A wedding story

I had the most lovely time with Polina and her tribe this weekend as we went camping in Barryville, NY to celebrate her sister Ella's wedding. I've heard much about Ella, but have never actually met her until yesterday, her wedding day.

I arrived at the campground around noon on Saturday and had a nice reunion with Polina - we hadn't seen each other for a month and it was wonderful to hold her and kiss her again. She helped me set up my tent and we socialized a bit and helped set things up. Here's a photo of Yoshi and my brandy-new tent with my air mattress and sleeping bag (which I bought last year for a trip to Assateague Island that got cancelled due to a bout of food poisoning):



The campground was called Luke's Landing, and it sits on the upper part of the Delaware River, an area with lots of river rafting outfits. The campground is the home of a music festival organized in part by the groom, Sasha, so it's an area with lots of good memories for both families. Here's the gorgeous view from just outside my tent at my campsite - you can hear the gurgling of the river very clearly:



At around 2 p.m. Polina and I went to get changed into our party clothes and put on some makeup. I wore a diaphanous beaded orange and yellow dress with a silk wrap, an outfit that has an interesting back story. After the fire of 2005, I found this dress at a Lohemann's store in Houston, so it was one of, if not the first dress in my current wardrobe. One of the straps was damaged, and it's a braided string of beads, so I had to have my tailor find the same beads and rebraid the strap. Then, a year later, I was visiting Mandy and Colleen in Columbus, Ohio and we went to the Columbus Fine Arts Museum. I saw the orange silk wrap, so the wrap and dress were bought separately and are a perfect match, even down to the pattern of circles on both. The dress survived the second fire in 2007 since it was in a protective bag, but I had never had an occasion to wear it until now - yesterday was the first time it's ever been worn in public.

Speaking of perfect matches, you can see from the photo that Polina's bangs, which had previously been colored a deep shade of red, have faded to a light orange and yellow blonde, which we took great delight in pointing out that it matched my dress perfectly:



The wedding started at 3 p.m. with some games presided by Polina's eldest sister Sophie, where Sasha was given several tests, such as guessing people's hands while blindfolded, and picking out his bride's lipstick mark from several others in the wedding party. Each time he guessed wrong on the latter game, the woman he thought was Ella would get to place a lipstick mark on his face. He only had to endure this twice (Polina was his second wrong guess) before he successfully recognized his bride's lips. After completing all the tests, he was allowed to go find Ella, who was hiding on the other side of the campground near my tent, and together they walked back to the party to start the wedding ceremony.

The wedding took place under open sky outside the main tent under a huppah, which symbolises their home, and the house they hope to build someday. The families of both bride and groom are led into the huppah and several rituals are performed of walking circles clockwise and counter-clockwise, sharing wine and exchanging rings.



Once the rings and vows are exchanged, the newlyweds are wrapped into the talles of the huppah, where they share their first kiss as a married couple and Sasha breaks a glass to remember the fragility of our world:



After the wedding recession, everyone gets to throw rice on them and the feasting and drinking begins in earnest. There were lots of toasts (Polina and her family sang a song in Russian about how the couple met that reminded me of the Brady Bunch theme) and as night fell, even a heavy downpour did not dampen our spirited dancing, nor the determination of a fellow named Roman who managed to start a bonfire.

We gradually migrated to the bonfire, where we sang songs (Sophie played many songs on guitar) and talked until the wee hours, until people started drifting off and it was just me and Polina, her sisters, mom and grandmother. We sang lullabys, showtunes and Beatles songs, and I managed to play and sing "All I Want Is You" by U2 and "Leaving on a Jet Plane" by John Denver on the guitar. Around 2 a.m. we decided the fire was low enough to leave for the night, so we said good night and I dropped Polina, her mom and grandmother at their tent and retired to mine (which luckily was not too wet because I'd stupidly left only the bug screens closed when I left the tent that afternoon).

In the morning we had some breakfast and chatted a bit before breaking down campsites and starting the cleanup. Polina had to leave early to catch her ride back to Stony Brook University, so we had a nice goodbye before I finished packing up my tent. I asked Ella if I could take some of the extra mugs (they were used for coffee and tea during the wedding, but some people didn't take them home) so I could finally replace the mugs I've been using since the 2005 fire, which were part of a china set that someone donated to me. It's nice to have mugs that remind me of happier things than the fire, and this weekend was certainly one of the happier times in my recent memory.

On the way home I stopped at High Point State Park, the highest elevation in the State of New Jersey, just south of the New York border, and visited the Veteran's Memorial obelisk at the summit. It was a beautiful day after the rain and clouds of the two previous days, and it was wonderful to feel the wind whipping through my hair at top of the mountain. Here's the view of the glacier lake in the park:



Tomorrow after work I'll head to Poly Cocktail Hour for a bit, then to Diana and Kerry's viewing party for the MTV True Life premiere. But I will certainly remember this weekend for a long time to come, not just for the fun I had, but also as a milestone in my relationship with Polina where we officially were recognized as a couple by her family and close friends. The way I was accepted as Polina's girlfriend, with such warmth and open-mindedness, was both humbling and gratifying, and I hope to see many of those people again soon.

First day at work

Just got back from my first day at work, an 11-hour one at that, so I'm pretty beat. But there's so much going on, I have to write a few lines just to keep up with my fast-moving life.

Tuesday night I went to Madison, NJ about 30 minutes away to hang out with my friend Kerry. She's been feeling a little apprehensive about the upcoming MTV premiere of True Life titled "I'm Polyamorous" in which she and her now-ex girlfriend Diana will be featured and wanted some advice. I'll probably also appear in a cameo from the party at the Slipper Room way back in May ("Birthdays, MTV and Polina" - May 6, 2009) but not for more than a few seconds, I'm sure. If you want to catch it, the show premieres this Monday at 10 p.m. ET ("TNG poly documentary coming to MTV" - Polyamory in the News).

The worst of it was that I had a job interview the next morning with a PR firm in Hackensack, so even though I felt like crap I managed to drag myself out of bed and get to the interview, a few minutes late because I got lost due to poor directions. The interview was fine, but it will be a few weeks at least before I hear anything. I also got emails that morning saying that I wasn't going to start my job on Thursday as expected, so I figured I'd at least be able to sleep late the next day, as I had plenty left to do on Wednesday.

After the interview I went into the city for a haircut with Edison, and he did his usual thorough job. I had a few hours to kill before the Women's Poly Meeting, so I walked around the Lower East Side and had dinner at Whole Foods before my friends all showed up. We had a new woman named Sheila who had responded to my PolyNYC personal ad, and we've been emailing back and forth a bit, which is how she knew about the meeting. Afterwards, I took my friend and group co-founder Sylwia back to Weehawken before heading home.

When I got home at midnight, I found emails that contradicted the previous ones, and asked me to come in to my new job at 8 am! Yikes! So instead of sleeping in, I got about 4 hours of sleep and showed up a half-hour early (since I didn't know what traffic would be like). The first day was very good - got all set up on a computer with two screens in a quiet corner of the HR department. I found out that they serve free lunch every day, which is wonderful, and they also have free sodas and snacks for employees. They even have an indoor half-court basketball hoop and locker rooms for working out. It's a 90 minute drive down there without traffic, and god only knows how long during rush hour. At this point, I'm inclined to go early and stay late just to rack up paychecks and avoid sitting in traffic. My paycheck today is almost double my weekly unemployment check!

That is all for now - I'm off to bed.

Labor Day retreat

Hello everybody! Well, it's been a while since my last post, and a lot has happened. In a nutshell, Tara and I formalized our breakup on Sept. 1 (exchanged house keys, agreed not to visit/talk with each other anymore, etc.), got confirmation on my new job starting Sept. 10 in Princeton, and just got back from a three-night weekend retreat at my friend Buck's house in Middletown, NY with Open Love NY leaders Simon, Donna, and Kyle. How's that for an eventful week?

As the first two items are the most important but the most personal, I will focus this post on the most recent event, the trip to Middletown this weekend. The purpose of the trip was to do some bonding among the Open Love NY leadership and talk about our mission and vision for the fledgling group. We also had a lot of fun together hanging out, going to the Renaissance Festival, shopping and cooking together.

Friday night Simon and I drove up together and met Buck, Donna and Buck's daughter Clara at Buck's house. Simon, Buck, Donna and I went to a Mexican restaurant called El Bandito for dinner, which was pretty good food for the northeast. We also stopped at a hippie store across the street and I saw a wonderful gong windchime that I fell in love with, and resolved to buy later.

