Yes, that's right, it's my second day of spring break! Actually, I've been acting like I've been on break for most of the past three days, but then again, I only had two classes, so why not relax a little. The weather is very typical for a spring break so far. After the wonderous 70 degree weather we had most of the past two weeks, we got about 4 inches of snow Last night. I think something similar happened during my last spring break.....oh well.

I actually sortof have a goal for this entry, which is to basically discuss the past week just a bit since I did not mention too much in the previous journal entry, and also to plan out the next week a bit. This is a bit odd because this break is like a breaking (or braking) point for my life at the moment. Usually I let my spring break waste away without getting much done, but I'm expecting a good bit of transitioning towards the future. But, I'm getting ahead of myself, first I need to finish talking about a couple things with the past.

Last Thursday I went to an openhouse at this really nifty company nearby. I honestly hadn't heard of the place before, so I had no idea of what to expect, so I was way pleasantly surprised at what I found. They make construction chemicals: non-skid bridge decks, industrial floor coatings, reflective road paints, concrete restoratives, and a lot of other stuff. The really nifty thing though wasn't what they made, but how they operate. I can barely begin to explain how unorthodox this company is. First off, their focus is not selling products, but rather, selling solutions. They don't have set products that they advertise. What they do is taylor the product to the needs of each customer using the basic technologies they own. More than that they have, in many cases, begun to go beyond the formulation and get involved in the quality application of the product (full service).

But the whole company conception is unorthodox. During the open house (there were probably 30 students there from area universities) for the first three or four people who spoke to us they didn't make any mention of what they actually do or make. The whole time they were focussed on their core principles and how they do business. The long and the short of it is that they are totally based around their principles which have no mention of profit or money. I have honestly never seen anyplace that is so focused like that. They spent most of the open house asking us questions related to what we are looking for in an employer and a job. It was so different. For lunch, they had a wonderful little buffet, and we sat for about two hours just chatting about whatever. After that they took us for a short tour of their facilities. They don't have any job titles, because there is no hierarchical structure, and through their policy of cross-training, most everyone in the company can come in and assist on a particular project if necessary.

Basically, I'm very interested in working for this place. This was the first time that I went into a job related event and mentioned that I my ideal job would be working for the UN Environment Programme, and I didn't feel like they thought I was insane. They seem to be a young, highly motivated, growing company. They asked about future educational plans and seemed very interested in seeing their employees continue to advanced degrees. They place their primary emphasis on their ideals and doing thing the right way. Overall this seems like exactly the kind of place that I want to work. I'm going to be filling out their application and writing a letter to request an interview in the next couple days, and I'll keep you all posted as things progress.

Well, today was a good, if modest, start on my road to reinvention. I was slightly hampered by staying up late last night, but I think that I won't be making that mistake again tonight if all goes as planned. I woke up fairly early this morning and joined the rest of the gang (minus Andrew) at the gym. I taught myself a good lesson about why consistency in exercise really is important. With about a month between my last workout and this one, I wasn't lifting my old weights very well, so I decided to take it easy and just get myself back into the feel of things. Actually, it was my body that wouldn't let me lift the weights I had been lifting, and a lack of sleep was not helping either. But, the most important thing was being back in the gym again and working.

After the gym I got back and ate a good lunch. I played on my computer a bit and decided to take a nap for a couple hours. Then refreshed from my nap, I tackled the laundry and room cleaning that I had started on last night. I've gotten most of the way through cleaning my room and laundry at this point. I have to admit that my life already seems to be far more in order than it was earlier today. This is good.

This evening I went to OfficeMax in search of my big pad of paper for wall notes. They were out of them, but are expecting more soon, so I'll check back later this week. While I was out there I stopped at the new Borders Bookstore in Severence Mall. They are open til 11:00 PM, so I took a couple hours just browsing. I spent a bit of time in their political science section, which was pretty ample, some more time in the Gay/Lesbian section.

I spent a lot of time browsing through the travel guides with my trip in mind. It helped solidify in my mind what major decisions Brigitte and I need to make for our trip. There are really three legs to the trip, as I mentioned before: the northern route out, the pacific coast, and the southern route back. The first big choice is how much time to spend, and how to divide it, in South Dakota and Wyoming seeing the natural wonders. The second big choice is how much time exactly to spend in Seattle and San Francisco (our two long term stops) and how much time we need/can devote at our smaller stops and visits along the way. The final choice has to do with our route through Texas and whether we want to take a southern route through Austin, San Antonio, and Houston, or just fly through the northern part on our way.

I also browsed through the section on Eastern Thought, particularly the books by Thich Nhat Hanh, who you will remember as one of my recommended reads. I bought myself a book of his meditations titled The Blooming of a Lotus as a possible extension of the whole spiritual side of things.

