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The Great Job Hunt 3.2

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Here I am, smack dab in the middle of a busy interview stretch. Four interviews in a seven day period.

I’m really happy to have some traction in my job search…hopefully, one of these opportunities bears fruit. Right now, I’m sitting on the MAX on my way into the airport for a final interview with the Port of Portland.

I’m one of two finalists for a position that would put me – potentially – in daily contact with my former employer, so that’s sweet.

I mean, awkward.

Still, of the four potentials, this one is my fave.

It’s a Sunday through Wednesday schedule, 5am-3pm. Three day weekend every week? Yes, please!

I believe this also puts me into the PERS retirement program, which is the Portland Employee Retirement System. That’s a sweet deal, as far as benefits go.

But…because there’s always a but.

As I was leaving the first interview – a five on one panel interview, which I nailed – the HR Manager walked me out. Between the conference room and the elevator, she apologized for not reaching out for a phone interview prior to setting up the panel interview. There was only about six business days between the interview request and the actual interview, but maybe I was low on her list of priorities. Anyway, she goes on quickly as we walk to make a circular gesture around the pay range in the job description she’s holding and say that they were looking to bring someone in around the low end, since that’s where the peer position was at in the range.

A) overshare

B) the bottom of the JD says DOE, and I’m pretty “E”

So, I stopped walking.

I told her that the low end was about a 25% pay cut for me and I really didn’t think I could take that kind of financial hit.

“Well, I’ll see where your peer is and maybe there’s some room to work. Anyway”, she starts walking, “we should be making a decision by Friday.”

Friday comes and goes and then the next one does, too. I decide that I was disqualified for salary expectations and was bummed.

However, that following Wednesday, I get a call from the Director’s Admin wanting to set up an interview. She said that she was sorry that apparently I hadn’t been kept in the loop.

Ten minutes after that call, I get a voicemail from the HR Manager.

It’s 4:50.

“Hi! I just wanted to let you know that you’re going to be getting a call to set up an interview with the Director. You’re one of two final candidates! Anyway, I’ll be leaving the office in a few minutes and won’t be back in until July 2nd, but you’ll hear from me then. Good luck!”

Come.

On!

This is why I say Human Resources is the least valuable part of any organization.

Oh well, it’s an honor to just be nominated…

I’ll take all the good vibes you’ve got to spare! Mostly because I know that the first and last (which hasn’t even happened yet) interviews are positions I’m not interested in.

The last interview – this coming Thursday – was professionally set up and I was intrigued by it. It’s an Operations Manager position with a support vendor at the airport. Actually, so was the first interview in this series, but with their competitor. Anyway, I LinkedIn stalked the guy I’d be reporting to and he’s about 27, so I immediately lost interest in the job. The last thing this grumpy old man needs is to report to a millennial!

Plus, he’s a farkle.

The first interview, with their competitor, started out ok. The woman offered me an interview at 11 or 11:30, saying that either worked for her schedule that day. I choose 11:30.

I show up at her hotel at about 11:20 and am waiting to meet her in the lobby. I begin to realize that the conversation taking place on the other side of the dividing wall in the lobby is her interviewing another candidate.

Now, I’m thinking, whiskey-tango-foxtrot…who schedules in person interviews 30 minutes apart?!? There’s no time to get it all done in 30 minutes, so I decide this is just a preliminary interview. The first of a series.

She’s 15 minutes late getting to me. To make it worse, she texts me where she’s sitting and what she’s wearing.

Very professional.

I knew when she didn’t stand to greet me that I was not going to work well with this person. She proceeds to pretty much phone in the interview and at the end tells me that she wants to have an offer out by the following afternoon. Adding that she still has one interview that day and several the next morning.

Well, bully for you, lady…now I know I’m for sure not interested.

Sidebar: I get to the airport early – because I’m an adult person – and decide to take a look around. See who I know, and whatnot. Naturally, I run right into my old boss. Speaking of awkward.

Which leaves us with bachelor number two in this round of opportunities.

It’s a network opportunity and it’s the second or third time that this past colleague has tapped my shoulder for this company. This time, the stars are lined up for us: I’m free, it’s in the right city, etc. It’s a women’s athletics company and I was kind of concerned that maybe I wouldn’t be a good fit. However, after a dynamite first interview with the recruiter, I’m super jazzed about it. We’ll see what comes of it.

Ironically, this job at the Port will move slowly enough that if I am fortunate enough to receive offers on both jobs, they’ll come around the same time!

This is a problem that I’m eager to have! Keep those fingers crossed for ya boy.

The Great Job Hunt 3.2

Milestones

galby68, , , 13 Comments

I’m two weeks away from my third anniversary on WordPress.

Do you think they’ll get me anything?

I’m not registered anywhere.

I find myself torn emotionally about my blog, recently.  I can’t tell if it’s an actual ambivalence about my blog or if it’s a low-grade professional depression creeping in and coloring my perspective.

