What is the sound of one geek clapping?

Looks like I’m not going to California after all, or at least not during this month. The person out in California who is responsible for contracting us is waffling on it and rather than negotiate and pressure her into getting a move on, my company is just going to put it off altogether.

So I guess the St. Patrick’s Day celebration is off. Why is it that the fates always do this kind of stuff and never the “we realized that we’ve been overcharging you for your health insurance so here’s $500” kind of stuff?

Well, not really.

However, I was approached by my boss today and was given the opportunity to go to California for work for a couple weeks. So starting sometime the second weekend of March, I’ll be flying out to San Diego for two weeks, heading back on the 27th.

Anybody in that area want to get together? The weekend of St. Patrick’s Day, I may be flying up to the Sacramento/San Francisco area to hang with some friends, too.

Man, talk about exciting!

Just popped the cork on bottle o’ wine #2 of the evening. I’m certain that I won’t drink the entire thing, but it does go to show how much I hate Valentine’s Day. For right now, I don’t even want to think about the implications of opening two bottles of wine in the same evening for right now, but for right now I don’t really care, either.

Happy VD to me.

EDIT: By the way, I totally finished bottle #2. I should know better. Who cares if it’s a sign of alcoholism. Fuck it… It’s a special occasion.

Two things that happened to me today:

1) I looked at an apartment. It was about 10 minutes from work, which was nice, and it was newly-built, which made it look nice and clean. It was a little small for my tastes, but only by a hair. I could’ve made it work, but that was when I thought it was $700/month. I had been looking at several ads in the same day, and I had thought that this apartment was advertised for $700/month, which was great because it would save me money from what I’m paying now, even though it was smaller than I’m used to.

Then I found out while talking to the owner that no, it wasn’t $700… it was $825. All of a sudden, the apartment didn’t seem so appealing or workable. Oh well. My lease ends at the end of March, so let’s hope that I can find a place by then.

2) Then, on my way home, I talked with my dad on the phone and told him about the apartment. While I was talking with him, he mentioned taxes and all of that, and I told him I was going to file my taxes this weekend, but the more I thought about it the more I wanted to see how much I was getting back from the government.

But that would be too easy, wouldn’t it? Turns out I’m going to owe money this year. For both state and federal. What blows the most about that is that I was hoping I could use my tax return to pay my 2005 car taxes. Yeah, it sucks, but I had no other options.

It looks like it’s going to be that I can either pay for new brakes or taxes. I don’t like having to pick between these types of things.

Okay, so it’s now a week into 2006 and it’s time for my wrap-up of last year.

2005 started out with a whimper and not a bang. I had spent New Year’s Eve alone in my apartment, and I don’t even think I had bothered watching the festivities on television. In fact, I was probably watching The West Wing or some other thing on DVD. For at least part of the evening, I was speaking to a friend on the phone. I probably went to bed at a pretty reasonble hour.

The beginning of 2005 was not great for me, but it wasn’t entirely horrible, either. I had lost my job in June of 2004 and had started a new one in September. The resulting debts and financial issues weren’t easy to deal with, but I was definitely in a better place in, well, almost every way.

Except the actual place I was in. The apartment I live in is about 50 miles from my place of business, which means that at the height of the gas prices in 2005, I was paying out more then ten dollars a day, just to drive to and from my job. It seems virtually impossible to find decently-priced single-bedroom apartments, though.

In June I got a raise. While it wasn’t as much as I was hoping, a raise is a raise, and it was welcomed. I was still recovering from the unemployment thing the year prior, though.

Then, in July, I lost someone I thought was a very good friend. That hurt, especially because I had really done nothing except try to be a good friend, and it ended up getting me burned. That event has kind of weighed on me since then, and it’s rather depressing.

I try not to let it get me too down, though. I’m trying to keep things positive, and for the most part I’ve done pretty well with that. Things are fairly stable and steady, if quite a bit boring. Work was crazy for a little while, as I’ve mentioned previously, but it paid off in the end and things are back to normal now.

The year ended, though, with quite a bit more bang than it had the year before. I was with friends and while it wasn’t anything crazy, it was fun and not nearly as lonely as New Year’s 2005.

And I’d say that was a fitting close to a year that was, start to finish, represented quite adequately by its beginning and end.