In that vein, I did want to spend some further time on the subject of religion and homosexuality since I've gotten a few responses and thoughts. Rob sent me a long letter in regards to my entry. He had some apologies in regards to his reaction in his journal. He honestly hadn't expected me to get the kind of response that I got.

In retrospect, he probably shouldn't have expected what I did. I can honestly say that I knew before going in to my conversation with the priest pretty much the tack that he was going to take on this. This same priest says Mass for us here at school 2 or 3 times a semester and he had given a talk about two years ago on sex and dating and relationships, where he had taken the exact same stance (and even gave a same-sex scenario, which I was totally surprised at at the time).

Honestly, having seen the hardened stance that the Vatican has taken in recent years on homosexuality and church teaching, I have to question whether he isn't taking a risk in even saying what he is. There have been a couple cases of Catholic religious persons ministering to the gay and lesbian community in the US recently who have basically been silenced by the Vatican for simply not stressing the celibacy stance enough. I can only hope that the predominant focus within the American Catholic Church is one of understanding and love rather than the heavy handed traditionalism that we see so often.

I guess that I can also see where Rob is coming from considering the stance we've seen from the California bishops on Proposition 22 in the recent elections (Prop. 22 banned recognition of same sex marriage in California). I believe the figure I read was that the Catholic Church in California put something close to $350,000 in support of the measure, which I find particularly disgusting considering the huge number of social ills that money could have been used to combat instead.

Well, it's about time to call it a night so I can get a bit more sleep than last night. I have a whole bunch of stuff on the books for tomorrow. I want to start my spiritual stuff in earnest, since I have most of the physical clutter removal done. I also need to get started on the job search stuff, some small Model UN stuff, and at least one item of homework. Tomorrow evening is Tuesday TV night. I think Rhiannon might be bringing over some cabbage rolls for dinner that she made tonight. I'm also thinking of making some blueberry yogurt muffins to use up some yogurt in the fridge. I think I'm going to have Kari and Karen and a few other people over Wednesday or Thursday evening for lasagna dinner, so I need to start preparation for that too.

Well, we had limited progress today, at least in the categories that I mentioned yesterday. I did some more decluttering of my room, to the point where I think it is pretty stable. I talked to a good number of people via ICQ, including Robb and Rob Brigitte, and John from Model UN.

I spent a lot of my day cooking too. I made spetzle (a type of small dumpling) with Rhiannon to go with our cabbage rolls. It was most delicious. I've not had that good ethnic cooking in quite a while. I also made lemon poppyseed muffins with the yogurt. Tomorrow is going to be lasagna as I mentioned yesterday. We had a wonderful TV night with a good episode of Will and Grace.

Earlier today I spent a bit of time just looking through my bible reading over the annotations that are at the beginning of each book (particularly in the old testament). It was a nice overview and gave me an idea of where I want to read over the next few days. I'm sitting sown with my new book of meditations now, just to peruse it a bit. I'm not all that sure about meditation and how to go about it, but I suspect that I will gain some benefits of relaxation and good thoughts even if I'm not getting the full effect. This is, after all, something that is new to me.

Tomorrow morning I think I'll be skipping the gym. I was feeling the soreness from yesterday quite profoundly today. I think that I'll try to do some lighter stuff here at the apartment. I'm hoping that I can at least get back into things a bit quicker than when I first started lifting last fall.

Well, I think that what I've learned from all this is that the less deadlines and structure that I have in life, the less efficient I am at applying myself to the key tasks. I managed to not accomplish a lot of the stuff that I set out to do over spring break. On the other hand, I did have a nice relaxing week. Allow me to recap some of what occurred the rest of the week.

On Wednesday I spent a lot of time cooking, and ended up with a wonderful lasagna for myself and my guests. I spent half of Thursday helping at the CCWA high school Model UN Conference. It was a lot of fun, and good practice for this week and the North Coast Conference where I get to do that for 5 or 6 times as long. I had Rhiannon over for dinner (more lasagna) and then we went to Borders bookstore to browse some more. They had a book on coming out to parents that Rob suggested to me the other day, so I sat down and read through some bits of it. It looked very good from what I read, though I only wish that it didn't have a huge section on coming out with HIV, since I think that would freak my parents out to see that.

On Friday I went to the gym again and lifted. I was feeling much better finally from Monday, and I was stronger, though not up to spped completely yet. After lifting we played racquetball for a while before heading back home. I went home to deal with taxes and drop off my suit to get drycleaned for this week. The government is going to be giving me a hefty sum back this year, which is good because it is going to get me through the last couple months of school. Friday night a bunch of us went to dinner in little Italy and bowling afterwards. I spent Saturday all by mself doing nothing productive. I never left the house, I didn't see anyone, and I didn't accomplish much of anything that I cna recall. Sunday was my time to get settled back into regular life again. I did some of the school work that I neglected for the whole week and welcomed my various roommates back. Then I went to church and whatnot.