Here’s what I’ve accomplished:

I’m closing in on 300 entries.  That’s a lot to me.  I think my original goal was to publish a couple posts a week, so I’m a little light against that goal.  But I’m within about a dozen entries.

I’ve got about 150 documented followers.  That’s a lot, considering I only started this blog because a few people in Facebook badgered me into it.  Can I take a dare, or can I?

And I’ve got about 10,000 views.  Well, more, actually…for whatever reason – probably, unknowingly the way I have it set up – when someone clicks into my homepage, I lose visibility to what they look at.  Who knows where they go or what or if they read anything.

Still, while I count those as pretty solid metrics for something that started as a dare, I measure myself against other bloggers and fall short in the comparison.  

That kind of bugs me.

I don’t blog every day.  My posts are pretty long, usually over 1500 words.  If you’ve read my blog, you wouldn’t be surprised to know that I’m not surprised that my fellow Americans can’t commit to something over 100 words.

I’m killing it in the UK and Australia, though!

I don’t get as many likes as the bloggers I measure against.  When I see someone with more likes on a post than I have followers…I get a little

Then again, those bloggers have a specific content…and post daily.  And I just don’t.

Effort I put into SEO for my blog? It’s not zero, exactly…I mean, I know what SEO means!

But at the same time, I use my blog semi-therapeutically. Bitching about the state of social graces in America, psyching myself up to endure another round of this Persistent Survival thing I’ve got going on, my dating – or not dating – exploits.

And, yeah…work, sometimes.  Less so, and much less specifically nowadays since several people at work read this.  I mean, I’d hate to get into trouble at work for my behavior on what could be considered a social media platform.

Which would be ironic, since what has me depressed about work is the futility of it.  The absence of institutional accountability:

Those who have a personal work ethic, do good work.  Demonstrating a will, at least, where they may lack a particular skill.

For those who don’t have a functioning mechanism within them that holds them accountable to consistently meeting the expectations of their roles…well, they don’t meet them.

And nothing happens when they don’t.

It’s depressing.

But, for all of my omnidirectional themes, I’m reminded of how sometimes just checking in with my metrics can be therapeutic in and of itself.  A couple times a week, I’ll notice that there’s hits from a search engine.  Search engines are one of the leading – as far as I can tell – contributors to homepage hits.

I used to think it was Sacha.  Once or twice a year, he’ll fire off a rant at me to stop writing lies about him, that our mutual friends read this and then tell him about it.

I’d say that’s one of two things actually happening:

A) those are my friends and they don’t really like him that much and are fucking with him,

Or,

B) he’s checking in on his brand and doesn’t want to admit it.

Either way, I didn’t really care.

But then this started happening more and more often

My search engine hits have been lining up directly with my posts about BDSM and fetishes or kinks.

Ok, A) who wants to know what my thoughts are on that topic?!?

And, B) how many pages of results did you have to scroll through to get to mine?

Lol.  There’s some unexpected sexual healing…

Now, why don’t you go out there and help a brother out by sharing a post from my blog that you’ve enjoyed?  I’ll take more followers, happily!

Milestones

An Apple A Day

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Keeps the doctor away.

What keeps Apple at bay?

Oh, $2.99/mo will do it?

Still “Not Now”, Apple.

I sprang for the iPhone 7 because I was tired of the storage-slash-memory on my 6s being too full to download apps or take pics when I wanted.  That was ~$500 – which comes out to $27/mo, until I got bored with a $100 monthly phone bill and paid it off last month – and now I gotta cough up another buck or three a month to get you off my back again?  

For – y’know – ever.

Can I just buy a ranch in the Cloud where all of my storage can run free with apps and pictures of my meals and Myrtle?

Hey…even better, can you make it easier for me to delete apps from my Cloud ranch that I really don’t want any more?

Looking at you, Scruff and Grindr.

My virtual world would be a lot less cluttered without you two hoes running around eyeballing the fenceposts on my Cloud ranch.  My actual world would probably be greatly enhanced without you reducing my culture to its basest components.  

Hey, Apple…if I do cough up $2.99/mo forever can you get rid of the asocial media apps?

No?  

Oh, right…one begets the other.  Gotcha.

The most frustrating thing is this, no…wait.  I just thought of another:

1) With a billion active Apple products in the world, can you really not afford to give up s little more free space in this vague Cloud thing?  Google gives its customers unlimited photo backup when they buy a Pixel phone.  Are they better than Apple?!?  Don’t tell me you’re hurting for cash and looking for a way to scrape together an extra half bil each month to make ends meet…

2) Is this weekly passive-aggressive sales pitch really just a way of making me break up with you and get with GOOG?  We’ve been together for six years.  We’ve had three phones together…doesn’t that mean anything to you?

I mean, I get that you’re not going to give me more free space in the Cloud or let me delete obsolete apps from it.  But at least let me delete photos from my camera roll after I put them in a file without deleting them from both locations…that just screams redundant space usage in the Cloud.

