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bi_janus

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  1. bi_janus

    Tuning

    By bi_janus,

    At the University of South Florida, in the small gymnasium, on a platform draped with hand-woven rugs and supporting pots of burning incense, Shankar and Allarakha sat and began to play.
    Lines of raga and percussion pierced me. After a few minutes, the music stopped; the crowd applauded wildly.
    Shankar smiled toward Allarakha and said, “Thank you. If you liked the tuning so much, we hope you enjoy the concert.”
    The tabla playing that evening was virtuous, and like lightning striking.
    Try this, and be sure to wait for the tabla solo beginning in the middle of the video:


  2. bi_janus
    So, after a hard drive crash on Wednesday, I was in the PDX Apple Store to get another drive installed in my MacBook. The genius at the Genius Bar took the little gem to the surgical suite and began the surgery. I waited close to the Bar near a wall. I put my laptop bag on the floor at my feet and looked at some accessories on the wall. Within three minutes, a very delightful and very gay (at least according to my bidar) young man in a blue Apple Store shirt walked over, smiling, and asked if I needed anything. I said, "No thank you, I'm just waiting for a drive installation." Nice customer service I thought.
    Over the next seven minutes four more very nice young men, all of whom I assessed as gay, walked over one at a time to and to ask if they could help me. I'm trying to figure out why I warrant this attention from this group of guys. I mean I think I give off the vibe of a straight ex-cop. Then I remember that on my computer bag handle I've placed a luggage tag from HRC with the blue and yellow equal sign. I put it there mostly to piss off any homophobic cops and firefighters I see in the course of training them.
    Oh well. These solicitous young men were only interested in caring for what they thought was an elderly queen. I'm surprised that one of them didn't ask what I was doing during the riot. At least, that's the explanation I invented.
  3. bi_janus
    Virtue and Integrity (dé or te 德)
    I made good on a lost wager today. The wager was with a colleague, a woman two months older than I with whom I shared a remarkably similar late childhood and early adulthood. She was a South Carolinian and I lived most of my life in Florida. She and I, in separate parts of the world, marched, sat-in, protested, and worked on behalf of civil rights, women’s rights, sexual minority rights—you get the picture.
    She was a Nurse Practitioner and Midwife. She cared for poor women who had no other healthcare options. She attended countless births. We both ended up in Washington state, where she was a volunteer EMT and worked on a Search and Rescue team with her cadaver dog, Noble, in a small, rural community.
    I am out to my co-workers, and she was among the first with whom I shared my sexual orientation. Her reaction defined the difference between tolerance and acceptance. She was also deeply interested in Buddhism. If thought of as Buddhists, we shared a determination not to talk about our shared interest abstractly. We also shared a different form of a common disease.
    We talked about tips and techniques for surviving chemo and when our hair disappeared, we shared watch caps. The wager was one-sided. If she died first, I would attend any service her family arranged. If I died first, she would attend my service, except that I have been clear that I will have no service. So, today I paid the one-sided debt.
    Our last conversation was about the concept of virtue as expressed in Chinese thought about how to live as a human being. Virtue in this sense has little to do with the Western concept delivered to us by the Roman notion of vir, in which is embedded in the notion of manliness. The Chinese notion has its roots in growing up from the earth as a plant grows and speaks of integrity and what Buddhists sometimes call suchness or thusness, which brings argument and discussion to silence.
    Why did she suggest such a wager? I believe she asked because she knew that I would have something to say to her grandchildren about the woman of whose suchness they are inheritors.
    Selah
  4. bi_janus
    Advice for the young on love: get ready for the struggle. You can’t take care of anyone else if you don’t take care of yourself. Don’t let the strong winds born of identification with your beloved extinguish the small flame of your ego. Don’t let your ego grow to the extent that it tries to encompass your beloved. Welcome a companion. And, as important, this work is fun even when painful, so let your souls laugh. The practice is all we have.
  5. bi_janus
    This has been around for a while. I used it at the last Incident Management Team training I ran for firefighters and cops. Cooperation and coordination are essential to good incident management, and I'm always interested in the reaction it gets from cops and firefighters. I use it regularly; so far no one at FEMA has complained.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6D8CB3inzSQ
    The UK must be such a cooperative land.
  6. bi_janus