Saturday Kyle arrived by train, and we all went out to Sugarloaf, a quaint village filled with artisan crafts stores of all kinds: clothes, magick shops, artworks, herbs, records, etc. We visited all the stores, but didn't buy much other than some fresh vegetables for dinner. We stopped by Donna's condo in Chester, NY to visit with her son and his fiancee who live with her, then back home so Donna could start dinner. Buck and I went out to the grocery store for a few things (he let me drive his BMW Z3 because his back was hurting) and when we came back we sat down to a meal of salad, stuffed artichokes, un-chicken parmagiana, portobello mushrooms stuffed with a broccoli rabe, angel hair pasta with tomato-vegetable sauce and ice cream for dessert.

Sunday we got up early to go to the New York Renaissance Faire in Tuxedo, NY, only the second time I've been to this particular event (although I've been to the Texas Ren Faire many times). Here we are at the front gate:



The first show we saw were some aerial acrobatics, like those my friend Kerry can do, in the context of a play about the tales of Scheherazade:



The best thing about going to the Faire was that now that I have a job in front of me, I felt a little more comfortable spending money (which makes it so much more fun!) I bought several things at various shops, including a gorgeous purple leather mask that reminded me of Neil Gaiman's characterization of Death of the Endless from Sandman (I also got an ankh to complete the image), a pewter talisman for poets and writers (appropriate for someone starting a writing job), a new sterling silver talisman of a seven-pointed faery star, and a replacement pair of goddess earrings I had bought the last Faire that I subsequently lost in the fire of 2007. I also bought a pair of lace-up leather bracers, or wrist guards, for Polina.

We also saw the glassblowing demonstration, which is always a fan favorite - here they are just finishing a small flower vase:



Kyle's new boyfriend Mike joined us for the day and we saw a comedy show starring two nuns called "Hey Nunnie Nunnie!" that was quite funny. We also saw the jousting and a bit of the stunt show. Interestingly, this year the Faire was rebranded as a "family festival" so unlike past events, you could not buy sharpened swords or other weapons (although swords for stage play or display were available) nor could you buy any whips, floggers, handcuffs or other kinky items that have been available in years past.

We came home and ate leftovers from the huge meal the night before, and sat up to watch The Unbearable Lightness of Being, one of my all-time favorite movies which has a quasi-poly theme and generated a lively discussion into the wee hours of the morning.

Monday we actually buckled down to get some work done on our work for various poly groups, including Open Love NY. We started working on recording a timeline of polyamory for the Polyamory Leadership Network, and the bylaws for OLNY. I also tried to go back to get that wind chime gong, but the store was closed for Labor Day, so I gave Buck the money to pick it up for me later. We worked on things for as long as we could, then Simon, Kyle and I drove back to Wayne so they could take a bus back into Manhattan.

Here's a picture of our group at our lunch on Monday:

Building intentional families

I was rather disappointed with Darren Aronofsky's latest work, The Wrestler starring Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei, who both garnered Oscar nominations for acting. While the acting was certainly fine, the whole movies just seemed to plod along in scene after scene of a pathetic aging wrestler. I understand that's what the movie is about, but I expected a more original telling from the director who gave us Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain. Maybe his updated take on RoboCop will be better.

On the other hand, I was pleasantly surprised by the movie, The Secret Life of Bees starring Dakota Fanning and Queen Latifah. It was a very funny and touching story about a young white girl who finds love and a new life among a family of Black women in 1960s South Carolina. To me, it spoke volumes about the need we all have to be loved, and how we build intentional families based on love. While my first attempt to do this here in New Jersey has not been entirely successful, I am hopeful that the experience will be beneficial for the future.

When I think about why my family did not work out, I can't really say I'd do anything differently if I had to do it all over again. In hindsight, I recognize that we came together when I was in a period of great volatility in my life, figuring out elements of my core identity and personal values on the fly. Ultimately, as much as I would have wished otherwise, my self-actualization caused a deep incompatibility that we could not overcome. I'm sure we all have wished at one time or another that people didn't have to change in ways that drive us apart, but sometimes there's no way to avoid it. We all have the right to live how we feel is best for ourselves, and everyone else is free to decide if they want to come along or not. If I decide to build a new intentional family, I'm sure I won't be dealing with the same magnitude of change in myself as before, but perhaps I'll have to deal with it coming from other people instead.

But before I can even think about doing anything along that line, my first priority is finding a job and becoming self-sufficient again. Aside from the jobs in Princeton and Jersey City, I now have a lead on a job in Hackensack, which should result in an interview next week. I am definitely seeing more opportunities out there, so perhaps it will not be long before I find something and get back to a normal life, although I'm not looking forward to normalizing my whacked-out sleep schedule.

Poly picnic in Bridgewater

I got a second-round interview for the customer relationship management company based in Israel. The hiring manager is the UK, so I have to get up early on Monday for that call. This job would be based in Jersey City, so this would be one job opportunity that would not require me to relocate just yet. We'll see what happens.

Today I went out to Bridgewater, NJ to Duke Island Park for a picnic with an older polyamorous crowd I don't get to see very often. My friend Adele, who comes to my women's poly group, is a central figure, so she invited me. Most of the others I met either at the Poly Leadership Summit back in March ("Poly Leadership Summit 2009" - March 3, 2009) or at the one Thursday night poly munch I attended back in February ("Limerancing through life" - Feb. 27, 2009). Adele was actually at that meeting in February, but we didn't know each other by sight back then.

The weather was pretty crappy but we had reserved a covered pavilion, so it was reasonably comfortable. I brought some tortilla chips and organic salsa, and baked some of my famous Ghirardelli triple-chocolate brownies, which were tremendously popular, along with Adele's peach and blueberry pie.



Here's a picture of Adele and our friend Bill - he was a volunteer at Poly Pride back in October ("Poly public relations" - Oct. 5, 2008) and also marched in the Pride Parade ("My first pride parade!" - June 29, 2009) yet somehow we've never actually been introduced, although Polina knows him. He's a former analyst in the intelligence industry, which is a fancy way of saying he used to be a spy.



Adele and her husband Lance also brought their six-year-old Haley and she was a delight to watch. She couldn't stop making comments about my height! She dragged Adele out from under shelter to splash around in the mud with another Michelle, who is in a triad with a fellow (Rob?) and a black woman named Stephanie (who recognized me from a PolyNYC meeting more than a year ago):



Here's a picture of me and Haley - she got really tired and grumpy at the end of the event, so she didn't feel much like smiling. She reminded me of Pearl at that age, who also used to get the same way. Or maybe it was her coming down from the sugar rush of eating three of my brownies. But I think I look cute in this picture, at least:



"Miss Polyamory" Beki Rosenthal called my friend Mark Van Pelt during the picnic, and I got to talk with her a little bit on his cell phone. I got to know both of them during the Leadership Summit since Beki was one of the online participants I handled during the event and Mark helped me with communications.

Polina also called me on my cell using Skype from Switzerland during the picnic, and we had a nice chat about chocolate fondue, foggy mountains, and video blogging. She comes back to New York tomorrow and goes straight to college from the airport. I'm very thankful she convinced me to start using Skype - it's been a wonderful tool to keep us connected while she's been on vacation. Plus I even had a chance to chat with her Dutch boyfriend Peter, who visited with them for a few days. But I'm certainly ready for her to be closer to home so we don't have to deal with the six-hour time difference when we talk.

All in all, it was a fun day, despite the wet weather. Tomorrow I'll go to Costco and buy some more brownie mix, since I've run out.

An embarrassing first date

So the job search is ramping up to high gear of late, which is a welcome distraction while Polina is away in Switzerland. However, she has been very good about calling me on Skype and videochatting with me regularly, so I don't miss her too too much.

The interview in Princeton went very well. The company is really in the middle of nowhere, smack dab in a giant corporate complex about 18 miles from the New Jersey Turnpike. They have a big trading floor that you can see behind glass as soon as you walk in the lobby, and the rest of the offices are open desks with no walls whatsoever. Not really my preferred environment, but I can't really be picky about that. My recruiter who set up the interview followed up afterwards and reported this morning that they really liked me, and thought I was a good candidate, but they are just starting their search and they want to see some more people. This is actually okay for me because I have a couple other interviews I want to explore before I'm required to make a decision.

The Midtown PR agency let me know they were not going to offer me a position, so that's a dead end there. I'm waiting to hear more from a phone interview I had last Thursday since the interviewer went on vacation for a week after she talked to me. Then I have another phone interview on Tuesday for a new position being created by an insurance brokerage company, one that reports directly to a CEO. That's a pretty exciting opportunity, so we'll see how that pans out next week.

