Everything In Between

Here’s a topic I’ve been meaning to write about ever since I was deeply depressed last Fall and Winter. Back then, I was incredibly lonely, and despite my best efforts I simply found it damn near impossible to do anything to improve my situation. That’s because my “best efforts” consistently lead me to dead-end resources that sounded good but that had no practical or immediately useful information; resources like WikiHow.com’s “How to Deal With Loneliness” article.

In their article, WikiHow contributors write:

Get involved in anything where you will meet people. If you are very shy, find a group for social anxiety, even if it has to be online (obviously it’s better if it’s not). Look on places like Craig’s List, or local news websites for your town for activities in your area. Volunteering can help. But don’t attend functions with the idea of making friends or meeting people. Being too demanding is a sign of loneliness. Try to go with no expectations whatsoever, and to enjoy yourself regardless of what happens. Look for activities that interest you, that also involve groups of people, like intramural sports, book clubs, church groups, political campaigns, concerts, art exhibitions, etc.

While it all “makes sense,” the WikiHow article reads like an elaborate horoscope. It’s incredibly annoying because it contains no meaningful, discrete, actionable items. Where, exactly, can I find “activities in my area”? And once I find them, how do I make sure I know about them when they are happening? And as if that wasn’t hard enough, how do I make the process workable under the extreme energy constraints that being depressed and lonely put me under? (See also: without using up too many “spoons”.)

Ironically, when I finally concocted a solution to this problem, I no longer had the time to write the blog post about solving the problem because I was so busy doing things and being social. I proceeded to pull myself out of my depression, have a pretty good (if still difficult at times) Spring and Summer, and even Fall in 2011. But now that the days are getting shorter and I’m increasingly feeling like my moods are walking on a tightrope of “happy” above a pit of bleakness, I figure it’s about time to document my process. That, and it seems people I know are running into the same problem, so hopefully sharing my own solution can really make a positive impact on others’ lives.

Creating a Cyborg’s Social Calendar

The basic problem was two-fold. First, I needed an easy way to discover local goings-on. Second, I needed a way to remember to actually attend events that I was interested in.

It turns out this is far more difficult to accomplish than one may at first believe since the set of events that I both want to attend and have the capability (energy, time, money, motivation, physical accessibility, etc.) to attend are actually relatively limited. Moreover, I also need to align the set of events that match both of those criteria with the knowledge that said event is occurring when it is occurring. It’s a bit like playing temporal Tetris.

In a nutshell, the solution I implemented was similarly two-fold. First, I cast an incredibly wide but low-cost sensor net, integrated directly into the process I already used for keeping track of my daily appointments. (See also the “no extra time” concept and its wide applicability). Second, I classified the “activities in my area” into two distinct groups: “engagements” (stuff I’ve said “yes” or “maybe” to) and “opportunities” (stuff I haven’t yet said “no” to).

Here’s what my calendar looks like after all the pieces of the system are in place:

As you can see, I have an enormous selection of activities I could participate in at any given time. Better yet, they all show up on my calendar without my ever needing to repeatedly go “look[ing] on places like Craig’s List” to find them, the events on my calendar update themselves, and I can show or hide sets of events on a whim.

The prerequisite tool for doing this is the iCalendar feed, which, in the words of Stanford University, is a popular calendar data exchange format which allows you to subscribe to a calendar and receive updates as calendar data changes. Each of those calendars under the “Subscriptions” heading in the screenshot of my iCal is actually an iCalendar feed from a remote website. iCalendar feeds are to calendars as RSS feeds are to blogs.

The first thing I did was add the event subscription feed from my Facebook. Do this:

1. Log into your Facebook account and go to the “Events” page.
2. Scroll to the very bottom of the page and click on the small “Export” link. This will reveal a personalized web address (URL) listing all upcoming Facebook events you’ve been invited to or have RSVP‘ed either “Yes” or “Maybe” to, in iCalendar feed (.ics) format. Copy that URL.
3. Back in iCal (or your calendaring application of choice), choose “Subscribe…” from the menu and paste in the URL you got from Facebook.
4. Give this calendar subscription a meaningful name. I called it “Facebook Events” (see above screenshot).
5. Set the “Refresh” interval to something that makes sense; I set it to once “every 15 minutes,” since the Facebook feed is one I check often because it changes so frequently. (For feeds from calendars that I check or that update less often, such as those of community groups, or calendars listing events that are far from home, I set the refresh rate much, much slower, such as once “every week.”)

Okay! Now, whenever a friend invites you to an event on Facebook, your calendar will be updated to reflect that event at the appropriate date and time. If you RSVP “No” to the event, it will disappear from your calendar when iCal next checks your Facebook iCalendar feed.

Repeat the same steps for any other event-management website that you use and that offers iCalendar feeds. Some services I use, such as Plancast.com and Meetup.com, actually offer two distinct iCalendar feeds, one for all of the events visible to you on the service, and one for events that you have RSVP‘ed “Yes” to. Subscribe to both; in the screenshot of my iCal window, above, you’ll note the existence of a “‘meitar’ on Plancast” calendar as well as a “Plancast Subscriptions” calendar, and similarly a “My ‘Yes/Maybe’ Meetups” calendar as well as a “My Meetups” calendar.

Now that you’ve got a bunch of subscriptions, it behooves you to organize them in a way that makes sense to you. How you can do this will depend a little bit on the tools you have at your disposal. I found Apple iCal the best choice because of its Calendar Group feature, while I found Google Calendar an incredibly frustrating tool to use.