    February celebrations

    By bi_janus,

    Just a reminder of important February celebrations:
    Entire month: Pull your sofa off the wall month
    2/7: Wave all your fingers at your neighbor day (not just the one you commonly use)
    2/9: Read in the bathtub day
    2/11: Don't cry over spilled milk day (requires spilling milk)
    2/18: Thumb appreciation day (I think in the UK it's opposable thumb appreciation day)
    2/23: Curling is cool day
    2/28: Public sleeping day
  8. bi_janus
    For most of my adult life I have tried to destroy heteronormative myths about gay couples: that gay men are promiscuous and incapable of long-lasing monogamous relationships. Notwithstanding the fact that I have known more than a few gay men who were promiscuous with no interest in stable, long-term relationships, most of my gay male friends are living lives that look a lot like those of many heterosexual couples (different plumbing excepted).
    Ann and I, resisting the common slanders, have been heard by audiences as a nice, normal, married couple—the kind you see in TV spots and just the kind of allies many gay men desire in this cultural battle. Our support of gay marriage would seem to come from the reasonable recognition by a straight couple that gay men are quite capable of having the same kind of relationship as we have. They can make homes and raise children as part of a stable dyad, all of which is, of course, quite true. But, Ann and I have the nagging feeling that we should be battling for others as well. After all, while the battle over marriage is a battle for a certain recognition of normalcy, Ann and I are floating out there near some decidedly abnormal boundary.
    Here’s the rub. Ann and I have not been a nice, conventional monogamous couple. We created a marriage that would be seen by most as demonstrating a decided tendency to polyamory. Our accommodation of my sexual proclivities has included both triads and my relationships with other men in which Ann has not participated. I am a little troubled by the strategic retreat from discussing the validity of choices other than life as a couple.
    One paper from a 2008 article in the Journal of Bisexuality (Yes! We have our own academic journal) by the well known authors, Pallotta-Chiarolli and Lubowitz on an ongoing Australian study put it this way when discussing the borderline existence that Ann and I live (avert your eyes; this is why no one reads academic journals):
    “Their multi-sexual relationships are both “outside” gendernormative and heteronormative constructs of marital and defacto relationships and yet “belonging,” for the partners may “pass” as a “normal” couple. They are also “outside” the dominant constructs of Australian gay identity and community while simultaneously “belonging” due to their partners’, and sometimes their own, same-sex attractions and relationships.” (Maybe we are fully inside the dominant constructs of some other country's gay identity and community. Des, would you speak to your people about this?)
    I wonder how much the weight audiences give our support for the monogamous gay brethren in our community would decrease if people knew how Ann and I really have lived. To be sure, if people have enough gumption to ask, we are quite honest about our lives. Many of the gay male couples we know, including some who have asked us to speak up, have never asked. Why would they? We look so bourgeois. I just hope that they would be as supportive of our choices as we have been of theirs, the marriage battle aside.
  9. bi_janus

    Crying

    By bi_janus,

    I am surprised that crying is the most difficult matter for me to write about. If you’ve read any of my entries, you know that writing about death, sex, and love are pretty easy for me. When you’re wounded as a kid, you become very careful about crying.
    When I was fifteen, Tyler cried once when we were together after an afternoon of instructing each other on the finer points of fellatio. His tears, I learned, weren't the result of the lessons. Tyler was fifteen and overwhelmed by confusion about love and sex. I wasn't confused about sex, but had my own issues to cry about. I was stunned and pleased that he trusted me that much.
    He was embarrassed and worried that he had given me power because he thought that, in crying with me, he appeared weak. When much younger, I had learned a lesson that I have fortunately replaced, that I should avoid tears altogether. I think I was worried that if I started, I could never stop.
  10. bi_janus

    Ann comes out

    By bi_janus,

    Ann came out as much as I did. If you imagine that people had trouble with my sexuality, you can guess that a lot of people thought she was naïve at best and nuts at worst to stay with me. She saved my life and discovered that rather than occasioning loathing, my affinities struck an erotic chord in her.
    In fact, we share the same taste in men. I’m sure strangers would be confounded if they overheard her, out on the trail or on a walk along the river, point out some particularly attractive guy so I wouldn’t miss him. Somehow she saw that what she loved in me was inseparable from my core.
    How does such a relationship last the decades? Luck in the first choice, forgiveness, and reinvention of the stronger, more conscious self. She has done the majority of the fresh underpinning of our love. I know who got the better part of the bargain of our life together. The sacred whispering of a lifetime with her liberated my soul.
  11. bi_janus

    Ple-ize, stop!