Oops…sorry about the not so subtle obscenity in the wallpaper on my screen grab.  Here’s the whole pic for you curious types:

At least it wasn’t the actual pic that gave The Wallpaper his name…that is a deliciously inappropriate pic.

An Apple A Day

Dating Into Oblivion, ep2

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Here we are…Bachelor Number 5.

Sorta.

If January was an embarrassment of no-shows, February was mostly a cluster fuck of bad timing.  Ultimately, Bachelor Number 5 had a lot more qualities about him that worked against our compatibility than just bad timing, though.

That bad timing was mostly a product of my being sick for a week, struggling to get fully recovered for another and then dealing with some pretty hostile BS at work for a third week.

The free spaces in the shortest month of the year outside of those three weeklong timeframes didn’t really leave much for me to work with.

Sidebar:  the only man on my early morning MAX to work this morning happens to be a cute, lil twink nerd.  He’s mostly sleeping a couple rows up from me, but just woke up long enough to stick his finger in his nose and then bite his nail.

I’m screaming inside.

Ok, so…Bachelor Number 5.

In a moment of questionable optimism – and probable inebriation – I created an OKStupid dating profile.

While it’s not overtly a hook up site/app, it still qualifies as asocial media in my book because of its swipe culture:  left to reject, right to express interest.  These swipes are encouraged based mostly on the picture, you don’t really get a lot of data about the person until you open their profile.  Really, we’re dismissing people based on looks here, aka:  fuckability.  But it’s got an addictive quality to it, this swiping.

Once you actually click on someone’s profile, you can see what they have to say for themselves.  What they like, how they spend their time.  People are encouraged to answer questions ranging anywhere from values to politics to dating to sex in order to help the algorithm determine compatibility with the most important person in the world:  you.

Still sounds fun, but it gets a little tedious.  Questions aren’t filtered based on the basics you provide in your profile, so I get questions like, “I think I would enjoy experimenting sexually with someone who is the same gender”

Definitely me.  ✔️

But in the case of Bachelor Number 5, I could also discover that we are both tops, so that was helpful…if not poorly timed since I swiped first and found this out later.

We had only traded a few messages beyond the initial “Hey, how are ya”.  It wasn’t something he was making a priority, a minimum of a day passing between my messages and his responses.

I tend to read that as a sign, part of my E.O.G. charm as The Silver Fox and Little Buddy have pointed out.  In this experiment, I was keeping that impatience in check.

Over the course of the week we traded messages, he went to visit Shittatle for the weekend.  I tried engaging him about what neighborhood, whether he goes up often, how I lived there for a decade, etc.  He still just gave me…not much to go with.  So, by the time he messaged me back on Tuesday after his trip, I’d learned he was a top and not really looking for friends.  At least not putting any efforts into creating friendship with me.  That partnered with his geographic undesirability – Beaverton, if you can believerton that – it was pretty easy for me to check him off of my list of potential mates.

Swipe.

But, February wasn’t a total bust.  I did finally get a chance to connect with one of my January Bachelors early in the month.

He’s a cute kid.  Twenty seven, now, not really a kid…but he hasn’t really come into his own yet.  I feel his struggle.  But I’m not engaging with it, as is my usual reflex.

So, y’know…coming out of last year without that habit was good for me.

Remember, this particular bachelor is someone I tried to meet unsuccessfully three years ago.  To his credit, this time around he was dealing with my grumpy old man-ness with jovial alacrity.

Or not really paying attention.

Speaking of geographic undesirability, he lives about 30 minutes away in Vantucky.  With me not driving, that puts a lot on him, effortwise, if we’re gonna see one another.  Which is another solid plus for him since I don’t even have a parking space to offer a guest.

When we finally got together, it was just a shared bottle of wine at my place.  He took about a half a glass to warm up and then it was off to the races.

Talking, you depraved perverts.

Unfortunately, he was kind of just barfing out his life story, not conversing.  But we finished the bottle and I learned some stuff about him.  I didn’t get a lot of talking in, so he probably only learned that I could listen and decided I was cute…which is always nice to hear.

We decided to do it again the following week, so naturally, I had to get the plague that was going around.

Whaddyagunnado?

We texted throughout the week and he was gracious about my frailty, but over the next ten days or so…pffft.

His responses started getting further spaced.  And shorter.  There’s not much I can do with “Hey” greetings or “Yea” responses.  So…I don’t.

Maybe we’re just meant to be acquaintances.  Which is fine…but he is just so darned tasty looking – a feast for these old, lascivious eyes, if you will – that it is a little disappointing.  But ultimately, I want to nourish more than my libido.

Alas, poor Whorick.

Dating Into Oblivion, ep2

TIL #1:  A Life of Bias

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I’ve recently begun thinking that we need a forum for old people to share information.  I’ve literally picked up two tricks-slash-tips from Sallory and The Silver Fox in the last year or two that have me thinking this is a missed gold mine of information.

