There is, of course, the fact that as a native Angeleno I’m supposed to think of San Diego as either mildly amusing or beneath notice, and that as an adoptive New Yorker I’m supposed to see a place like this as frivolous and its relaxed, happy people as dangerously un-vigilant re: whatever slop life’s bucket is about to dump on them.

All of that is true. And yet, more than most other places I’ve visited in the past few years, I look around San Diego and I think, “This would be a nice change.”

I think, “I could have a little house, or a nice big loft apartment in a perfect location, for 40% less than I’m paying now.” I think, “Here nobody gives a shit what you’re wearing, ever,” and I think “Is it 64 degrees and sunny every single day of the year here?” (yeah, pretty much, except when it’s 70), and I think “Oh, so that’s what a tortilla is supposed to taste like.”

San Diego isn’t London, or New York, or even Los Angeles. But nobody here cares. They’re fine with it. Why wouldn’t they be (see “64 degrees,” above)? And anyway, it’s big enough (hello! 3 million people). And did I mention nobody ever cares what you’re wearing? And the buses all have bike racks on the front?

Admittedly, sometimes it’s nice to look nice, and I’m annoyed by the inland West (which is where 75% of the tourists around here are obviously from), and bla bla bla. But. 64 degrees and sunny! A house! Tortillas!

It’s now falling into my eyes (I can see some of it right now!) — I wouldn’t exactly say I’m Adrian Grenier or anything, but hey, I look loose and free.

I’ve been letting my hair grow out for, I dunno, 3 months? just to see what would happen. For most of my adult life I’ve been trying to keep it “under control,” but the fact is I have a big head (I know I do, it’s right there in front of my face, there’s no use pretending otherwise), and big head + really short hair usually = “ridiculous.”

I had a complex about having “big hair” for years because when I was a teenager I always wished I had that thick, heavy, straight dark hair that all the cool kids had. (In high school and then again in college, “Q-Tip Head” was a nickname that was occasionally heard in the hallways.) But what I didn’t reckon on is that that thick, heavy dark hair I envied usually starts falling out by your late 20s and what’s left is usually totally grey by 35. My hair, on the other hand, looks and acts more or less the same now as it did when I was 20 — there’s a bit less pigment in it and some of the follicles are going coarse, but it’s still thick and ample.

There were times when I let it grow out but styled it like a Nazi — I don’t mean that I styled it to look like the hair of a Nazi, I just mean that I applied the determination and precision of a Nazi to the task of taming it. There was the crunchy “mousse” period of the early 90s, followed by the slick “gel” period of the mid-90s. And I have a dozen more recent tubes and cans of pomade and spritz and thickener gathering dust in the bathroom at home.

In LA in 1989 I wanted that pouffy side part the cool kids had; in Atlanta in 1999 I wanted the “midtown flip” (think Tintin). In 2009, if I were younger, I would have wanted that funny mound in the middle that was trendy for about 5 minutes. But none of that stuff really works on me. My hair wants to be free!

I’m still a bit uncomfortable about having “big hair” in a professional context, but then again I am a gigantic bulky person with a loud voice and, er, a clearly evident personality, and when I walk into a room people have more to focus on than my hair.

So I think I’ll keep growing it out for a while more and see what happens. (I do need a cleanup, I know this, and was hoping there would be a salon open here in San Diego on Sunday, but no such luck.)

I scheduled myself too tightly — Ottawa, DC, Minneapolis and San Diego all in a row — and felt myself starting to get sick by the middle of last week. It’s just a cold, but at my advanced age (cue the tiny violins) I can’t just go about my business. Plus there’s that whole “sneezing viruses all over the entire American museum professional community” thing.

So I sent my regrets to James Leventhal, the panel organizer, spent a lazy Saturday morning at home in New York drinking fluids, and am passing a sleepy Sunday afternoon here in San Diego, catching up on email in my hotel lobby.

To those I’m missing at AAM, my apologies — I’ll see you at another event soon. And fortunately my able and charming colleague Will Begeny is on another AAM panel today, so you can get a bit of that Blue State Digital magic.

(1) In an office discussion about nonprofit organizations, it occurred to me that I have barely 3 1/2 years until I’m eligible for AARP membership.