In iCal, I first created two calendar groups. The first one was called “Social Engagements,” into which I placed all the iCalendar feeds that showed me events to which I’ve RSVP‘ed “Yes” to on the remote site. This included the Facebook, “‘meitar’ on Plancast”, and “My ‘Yes/Maybe’ Meetups” feed. The second group was called “Social Opportunities,” into which I placed all the other calendars.

Every time I learned about a new local venue, such as a nightclub, or a café, or a bookstore that had an open mic, I would scour its website to see if it offered an iCalendar feed. If it did, or if it used a tool that did, such as embedding a Google Calendar on their website,¹ I’d add their feed to my “Social Opportunities” calendar group, too. I’d do the same every time I learned of a new event aggregating website, such as the IndyBay.org calendar or the Calagator Portland Tech Community calendar, which both offer feeds.

In very short order, I became one of the go-to people to ask about what was happening ’round town—including some towns I didn’t even live in!

However, as I travelled across the country speaking at conferences, I realized that my “Social Opportunities” group was getting cluttered with events that I could not actually attend because I was literally thousands of miles away from them. To solve that problem, I created distinct “Social Opportunities” calendar groups based on geographic region, and moved the individual subscriptions to the group with which they were geographically associated; the Occupy DC calendar feed is in the “Social Opportunities – DC” calendar group, and so on. I also created an “A-geographic” group to house feeds that listed events from all over the place.²

Some event-management services let you filter by geography, making this even easier. For instance, Yahoo!’s “Upcoming” event listing website shows you events by “place,” and you can subscribe to an iCalendar feed of just those events. For instance, here are the Upcoming events in Seattle, and here is the same information in iCalendar feed format. I added the feed of each Upcoming Place to which I regularly travel to its appropriate regional calendar group.

The benefits of this set up are obvious:

• Visually overlay social opportunities on top of social engagements to ensure few conflicts, and help make the most informed choice about which events I want to go to when there are conflicts, to mitigate my social opportunity cost.
• Toggle calendars on/off to find nearby activities. Ordinarily, I simply leave all the “opportunities” calendars deselected, so I’m just looking at my personal calendars and the “Engagements” group, since this view shows me “stuff I have to do today.” When I’m bored or I’m looking for new things to do in the upcoming week, however, I simply turn on the “opportunities” calendars. Voila! In 1 click, I’m browsing a wealth of stuff to do!³
• Quickly orient oneself within the social space of a new city. If I’m taking a trip to Washington DC for a few days, all I have to do is deselect/uncheck the “Social Opportunities – SF/Bay Area” calendar group to hide all of my calendar subscriptions in that group, then select/check the “Social Opportunities – DC” calendar group and, voila, my calendar view has instantly shifted to showing me events that I can attend in Washington, DC.
• Make RSVP‘s meaningful: if I RSVP “Yes” to an event on Meetup, the event is automatically removed from my “Social Opportunities – A-geographic” calendar group and added to my “Social Engagements” calendar group.
• Easily move event information from a calendar feed to a personal calendar using copy-and-paste without ever leaving the calendaring tool of your choice.

Of course, none of this matters with regards to feeling lonely if I don’t also show up at events in physical space. Admittedly, actually mustering the physical and social energy to get up and go is by far the hardest part of this whole process. Typing on a keyboard is all fine and well (rest assured I do more than enough of it!), but there is no substitute for actually being around other human beings face-to-face. Physically vibrating the air using one’s mouth and having those vibrations move another’s ear drum (or physically moving one’s hands and letting the photons bounce off those movements and onto the retina of another’s eyes, in the case of sign language) is a vital part of the experience of being social.

This system isn’t perfect, but the imperfections are mostly due to the way sites like Facebook handle RSVP information. For my purposes, though, this workflow gets me well over 80% of the way towards my goal, and since I’m actually a human (not a machine), I can deal with a little data pollution here and there. There’s also plenty more I could write about with regards to “being a social cyborg,” such as how I use my calendar in conjunction with my contact management application (my digital rolodex) to maintain “loose” or “weak” interpersonal ties with over 1,000 people spread across the world—again, using “no extra time.” But I’ll save that for another post.

For now, hopefully this gave you a better understanding why my most frequent response to being informed of a party is something along the lines of, “Can you send me a link (to Facebook/Meetup/Google Calendar)?” and also why I’m so, so, so critical of important websites like FetLife that seem to prioritize everything but user security and interoperability.

1. Every public Google Calendar also publishes its information in an iCalendar feed. For example, rather than view the Occupy SF calendar on their website, just subscribe to the iCalendar feed provided by Google. Also, while you can create an aggregate view of multiple Google Calendars to embed on a Web page, it seems to me like this isn’t a feature offered for iCalendar feeds, so if you come across such a calendar, you’ll likely need to add the individual calendars’ feeds one by one. [↩]
2. Currently that’s just Meetup and Plancast, for me, since I’ve joined Meetup groups all over the country and I’ve subscribed to people on Plancast who live in dozens of cities. [↩]
3. Frustratingly, although Facebook also offers you a page listing events that you were not invited to but that your friends were, there seems to be no iCalendar feed of that list, forcing me to periodically check that page for events that would be “Social Opportunities” if I knew of them. Thankfully, to add them to my own calendar, I just RSVP “Yes” or (more likely) “Maybe.” [↩]

She had blue skin.
And so did he.
He kept it hid
And so did she.
They searched for blue
Their whole life through,
Then passed right by –
And never knew.