In other personal news, I had my first date with someone new since I started dating Polina almost a year ago. My friend Vivek, who runs the cricket meetup group I participate in ("My first cricket game" - July 8, 2009) asked me out to Lolita Bar on the Lower East Side near my old burlesque studio. I planned to go directly after my Women's Poly Meetup Group on Tuesday, and I did, but we ran quite long so I turned up almost an hour late. It also started pouring down rain when I was about two blocks away, so I got drenched and showed up looking like a drowned rat. To add to my embarrassment, he was dressed nicely in a suit and dress shirt, and I was wearing just a t-shirt, skirt and sandals. He seemed to take it all in stride and we had a nice time talking about all manner of topics. He lives in Jersey City and runs his own mergers and acquisitions firm with a partner, matching up companies that do IT outsourcing in India. We'll try to get the group together on Tuesday after my phone interview to have another cricket practice, and maybe I can get him to go with me to Brick Lane Curry House, which was recently featured on Man vs. Food, to eat some spicy food.

I've been captivated lately by Regina Spektor's last album, Begin to Hope, which I checked out of the library a few months back and listened to, but wasn't impressed with it at the time. This time, her quirky lyrics and quasi-electronic folk music have caught on with me. Maybe I will find a copy of her latest release, Far, and give that a listen as well. I am also now more than halfway through my collection of Ranma 1/2 DVDs, just starting Season 3 now. Even after all this time, they still make me laugh. Maybe after I'm done with those, I'll finally get to watching the first two seasons of The L Word, which is the only remaining TV series I own on DVD that I haven't watched yet.

All for now. Hopefully I will have some good news on my job search the next time I post.

Job search update

First off, a quick update on my busy job interviewing schedule, which I haven't mentioned in a while. I had a decent interview with three vice presidents at a large PR firm in Midtown on Wednesday. This firm is very big on social media, and actually requires all its employees to be on Twitter (which I'm not, by the way). The job is pretty much the same things I've been doing the past nine years, so it would be more of the same, and in the same place as I was before. Not terribly exciting, but certainly not the worst job in the world.

The second interview on Wednesday was with a recruiter who has found me an opportunity with a large energy company in Princeton, NJ that is interested in talking to me. He just wanted to get some more background and meet me in person so he could see if I present myself well, and he said I passed on that score. So next Wednesday I'll drive down to Princeton and start interviewing directly with the company itself.

The third interview was a phone interview on Thursday, and it was a large company based in Israel that does customer experience improvement. The job would be based in Jersey City, and some days in NYC, plus some work from home. This would probably be my least favorite job opportunity because it's a little outside my bailiwick, but of course, I'll take anything at this point.

Friday I woke up relatively early to prepare to go into the city for one last visit with Penny before she leaves for Switzerland for a week-long vacation and then college. Since I had made plans to see a movie with my friend Angel that night, and Penny was working the last day of her job in the city, it was an opportunity I didn't want to pass up even though I thought when we parted Tuesday it was going to be our last meeting for a while.

I had been thinking about what I might get her as a college going-away present, my used mini-fridge notwithstanding. She gave me an idea when she recently expressed how much she was going to miss me, her friends, and the poly community in NYC. I decided to give her something that would help her keep all that in mind while she's away in school - a digital picture frame with photos from our adventures together this summer. So I went out to Target, picked out a Kodak frame, came home and set it up, loaded it with about 70 photos spanning the period from our cooking party ("Cooking party" - Jan. 24, 2009, the first time she visited my apartment and my first picture of her) through last Monday's Poly Cocktail Hour. I also included random photos like those of my stuffed animals and me in the dress I wore to her New Year's Eve party, pictures of our friends and a few others of us that have never been shown before. Then I repacked the frame and wrapped the box before hopping the train into the city.

I got to her workplace almost an hour early due to the train schedule, so I wandered around the Financial District until it was time for her to leave. Here's a photo of the New York Stock Exchange Building, where I sat for a while and read a book:



Here's a photo of Polina working with the dogs at Ciao Bow Wow:



Her ex-boyfriend Louis (whom I met at the New Year's Party) joined us when it was time to leave work, and we went to a nearby Borders Bookstore to buy some travel guides for her vacation. Then we went to grab a bite to eat at a cafe, and I gave her the present before I had to leave to meet with Angel.

Angel had invited me to a Meetup.com group of queer people who like movies, which certainly describes me. We were supposed to have a group of people to see the 7:20 p.m. showing of The Time Traveler's Wife, but by the time we got there, that show was sold out. So me, Angel and her straight friend Victor bought tickets to see the next showing at 8:20 p.m. Since we had some time to kill, we went to the Coffee Shop on the west side of Union Square and had a bite to eat. Victor and Angel sing opera together at an opera company. I love Angel's hair - it reminds me of the giant block of stibnite on display at the American Museum of Natural History, pictured below ("The week in review"- July 26, 2007):




Unfortunately, we dallied a little too long and by the time we got back, the theater was almost full so we had to sit near the front of the theater and look straight up at the screen. This might have contributed to my inability to emotionally connect to the movie, so I'll reserve judgement until I see it again, if I ever do.

I did have some more relationship stuff to write about, but since it's getting so late now, I think I'll save that for my next post.

Polys in the wild

It's been quite an eventful 48 hours with Polina, and following on the heels of our Great Adventure Shindig a week ago, we definitely have made the most of our dwindling time together. In four days she leaves for a week-long family vacation overseas, and then goes directly to college for band camp. That means we probably won't see each other again until Sept. 12, when she's taking me to her sister's wedding. But we've had some very good talks recently and I think we understand what's needed if we want this relationship to weather our extended periods of separation while she's at school.

Friday I brought Yoshi into the Honda dealer to have the engine problem looked at, and it turned out to be a major repair of almost $2,000 requiring a multi-day stay, so I drove a CR-V loaner all weekend. Saturday night I had dinner with my family, and we completed our Kill Bill series by watching the second movie. I think that's all the Tarantino I'm going to get out of them, but that's okay - I'm not a big fan of any of his other movies besides Pulp Fiction, which they've already seen.

Sunday morning Penny called me and we chatted for a while until Ryan showed up at her place for a visit - he came to the first part of our Great Adventure Shindig at my apartment ("Great Adventure Shindig" - Aug. 5, 2009). I packed for an overnight stay and joined them around 5 p.m. to hang out while Penny tended to laundry and helped her mom and grandmother work on a scrapbook for her sister's upcoming wedding.

Ryan, as you might recall, is a polyamorous guy who is dating a monogamous woman named Beth. We decided the best way to help him was to invite Beth to Monday's Poly Cocktail Hour so she could see for herself poly people in their natural environment, so to speak. After dinner with Penny's family, we three went upstairs so that Ryan could give us an improptu lesson in shibari (warning: link contains nudity). He performed this lovely tortoise shell tie on Penny (who of course kept her pajamas on):



He also demonstrated an ankle tie on me and performed some light S&M on both of us using a plastic rod from the window mini-blinds in Penny's parents' room. I know this sounds very kinky and probably weird to some people, but it was really just innocent play, and involved a lot of instructional talking about etiquette, role-playing and boundaries. Plus, we couldn't really do anything too loud or involved since Penny's parents and grandmother were downstairs working on the scrapbook. They even called for her once while she had her wrists tied to her ankles and we had to quickly untie her so she could go downstairs.

After we put the ropes away we sat up and watched an episode of HBO's True Blood on DVD before Ryan had to go home. Penny and I got ready for bed and watched six more episodes in bed together on her laptop until about 5:30 a.m. before we finally stopped to go to sleep. Then her mom woke us at 8:30 a.m. to ask about something, but we went back to sleep until about 11:30 a.m. before we finally got up.