(2) Today I saw a ridiculous old man walking down the street in orange sneakers, looking ragged and rough, and thought “You’re a ridiculous old man” — then realized he was probably a year or two younger than me, and I was wearing red sneakers.

(3) Finally, and most portentously, the Harvard Class of 1987 25th Anniversary Report arrived in the mail, a two-pound brick chronicling everyone’s perfect marriage, beautiful children, and dream career. I know it won’t really be like that — by now there are plenty of people who have seen ill fortunate — but it’s still hard to open. I think I’ll steel myself with a gin and tonic first.

In later life, he became an “evangelical Christian,” which in latter days, unfortunately, has become code for “nasty right-wing bigot.” Colson said things about gay people that I can say without hesitation would have disgusted Jesus, and said them often.

No one “deserves” to die, but I certainly won’t miss this bitter old man who used his social power to spit on people like me, on our families and on our honest, earnest lives. (The question of why a disgraced felon, who used his position to attack and defame others for political gain and was rightfully sentenced to prison for it, regained social power says more about America’s hypocrisy than it does about Colson, but that’s a subject for another post.)

The fact that Colson cloaked his words in the disguise of reason and the confidence of social power doesn’t make him less of a fomenter of hate. What it makes him is a thug.

And today I have to sit through nonsense online from the whole of the Christian right, hailing Colson as a hero. Excuse me, but this hypocritical old felon claimed the mantle of Jesus Christ while preaching the vilest hatred against people like me and my family.

Plenty hasn’t changed in the 35 or so years I’ve been alive and politically aware, but one thing that has changed is that hundreds, thousands, on a good day millions of people in America are willing to call hate speech what it is. Good for us, and keep it up, everyone.

When someone says gay people are worthless or immoral, or our lives are without meaning, or our families are illegitimate, speak up! Say, “um, hello, I am here and listening, and you can take that nonsense and [forcibly place it in an appropriate location, outside the public discourse].”

Or, if the someone is Chuck Colson, “shove it.” I owe no justification or explanation to someone who says my life is “morally problematic” and I am not a full person, entitled to the rights of a full person. That someone deserves to be shunned, as Jesus would have shunned him. Rest in peace, but leave the rest of us alone.

So I walked and walked, and the road got hilly, and I saw no one, and it started to rain, and it rained and rained, and I put on my poncho, and I still got soaked, and my shoes squeaked and got stuck in mud, and I got wetter and wetter and madder and madder and listened to my Walkman with the one mixtape over and over, the one that was mostly U2 and James Taylor.

But I made it to Exeter. And that is the story of the Great Yeovil Downpour of 1987.

The supply of NYC taxis (the cabs in the familiar yellow livery) is constrained by the city. To put one into service, you don’t just have to comply with a long list of very specific regulations regarding the equipment; you also have to purchase a medallion giving you the right to own one. New medallions are not being issued, which means there is a speculative market in them, and the going price is several hundred thousand dollars.

NYC taxis cruise the streets of Manhattan (below 96th Street) frequently and are easy to hail. In certain parts of Brooklyn, they’re easy to hail. In the rest of the city (where the vast majority of New Yorkers live), they are few and far between. (This is the market in action; cabbies go where the density of business is.) As a result, people outside Manhattan tend to use livery cabs.

Livery cabs are also regulated by the city, but much more loosely, and no medallion is required. They are enjoined from picking up street hails, although often they do.

The city has adopted a proposal that will sell medallions for livery cabs for $10,000 permitting street hails. Medallion livery cabs will be required to install meters, and will presumably be subject to a range of other normalizing measures to protect consumers in the same way that medallion taxis are.

Taxi medallion owners (who are, on the whole, not taxi drivers or taxi owners, but investment syndicates) are concerned in effect that their rents — the money they receive as a result of owning something, not of doing anything — are being put at risk. But I don’t understand why. The new class of medallion livery cabs won’t be permitted to pick up street hails in Manhattan or at the airports, which is where the yellow cabs all operate anyway. And it’s not as though the market can’t support more supply; have you tried to get a cab at 5pm in Manhattan?