—“Masks“ by Shel Silverstein

I remember the sunlight on 8^th Avenue and 15^th Street that morning vividly. New York City is beautiful in the morning, but only if the streets aren’t packed with throngs of hurried people. The sunlight streamed into the tangled mess of steel and concrete and glass, bouncing from one reflective surface to another until it finally lay flat on the ground, or on me.

Often, while alone—and only while alone—I’d walk facing the sky. In the Summer, if I woke early enough or stayed up late enough, I’d slow my typically brisk pace to relish the thick, warm air as I walked through it. In the Winter, when too many people woke before the sun, I’d wait for rush hour to end before venturing outside, because that’s when I could feel the sun drape its light on me the way I wanted to feel it.

It was one of those cold, late mornings in the Winter that I remember, except I wasn’t alone. On this particular morning, I was walking with my father and we were talking about school. I’d recently started attending another school after dropping out of the one I had just been in, and, again, I hated it.

But there was a girl, and her name was Bre, and one day she told me in visibly unconcerned confidence that she, like me, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. And so, she was beautiful to me, and I got a crush on her. And on this particular morning, playing hooky for a while with an understanding father, I was explaining all this to him as matter-of-factly as I could, lest I seem too smitten.

As my father is wont to do when he correctly sensed I had shared something that made me feel uneasy, he paused momentarily, looked at me concertedly, and then began to tell me an allegorical tale. This time, he told me of a short story he had once read. It went something like this.

On a day very much like that sunlit day, a man and a woman met at a sidewalk café. They quickly struck up a conversation and, soon thereafter, found themselves spending a good deal of time with one another. As their friendship flourished and their fondness for one another deepened, however, they each became more afraid of revealing their romantic feelings to the other.

The story, my father told me, was written from both of their perspectives. The narrative voice switched from one to the other, so that the reader became a sort of voyeur able to peer into each of the protagonists’ minds. Although the details of his fears were different from hers, the outcome was the same: neither told the other the extent of their true feelings.

Ultimately, it was a very sad story. It ended on a note of mutual resignation rather than happy romance. But the moral is clear, and so was my father’s message.

I remember this story whenever I shy away from revealing something about myself for fear of rejection, ridicule, or even shame. Like the characters in the story, I don’t always muster the courage to lay myself bare. In fact, I never told Bre about my crush on her and before long my opportunity had gone, as she transferred to another school. However, the memory serves to make me that much braver in moments like these.

There are numerous things I’m struggling to work up the courage to offer for public view. I am afraid of being ridiculed and mocked. I am afraid of being ignored; that things important to me are not important to anyone else; of being unimportant, myself. Most of all, though, and contrary to some of my bravado, I am afraid of being disliked.

But I also know I am often ridiculed and mocked precisely because I show courage when others do not. I know I am often ignored precisely because the things important to me are too threatening for others to acknowledge. And I know I am often disliked precisely because of my conviction’s integrity.

Often, all of that makes me conspicuous, and so I’m sometimes thought to be “inspiring” when framed positively or “intimidating” when framed more negatively. I think enfant terribles are important, and I’ve rarely felt happier than when I receive (now weekly, if often private) thanks for sharing myself publicly. But at the same time, I really do not want to be any of those things. I want, instead, to be plain and largely forgotten.

I want to be in love and feel close with people. And I’m afraid the more “inspiring” or “intimidating” I become, the more I’ll stand out as someone hard to feel close to.

I remember when someone who was in love with me sang along to Billy Joel as we crossed the Golden Gate bridge. And I remember when another who was in love with me put her arm around me as I gently shook flowers off the tree we climbed on Atwell’s Avenue. And I remember both of the days when each of them stopped feeling safe enough to be in love with me, days I revealed the extent of my true feelings.

So I think that, these days, I share so much of myself with strangers so publicly because what I really want is to share myself with someone who loves me. And I just hope you’re reading.

(Originally posted to my Tumblr blog.)

On the way to a housewarming party, I wrote an email to a piece of my past. A snippet:

[M]y dreams have subsided but my memories are resurfacing. I’m spending some time for the first time in years reading the archives of my own blog. And, as part of that, writing (drafts of, until the story about CV and Ken) the stories important to me. I’ve done a lot of learning over the past year or so and am recognizing things I once overlooked, like the power of storytelling.

Other memories that pop up often as I do this are all the times you asked me to write about us, which I’m sure you recall, as well as all the times I sat down in front of a blank screen to try, which you may not recall because I was alone. I want to say, so that you know if you don’t already and to be reassured in case you do, that I would have written more about us, and I wanted to, but I was hurting and I could not bear the task. I’m sorry I wasn’t strong enough to accomplish that.

When I arrived at the party, things immediately felt at once unnervingly familiar and yet disconcertingly foreign. I did not know such a strange self-contradiction was possible. Everything from the way people looked—the slender, long-haired man in the Utilikilt serving drinks; the sharply-dressed fast talking woman whom he called “sweetie”; the animal lover and perpetual student in the green dress; and others, too—to the music on the stereo—Gaelic Storm—to the layout of the apartment—not quite a bullet house, but close—was eery. Pieces of them each reminded me of people I had once seen almost daily.

