Defend Traditional Marriage!

The Faithful Skeptic wants to defend "traditional" marriage. Hiliarious!

Similarly, I've never liked the term traditional marriage, because it tends to lead to disengenious arguments about the state of modern marriage and its links to ancient or older traditions. But I'm hard-pressed to find another one. However I will say that the best PC term I've heard to date was from the New York Times last month: 2-sex Marriage.

Two Guys, a Camaro and an Alpaca

This weekend the boy and I to the Homaro into Guilford, CT for some apple- and raspberry-picking. For some reason he got it into his head that he wanted to do a lot of baking this week and I got into my head that you can't make a proper apple pie if you don't pick your own apples (similarly, if you can't harvest your own mussels you should make sure that the ones you buy from your fishmonger were grown on a rope in the middle of a fjord). So off we went, picking about 35 lbs of apples and 3 lbs of raspberries.

Now I love raspberries, but we had to cart them back to New York on a train and since we were rushing to catch it we didn't have time to put it in a proper bag or something so they were sitting open in a carboard container. Right next to me. So I picked at them. The whole ride home. For those of you who have never eaten a pound of raspberries in one sitting you have absolutely no idea the kind of upset stomach and noxious gas that they induce. It was also amusing to be lugging 35 lbs of apples and (now) 2 lbs of raspberries down 125th St. to the subway. We had a few people eyeing us suspiciously, a few people eyeing us confuddled, and one woman on Metro North eyeing us longingly, hoping against hope that I might miss one of the apples I kept dropping on the seat.

In the end we got to make a delicious raspberry tart and a (hopefully delicious) apple-raspberry pie. And since we have approximately 32 lbs of apples left, I see a few more pies, streussels and tarts in my future. And probably a lot more gas...

Must See TV

After a less than stellar dinner at Wondee Siam II (Wondee Siam I was packed and their sister restaurant across the street isn't nearly as good (can we say $10 corking fee?!)) I was tired and headed home where I watched a little TV before crashing early. I caught a bit of The Apprentice, but like to wait until Saturdays to see it because they have amazing, juicy extra footage from the board room. Trump still kicks ass. As does Carolyn (if not more so this season). I never warmed up to George. This season, my money's on Pamela or Ivana (although her name might put her at a disadvantage). I can't get behind any of the men, although I'd like to get behind a few of them, if you know what I mean (oh, smack!).

But afterwards I slid back into my old standbys for an evening alone, South Park and the Daily Show. I don't know how or why I'd missed this, but the South Park episode where the kids go on a Lord of the Rings quest to get the One Video (the porno Backyard Sluts 9 in a LOTR box) back to the video store is pure genius. Genius. Although less genius then when Jon Stewart suggested to Gwenyth Paltrow that she let his kid bang hers. His newborn and her newborn. I have a feeling that Gwenyth won't be accepting any more invitations to appear on the Daily Show.....

Area Code Misery

Well, I finally did it. Today, I canceled my ground line. My blessed phone number, that 212 with such an easy, rhythmic feel to it that I had it memorized in less than 10 seconds, that wonderful, wonderful phone number that I'd had for four blessed years, that number that I finally got purged from most telemarketing lists so for the first time in just under two years I've been able to sleep past 8:15 on the weekends, that fantastic ten digit number will soon belong to someone else.

Please, join me in a moment of silence.

Now you may weep openly with me, so I don't look like a pansy all by myself.

Relaxation...

So I haven't blogged in a while because I've been out of town a good deal. Since I didn't get a chance to get a real summer vacation, and since summer was ending, I decided it was time to relax. And relax I did! My relaxation reached fairly epic proportions at one point.

I shall begin with Labor Day weekend. I decided to join the boy and his fam in a cabin in Georgia. We started relaxing early on Thursday by renting the gayest car on the planet, the PT Cruiser, against our will. We relaxed for 16 straight hours in which we made many relaxing detours through various inner cities in an attempt to find a multitude of Starbucks Skyline mugs. We paused briefly from our relaxation in North Carolina since too much relaxing in a PT (Poon-Tang) Cruiser is bad for your health.

The cabin was in a loverly spot in the Blue Ridge Mountains, far away from everything, which meant we spent most of our time having his sister, our Relaxation Coordinator, driving to various spots of relaxation, where we enjoyed a non-stop barage of relaxing mountain activities such as rafting a class 4 rapids, galloping through the woods on a flatulent horse for two hours, and trying to stay afloat on an inner tube in a chin-deep river travelling forty miles an hour while trying not to spill our beer. So blissfully relaxing!

When we weren't doing such relaxing outdoorsy events, we were relaxing in front of the Weather Channel in an attempt not to wonder if the boy's parents (who live in Florida) would have a house to go back to after their relaxing vacation.