Let the market work, I say. It’s undisputed that there are millions (literally millions) of New Yorkers who can’t hail a cab in their own neighborhoods and would do so if they could. Theoretical (not actual, but theoretical) financial loss to a few dozen speculators should outweigh actual daily inconvenience to millions of people?

Woot is a closeout service that brings you five specific deals each day, some of which are really good. The ad copy suggests that the target audience is people about 20 years younger than me, but that hasn’t prevented me from buying things, like a NeatDesk scanner, which I’m using (along with Evernote) to finally start moving myself toward paperlessness.

Fab brings you selections of products from a dozen or so small independent retailers every day. It’s typically design-oriented, artsy, hipster stuff, sometimes closeouts, sometimes one-of-a-kind or few-of-a-kind objects. They do a pretty good job of making it a social experience, by encouraging you to recruit your friends and giving you significant cash-money discounts when you succeed.

I’ve bought the following from Fab in six months, for a grand total of almost $1200: travel mugs, coffee cups, iPhone handsets, Fancy Hands, luggage, T-shirts, a mozzarella cheese making kit (!), 2 wallets, kitchenware, a bicycle, 2 messenger bags, notebooks.

Add these to my Amazon spending (short description: thanks to Amazon Prime, I check Amazon first whenever I decide to buy anything, from toothpaste to kitchenware to aluminum foil to electronics), and I’m now buying almost everything online except for groceries. I’m spending a bit more, because I’m buying a bit more than I otherwise might be. But I’m happy, finding things I enjoy and can afford and having them brought to my door by a cheery man in a brown uniform.

I got an offer via Fab (on which more later) for a discounted first month of service with Fancy Hands, an on-call personal-assistant service. You pay a monthly fee (starting around $25), and for that you can make a specified number of “requests” in email during the course of the month. At the level I’m signed up at, I’ll be paying about $3 per request after my discount expires, and I’m likely to upgrade to a higher tier which makes them cheaper.

Fancy Hands’ helpers are on duty 24 hours a day, and I’ve found them professional, reliable, and competent. They can’t go anywhere for you and can’t spend any money on your behalf, but they can do pretty much anything else for you that a person can do with a phone and/or a computer. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve used them to do things like this:

• make a doctor’s appointment
• straighten out an insurance claim
• track down a missing hotel invoice
• change a train reservation while I’m traveling
• find a suitable hotel in a city I don’t know
• figure out how to connect my scanner to Evernote
• find out what kind of charger I need to power an old device

These are all things I can do myself, but they’re all pains in the ass, and it turns out I’m perfectly willing to pay 3 bucks each to have someone else take care of them reliably, report on the results, and clearly document what they did. So I’m renewing.

By “storage” I mean “untouched for months in a parking lot 10 minutes’ bike ride away,” but it might as well be locked in a vault: they keep it up on one of those car elevators, so getting it out is a production.

Today when I picked it up to drive it around (to charge up the battery and get it washed I took it to get it washed), I had a fee notice on the steering wheel — they’re increasing my monthly parking fee to $250. By NYC standards, this is not a bad deal, and I like the staff at this lot and find it secure; but insurance and parking and registration on this car I own free and clear now amounts to around $450 a month, regardless of whether I use it at all. Maintenance, even in a good year, ends up being around another $100 a month, so I’m paying a hefty price tag for a car I almost never use.

I think last year I probably took the car out a dozen times, mostly in the summer months, of which maybe four were long-distance trips and the rest were day use. That means that if you generously peg the rental value of day-use days at $120 (the cost of 6 hours of Zipcar) and call the long-distance trips $300 each, that means I spent almost $7,000 last year for $2,000 worth of car use. I’m not sure this makes sense anymore.

If I’m going to sell it, this is the time; it’s a good summer car and the weather is nice. So should I?

So here I am on the New Jersey Turnpike speeding along in the left lane at a bit more than 70 miles per hour.

A few observations:

We left 15 minutes late but were through the Lincoln Tunnel in five minutes, are making excellent time and I suspect will arrive ahead of schedule. The bus is direct – board near Penn Station and ride to Union Station, with no intervening stops.

