Inauguration Day was emotional on and off. I kind of teared up the way I did when Obama was elected, but since he was expected to win, I didn’t cry very hard at that point. Tuesday morning it was just wonderful to see real people take over leading this country. I was very touched, but nothing like that night when I got home and I started watching NBC News. A white woman with her two small children made me uncontrollably lose my emotions when she said that on the morning after the election she work up her children and said … (I’m choking up writing this) … "Martin Luther King’s dream came true last night." I had to call my daughter in and show the DVR’d news to her, as I wanted to explain why I could not stop crying. Then, moments later, a veteran of color who had served in a segregated army couldn’t contain his joy. I kept on crying harder, as if I haven’t heard an incredible number of stories of the aged trying to wrap their mind around what just happened. That day was truly glorious. Who is his right mind would not see the joy that this country is enjoying because of an invisible barrier that was broken?
By the time lunch rolled around, I was asked by the guys I was going to eat lunch with to meet them on the corner of "Obama and Second." I thought there was an inside joke, but in a way it wasn’t — check out what they meant. Unfortunately by the time I reached them, the placard had been removed. However, it did remind me of when Bush One was running against Bill Clinton. A block from my home in Brooklyn was the intersection of President and Clinton. I lived on President and Henry. I was watching the national news one night before the election that year in 1992 and someone focused in on the corner, and then showed that there was an intersection between Clinton and Bush. Mind you, these streets were probably named at least 200 years earlier. Then they pointed out something interesting. Bush Street did NOT cross President. That was gleefully prophetic.
Last week I finalized my dirt cheap plans to travel to Las Vegas and Honolulu within the next few months. In both instances I’ll be staying with friends. I’m also going to try to harness an opportunity to work from my company’s New York office, so that I don’t have to use any vacation time to take a week and visit there on my own dime. There are several things happening in my life that have made this much travel for almost nothing possible. The big challenge will be to see my family in Italy this summer, as it’s been three years, but I will make sacrifices if necessary to be able to do that.I’m also exploring more plans to host friends old and new here in California, which gives me a chance to show off my area and spend quality time with quality people. I’m excited about my prospective new housemate too. He reminds me of myself having a passion to live in another part of the country that he has been to before. My other short-term goals are to plan a trip to Mexico City and maybe San Diego.
Something’s been bothering me since I first started DVR’ing D.L. Hughley‘s show. I was very excited that someone so witty and politically savvy was going to have his own show on CNN, when he started out as a comic, especially because he is an African-American. Then I started watching the show and I realized that part of the schtick was that half of the "news" he talked about was satire and farce – on CNN – as if he was Jon Stewart on Comedy Central (who I am also not the biggest fan of, even though I was on the show of his protege, Stephen Colbert). It started to take a bit of the credibility that I had grown to enjoy on CNN, despite Anderson Cooper’s constantly avoiding his sexuality, while talking about homosexuals in the third person.
What really bothered me, though, was when Dan Savage was on D.L. Hughley and was too polite. I agree with 99% of what Dan Savage says, but I think he should have caught D.L. (which ironically is the acronym for the "down low") on his supposed liberal stance. D.L. said to Dan, "While I don’t condone [emphasis mine] the gay lifestyle…" Then D.L. went on to say he did not see any problem with gay marriage in theory. Wait a minute. Who asked D.L. if he "condoned" anything? Who said we needed him to "condone" it? How can he be liberal and in support of equality for people of all colors and those who are homosexual if he still thinks we need him to condone us. Well, I hereby declare that I condone D.L. Hughley being heterosexual and black and male and whatever the hell else he identifies as. I hope he feels better because I condone him, even if he doesn’t condone me.
Today I finally got around to watching "300," mostly so that I would understand the satire of it that I intend to see where the woman from MadTV plays a bald Britney Spears who gets kicked into an abyss. I don’t remember the name of the satire off-hand. Did I think it was soft, homoerotic porn? I remember so many gay men having strong opinions about it one way or another. I do not. Some of the special effects were unique for me. For example, I never saw them cut the legs off a horse or otherwise hurt an animal in any spaghetti western I’ve ever seen. I trust no animals were harmed in the filming of the movie and that these animals and most of the heavily clad, particularly dark-skinned and effeminate Persians were probably computer-rendered, which would have made a lot of the graphic violence much easier to film than to have that many extras. The movie is blatantly racist. I can completely understand how Persians would be insulted, because I was. Ancient Persian culture is no less amazing and worthy than Greek, particularly the barbaric, Draconian aspect of Ancient Greece that was epitomized in Sparta, which had little respect for Athenian intellect. I know that good art is rarely politically correct, but this movie went out of its way to make the enemy look bad in a way that was so obvious like the Star Wars trilogy had Darth Vader in a black suit (although the storm troopers broke that mold by wearing white).
