0-2

So, it appears I’m 0-2 on my recent dates. lol The 2nd guy started out very sweet but then got all jealous after 2 (yes 2) dates. He then promptly stopped responding to me as a way of ending it. Such behavior reeks of immaturity, which tells me it was for the best. I am not looking for drama and if you wanna throw a tantrum, knock yourself out. Had I not repeatedly made it clear this was a FWB sort of deal, [1]To which he stated he was looking for the same I could have at least understood to a degree. And we discussed it more than once. Whatev. Maybe this is the universe’s way of protecting me from drama. lolol

After the bizarre episode with the porn guy, I wasn’t sure it was the best idea but I told myself I wouldn’t avoid dating this time around. After Drew and I separated, I didn’t exactly hide from the world but I shut myself off from feelings or dating. I became almost mechanical when it came to hook-ups and play time. I guess in some ways it was a defense-mechanism. Anyhoo, I promised myself this time around I wouldn’t do that. So yeah, I’m still making the effort. I’d rather try and fail vs not try at all.

References

References
↑1 To which he stated he was looking for the same

Settling

Ok, I’m officially in my new hosting space. Apparently, I setup my account a bit wrong so they had to move everything around internally. I must say, while there were a few unexpected delays, the customer support team has been great. I opted for 1 month of managed shared hosting, which is a fancy way of saying I paid them to help me.  It comes with 24/7 tech support by phone, chat, email, and/or online.

I think I’m gonna be happier with them. I’m still discovering more and more how shitty 1and1 was in so many ways. I have direct access to chron jobs, apache, mysql [1]To be fair, 1and1 did give me mysql access, email filtering, IP blocking, etc. For basicaly a dollar more a month, I have so much more control over my domain and how it functions now. Some of these items are not for novices but it’s nice knowing I can use it, if and when I need it. I’ll definitely be using the chron jobs now.

In other news, I’m gonna attempt to import my old blog data into this one so I can do away with the duplicate setups. I figured since I’m moving all this stuff around, I might as well go for broke! lol I’m gonna try an XML import to avoid conflicting issues with API keys, blah blah blah. You shouldn’t notice anything significant. Well, if something goes horribly wrong you might see the domain go blank while I fix it again. lol

Another post coming today so sorry in advance for doube emails. I turned off subscribers so as to avoid bombarding everyone with emails.

References

References
↑1 To be fair, 1and1 did give me mysql access

Change

Ever have one of those odd moments where you flash back to time in your past w/o any real explanation?

I was standing in my bathroom this morning and had an abrupt flash of a time when I was growing up and still at home in East, TX. I was overcome with a sense of being in two places at once. It was almost as if I could see both scenes overlayed on top of each other. I have no idea what sparked it but it was a bit jarring.

I started thinking about how much my life has changed since then and how very different I live. While I’m by no means wealthy, I lived very different back then. And while there were times I went w/o things I wanted, I can’t remember many times of going w/o things I needed. I grew up very poor in the boonies of East TX. My family moved from Louisiana to Texas when I was young. They actually moved from a small town to an even smaller & very remote town. lol

Looking back at the memory, it felt foreign. I probably don’t need to say my home was very cluttered and somewhat disheveled. lol I’m not making fun just stating fact. I didn’t know any better at time. I thought everyone lived the way we did. My parents weren’t hoarders but they tended to keep a lot of unnecessary stuff. I guess this might be part of how different the memory felt.

It’s funny how life changes around us and we sort of forget how different things can be. People to this day still don’t always believe me when I explain how I grew up. I admit, it sounds almost alien. It was like one step above the TV show, The Beverly Hillbillies. [1]prior to their getting rich. lol People still laugh when I tell them we had a washing machine with a crank. We had an outhouse at one time. We had a “frigadere” specifically for fresh kill before it was skinned and cut up for sale or food. (It sat on the back porch) Our a/c was a giant industrial fan mounted in the ceiling. Our heater was a wood burning stove. We never had cable. We didn’t have a phone. [2]My parents got one at some point after my 18th birthday but before my 22nd one. I had been long gone from home before then. Our water was a self-drilled well. The only thing we got from the city was electricity. And that went out every time a thunderstorm came thru, which was often. We grew our own vegetables and slaughtered our own meat. We only bought things we couldn’t readily produce (or didn’t want to). Before my foster mom died, she even made all of our clothes. For me, it was my way of life. I didn’t know different until I got older and discovered people lived in different ways. Not everyone had a separate fridge just for hunting. lol Nor did everyone have their own personal little bear logo stitched on their clothes. (My mom had a logo for each of us.)