Not the typical “fool me once” or “eat dinner at 4 pm” type of wisdom we expect from the older generation, no.  Having learned that you can’t tell young people anything, older folks know it’s best just to speak in cryptic tones when the situation of giving advice arises.  

Rather, this blog theme is some real Today I Learned bullshit that you’d never see on the Reddit…mostly because we’re too old to understand how Reddit works, what a s/Reddit is or even to want to risk the inevitable disrespect of a down vote our input might engender on the site.

Redditors are such punks.  

I’ve no thought on what to call this blog theme, so feel free to make suggestions, for now, I’m just going with TIL.

The thought that prompted this first entry, I first learned about two-ish years ago, actually, but once I started thinking hard about the real pro-tips coming my way, I realized I had to start out with this particular gem. 

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Diagonal.

The scramble crosswalk had appeared in the Pearl District while I was living in Shittatle.  I know it wasn’t there before I moved because I have a vivid memory of standing on one corner of the intersection between Powell’s City of Books one weekend when I’d popped into town on the sly for the night without telling my family.  What makes it such a vivid memory was the smirk on my younger brother’s face as he stood on the other corner.

Of all the times for my suburb dwelling siblings to decide to meet in town for dinner.

Anyway, the scramble was not there in that memory. 

It seems to take an inordinate amount of time to trigger the scramble.  Luckily, Portland is still a small enough city that traffic usually allows you to safely jaywalk whenever the hell you want,so one mustn’t necessarily wait.  However, whenever I’m around when the scramble lights officially engage, I feel compelled to say “scramble!” before or as I am entering the intersection.

I’m not really very mature.

In addition to this scramble crosswalk, another thing I noticed after moving back was The Fox’s predilection toward stepping off curbs in the middle of the street and just crossing devil may care style when traffic allowed.  I noticed this new habit because it’s what I do, notice things.  

I also noticed because of the increased threat to my persistent survival this created for me.  He’d decide to cross without warning and I’m still walking down the street jabbering away as I realize he’s now adrift in the middle of the street, fading in my peripheral vision.  Immediately setting off on an intercept course usually put me in danger of taking a hood ornament in the ass…it took me a while to learn I wasn’t going to break him of this habit and train him to give me warning before taking off on one of his impromptu scrambles.

“It saves so much time!”

Because you have fewer days ahead than you do behind, this is a going concern of yours?

That was pretty much the gist of our conversations, but over time the distance at which those conversations had taken place has decreased.  That tells me we’re working the kinks out of our system of non-verbal communication.

“Think of all the steps we’re saving!”, of course, this was before everyone lost their shit over getting their steps in last year.  What do they really know, anyway?

And it’s true!  The Diagonal saves me a ton of steps and time.  Especially when I’m heading to the MAX stop at 430 in the morning.  Young Xtopher would waste both standing at a cross walk just to hook a 90 degree turn and head down the street perpendicular to the direction I crossed.  Cutting across the street’s traffic lanes is a much more productive use of my resources.  Plus, that whole pivot motion as I turned had to put undue stress on my little chickeny ankles.

Who needs that?

Plus, it’s a victimless crime.  Portland Police don’t really come out for crimes unless they can reasonably expect to discharge a non-lethal weapon into a group of liberals…so there’s really no threat of a downside here.

TIL #1:  A Life of Bias

Gay Rights…

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or rather rites…of passage, that is.

I was doing laundry last night and wondering how to kill time while simultaneously reflecting back on my evening out with Little Buddy.

She had taken me out to a show for some quality us time, which was awesome fun – as usual – but also something I enjoyed being able to enjoy with her.  Planning a party is always kinda stressful, so I know I wouldn’t have been able to really enjoy myself in her shoes at the surprise party she threw me.

I know, I’m projecting!

Anyway, this was just time for us to witness and enjoy!  

Witness…Tony Starlight!

Enjoy…his tribute show honoring Sir Elton John.

It was amazing…just the right type of retro-drag-schmaltz.  I’m sure I will get to more depth than that at some point, but something else caught my attention while I lay on the couch, listening to the washer spin.

He took a break during his show to acknowledge special events people were out celebrating.  Naturally, Little Buddy was ready.  I thought about sinking under the table, but knowing my gut reaction to spotlights and microphones, LB had provided a picture to make me easier to track down.

It was fine.  He took it easy on me.  Plus, Little Buddy had thoughtfully avoided any pictures with the diabolical “50” in them.

I’m kinda still busy selling myself on those digits.

However – and this is what I was thinking about last night – he did bust the chops of a couple of younger folk.

There was another guy celebrating his birthday, he was marking his 28th.  Tony suggested he could maybe help him out by being a Big Brother for his drummer.  His drummer, of course having caught my eye several times over the course of the night.