After a few days of this, we decided it was time to relax some more, so we piled back into the gay-wad mobile and drove back to New York. I then got to wake up 6 hours later so I could get to work early, scrample to get my poster ready for my conference and then get up even earlier the next day to spend the rest of the weekend relaxing on the Cape. And by relaxing I mean going to relaxingly long talks about phophatydalinositol involvement in cell signaling, without a break, from 6pm on Wednesday until noon on Saturday. Literally. Which was wonderful because who wants relaxing activities like an hour long lecture about PIP2 binding to FYVE domains in an un-airconditioned auditorium with 127-year-old wooden seats to be interrrupted by something as horrible as sunny weather and all-you-can-eat-oyster bars?

It's a good thing that I got to relax so much because when I got back to work I was saddled with the wonderful job of training our new technician, which means that if my vacation hadn't been relaxing and I wasn't terribly eager to jump right back into my own work and try to get the hell out of graduate school in a reasonable amount of time, I wouldn't really have been able to anyway.

Oh well. At least I know I'm never buying a PT Cruiser.

That Box Turtle's Lookin' Fine...

Apparently if you want to marry a box turtle and make sure he gets insurance, just go work for Home Depot.

The Human Rights Campaign today condemned Home Depot, Sprint, Ecolab and Waste Management — all Fortune 500 companies — for offering their employees pet insurance but not domestic partner health insurance.

“Paying for a parrot’s but not a person’s hospital stay is absurd,” said HRC President Cheryl Jacques. “This is no joke. Employees deserve better from these companies.”

John Cornyn would be proud.

An Absolutely Positively 100% Guaranteed Way To Piss Off Your Lover/Partner/Spouse/Trick/Prostitute/RNC Delegate:

Out of the blue, laugh uncontrollably during sexual intercourse.... Or grow facial hair.

ThirdoftheMonthless

I regret to inform you, my loyal readers (I think there are more than one of you) that this Third of the Month you are going to have to go without my words of wisdom, for alas I shall be out of touch with civilization (Georgia) where I will be spending Labor Day weekend in the mountains. So if you come looking for some Third of the Month advice on Friday, just click here. That should cover you in a pinch.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Within the past year I've switched from getting my haircut at my local barber (who I never really liked but went to support the fact that he had issues of Playboy in the waiting area) to using a more stylish "unisex salon." It's marginally more expensive but I get a marginally better haircut, so I don't miss Jack's so much. What I do miss, however, is the lather. Any guy who gets his hair cut from an old-school barber knows what I'm talking about, that little machine that looks thirty years old and pumps out the warmest, thickest, creamiest shaving cream ever. Then they rub it into your neckline and sideburns and take a straight-edge razor to your bare flesh and clean up the lines. Lo! how I do miss that wonderful sensation. Instead, these "salons" use that fancy-wancy electric razor that goes scrape scrape scrape along your tender, dry neckline. And it isn't nearly as clean and sexy. It's enough to make me want to go back to Jack's. Well, that and the Playboy.

Gays Will Be Gays

It's not very often that the Republican National Convention comes to a place like New York City, so I've felt compelled to participate. That is the reason I ended up at an RNC event last night. Well, OK, that and the free booze. It was hosted by the Human Rights Campaign and Victory in association with the Log Cabin Republicans. And it was in Chelsea. Which means it was pretty gay. Sure, it was a bunch of gay Republicans and so they were dressed slightly less whorish than your average queer, but when push came to shove, everyone else was there for the free booze as well. And by the end of the evening it had more or less turned into any gay bar in the city, only with more neckties.

And as I said, gays will be gays. When Rep. Christopher Shays (from my homestate!) made a comment about his very young looking college intern (who was in the room) having to lick envelopes, the guy behind me said, quite audibly, "He can lick anything he wants..." I guess you can take the liberal out of the fag but you can't take the fag out of the Republican.

Area Code Angst

So for sixth months I've been paying for a phone line that I don't use because my phone is broken. I kept it around because I thought that some day I'd get a new computer and start using my dial-up service again. Now that I have a new computer, I've decided that dial-up is too slow and now I want Road Runner. I can't afford to pay for a high-speed internet connection and a phone I don't use. But....

I don't want to give up my 212 area code. Whatever is a boy to do?

Tashalee...

... is a big fat doody-head. Just thought you should know.

All My Sons

While certainly very similar in many respects, America and Britain can be worlds apart sometimes. Today we have Bush and Blair, who could never be mistaken for each other. But back in the day we had Reagan and Thatcher, two peas in a pod who worked steadfastedly to bring the threat of Communism crashing down. But what are their inheritors doing today? Fighting the good fight, of course. But in very different ways.

