I was born in Rhinebeck, NY on July 8th, 1976. This was surely one of the crucial formative events of my life, but I'm afraid I don't have the slightest memory of it.
My parents and I (and, three years later, my sisters) lived in the West Village of Manhattan. That part has not changed. We spent every spare moment -- weekends, summers, school vacations -- at our country house in the Catskills, so that I could have fun playing by myself in the dirty hot outdoors instead of going to any of my friends' birthday parties. That changed as soon as I hit my teens and was trusted at home alone. I came away from the experience with a fear of and unfamiliarity with normal human interaction, not to mention a deep and abiding hatred of the outdoors.
I went to the Downing Street Playgroup Cooperative until I was 5. It was fun. Then I went to P.S. 11 (gifted program; my parents had figured out that I could read the Wall Street Journal and that I was skipping the op-eds) until I was 11. It was less fun, but I liked the other kids. Then I went to Manhattan East until I was 12. It was still less fun and I didn't like the other kids, but it didn't occur to me to be unhappy. Then I went to Hunter College High School until I was 18. This time the other kids didn't like me either (until I met all the decent people -- Dave, Josh, Emily, and a few others who are no longer in touch -- at once in the last year). But by then I found the school part fun, so it was okay on balance.
It was discovered when I was six years old that I couldn't see the blackboard, and I was fitted for some very strong eyeglasses. Leaving the optician, I turned south, pointed up, and exclaimed "I never knew those buildings had windows!" The WTC.
I was inconsistently but stubbornly closeted, by which I mean that I told people that I was "bi" when they asked but still preferred the idea of dating women (and, in several sad instances, did). I was in the proto-GSA and unashamed about it, and I didn't consider the possibility that I would ever date a man.
I got a 680 (verbal) and a 710 (math) on the SATs, was a National Merit finalist and an AP Scholar with Honor, and finished the year as editor-in-chief of thedeepend, our humor magazine. Most of my grades in the last two years were As and Bs, with one straight-A semester that came out of nowhere. Naturally, I was the slacker among my friends -- I mean, I didn't even apply to Brown. My stretch was Amherst (waitlisted, then rejected), while my safeties and maybies were Drew, Sarah Lawrence and Wesleyan (accepted times three).
I could not wait to get the fuck out of there.
Chose Vassar, partly because of its excellent reputation, partly because of its liberal reputation, and mostly because it was just the prettiest campus I visited that let me in.
I switched to Macs right before I got there because it was an all-Mac campus (networked by LocalTalk). Vassar's gone multiplatform, but I haven't looked back.
I spent the first year and a half quite unnecessarily closeted. When I came out on the spur of the moment (by e-mail!), the reaction was marked by practiced nonchalance. I was disappointed, but consoled myself with the knowledge that I would certainly be dating before long. I was dateless for a full four years.
Perhaps liberated by my acceptance of my sexuality, I discovered that I really, really loved musical theatre. Not enough to get involved in it, which might have launched me into a career I loved, but enough to start collecting cast albums (and, later, to start the Cast Recordings FAQ after Dave Levy and Matt Kingston abandoned their similar sites.
I majored in Cognitive Science under the mistaken impression that it was okay to study whatever you felt like without regard to its usefulness in the future. I did like it, though.
Mostly because of the depth of my Babylon 5 obsession, I was at one point elected Chief Bureaucratic Goombah of the Nonhuman Student Association, a social club that alleged to be a celebration of science fiction and geeky pursuits but was really an excuse to get the straight guys laid. It succeeded admirably in that respect.
I worked in the copy center. Could have had a r�sum�-builder of a job as a coach for introductory computer science students, but I wanted to keep working with my friends there and the school wouldn't pay me for two work-study jobs, so that was that. Bright. I also had two internships at New Directions Publishing, which stayed on my actual r�sum� far longer than they should have.
I made a lot of very good friends, among them OtherMike, my first best friend. Most of them are still in constant touch. Thank god for blogging.
My GRE scores were 710 (verbal), 740 (quantitative), 740 (analytical). My GPA was 3.65 (wait, can that be right?). I eventually graduated without either general or departmental honors, and was again the slacker among my friends. Finding grad school preferable to real life, I applied to Johns Hopkins (interviewed, wined, dined and rejected) and also to Brown, UCSD and the University at Boulder (rejected times three...actually, never even acknowledged by the third). But I was resourceful, as it happened.
I could not wait to get the fuck out of there.
The University at Buffalo's Department of Linguistics accepted me, as they wanted cog sci students. In fact, they gave me a Presidential Fellowship, a level of funding achieved by only a handful of students in the PhD program. Naturally, I responded to that honor by lolling about for the next three years, not doing any work to speak of.