Today was back to classes.....even though I didn't accomplish all that I wanted to over break, I am back feeling refreshed and not as far behind as I was feeling before break. I have been icqing with many people of recent, which is part of the reason that I have not posted to my journal in a long while. Most recently I've been talking to Robb quite a bit, plotting all kinds of evol niftiness. I like plotting.....it's very fulfilling.

We'll call today Gay Day if only because that's my subject matter of choice....I had some various stuff running through my head on different aspects of being gay and sex and morality and whatnot last week. I'm going to try to share some of my thoughts if I can form them properly.

Well, starting with the non deep stuff, have you all heard about these new gaydar devices? They're little electronic keychain thingies that set off an alarm if you get within 50 feet of someone else with one. They are supposed to help gays know when others are near. They even have different settings depending on what you're looking for. Being the gadget minded person that I am, it sounds sortof nifty to me, but I honestly wonder whether they would really prove all that useful. Somehow I don't think that a little electronic device is going to find me Mr. Right.....maybe Mr. Horny or Mr. Sleeps-Around, but that's another matter.

On a bright note, the Vermont House of Representatives passed their "civil unions" legislation yesterday by a vote of 76-69. It now has to go on to their Senate, but it is expected to pass there too. I've been following the whole thing pretty closely as it's been moving along in the past few months. To me it's very exciting because Vermont is the first state to be putting this level of legislation into effect. For those who aren't up on this, if the "civil unions" legislation becomes law, it will basically create a system of "civil unions" for same-sex couples, parallel to the institution of marriage in the state. This would grant the same rights and responsibilities to same-sex couples choosing to enter into a civil union as are granted to couples with a marriage license in Vermont. This only applies to Vermont laws and does not extend to federal matters like federal taxes and whatnot.

In many ways I think that there are parallels between the fight for gay rights in recent decades and the fight that has been going on for African Americans over the past nearly 150 years. No, you can't draw direct comparisons, but I think that you can certainly see similar paths and trends in the movements and particularly in society's reaction to them. Particularly on the marriage issue, I see this "civil union" legislation as an attempt at "separate but equal". I think that eventually, once more states take similar action and it bears out that society is not decaying any faster because of it, society will get used to the idea of same-sex couples in general. Once that happens, I believe that it will be only a matter of time before some state ends up opening up marriage, in name as well, to same-sex couples. I'm not sure if it will be voluntary or judicially motivated, but it will happen.

An interesting side note, is that by enacting their "civil unions" legislation, Vermont may be doing an end-around on all of the "defense of marriage" type legislation being passed by other states. Since the unions are not actually marriages, it very well may be that if couples in a "civil union" move from Vermont to another state, that state would have to recognize many of the provisions of the Vermont legislation, as it pertains to medical decisions and visitation, etc... This might involve court battles, but could be the impetus for other states to be required to pass similar legislation.

I have to say that this one state gives me hope that erases a lot of the despair I've been feeling in relation to the actions in much of the rest of the country. I certainly hope that Ohio can continue to fend off the same-sex marriage ban push yet again this year. I doubt we will see something like Vermont in the near future, but you have to take things one year at a time I guess.

This is going to be a really quick entry since I have a ton more stuff to do than I can reasonably expect to accomplish in one day. I got back from my high school Model UN staffing venture last night. I had a really good time there and got to know a few people on the staff better and some who I'd never even met before. There were one or two new hot guys there on staff, but chances of interest are nigh-impossible.

We had a big contingent of CWRU related people on staff this year. The Secretary General helped us out on staff at our conference, so he took a risk in accepting a lot of us into some key positions this year on his staff. It turned out that our people did really well and impressed a lot of people on their staff. We have one person who was elected to their conference Advisory Council, so hopefully he can continue to build bridges and contribute to the conference. I ran for the Advisory Council also, but I wasn't chosen as one of the 10 elected members or the 5 appointed members. The people in charge know that I'll do shit even if I don't get elected...heh...such is my curse I suppose.

I personally had a very gratifying time while I was at the conference. My committee went really well overall despite a few rough spots at times. I got some time to spend with Jeneanne and John, both of whom were also chairing at the conference. We stayed with the lady who usually has us over when we're out in Ashtabula, which is always a pleasure because she makes our stay so very comfortable and pleasant, and we try to make ourselves fun guests as well.

Of course, I missed two days of classes and now I will pay for that. I have two exams and a presentation to give tomorrow and I really have not studied for that stuff too much. I'm probably in deep doodoo. I think my plan is to work to do really well on two of the three and do enough to not fail on the third. At this point that's about all I can do. Hmm...well, seeing how I have more to do than I have time, I better go and see how much I can get done now. Laters!