The boarding experience on a sidewalk near Penn Station is not elegant, but (given the context, which is a man in an orange vest yelling at a motley crowd while traffic streams by) is orderly and tolerable.

I booked my ticket 90 minutes before departure and paid $16, which, seriously, is a ridiculously small amount of money.

The bus itself is fine. Seats are newish and comfortable, there’s wifi (not as fast as my AT&T 4G, so I’m not using it). They’re a couple inches too close together, but it won’t kill me. The driver is professional and obviously competent. Air conditioning is operating,

They filled every last seat with standby passengers. I’m near the back, so the air is a little urinous (rookie mistake), but I’ll live.

The crowd is way less low-rent than your typical bus customer was 30 years ago — the vast majority being what I would consider “normal people,” albeit not necessarily wealthy or trendy. I will say that I am one of only two or three people on board who is dressed in business attire (by chance I’m sitting beside one of the others), but nowadays that’s often true on airliners, too.

Bus etiquette is different from train etiquette — people are in conversation, some people are watching a movie together audibly across the aisle — but put on your headphones and it’s fine.

Would I do this again? Sure, anytime my exact arrival time is somewhat flexible.

Anyone would think this book was heavy. I think even its characters, in whose minds most of the slow, significant, non-action happens, would set it down after 50 pages and go do something else. But I’m going to try to stick with it.

I did, however, take a break to read Chuck Klosterman’s Eating the Dinosaur, an incisive and approachable book of cultural criticism. Rewarding as expected. Klosterman’s one of the smartest people writing on popular culture at the moment, and one of those who seems to have the least to “prove.” It takes significant art to convince me to read an essay about basketball and an essay about Weezer in the same 12-hour period, so there you go.

New Yorkers are desperate for public space, though, and even when we don’t love these places we use them intensely. One of the most frustrating things about Occupy for the other (OK, I’ll say it) 99% of us who live and work in lower Manhattan is that it effectively privatized Zuccotti Park, a surprisingly well-trafficked park, recently renovated and refreshed, occupying a tight square block in this dense neighborhood.

One of my favorite public spaces in the entire city has been open for three years, but I only discovered it recently, and since I did I’ve been back over and over. It’s the grand glass lobby of the 2009-renovated Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center. As The New Yorker’s Paul Goldberger wrote in 2009:

In terms of its configuration and the precision of its details, this is probably the most urbane lobby at Lincoln Center. It avoids the grandiosity of Philip Johnson’s space at the State Theatre and the sappy romanticism of Wallace K. Harrison’s Metropolitan Opera lobby. One wall of the new lobby is covered in muirapiranga, a Brazilian wood, set in narrow tongue-and-groove panels. There is a huge freestanding café bar made of Portuguese limestone, with one end sculpted in the form of a flying wedge. It looks like a model of a building by Zaha Hadid, but more elegant.

Because of the soaring glass curtain walls, this lobby is in effect a grand indoor plaza, feeling fully open to Broadway and to 65th Street on two sides. When you’re there on a sunny afternoon, as I was recently, the sunlight streams in. Half the room is furnished with cafe and bar tables, open to use by anyone (the lobby seems to be open to the public at all hours of the day and evening), and in the afternoon and evening, an excellent cafe/bar counter (from the school of “art institution catering,” i.e., artisanal beet salad, not hot dogs) serves reliable, interesting small plates and stocks a full range of beverages. The other half is the open entrance lobby for Alice Tully Hall, which serves as overflow cafe and sitting space during the day.

Because of my schedule I’m typically there in the late afternoon or early evening, when the daytime crowd is starting to give way to a well-dressed and usually older (depending on the evening’s program) night crowd. You get the full people-watching experience, both inside and out, something to eat, and a cheery public space with a pleasant bustle to read your email or whatever.

Brief plot summary: alien ships land on earth; humans are commandeered into an alien fighting force; stuff happens; it becomes clear that two alien races are fighting each other on our turf. More stuff happens; crisis averted for humanity (barely) on the final pages of Book One; but a surprise at the start of Book Two starts everything rolling again.

It’s obvious that this was written by a certain type of man — the only female character of any significance in Book One is a “coed” — but then so was Heinlein, and we still read him, so there you go. There’s also a bit more deus ex machina than I prefer (replicators, etc.), and Larson’s a bit loose with the science. But if you get into the spirit, the story rolls along.