We spent a good portion of Monday afternoon looking at her family photo albums and cleaning up her room, which has been just this side of a disaster area for as long as I've known her. We hung up all her clothes, sorted out rubbish from recyclables, got everything off the floor and vacuumed. Now her room will be more presentable for any guests who need to use it while she's away at college:



Ryan came over after work and we followed him into the city to pick up Beth from her studio right at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. We had a bite to eat at an organic grocery store and proceeded to Poly Cocktail Hour at China 1 Restaurant. We met several first-time attendees early on, plus our friends Barbara and Joe, Simon, Lyndell, Bill, Diana, Rob ("Karaoke virgin no more!" - July 27, 2009), plus many other familiar faces. Far from feeling threatened and insecure, Beth seemed to have a very good time hanging out with us:



The event was quite successful this month, and they soon had to open a second room to accommodate the crowd. Polina and I spent the latter part of the evening participating in some group cuddling and giving/receiving massages with various people:



Ryan and Beth left around 11 p.m. while Polina and I stayed until about midnight, saying hi to the owner Alan when he showed up late. We said goodbye to everybody and drove to Ryan and Beth's apartment in East Rutherford for a quick visit and to see some of their collection of erotic and BDSM toys. We got home around 1:30 a.m. and had some tea while I showed Penny some of my shoebox photos from my former life that were rescued from the fire of 2005 before going to bed.

After breakfast the next morning we finished the last two episodes of True Blood and we got a text from Ryan, saying that Beth had a great time with us the night before, and that "progress was being made" in resolving their relationship issues. It's encouraging to believe that their relationship will be stronger now that Beth has seen what poly people are really like, instead of what she thinks we're like.

I drove Penny back to Staten Island to pick up the things I'd left in her house from the night before and then drove her to her doctor's appointment. Then I went to the White Castle near her house and bought a baker's dozen of hamburgers and jalapeno cheeseburgers to eat on the way home. Once home, I went to pick up Yoshi and now I've got to get ready for tomorrow's trip to the city where I have two job interviews and plan to visit Simon to work on his marketing stuff.

Getting married

My friend Simon was out walking yesterday on Christopher Street and he took a picture of a lesbian couple getting married in a park:



It's such a lovely statement of love and the fight for equality that I just wanted to share it. And although I don't have any intentions of getting married again, I will continue to speak out for those who are denied the right to call themselves married if that's what they seek.

Great Adventure Shindig

Penny and I threw a fun party together celebrating my fifth birthday at Six Flags Great Adventure. Various people came and went for different parts of the party, and hopefully a good time was had by all.

We started at my apartment Monday afternoon when Penny brought her longtime friend Dakotah (whom I met last New Year's) and a new friend Kyle (whom she met at Otakon last month - he lives in Pennsylvania and is visiting her for the week) on a bus from Port Authority Bus Terminal. Shortly after, Ryan arrived in his own car - he lives about 20 minutes away from me in New Jersey. Polina met him at Otakon too; he's a polyamorous man in a relationship with a monogamous-minded girlfriend (who called him about three times that evening), and also quite experienced in the local BDSM scene.

Once everybody arrived, we took a quick swim in the pool before going to Costco to buy some pizza, salad and ice cream for dinner, and Penny bought a 1TB external hard drive for her new MacBook Pro. After dinner we spread out to watch a movie on the cuddle space I created by putting a raised air mattress in front of my couch and loveseat, like so:



After the movie Ryan left, and the four of us remaining showed each other music and video clips on the Internet as we got ready to retire for the evening. After putting our guests to sleep in the living room, Penny and I stayed up a while and chatted in bed, finally going to sleep around 3 a.m. I was the first to awake at 8:15 a.m. and made omlettes, turkey bacon and toasted jalapeno parmesan bagels for the girls while Kyle had cereal.

We got to Six Flags Great Adventure just before noon and met with Penny and Dakotah's longtime friend Matt (nicknamed "Panda"), who took public transport directly to the park from his home in Brooklyn. Since we bought and printed our tickets at home, we went straight into the park, bypassing the horrendous ticket lines. Seriously, I don't know why anyone would come to Great Adventure without a ticket already in hand.

Of course, no visit to a Six Flags park would be complete without a picture with a famous cartoon character - how appropriate that we got this one with the most famous lover in the Warner Brothers stable of characters:



Our first rollercoaster was the Superman ride, which suspends you facedown in a flying position as it loops and rolls. Then we went to its neighbor, the Great American Rollercoaster. At this point we were getting really hot from waiting in lines, so we decided to go to the log flume ride to cool off. We were briefly tempted to try the "Guess Your Age/Weight" booth, but decided in my case it would be cheating.

After getting soaked on the log flume (Panda hit us with a water cannon at the end of the ride) we lined up for the Bizarro coaster, a revamped version of a rollercoaster originally called Medusa. They added flamethrowers and mist sprayers to represent Bizarro's flame breath and ice vision powers, but it's essentially the same coaster we've all ridden before.



We took the sky tram to the other side of the park and rode Skull Mountain, a small indoor coaster, then to Congo River water ride to get thoroughly drenched (Panda received his due karmic justice by getting the most soaked). We took a break for lunch, and had some fun taking pictures of unusually shaped curly fries:



The line for Nitro was too long and slow, so we had to skip that one, which is a shame because it was my second favorite coaster in the park (Kingda Ka is my favorite, and it wasn't running that day) so Polina, Kyle and I went to ride Batman and a new indoor coaster called The Dark Knight while Panda and Dakotah wandered around together.

As the evening started to wind up, we played a few games to try and win prizes. I almost won a large prize shooting a basketball, but left the shot just a few inches short. Polina came in second on a Whack-A-Mole contest, so no prize there:



Eventually we all played a water gun shooting gallery together, and Kyle won a stuffed M&M man in gangsta wear:



As I mentioned in past posts, originally our friends Reiko and Kerry were going to come, but both had to cancel at the last minute. I had intended to come home after dropping Polina and Kyle back at her house in Staten Island so they could have some private time together, but Yoshi started developing a bad engine vibration while I was dropping off Dakotah and Panda in Brooklyn, so just to be safe and not get stranded in the middle of the night, I stayed over at Polina's house. Her mom made us some dinner of pan-roasted chicken and spinach pancakes with some fresh cucumbers and tomatoes from their garden. We all went upstairs to share the air mattress, and I was pretty exhausted from the day, so I pretty much dozed off while Penny and Kyle stayed up to watch Eddie Izzard videos on YouTube. In the morning Penny and I woke up together and let Kyle sleep in while I left for home. Yoshi is running roughly, but made it home okay. He has an appointment on Friday to get checked out.

When I got to my apartment, I saw an injured kitten on the side of the road in front of my apartment building. I parked Yoshi in the garage and got a box and pillowcase and walked out to retrieve it. It was still alive, but breathing rapidly and had blood coming from its mouth. I brought it to the city animal shelter, and they directed me to an animal hospital, but I couldn't find it. I called my family and Bee helped me find a hospital with a doctor on duty. I brought it in and the doctor told me the kitty had sustained severe cranial trauma and had a broken jaw. Based on its eye reaction and breathing pattern, he said it wouldn't survive more than a day or two, even with intensive treatment, so he recommended euthanasia. I left the hospital crying for this poor baby kitten, but knowing that at the very least, I helped to lessen its suffering.

As with everything else in life, sometimes we win, sometimes we lose, but the point is to try and not to give up until we know there is no hope left. It was not the way I would have liked to end my birthday shindig, but sometimes we can't control what is put in our path. All we can do is control our own actions and handle things the best we can.

My life according to U2

Here's a clever little meme that has been going around the Internet that I thought I'd share in case anyone else wants to try it. Polina did one for Red Hot Chili Peppers that made me laugh.

Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly answer these questions.

Pick Your Artist:
U2

Are you male or female?
Even Better Than the Real Thing

Describe Yourself:
Can't Help Falling in Love (a cover from the soundtrack to Honeymoon in Vegas)

How do you feel:
Running to Stand Still

Describe where you currently live:
Where the Streets Have No Name

If you could go anywhere, where would you go:
The Playboy Mansion

Your favorite form of transportation:
Fast Cars

Your best friend is:
Out of Control

You and your best friends are:
In God's Country

What's the weather like:
Indian Summer Sky

Favorite time of day:
11 O'Clock Tick Tock

If your life was a TV show, what would it be called:
Pride (In the Name of Love)

What is life to you:
Some Days are Better Than Others

Your relationship:
Love is Blindness/Desire

Your fear:
Wake Up Dead Man (i.e. killer zombies)

What is the best advice you have to give:
Peace on Earth

Thought for the Day:
Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own

How I would like to die:
If God Would Send His Angels

My soul's present condition:
White As Snow

My Motto:
I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

Manhattan LoveFest IV

Tonight I went to Manhattan LoveFest IV - Summer of Love, a charity fundraiser benefiting the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, dedicated to causes for consenting adults who engage in alternative sexual and relationship expressions, and Fractured Atlas, a non-profit organization that provides services and support to artists and arts organizations.