Well, strangely enough, what started out looking like a very bleak week has turned into what could be the turning point in my semester. If we recall, on Sunday I was lamenting all the stuff I had to do for school but didn't have time to do right. Well, I ended up spreading that stuff out some by pure luck and good fortune. I spent a lot of time studying for my P-Chem test for Monday morning. That one turned out to be the bleak part of the entire week. I have not gotten it back yet, but based on what I actually finished, I can't get more than about 35% on the exam.....life sucks sometimes. After that I spent most of my day preparing for my Chemical Engineering Design presentation. I was prepared to bite the bullet and take a hit on my Physics Exam, but I managed to get that pushed off until Tuesday, thankfully. My Design Presentation went reasonably well (the Prof really liked this one graph I had that no one else semmingly thought of), and I finagled my way into turning the written report in on Wednesday. I took the Physics exam Tuesday morning and got a B, which was as much as I could have hoped for considering how little work I've put into the class in recent weeks.

The clincher on things has been that I've been getting to sleep at a reasonable time and getting up earlier too. This has really changed my whole life to a degree I had not expected. I went to the gym again after more than a week's hiatus on Wednesday, and tho I was not up to my old weights, I managed to do far better than I had when I resumed two weeks ago. I really think that it is all attributable to sleep.

This morning I went down to the Rapid station to see the Model UN team off to the airport for the University of Chicago conference. I'm honestly glad that I'm not going because I'm also honestly tired of stressing myself out over Model UN. I need to b away from the burden of it to a certain extent for a while....I think that the work was getting in the way of the fun of it for me this semester, partly because it was infringing so much on the rest of my life. I'm now taking on Model UN tasks that I feel I want to do to leave the organization in a good position to proceed forward next year. I feel that I've secured my legacy by action, so now I just have to do it by word, making that legacy known. I think it's sortof like a US President going on to build their Presidential Library....a pleasant capstone to a stressful job.

So, we'll see what this weekend brings....I think that I'm going to have to follow my same schedule of early to bed, early to rise to see if it helps me get the stuff I have to do done during the weekend too. I have a lot to do still, really for the rest of the semester, but I think that this week sortof gave me a vision that I can actually get it all done, do it the right way, and be successful with less stress. The key thing is that I really won't have to become a hermit, and that would in fact be detrimental.....I just have to keep a focus and spread out my time just a bit better in accomplishing tasks. This doesn't sound like a big deal when I verbalize it, but I honestly feel like I've reached some type of epiphany this week, which is all the more wonderful because it's not something that I had any plan of anticipation of.

So, anyways, what does that leave for the future, you may ask? Well, this evening I have a few items of homework and reading to keep up with, and then I'll play on my computer until I decide it's time to pass out. Tomorrow morning I find out if Brigitte is going to be up this weekend to visit. I think I mentioned that the last time didn't happen for various reasons. I hope she's able to make it up here because she really needs some relaxation time with her friends, who she hasn't seen for months. She's been dealing with a lot of family stress, and I think she just needs someone to talk to and spout off to for a while about whatever. Between P-Chem and Physics tomorrow I'm going to the gym to lift again. Two sessions in a row is a bit unusual for me of late, so I'm excited. I'll probably spend the afternoon at the library doing some research for a few papers and presentations that I need to prepare for. Happily, I don't have a Model UN meeting since most people are in Chicago, but I think those of us who are here will be getting some stuff together so we can mail out brochures for next year's CNMUN conference here at CWRU. Other than that, I think I'm just going to drift and see where fate takes me for the evening. Model UN Andrew is going to be in town too, so I may do something with him too.

Other than Friday, I don't have too many specific plans. I need to do lots of homework during the days and have some fun in the evenings. Next week isn't going to be a cakewalk, with an exam and a presentation coming up, and two or three major things to follow every week between now and the end of the semester. I suppose the other thing on my list is to finally got down to business on the job search. There is no question that I need to move quickly....most people I know are already getting ready to move to the jobs that they've already secured, so I'm just a bit behind the times.

Well, that's the story for the recent past and future. Hopefully I'll catch up with a few of my fellow journalers in the next couple days as well. I've had some short chats, but nothing major in over a week. I'll be around, sio please feel free to drop me a line on ICQ if anyone is around. Laters!

Well, Saturday evening was definitely a wierd experience. Things were looking to be pretty disappointing for a while....Brigitte never made it up here....I was supposed to go to dinner with Jeneanne, but she never showed up.....it was all looking bad, but then I should have known that April Fool's Day would not disappoint me. Let me give you the lineup of people.

The Players