to reinforce the idea with the kids in my school and in my thinking at that time, hiding myself from them was the way to do it.

I never learned how to be friends with boys.  I never learned how to talk to them or touch them.  I never figured out the apparently very fine line between appropriate, friendly affection and “inappropriate gay stuff”.  To this day, when I see guys interact as  “buddies”, I don’t understand.  When a guy puts his arm around his buddy’s neck or leans on his friend’s shoulder, when two guys  hug, I’m conflicted.  Put those guys at the beach, wearing only board shorts, or in a locker room in just a towel?  My confusion is off the charts!

In my irrational memories of childhood, these actions, any one of them, would have been crossing a line.  Putting my arm on a guys  shoulder, especially if he wasn’t wearing a shirt, would have gotten me insulted and teased to no end, maybe even beaten.  I never  really learned how to navigate these situations and so instead, I simply don’t touch.  Oh sure, I hug my close friends (all of whom happen to be female) and I shake hands when I meet people, but other than that, I do not touch.  It doesn’t make me uncomfortable to have my personal space invaded, no; I don’t touch, because I’m afraid to.  I’m afraid how it will be perceived, how it will be  received.

I think about those boys in elementary school, standing around that God-awful urinal trough and whipping out their noodles as if it  was as pedestrian as…well, a pedestrian, nary a thought in their pre-adolescent heads about what the other boys might think and it  occurs to me that as best I can remember and with the exception of my father when I was a young boy, I’ve never seen, live and in person, a Meat n’ Potatoes that wasn’t my own.  That seems abnormal to me.  Who makes it into their mid thirties and never sets foot  in a gym locker room, or public pool changing area?  But it’s true.

The societal stereotype of what a gay man is has changed since I was a boy.  Where it used to be that everyone assumed that a gay  man was effeminate, possibly a cross dresser, wished he was really a woman; today it is more often assumed that a gay man is a sex  fiend, a predator even, cruising the streets and parks for anonymous sex.  And now with the advent of the home computer and the World Wide Web, guys can cruise for anonymous sex without ever leaving their homes.  Hell, there’s even an app for that.  I once  heard a line in a movie (which one is escaping me at the moment) that for gay men sex is equated with a handshake.  For a lot of  Conservative, Republican, Christian types out there, this is a disgusting thought.  To me?  It’s just terrifying.  Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t want to come off as a prude or as some sort of high and mighty, judgy type (I’ll leave that to the afore mentioned Conservative, Republican, Christian types).  I am interested in sex, for sure.  But I’m interested in sex with substance.  I’m not interested in sex for the sake of sex and I’m not interested in dating as a means of getting to the sex.

As a gay man, I do not fit the current stereotype.  Think of me as your fairly average American, Christian male.  I want to live a respectable life.  I want a job that satisfies and fulfills me and pays a decent salary.  I want a nice home.  I want a great car.  I want plenty of money in the bank.  I want to travel.  I want to find the love of my life, settle down and have a family.  That the love of my  life will happen to have the same anatomy as I do is but a minor differentiation from the accepted norm.

I can’t help myself, though.  I’ve fallen victim to the stereotype.  I buy into it.  Partly because, the only men I’ve known were gay, were the ones that were living up to the stereotype.  It’s so easy to identify a black man or a Hispanic or Asian man just by looking at  them.  It’s not so easy to identify a gay man just by looking.  Oh sure, sometimes it’s really easy, but it’s not always.  And when it  comes to this, I am still very much that scared little boy who is afraid to lean on another man’s shoulder.  I do not know what the  proper etiquette or decorum is.  I don’t know how to feel out a situation and make my interest known in such a way as to make progress with the guy if he’s gay, but not insult or offend (or risk my personal safety) if the guy is not.

I’m also fairly oblivious, unable to recognize flirtation when it’s happening.  And as I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I wouldn’t necessarily know I was being asked on a date if I were, let alone how to react to it.  Not to mention what a nervous wreck I would be!  How off-putting is that?

I was asked if I’d been on a date since coming out.  The answer is, “No”.  And now we know not just that I haven’t but, possibly more than you ever wanted to know about the reasons why.

Didn’t You Know This Is An Interactive Blog?

~ riggledo ~ 6 Comments

Recently, my newest regular reader, Jody took the time to peruse my entire blog, from the beginning and had a few questions when she was  finished.  It’s actually kind of funny, because like some sort of obsessive/compulsive, neurotic freak in desperate need of attention, I check the stats on my blog, like, every few minutes and I could actually see her (well someone) making their way through the monthly archives of my site.  I suspected it was she, but wasn’t sure until she left a comment on one of my last entries with a series of questions about what she’d found.

