Tag: Pondering

Left, Right, Left, Right

So. 51 days into the redesign, and where am I at?

It’s going pretty well, actually. I’ve converted all of the pages except the photo galleries to the new (provisional) design, and even those should be done very soon. That’s the easy part. Now that I’ve got the styles in place, I’ll be able to shuffle things around much more easily. CSS-based layouts are a godsend, they are. I’ve still got a lot to learn (no duh), but it doesn’t look so intimidating anymore.

So. 51 days into the redesign, and where am I at?

It’s going pretty well, actually. I’ve converted all of the pages except the photo galleries to the new (provisional) design, and even those should be done very soon. That’s the easy part. Now that I’ve got the styles in place, I’ll be able to shuffle things around much more easily. CSS-based layouts are a godsend, they are. I’ve still got a lot to learn (no duh), but it doesn’t look so intimidating anymore. At first, I was going to stick to my trusty old table-based layout; but when I tried to get a little fancier I ended up with massively nested tables, so I said “Fuck that noise!” and took the plunge. CSS all the way, baby. Haven’t looked back since. In fact, a while later, I decided to move the sidebar from left to right. All it took were a few changes in the stylesheet, and boom, all my pages had their sidebar on the right. Seriously, how awesome is that? If I hadn’t been enlightened before, that would have done it for sure.

But like I said, that’s the easy part. CSS and HTML, that’s just… coding (I always code my pages by hand). The real struggle will be designing graphics, because it means using a side of my brain that just hasn’t gotten much exercise. Left brain—analytical, logical, language oriented? No problemo. Right brain—intuitive, emotional? Ah. That’s a problemo. I’ll need to learn a whole new language. No, not even that (just showed my bias, right there), but much more basic—primal, if I may use the word—ways to express myself.

I think I got that particular revelation while visiting Web sites on Paleolithic art a couple weeks ago. The people living 20 or 30,000 years ago had no written language, and maybe not much of a spoken language, but they still produced some seriously kick-ass art. I have to watch myself here; can’t fall in the trap of thinking “Ooo, Cro-magnons were primitive and brutish, they had no left-brain thinking at all.” Which, well, is certainly very condescending and probably very wrong. But they must have had a very different mindset, and that’s something I need to explore.

My Coming Out Story

It happened in late May of 1992 and became official on May 28th, the day I started my diary to come out to myself on paper; I was seven weeks away from my 21st birthday, having just finished my first undergrad degree. Suddenly, without warning, denial took a permanent holiday and I accepted the simple truth: I was gay. Had been all along.

It happened in late May of 1992 and became official on May 28th, the day I started my diary to come out to myself on paper; I was seven weeks away from my 21st birthday, having just finished my first undergrad degree. Suddenly, without warning, denial took a permanent holiday and I accepted the simple truth: I was gay. Had been all along.

Of course, it wasn’t really “without warning” and looking back, I’m amazed it took so long for me to come out. I’d liked boys for years, fantasized about them with every spare neuron. It’s true that I’d never actually done anything about it… and denial is a powerful thing. Since I understand how pointless it is to obsess about wasted years, and even though I wish I’d done it earlier, I can only say I just wasn’t ready to face the truth.

So I was out to myself. but now what was I supposed to do? Who should I talk to? Where should I go to find other gay people? Too many questions. Internalized homophobia was really the least of my worries: I felt lost and confused, full of fears and self-doubts, and not just about this particular issue. In the first week of June I attended my graduation ceremony; though I was proud and happy to have completed my degree, everything intensified my insecurities. All the other graduands seemed so sure of themselves, of where they wanted to go, what they wanted to do. Me? I didn’t have a clue. Only that I was staying in school, postponing any major decisions about my life for as long as possible.

When classes started again in September, I decided it was time to get off my butt. I’d spent the summer getting my head together, and felt a bit more confident about things. I remembered seeing posters for a gay/lesbian/bi group at Ottawa U, but that had been a couple of semesters ago, so I didn’t know if they were still active. Of course, back in those days, there was no centre or Web site. However, the student info guide was helpful in other ways: I found out about GO-Info, Ottawa’s G/L monthly paper (now defunct), and several gay or gay-friendly bookstores. And in GO-Info, I learned about various discussion and support groups held by local queer organizations. That was exactly what I needed.