It felt like a combination of being in bizarro world mixed with blasts from my past, all in a parallel universe. I floated from one conversation to the next, throughout the evening feeling as though one half of me was not really in attendance but rather observing the other half of me that was, except for the brief reprieve in which I dropped to the floor to commune with the household’s feline pets. I stayed for a couple hours, then caught a ride back over the bridge, towards home and far too much NyQuil.

I feel emotionally irradiated by the experience, and it hurts.

On the car ride back, a thought occurred to me as I shared a little bit of my history with my couriers. I used to work as a web developer fixing other people’s broken code. I never could find a situation or make myself any significant, sustainable opportunity to just write my own damn code. Now, I’m an activist and I’m trying to fix other people’s worlds, but I don’t feel like I have one of my own.

I walk a lonely road
the only one that I have ever known.
Don’t know where it goes
but it’s home to me and I walk alone.

[…]

My shadow’s the only one that walks beside me.
My shallow heart’s the only thing that’s beating.
Sometimes I wish someone out there will find me.
‘Til then, I walk alone.

I’m walking down the line
that divides me somewhere in my mind.
On the border line
of the edge and where I walk alone.

Read between the lines of what’s
fucked up and everything’s all right.
Check my vital signs to know I’m still alive
and I walk alone.

I always felt I’d make a great lost boy. I had such a crush on Peter Pan, too.

Dear readers,

About an hour ago, while walking home from Noisebridge, I was mugged. Two men who seemed to be in their mid-twenties, one dark-skinned gentleman and one lighter-skinned, wearing black hoodies and jeans attacked me at the corner of Fillmore and Waller streets. The dark-skinned man looped his arm around my throat roughly and yanked me to the floor, catching my bag as I fell and pulling it above me.

“Give me everything you’ve got!” he yelled at me.

“Hold on! Hold on!” I said.

I was on the floor in an instant and trying to find the strap of my bag. I couldn’t, he pulled it above my head, and the two men bolted as fast as they could.

As I got up, I pulled out my phone from my pocket and dialed 9-1-1. A few minutes later a police car sped up to me, I waved at it, and the officer inside rolled down his window as he slowed. He asked me a few questions, including asking for a brief description and the direction the perps ran. I told him, he said he’d be right back, and he sped off.

A few minutes later he returned empty handed. I tweeted. I filed a police report.

Inside my beige one-strap bag was a 15” MacBook Pro laptop, (serial number W89410HRB22) one with a specially-ordered matte display. (I hate the glossy ones.) There was also the laptop charger, my Samsung mobile phone charger, and a bunch of other odds-and-ends, including two Rubik’s cubes. All told, it was pretty expensive: upwards of about $2,500. While I’m pretty sure the data on my laptop is (mostly) backed up safely, my pen-and-paper notebook, which I’ve carried with me for more than two years and is full of irreplaceable notes and memories, was also stolen. That’s hard copy, and can’t be backed up digitally. Damn.

I don’t have a budget for replacing this stuff. Some of it can’t be replaced. I’m taking the somewhat uncharacteristic step of asking you to donate whatever amount that you can to me through the donation button below to help me weather the budget crunch I’m going to have to deal with in the next couple of months as I replace my equipment. It’s particularly bad timing; I just bought airfare for the upcoming CSPH conference as well as a conference ticket for the Poly Leadership Summit in Seattle, which I have yet to purchase travel for.

HELP MAYMAY REPLACE STOLEN EQUIPMENT AFTER STREET MUGGING:

If you can’t offer me financial support, then please, please, please simply take the time to tweet about this blog post. Muggings rarely end with stolen goods returned to their owners, but the ones that do all have one thing in common: people are able to identify the goods quickly because word gets around. Here are some 140-character postings you can use to help me out. (Consider it a karmic investment.)

• Help @maymaym recover from getting mugged on the street in #SF. His laptop and bag was stolen. Help him out: http://ur1.ca/1mqz0 Pls RT—thx!
• Activist @maymaym’s laptop stolen in SF street mugging. Chip in to help replace it http://ur1.ca/1mqz0 and/or RT to get item description out
• See 15″ MacBook Pro laptop w/matte screen selling in Bay Area in odd circumstances? Contact @maymaym. Was stolen: http://ur1.ca/1mqz0 Pls RT

Alternatively, of course, write your own tweet or cross-post this entry and include a link back to this blog post.

So, yeah, it’s kind of been a shitty month. Thanks for your help, in whatever form it may take.

This was originally published on my other blog.

On Monday night, despite efforts to the contrary, I was true to my word and ended up watching Scott Pilgrim vs. The World on my own. I had invited not one but two others local to my neck of the woods to join me, both accepted, and then both canceled on me.

So much for helping me dissuade notions of prophetic predictions. I felt lonely, but it wasn’t so bad. When I’m lonely, I work myself to sleep because that’s more pleasant than crying myself to sleep, which is too often the alternative. (When neither of those options present themselves, I’ve been reaching for NyQuil.)

However, for weeks now, the debilitating sadness has been coming in waves. It’s been years—maybe a decade—since I’ve felt this kind of heaviness in my limbs. I’ve been making the most of the times when I feel able to move (because, yes, there are times when I don’t), and am proud to say that I’ve done a relatively enormous amount of reaching out in times when I’m not.

But as much as I’d like to pat myself on the back about that, to congratulate myself on making social arrangements despite the persistent pessimism, it doesn’t seem to be doing any good.