Swarm: Star Force Series #1

It’s obvious that, within my lifetime, not only are we going to have the Internet always with us in cybernetic devices (that cow is more or less out of the barn), we’re going to have it implanted into our bodies in an always-on manner.

I predict (and you can hold me to this): Google Glasses with consumer pricing, i.e., “Internet on our heads,” in 10 years; hearing-aid-type network device accepting subvocalized commands, i.e., “Internet next to our heads,” in 15 years; true implant accepting thought-impulse commands, i.e., “Internet inside our heads,” in 25 years. I plan on staying alive long enough to get the last one.

This stuff has been all over science fiction (of both the utopian and dystopian varieties) for a couple of decades. In fact, at the moment I’m reading M.T. Anderson’s Feed, in which implanted always-on connectedness is a major plot point.

In Feed, told from the perspective of a teenager about 20 years in the future (I’m guessing this because one of the dads in the book says “dude” a lot), kids go to the Moon for spring break, and everyone has a flying car, and (for the 73% of Americans who have always-on feed implants) basically every interaction with the world is shopping-focused and mediated by a corporate information aggregator. It’s awesome that you can chat your friends in your head; some of the rest of it (like the fact that the President of the United States can’t put together four coherent sentences), not so much.

It was a free-distribution mag for a while and they recently upgraded it to more pages and started charging. It’s really cheap ($20 a year) and I heartily encourage you to subscribe. The copy and ads are more useful than those in Bicycling magazine (which I also read, don’t you worry), and it’s a lot more fun.

Not to be uncharitable, but “I don’t have any brakes” isn’t much of an excuse, and neither is “I was going too fast.” The poor cabbie had done his job and stopped in traffic with the bike lane clear; the suit just took a little long to get into the cab, and bike guy wasn’t looking far enough up the road. (LESSON ONE. Enough said.)

Ten points for honesty, there, but hey, watch out! And if you can’t stop in 50 feet at the speed you’re going with the equipment you have, you either need to get some goddam brakes or, I dunno, maybe not ride so fast in the curb lane on congested 6th Avenue? And before you lay into me (I don’t know what “you” I think I’m talking to, this doesn’t apply to anyone I know personally to be reading this blog, but anyway), yeah, I know the fixie “riding experience” is more authentic, and brakes “are no guarantee of stopping” and so forth, sure. I’ll even buy a fixie eventually (I predict it’ll be my eighth bike). But the whole point of riding in the city is not to plow into things, so, you know, TAKE NOTE.

All that, as you know, has changed. Not only am I now a cyclist, willing to ride in bad weather and eager to get back on a bike when I’ve been away for a few days; I am also a Cyclist, someone whom my friends and colleagues look to for bike advice, with whom they share bike jokes and videos, of whom they’re a little afraid lest I show up at an important meeting or, say, a wedding in a funny outfit riding my latest two-wheeled acquisition.

This is all a bit baffling, not least to me, because I think of myself as, number one, a completely unathletic person, and number two, not an insider or a joiner at all. Yet I’m now, number one, on a bicycle almost every day for somewhere between two and ten miles, and, number two, incontrovertibly, a member of the NYC cycling “community,” a group that has no membership test or dues or requirements but that nonetheless obviously does exist, in the eyes both of those who are in it and of those who are outside it shaking their fists at it for taking away their precious parking spaces or whatever.

How did this happen?

As with most fortuitous yet unplanned things that happen to us, my taking up of bicycling was the outcome of a virtuous cycle. Approaching my mid-forties, I found my doctor yelling at me for sitting on my ass all day. I felt the need to lose some weight. (That didn’t happen, but my weight distribution got much healthier and my stamina increased markedly, so I don’t care.) I discovered that I didn’t hate being on a bicycle. I learned that I enjoyed the sense of freedom and mastery of the city that it bestowed. I learned that being on a bicycle could be stylish and playful and colorful, instead of serious and dudish and douchey, while still conferring all the same health benefits.

