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I’m sure every one of you has heard, whether from time to time or on an annoyingly regular basis, someone referring to someone or something as “gay”. Usually this is said in a tone conveying sarcasm, disrespect, or ignorance in a way that brings to a simmer the blood of any socially-conscious person. However, I feel like I can say– without any fear of admonishment– one thing for certain:

Pride is gay.

Southern Maine Pride took place last week. It culminated Saturday with a parade replete with dykes on bikes, floats sponsored by local gay bars, religious organizations fighting for equality, student groups for gender diversity, and a handful of odds-n-ends guests (a lone man in a black cape, someone riding a tandem bike dressed up like a bumblebee, and a troupe of actors from a local production of “Hair”) The parade started in Monument Square and ended in Deering Oaks Park, where booths, stands and a stage were set up to present, proffer, and perform various ideas, comestibles, and songs (respectively). The group of revelers was at once incredibly diverse and similar, for all in attendance had in common, if nothing else, the spirit of celebration.

The decorations, the floats, the flags, and even the small costumed dogs had this queer glow about them. And the people!—oh baby, the people. Bulldykes, lipstick lesbians, soft butches, androgynes, bisexuals, pansexuals, trannies, grannies, twinks, bears, leather daddies, and topless ladies of both chromosomal origin buzzed around the park like a hive of excitable honeybees. It could’ve been gayer, but only if it was being viewed on TV as shot through a rainbow lens.

It was quite an unusual atmosphere for me to be a part of. And my mild sense of displacement has nothing to do with the people or the goings-on. I’ve got no issue with watching svelte, shirtless men saunter by in a pair of denim daisy dukes. I don’t turn away at the sight of the grandmotherly life-partners sharing a kiss or two next to the lemonade stand. I love every one of the myriad expressions of queerness and hereness.

But the thing that’s always made me a little confused is the name attached to all these festivities: Pride.

When I think of “pride”, I think of something worth being proud of. When I think of something worth being proud of, I usually go next to things that one can achieve or attain, either through individual or collective efforts. Perhaps this achievement required the overcoming of an obstacle of some sort. Pride, to me, is a reward earned from and for ourselves. Pride involves making choices.

A self-made person should have pride in who they’ve become through hard work.

A person who takes confident steps down a winding path of life questions should have pride in their dedication to arriving at some ultimate truth.

A person who is able to break free from a pattern of harmful behavior should feel proud to have overcome themselves.

But should the parade-goers and flag-wavers whose lifestyles don’t fit the heteronormative paradigm feel proud?

One of the largest misconceptions regarding homosexuality is that it’s all about choice. You choose to be gay. You choose to act on it. You choose, choose, choose, choose. But the overwhelming response to questions and accusations of choice is simply “this is just who we are.” So although there is always a choice in whether or not to come out, it would appear as though there is no choice at all when it comes to truly being gay.

Because of my ideas surrounding the topic of pride, I am not proud to be an American. I am not proud to be white, of French-Canadian descent, or female-bodied. I wouldn’t deny that I identify as any or all of those things, but I never chose these aspects of my identity for myself. No choice, no pride.

So to me, being gay is as worth being proud of as having a naturally good complexion, size-7 feet, no family history of heart disease, or a ring finger longer than your index. It’s just part of who and what you are.

However, tremendous pride should be taken in the work of the gay-rights activists who have fought and continue to do so for all of us.

Through great effort and perseverance are events such Pride celebrations able to take place and bring together the local queer community and its allies alike. Wherever the easy choice is made in a difficult situation, amazing things can occur. The magic really happens when so many people from all walks of life choose the same thing for a common cause.

And Pride is magic—and I’m not just saying that because there’s so much goddamn glitter.

So maybe Pride isn’t about being proud of who we are. It’s not about being here and queer and telling the others to deal with it.

Maybe Pride is about being proud of what we’ve done

Maybe we’re just proud of Pride. I think we’ve got plenty of reason to be.

And might I add that there’s a very unique sting that comes from seeing a man’s ass and realizing it probably looks better in those denim daisy dukes than yours would.