Ron Reagan, Jr. is fighting the good fight by being the poster-boy for embryonic stem cell research, thereby protecting the AARP from the grisly fate of senility. Mark Thatcher, on the other hand, is financing military coups to overthrow brutal African dictators, thereby protecting entire populations from massive human rights violations. Way to go, boys!

Big Couch Cushions...

... contain big amounts of change. Not feeling as if the selling of my bodily fluids would get me through the week, I finally decided to get rid of all of the change I've been collecting in my apartment. When I get home at the end of the day I usually just dump the change from my pockets either on the table, the floor or somewhere in my closet. Well, kiddies, last night I collected it all into a large mason jar and a Zip-Lock bag and this afternoon took it to Commerce Bank where they have this nifty little Penny Arcade. I returned just under three thousand coins for a grand total of $158.42.

All I can say is: I'm in the money! I'm in the money!

Cash Poor, Blood Rich

Right now I am cash poor. Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not broke. I have plenty of money. I have a few checks on deposit, an approved loan that is stuck in paperwork and thousands of dollars of credit on my Visa card. Which is all fine and good for big things, like a computer or a sofa or a night at Sushi Samba. It's not OK for things like, oh, lunch which generally requires cash. Fortuantely for me, shortly before lunchtime I received a very important phone call from a guy in an immunology lab downstairs. You see, for certain scientific studies you need your cells to be fresh. Very fresh. And when I say very fresh, I mean straight out of the vein fresh. And fortunately for me, I got nice veins. Veins that earn $4 per 10 cc. And I don't mind getting stuck every now and then.

So suffice it to say, I will be able to eat lunch today. And maybe even dinner. And maybe breakfast tomorrow. And maybe, just maybe, by that time one of my checks will have cleared because I'm feeling a bit lightheaded....

Wildhorn's Latest Suck-Fest

I've been wanting to see the new musical, Dracula, for some time now, mainly because it stars Tom Hewitt and Melissa Errico. Although I haven't been paying much attention to theater news of late so I had no idea that it was a Frank Wildhorn show. I was wondering what he was up to after that major suck-fest, "The Civil War." Apparently making a bigger suck-fest. As Ben Brantley puts it:

Expectations were exceedingly low for this latest offering from the unstoppable Mr. Wildhorn — the composer of the expensively dressed clunkers "Jekyll and Hyde," "The Scarlet Pimpernel" and "The Civil War" — and expectations have not been disappointed. So go ahead. Take your shots. Say something, if you must, about toothlessness or bloodlessness or the kindness of hammering stakes into the hearts of undead shows. Think of every appropriate variation you can involving the verbs to bite and to suck.

It definitely makes me wish I'd appreciated "Dance of the Vampires" more. A pop-song writer (Jim Steineman, of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" fame) making a cheezy musical about vampires is much more appealing than a cheezy musical writer making a boring serious musical about vampires set to pop-songs.

Cock-A-Doodle-Doo

My friend was visiting from England this week, after having finished his work teaching soccer at a camp in New Hampshire for pre-teen Jewish girls. For the purposes of this tale we'll call him Dickie, mainly because that's his name. So Dickie, Timmy, the boy and I all went out last night for a rockin' good time. At least that's what Dickie wanted. We headed down to the Village for some beer and, um, a rockin' good time. After going to a couple of places, Dickie began to get bummed (i.e. whingy and mopey) because, I believe, the bar we were currently at was clearing out. This was not surprising because this was a Thursday night and contrary to popular belief not everyone in New York has nothing to do on a Friday morning. Granted you can always find a party at any hour, but at 2 am even the Village begins to empty. You need to know where to go to find the action. Now, of course, I knew where to go, but I wasn't about to suggest it. We needed to stumble on it.

So off we went to walk up Avenue A in an attempt to find a decent scene. Dickie continued to whinge that we were walking too far and what was wrong with all the places we'd passed. Of course, if Dickie had looked into any of them he would have seen that they were as empty (if not more so) than the bar we'd just left. (Of course, I must now point out that none of these places were really empty by any measure of the word; they just weren't wall to wall people).

But lo! What's that we see across the street? Loud music and a bunch of people heading in to a darkened bar. I ask Dickie if he wants to check it out. He readily agrees because at that moment a tall, leggy blonde woman whose ass was hanging out of her thong was going in and Dickie said he definitely wanted to check that out. Well, at least he thought it was woman. I'm not saying that I knew Dickie had just suggested that we go into a notoriously seedy gay bar called The Cock and I'm not saying that I didn't know. All I will say is that Dickie is the one who wanted to go in. It's not my fault he was chasing transvestite tail.

