My NotBoyfriend is adorable.

Eric just bought My Name Is Earl on DVD and Mary Alice loves the show, so it trumped our other soap opera options forn today's lunchtime viewing (since The West Wing has not yet been returned to Mary Alice). I was not excited about watching this show (he looked so deflated at this news; I think he's a people pleaser) but I was willing to watch it (esp. since I'm hoping we'll have West Wing tomorrow). So we watched the pilot. (This is what? the third show I've seen recently which doesn't give its pilot episode a real title -- HIMYM, Smallville, My Name is Earl.)

I enjoyed it a lot despite myself. Things made of win include daytime hooker and canon gay. (We also watched the "lost" pilot -- "Bad Karma" Exclusive Earl Mis-Adventure in the main episode listing -- which, again with the hella gay.)

He said something about some show (I think The West Wing) not being gay and I said, "I can make anything gay. Do you doubt me?"
He responded: "Not even for a second."

Eric says that that Desperate Housewives is more gay than Smallville. (I thought of thelastgoodname's comment :) but didn't have a chance to mention it.) He said something about Matt from Melrose Place being on it and I didn't have a chance to say "Oh, I was thinking of the women actually." [I wasn't even gonna try to get into how: Having an actor on your show who once played a gay character does not make your show gay.]

Also, apparently Grey's Anatomy requires too much suspension of disbelief for him.

***

After lunch, I asked him if he was coming to my party on Saturday and he said he might have to go to a birthday dinner for his dad that night. I pointed out that he could just come to my party in the afternoon. He is the second person (RA was the first) to think it was strictly an evening affair. He also said that if I had a smaller gathering he'd be more likely to come 'cause he doesn't like large groups of people he doesn't know. (This actually surprised me -- both parts.) I said my friend Emma, who was one of the friends of mine I thought could outdork him [this references a conversation we had quite a while back], was gonna be there and I'd love to see them talk. (I didn't have a chance to mention she's also the one who likes "bad" movies.)

him: "The thing about my dorkiness is that I'm not committed to it."
me: "Are you committed to anything?"

Spurred by this he insisted on showing me a video of his (in his view) incredibly dorky younger self. [There is no way I can tell this story without it sounding like flirting, even though it didn't feel like that -- just felt very random, especially because I feel like he usually avoids talking about his family much.] It's just a short video of him and his family ten years ago (though I think he looks younger in it than he is now). Alyssa walked by to use the copier or something and he called her over to show her as well. It was very bizarre. But I watched him type in the URL -- [hislastname].org -- plus he never closed the window (we got distracted trying to make the video play) so I was putzing around on that and enjoying the stalkability. (His uncle put it together, and it has awesome stuff like a family genealogy.)

***

He called me later and said "You're probably gonna yell at me for this, or laugh at me, because I could probably just look it up myself just as quickly, but if you know it off the top of your head, what's Cailin's number?"

***

Edit: Speaking of adorable, birthday lunch invite from Cailin: No RSVP necessary because you are all coming! : P

Bisexuality: Successes and Challenges

Apparently "Celebrate Bisexuality Day" is officially this Saturday.  (Apparently the founders weren't Jewish, so they didn't know that date -- Sept. 23 -- would routinely fall during Rosh Hashana.)  Which means that my big party falls on Celebrate Bisexuality Day; this pleases me, of course.

Anyway.  I was seriously tempted to not go to this (dinner&panel), but I'm ultimately glad I did.

The speakers were uneven.  The first guy said that media representation is important, and said that a lot, but really didn't have a focused mini-speech so I had to force myself not to zone out.  Most of the other speakers were good, though.  Bobbi Keppel is 73(?) year old UU who started doing bi activism oriented toward educating therapists ('cause she's a therapist) but has also become really active around issues of bisexuality and aging (first being asked to represent that contingent about twenty years ago -- "When I was much younger than I am now").  Luigi is a Puerto Rican HIV+ bisexual man.  Lori is a trans and bisexual woman who decided to speak after Robyn Ochs had to cancel last minute due to illness.  She talked about how bi and trans are complementary "not just because they're the letters at the end [of GLBT]" but because of fluidity.  She was a bit hippie-dippie for me, but I also really liked her.  There were one or two unmemorable speakers after that.

Apparently Transcending Boundaries this year is a joint conference with PFLAG's Northeast Regional Conference and is being held in Worcester (hi, Jonah).  It's a Friday-Sunday (Oct. 27-29) and I don't think it would be a big deal to take that Friday off from work.  I have really mixed feelings about going, though.  It could be cool, but I'm really hesitant about workshops and am bad at socializing.

Sidenote: People often talked about a bisexual community, and I was a bit surprised to find myself feeling uncomfortable around the idea of being a part of that.  I often find myself wanting a queerer community around me, so it's not that I have a deep antagonism toward identity politics.  Though I think I am developing something of an antagonism toward that -- because while I want to be surrounded by queer people, I want that to be incidental to everything else.  It occurs to me to to wonder if this is some sort of performance anxiety -- in that I feel like I don't have queer cred because I don't have past queer relationship/sex experience.  (Yes, this elides the fact that my heterosexual experience is similarly nonexistent.)  This occurred to me because I compare everything to WriterCon these days and I was thinking about how defining myself as a fan and inhabiting spaces focusing on that is both similar to and different from identifying as queer and inhabiting queer-specific spaces, and one thing I thought of re: WriterCon is the anxiety around identifying myself as a fan giving my relative lack of production/participation in any of the fannish venues (fanfic, meta, etc.).

I didn't really ping with any of the people I talked to, but I saw Ellyn, which I sense is going to become a theme (I last saw her at the MFA Gay&Lesbian Film Festival.) so I went to say hi afterward.  I was pleased that she had seen me across the room and recognized me.  She was talking to a woman Robin (age 26, BA in Linguistics, living in N. Quincy newly from Colorado, partnered with a biphobic woman, UU, grew up Catholic) and we had good conversation and will hopefully get together at some point.  (She's getting a new phone number in the next day or two but took mine.)  Oh, and Ellyn introduced me saying "Elizabeth was one of my interns a few years ago," which was said entirely innocently of course but just sounds so naughty when phrased quite that way.

Also, Robin wants to write.  Ellyn said there are a lot of opportunities for that around Boston/Somerville, which Tim said to me recently as well.  I didn't have a chance to ask for actual suggestions, though, unfortunately.

*

Speaking of bisexuals (and the in/visibility thereof):

"A recent study of more than 4,000 New York City men found that nearly 10 percent of participants who identified as straight admitted to having gay sex in the past year."
(link seen via kita, where there is plenty of discussion)

ATTN: Jonah, sarah_p, etc.

Little Shop of Horrors October 6 - 21