Jake’s Life

BBspot - Microsoft Purchases Evil From Satan

This season of COPS opened up with dash cam footage of an officer being shot, something I’ve never seen while watching the show. Good segment, and you can tell the dog is having fun too.

Last night after I dropped Sandro off at home I went to the car wash and was there for at least a good hour and a half (I go at night so that I’m not rushed and holding others up). I picked up a bunch of car care products the other day when I saw that my favorite brand, Black Magic, was on sale. After washing the car I dried it off and scrubbed the wheels and tires. Then came the two coats of Turtle Wax Ice, drying off the glass (which is the entire roof of my car) and cleaning it, and polishing the wheels. I hit the tires with Black Magic Tire Wet, and while that was drying I detailed the inside.

Now it’s all pretty.

When my mother heard the message she asked me about it and I of course denied it. I thought she believed me, but she didn’t. Within a few weeks she told me that we were losing our house and she needed to take another trip to Henderson in order to put more time into the shop so that we could have enough money to rent another, and that she would only be gone for a few weeks. I came home from the school the day she left and found very little left inside the house. She told me that it had been put into storage to get that out of the way and make the move easier when she gets back.

Wait, are you catching on yet? She wasn’t coming back.

She called me one night and let me know that I had to call friends and family to see who I can move in with because she can’t have a devil-worshipping, prostituting, drug using son (which in her mind directly translated to “gay”). So here I was 14 years old, no mother, and no way to even think about what was going on here. I stayed with one friend for about two weeks before the police showed up at their home and letting them know that my mother was pressing kidnapping charges if they didn’t release me to them. They took me, dropped me off at the empty home, and that was that. I then moved in with my best friend, and that lasted a few weeks before she was transferred out of her mother’s custody to live with her father.

A few days prior to this happening I had heard that my mother was back in town. When I was told to leave this house I called her and she hung up on me after telling her that I had nowhere to go. I called another friend’s mother who immediately came to pick me up and that’s where I lived for a few months. After the financial burden weighed too heavily, they called my aunt who came and picked me up to live with her and my two younger cousins.

Living with my aunt was no treat. Her idea of providing for us was going to McDonald’s on $.39 cheeseburger day and buying 50 of them to last through the week. When my grandfather sent her money to help with the cost of adding me to the household she bought one shirt and one pant for me to begin the tenth grade, and put the rest up her nose. I was constantly at my wit’s end here and walked to my grandmother’s small studio apartment every night until my aunt fell asleep (which was often really late). I ended up moving in with Gammy (who moved to Washington and lives near me now) and finishing my ninth grade year here.

Between ninth and tenth grades my grandmother sent me to my uncle’s house in Washington to get away from things, and also knowing that my uncle is gay and should be able to give advice on how to develop from here. I spent two weeks up here and found a lot of things that I have never seen before, namely people living the life that was inside me that I have never been able to experience. I actually found a place where I felt I could fit in, and his circle of friends welcomed me more than I have ever felt welcomed before. It really was the best place for me to be, but I came back at the end of Summer to go back to school.

End part two.

Starting today T-Mobile is dropping prices on its data plans. Total Internet is dropping from $29.99 to $19.99 to match their Blackberry Internet Service price. They are also beginning to offer a $9.99 service plan for Blackberry which offers e-mail only,for those BB addicts who don’t surf the web (if there are any).

Woowoo for my cheaper phone bill!

via Boy Genius Report

We all know what devastation occurred six years ago today. Right around the time I was leaving work this morning marks the hour (PST) that two planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers, another into the Pentagon, and another onto in a field, missing its intended target of the White House.

I was house-sitting at the time that it actually happened for a friend of my roommate’s. My roommate Leslie called me and told me to turn on the TV. I remember the chills that ran down my spine laying there on the couch watching this, and couldn’t help but look up to the sky when I left the house that day. I had never seen anything like this before, watching hundreds of people die on live television, and to this day have not. Each time they replayed the footage that morning I felt thousands of families grieving for loved ones, crying and screaming, in pain that they should never have to feel. I felt terror for those who were in the buildings and who occupied the streets down below as the planes impacted and debris—the finally the buildings themselves–fell.

There are still a lot of questions regarding these incidents and accompanying theories from the rational to the just downright crazy. While we may know what the results of the incidents were, many are not confident that they know what happened, why it happened, etc. Truthfully, I would love to have these answers but it is unlikely that I ever will. Many aren’t satisfied with this stance and seek to uncover the truth (or their own truths) about that morning and the events which led up to it. That’s their right and it’s yours too. While questions are natural and high priority due to the magnitude of this event, please don’t lose sight of those who died that day and since then due to related conditions and illnesses. We lost a lot of Americans that day, and other countries lost their citizens too.

