So the story goes like this…

My plane rolls into Taipei, and it was a great flight all things considered. I slept for close to 8 hours (ah, Ambien) and was feeling great.

As we taxied to the gate, I could see a beautiful sunrise out my window. Being the technophile I am, I grab my cell phone to take a picture, but end up getting a text message via Taiwan’s GSM service. A message from a boy, “Happy Valentines Day to my favorite Valentine!”

The whole thing would have been great and truely flattering were it not for two things:

1. Text messages don’t have send headers – you never know if it was a group message or not.

2. I skipped Valentine’s Day this year. I took off from San Fran on the 13th, and landed here on the 15th.

All things considered, I think I am okay with this.

I have been preparing for Sri Lanka this week. It has been insane.

It has been an endless barage of appointments, some business, most social. Every evening on my calender was obligated to a different occasion, as if the ability to assign it an available time slot somehow also indicated that I was physically and emotionally available.

I spent several hours at the travel clinic running up quite a bill on my company credit card, and being told that I would certainly get maleria and die if I stepped into any of the grey areas on any of the endless maps that were shoved into a folder and then shoved into my briefcase. I intended to look at them. Really, I did. A glance at least. Then the side effects hit.

So with one day left before I go, it is only the most crucially important things that bubble to the surface — like, what am I going to wear?

There just isn’t anyway to pack. The weather there is supposed to be between 80-100 degrees each day, with so much humdidity that it rains multiple times a day. I would typically overpack at such a deliema. That isn’t an option this time:

Yes, as promised. I have about 1″ around the big metal box that is filling up my suitcase to pack everything I will need for over 3 weeks, and most of it has to be squishy. As I said, packing for this trip is impossible.

Fortunately, the standards are pretty low. Just a few weeks ago, preparing for D.C., I stood over the same suitcase thinking, “packing for this trip is impossible.” The problem was the professionality. How do you pack 6 different business outfits, evening wear for the arts, and casual wear for the touristing into a space so small? Personally, I’ll take a server to Sri Lanka any day.

Tonight, 6:55pm: Salt Lake International Airport

I know this is a bit Margaret Cho like, but it seems we both could use some digital help for our sexuality, albeit in different ways.

It is funny to write about this. The entire crux of a spiritual dating path is to not judge, while the entire purpose of blogging, and perhaps communication in general is to present judgment to someone else as a means of existential reference.

So, I contemplate the events of the last month with Shane, and I explore the emotions. It has been interesting (albeit probably obnoxious to read about) to choose not to distance or detach myself from the grief of the “loss.” In the past I would have worked quickly to eliminate the issue through a progressive series of emotional slight-of-hand. A little bailing wire hear, some plaster there, all to make sure that the rationalization sticks. “The following is an itemized list why what was thought, was indeed not the truth. It is our hope that with the provided insights, a change of perspective will eliminate the current undesired state of mind. Item number one…” This, from the overly competent demons in my head. But they don’t know about the baby. Or perhaps they simply don’t care.

While trying to stay on my spiritual path, I some times feel lost. The landmarks are all wrong, leaving me without a sense of self, let alone direction. Lame MapQuest – Google Maps would had this figured out, with a pretty picture none the less: “<– You are here!”

In the end, all I really know is this: “I liked him. I really, really liked him.”

Back in D.C. – this time for two weeks. Two courses, one a week, 3 days each, with plenty of time to play.

This is a far cry from last November during which I enacted 5 death-defying acts back to back. When NetCom, an technical instruction/education outfit located in NYC asked me to teach a class on PHP in Washington DC for a week, they must have caught me at the right combination of boredom, poverty, ego, and apathy to make me agree. Add a dash of flatery,
and who knows to what I would have aggreed?

I found out the Wednesday before the Monday class that I was going. The Association of American Medical Colleges was switching from ColdFusion to PHP and they needed to know everything. The sheer amount of lecture hours to prepare was staggering. 5 days, 6 hours of class, PHP Beginning – Advanced, Object Oriented Theory, Databases, SOAP, XML, Smarty… the list goes on and on. The students were troopers, but many were dissatisfied with the lack of course materials (what could have covered all of those topics?).

I originally accepted the course with the idea of doing what was nessesary to fulfill my contract, get paid, and move on. Of course, things never work like that. Within minutes of my first lecture, I began to care about my students. With a manic level of zeel, I reworked all of my lectures, each night preparing for the next day. I didn’t sleep for a week. I remember laying in a tub on Thursday night/Friday morning, somehow having decided to return to the original Smalltalk article in preperation for my lecture on MVC.

At the end of the course, I wrote a summary to NetCom (attached to my invoice, of course) in which I described the best way in which to make the course successful in the future. Most noteable, how about 3 weeks of class time instead of 1?

It isn’t like I didn’t try to enjoy myself when I was there. After class on Monday I headed off to the Smithsonian. I wandered through some museums, not really aware of what I was looking at. At one point I ended up in a video installtion of some modern piece that was really quite… mesmerizing. I think that is the best word. I woke up half an hour later. I stayed in my hotel after that.

I got a call a week after the marathon had ended. The AAMC was asking for 2 more courses, so here I am. This time I am just teaching PHP Basics. Wow. What a nice change. This round, I am making up for lost time… starting with dinner!

Life keeps on changing. There is a lot to talk about, and I am not the best at archiving my experiences.

Given all of the travels that are on the horizon, it would seem ridiculous not to capture them in some meaningful way. I suppose that is the major reason for pulling this site together and writing this post now. Consider this a thesis statement. The itinerary is exciting: Washington D.C. (twice), Sri Lanka (at least once), Bangkok (4 whole days)… the list goes on.

Stay tuned! (See, now I’ve made a commitment.)

During my undergraduate thesis at the University of Utah, I got the opportunity to spend a year and a half working with Dr. Pasupathi. This entry is simply to provide an online location for that thesis. It has been backdated to the completion date of what was an incredibly exciting project.

Here is a taste:

Our major goal is show that duration of time involved with the gay and lesbian community correlates with narrative prototypicallity. We expect that individuals who have been out for longer periods of time will have had more opportunities to collaboratively construct their coming out story with other gays and lesbians, leading tomore influence from the gay and lesbian community on that story. We also expect that the degree of narrative socialization should be positively correlated with the degree of enculturation and integration with the gay and lesbian community. What is the effect of this increased narrative socialization? My exploratory hypothesis predicts that narrative socialization with be positively correlated with measures of well being.

Read the entire thesis.