It’s not that I minded this drummer boy, if you will, staring at me.  Darkened dinner theater corner is some of my best lighting.  Plus, one has to admire the craft of an overt flirt like this.  He was using his de facto bandleader as an excuse to gawk openly at me, since I was right over his shoulder.  Whenever he would look at his band mate for cues, there it was.  I could feel him staring at me from behind his sunglasses.

Yeah…you keep telling yourself that, Xtopher.

Anyway, he was looking pretty cool in a patterned shirt under a white fur vest paired with white polka dot pants.  It was a fun outfit.

I appreciated it even more when Tony gave him a little hell when introducing the band.  I swear he said his drummer’s name was “Michael Homo”, but who knows for sure?  Anyway, there he was being outed as a 25 year old college student while Tony quipped he got college credit for playing music for old people.  I think that was supposed to be a cheeky bit of self deprication because this is also Tony’s 25th anniversary year, but I think most of the room felt that burn.

I just sat there and laughed.

But I was realizing how desperately young gays, like this Mike Homo fella, need a good intro into camp during their formative years.  This drummer boy has the schmaltz with a gay tilt that is Tony Starlight.  Lucky for him.  And, further, it needs to be personal and intimate, this camp schooling.  The modern crop of gays seem to get their camp exposure from RuPaul’s Drag Race.  Fine, I guess if you enjoy that kind of thing.  But all it seems to be creating is a bunch of gay parrots that speak in bitchy one-liners and memes.

I’d like a side of personality with mein camp, please.

I’m not saying that a sense of camp humor is the first thing a gay needs to learn, but it should be a part of the whole.  I think it’s a part of being fully sub-culturally aware, regardless of whether it’s an active part of your personality.

It’s part of our collective history, and I think young gays today don’t understand that history.  I love pride month as much as the next gay – total lie, I eschew pride most of the time, but at least I know what it’s about.

Hint: the party is not what it’s all about.

What frustrates me about pride month isn’t so much that I seem to have permanently misplaced my pride body, but rather that our month has been reduced to as many weekends of parades, costumes, excessive drinking and indiscriminate sex as one can cram into a month.  

Today is February 3rd and in the first 72 hours of Black History Month, I have yet to see a randomly occurring parade, party or orgy.  I think the gays are missing an opportunity.  Sadly, I think this thing that should bring us together and strengthen us as a community is on a trajectory to become a divisive agent within our ranks.

I wonder if middle aged blacks are worried that black youth don’t know what this bridge represents

or could even name it in the same manner that I worry that young gays can’t identify this building

or this man

and engage in a conversation about the cultural relevance of either.

Whoa.  How did I end up here?

Suffice it to say, I had a point…originally.

Maybe I can salvage my train of thought.  It was a rough day at work…

Gays today are being cultured by their own generation.  I’ve had conversations with younger men that left me not only certain that they had very little – if any – idea of the struggle to earn the freedoms they enjoy.  

That’s kind of on us as a culture.  

Sure, it wouldn’t hurt to teach some gay history in schools…but how likely is that to happen?

And the hard part here is that a good chunk of a couple of generations was wiped out by AIDS, so there’s not a lot of us old geezers around to do the good work.  Not to mention the priority we put on sexualizing our youth obsessed subculture versus taking the time to raise them before we rear them.

But on the other hand, that phenomenon goes both ways.  There’s a fair number of Daddy Hunters out there sexualizing their elders.  If that’s not a misconstrued cry for help…

Anyway, back to the gay rites of passage.

If I was allowed just one, it wouldn’t be coming out to oneself, or ones family.  Nor would it be the first time in a gay bar or pride parade or sexual encounter.

No.

I think my prescribed rite of passage would be to read Tales of the City.  At least the first six books.

Actually, I think that would be a good thing for any person wanting a glimpse into the breadth of our culture and how our struggle impacted individuals.  Sure, there’s a couple odd story lines in there.  Otherwise, it has a lot of important exposure for people: gays, lesbians, trans, young, old…not to mention rich, poor, middle class, happy and not so happy childhoods and how they prepare individuals to become a part of the culture they identify with or the adult chosen families that they find themselves a part of.

What say you, mein reader…what would you prescribe as a rite of passage into this gay culture we are inhabiting?

Gay Rights…

The Red Shirt Diaries #19

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Portland’s Got Stabby edition.

I admit that walking through Old Town on dark or early mornings gives me more pause than I’d like to acknowledge.  It’s always been a little dodgy.  When I would drive into town back before the turn of the century – yes, we had cars back then – to go to the downtown bars, it was with the knowledge that there were strangely high odds that my windows could be punched out when I returned.

Luckily, I had a Jeep ragtop.  

Leaving the bars and heading back to my car, I could count on seeing a couple of cars that had been broken into along the way.

You could discourage this by locking up stuff in your trunk versus leaving it on the seat in plain sight.