If you aren’t the type of person who acknowledges these losses on a daily basis in an understanding of how our world really is, take a moment and at least do it today. Don’t just do it about what happened on 9/11/2001 either, do it about all losses like this and the injustice that accompanies them. Better yet, do something about it.

This post starts the story of not only my coming out, but also the repercussions of it, my development based on it, and overall what I learned from the experience. I am unsure how many parts it will be, but don’t want it to be one or two massive posts that are difficult to get through.

I’m sure that you can relate, but I knew I was gay before I knew what “gay” actually meant. Whether it was the adoration I viewed Billy on the playground with while he was infatuated over Sally or just a feeling of being different, I knew it. While it was natural to me, I had a feeling it wasn’t to others, so I kept my mouth shut about it and in my mind from about the third grade up until the fifth grade when I finally realized what the hell was going on.

One day I saw a friend at school that I hadn’t seen since second grade (I moved away and evidently he moved to the same area, Lancaster, CA, a few years later). He was the bad kid, always in trouble, and now was in the class that would now be termed for at-risk youth. We were never really good friends at our old elementary school but we found familiarity in each other. He didn’t live too far from me, so we made it a regular habit of hanging out. One day my mother wasn’t home (which was often at that age due to her body piercing business in Henderson, Nevada. She would take one-to-two week long trips there at a time) and my first view of another naked body in a sexual way happened and that’s when it really struck me what was going on in my head. It scared me, and I never really saw him again.

The next year in school, sixth grade, I met someone who became my best friend that year before he was taken out of his mother’s custody and placed with his father across the state. That had to be my first crush, and I’ll never forget him. Okay, I’ll admit something to you…we both loved the show CHiPs and we both loved riding our bikes together, so I’ll let you imagine how we looked flying down the street sharing the same lane and taking corners…but we were pretty damn good at it after a couple of collisions!

Next came seventh and eighth grades — junior high school — and gym class. I was always a fat kid and being around bodies I deemed more suitable for attraction was never pleasant for me, not to mention the other…inconveniences…which occurred at that age in the locker room. I made some lasting friendships here, some of which would be part of my coming out process later on in high school.

In high school is when things really started to pick up in terms of my own social development as it relates to my sexuality. Leading up to this point, I never really was social per se: I was never popular, often overlooked unless someone had a fat joke to spit out, and not the cool type kids wanted to hang out with. By this time I had told my best friend, a girl who I had “dated,” and a few other friends that I was “bi.” (I think this had to do with wanting to be at least partly normal even though I knew that I had very little interest in girls). During this time I made an insidious enemy, a chunky girl with red hair, who decided to call my house one day and leave a message on the answering machine that I was gay. I was 14 years old.

Let me break away from the story to give you some background on my family structure. I am an only child and lived in a single parent household. Growing up my mother was all I ever had. She was involved with two main men throughout my childhood, both bikers. One was a “reformed” gang member who was now a surgeon, a man of God, and worked in a halfway home. He was extremely strict, to the point that television was from the devil and we weren’t allowed to watch it, and after dinner I had to read the Bible aloud for two hours. The other was a current gang member and overall mellow guy unless you messed with his money, his brothers, his ol’ lady, or her son. My household was full of interesting things as any given point, and if I wasn’t seeing interesting things at home it was at the body piercing shop that my mother frequented in town (she also owned half of one in Henderson, NV). Needless to say, it was not the most open household to issues such as sexual orientation, race, or religion.

End part one.

A lot of the blogs I read everyday–and those I link to in my blogroll–feature bloggers who are in the process of coming out. Some are already out completely and some are documenting their own coming out as it happens. Many of them show the usual and normal emotions affiliated with coming out: fear of those close to them not being accepting, friends and family thinking less of them. One constant I’ve seen is that once they have successfully come out to one, others are nearer to knowing and most of the person’s fears are invalidated once the typical “Oh you’re my son/friend/cousin/grandson and always will be” talk happens.

I want to give a different side of coming out, and explain my history to those who read my blog. I have a feeling that once many read that they will understand me much better, whether it be my outlook on life, my views on social issues, my bluntness, etc.

While the story will start at the whole “gay thing” it will go beyond coming out, as that situation opened up several others that I want people to be able to peek into. I am going to be splitting it up into a few chunks, so this is mainly the precursor. Consider this the back of the book, telling you about a story of a boy in a single parent family who comes out, faces the challenges of several schools, homelessness, intolerance, and being the only one in his environment who is honest about being gay. All in all, I think he turned out to be an okay guy in the end.

Photo shoot with Kitty

Sandro and I eating

The truck next to us had tons of beer in it

Hot grocery store boys

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