I was out of the closet to students and faculty almost immediately. It again did not help me get a single goddamned date -- that didn't happen until I turned to the personals in my second year. (This was just after my two best friends simultaneously found girlfriends and devoted absolutely all of their free time to them.) And then there was an unexpected learning curve -- you wouldn't expect it, but the preponderance of personal ads in Buffalo are embarrassingly bad.
I made some friends who have kind of vaporized in the last two years, except for Chris, who checks in often enough. He's the one who taught me how to drink. Someday he will hopefully teach me how to stop.
I taught two classes and TAed four others. I got quite a bit of poise and self-confidence from doing so much public speaking, but the way I got myself to do it was to try to win the students over through means of aggressive pandering. This is not exactly the right way to educate someone or to win them over to your department; they liked me far more than they liked or understood the subject by the end. I also did some side work on software quality assurance at Cymfony, Inc. I still don't know exactly what I was doing.
On November 22, 2000, I started Useless! Worthless! Insipid!, then at BlogSpot. At the time it was a lark to occupy one of the few evenings on my vacation at home that I wasn't using to see a show. Later I would realize that it's probably the most important thing I've ever done in my life.
Eventually I realized that I was not going to be finishing a dissertation...and that if I somehow did, it was sort of unlikely that I would be perceived as the kind of star educator who actually gets a job in a city that's worth living in. I decided to cut my losses (I'd qualified for a Master's along the way) and head home, New York being an ideal place to get my bearings and find a new job in a booming economy.
I could not wait to get the fuck out of there.
So I get home and am almost immediately treated to the sight of two big, big buildings collapsing outside my window. Well, that sucked. It also meant that there was to be no employment for drifters like me for a long, long time. I did get a part-time job with no benefits -- doorman for a luxury apartment building in TriBeCa. My next-door neighbor, the building manager, scored it for me but was never able to get me a promotion.
The love life picked up here. And then some. I had boyfriends, and I had tricks, and I had fuckbuddies, and I had people who crossed lines. Too bad I had to tell all of them (who cared) that I was a part-time doorman living with his parents.
When Dan sent me a note through my blog, I made a really great friend -- my first close gay male friend, in fact. Stands to reason we started as boyfriends. After breaking up we kept hanging out, having dinner, seeing shows, and drinking. Eventually we settled on The Duplex as our hangout of choice, often dwelling in the piano bar until dawn. He also introduced me to Pub Night, which expanded my drinking horizons ninefold and introduced me to a ton of cool, cool people. Still other friends drew me into Trivia Night, for which I will still turn down sex on a Thursday. And my discovery of Blind Tiger Ale House may yet be the death blow to my liver.
I was happy in the sense that I had friends and was always busy (though my attempts to find a boyfriend weren't going all too well). But I was also always too broke to lead the life I loved, in terrible, scary debt. I was unqualified or overqualified to do any job I could think of, short of contacts and running out of time. Being unemployed is tough, but being unemployed without having had a real job is indescribable -- there's no reason to expect anything to ever get better if you don't have an ace in the hole on your side. And no money to go back to school, no money to move away...
I could not wait to get the fuck out of there.
Sparky turned the tide. His trusty Rooster happened to need a new facilities manager at his office in Manhattan, and they trusted his opinion (and Sparky's by proxy) enough to give me a try. And suddenly I was working for a living wage (and benefits!) at a nonprofit where interesting stuff was always going on, doing things that I didn't necessarily want to do in the long term but was eager to tackle.
That job came to a sudden end in March 2004, never having gelled in quite the way any of us envisioned (although as there was never a question of the quality of my work, I was entirely shocked that it came down to "clean out your desk"). But thanks to my insanely great network of contacts (Emily from trivia night, in this case), I snapped up a better job when she left it about two months later -- editorial assistant for a well-regarded medical journal. More money, equivalent benefits, less grueling labor, far more attractive on my resume. Getting fired, it seems, is sometimes a good thing.
My dad died in June of 2003, a few weeks before he would have turned 65. So it goes. Shortly before that happened, my grandmother had a stroke and began to require constant enough attention that we had to bring her to live with us. When we finally moved her into assisted living (one step short of nursing care), she immediately had a relapse, meaning she needs really constant attention, except that she lives across town now. At least my mom's keeping busy.
There's reason to believe the debt will soon be under control, in which case I can escape home life well before I turn thirty. (The bar tabs are quite a bit reduced, anyway, with me going home at a decent hour on weeknights and, generally, taking it easy on weekends.)
At this writing there are promising contenders in the boyfriend arena. And even if there weren't...how much easier is it going to be with a good job and a home of my own? (Or a home shared with a buddy or two? There are a few candidates there as well.)
The world seems to be falling apart, as though it itself can't wait to get the fuck out of here. Lucky I've never been one to go with the crowd.
Photo: TK, 2003.
If there's anything else you really feel you must know about me, there's an excellent way to learn.
