Moving On, or How I Spent My Last Summer in DC

Lately, my life has provided me with an overwhelming amount of blog fodder. In my infinite laziness, I've avoided most serious thinking/writing about my giant life changes, and I'm not totally sure why. Maybe because I'm a lazy asshole. Maybe because I've been mapping out the logistics of moving my life across the country. At any rate, Will Danger is (finally) back and he's got some serious blog-ish (bloggy?) heavy lifting to do.

Both because I am boundlessly self-absorbed and because I have about six readers (on a good day), I'll assume that most people reading this blog already know my giant life news: I quit my job, picked up my life, and am currently moving it to the west coast. This move is exactly as terrifying, irresponsible, and wonderful as it sounds. I'm currently in a small-town coffee shop in Iowa, where I'm beginning to write through my journey up to this point. Pausing to flip the District of Columbia a half-hearted middle finger, I drove away on Tuesday morning and I've been casually making my way through America's heartland ever since.

As a starter, I've compiled a glorified "How I Spent my Summer Vacation" list, detailing a few landmarks of my final months in the District. They're not all good moments, and they're certainly not all significant events, but I think they're all vaguely important in one way or another and they do a pretty good job of mapping out my final months in DC. My hope is that we'll all learn something about the life I'm deciding to run away from and that this will help me sort out the recycling from the garbage. Or maybe this will all just make it clear(er) what a total idiot I am.

It's interesting, and maybe totally unsurprising, that my final month in the District was actually really pleasant. All it took for me to finally feel like I had a life in DC was the decision to leave. For pretty much the first time since moving into the city, I managed to locate some happiness for myself. The overthinkers among you are, of course, joining me in the following questions: What the hell? Did I leave just as DC was getting good? Is the city luring me into a false sense of security before delivering a final kick the teeth?! What if this means that leaving is not a good idea?! After much thinking and panicking, I've decided to consider my pleasant final days in the nation's capital a parting gift, of sorts. At any rate, without further ado:

1. Work a job you hate, realize you don't actually need it as much as you think you do, and finally quit.
I won't belabor this point, because everyone knows how much I hated my DC job. I learned the following lesson while working the job though: Always sing along to something on your way to work, no matter how soul-crushing your job is. The harder it sucks, the louder you have to sing, obviously. Boss gettin' you down? Coworker being a pretentious fuck? Just. Sing. Louder. It's what Whitney would have done.

Quitting my soul-crushing job was a nice exercise in coming to my senses, in realizing that unseemly circumstances are almost never as self-evident as they seem, and in understanding that all problems have a solution, even if that solution ends up taking you some weird fucking places.

2. Locate the most attractive guy in the room and ask him for his phone number.
(Optional: Continue to casually date him for a while.)
Sending yourself on the occasional suicide mission strikes me as a healthy habit. It's probably good for us to push the boundaries of our discomfort every now and again, keeping in mind that getting shot down (in most circumstances) really isn't such a big deal. I'm also thinking that this is probably a good way to remind yourself that a pretty significant chunk of the boundaries we think we're encountering are both completely bogus and also self-imposed. Plus, every now and again, the 800 foot tall bartender will actually give you his number and meet you for coffee.

3. Finally figure out some hobbies.
This number is actually the linchpin of my recent happiness and it's been a long process. I think part of the reason I had such a hard time tracking down proper adult hobbies is that most of my hobbies are neither proper nor adult. They're grossly nerdy habits I picked up in my early adolescence and which contribute absolutely nothing constructive to my life. What I'm really asking you to do, dear readers, is pick up some comics and a trashy teen fantasy novel every now and again. Or play a game of Dungeons and Dragons. People will give you a weird sideways look when you tell them how you spent your weekend, but you'll have a hard time hearing them over the awesome sound of your dice hitting the table. Fuck off, dudes, I'm just trying to fight some imaginary dragons/kobolds, ya know? I'm really hoping I can use this re-discovered nerdiness to make some friends in Seattle and to become exactly the kind of adult my parents were always afraid I'd turn into.

4. Go see a Florence+the Machine show.
Seriously, just go. I don't know why you're still reading this post. Go.

Flo is a fucking goddess.

5. Make a complete ass of yourself in front of an almost total stranger, who it turns out lives around the corner from you. Continue to regularly run into him on the street and relive your shame. 
I'll try to make this embarrassing story as short as possible, though in retrospect it is one of my favorite DC shame stories. I met an attractive dude very briefly in a bar. When I arrived home that night (extremely drunk at 3am), I did a little creative Facebook stalking, to discover that we had a ton of mutual friends, as is common in DC. Because I am both incredibly clumsy and had consumed Olympic amounts of tequila, I accidentally clicked the "add friend" button. Because I'm a dipshit. (Facebook, after all, does not ask you to confirm a friend request before sending it.) In addition to being super suave, I'm also incredibly lucky, because as soon as that happened, this dude sent me a message in real time that pretty much went, "Uhh, do I know you? and why are you so fucking creepy?" This wouldn't have been a big deal (what's another denizen of the District who thinks I'm a total fucking nutjob?) except that once I finally moved into the city, this motherfucker happened to live literally around the corner from me. So I ran into him on the street a ton, and was forced to relive one of my more egregious tequila errors over and over again. Whoops!