On the way to the event, I stopped by to visit Polina at work - she works at Ciao Bow Wow in the Financial District as a dog sitter. One of the dogs, a boxer named Odysseus, took a liking to my fishnet hose and put a few rips in it, which I guess made my outfit a little more punk-y. He must have found the pattern irresistible.

I made my way to the Happy Endings Lounge and met my friend Lyndell at the door where she was a volunteer greeter. I talked with her for a while and then got a free chair massage from a tall, handsome black masseuse named Chaka. I haven't had a massage in such a long while - it felt wonderful. The next booth over had a Sybian machine (which costs around $1,400) that people were taking turns trying out. I also saw Rob there, whom I met a couple weeks ago at Poly Cocktail Hour and again last week at the Adventure Quest play.

The first program I attended was given by Steven Speliotis, who did a demonstration of Shibari, a form of erotic Japanese bondage. He demonstrated on a young woman named Alexandra, who is a aerial performance artist and teaches pole dancing classes. Using braided nylon ropes, they showed how to make intricate knots that stimulate erogenous zones on the body by applying and releasing tension, and controlling blood flow to different parts of the body, making them more sensitive to touch.

Then they demonstrated how to use a vibrator on the ropes, which transmit the vibrations to multiple parts of the body simultaneously. The audience was encouraged to participate by holding wrist knots extending Alexandra's arms, and applying the vibrator. After the program I chatted with him and Alexandra and her partner Michael before moving on to the next program upstairs.

The next presentation was by my friend Morpheus, who did an introductory course on BDSM. Using a volunteer from the audience, he demonstrated his expertise with various toys, such as a leather whip (which made an impressive "crack"), flogging with a martinet, and a violet wand, a device that generates static electricity which can be applied through the wand or through the fingers, tongue or lips. But he also talked about BDSM etiquette and the need for proper communication to make the experience a pleasureable and consensual transfer of energy from one person to another.

For the third hour, I listened in on Diana Adams' talk about Polyamory 101, a subject I obviously have plenty of expertise in already. Alexandra, who is poly, chimed in on the topic, but I didn't see Rob there. I saw my friend Kerry (she's Diana's girlfriend) and we listened together for a while, then went off to chat privately for a bit. Kerry is coming to our Great Adventure Shindig next week, so we discussed plans for that. After Diana's talk was done, I talked a bit more with Lyndell, then left to go home.

Hogwarts professor

I spent two days in a row on the Hogwarts Express with Lori on Tuesday and both her and Polina on Wednesday. Tuesday I came into the city and met up with Polina at the Macy's Herald Square, where she needed to exchange some shoes. As a result of her ongoing wardrobe overhaul, she showed me some of the clothes she purchased earlier in the week with her sister. Afterwards, we had a bite to eat at a deli and then she caught an express bus back to Staten Island, while I continued to Lori's office to meet up with her so we could go to a lecture at the New York Public Library.

The lecture was titled "Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures" by John Granger, author of the book with the same title, and most recently The Deathly Hallows Lectures: The Hogwarts Professor Explains the Final Harry Potter Adventure.



The lecture was quite good, and of course, to a very involved and interested audience. Mr. Granger explained how J.K. Rowling borrows from many of the greatest works of English and world literature, most notably Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Dante's Inferno, as well as several different established literary genres, such as gothic romance, mystery, and English schoolboy fiction. He also confirmed that he is not actually a relative of Hermoine Granger's, as some people have asked him.

As longtime blog readers know, I'm relatively new to the Harry Potter phenomenon, having read all seven books for the first time in 2008 (since the Twilight Saga was done and I needed more stuff to read, so my family got me the box set of hardcovers for my last birthday - "Birthday gifts" - July 16, 2008). But even to a Potter newbie like me, the talk was very interesting, and will certainly enrich my future reading of the books.



After the talk, he signed books and Lori bought a copy of Harry Potter's Bookshelf. I said hello with her, and Mr. Granger explained why he was making a lot of eye contact with me, because he was using my reactions as an audience barometer of sorts. When I smiled and looked interested, he would take that as a cue to continue on that topic, and when I looked bored, he would move on. I was wondering throughout the presentation why he was looking at me so intently.

On Wednesday I had a very nice interview at a boutique (read "small") PR agency near Grand Central Station in the city. I met with the president and chief operating officer, and we seemed to hit it off very well. He even indicated which office I'd be sitting in if I were hired (which unfortunately doesn't seem to have a window that I noticed) but of course, this is dependent on them getting some new business in the door. The gratifying part for me was that he had called one of my former senior colleagues at Agent K and they had spoken highly of me, which is always nice to hear.

After the interview I went down to Union Square in the pouring rain to meet up with Lori and Polina at the Whole Foods to grab a bite to eat before heading to the movie theater to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Polina liked it all the way up to the end, but was peeved that the defense of Hogwarts against the Death Eaters was omitted. Also, she's still steamed about how Sirius Black met his end in the last movie. Lori was just shocked at the death of a major character in HBP, as she hasn't read the book yet. As for me, I still liked the new movie, but it doesn't surpass Order of the Phoenix as my favorite of the series so far.

Karaoke virgin no more!

Guess it's time for an update before the next round of activity starts again tomorrow, since it's been a week since my last post.

Friday I drove into the city and met with Polina and her friend Reiko near Union Square. I met Reiko on New Year's Eve, but we didn't get to talk very much, so it was like our first meeting. However, she is planning to go with us to Great Adventure next week, so we'll have plenty of time to get to know each other. We chatted for a bit over frozen yogurt treats, then she went home while Polina and I went to Brooklyn to see the Adventure Quest play at a venue called The Brick.

The play basically started as a live-action version of an early text RPG (e.g. Zork) with actors playing the roles of the Hero (who reminded me of Dirk the Daring from Dragon's Lair), Guard, Peasant Girl, etc. But as the Hero goes from scene to scene, talking to people and getting the same answers over and over, and figuring out what he needs to do, it slowly turns into an existential parody where he questions why he has to kill everyone in order to achieve his goals. Plus he falls in love with the Peasant Girl instead of the Mayor's Daughter whom he's supposed to rescue. There's an omniscient female computer voice giving instructions which adds to the realism (i.e. "You can't do that") and a points counter projected on the background goes up every time he does something right. It was a very clever and funny play, and a must-see for computer game geeks.

We met up with two new people at the play - Rob, a guy Polina and I met at the last Poly Cocktail Hour ("Deep fried pickles" - July 14, 2009) and Kevin, a bloke she met on the bus back from Otakon in Baltimore. After the play, we went to a diner for a bite to eat, then trekked back to Manhattan to find a karaoke bar in Korea Town, an area around 32nd Street and Broadway. Believe it or not, it was my very first time in a karaoke bar - since I grew up with karaoke machines in the house, there was never any reason to go out for that kind of entertainment.

So here is me singing Linkin Park's "In the End" - I sang Chester Bennington's part, and Polina rapped Mike Shinoda's lines, so we did it as a duet. We also sang "Attack" by 30 Seconds to Mars together, but that was a hard song to sing!



There was a lot of multilingual singing, as Rob is fluent in Japanese, and Kevin in Chinese. Polina also sang a few songs in Japanese. However, none of us were familiar with Korean, which made working the Korean remote control somewhat of a challenge. Kevin and Polina sang "Tribute" by Tenacious D together, Rob sang "Don't Look Back in Anger" by Oasis and "Beautiful Ones" by Suede (among others - he's a really good singer). Kevin and I sang "Sweet Home Alabama" together, and we all sang "Phantom of the Opera" together, with Polina and I singing Christine's part and Kevin and Rob singing the Phantom's part.

One cool thing that we realized near the end of the night was that the four of us were each from a different decade in age: Polina in her teens, Kevin in his 20s, Rob in his 30s, and me in my 40s (biologically speaking). I have to think that's a pretty rare thing, and further proof that age is just a number, not a limit at least when it comes to having fun. From left to right, here's Polina, Rob and Kevin:



After a couple hours of singing, we parted ways and Polina and I headed back to her place for the night. The next morning we had Shabbat breakfast with Penny's parents before her grandparents, older sister Sofia and her husband Robert came over for a visit. Sofia and I spent a couple hours going through Penny's closet and critiquing her wardrobe before I left for home for Saturday night dinner with my family. After dinner we watched "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull."

The irony of monogamy

There is a very balanced and thoughtful essay on the irony of monogamy on Examiner.com today that is worth addressing. You can read the full article here.