    By bi_janus,

    I write to you on behalf of a dear old friend near death in a shabby linguistic hospital ward for the aged, replaced by a newer, longer, less precise but more scientific sounding, and newer version.
    . . . the short words are the best, and the old words, when short, are best of all. — Winston Churchill (Speech on receiving the London Times Literary Award, November 2, 1949, Never Give In! The Best of Winston Churchill’s Speeches)
    Use use, do not utilize utilize.
  12. bi_janus

    Strange Creature

    By bi_janus,

    A mating pair of Sandhill Cranes (Grus canadensis pratensis) lived part of the year at the back of our lot, which butted up against an old orange grove. Cranes represented long life and prosperity in old China. I have had long life and know the difference between wealth and prosperity.
    Each year we looked forward to seeing them move across our back yard, at first alone and then with a pair of youngsters. They were tall birds with grayish feathers and heads that, capped in bright red, came up almost to my shoulder. They treated us warily, never getting too close.
    Early weekend mornings I practiced Yang’s form of Tai Chi Chuan in the back yard. One Sunday as I slowly moved through the postures, I turned to see them approaching. The exercise takes about forty-five minutes to complete. During that time they moved to within ten feet of me, stood still, and stared. Then their wings spread, and they began some instinctual silent dance of greeting, circling around me. They did not mistake me for another crane, but were drawn to reach out to a strange dancing creature waving hands like clouds.
  13. bi_janus
    I was never confused, as many people think bisexuals are. I liked to eat pussy as much as I liked to suck dick (both at the same time is the sweetest spot). I liked to fuck girls and boys and be fucked by both. I wish that the lack of confusion about what I was had extended to how to live what I was, but that clarity was dearly won. I would have benefited from models.
    Either sex could set me aflutter and I suspect that I could have made a life journey with one of either sex. The intimacy I have shared with Ann, surging with the physical and the spiritual, was born in early explorations, lessons in trust and ease of caring in the midst of fear, with boys and girls. With all of them, I learned that sex was only one door to intimacy and not always the end of a chase.
    I also learned that people are anxious to be themselves with someone who listens and won’t punish them for asking uncomfortable questions. I loved people of both sexes, but I have only been interested in marrying one person, because I discovered a surprising fundamental disposition to pair bonding. Just that simple (is there a font for irony?).
    I was to learn later that I was liminal, at a threshold and just beyond reach from either side, seen as betraying both by many heterosexuals who thought people like me could only be gay and deceiving and by many gay men who thought I could only be gay and in denial or passing (no one thought I was straight and just kidding). Sometimes I felt as if I aroused more fear in both camps than did members of either in the other’s camp. Not surprisingly, most lesbians were immediately comfortable with the bisexual model (abstract model, not Victoria's Secret model. Well, maybe both.).
    I remember meeting my brother-in-law's friends in St. Louis. My brother-in-law, who among many fine traits is gay, had told them of my complication. They looked at me as they would at an accidently caught coelacanth; they couldn’t quite see what use I had in the modern ecosystem. Or, maybe Ann's presence inhibited them because she enjoyed their discomfort so much. She doesn't suffer impoliteness gladly, and is the unusual wife who, on rare occasions, has recommended my oral talents to other men. No shrinking violet, she.
    This is hollow complaining for someone who looked so straight from the outside and was never bashed or bullied (well, I guess if you’re breaking bricks with your bare hands a certain deterrent factor exists). When you are a kid and the other, you feel isolation. If bisexuals can be out, we’ve been out for a long time to the people who matter. People’s usual reaction, before they talk to her, is to worry about Ann. Unlike Diogenes, over a lifetime my lamp discovered a few bisexuals like me, out to wives and in happy heterosexual marriages. Even coelacanths stumble on each other.
  14. bi_janus