Last Friday, at the behest of a new acquaintance who wrote me some of the smartest emails I’ve ever gotten after reading my blog, I went to the Transmission party at the SF Citadel.

You: “Well, how was it?”

Me: Meh.

You: “Oh, come on. Why ‘meh’?”

Because despite knowing more people than I thought I would, spending $35 on a cup of coffee and some fruit for a chance to give out some cards and shake a few people’s hands over the course of a couple hours isn’t my idea of a good time. I would have had a better time if I had met this acquaintance over an overpriced Starbucks latté, we would have talked more (they had play dates to attend to), and it wouldn’t have cost me $35. Thirty-fucking-five-dollars.

Some of us just aren’t party people. If that’s not okay with you, you’re shitty friend material to begin with.

Rather than ramble on—I’m only writing this because I literally have no idea what else I could possibly do with myself that would be constructive at this point—I’ll record this overly-personal SMS (that’s “text message” for you luddites) conversation I had today:

Them: “I’m in introvert hell.”

Me: “Oh dear. I’ll appreciate a brief Skype call if you’re up for it in a few. You can tell me what ‘introvert hell’ is. :)”

Them: “I’m in a car with grandparents for the next 45 min and then sleeping on a couch. I’ll see if I can step away once we arrive”

Me: “Okay. No pressure. Enjoy family while you can.”

Them: “I just have no privacy…. How’s your weather?”

Me: “Ah. Well, if you need privacy maybe you should grab moments alone, not on Skype with me. :) My weather is…cold? I don’t know. I just have no idea what to do.”

Them: “No idea what to do?” [Then, later] “Hey. I def don’t have enough privacy to make a phone call. :-( I’ll wake up one of the Olds. Anything I can do for you besides love you from here?”

Me: “No. Thanks for asking. Have a good night. I hope you find some privacy.”

Them: “I’m so sorry to disappoint.”

Me: “Disappointment implies expectation. I hope I didn’t give you an impression I expect of you, that you’re somehow obligated. I don’t—you’re not—so don’t be sorry.”

Them: “I’m fine. Just wish I could give you more this moment. Am willing but not able.”

Me: “I understand but can’t empathize. Story of my life is either unwilling but able or willing but unable. It embitters me—how could it not?—and it’s NOT your fault.”

Them: “Goodnight, may.”

So, now that I’ve managed to find a way to pass this hour, I’ll go see if I can face working again. Kink On Tap episode 57 needs to get published. I hear that show makes some people happy.

And even if I’m not, I can’t stand the thought of my own depressive lethargy standing in the way of a smile on one of the show’s listeners. I’m pretty sure, now that I think about it, I’ve turned into an activist because it’s the strongest reason I still have to stay alive.

I guess that would explain why I have so few friends.

I wrote this on July 27, 2009, a little over a year ago:

Not long ago I moved to San Francisco, California in order to make a fresh start for myself in a number of different ways. Creating a new home turns out to be a ton of work, especially since I had almost nothing except for a bunch of clothes and my computer with me. I had no housewares, and after spending a week literally putting blisters in my feet trying to find an apartment in which to live, for the first few nights I ate delivery with plastic utensils out of tupperware.

Soon enough, though, and with the help of some inspirational friends (most notably Susan Mernit, Sarah Dopp, James Carp, Emms, and Gabrielle and Tara) things started to come together. I visited Ikea twice for some furniture, but a lot of the other things in my apartment from the futon I sleep on to the plates I eat off of came from friends. I even got a microwave as I started to make mental lists of the things I needed.

Then, without publishing those words, I stopped writing. A year passed. In that time, a lot happened. But San Francisco is no more home today than it was before I arrived. If anything, I feel more out of place than ever. More alone than ever.

I am struggling. No one who thinks they know me, who sees all the stuff I do, no one knows how hard each and every day is for me. No one.

Of the Ten Commandments, only 3 are phrased in the affirmative. The other 7 are phrased as negatives. Why? Doesn’t that seem kind of oppressive to anyone else?

Here’s the Ten Commandments as listed on Wikipedia:

1. I am the Lord your God
2. You shall not make for yourself an idol
3. You shall not make wrongful use of the name of your God
4. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy
5. Honor your father and mother
6. You shall not murder
7. You shall not commit adultery
8. You shall not steal
9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor
10. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife

Well, it certainly sounds like Insert-Your-Favorite-Deity is having a bit of a power trip. Let’s take a closer look at these commandments, but this time let’s phrase them all in the affirmative.

1. I am the Lord your God
2. You shall identify falsehoods and treat them as such
3. You shall respect the power of words, names, and language
4. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy
5. Honor your father and mother
6. You shall let other living beings live
7. You shall honor the relationship contracts that you enter and those of others
8. You shall honor the property of others
9. You shall uphold truth as you have seen it
10. You shall strive for your own happiness

Doesn’t that sound infinitely better already? Interestingly, I feel that this rephrasing not only covers more ground (e.g., “You shall honor the property of others” turns “You shall not steal” into protections against stealing and vandalism), but it’s also a lot more inclusive of diversity.