Why am I including this event on the list? Because it's a hilarious story, and because I'd like to learn to be more comfortable making a complete ass of myself. Lord knows it happens often enough. There is life after embarrassment, Will.

6. Learn to tell people to fuck off more regularly.
I firmly believe in the medicinal power of being told to fuck off. Everyone is better off for hearing it. Plus, anyone who has spent longer than like 30 seconds talking to me knows what a worrier I can be. I overthink and I fret. Then I overthink and I fret some more. In an effort to let go of some of this anxiety, I've taken to occasionally channeling this Natalie Dee comic. My hope is to eventually settle into a middle ground that involves both empathy and less anxiety, but for now, I'm experimenting with being the kind of asshole that tells people to fuck off. Among other things, being a total asshole in this way is helping me abandon most of my self-induced stress, which will probably cause me to live a little longer. And I'm all for that.

7. Get a little lost.
After nearly a year and a half of it, I think I've finally settled into being lost. What's more, I've discovered that a large part of what I found so frustrating and off-putting about DC is that it's a city of people who, on the whole, have never been lost. They've all wanted to be lawyers/work for the government since they were wee youngin's, and they've followed a connect-the-dots path from womb to congressperson. The next time some fucker in a bar tries to tell me about his Capital Hill job or about how he's going to make partner by 30, I'm gonna puke in his hair and then start crying. And that's gonna be gross for everyone, so let's just cut that shit out. How about we do some wandering together instead? I hear Iowa is lovely this time of year.

Caveat: Continuing to be lost is all fine and dandy, Will Danger, but for fuck's sake, don't stop writing about it! Look for more blogging as my journey continues. Unless I get serial murdered in the mountains of Idaho.

Birthdays and Death-days, an Absence/Presence Story

I'm having a particularly difficult time writing this, because of the way in which this post has needed to inhabit a space that is simultaneously celebratory and morose. The post is motivated primarily by two concurrent events. First, today marks the one year anniversary of my plunge into the blogosphere. The second, infinitely weightier event, is the untimely passing of an old friend's father. I had concluded that the easiest, and perhaps most reverent, course of action would be to write two separate posts and to leave it at that. In the midst of my emotional and intellectual head-scratching, however, we lost Ms. Whitney Houston, which has made it feel even more important that my celebration and mourning remain intertwined. I've tried to let this potentially insensitive tension guide my thinking but, as with anything worth writing, it remains difficult.

In spite of my Danger-prone blogging pseudonym, I am very fortunate to have only experienced death in the most peripheral way. I've witnessed the death of acquaintances, friends-of-friends, and distant relatives, but never a passing in which I had real emotional stakes. Even now, my attachment to both of these losses is distant. I obviously didn't know Whitney as anything more than a diva figure (a position we shouldn't undervalue), and in the past ten years, I have lost touch with both my friend and his father (though I was once close to both of them). Nonetheless, I do feel both of these deaths, and they have both occasioned serious thought on my part. I think this paragraph treads some questionable ground, so I should be clear: my thinking centers around these two passings because of their temporal proximity, not as a way of analogizing them. Tragedies cannot be analogized; grief can't really be compared in any productive way. All I can concretely say is that both have affected me, and that my (admittedly distant) grief in both cases shares a similar affective core.

What is it about death, exactly? It wounds us, it scares us, it fascinates us in some strange way. No small part of my own attachment to death is the fact that every death I encounter reminds me of my own potential to end. In that way, my reaction to death feels inappropriately selfish, a discomfort which I find quite interesting.

Having just come from a funeral service, I am struck particularly by the awkwardness of grief, both our own and other people's. Though perhaps outside of culturally available scripts for grief, this awkwardness feels really important. Unbalancing as it is, extreme awkwardness makes us feel our proximity to other people in the most visceral sense. It underscores the fact that death organizes and mobilizes us in ways that life, commonplace as it is, cannot. Death creates strange intimacies and brings us into contact with figures from our past, friends-of-friends, and total strangers. Funerals become both a staging of grief and an environment in which these oblique and decidedly un-permanent relationships play out.

I don't have any concrete conclusions to draw/arguments to make, but I am wondering about the publics of grief and the way in which the performance of death becomes about diagraming a particular life. At the funeral, the priest proposed (correctly) that everyone present had their own interlocking and overlapping stories to tell about Mr. Rob. To me, this indicates a desire to map out a life and to account for our own (inevitably complex) intersections with another person.