The article asks the pointed question: how did we as a civilization come to idealize lifelong monogamy as the primary, if not only, form of loving relationship? How and why did this become our modern-day reality? Were we biologically predestined to be this way? Or are we the living in the shadow of historical accidents?

After much discussion about human biology and the patriarchal usurpation of goddess-based religion, the conclusion is that monogamy may have its roots in the control of female sexuality so that men could keep track of their lineage, thus historically linking monogamy with women's oppression throughout human history. And in a final huge ironic twist, the modern stereotype requires that women have to nail men down and make them commit to monogamy!

However, the article does conclude in a balanced way, saying that none of this means that monogamy, as such, in necessarily bad - only that these conclusions should give us pause for thought. The writer asserts that some people (maybe even a majority of people) are best-suited for some form of a monogamous lifestyle – whether it be life-long monogamy, or serial monogamy.

However, he also makes the point that people (especially women) might do well to seriously consider the roots of their own desire for monogamy and if they do, they might find that the best path for some people is some form of non-monogamy. Living as we do now, with the option of genetic paternity testing, it could be that the original motivation for the widespread social endorsement of monogamy as the "one true path" for a spiritually rewarding and socially fruitful life is now gone.

Relationship talks

I just got home from a nice visit with Polina on Staten Island over the last day and a half. She has been busy working at her job in Manhattan, and was out all weekend in Baltimore for Otakon 2009, a huge anime, manga and Asian pop culture conference. She cosplayed as Duo Maxwell, a character from Mobile Suit Gundam Wing.



And she wasn't the only person playing Duo - there were at least three others at Otakon (but she was the only one who bothered to bind her breasts for added fidelity). Polina is at the far left:



She got back from Baltimore late Sunday night and slept over at her grandmother's place near St. Marks, and I picked her up from there Monday afternoon to bring her home with all her cosplay gear she had to carry. We hung out and read books together for a couple hours, making plans on Friday to see a show in Williamsburg called Adventure Quest with some of her new Otakon friends. Supposedly "capturing the style and spirit of the Golden Age of home computer gaming, Adventure Quest is both a nostalgic treat and a glimpse into the yawning Void." I expect that Penny and I will chuckle at different things in this play, considering that I was playing computer games that were state of the art almost a decade before she was born.

Afterwards we drove to Lori's place about 10 minutes away on Staten Island and she made us a nice dinner of spicy fried eggplant, pan fried vegetable dumplings, fresh green beans and onions in a curry sauce and rice. Then we watched Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which neither of them had seen yet. We'll try to watch the new Harry Potter movie in the city next Wednesday. Lori's boyfriend Erik came home soon after the movie concluded and we chatted for a while before saying goodnight to them and going back to Penny's house to watch an episode of True Blood on Penny's MacBook.

I called Tara for goodnight around 1 a.m. to tell her I was staying overnight, and we had a decent chat, all things considered. Penny and I stayed up until almost 4 a.m., talking about very personal things that we've not shared before. I am encouraged that we continue to break new ground in our developing relationship, showing that we can trust each other and communicate about things that are sometimes uncomfortable to speak about.

The next morning we made an omlette for breakfast and continued watching True Blood. We got a pizza for lunch and had another good relationship talk in the car as I dropped her off at the ferry terminal on her way to visit with other friends over the next couple days.

Fifth birthday at the Guggenheim

Wednesday was the fifth anniversary of an event that I celebrate as my birthday. My family came over in the morning and we drove into the city to visit the Guggenheim Museum, a very special place in my personal history. I first visited there by myself back in the early 1990s on my first trip to New York City, and it was probably the first time I'd ever been in a modern art museum. Looking up into the famous structure designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, I began a tour of contemporary art that expanded my conception of what art could be, and I've been a fan of modern art ever since. It was an honor to share this special place with my family.

Here's a photo that Tara took from the lobby - which incidentally is the only place that photos are allowed:



We came home and had an early dinner at Burger Deluxe, a gourmet hamburger diner near my apartment that we've been meaning to try ever since it opened last year. Then we came back to my place for a quick rest, watched some TV, and opened presents. As always, I got some wonderful things - the landmark DC event comic Final Crisis, a new Sherlock Holmes/Jack the Ripper story Dust and Shadow, Marvel Comics' Thor! Ages of Thunder, Terry Moore's follow up to Strangers in Paradise titled Echo: Moon Lake, and a new Vertigo title called House of Mystery: Room and Boredom.

I also got the first season of HBO's True Blood, based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels of Charlaine Harris, which I have been reading after getting caught up with Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series. The show so far is extremely faithful to the books, which is nice, and although Sookie is not as cool a character as Anita, the later books do start to capture some of the vampire and shapeshifter political structures that Hamilton brings to life so eloquently. Sookie is much more innocent than Anita, and unlike Anita, generally succeeds in staying that way. Other DVDs I got were the limited edition CD/DVD of Jeff Buckley's Grace Around the World and Peter Gabriel's Still Growing Up - Live and Unwrapped.

After presents we had some cake and went to the movie theater to stand in line for the 10:45 showing of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Out of respect for blog readers who haven't seen this yet, I'll refrain from saying anything about the movie, but I will say that I enjoyed it.

On Thursday I was supposed to have a job interview, but I woke up to find out that it had to be postponed due to a client emergency. I went into the city to have lunch with my friends Erika and Brigitte, who I'd last seen at Erika's birthday party in May ("Happy Birthday Erika!" - May 16, 2009). We were talking about their ideas for new business ventures that we'll probably continue to discuss in the coming months.

Afterwards I went to my friend Simon's apartment for a Vortex Healing session, something he's giving me in exchange for some PR work I'm doing for him. It was a very interesting experience, and it gave me some insight into how I might improve my life in the coming year, so I will see if I can follow-through on what I received from him.

Deep fried pickles

Just a quickie update because I have to get to bed for my big birthday celebration with my family tomorrow.

In preparation for my job interviews on Thursday, I went into the city Monday for a hair coloring, and got some rather bold red highlights done. I just wanted something a little more dramatic than the boring - albeit natural - color I've been wearing the past six months or so.

Afterwards I went to China 1 Restaurant for the monthly Poly Cocktail Hour, where I saw my friends Buck, Kyle, Lyndell, Simon and others I knew. Barbara and her partner Joe came for the first time since I've been coming, so it was nice seeing them. Polina showed up about an hour after me, and we met several new people, including a couple of dancers/choreographers named Anthony and Kristen, who are exploring the possibilities of opening up their long-term relationship. This meeting also marked the first public meeting of Open Love NY (which I unfortunately missed because my hair appointment ran long).

Polina and I left at 11:30 p.m. since she was coming home with me to do some shopping the next day. And just like last time ("Firefly marathon" - June 10, 2009) we seemed to attract an undue amount of attention on the train ride home. First there was a U.S. Army staff sergeant visiting home from his post in Italy telling us war stories from his time with the 82nd Airborne Division - he was on his third or fourth tour of duty and getting ready to go to Afghanistan. Once he got off at Newark, another man took his place in the seat across from us and continued telling us stories about Operation Desert Storm. We'd pretty much had enough at that point and started playing a game on Polina's iPod Touch so he'd take the hint to leave us alone.


The next morning, after a bit of a rough start upon waking, we headed out to do some shopping. As I did with Tara when we were actively dating, I offered to get Polina some things to make her overnight stays with me easier and more comfortable - a toothbrush, change of clothes, pajamas and toiletries, so we got those at Target. Then we went to Paramus to look for some boots that Penny has been trying to find for her anime-con costume this weekend in Baltimore. We found them at Nordstroms Rack, my favorite place for bargain shoe-shopping, and also found her a pair of jeans at the Marshalls in the same shopping center. Her old jeans were definitely ready for the recycling bin.


Then we went to a wig store so she could buy some conditioner/detangler for the wig in her costume. Afterwards, we had lunch at the nearby Hooters, the first time I'd been to one since I left Houston. I've been missing their super-spicy chicken wings, regardless of who is doing the serving. Naturally, we were the only two women in the place on a weekday afternoon. We also tried the deep-fried pickles, which I thought were pretty tasty:





After lunch I drove Penny into the city and dropped her off at work, and came home to visit Tara. We had a nice chat, and then in the evening I went out to the free movies and saw Public Enemies. I liked Johnny Depp's performance, but the movie seemed to lack focus and was a little difficult to follow for me. Not Michael Mann's best work, unfortunately.