My eyes are burning from sleepiness, but theycan’t stop darting back to the TV where Bobby Flay is challenging a San Antonio woman to a “puffy taco” battle. My head is throbbing with every beat of my heart. My nostrils are flaring because of the damp smell that mysteriously emanates from the downstairs shower. Yet all of the sudden, I’m feeling marginally inspired to post.

I have been reading this blog I found today for about 5 hours now, and something the guy said really hit on the hardest part about writing for me. He said “blogging can really alternate between being a chore and being fun.” It’s not just blogging, which I feel is done primarily for the (desired) enjoyment of other people, but also straight-up personal stuff as well. I wouldn’t consider writing to be a chore unless it’s some lame thing I need to do for class, but it definitely becomes a sort of burden at times. When I am writing, it’s great. When I feel like I’m on a roll, my flow is good, and I can get my ideas out, I’m totally Zen. But when I can’t get down to it, I feel mentally constipated. It’s all building up in there, it’s practically marching to the gate, but it’s stuck. Maybe a little something comes out, like a few adjectives on a scrap of paper, or a fragmented rambling in a Word document, but it’s more frustrating than satisfying.

My left pinky twitches to the shift key as I make it halfway to starting a new sentence. My right ring finger lands on the backspace button to erase some ill-begun thought or sloppily-arranged sentence. My thumbs dance on the space bar in an impatient routine. My brain acts as a child’s hand grabbing at fireflies in the night air, always reaching, but mostly missing the words I want to use completely, or crushing them in the haste of catching them. All this makes me understand why poets and authors are often accused of being broody or morose– it’s because they’re pissed they can’t write. Because when I’d rather scratch at the peeling sunburn on my back than pound away on my keyboard, I’m not a happy camper. Because I know there’s this great well of inspiration in my mind, but every time I lower the bucket to pull some of it up, the rope’s always too short. Writing is only not fun when I can’t seem to do it.

But for all my frustration and impotence, at least I know when to give up. And that “when”, my friends, is right now. I think I’ll go have a beer.

Some people have their biological clock ticking down to Parenthood.

Mine is winding down to Success.

I’m sure it seems arrogant, but I feel like I gotta do something awesome with my life. I know success isn’t something that can really be quantified, and that being successful doesn’t mean being rich and/or famous, but I wouldn’t mind if it did for me. Everywhere are people who fail and succeed, some more spectacularly than others. Our culture is obsessed with the lives of celebrities and criminals, whose comings and goings we know as well as our own. We’re already living their lives along with them through our computer screen, TV, and gossip rag, but there are some people who really idolize and mimic celebrity behavior– for better or worse. These copycats usually wind up self-destructing in a big, face in the gutter, shots of them in lewd situations fluttering in the winds of the Internet, used and abused and burnt out kind of way. But if I were to pilfer from someone’s lifestyle various aspects or achievements, it would be to some creative end.

The choices of who I could imitate are legion, but after careful daydreaming and deliberation, I’ve managed to pick a handful of potential candidates whose lives might be worth snatching up. Or at least Xeroxing.

At first I mused that it might be nice to live the fat life of a musician or actor. But I figured out that I have virtually no tendency toward practicing music of any kind, despite my ability to achieve moderate skill when I do practice regularly, and I just wind up bored, mired in instruments and sheet paper. Being an actor is something I’ve always enjoyed toying with, but aside from being randomly and miraculously discovered while I go about my daily life, I would have no chance of competing with the svelte and coiffed starlet wannabe clones that flock to LA like seagulls to the city dump.

Oh, and have you ever seen “Catch me if you can”? It’s about this kid who was a criminal superhero, basically. Frank Abegnale Jr was a crazy multi-millionare by the time he was 20 or something. Granted, he was an enormous career criminal by the time he was 19 who specialized in bank fraud, but he was a crafty motherfucker. And now he’s got a sweet gig working with law enforcement to catch the crooks that do what he used to. He’s not in a bad place at all.

But I think I’ve narrowed my list down to a single field of specialty: writing. There are so many dynamic and incredible authors whose books I’d like to take a page from. However, I’d found there’s a big difference between me wanting to temporarily live someone’s life and me wishing I could use someone’s life as a template for my own. For example, while I’d love to write an entire novel in a matter of weeks, I don’t have enough Bennies to last a cross-country road trip. And though there is a sort of sinister appeal in going on crazy drug binges and keeping my nose close to the campaign trails, I probably wouldn’t do it in my body since I don’t want to fry my brain and wreck my body before I get to have a mid-life crisis.

