Throw on Your Best Cardigan and Celebrate Fall 2011 with the Gays of ILX

Gimme four years, surm.

it's a date!!

yay! I'm that chick indeed.

i think i'm going thru my summer late this year. i feel very ... antsy ! ! ! !

hmmmm, I feel lazy rather than antsy during summer.

hey so I thought I'd share -- I've been out to my mom for a few years but my sexuality & my boyfriend have been pretty much forbidden topics of conversation around her super-conservative catholic husband and my younger bros. i went along with it for a time, mostly out of fear & uncertainty about what his reaction would be & whether he would prohibit me from having a relationship with my mom & brothers, since he's a sanctimonious controlling prick

but I've been in therapy for a little while and finally mustered the self respect & courage to directly address the situation, saying what a burden secrecy is & how hurtful it is for me to have to keep the man I love a secret for their convenience. this was all in an email I wrote last weekend, and I've talked to my mom once since. she was upset and anxious about what this means going forward, but it's necessary for me and the only way to demonstrate my respect & commitment to my relationship with D.

the situation is evolving & idk where I'll end up with my mom & her husband & their kids, but it's a step -- one that I feel really good about taking

helllllllllll yeah!

that sounds like a great first step! proud of you :)

Way to go, elmo!

Good job!

yah, rad, elmo!!!!

also, just felt my first earthquake in Cali, though i've definitely been here for more than a few. twas tiny. just felt like a truck hit my house or something.

maybe it was elmo's courage pulsating thru

4.8 on the self-actualization scale!

lol

it was a 3.9, epicenter pretty much right under the Berkeley campus.

GOD HATES ACADEMIA

anyone have any opinions on portland, or?

WHITE PEOPLE

i think i think it's ok. less provincial than salt lake but not exactly a big city. bf really likes it too.

xp yeah seriously :\

that's my one complaint, no diversity. might even be worse than salt lake?

it's a nice place, actually. but any place that's 74% white people just gives me the heebie-jeebies a bit, i grew up in philadelphia.

i had fun last weekend though. people danced, at a club, to house music. there was even a black person there.

about the same, tbf.

Oh, I meant to mention to Eric and T, I took my first climbing lesson! It was incredible! And really challenging. I hadn't done a lick of weight or resistance exercise since I moved in July, and no running for over a month, so it wiped me the fuck out. I've been back at the gym, and I can't wait to have a little more endurance in my forearms next time.

It felt weird and unnatural the first time I let go of the wall at about 20 feet up. My brain deadlocked with itself trying to force me to let go or hang on. My forearms broke the impasse.

bravo, elmo <3

I lifted my (old tube) TV tonight.

Very friendly Eagle crowd in Portland. Saw a nice gal-on-guy flogging there.

I saw that you'd started from a FB post, J3ss3. I thought I'd liked it, but I dunno with the new FB layout. Things slip by me so easily.

I love watching newbie climbers get past that first "let go" moment. I also like watching them totally worn out from the first few climbs. I forget what it felt like to feel like total jelly and not to even be able to land on my feet. I sometimes miss that feeling.

Eric, the Gotham nominations are out, so, detrius.

Thought NRQ would do the honors this year.

Plus, what fresh hell is it that NYFCC moved their year-enders by three weeks?

2 weeks, I think. Very prez-race circuslike.

Has nrqy mayne even posted lately?

Not sure, I haven't trolled many of the movie threads in the last few months.

After I became OK with letting go, I tried the auto-belay and it got freaky all over again.

I was reeling with giddiness when I posted about it on FB, but it really is something to literally let go and trust someone to keep you from plummeting.

I wasn't thinking when I chose the location with the outdoor wall for lessons going from mid-October through November. They'll probably postpone Sunday's lesson since this weekend's going to be a continuation of yesterday's Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald conditions :-/ Hopefully we can switch locations if Indian summer doesn't come back.

I want to go out for a drink b/c I'm wide awake and stir crazy, but it's 12:21 on a Friday night, so it's going to be not-low-key everywhere within a reasonable distance of my home. Even the little lesbos bar will be fully right now. Hmmrmrrm.

There have been so many fucking idiot bros screaming down on the street tonight. There are always a few revelers, but tonight they're being idiots. Three drunk dummies are hollering at cars and mooning cabs....

Some friends who drove here from NY bought me a paper grocery bag full of fireworks in Indiana, which I have had for months. I'm always so tempted to throw firecrackers out the window at jerks. They would never be able to tell where they came from, but I can't further disturb the peace that way.

Anyway, I guess I'm off to the lolManhandler. Ta.

i have been sitting around with my cat and boyfriend. we watched an episode of 90210, then threw on some sex and the city. 5th season. we also made brownie sundays and took a nap.

That was lots of fun. That bar is a rare holdover from he late-70s/early-80s Chicago gay scene, and as such it's sleazy, but friendly also and quiet in some senses. I'm pretty sure it's the only bar left in Chicago that plays porn in the main room. Its "back room" is a courtyard w/ a tin roof. One of the old-timers told me that they added the roof in the 90s when straight DeP@u1 students started moving into adjacent buildings and complained of the plein air debauchery.

oh, I been dere

sounds good

it's saturday and i'm at work

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y153/struggin/photo-1.jpg

^view out the window

damn

life is fucking rad, y'all.

tabes, were u around that shit at Occupy Oakland?

also jesse, i think an indoor wall is most certainly necessary for chicago. christ, it's necessary for here.

i bouldered today. it's getting to the point where i'm giving people beta and it's working. didn't have the best day myself— got thrown off of this v6 way too many times— but a good round of core exercises and 45-minute sauna session later and i feel fantastic.

*the shit*? which shit. i've been around for a lot of stuff, missed it today because i was helping my friend move things and/or having sex.

I read about some nasty police aggression that happened on Thursday or Friday

Went to the gay cowboy bar on their one disco night. Got a number.

Ugh. I need a sex life I'm going insane.

xp did you get a hand-drawn portrait of Grace Jones as well?

I can't believe I missed the discush on ageism. I have quite a bit to say about that topic

I am wearing my best cardigan right now.

That is all.

pic?

Age is such a weird thing in that people get freaked out about it so easily, and I'm hesitant to discuss it (re: fucking older guys) with a lot of people because of how freaked out they get. I've thought about it quite a bit and I'm convinced it comes down to the way people use age as a means of sorting people into some hierarchical structure whose upper/lower tiers are "off limits" to them in terms of closeness, friendship, intimacy, etc., and it's something that they cling to very dearly and get very nervous about when it's permeated. I mean, I just find it really easy to talk to/relate to guys of all ages and have a great deal of friends who are around or over 40 who I'd consider my peers; obviously there's that inevitable gap of life experience and, often times, wisdom, but I've never thought that it was some sort of thing that had to actually separate people. So, as a result, I often times approach/talk to/build friendships with older guys like they're people my own age.

I mean, on the flip side, I've definitely interacted with older guys who also cling dearly to this hierarchical structure and as a result talk down to and even fetishize me as a "young guy", and it's really skeevy.