    Fire and Rain

    By bi_janus,

    The first two fires I attended were in the rain. After the Fire Academy and three weeks of department training I was a probie in the cab of a ladder truck, seated between the driver and the officer, headed to my first fire. I experienced a little boy’s delight as I worked the electronic siren. As we approached, the single story house’s roof was collapsing, a dark hole spreading from the center of the fire’s first penetration through the shingles. The engine companies had matters in hand, and we helped with salvage covers and overhaul.
    The third fire was a night fire in a commercial row with a common cockloft where the fire was spreading. I was on the second arriving engine and went in second on our first hand line. When we went through the rear door into the narrow hallway, crouching low, I couldn’t see anything. I could hear the sound of breathing through SCBAs. I kept my hands on the line as we advanced in a world consisting only of sounds, including the failing wood and steel, and warmth. The first guy on my line stopped, and I heard water flowing from a fog nozzle, but not ours. The first due engine, having arrived just before us, had advanced from the front of the store, placed an attic ladder, and was darkening the fire.
    I felt a hand on my shoulder and I heard my Lieutenant through his mask telling me to back out and take a break. Moving around him, I followed the line out of the rear door and went to the tailboard of our engine. After we wrapped up and reloaded the pre-connects and the supply line, the boss told me I did a hell of a job. I thought, “If that was a hell of a job, I wonder when the real work begins.”
    Much later in my career I had learned what he meant. Even though I had no role in putting that fire out, I had gone into the hot darkness and stayed in the hot darkness with my crew. They would have carried me out had I stumbled and I would have done as much for them. I learned to trust most of them in the next many years, and learned that trust in your company when your ass is hanging out banishes paralyzing fear.
    Even though the fire service was slightly more reactionary than a Southern Baptist church and most of them would have been appalled by my secrets, all that mattered was that we trusted each other to care when no other agent of care was present. Among the finest compliments I received as I rose through the ranks was the recognition by my peers in blue shirts that I was a hell of a firefighter.
    I still love the memory of moving low in a dark building while flammable gasses overhead periodically ignited, causing flames to roll over our heads until the vapors were temporarily exhausted, as we looked for any in need of rescue, moving always to the seat of the fire.
  15. bi_janus

    The Standard Model

    By bi_janus,

    At the Hilton for a charity event with silent auction. Of all that I do in my present tired and cranky state, public socializing is most taxing. But, I know the organizers and I support their work. They'll help Ann later, so I feel obliged. I don't drink and never have, a nod to my passion for control, but now I couldn't even if I wanted to change a lifetime habit. Ann has four or five of these events around the holidays and begged off.
    I circulated, receiving greetings from acquaintances who remember little about me except that I am sick. Most of them speak briefly with an unctuous tone that substitutes for real empathy. Having placed bids on several items that I don't really want or need, but will give to our friends should I win, I stood at the bar, sipping a ginger ale. Earlier, as I circulated, I realized that about thirty percent of the men in the crowd were gay. I knew this because I've met many of them in social settings.
    A friend saw me and joined me at the bar. I've known him for a long time, and he knows Ann and the history of our somewhat unusual marriage. I thought I'd found a way to make the evening less painful until a gay male couple I know casually and my friend knows well joined us. My friend had obviously at some point mentioned to the couple that I'm bisexual. The couple looked at me as if I were an accidentally caught coelacanth; they couldn't quite see what place I had in a modern ecosystem.
    One member of the couple was sympathetic, and, with a significant level of ethanol lubrication, tried to say that it must be hard to live as a pendulum. How do I know, the questioner almost tactfully asked, whether my compass needle is pointing to men or women at a given moment. Oh, the horror, the horror. I chose to regard the questions as born of genuine curiosity and not social incapacity.
    Never one to avoid a moment of possible instruction, I waded in, suggesting that I was not a pendulum, but more like the quantum mechanics description of an electron. My general state of attraction could only be described by a statement of wave-form probability that always included both men and women in varying combinations, and that only at the time of a given observation, should I invite an observer, could the result of my state of attraction be precisely defined.
    The couple was confused, and wandered away. My friend, unhappy with their obtuseness, said that the confusion served them right. I went home having won a couple of bottles of wine which were useless to me, but which friends will consume at holiday gatherings in our home, attended, among others, by a few other coelacanths.
  16. bi_janus