Film screening

I had a nice time out last night with Polina and Afiya for a screening of Polina's short film, "Learning to Lead" at this year's class of A Different Take, an annual summer program that sponsors LGBTQ youths to make films about their lives and experiences. Polina participated in last year's class, and her film was shown at the MIX 21 Festival last October, where we went for our first date.

I was a bit early getting to Bluestockings, the queer bookstore where we were to meet. While waiting, I met and chatted with some people from Austin who were reading Julia Serrano's book Whipping Girl. Once Polina and Afiya showed up, we went to nearby Katz's Deli for a bite to eat. Katz's is the famous deli on Houston Street (pronounced HOW-stun) where the orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally was filmed - in fact, we sat one table away from the exact place where Meg Ryan demonstrated her acting chops (it's marked by a hanging sign). Here's a picture of my pastrami and chopped liver on rye, something I saw Anthony Bourdain order on his show, "No Reservations" on the Travel Channel:



After eating, we strolled over to Le Petit Versailles, a public garden in the East Village maintained by neighborhood volunteers. Polina got reacquainted with her former teachers and colleagues, and we started the screening as soon it got dark enough.



Polina had also invited Marc, a guy she met while in Argentina, and his boyfriend Xavi, who were visiting New York together, and they showed up midway through the program, just in time to see her film. Marc and Xavi are both journalists who live in Barcelona, Spain, and are traveling the world, working on research for a book and other projects.

After the screening, some audience Q&A and socializing, we decided to find a place to get a bite to eat. Polina invited me to stay over at her house so I wouldn't have to bail on the group in order to catch the last train back home. We made our way to St. Marks Street and found a Japanese restaurant where we had a late snack and chatted until about 1:30 a.m.



After walking Afiya and the guys to their respective trains, Polina and I headed to Staten Island, and got home about 3:30 a.m. She showed me her shiny new MacBook Pro and some YouTube videos on her new iPod Touch before we turned the lights out. In the morning, we had Shabbat breakfast with her parents and grandmother and played around with the MacBook some more until I started to make my way home.

Age gaps

Some old business before I get into a new update - here's a photo of the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows Park, where I played my cricket game. This stainless steel artwork is 140 feet high, 120 feet in diameter, and weighs 700,000 pounds. As Marty McFly might say, that's a lot of DeLoreans. The empty pool surrounding the base was filled with skateboarders and cyclists taking advantage of the smooth surface that is normally underwater.



On Wednesday I ran a bunch of errands during the day, including setting up another job interview for July 16 - I have two scheduled for that day, both PR agencies in NYC. One of them is a smaller agency near Grand Central Station, and the other one is a Top 5 agency a few blocks from my last job at Agent K. I'm also still waiting to hear from the agency in Cranford, NJ, but from a purely logistical standpoint, I'd much rather work in the city than have to drive through rush-hour traffic every day.

In the afternoon, Polina came over to my place after spending the previous night at her friend Laura's house in nearby North Haledon - Laura was part of our first Firefly marathon last month ("Firefly marathon" - June 10, 2009). We drove into the city to meet with Lori at my monthly Women's Poly Meetup Group, which includes my friends Barbara and Sylwia, who have been mentioned before ("Midsummer update" - June 23, 2009). We had nine women total at the meeting, a record high for this group, including a new woman also named Michelle, who is of Japanese descent. She was kind to take this photo of the rest of us - Barbara had to leave early, and Lori didn't want to be in the photo since she's not technically part of the group yet.



From left starting at the top, the women pictured are Adele, Polina, then myself, Sylwia, Oxy and Tamara. Lori actually knew Tamara as a friend and was pleased to reacquaint with her.

One topic of discussion, not surprisingly since Polina and I were there as a couple for the first time, was talking about age gaps between partners. Adele and Lori both have older male partners with age gaps similar to the one between me and Polina, and a few others were struggling with smaller, but still significant age gaps between themselves and younger men.

Although I constantly crack wise about the age gap between me and Polina, I've never considered it a serious obstacle to our relationship. Obviously, my personal history makes me unlike most women of my biological age, and it's not entirely in jest that I celebrate my 5th birthday next Wednesday. There is no doubt I skew very young in my appearance, my demeanor and my outlook on life. Polina, for reasons of her own, skews older than her tender age, so from an outsider's perspective our age gap seems unremarkable. In fact, many of the women last night commented that we seemed a lot closer in age than we actually are. Perhaps part of that has to do with the way we are slowly finding our feet as a couple. At least we have the advantage that no one will ever mistake me for being her mom.

On the rare occasions I think about our age gap, I consider the reasons that many people make age an issue in relationships. The most practical and objective one would be having children - a couple who are both in early childbearing years are probably going to be more successful at conceiving and raising a child together. Then the more subjective reasons have to do with social stigmas, inequities in education/income/career development, and generational attitudinal differences. Finally, there is the inevitable issue of not having the chance to grow old together, barring an early departure (morbid, I know, but it's true).

For Polina and I, believe it or not, we have talked about children, and natural childbirth is probably not in either of our futures, together or separately. Obviously social stigmas aren't much concern to transgender polyamorous pansexuals - what's one more log on the fire that social conservatives want to light under us? As for the inequities mentioned, her exceptional intelligence and my careful separation of my work and my private life keep those in check, while generational differences are something we have both always thrived on, even before we ever met one another. With the circles she travels in, Polina tends to have older friends (she has two older sisters), while mine tend to be younger than me (e.g. Pearl and Amy from my old life, and practically every close friend I have today).

As for the issue of mortality, I simply turn to one of my three core tenets - live for today, live in the moment. We don't know what tomorrow will bring. If we are happy today, that is enough. It would be a shame and a waste to spoil a chance at love today because we worry about what the situation will be decades from now. As I've said before, I'm not looking for the one "perfect" love that may or may not cross my path. Love is too precious to me to turn away because it doesn't meet some arbitrary standard or requirements. If two people feel that connection and spark between them, it should not be ignored. If there is no room in your life for more love, then you must be a very lucky person.

My first cricket game

Yesterday I played in my first cricket game, something I've wanted to do for almost 15 years. I fell in love with the game when I visited the U.K. back in 1997 and watched some games on the BBC. When I was visiting the City of Bath in England, I saw some kids playing on a school field and something about the sport just clicked with me. The sound the ball makes off a bat made of willow is somehow very appealing to me. I bought a couple balls, a set of wickets and a bat from a store in Bath and brought them home, along with a book on how to play the game.

My 15-year-old cricket bat has survived two fires and I had to replace the grip in 2006 after the first fire melted the original grip off. This was the first time it has had any opportunity to be used in a real game, so I brought it along on the bus ride into the city.



I went in early to have lunch with Polina at a barbecue place in Times Square before taking the subway out to Flushing Meadows Park in Queens. This is the location of the USTA National Tennis Center, home of the U.S. Open, which starts in a couple months. It's also nearby Citi Field, the new home of the New York Mets.

The group consisted of six young men of Indian descent and myself. The guy who was supposed to bring the wickets (a set of three wooden stakes in the ground with two small bails perched on top of them, each about the size of a Mars candy bar) couldn't get away from work, so we improvised by dragging a 55-gallon trash can barrel to one end of the pitch, a strip of hard-packed dirt where the ball is bowled to the batter. This made the game easier for the bowlers, because the wicket target became a lot larger. We each took turns at bat, and each player bowled six overs (analogous to pitches thrown for strikes in baseball) to the batsman.

We scored the game as follows - if the batter makes contact with the ball and hits it far enough, he scores runs by running the length of the pitch as many times as it takes for the fielders to return the ball, each length counting as a run. If the ball went past the field boundary before it is touched by a fielder, it's an automatic four runs; if it leaves the field on the fly, it's an automatic six runs.

There are also several ways for the batter to make an out, which results in a deduction of five runs. First, if the bowler manages to get the ball past the batsman and hit the wicket (which in our case resulted in a loud "BONG" when the steel barrel was hit) that's an out. If a fly ball is caught by a fielder (who don't wear gloves, by the way) that's an out. Or if the fielders return the ball to one end of the pitch before the batsman gets there, then the batter is "run out." Any of those events causes a loss of five runs.

Even though I've never bowled an over in my life, I acquitted myself quite well, bowling three or four outs by striking the wicket. Unlike baseball pitching, the bowler is allowed to run up to the line where he (or she) releases the ball, and the elbow must be straight once the ball is brought higher than the shoulders. I usually keep a cricket ball around my desk and practice my grip and toss in my idle moments at my computer. Everyone was most impressed with my technique, especially when I told them I learned from a book, and it was my first game ever. Most of the guys I was playing with have been playing cricket since early childhood, so that was pretty high praise.