So I’ve shortened the list even more. Because the technology for life-borrowing hasn’t yet been invented, my remaining option is to emulate. And even though few people I admire did anything noteworthy before they were 30, I see no reason to procrastinate all over the place and panic when I’m turning 27 that I’m running out of time. But since I know that I probably would just put things off for nearly another decade, I picked someone who would light a fiery blaze of productivity ‘neath my arse. Someone who not only did something before she was 30, but made her big move at the tender age of 23: author Carson McCullers. For her 50 years of life, she was generally melancholy and poetic, with a fondness for the drink, whose moodiness and illness only lent strength to her mind and skill. Although we’re nowhere near a perfect match in a side-by-side comparison, there are definitely similarities that lead me to think “Hey, if she could do it…” with eager, yet complacent hopefulness. Carson wrote her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, when she was 23, and damnit if I won’t try to do the same. I oughta get crackin’.

Plus, the harder I work at something I actually want to do, the less I’ll have to work at crap I hate– like a real job. I’ll be a happy camper if I can hold off on getting another job for a handful of years more. With a spectral Quiznos sandwich mechanic playing my Ghost of Corporate Past, I’d be hard-pressed to run my Luck Ship aground that hard again. From foot-long subs piled with more than a pound of meat and slathered in lardsauce, things can only improve. And that’s one hell of a relief.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I must fix myself a drink and get back to brooding hunchedly over my laptop while I feverishly work on my manuscript.

When it comes to things that are cyclical in nature, the ones most easily-predicted are, without a doubt, ones that are directly related to the whims of people. There are all sorts of  trends that come and go each year, like senioritis, making resolutions, patterns of shopping… the list goes on (although not very far for me since I only had a 1×2 inch scrap of paper to scrawl my notes upon). One invaluable tool for tracking the Ouroboros-like beast of human interests is Google Trends, which was reintroduced to me by my brother. For those of you who haven’t checked this out yet, this toy allows you to check the frequency your particular term has been searched for with Google. The imagination runs wild…

After exploring the trends associated with juvenile queries like “buttsex”, “boobies”, and “orgies” and seeing no obvious trends, my brother and I moved onto more serious terms. Predictably enough, “turkey” showed a spike in  frequency twice a year: Thanksgiving and Christmas. “Eggs” had their 15 minutes around Easter time, “pranks” were in high demand just before and on April first, and great interest in  “shopping” took place during the holiday season.

After getting bored with the easy ones, we put a little brain work into our terms and discovered that “dieting”, “weight loss”, “quit smoking”, and “champagne” all peaked at the end of each year. I put my guess to the test with “thesis”, and sure enough, it spiked around the beginning and end of each semester (perhaps for those grad students who show initial interest in what will be due, and then again near the end to frantically figure out how to accomplish what will be due?). “Wedding” had small spikes in the spring, summer, and fall, but had a huge lull  during the winter months. “Jewelry” and “diamonds” were eagerly sought around Valentine’s Day.

I think we all get the gist of these annual happenings, right? Well how about singular and interesting spikes?

For example, never before had people been so interested in Saddam Hussein until the day he was executed (thanks a heap, YouTube). And spinach was extraordinarily intriguing when the whole E. coli deal went down. I didn’t check, but I’d bet just about anything that pigs are experiencing a lot of popularity at the moment. And then there are people who win stuff on reality TV shows, who get feverishly searched for until the next person wins it by combining the contestant’s name and the show he/she was on (“David Cook, American Idol” or “Bob Crowley, Survivor” will get big hits for a while).

And while “superbowl” itself has its predicted spikes at the beginning of February every year, and “nipple” typically has a steady– albeit slow– stream of Googlings, if you add those two terms and throw in “Janet Jackson”, you’ve just hit on a veritable trifecta. Common Spike Phenomena.