I look at my life now and then and it’s literally like two different people. Many of the modern coveniences I’ve come to take for granted were unheard of back then. I mean how did I live before the internet, Google, Netflix, email, smartphones, etc!? Ironically, we did live and we did ok. In some ways, I think it made me more well-rounded. I can say for sure it makes me appreciate the things I do have today more.

References

References
↑1 prior to their getting rich. lol
↑2 My parents got one at some point after my 18th birthday but before my 22nd one. I had been long gone from home before then.

Pings v2.0

As I settle into my new digs, you should begin to notice “likes” from Facebook showing up in the comments section. Imagine my surprise when they suddenly started showing up! I’m discovering several of my plug-in errors were caused by not by poor coding skills but my old host, 1and1.com. [1]Needless to say, I do NOT recommend anyone EVER using them. I can’t tell you how happy I am to be on a new host. If I’d know it would be this easy, I would have dumped 1and1 ages ago.

If anyone is interested, I’m now on lunarpages. My only beef so far is their tech support is only avail 24 hours by email. They do tech support by phone 7a to 7p. Not the end of the world but in this day and age you’d think it would be ubiquitous. Anyway, I’m now going back over a few of my old plug-ins to see if the original errors have been fixed.

In related news, I have like 10 or so posts backed up. lol It’s funny when I was holding off on posting due to the move, I wanted to blog about everything. heeheee Instead of dumping them on you all at once, I’ve scheduled them out every other day. Some I’ve already had to edit for relevance.

References

References
↑1 Needless to say, I do NOT recommend anyone EVER using them.

Up

Well, it looks like I’m up and running again. I’m still tinkering with the settings but so far so good. I had an issues last night when the domain updated. [1]user error lol

I’m still getting settled with the new host. If you notice any problems, please email me, blogs@[insertmydomainnamehere]

PS: The old blog archive is still down. Naturally, shitty 1and1 is down. (not my domain but all of their admin services) Once, it comes back up I’ll finish the migration. The hard part is over though! Yay!

References

References
↑1 user error lol

Bizarre

I had the most bizarre encounter the other day. It was truly a noggin-scratcher. This is a bit of an adult rant so be warned. Keep in mind, I’m skipping some detail and including others that are trivial but help to paint the overall picture.

There is this guy that moved to SF a couple years back. I’d seen him around and thought he was very handsome. Actually, I thought he was HOT! lol Turns out he started doing porn and dancing (in bars) not long after he arrived. [1]No, I’m giving out his name. He lives here and I have no desire to be mean. It didn’t bother me as I see nothing wrong w/porn. It did raise a little bit of a red flag but honestly, most of my interest was of the carnal nature anyway. I’m not looking for anything serious right now. So we had dinner one night and I was pleasantly surprised at how disarmingly charming he was. While not overly intellectual, he seemed very genuine, which is a quality I like very much.

Skipping the irrelevant details, he asks to come over one night after he got off a dancing gig. I said yes, he shows up and is obviously a bit intoxicated. Thinking he just needs to crash, I offered him my couch. He asked if he could sleep in my bed w/me. Knowing he was in no shape for nookie, I figured we’d cuddle and pick up in the morning.

Two or three hours into sleep, he wakes me up for some fun. Still knowing he wasn’t prepared for certain things, I settled for giving him some licky-licky, no sticky-sticky. And after seeing him dance, I wasn’t sure he’d be that great at it anyway. You get my drift. lol We finish, everyone seems happy, and I begin to drift off to sleep again. Maybe 20 mins later he goes to the bathroom.

And here is where the bizarre comes in. He is gone for like 10-15mins. He finally comes back and I asked if he is ok. He says no and that he is gonna leave. I’m like ok. I get up to turn the light on and help him out. He is sort of mumbling under his breath and it becomes apparent he is upset. I asked if something was wrong. He starts making a lot of what would be inflammatory statements if they were at all relatable to me. He leaves and spends the next 20-30 minutes texting me a lot of gibberish and insults. I wasn’t upset as much as confused. We’d had a great time and now suddenly he is upset and absolutely refused to tell me why. After asking repeatedly why he was upset, I finally gave up. I even asked if he was upset that we had messed around. [2]Even though he instigated it. He gave the impression that wasn’t it so I have no idea what set him off. I wished him a good life and left it that.