At the end of the day, though, what happened is that I got off my ass and onto a bike, I liked it, and I got back onto it again the next day. I repeated this about 30 times, enough to realize that there were things I could do to make the riding experience better (get proper lights, a messenger bag, adjust my wardrobe), and I did them. This made me more inclined to get on the bike again, and I did it about fifty more times.

At this point, since I was on the bike so much I started paying attention to other people’s bikes, and this led me to do research, and this led me to buy a better bike, which led me to buy another better bike (and so on), which in turn led me to ride more.

Once I’d gotten on the bike another fifty times or so, I started noticing that not only was I participating in bike-related conversations (including #bikenyc on Twitter), but other people in those conversations were acting like I had the right and the standing to be in them.

Fast forward about another year, and nobody disputes that I’m a Cyclist, not even me. But, I repeat, the single most important thing I did to become the expert, the aficionado, the frequent rider that I am was to just get on the bike, and then get on again. After a certain point you just stop giving a shit whether the “insiders” think you’re one of them, because you know as much as they do and certainly have enough experience to act like one.

It was exciting when I first realized that I was riding fast enough that I overtook a lot of perfectly competent-looking cyclists in the course of my ordinary ride to work. But the real turning point for me, probably, was the moment when I realized that I would rather ride to work in the left lane up Church Street and Sixth Avenue, even with all the traffic, than go out of my way to take one of the separated bike paths. I’d reached the point where I was a competent street rider, not particularly anxious about traffic, capable of taking the lane, not afraid of the occasional honk. I had arrived.

All this was easier for me, I grant, because I have nothing to prove. I literally do not give a crap how some 23-year-old with an 11-pound fixie and a 20-pound bike chain around his waist thinks I look on my upright BMX with the big basket in front. I don’t even care what he thinks as he swerves around me (into oncoming traffic, without looking) as I stop for a red light. I don’t care if I’m the fastest, I don’t care if I’m the coolest-looking (and with that blinking red light on my helmet, I certainly am not). I just have fun, and (knock wood) try not to get hit by a car while doing it.

I might well do otherwise. Even in America, slow as change is to come here, marriage for gay people will be routine in a generation. The shaving cream is out of the can, and it isn’t going back inside. NOM is on the wrong side of demographics, and of history. An organization that calls itself “pro-family” while it spends donors’ money trying to find children who will denounce their parents on camera shouldn’t be surprised to be treated as a bunch of laughable hypocrites. Besides, I have twice as many Twitter followers as they do, so what does it matter?

It matters.

In 1980, I was fourteen years old. I was already a gay person then (for that matter, I was already one a decade earlier, but that’s a subject for another post). But the overall tone of press and the public discourse about gay people, even after a decade of sexual revolution and social liberation, was one of pity and scorn. Gay people, even in big cities like Los Angeles (where I grew up) and New York (where I live now), were not real people or full people in the eyes of the mainstream media.

Gay people did, of course, exist, even in the media. They had jobs, mostly in fashion or hairdressing or flight-attending; they had boyfriends, or even “lovers.” The really edgy ones had “domestic partners.” And, as everyone knew, all of them had sex, and quite a lot of it, too.

But despite surface similarities, gay people weren’t Like Us. They lived in the city and didn’t even mind! (suspicious behavior, in those days). They stayed up late! They were stunted, big children with no responsibilities; they spent their money on fun and frolic; but at bottom, their lives were empty and sad.

You may think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. The American Psychiatric Association didn’t remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders until 1973, and the rest of the culture took 20 years to catch up.

Like every gay person who lived in those times, I absorbed the trivialization of gay people, of our lives and our loves. As recently as 10 or 15 years ago — when I was 30, 35! — the idea of gay marriage startled me, because I had been conditioned to think of my love as somehow not real love, my family as somehow not a real family. The inevitable consequence of that is that one comes to think of himself as less than fully human.

Now, I’m a relatively healthy person with loving family and friends and a sound sense of self-respect, so I survived. And I had come across examples in my own life of gay people who were fully realized human beings and paid no mind to anyone who said or thought otherwise, so I grew into a more or less comfortable gay adult.

But not everyone has my advantages.