On the batting side, I came in last in scoring with a +1 run result, but the next best guy was only +2, so I wasn't too far back. The best guy scored more than 50 runs. I wanted to use my own bat, even though it was heavier than the other bats. Next time I'll use a lighter bat. In the field I had one decent play stopping a fast ground ball, but let a couple of fly balls drop because I misjudged the flight of the ball, or I got nervous about catching a hard-hit ball with my bare hands. The cricket ball is harder and heavier than a baseball, so this is definitely not a game for the faint of heart! I had one ball jump up and smack me on the forearm, but luckily did not leave a bruise.

We played until the light got so low I was having trouble seeing the ball, since cricket balls are dark red they don't show up very well in low light. When I got home, I was so exhausted from the play and just from being out in the sun so long that I felt a little sick and had to go to bed at midnight, which is really early for me these days. Consequently I woke up just past 4 a.m. and couldn't get back to sleep until 7:30 a.m., then I slept until 12:30 p.m. Now today I'm just sore all over and it's painful just to move about. But it was totally worth it, and I'm looking forward to playing again.

Buffy vs. Edward Cullen

As a fan of both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight, this has to be the funniest remix I've ever seen! In this brilliantly edited clip by Rebellious Pixels, Edward Cullen shows up at Sunnydale High and tries to put the moves on Buffy Summers, who sees right through his sparkly facade, shutting him down at every opportunity, leading to an epic final battle between Slayer and vampire.

I've been ripping a lot of music from DVD today, taking advantage of an unusually stable computer. I completed two of my favorite Crossroads episodes - Taylor Swift and Def Leppard, and Sara Evans and Maroon 5 - plus the Peter Gabriel's Growing Up Live concert and started on Yes: Live From House of Blues. For those of you who don't know, Crossroads is a show where country music artists pair up with rock or pop bands and do a mash-up of sorts - Robert Plant and Alison Krauss was one of the most well-known and successful pairings. I especially like this song "Love Story" by Taylor Swift which works wonderfully as a duet with Def Leppard frontman Joe Elliott. Plus any song channeling Shakespeare can't be all bad, right?

Taylor Swift More CMT Music More CMT Music Videos

Kubrick and Concrete Blonde

Yesterday I watched a documentary on one of my favorite film directors called Stanley Kubrick: A Life In Pictures. It was a fascinating portrait of his life, told through people close to him and those who worked with him - actors such as Jack Nicholson, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Matthew Modine, Malcolm McDowell, Shelley Duvall, and others. I wrote a paper on Kubrick for a film studies class in college, so I've been a fan for a long time. Among great directors, I think only Alfred Hitchcock comes to mind as similarly influential and congruent with my cinematic tastes. Of course modern directors like Steven Spielberg (who collaborated with Kubrick on A.I. Artificial Intelligence), Ridley Scott, Peter Jackson, Woody Allen and David Fincher stand out as auteurs in their own right, but only time will tell if they achieve the immortality that Kubrick will be remembered for.

I went to the record store today and got an old CD I've been thinking about, Bloodletting by Concrete Blonde, a dark, goth-y work that was definitely the high-water mark for this band. Probably most people have heard their hit "Joey" from this album, or their cover of Leonard Cohen's song "Everybody Knows," which was on the soundtrack for the Christian Slater movie "Pump Up the Volume", another CD I used to have. I also used to have a CD single of the song "Ghost of a Texas Ladies Man" that included both "Everybody Knows" and an extended version of "Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)" that included some nice atmospheric effects like a distant clock tower and footsteps on a wet cobblestone street that evoked images of the Whitechapel District of London in Victorian times. Cool stuff.

Today I also went to the Verizon store myself (a day after taking Penny to the one in Staten Island) because my phone was starting to malfunction and it was time for a replacement. I opted for the Samsung Alias 2, which has a cool E-ink keyboard similar to those used on electronic book readers like the Kindle. It allows the phone to display both vertical and horizontal keyboards, depending on which way you open the phone. I like it because it doesn't have an exterior touch screen (which I don't trust to remain undamaged) and the keyboard is easy to use for text messaging. I also finally got a texting package so I don't have to pay for every message like I used to.

All for now - back to watching my collection of Kubrick movies.

Pride video

This is an amazing video and song done for Pride 2009 in the style of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire." The lyrics are below - thanks to Polina for finding it!

The job interview went well today, so now all I can do is wait and see. Afterward, I went to visit Polina for a bit, and help her deal with her dying cell phone by taking her to the Verizon store. I'm going to need to replace my phone soon too, but hopefully it will hold out for a bit longer.

I drove home from Staten Island in a tremendous thunderstorm, which was stressful and exhausting. I took a bit of a wrong turn on the NJ Turnpike because I couldn't read the signs clearly with all the rain, so it took more than two hours to get back. Plus I had to pee really badly the second hour in the car! So when I got back, I took a three-hour nap before Lori called and woke me up for a chat.

Now I'm going to shower and watch movies until the sun comes up.

PRIDE 2009
Music & lyrics by Jon Gilbert Leavitt

Silk top hats and button shoes, erotic tintypes, midnight cruise, Berlin gay society 1903
Sigmund Freud's Vienna's hype, identifies the homo-type, The Intermediate Sex and Heterodoxy
The gay wave moves across the sea, hello there Miss Liberty, Betty Boop is hot and hooch is out in the cold
Greenwich Village, Bloomsbury, gays in high society, Harlem nights, Chicago fights, Leopold and Loeb...

[CHORUS]: Pride, gotta have pride - we've been around too long to keep it inside.
Pride, can't sit back and watch from the side, pride is power and power is pride.
It's time to celebrate all the colors of the rainbow, get out into the streets, follow the tide...

The Captive hits the Broadway stage, The Fleet's In, Cadmus' all the rage, and The Well of Loneliness appears on the stands
Depression, bread lines, Crystal Night, Adolf shows Olympic might, put on your pink triangles and put up your hands
A-Bomb, 50's keen, the Kinseys shake the cocktail scene, James Dean, Mattachine, Doris Day and Harry Hay
Donald Webster Cory writes, Joe McCarthy picks a fight, J. Edgar, Roy Cohn shame on you, what else do you plan to do?

Christine Jorgensen's reborn, Daughters of Bilitis form, Ginsberg, Naked Lunch, Giovanni's Room.
Marilyn, the Beatnik scene, Jackie's in her Cassini, Vatican II and something's coming soon...
Summer 1969, the heat is rising all the time and over the rainbow Judy Garland sleeps
Stonewall Bar, men in blue, heads were broken bottles flew, "out of the bars and into the streets..."

CHORUS...

Boys in the Band played, Bette Midler sang, those bathhouse days, Lance Loud, gay and proud, Oscar Wilde Bookstore
...Sister George, Doonesbury, Tales of the City, Anita Bryant, Village People, Studio 54
Harvey Milk, rough trade, Aaron Fricke's prom date, GRID, Torch Song Trilogy, Boy George, GMHC
HIV identified, Rock Hudson, Liberace died, Bowers versus Hardwick's heard, Reagan finally says the word…

Barney Frank, AIDS quilts, ACT-UP, Randy Shilts, Queer Nation, Mapplethorpe, AZT
Amendment 2, Cracker Barrel, "don't ask, don't tell," Angels in America, March on DC
Greg Louganis, Elton John, George Michael, what is going on? Lilith Fair, riot grrls, spend a day at Disney World,
Cunanan scare, the McVeigh case, Ian, Ellen, Will & Grace,
Matthew Shepard- God bless you, what else can we look forward to...?

Gay-dot-com, VaxGen, another Bush in Washington, Millennium March, Mary Cheney, Queer as Folk
Dr. Laura's evil ways, bug chasers, ex-gays, 9/11 – Mark Bingham, Father Mychal Judge.
Holland starts the marriage trend, Beanie Man and Eminem, L-Word, Dubya's back, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.
Executions in Iran, no same-sex marriage ban, linguists discharged in Iraq, one step forward, two steps back...

Logo, Rosie, crystal meth, PNP, Mark Foley, Jim McGreevey, John Amaechi tells all
Doogie Howser, Lance Bass, Brokeback, Superman, Rufus does Judy at Carnegie Hall
Larry Craig - vice squad, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - Dumbledore, Nutmeg State, Obama wins, so does Prop 8 -
Forty years ago who knew, when Miss Rivera threw her shoe –a raid became a movement – and our Fourth of July…

CHORUS…