Now let’s take this one step further and rephrase even the ones that were originally affirmative so that they not only reflect positive ideals, but also engender self-empowerment in the reader. Now my ten commandments read as follows:

1. I am lord over my own body and mind
2. I identify falsehoods and treat them as such
3. My power comes from words, names, and language
4. I honor my memories and choose my traditions
5. I honor my chosen family
6. I protect and create free life
7. I demand respect for the relationship contracts I enter and grant respect to those of others
8. I gift wealth to others
9. I uphold my own convictions
10. I spread joy

I wonder what kind of world we would live in today if this list had been the Ten Commandments so fervently adhered to. Since nothing in life is unchangeable, I’m going to start believing that these self-empowering words are the Ten Commandments for me.

I’m very excited to announce a new initiative that I’ve begun working on in collaboration with Emma, co-unorganizer of KinkForAll Providence and my co-host on Kink On Tap. The new project, called SexEdEverywhere, is going to be our biggest and most challenging project to date. It also has enormous potential.

(This announcement was originally made on another blog of mine, but I’m cross-posting it here to spread the word rapidly.)

The core of the project is a sexual health education and empowerment video campaign highlighting the reality that we learn about sex from disparate sources in many locations. I believe that the time has come for people to realize that “sex education” is not, has never been, and never should be confined to health class. I believe that young people, sexuality minorities, and certain other disenfranchised groups (still including, sadly, women) have an enormously important role to play in reforming the empty-vessel, top-down model of education and turning it into a peer-to-peer meritocracy where accurate information wins out over misinformation because it saves lives rather than being politically expedient.

And I believe that this change is only possible when it comes from the very people who need such change most: young men, women, and other people like you and me.

That’s why Emma and I have put together a proposal for the project and submitted it to the International Women’s Health Coalition Young Visionaries contest, a contest that, if we win, would seed our project with $1000 USD of necessary funding to get it off the ground. Part of the criteria for winning the contest is based on popular vote, which means I need your votes to win.

If this sounds like a project worth supporting, please go to the Sex Ed Everywhere IWHC voting page and click on “Vote” right next to our picture. And then come back and vote again the next day, and every day until voting ends on March 25, which I understand is totally fair for the competition!

Here is an excerpt of our proposal for the IWHC Young Visionaries contest:

With the $1000 grant from the IWHC Young Visionaries contest we will fund a sexual health education and empowerment video campaign that highlights the reality that we learn about sex from disparate sources in many locations. The heart of this campaign, which we call SexEdEverywhere (“SEE”), will begin with a competition calling for submissions of 30 to 90 second videos that will be reviewed and featured on a network of 5 (or more) microsites over time. The campaign will be based at SexEdEverywhere.com, a website that will actively engage the people to whom it will speak: women and youth across the globe.

[…]

Our vision of lasting change is to create a world in which accurate information about sexual health and freedoms reaches more students and young people than suffer from misinformation or a knowledge deficit. By engaging young people in the creation and distribution of knowledge, we hope to help them recognize their power to enact social justice in their local communities. This would be a world in which women and young people are aware of their sexual and reproductive rights from an early age, and are empowered to make informed decisions for themselves and educate those around them.

Please vote for SexEdEverywhere and help us SEE a world where everyone is aware of their sexual and reproductive rights! Thank you for your daily voting support!

I quit my job today. I’d been working there for less than 4 months, and it’s one of (if not the) best normative corporate gigs I’ve ever had. And yet I handed in my 2 weeks’ notice today, without anything “lined up” and no concrete idea about how I’m going to make a living. And in this blog post, I’m going to tell you why I think quitting was the only sensical thing for me to do.

Economy of opportunity

I recall that when I first came to San Francisco and started looking for work, the first interview I had began with a very telling exchange.

“May I ask you a personal question?” the interviewer asked me.

“Of course,” I said, bracing for a question about my sex life, which I’m very open about online, or about my views on education, which are radical if not heretical. My beliefs clash so dramatically with so much of traditional Western society, and yet I’d never been asked a directly personal question at a job interview before. I was almost looking forward to it. But the question I got wasn’t anything I could have expected.

I was asked: “Are you crazy coming to San Francisco without a job in this economy?”

“I’m sorry?” I said, surprised.

“You said you got an apartment before you had a job lined up.”

“Yes, that’s right,” I confirmed.

“That’s very brave,” the interviewer said.

I smiled silently to myself, mentally noting that my interview of this company, the one I conduct simultaneously as any company’s hiring managers were interviewing me, was showing results. I reasoned that I probably wouldn’t want to work there.

“I don’t think of it as being brave,” I said after a moment’s pause. “I choose to believe that, with my skills, I can find a way to do whatever I want. I believe everyone can, if they only believed it, too. So I don’t need to be brave, I just need to be resourceful.”

I didn’t end up in that job but, obviously, I did find a job quickly because otherwise I wouldn’t be quitting that job now. :)

I’ll admit, I’m a bit of a strange breed. A careful look at my résumé will reveal two somewhat odd things. First, that I’ve almost never kept a single “9-5″ (job) for more than a year. Second, the entire education section, often mistakenly believed to be “required” in résumés, is—and always has been—completely missing.

It’s therefore unsurprising that a very common question I get asked during interviews (and parties, and when I’m out at bars, and basically all the time with everyone, always) is, “where did you get your degree?” It’s a funny question because I don’t have a degree. I don’t have a high school diploma. I don’t even have a GED. In fact, I never actually graduated from middle school.