All of my friends think he must have been doing drugs in the bathroom, being gone so long. There was no mess to clean up and he didn’t get in the shower so I doubt he was ‘cleaning.‘ I don’t know what he did or why he suddenly got upset. In a word, it was bizarre. A couple friends asked, ‘what did I expect considering he was in porn?‘ I don’t like that. While it certainly does raise concerns, doing porn doesn’t make someone less of a person. Regardless, it’s over now. I harbor no ill-will toward him. If it was drug-related I hope he eventually gets the help he needs.

References

References
↑1 No, I’m giving out his name. He lives here and I have no desire to be mean.
↑2 Even though he instigated it.

Donate

I’d like to take a break from my ramblings to encourage each and everyone of you reading this to take a break from your day and donate money to the relief efforts on the East coast.

It’s easier than you might think. Most carriers support the donate by text method. All you do is text the words “red cross” to 90999. You get a confirmation that you have to reply yes to and you’re done.

If you can’t use text, please go to redcross.org and click on donate. Please donate, no matter how much you can afford. Even a little will help.

You make not be personally affected but if the situation were reversed wouldn’t you want people to help you too? Please, take a moment out of your busy day to send a few dollars to the relief efforts.

I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Down

After almost 24 hours, my blog & email are back up and running. My ISP, 1and1.com, in it’s complete incompetence took my domain down over a “system error.” Three phone calls later, it’s finally back up after who knows how many emails sent to me bounced.

Mistakes happen, I realize that. Unfortunately, this is not the first time it’s happened. After losing my wallet recently, I got an email from them stating I had a balance and needed to update my cc info. No biggie, I log in and update with the new info. I did this almost 2 weeks ago. Yet somehow, their system did not register the update on the payment side so they locked my domain. Uh, don’t ya think it might be relevant to have the system look for new info? Especially when you send me a nice confirmation email of the change to my account two weeks ago!

Even worse, my first call the rep was too busy to even bother with trying to help me. While I was annoyed, I was courteous and by no means disrespectful. He then has the audacity to tell me, while I am on the phone with him, I can file a complaint by email. NO MA’AM! I am on the fraking phone with you, why in the hell would I need to send an email. Oh and btw, what EFFING EMAIL! You turned off all my email! Needless to say, after a few rather unpleasant obsenities regarding his indifference, he decided it was best to get me his supervisor. While polite, she was no more helpful than he was.

Realizing their mistake caused the problem, do you think they acted in a rush to get my site/email back up? Nope. First, I was told within the hour, then within 2 hours. On my 3rd call at the 2 1/2 hour marker, the girl was very apologetic and got something done. Keep in mind, this is 4 hours after my original call when I was told no more than 2 hours, at most.

I’ve had it with 1and1.com now. Their customer service and incompetence is approaching AT&T levels. If any of you have a good webhost that offers robust packages with plenty of emails, please let me know. I don’t even mind if it ends up being more expensive that what I have now. I would strongly recommend against using 1and1 now. What a waste of time.

Mainstream

I like gay-themed movies, books, tv-shows etc. I like seeing characters who represent me. That would be a no-brainer I guess if ya think about it, like likes like. That said, I’ve been disappointed for years with many of the gay-themed entertainment options. A lot of the books are basically soft-core porn. Sorting thru all the crap to find the real gems is not an easy task. Amazon should cut me a check for all the crappy ebooks I’ve had to sort thru. The movies aren’t much better. At least on Netflix I’m not losing money. lol And to be fair, there are some great gay-themed books and movies out there, even iconic ones. Sadly, they are the exception vs the rule. What is our fascination w/being werewolves and vampires btw? Seriously, like 50% of all the gay-themed scifi/horror books follow this format.

Anyway, I’d heard about the movie BearCity being produced and released awhile back. Even better, I heard some really positive reviews on it. I queued it up on my Netflix and had a chance to watch it the other day. I can honestly say the bears are officially mainstream. And by that, I mean they now have their very own overly contrived movie(s) that smashes would-be heart-warming scenes with the hammer of constant self-reinforcing stereotypes. God what a mess, where do I even begin?

The movie boils down to three plots.