Over the next few posts, I shall attempt to answer some of those questions as best I can, and hope not to bore everyone to tears.  Her first question was “Have you had any dates yet?”  Since I’ve discussed in recent posts that I was once engaged to a girl!, and since I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m gay, I assume Jody is asking me if I’ve had any dates with guys since coming out.

My immediate, gut reaction answer to that question is, “No.  I have not had any dates.”  That’s the simple answer and tomorrow, if I can eek out the time during my hectic and swamped day of reading twitter, playing Fish Wrangler, reading other peoples blogs and avoiding any  semblance of real work and if I can muster the courage to be completely open and honest with myself, let alone all of you, I will write a more  in-depth answer to that question.

I’ve been pondering the question today, though, and it suddenly occurred to me that there is a little more to the story.  Once upon a time, I  owned a blog similar to but just different enough from this one, before the birth and development of Riggledo.  And on that blog, the details of which will forever remain dead and buried, I wrote a post that speaks to this question.  So, because it’s already a quarter till six and I still have to copy and paste, review for errors and then post this bad boy, and because I am lazy, I give you the story of My First Gay Date… Sort Of.

I’ve had my job, in the Facility Management office of my building, for just over six years.  In that time, I’ve had interactions with many types of individuals:  vendors, repairmen, engineers, etc.  When I started I was, among other things, responsible for approving and coordinating building wide events in our building lobby.

There is an individual with whom I dealt on a number of occasions, who coordinates education fairs.  He  works for the University of Phoenix here in Oakland, CA.  I will call him UOP Guy.

UOP Guy and I communicated on multiple occasions about education fairs in the lobby.  One day when I  was sill an Administrative Assistant UOP Guy invited me to lunch as a show of appreciation for my efforts to help him coordinate his education fairs.

I spent the next few days after the invite, experiencing anxiety over the possibility that this might very well  be a date, I just wasn’t sure.  I was still very closeted, and still in denial to myself.  And yet, I was willing, at least at that moment, to take the chance that this was in fact a date.  How would I handle it if it were?  I had no idea.  Part of me hoped that it was just that.

UOP Guy and I met up for lunch that day and I was very nervous about the whole thing.  I imagined it was a date.  I tried to make sure I said the right things.  I complimented UOP Guy on his choice of  restaurant and the type of food/environment it provided.  I smiled politely, I laughed at all the right moments.  I commented on what a great time I’d had and how we should do it again.

When the lunch was over, UOP Guy walked me to the door and bid me farewell…

I walked back to work befuddled as to what had happened, and what might come next.  While we had a  few interactions in the interim, UOP Guy and I didn’t communicate much for a good year or two.  By that  time my title had changed and UOP Guy and I didn’t have much interaction at all, yet he invited me to  lunch again.

It was at this lunch that UOP Guy began to talk to me about his girlfriend and their living arrangement as a couple living together in San Francisco, apartment life, parking problems, et. al.

I was even more befuddled.  My instincts told me that UOP Guy is gay, and I’ve fantasized about a lovely life as a same-sex couple living in San Francisco with a great social life, healthy bank account and a great apartment in which we’d live.  If only that damn bitch (he said playfully) weren’t in the way…  Assuming  she even exists.

To this day, I have very little interaction with UOP Guy.  I wish I had the courage, strength and knowledge of our culture to know what is welcomed and whether/how to make an advance, but I don’t.  I just get to  wonder…

I would sure like to find a guy with whom I have things in common, and I can be myself.  But from where I  stand now I don’t know how to tell who’s who and what they represent.  I sure wish we wore signs or  something.

Mis Ojos Bonitos

~ riggledo ~ 10 Comments

We were conducting earthquake drills in the building today.  For those uninitiated, this is where someone gets on the PA system and makes an announcement to pretend the building is shaking and to take cover under your desk while everyone else crawls around on the floor grumbling about it.  When and where I grew up, we conducted tornado drills, which are remarkably similar except we were to run out into the school hallway, sit with our back to the walls, heads in our laps and with a text book over our necks to protect us.  Traditionally, we have conducted two Earthquake drills a year, one in April and one in October.  This time around, however, my fearless leader decided that we  needed to do two in one day… Call it an aftershock drill.  The second drill was to be conducted at 2:00 in the afternoon and since I hadn’t yet  had lunch, I slipped out at 1:50 to avoid the second drill and the public outcry that was sure to follow.  Surprisingly, it did not.  This is not the point of my story.