    Glowing in the dark

    By bi_janus,

    This morning I'm not working because I'm going for a bone scan. Early in the morning I'll find my way to the basement of the nuclear medicine building where I'll be injected intravenously with a slightly radioactive soup that has a preference for accumulating in bone. Then about noon, I'll go back to be scanned back and front from head to toe with a gamma camera. Areas where the tumor is growing will light up brightly.
    Here's the fun part:
    Since this is by now a regular ritual, tomorrow my colleagues will all be wearing dosimeters in a kind of HazMat joke. Because the isotope is excreted in urine, I'll have to be more careful than usual not to splash at the urinal. After I pee for the first time, one of the epidemiologists will stand guard at the men's room door while my whole team, men and women, will examine the urine in the urinal with a Geiger counter. We have a one-dollar pool won by the best guess as to the reading. I've never won the pool. After forty-eight hours, I will cease to glow in the dark.
  17. bi_janus

    First random thought

    By bi_janus,

    Not to disarm you, but we' re all dying. My schedule is just a little more accelerated than most. I believe, with Daniel Servan-Schreiber that, "Death is part of the life process; everyone goes through it. It is very reassuring in itself." I am reassured and require no extra measure of sympathy (I'm very cross with anyone who extends sympathy). I'll violate social norms by sharing my thoughts as the wild part of me cannibalizes my bones. I don't spend most of my time contemplating the end (really, I'm not protesting too much), as I have life to live. I find, however, that an imminent demise (no, I haven't calendared it yet) has made me a bit nostalgic, and that I am moved to make a few observations on the process and on my life thus far. Observation number one follows.
    Robin Ochs has said that, while many think of heterosexual people as having lives, they describe sexual minorities as having lifestyles. Ann suggests that any word containing style can never be applied to me. I have to agree, but Ann and I have a life, albeit an unconventional one. The people who would characterize us as having a meager lifestyle do so because, while they are impelled to defend human life, they can safely refrain from defending my existence because mine is only a lifestyle.
    Questionable fashion sense aside, my approach to love and sex cannot be discarded like last year’s jacket or disconnected like Peter’s shadow. I have lived with heterosexuals for over sixty years and none has been tempted to don my particular orientation to life. I have known many gay men over the years, and sharing with them has never disconnected my desire for women.
    Assuming that I can change my spots is glib, like assuming that heterosexuals can transmute their leaden lives into the golden mien of bisexuals (really, some of my best friends are heterosexual). People who spout that glibness believe that I should be an alchemist while their natures are immutable. Then, the business of religion in the West is to dehumanize non-believers the way war propaganda dehumanizes the State’s enemies. We’re really talking about power, conformity, and fear. Perhaps, they should worry more about my deplorable fashion sense than my life.
  18. bi_janus
    We went to a call for a woman in labor at an apartment complex. We were met by a four year old at the bottom of the stairs to a second story apartment. Silently, he led us through the open door of an apartment that was unfurnished except for a king size bed in the master bedroom. We asked the police officer who trailed us to watch the boy.
    In the middle of the bed was a young woman of remarkable composure given the circumstances. She was pushing, and I asked her to try to stop until we were ready. She was ready if we weren’t. We learned that the family was just moving from out of state and that her husband was on the way with a moving van full of furniture.
    I went to one side of the bed and Huffer went to the other. I put a knee on the mattress to get closer to her and promptly sank to the bottom of the bed frame as the center of the bed was thrust upward carrying the woman atop it. A moment later, Huffer kneeled on the other side and I was carried up on a wave as he bottomed and the woman came back down. My first experience with a waterbed. Finally, we gently eased her to the foot of the bed in time to make the catch.
    The delivery of the little brother was, as most are, uncomplicated and joyous, and everybody did well except for a bit of seasickness.
  19. bi_janus

    Subtle Emanations

    By bi_janus,

    When I learned Tai Chi exercises, the old man always began facing the North. When I asked why, he told me that he was able to feel the interaction of the subtle emanations of Earth’s magnetic field and the field of his own Chi. Then he laughed and told me about the dangers of habit. I have never felt this interaction, but since the old man never lied to me, I begin the exercises facing North. Who knows? One day . . .
  20. bi_janus