Suffice it to say that the look on Dickie's face was priceless when he realized, which didn't take him very long. I'm not sure if it was the snogging men in the corner, the butt-ugly trannies or the man masturbating in nothing but a jock-strap on stage.

I would also like to take this opportunity to point out that Dickie is the nephew of a very high-ranking official with British Intelligence, so if you happen to be a sleezy tabloid I'm willing to sell. Dickie doesn't know this, but I have pictures of him dangerous close to a penis.

Why Are You Here?

One of my favorite things that I like to do with my blog is find out how people get here. I don't get a significant amount of traffic because most of my loyal readers are my friends and I don't employ any rouse to get people to surf on over. But I do have the luxury of looking at referring pages, including what Google searches get people to come on over to my neck of the woods.

Apparently most people who randomly stumble onto this blog via search engines are looking for pictures of the Gotti boys, information on Ed Heeney or for Charisma Carpenter's e-mail address. However, my personal fav is that I am Google's number one match for "doll's head ingestion".

So, if you got here looking for Hotti Gotti pics, homo-nausea or Cordelia Chase, I'm sorry to dissappoint but I hope you stay awhile and poke around here at ThirdoftheMonth. Make yourself at home; we enjoy the company. But if you came looking for some good ol' fashioned anal autoerotic gratification, well then according to Google you've come to the right place.

It doesn't matter why you're here, really, or even how you got here. But since you made it, throw on some plaid, grab a moist towelette and revel in the beauty that is you. Because here, every day is the Third of the Month.

Highfalutin Panhandling

This one goes under the category of "Only In New York"...

So it's about 1:00 am on Sunday night / Monday morning. I've got some friends in town so we're still out, chilling at the Auction House, surprised that we aren't the only people who apparently have nothing to do the next morning. We're standing outside for a smoke (frickin' ban) when this panhandler comes up to us, about the third one all night. Usually they want spare change or a spare fag. Or, if they want to sell you something it's usually magazines or batteries. But not this one. No, this one asks us if we like books. Books! At 1 am. Turns out the man is selling books out of his knapsack in the middle of the night. And not just any books, mind you. No, these are books for a special audience. He was selling Beowulf. And a book on the ancient Chinese art of foot-binding. And a few other titles in that vein. In the middle of night. Now granted, we were at a bar called the Auction House. And we almost actually did by Beowulf but it wasn't a good translation.

Fat and Hippies

So I just got back from Ithaca where I was at a "retreat". Well, a retreat in the scientific sense whereby you go to some remote local with some sort of "nature" (hence the Ithaca) and stay inside, in the dark, all day listening to people talk in excrutiating detail about excrutiatingly detailed topics. The retreat was on the molecular biophysics of signal transduction which means that the topics ranged from lipids to proteins in lipids to proteins modified by lipids to proteins that sense lipids to proteins that make lipids. And phase diagrams.

We did get to stay in the Statler hotel, however, which is staffed by gays and Mormons. They also make the best cheesecake in the world. Not so much with the pastries.

They did let us out for an afternoon which was exciting because I got to see my friend Amy who never comes to visit me in the City because she's a dirty hippy who lives in a co-op with a three-legged cat and tree-huggers with names like "Grasshopper" and will probably write something nasty in my comment box because I've insulted her fragile sensibility and collarbone. She did, however, take me and Deirdre on a hike around Six Mile Creek. "Oh, it's just a short walk," she says. Um, yeah. Anyway, for those of you who don't know Ithaca very well, it is all up-hill. I know this sounds physically impossible but trust me; I walked everywhere and never went down.

So, anyway, we're walking along, getting attacked by dragonflies (I hate bugs, but dragonflies are the worst! They are ugly and nasty and I haven't figured out what they are useful for yet), when Amy realizes she took us a different way than she was planning and we might have to do a "bit of climbing." Um, yeah. Suffice it to say we did manage to scale the cliff we needed to scale in order to get to the naked man. I actually don't know why this 60 year old man was lying naked on a rock, balls to the wind, reading The Nanny Diaries, nor do I know why he gave us a dirty look when we walked by his naked ass. It wasn't like by lying naked he'd laid claim to that rock or anything, like that guy who licks the car door handle in that Volkswagen commercial. I don't know, maybe he didn't want us looking at his dick. Whatever. It's Ithaca. On our way back to campus (up-hill, of course) we passed a guy in his boxers climbing through the second-floor window of his apartment, which of course makes perfect sense. I mean, where are you going to carry your keys if all you're wearing is your underwear?

I was happy to get back to the City, though, even if the boy made me start running this morning. Thirty minutes and eighteen leg cramps later I still felt like crap. Endorphins, my buttocks. But at least I've found a good use for my $100 pair of running shoes. Violently kicking my boyfriend in the ass.