Plot #1: Opens with a cute thin guy who is an aspiring actor and closeted bear-lover. Said guy falls for the popular fuzzy muscle bear who basically spends 90% of the movie bouncing from hookup to hookup all the while dishing the guy until finally he “falls” for him in the end.

Plot #2: Involves a very overweight bear and his cute muscle cub. The large bear is considering a gastro bypass to bring his weight down to help with getting a job. The cub and his friends are all adamantly against it.

Plot #3: A couple explores ‘opening‘ their relationship.

Before I continue with my very unhappy review, let me first say there are several funny scenes in the movie. IMO, the two best characters were the nellie gay boy (the original roomie of the bear-lover from Plot #1) and the large bear from Plot #2. They stole the movie. Moving on…

Plot #1 tries hard to make you believe the hot bear has suddenly changed his ways (at the very end) and falls madly in-love with his chaser. This whole story was so contrived and fake as to be laughable. And the overt stereotyping from this plot made my skin crawl. I almost turned the movie off several times while this story unfolded.

Plot #2 really upset me because the implied message was don’t worry about how overweight your are, just be happy with yourself. Normally that would be a great message for self-respect and self-esteem. The problem here is the large bear was not just a little overweight he was grossly overweight. The type of 100+ lbs overweight that significantly shortens one’s life span. This whole storyline pissed me off because it masqueraded as a message of being ‘accepting of yourself.‘ There is a very important distinction between being accepting of one’s flaws and taking no responsibility for your bad habits/behavior. This plot could have saved the movie had it not been so extreme.

Plot #3 jumpstarts when the older bear in the couple gets the hots for the thin bear-chaser guy from Plot #1. The bear-chaser ends up being their roommate. [1]Yes, I know it all sounds very lesbianish. lol Toward the end of the movie, they do finally agree to open up their relationship. A couple abstract sex scenes later, you see both of them getting high and showing more emotion while high than at any point in the whole movie. I still don’t quite understand the point of this particular storyline. The only implication I could find was ‘to be happy, we have to be high,’ which is pathetic IMHO.

The entire movie gave the impression that being a bear (or wanting to date one) was the characters only lot in life. And I think this is what rubbed me wrong the most. Of course, it isn’t much different from many other gay movies out there so I am not singling this particular movie out. And lord knows I’m not bashing bears, I’m more of a bear than not. So yeah, I thought it sucked. Maybe it was my own fault for getting my hopes up. I was expecting something more after all the reviews I’ve heard so far. Needless to say, I won’t be watching the second one.

References

References
↑1 Yes, I know it all sounds very lesbianish. lol

Teef’es

I’ve finally decided to move forward with the teeth work I’ve been putting off for years. Structurally, they are all fine but cosmetically they need some work. lol I’ve been putting it off and putting it off and I figure it is time to bite the bullet. (pun intended)

Due to some traumatic injuries playing football in high school, I’ve had a slightly crooked grill since. Nothing major or gross but still crooked. On top of that, I want to get veneers for the front grill to make’em all nice and ‘purdy.

I’ve been putting off braces for obvious reasons ie I hate going to the dentist. lol It also happens to interfere with certain skills. [1]You laugh but I ain’t joking. I can’t go 18 months w/o. lolol  Now, thanks to modern technology and lower prices, I can go with invisilign so as not to cause problems. Once that is done I’ll work on the veneers.

The one hitch in the whole process is one of my top two front teeth. The tooth actually came completely out in the above mentioned injury. Knowing it was my permanent tooth, I promptly shoved it back in in the hopes it would grow back. As luck would have it, it did. Unfortunately, after a root canal, the tooth died inside. It is structurally sound but if I start moving it around, it may come out. I’ll see what the Orhto doc recommends but I’m prepared to move into a replacement if he deems it necessary. I can’t even whiten my teeth too far right now because of this same tooth. Being dark on the inside, if I whiten my teeth too much the lone tooth would stand out like a sore thumb. lol

Anyway, I plan on getting a referral for an Ortho doc at my yearly cleaning in a couple weeks. I’m nervous as all hell about it but it is time. I’m 42 this next year and while not an overly vain creature, I’d like to have my teeth look nice. My insurance will cover the braces but the cosmetic work will be all out of pocket. I figure I can put in some overtime to cover it.

If anyone has had veneers done, I’d appreciate your feedback!

References

References
↑1 You laugh but I ain’t joking. I can’t go 18 months w/o. lolol