Armchair Sociology

It’s Tuesday night and for some reason, I keep thinking it’s Thursday tomorrow. I’m wishing my life away. Or maybe I’m getting an extra day free. Who knows??

Yesterday was fairly pedestrian at work; Boris (the old server) is now clear of user files. I just need to shift a pdf-creator service to another machine and I can switch it off for good. The super-duper colour copier/printers in our reprographics department are giving me a headache though; they keep going offline every time someone tries to print to them. I can’t work out what’s going on, neither can the Canon engineer so I have the constant buzz of users asking me what’s going on and when will they be fixed (not being able to print out sharp colour documents in quantity is a real problem when your business is delivering professional documents to a deadline!) but the honest answer is; I don’t know. It’ll get fixed as soon as we’ve worked out what’s going wrong!

(I usually phrase that last bit a little more tactfully when talking to the consulting staff…)

We had another positive Chorus rehearsal last night; we sounded really good on the songs we checked through and, despite a really dreadful first attempt, by the end of the evening we’d managed to remember the choreography for Let It Snow that we learned on Sunday.

Brett’s friend Rich was staying with us last night, so as to be convenient for Gatwick this morning. We met up in Belsize Park with him and Dan L and had a pizza before rehearsal. Then the poor guy had to sit and watch us rehearse for three hours, which he claims he found interesting but I suspect must have been tedious for him – he sings in a Chorus in Austin so, once you get over the stylistic differences, it was a kind of busman’s holiday.

When we got home after rehearsal though we sat and chatted for a while – the first time I’ve really spoken to him beyond smalltalk. He’s a bit of a poet (published, apparently!) and recited one of his poems from memory. He’s also written a new one while he’s been here, but it is rather bleak; comparing the words of a departing lover to the bites of a venomous snake.

One observation that made me think though was his description of our generation of gay men as ‘The Lost’ generation: The generation before us were totally closeted and dealt with it; they didn’t expect to be out and part of mainstream culture. The generation after us are virtually emancipated and don’t expect their sexuality to unduly affect their progression through life. Our generation, the thirty- to forty-somethings grew up in the in-between era, when it was legal to be gay but it still wasn’t widely acceptable. Rich’s theory, which I find myself largely supporting, is that as a result of being neither one thing nor the other, there is a lot of awkward emotional baggage being carried around. There certainly seem to be more emotional fuckwits in the people of my age than in the twenty-somethings age group.

It kind of meshes with my theory (which I think I may have articulated in a previous posting that I now can’t find) that gay men of my age were denied a proper adolescence by being in the closet; we didn’t get to do the ‘different-girl/boyfriend-each-week’ stuff that straight kids do, we didn’t get the chance to work out how to handle relationships and what we wanted out of them during the whirl of our teenage years. As a result you find middle-aged men still struggling to find the answers to those kinds of questions, and usually failing. Although my emotional balance isn’t exactly perfect, the more I see of the gay society of my generation, the more I think I’m doing okay with my man!

Anyway, enough of this armchair sociology. If you believe Bridget Jones, the straight guys are actually even worse at it than the gay guys, but that’s a whole other discussion..!

It was my mother’s birthday today and, for once(!), I remembered to ring her to wish her well. Turns out she was at a funeral for her uncle, whom I didn’t know and certainly didn’t know was dead. Hey ho. Mum called back later to apologise for not being able to talk at the time: Apparently it was a very good day actually, as she so rarely gets to see most of her family that weddings and funerals are the only time they get together for a good chat…

Tonight we went to see ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’ with Ping and thoroughly enjoyed it. If you like Quentin Tarantino’s style of films, but would prefer less grittiness and more black humour you should go see this film.