No need to beg for it like a dumbass.

Over the decades since, Portland’s Old Town has gotten increasingly developed.  Mostly, or firstly, by Central City Concern…an organization that has used its property to provide affordable short or long term housing for the disenfranchised.

The disabled.

The recently out of rehab.

Some battered spouses.

And the mentally questionable.

In addition to providing low – like sometimes free low – housing, these places provide resources for the residents to get back on track.

For those willing.

Portland is famously liberal, pretty much single-handedly turning a would-be red state blue.  Low to no cost healthcare, a police force that is more tolerant of homelessness than it is our Little Beirut liberal protests…and they are pretty tolerant of those, outside of a few notable exceptions.

All of this has led other cities with less tolerant officials to sometimes remedy their own homeless problems – er, situations – with bus tickets to Portland.  The last report I read said we had about 30k homeless residents.

Most living or killing – sometimes literally – time in Old Town.

Not to lay this stabby streak on the homeless, they only get partial credit.  However, the dozen or so Urban Campers that I walk by during the pedestrian portion of my commute put me a little on edge when they rustle the wrong way.

Sue me.

The stabbing seems to happen once a month or so anymore.  Most don’t reach my consciousness unless I happen upon them shortly after or during the investigation.

That’s a pretty sad realization, but in my defense, I don’t watch much news.

The ones that tend to hit my radar are the incidents involving my community like the local nightclub DJ who was stabbed and later died in what was presented in a manner that easily suggested a hookup gone wrong.

Thanks for that, Main Stream Media.

Of course, there was the MAX stabbing last year that had the whole city running cold for weeks afterward.  A man had been harassing two young women on a train, one wearing a hijab, when three cool portland types came to their defense and ended up stabbed for their efforts.  

Two died.

The three named murderer said, “That’s what you get for your liberalism” or something along those lines.

Great, our mentally ill population is woke.

No, the ones that get my attention aren’t those truly horrendous incidents or the white trash brawls and domestic disputes.

Those I notice are the true Portland-weird fashioned occurrences.

Like last weekend’s apparent workplace dispute…with a kukri.

Oh, good…you can pick this up on Amazon.  I wonder if there is free shipping.

Really, Portland?

Or this one.

Pink Bunny suit…let that sink in.

A 

Pink

Bunny

Suit

Unless the victim was Ralphie from A Christmas Story or Donnie Darko or even Glenn Close, then I can’t even guess what the fuck this was all about.

It was a couple months before the Onesie Party

So, just…really, Portland?

Really?

But, at this point, I could reasonably see “Really?!?” being one of my last words as I’m chased by a samurai wielding bear dressed up as an Oops. I Did It Again Brittney Spears…

The Red Shirt Diaries #19

I’m (Not) A Survivor

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It’s Sacha Story Time!

We were together for six years, which is a long time for a broken relationship.  While I’d say neither of our needs were optimally met, we both drew something or some things out of the relationship along the way.  

I’m not going to speculate as to what his takeaways were, but as my birthday draws nearer, I’m drawn back to this draft I originally thought of about last Spring when reading about the TV show Survivor.

You see, Sacha was a creative type and a person that approached his faith in humanity from a busted up, scientific method standpoint.

Pro: He generally gave great, all-in gifts to his loved ones.

Con: He required significant proof that you loved him.

That last one is pretty easy to dispatch with.  

Also, tricky.

Suffice it to say, tokens went a long way with him.  He called them symbols.  Not at all problematic.

Except…100 people surveyed, top 1 answer on the board.  “Name something that symbolizes a commitment in a relationship”.

“Uh, ring?”

<BING!>

So, you just know that came up way too early in the relationship.  And me being a long-game, “what’s next?” type of guy looked at this simple fix as an opportunity to ask what the next fix would be.

Yeah, no ring.

But we did end up with new cars about every other year – that’s every year for him and every other year I got a new car for a week or two until he decided he liked mine better and I got his hand-me-down.

Oh, and three dogs.

So, I was proving as hard as I could, without capitulating, of course.

That’s the con.

The pro?  

Man, there’s a lot of great stuff to talk about.  He was creative, so when he put his mind to it, he nailed gift giving.  Besides being elaborate, they were usually fairly unique and personal.

Take my 30th birthday.  He reserved the back room at this place called The Alibi. 

It was a disintegrating tiki bar in NoPo that we’d go to occasionally with friends.  I called it “the gayest straight bar in Portland”.

This was before the hipsters resurrected it a decade ago when Interstate Ave got its urban renewal shot in the arm.

So, we were just going there to hang out a bit with Black Sheep Bro and his current girlfriend, Jackie Jack Ass.

Everyone I knew was there.

And, Sacha – not a baker, by any means – had made a gigantic cake in the shape of the starship Enterprise-A.  It was, if memory serves, two half-sheet cakes and two tiers of a round cake.  It was pretty fucking amazing, indeed a unique and memorable way to usher in my 30s.