I had decided that Wendy’s sounded good and I wanted to try the new Asian boneless chicken wings.  I guess they’re still new.  Either way, this was the first time I’d had them.  So after I had placed my order and was waiting for my food, I stepped to the side and was watching the  goings-on behind the counter.  As the cashier was preparing my drink, she turned to one of the other workers and told them to get my small frosty (I can’t go to Wendy’s and not get a frosty, just like I can’t go to Arby’s and not get a Jamocha shake. I don’t go to either restaurant  often for this reason.)  As that worker walked away to get my frosty, another walked over to the counter and placed the bag with the food in  front of me.  I looked up and said, “Thank you.”  The young lady locked eyes with me for a moment and then walked away.

As she did so, I heard her say something in Spanish to the cashier.  The only word I understood, in fact the only word I even heard clearly was ojos, eyes, and then she tossed her head toward me.  The cashier looked up from what she was doing, looked at me, then looked at the girl, then looked back at me.

I immediately found myself on the defensive.  You see, I’m a plain, average looking, white guy who they presumed didn’t speak the language, and for the most part they are correct.  My first thought was that she was saying something bad about me.

Actually, I have to take a step back here.  You see, at the end of July, after I returned to California from my extended trip, I decided to  experiment with something I had wanted to try but had been too afraid to risk.  I began experimenting with “guy-liner”, which is of course just a trendy way of saying a guy wearing eye liner.  I figured if I was going to begin something like that, the best time to do it was fresh after an extended absence from work.  While I was surprised to find that more people seemed to notice than I thought (hoped) would, not one person from work has said a thing about it.  This is also not the point of my story.

I’ve seen many guys with eye-liner.  Obviously, many of them were gay, but it’s not “a gay thing”.  The whole purpose of eye-liner is to add  some definition, to attract attention to one’s eyes.  I have been complemented many times on my eyes and know that they are one of my  better attributes.  I think a lot of guys are attractive with eye-liner, so I decided to try it and the truth is I think it works for me. The one friend that I discussed it with said she agreed, so I try very hard not to be self-conscious about it.  I think I’ve figured out how to do a decent job of it and I’m becoming more comfortable with it… except that I’m not.

I have a long standing fear that was ground into me from a very young age.  The fear is that people will see me, recognize something in me  and decided that it must mean I’m gay.  I’ve lived the majority of my life afraid that people would think I was gay.  And now, now that I have  admitted it to myself and to a few people around me, and I’m not really afraid of it anymore, I’m even more tormented.  I go back and forth between being afraid people are going to recognize that I am gay and being afraid that they won’t.

So there I was standing at the counter at Wendy’s waiting for my frosty to come, and I heard the woman say the words “ojos” and thrust her chin toward me.  I saw the other woman look up at me, and then at her and back again.  I walked away from the counter to grab napkins,  straw and spoon from the napkin/straw/spoon counter and as I did, I said to myself, “I actually speak a bit of Spanish honey, I know what  Ojos means.  What about my eyes?!?” I was mad.  I was mad that she would say anything derogatory about me and I was mad that she  would so brazenly say something derogatory about me, within my earshot, but in a language she assumed I couldn’t understand.

I walked back to the counter where all of my food was now waiting for me and as I unwrapped my straw to poke through the hole in the lid of  my Large Diet Coke, the third girl, the one who had gone for my frosty, looked at me, looked me in the eyes and smiled.  And that’s when she said it.  She pointed at the young lady who spoke of my ojos and said, “She says you have beautiful eyes.”

I was surprised.  I smiled and looked at both of them and said, “Thank you.”  I never heard the word bonito, beautiful, but I have to admit I know so little Spanish that I could easily have missed one of who knows how many other words with similar meaning.

I smiled at the lady’s, picked up my cups and bag and walked out the door to return to my car and as I did so, I had a rush of thoughts pass through my addled brain.  “It never occurred to me that she might have been saying nice things about me.  Of course, I never heard her say bonito.  Maybe she didn’t really say that I had beautiful eyes.  Maybe the third lady was just covering up what she had really said.  Then again, don’t know enough Spanish to say she didn’t say it.  Who cares what she thinks anyway?”

And it was as simple as that.  Only it’s not simple at all.  Why is it so hard to accept a compliment?  And why is it so difficult to be confident?  OK, so, yes, I wear eye-liner.  And yes, someone who is actually paying attention when they’re up close to me would probably  see that.  And yes, there are going to be people in this world who will make fun or judge or criticize.  So what? Really, why does that matter?  And yes, there are people in this world who will lie to you, who will tell you they like something when they don’t and unless those people are  friends or family members, someone you’re supposed to be close to, who cares if they do?

Why is it that the moment the young lady drew attention to my ojos, I automatically reverted to the scared child that I’ve been most of my life afraid that she saw the make-up, automatically assumed I was gay and had a negative opinion about it.  And, why did I care what she  thought?