    Combat

    By bi_janus,

    The practice is not about eastern philosophical mumbo-jumbo or moral education, yet both happen. The practice is about combat. When I practiced with the old men, no confusion or internal argument clouded their actions. These compassionate and loving men would destroy in an instant.
    Here was the example experienced. Avoid combat, but once joined, someone dies. If your partner in this dance disengages or can no longer dance, then combat avoided. But, while joined, the roles were set; they were the killers and their partners were dying. I don’t mean that they hurt me during practice, unless I misstepped, which I did often enough. Their relentless motiveless actions, falling like sea waves and not engendered by fear or selfishness, came from nothing.
    Disparity of skill wasn’t the issue; they had no purchase onto which I could grasp. Like the pristine note of a violin sounding in a bell jar, their response would transfix me. As if my death had been destined, I could not escape, and I knew that if they perished in the process we would leave no hole in the world.
    They taught me that fearing loss and the attendant debate clouds action. By the time I graduated from high school, I had seen what everyone thought was mysterious and should be feared most. I had learned that suicide is superfluous and a quiet mind allows better decisions. This was a good lesson for an abnormal kid, one that let me look anyone in the eye.
  21. bi_janus

    Water from another time

    By bi_janus,

    In the mid-1950s when I was seven or eight, we lived on a dead end street that stopped at a creek bed. The garbage trucks would head down the street, nose-in, and then turn around in the driveway of the last house before heading back out.
    The crews were made up of a white supervisor who drove and two black men who handled the garbage. In the hot Florida summers, they often waited after turning around, and took a short break in the shade. The driver would remain in the cab with its fan while the others would stay outside.
    One day, my mother suggested that I take a bottle of cold water and a couple of cups down and see if they were thirsty. They were and appreciated the water. This trip became a weekly ritual. After a few times, the black men and I learned each other’s names and we began conversations about their families and homes. The ritual deference they had first showed me dropped away, and I learned that they were no different than I except that their children still had two parents at home.
    Later, I had to learn the hard lesson that empathy is limited by experience, and that I could never, with any depth, understand the evils that a whole community endured. Eventually their schedule changed; no more instruction at the dead end.
  22. bi_janus

    Persistence

    By bi_janus,

    One day when I was thirteen, during teisho, the old man, even then universally admired, recounted Okazaki Teruyuki’s definition of the relationship between teacher and student. Okazaki-sama said, “Student here (indicating his knees), teacher here (indicating his head), no steps (indicating the space between).”
    I told the old man that I had no notion that I could reach his level of skill, and that I imagined that he had been a prodigy. He told me that many of his fellow students were more talented, but some had died of illness, some had died in the war, and some had become distracted and left.
    I said that he undoubtedly worked very hard. He told me that many of his fellow students worked harder than he did, but some had died of illness, some had died in the war, and some had become distracted and left.
    He told me that he was dogged, practicing every day as long as he could, and that he had not died of illness, or died in the war, or become distracted and left.
  23. bi_janus
    I warned you I'd get back to it.
    A number of people want me dead. I think the number has decreased over my lifetime, but still, quite a few people are in that company. They don’t just want to make my life miserable; they would really prefer I suffer a painful death. I don’t have enough economic value as a possession to warrant keeping me in servitude. Death is the solution because I may be a vector.
    Many of them wouldn’t publicly condemn me to death or directly participate in the killing because of vestigial moral ambiguity about who deserves that ultimate penalty, but, given the right circumstances, they would look the other way. Since the invention of writing, records of those who should be killed have been available, and the list is impressive. Most of those bound with me for the place where blood spills have run afoul of religious prohibitions or judgments.
    You might be listed at any moment. I’m on a list because of how I conduct my love life (it’s a very long list, and most major monotheistic traditions seem in agreement that I should be on it). The people who want me dead don’t yet have the legal means to allow them to act or have someone act for them, but that could change, and then there are some who would act anyway. Young people don’t seem as anxious to kill me, but they don’t seem interested in keeping me alive by voting either.
    As in most of life, my situation is a little off center. I am a man married to a woman. I must have had sex with her at least once, because we conceived and raised a child. Under oath, she would have to admit that we had a lot of sex over a forty-three year relationship. We went to PTA meetings.
    But, there’s also the complication; I’ve had a fair amount of sex with other men. I want to ask the moral jurists whether the acts cancel each other one for one. Or, does one act with a man put me on the list? If I lusted after or loved another man, would that be enough to get me listed even if I had never followed through? Did I pollute any true believers I pulled out of burning buildings?
    Since we took the “’til death do us part” thing seriously and I have married only once, while many of those who want me dead are serial marriers, do I get some slack? Or, is bisexuality the most wicked betrayal because my life looked much like theirs, so that I should be exterminated before my monosexual gay brethren?
    Does the fact that they may have known me and even liked me, disturb them more deeply? Does it anger them that I lived unnoticed among them or that I may have taught their children? I think this issue should be addressed in the Tea Party platform. God has been largely silent on the issue. People have written on his/her/its behalf, but I haven’t been eliminated in direct divine supernatural cataclysm. I think of the cancer as a perfectly natural process.
    How should I feel about the fact that some people think I should be killed? I don’t think I’ll cooperate.
  24. bi_janus