In mid-September I came out to my twin brother Martin. I’d been working up the nerve to hell him for a couple of months… and as I expected it went perfectly well. I told him, and that was that. I’d been hugely nervous before, needing to tell somebody, and here I was with a totally anticlimactic coming out.

A week later I went to my first gay discussion group. I’d chosen one that took place on Sunday afternoons, since all others were on weeknights and I wasn’t ready to come out to the rest of the family. I told my parents I was going to study on campus—a plausible lie, since I sometimes did do this.

I took the bus to the ALGO Centre, at 318 Lisgar just off Bank Street. As I walked up those stairs (stairs that would become very familiar), I knew I was entering a different world. A world where I could be myself; where I could spill my guts; a world of people like me, who knew what I was going through because they’d been there too.

We went out for coffee after the meeting. Later, at home, I explained the smell of cigarette smoke on my clothes by saying I’d gotten together with friends—this time, not a lie. I kept my excitement and brand-new optimism to myself. Partly it was habit… and partly, I didn’t think even Martin would understand.

And so began my life out of the closet. Over the next few months I came out to my immediate family, read quite a lot (and especially got interested in queer history), and very gradually became politicized. It was slow going—change only came one small step at a time—but at last I was on my way.

Atheism: A Brief Manifesto

Though I’ve been an atheist for a number of years, it’s not something I usually think about. It doesn’t come up in conversations much. It doesn’t influence my day-to-day life, my job, my choice of clothes, my choice of friends. There are no churches to go to, no holy books to read, no rituals to perform. In a perfect world my lack of faith in deities wouldn’t be any more of an issue than my lack of faith in space aliens or Santa Claus.

Though I’ve been an atheist for a number of years, it’s not something I usually think about. It doesn’t come up in conversations much. It doesn’t influence my day-to-day life, my job, my choice of clothes, my choice of friends. There are no churches to go to, no holy books to read, no rituals to perform. In a perfect world my lack of faith in deities wouldn’t be any more of an issue than my lack of faith in space aliens or Santa Claus. But this is not a perfect world, and I think there is quite a bit to say about faith, and lack thereof.

The bottom line is that I don’t trust faith as a way to know the truth, about gods or anything else. Faith is easy; lots of people have it. Lots of people following lots of different religions and spiritual paths, each believing with equal sincerity, and for basically the same reasons, that they’ve got the right one. So out of all the mutually exclusive belief systems out there, which should I choose? And how? It seems all anyone has to go on are tradition, hope and fear and wishful thinking. That’s not enough for me, though: just because it feels good doesn’t mean it’s true—no matter how much I might want it to be. So until I know the truth for sure, with something more reliable than my heart, I’ll just have to withhold belief. Simple as that.

This is not a bad place to be. I’ve been told that I need spirituality to have hope, give my life meaning, or be happy. However, I don’t agree. It’s true that, once upon a time, I used to wish for some kind of transcendental experience, something that would have brought to life the fantasy worlds I loved so much, and blessed my everyday existence with a little of their magic. But the truth is, there’s plenty of magic and wonder to be had right here in the real world. Not the cheap magic of theology and superstition, with their shallow stories and simplistic moralities, but the much richer awe and inspiration that comes from facing the world and investigating its secrets. There’s no need to dream of an afterlife when there’s so much to see and do in this life. The fact that it won’t last forever doesn’t make it any less special. Quite the opposite, in fact: here and now, I am alive, and this is my only shot at being alive, so I should make the most of it. That may not seem to be a terribly comforting philosophy, but it’s enough for me.

I’ve grown stronger since I lost my beliefs in gods and mysticism. Maybe it’s not the only factor, but I believe it’s been an important one. I don’t waste my energy on false hopes or irrational fears, and so am free to focus on who I am, where I am, and what I really need: to live and learn, and find meaning to life, unburdened by gods or demons. This is what atheism is to me.