There were the trip-gifts he gave us.  Sure, I usually ended up funding them.  He always earmarked his annual freelance project money for these trip-gifts, but it never fully funded them.  But, it was ok.  We were making memories.  Again, he usually tried to keep them a surprise, requesting time off with my boss behind my back.

It was special.

I’ve been to Italy, France and Holland thanks to these little experience gifts he gave us.

Oh, and climbed a – y’know – volcano.

But even gifts that weren’t extravagant still demonstrated a lot of imagination and thought, making them uniquely personal experiences.

That’s where Survivor comes in.

For one of my birthdays, Sacha came up with this Great Race themed scavenger hunt or Survivor immunity challenge thingy.  He gave me a clue to start me off and then planted subsequent clues and gifts throughout the house.  Behind the TV, in the dryer, in our gazebo-thing…all over the place.  Once again, Black Sheep Bro and Jackie Jack Ass were on hand, following my progress.

For whatever reason, I wasn’t all on board. He kept kinda having to prompt me along.  Maybe it was because this was where I officially began getting old and grumpy.  Maybe the clues were actually more obscure than I could bet my head around in the moment.  Maybe it’s because I was inwardly terrified that he’d somehow actually submitted me to be a contestant on Survivor or Great Race.  

Maybe I just don’t like being propelled into the center of attention.  I can get there quite nicely, thank you.

On the one hand, even though I may not have demonstrated much enthusiasm in the moment, this example of Sacha gift giving also helped get me to the point I’m at today, where experiences are better than actual gifts.

On the other hand, I still carry the relationship wariness from that moment with me.  That I might get caught up as the Ethel to my boyfriend’s Lucy in some crazy harebrained scheme like submitting me as a contestant in a reality show against my will where I have to pretend to be excited about something I’m not. 

at. 

all. 

excited. 

about.

Let’s call that Why I’m Single #50 – turns out, I’m actually a reluctant participant.

But, I’m going with the pro: experience gifts > things.

So, there.

My birthday is in two weeks.

I’m not registered…go figure.

Your gift to me?  I’m turning 40.

Go with it.

I’m (Not) A Survivor

Merry Christmas!

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And Feliz Navidad!

My Christmas – low key as it usually is in my family, just mainly together-time and food! – was kind of crap this year due to circumstances I couldn’t really control.

Well…I could control them somewhat.  And I did.

But I still ended up working today instead of being off with my family.

What happened is that I had a couple of new associates scheduled to work today that called out sick yesterday, probably a pretty good indicator that not even paying them double time for working the holiday was going to motivate them in to work today.

So…I motivated them in to quitting.

Manipulate is such a negative sounding word and I really feel like my implied ultimatum was effective in getting these two off my team.  That’s important to me, because when people abuse our attendance policy, the rest of the team pays the price.  

Hard.

I was able and lucky enough to find an associate to volunteer to come in to replace one of their shifts.  But for the other shift I had to push our scheduled Manager On Duty into a store, which meant I got to be the MOD.

It’s fine.

Really.

Hold on, while I mop up the mess that sarcasm made.

Christmas plans scuttled, but it didn’t really break my holiday spirit.  I thought I’d try and put together a few of the Christmas memories that came into mind while I worked among the holiday travelers at PDX.

Christmasisms, if you will.

In no particular order…I really just hope to remember the thoughts I enjoyed today on my MAX ride home.

I’ll start with an easy one.

Ever since I took Spanish and Algebra in Junior High, I’ve amused myself by making a little equation out of the word Christmas.

Chris + mas (the Spanish word for “more”) = More Chris!

My staff today might disagree…hey, it’s double time!  I’ve seen enough war movies – both GI Jane and A Few Good Men! – to know double time means “fucking move faster, grunt!”.  

Yeah, that’s inside humor, Chris…

There was the Christmas that my grandfather gave us kids a foosball table.  Man, that was the shit.  I think we were so excited to see that sitting in the back of the El Camino that we collectively wet ourselves.  I didn’t even know gifts could be that cool.

But I did know that gifts could be the exact opposite.  When I was maybe ten, probably younger.  I got a gift that was basically this

As an adult, I’m ashamed of my ten year old self’s (maybe) behavior (definitely).  My paternal grandmother had bought me a suit.  I dare say it was my first suit.

It was very…brown.

Mom made me go into the bathroom and try it on.  I went.  I went and I stared at it, sitting there in its box.

I didn’t think of how little money my grandmother had, and that she’d chosen this while thinking of me.  Yeah, grandma totally knew ten year old me (maybe) was a Future Homo of America (definitely).

No, I didn’t think of that.  I thought of how brown it was.  I was apparently also hardwired to be a bitchy gay, too, since I waited an appropriate amount of time, rustled some paper and then went back out declaring it was, “Fine”.