    Shoot me an email

    By bi_janus,

    I'll get back to death soon. I promise. And now for something completely different:
    I’ve decided to use email only in the most extreme instances of inability to communicate with people in my building by other means. I've taken to walking down the corridors in the prairie dog warren where I work. Three or four minutes of attention and conversation between a colleague and me are both more satisfying and more effective than a chain of emails. Mind you, i still churn out more emails than I'd like, mostly for conversing with those in other buildings or cities or those not where I expect to find them.
    I'm taking this step because I found myself emailing colleagues in my own program who live seven feet away from my desk. I find that seeing the face of a colleague responding to me is important, so I've also taken to inviting colleagues to a relatively quiet space with plush chairs in the fourth floor lobby, which invites wonderfully digressive conversation lost to emails. I've also learned that the ease of emailing occasionally causes me to bother people when I really don't need to.
    I'm polite enough to ask if people have time to stop what they're doing to talk with me. Usually they do, and most of them have appreciated the face to face discussion, even if it takes only a minute. If they're busy, I resist the urge to email and try to see them later. At worst these small conversations result in short scheduled meetings to resolve problems or provide help.
    Perhaps the best result of this tactic is that my inbox has become more manageable.
  25. bi_janus

    It's hard enough for two

    By bi_janus,

    I've managed a lot of enjoyment and some pain in trying to figure out how to live happily, both socially and sexually, as a bisexual man. Early on, I tried threesomes, and while a triad provided a lot of advantages during sex, the social situation was almost always fraught. Often, each of my partners thought of himself or herself as having a primary relationship with me. I found trying to behave as if a primary couple existed within the little menage stressful, and eventually one or both partners would be wounded and leave. The few times these relationships really worked, they were wonderful, especially when the three of us went out and confused men and women trying to pick one of us off.
    Alas, most of us grow up, and for me that meant finding a nice girl and starting a family. In this case, a nice girl had to understand my sexual attraction to men with something more than desperate tolerance. Surprisingly, I found such a woman fairly quickly. Now, how was I going to avoid a life of compartments, one with my soul mate and one with other men? My wife was willing to try establishing a triad, but the work we were doing as a couple didn't allow either of us to give enough time to the guy and Ann wasn't wildly enthusiastic about trying to keep the sexual idiosyncrasies of two men straight in her mind, so the relationship sputtered out.
    Ann suggested that I could just have a series of sexual relationships with guys, provided I wore a full-body condom. I tried that approach for a while, and met some very good men and not a few asses. Something about these serial encounters, defined mostly by the sex, didn't meet my need for continuing intimacy with another man.
    Finally, my wife and I settled on the strategy of finding another man whose situation mirrored mine--working on a primary relationship with a woman, but needing a stable relationship with another man that didn't threaten the primary one. Easy, right? Either I was looking in all the wrong places, or I was inept. Apparently, there are a lot of happily heterosexually married gay guys out there. And, they would really appreciate my hanging up the phone if their wives called. After many attempts, I finally found just the right guy and he found me. We maintained a healthy relationship for many years, both of us continuing to love our primaries and raising families. The logistics were often frustrating, but we all made it work, awkward family picnics notwithstanding. Sexually this construct was not as satisfying to me as a threesome, but who gets everything he wants in life?
    If you're bisexual, how do or did you handle your relationships with men?

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