“Why don’t you go to college? You’d love university!” I’m frequently told. Although I love learning, and although I believe that education is one of if not the most important thing in the entirety of human experience, of life, our society, species, and even existence, I vehemently fought to free myself of the poisonous, debilitating reach of schools and institutionalized education way back in 2^nd grade.

The fight was painful and unnecessary, damaging me like almost nothing else possibly could. I feel less capable, less skilled, less intelligent, and a less happy person today because of that miserable fight to leave school. However, I believe I would have been even worse off succumbing to the incessant dulling of my creativity had I relented to “the educational system.”

When they learn some of my history, people are often quick to credit my current abilities to this dreadful experience, or else they dismiss my insistence that I deserved better by saying, “No pain, no gain.” But I reject the cruel idea that misery is necessary to build character or strength, as well as the misguided compliment that I am somehow better, stronger, or more abled than “normal” people for having experienced a largely unhappy life. Although I certainly learned a lot during my fight to leave the school system, that was a result of my human nature, not an inherent characteristic of the painful struggle.

My traditional successes, such as having little problem finding well-paying work, for instance, coupled with my lack of formal education makes me exceptional only in the literal sense: I do not meet most people’s expectations in many ways. But my unique experiences also exposed me to a profound truth that many others aren’t as fortunate to be routinely confronted with: we live in an economy of opportunity. We always have, and we always will. As Tim Robbins is fond of saying, the problem is never resources, it’s resourcefulness.

You might be familiar with Warren Buffet’s well-known advice, “be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.” But the whole of his sentence was, if [investors] insist on trying to time their participation in equities, they should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful. In other words, it is always the right time to do the right thing, regardless of the market’s current circumstance.

The value of appropriate valuation

Conventional wisdom says I shouldn’t quit a good job in a rough time. But it’s a matter of valuing appropriate valuation: even though they provide negligible or no monetary income, I value my “personal” projects, the Kink On Tap sexuality netcast, the free (as in free and as in freedom) KinkForAll unconferences, the “not safe for work” and subversive exploration of sexually submissive masculinity, the various digital outreach and educational efforts for queer people that I help with, and many other projects of mine, far, far higher than the salary I was getting working in my day job. And besides, I have been defying conventional wisdom my whole life.

When I was a pre-teen, I was diagnosed with early-onset bipolar disorder and handed medications. After 6 years being told it was impossible, I had completely stopped taking the pills my doctors were still prescribing. I’ve remained clinically “stable” (doctor-speak for “just fine, thank you very much”) for the 7 years since.

Throughout my school and early teen years, I was told lies about reality by caring but fearful and brainwashed adults. Lies like “you’ll never get a job if you don’t graduate” are, depressingly, still repeated to children today. Of course, a quick look through the histories of some of the most successful and influential people on the planet—people like Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Rosa Parks, and Mae West—show that this fearmongering is complete rubbish.

Just as I love learning but hated schooling, I love doing good work but hate working at jobs. I’m quitting my day job because I feel similarly about it to the way I felt about school. The idea that people have to sacrifice what they want to do by segregating it into whatever crevices of their lives are left after they forfeit 8 hours a day (and often much more than that) to their job is a reprehensible illusion that the school system conditions many to accept and which corporatism, consumerism, and classism perpetuate every day.

The institutionalized indoctrination laughably dubbed education that’s widely deployed today is a travesty, a prison for the young. Similarly, the rigid, outdated understanding of “having a job,” especially as the only valid form of “contributing to society,” is an economic jail for the working class.

To borrow a phrase from Mark Twain, I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. Now I will also no longer let my job interfere with my work.

Pricelessness and survival

Many of our current societal systems are unsustainable. We all know it. We’ve all felt the effects.

Global financial crisis. Depreciation of college degrees. Ecological disasters. Massive civil unrest resulting in groups of unhappy, violent people (“terrorists”). If we as the human race are going to survive the century, we simply have to change the rules of this game. And that starts with normal people like you and me committing to doing what we want to do, not what we were told we have to do. I wasn’t comfortable playing by the rules of the so-called well-schooled majority, and I’m no longer comfortable playing by the rules of this economy. I now aim to change it.

And I’m not willing to merely survive, because I demand excellence and happiness. I demand it of myself, and so I demand it of you. Watching the clock while thinking about doing other, “non-job” things is not a valuable investment to me.

Unlike school, however, at work I also have a responsibility to others, not just myself. Whereas poor performance at school largely hinders only oneself, poor performance—and, by extension, lack of interest—at work directly impacts co-workers. And y’know what, I have more than enough respect for my co-workers to believe that they should be working with someone who really wants to be there, because that person exists.

I believe that everyone should be thusly respected. Was it a mistake to take this job and quit only 4 months down the line? Maybe. But mistakes we learn from are good things. It is right of me, upon realizing that I no longer want to be where I was, to leave, to change my status-quo. It would be wrong to pull up a facade of either indifference or resignation because neither of those can inspire excellence.

On a personal note, it’s worth saying that I’ve quit jobs before but, this time, I didn’t quit because I no longer like the job. If I were a different person, or the same person 2 years ago, the job I had would’ve been great. This time I quit because I’ve finally gotten to the point where my skills are well-developed enough and my desires well-formed enough that I know enough about what I want to do, and I believe that I can do it.

I believe there is more value in doing, being, and getting what I want than in sacrificing it. I believe that there is more richness in the world than can be measured with all the world’s riches.