I also learned at Christmas that gifts could be a rite of passage marker, too.  Like the Christmas Mom and Dad got us three older kids bikes for Christmas.  

Banana seats.

Handle bar streamers.

The whole shebang.

Wait…is shebang a sexist word?  Oh, well…if you’re easily offended you should probably be reading The Bible and not this drivel, so you really only have your delicate self to blame.

You know…the more I think about it, the more I wonder whether those bikes were Christmas gifts or just Awesome Parent gifts.  Well, it’s a good memory, either way.  I remember the three of us taking our bikes out for an inaugural ride, so if it was Christmas, it was temperate.  Riding around our cul-de-sac on La Cour, streamers flying.

Speaking of La Cour, the street I grew up on and fun little equations…my first pets name was Butch, making my porn name Butch La Cour.  <adult toy drop>

Ok…walking home on icy sidewalks now.  Just a couple more quick memories from today’s Christmas Snowmageddon.

I told you about my least favorite clothing gift of all time, how about my favorite clothing gift of all time?

Silk boxers.

Not for me, per se.  I agree with Kramer.

But I remember working a post-Christmas sale at Meier & Frank when I was managing Men’s Sportswear.  Alison, the Men’s Furnishings manager gives me a “Psst!  Hey, hey!” From across the aisle.  When I look up at her, she gives me directions via some crazy eyes that I correctly interpret as “Look over there!”.

Subtle, Alison.

I played it cool and was rewarded with a couple of barely college aged bros walking through the department in sweatpants.

Enjoyable – anytime – for me, probably excruciating for them on this instance since they both appeared to be learning that silk boxers are not practical attire until after you can no longer ejaculate over your own head.

I felt bad for them, but that wasn’t the only thing I was feeling, figuratively.

Gotta love silk boxer season.

Last one, swearsies.

Sacha and I – y’know what?  It’s Christmas.  I don’t want to think of Sacha anymore today.  

Plus, I’m home.  Let’s end this on silk boxers.

I’m gonna go inside, take off my pants, peel off my tights – proper Snowmageddon attire, bad walking ten miles at work attire – and sit on my couch with a pamplemousse La Croix and let my boys air out for a while.

Enjoy that Christmas visual.

Merry Christmas!

BDSM Quiz

galby68, , , , , , , , 22 Comments

I was challenged by a fellow blogger to complete a BDSM quiz after commenting on his blog entry detailing his results.

Naturally, I ignored him.

I mean, seriously…in the first place, I think I made it six months into 2017 before bothering to be bothered that I hadn’t had sex yet this year.  Secondly, kinky sex is about pushing your limits…not one of the top reasons that I engage in sex in the first place.  Add to that, pushing your limits should be done with someone you trust.  

Have you met gay men?  We’re pretty flakey.  Most times, I can’t trust someone to show up for a date on time, if at all, or be honest about whether they are single or not.  These are not difficult hurdles to clear, people, and gay men frequently fail.

Nonchalantly.

So trusting one of these people to do something with potentially harmful consequences to the my favorite person.

Hard pass.

And let’s face it, when I’m having sex, it’s the intimacy I appreciate, not how well I tolerated to slightly to severely fucked up thing I just did.

Did you see Charles Darwin over there just giving me a big thumbs up?

But, my blog buddy persisted, despite my assurances that I was only living in the kinkiest city in America to drag the average down.  Plus, I’d already written a post on this topic.

Nevertheless, I took the damned thing.  My results – unsurprising as they are – are below.

Results from bdsmtest.org 

82% Vanilla – lights off, Missionary Position, keep your Freak Flag in your drawer.

54% Voyeur – ok, this was a surprise.  I assure you, if I’m watching, I’m judging your technique.

47% Ageplayer – yeah, this tracks.

42% Daddy/Mommy – ditto.  And it’s high time most of these boys had some active parenting.

39% Boy/Girl – wrong.

39% Brat – I thought it would be a little higher…maybe it doesn’t mean what I think it means.

37% Exhibitionist – gawd.  No one wants to see this!  

30% Submissive – I prefer to think of it as lazy.

23% Experimentalist – nah.

15% Non-monogamist – not by choice!

14% Primal (Hunter) – it’s not like they’re coming voluntarily.

5% Dominant – this is about right.  Lol.

2% Slave – to love, maybe.

1% Degrader – it’s not degrading, it’s the truth!

1% Sadist – nah.

1% Masochist – only because I try to actually date.

1% Degradee – ditto…

1% Primal (Prey) – nope.

1% Switch – they must have rounded up.  Generously.

1% Rigger – please.  This isn’t Boy Scouts, I’m not tying knots.

1% Master/Mistress – when they are bad boys, oh, who am I kidding?  This is wrong.

1% Pet – get away from me.  OMG…I’m Myrtle!

0% Rope bunny – exactly.

0% Owner – hashtag: why I’m single.

Feel free to try your own test and comment your results!  bdsmtest.org

BDSM Quiz