I have yet to write up my wrap-up of 2005 (which will come at some point soon, I think), but I just thought I would share with those of you who are interested that as of this moment, it’s been more than 36 hours since my last cigarette, and I seem to be doing okay. I don’t want to make a huge deal out of it—for one, I don’t want it to be a huge deal if I start up again, and for another, I don’t like to put a lot of pressure on “New Year stuff” like that.

But I’ll take whatever support I can get.

Just got back from hanging out with my friends, doing Trivia Night at a local pub. Well, local to Mystic, anyways. It happens to be more than an hour home for me, hence why I’m writing this at almost 12:30 am. It always feels so great to hang with people. Makes me feel, I dunno, like I have friends. :)

I got in my car tonight to drive home after work, and my one remaining headlight went out. Luckily, I had a new bulb in the glove compartment, since I couldn’t put it in the opposing headlight, because of the clip that fell off.

I replaced that headlight no more than two months ago. I was absolutely incensed, and yet there’s nothing I can do about it. After all, headlight bulbs don’t have any warranty on them.

Yay.

Had my first “Christmas” of the year this weekend. My dad and I went up to my grandmother’s place to do Christmas with the whole family (my stepmother had pinched a nerve in her back and couldn’t come up, unfortunately). Why so early, you may ask? It’s really the only time in December that everybody can get together, since we all have other Christmases to do with our own families.

We do a variant of the Yankee Swap. I ended up with a bottle of Chardonnay, but the important thing to remember is that the gift you end up with is not at all important. Our family is absolutely ruthless, which makes the game an absolute riot. It’s definitely my favorite part of the whole Christmas season. It’s also interesting to see what kinds of gifts will get traded out more (that is to say, which ones are more popular). This year the top picks were a million-candlepower flashlight and, oddly, the gift that I brought, which was a telescoping-handled car ice scraper. Funny thing about that was that I really wanted that scraper, and even though I had the second-best position for the game, my aunt, who had the best position, took it from me.

I was glad to be able to do something like this at this time during the month… It’s going to be quite busy at work this month, so it was good to get a relaxing day with the family before it gets crazier.

My stepsister, Elizabeth, has been accepted into the Peace Corps. I didn’t find out about it until a little more than a week ago—obviously I had known that she was trying to get in, but I hadn’t known she’d actually been accepted.

So the point that I found out she was going was just over a week ago, when I got an invitation to her going away party. So that’s nice. The only un-nice thing about it was its location, which was where my other stepsister lives, in Esperance, New York (way out there in upstate New York, about three hours from my location here in Connecticut and about two and a half from my parents’ place in Vermont). So there was a pretty hefty drive out to the party.

I went to the party in a caravan with my parents, and my sister and brother-in-law. We got out of the cars, unloaded Liz’s clothes and such, and went into the party. I happened to walk with with my brother-in-law, Dan. All in all, it was a pretty innocuous entrance. I said hello to the people that were there.

It wasn’t until later on that the strangeness started, or rather, that the news of the strangeness got to me. Apparently, Liz’s mother, who hasn’t seen me in years, saw me walking in with Dan and apparently assumed that he was my boyfriend.

I’ll repeat that, because it bears repeating.

She thought that my sister’s husband was my significant other.

I could sort of understand something like this, if it was somebody who hadn’t known me for twenty years. In fact, I’m actually quite used to people thinking that I’m gay, at least when they first meet me. It’s apparently quite common. Which, I suppose, leads me to the question that is the whole point of this entry:

Why is it that people seem to enjoy making the assumption that I’m gay?

I accept the fact that I am hardly the “typical” male. I’m not big into sports, I don’t mind talking about my feelings, I’m a performer (always a sign of the Queer), I have lots of gay friends. But the last time I checked, there’s only one thing that constitutes a gay male, and that is a desire for the same sex. And the last time I checked, I lack that qualification.

The strangest thing is that I would expect somebody who was practically family to know me the best (well, not as well as people who actually were family, but you get my point). The fact that Kathy saw me walk in with another guy and automatically made the assumption that he was my boyfriend means that she was already predisposed to thinking it. I get that this is all modern times and everything, but most people don’t think “Oh. They’re gay” when two guys walk into a room together, unless they have some reason to think so. So what is it? What is it that makes people—apparently the people that are even supposed to know me—assume that I’m batting for the other team?

I would make the suggestion that maybe this is why I haven’t had a girlfriend in forever, except for the obvious everybody-knows-this fact that women loooove gay guys.