(Note: “Nipple ring” could replace “nipple” and garner similar results)

Even after another hour or so playing around with Google Trends, I was unable to beat that discovery. Oddly sexual queries like “Vaseline, cucumbers” yielded no appreciable signs of CSP, nor did “sex, candy” (Sorry, Marcy Playground!). I decided to stop before I exhausted myself, lucky to have scored just one Google grand slam, but not before haphazardly throwing a few more combinations out there (“bubble gum, rocket launcher”, “shoe bomb, horse shoe”, and “aardvark, watermelon”). Sadly, my pessimism was justified as none of these last-ditch efforts to find a preposterous example of CSP were successful.

But maybe it’s just as well. I’m not exactly sure how I would react if I found overwhelming CSP with “bondage, teapot”.

Some people consider themselves to be “lovers” and not “fighters”. Some people are just downright aggressive and seem to lack the capacity to be calm and caring at all. As for me, I think that because I’m a lover, I’m also a fighter, and vice versa. Although loving and fighting might appear to be a world apart from each other, they’re actually more like different points of interest along the same meridian. If you head due-north from Anger, you’d see how the climate would change on your way to Love. Maybe things would mellow out as you get closer to the Equator (indifference, perhaps? Contentment?), but as you closed in on your second destination, things would have spiced back up again. Probably because they both involve a good deal of passion.

And they both take up a lot of energy. I typically save up my urge to debate, argue, and occasionally erupt for people I also enjoy talking, cuddling, partying, or relaxing with. Why? Because I can’t be bothered to grow a whole field of flowers and I’d rather just nurture the few kinds that I really like to look at. It’s laziness transformed into efficiency. Odds are good that if I like having you around, I’m going to find something to debate about at some point. It’s just because I think you’re interesting (most of the time) and I’m curious to see where the conversation is going to end up. It’s like dragging a child along in a sled when she is more than capable of moving herself; she just wants you to bring her someplace fun. Don’t begrudge a kid her adventure.

One of the people I watch from my Livejournal page said something that more or less kicked my brain into gear for this subject. He said:

“You’re family,” I said. “I might get pissed at you, but I’m never going to stop loving you.”(http://theferrett.livejournal.com).

And that certainly rang true with me, especially when it comes to people I consider my best friends. In fact, I usually don’t bother to get pissed with people I don’t care about. That’s not to say I don’t hate those assholes on the road who cut me off or go really slow, but that anger is more of a stationary angry cloud that dissipates rather quickly, not unlike a lingering fart smell that you walk through, crinkle your nose at, and then keep on moving. But being pissed at someone often means that they (the offender, possibly a friend) did something that hurt you (something you care about) and you feel strongly enough to be affected by it. I wouldn’t really be bothered if some random jerk online called me a foul name, but coming from a friend that would hurt. I’d pro’y call them on it and work it out, and we could continue being friends after repairing our relationship.

But just because I love someone doesn’t mean I’m gonna pick fights with them all the time. I have a few friends I’d probably never really get into it with, but that’s only because I know them well enough to realize they’re pretty submissive or sensitive and wouldn’t do well with me pokin’ at them. My general rule is to know I’m gonna get hit back before I put my gloves on. Even if it’s just one of those hit-and-hide things, as long as I’m sure I’ll get swiped at in return I’m comfortable stepping into the ring. I’m not trying to clobber our differences to death, I’m just getting them riled up a bit so I can enjoy them (most of the time. Sometimes I’ll lay into someone for being an ass, and that’s something I’m trying to smack out of ‘em). I don’t think there’s a person out there who would have the same opinions and ideals as me, but if there was, I wouldn’t be friends with them. It’d be boring as all hell! If I had this conversation: “Man I really hate it when those weird guys on the street ask me for money. I don’t give them a dime.” “Totally! I mean, get a job!”  “Right… Exactly.” I’d probably swap to an opposing opinion just to have some fun. If I just chatted with another Me all day long, it would be like getting locked into a sensory deprivation chamber. I love when my friends have other views, even if they (the views) annoy the crap out of me.

On second thougt, one advantage to having another Me to hang out with would be that she would get all the obscure references I make that go unnoticed by other people (and usually wind up making me look like an ass when I was, in reality, being hilarious. Bummer). For instance, I could pronounce Coup de Grâce like “coupe de gracie” and have her laugh at my impression of the grandpa from Rugrats. Yeah… that would be nice.