Doing good work is priceless not because its execution is necessarily of superb quality, but because its value can only be determined by the people who find it useful to them. But I can’t magically transport us out of the economic jail of living paycheck-to-paycheck that so many of us are in. It’s going to take many intermediate steps to get us from here to a place where the value that people create by doing what they love is also what sustains us.

And I have only the vaguest of idealistic dreams for how I’m going to help get us there. But I do have those dreams, and I can’t ignore them.

They say that when there’s a will, there’s a way. Well, I have more will, more skill, more knowledge, and thus more opportunity today than ever before. Now, imagine what kind of world we would inhabit if you, your friends, and all the people who look up to you understood that their opportunities today, like mine, are greater than they’ve ever been before.

That, dear fellows, is the value of passion. And no matter what your schoolteachers or bosses might tell you about “the way things are,” passion—excellence, not resigned acceptance—is the key to survival.

Over the past month or so, several people with whom I am close—either because we were once close and reconnected, or because we are newly close—have remarked on the jewelry I wear. I have five thin chain bracelets; one around each wrist and ankle, and a fifth closely fitted at my neck. I remember the nights Sara put them there.

“You’re still wearing these,” each of these friends said to me as they slipped a finger underneath one of them.

“I know,” I reply each time. “I’m still figuring out how much of them are me, and how much of them are Sara.” Who am I today, without the life I thought I’d have?

New York City has been a difficult place to be in. Instead, I have spent much of my time North, shuffling between Boston and Providence. The “organized” Boston communities are vastly divergent from The Scene that I am used to. I like the differences—I like that they exist, and that one place is different from another—even if I don’t like all the specifics.

In Boston, I attended the second NEPups.org puppy munch. I went with a friend and met a few gay pups and a kitty girl, and I spoke about queer masculinities and how uncomfortable I feel in the gay communities I’ve tentatively explored. I have never been gay, and I still feel a twinge of discomfort “admitting” to bisexuality in such spaces.

I have a growing connection to Providence. In large part, this is due to the people I’m coming to think of as the sun girl and the metal boy. They are young (younger than I am), which for the first time in my life is a notable thing. They live in slow time and enjoy the physical world in ways that are not entirely new yet not entirely familiar to me. There is much of Sara—a goodness and comfort—in each of them.

The metal boy in particular has been a quiet revelation for me. I find myself more unsure around him than I would have thought, as though I am younger, less experienced, more hesitant. I’ve been sexual with other men before but only now, after being with him, can I wholly and without silent reservation answer “Yes” to the still often asked question, “Are you really bi?” The sun girl, for her part, is in many ways a pure blessing. She is magic and warmth and a grounding force that has helped me move forward.

My trip to San Francisco these past five days proved useful but disappointing. It’s now obvious to me that the plan I had conceived before I left Sydney and which I so steadfastly tried to make happen despite the financial and emotional burdens of losing my relationship with Sara will not actually work. I’m thankful that I met with several other friends who have each generously offered support and crash space for my planned arrival time in late June. It may have perhaps been destined for me to be alone (but not isolated) when I arrive in San Francisco; it’s been almost a decade in the making for me by now.

I’ve been to San Francisco twice before this trip, but I’ve never been so happy to leave it before. I am still determined to move there, but as I write this in my airplane seat somewhere over the landlocked middle of the continent, I find myself eagerly awaiting a return to Providence. I can’t stay on the East coast, but I can’t leave. Not yet, not when there is still so much for me to do here.

My thoughts are consistently drawn to productive pursuits; my second CSS book, my sexuality projects (KinkForAll.org and MaleSubmissionArt.com). I feel strong in ways I’ve never felt before: I bend the world. I change reality. I can.

But I’m still so, so sad, and so, so pained. I don’t cry every day anymore, but I do feel overwhelmed by it. I suspect that, in part, Sara left me because I am so driven by the things I need to change rather than the things that work. Some parts of me want to reach a point where I’m no longer fueled by things that way, but other parts of me doesn’t. As one Bostonian friend fondly reminds me, “All progress is the work of unreasonable men.”

I speak about KinkForAll so often everywhere I go that I’m uncertain whether I’ve latched onto it or if it has latched onto me. I fear for it like a father fears for a child growing too fast and yet I keep pushing it out from underneath my own auspice because I know it can’t ever be what I want it to be without experience in the world. The weekend after I was in Boston, KinkForAll Boston was set into motion by the people I spoke with there and now I am determined to be a part of it.

In the mean time, I am also thinking and becoming increasingly excited about the Sex 2.0 presentations I will give on May 9^th. In particular, I’ll get to meet the likes of Sarah Dopp, one of the inspirations for the Gender and Technology presentation that was accepted (and seems to be in increasingly high demand) at the Sex 2.0 conference. I’m just learning to speak with the people I admire to that degree, and in a week and a half I’m going to stand up and present my own version of the very things they inspire me to be. I will feel like I am standing in front of the very giants whose shoulders I stood on when I was across the planet.

So again, I ask myself, who am I? What is my sexual submissiveness without the dominant presence that revived it when I had given it up those four long years ago? What is my career when I have achieved, for me, an unprecedented level of recognition after 8 long years of being in the workforce? What is my contribution to my own future, and to people like me who are still young children today?

What kind of man am I if so much of the world I live in refuses to see manliness in what I am? Because today, having considered the possibility that I was perhaps a woman at earlier stages of my life, it turns out I am a man. And I am going to make the world know it is good to be the kind of man I am.