At its core, though, our mourning always brushes up against celebration. Dear old Emily Dickinson wrote, "The absence is as the presence" (I cannot find a citation for this, forgive me if I've misquoted). Said another way, we do not mourn that which we did not celebrate, and mourning is celebration of another kind. And so, if feels strangely important that my halfhearted musing about death should coincide with New Queer's first blogoversary. Despite my uneven posting habits, this sustained writing project indicates a definite presence, in contrast to the sharply felt absence of death. My blogging efforts have helped bring about, or at least chronicle, a noticeable improvement in my ability to write and think, a progress that stands in opposition to death's haltedness. There's an appropriate symmetry to celebrating my blogoversary on the heels of a funeral, continuing to build and progress in proximity to death, and to celebrate every step, movement, and blog post along the way. When I die, let them pour streamers (or possibly Pokemon cards) into my open coffin.

So, I am left thinking about birthdays and death-days, about progress and passing, about the euphemisms we invent, the stories we tell, and the emotional baggage that we try to avoid. (As a short side-note, the copy of Nella Larsen's novel sitting on my nightstand has me thinking about the numerous conceptual puns we might explore regarding "passing." Why do we use an action verb as a euphemism for death, the most literally immobilizing human experience?) Mr. Rob, Whitney, you are both missed in complex and surprisingly simple ways. Happy Birthday,  New Queer. Let's toast to many more years of sporadic posting and bullshit before Will Danger finally lays his pen, his party hat, and his ten-inch stilettos to rest.

A short note for my own funeral: Drag optional, presents not expected but encouraged. In lieu of flowers, you may drop jewels/pages from Mrs. Dalloway/pogs into my casket. Whitney was slated to perform, but I guess that's probably not going to happen. Bjork, maybe? Alanis?

At any rate, here's to more years, while we have them. Let's let the late Queen of the Night sing us out:

Is Throwing Wine Even Something That Gets You on a Reality Show?

Like a phoenix, rising from the ashes; like a tree nymph, falling from the branches; like a lazy quarter-lifer, finally working up the nerve to re-enter the blogosphere. That's right, assholes, Will Danger is back. My first order of business is an apology for the nearly 6 month gap since my last post. At least partially, I'll blame it on the overly involved and bureaucracy-laden PhD application process that has absorbed a lot of my reading/writing efforts over the past few months. I am happy to say though, that it is finally winding down. I made the deliberate choice not to blog the process, if for no other reason than that I thought I'd spare my (few) loyal readers from 60 different (and differently obnoxious) freak-out posts. That doesn't really excuse my total absence from the blogosphere, though. In partial penance for my long absence from these rainbow-encrusted halls, I offer two links:

The first has been making its way around teh interwebz over the past week (Full disclosure: sentimentalist that I am, I tend to roll my eyes at a video like this, mostly because I understand it to be the latest in a long line of tear-jerking attempts to win a mostly useless political sympathy. Don't get me wrong, it's adorable and all. I just won't be mad at you if you decide to skip it).

The second, courtesy of the geniuses at Hark! a Vagrant, has been burning a hole in my e-pocket for quite some time. I'll leave it sans commentary, because Spiderman usually speaks for himself.

In my lengthy absence, lots of things have happened in the world, none of which I am particularly qualified to comment on (but totally would have anyway). In no particular order: Wall Street dun got occupied (and then violent), Florence released a new album, horrors were staged on several University campuses (I'm looking at you Penn, Berkeley, and Davis), and Community got awesome (and then canceled). Short the intellectual fortitude for a serious post, and because my only other option would be to blog my near-unemployment, I think it's time Will Danger returned to his roots. I gotta be honest with you folks, I've spent a large portion of the past few months trying to jump through intellectual hoops for anonymous admissions committees, so I'm looking to unwind with something a little more banal (never giving up hope, of course, that my meaningless blogging might actually mean something).

New Queer regulars know reality TV to be a foundational part of my intellectual sensibility (my interactions with other people may or may not be fundamentally shaped by the idea that there is an invisible audience watching me, and that I am secretly a character everyone loves to hate. I'm not here to make friends). Though there is a new season of the Real World and an ANTM All-Star cycle on tv right now (my cup runneth over), I actually want to spend some time talking through a show I had never heard of until about a month ago: The A-List New York. It appears to be Logo's (gay-er) version of the Real Housewives, and a certain Austinite is convinced that my desire to watch it means that I am Algernon-ing. Maybe he's right. The show follows several gay men with absurd disposable incomes as they pick completely meaningless fights, whiten their teeth, and drink all the throwing wine. Don't get me wrong, it is a really terrible show.

But I am hooked. 

The 18 year old in me is obviously a little annoyed to find yet another show about fabulous gay men being fabulous, and wonders when we can expect Disappointing-Gay-Best-Friend The Series. However, I am also left wondering what we might learn from these people, about the aerodynamics of white wine, if nothing else. Frankly, I'm too fascinated by grown men having slap-fights on the streets of New York to worry about much else.

I'll close with a quick to-do list for December:
Gather my tattered scraps of dignity and use them as camera filters for my Real World audition tape.
Begin training for my eventual porn career.
Celebrate Tyra Bank's birthday in the only manner appropriate (yellow sundress).
Oh, and I guess it's probably time to get a grown-up job, but I'm not holding my breath.

It's good to be back, folks. Bundle up for the impending winter weather. But more importantly, be fabulous, throw wine to your heart's content, and never, ever, be here to make friends.