Who I marry will make absolutely no difference to the life of anyone in, say, Missouri. But every time the odious Maggie Gallagher goes on TV to sneer at gay families, every time a NOM “social scientist” “publishes” a “study” “proving” that the children of gay parents are stunted and lead empty lives (sound familiar?), every time the name of Jesus Christ is invoked in order to mock the holy and human experiences of people like me — every time these things happen, a few thousand fragile kids in Missouri learn false lessons that they will spend the rest of their lives trying to unlearn.

They learn that their feelings are bad, that their experiences aren’t real, that their choices are indecent, that there may never be anyone to love or understand them. They learn to conceal themselves from those who most love them, and to live lives that aren’t true in order to protect themselves from pain and sadness.

I emphasize again that I grew up very fortunate: intelligent and well educated, in a financially stable family, loved and encouraged by parents who were not afraid to let me roam the world, taught to question and think for myself.

And it still took me twenty years of adulthood to come to understand that the way God made me was good and right.

The voice of the anti-gay American right wing (because, at this point, in the Western world, this sort of frenzied, spluttering denial of the humanity of gay people is largely confined to the Christianist American right wing) is mistaken. Its message is false. It’s simply wrong. Gay people are real people, fully human; our experiences are authentic and true and good; as a community, our lives and our loves can survive provincialism and fear and negativity.

But as the fragile individuals we are when we are alone in the dark with our thoughts, we are hurt by all that vile nonsense, discrimination masquerading as science, angry clannishness masquerading as the word of Jesus Christ (who would be startled and shamed to hear the things said in his name).

The relationship between NOM mouthpiece Brian Brown and his God is a matter for them to work out between themselves. But the God who (as Brian believes) sent his son to clear away the old covenant to make way for a new one, and to die for the sins of lepers and prostitutes and swindlers, is not a God who would countenance, for instance, pitting black people against gay people, or encouraging children to denounce their parents. Or, for that matter, as is currently happening in Minnesota, sending hate squads into Catholic high schools to teach young people that gay people are a cancer on society. (Again, a matter for another post.)

So speak out against hatemongering; speak out against fear. Speak out for happiness, yours and those of others. Speak out and say that you are fully human, fully American, fully Christian (if that’s what you are). Say that your experience of life is real and legitimate; describe it; help others to understand it, that they may protect you from those who (through fear, or malice, or whatever — it’s not your concern) undertake to hurt you.

Speak out.

It doesn’t hurt that I just finished reading one book in which self-driving taxicabs go berserk, and another in which global warming (or was it cooling?) was precipitated by someone on an airplane not turning off their electronic devices as ordered.

I would have enjoyed a bit more dystopia and a bit less rage-against-the-machine, but if you like your Charlie Stross (and I do), you’ll probably like this.

Incidentally, Amazon recommended this to me based on all the dystopia I’ve been buying. Good call.

In a wireless world, data moves magically through the aether, which is all well and good except when the data in question is 30 gigabytes. “Estimated time left: 11 hours” is not a cheerful message to receive. So I was dreading the task of restoring my iTunes music collection from backup.

But with taxes due soon, and my Quicken file one of the things still to restore, I took on the task today.

The music collection copied in about half an hour, once I hooked up the backup and the destination volume to the same Ethernet network. But the Quicken restore was trickier.

I had a backup file, but Quicken 2007 doesn’t run on Lion; there’s something else called Quicken Essentials, but that won’t read the backup file. So, faced with a complicated process involving moving my backup file to an old computer just so I could convert it to another format, I bought Quicken Essentials a few months ago and then put all this off.

Well, what do you know — 2 weeks after that, Intuit announced that it was upgrading 2007 to run under Lion after all. So today I downloaded a $15 patch…only to find that I couldn’t figure out how to get the patched 2007 to read my data file. I thought all was lost… But then I found a different version of the data on my backup drive, 2007 opened it on the old computer, I moved it to the new computer, and it opened. Success!

I also sorted out some inconsistencies in photo syncing among all my various MacThis and iThat devices.

All this nonsense took the better part of five hours (I have no idea where the time went).

The service works well, provides more than adequate speed, and it feels very fairly priced. Different plans seem to be available on different flights, but $1.95 for 15 minutes, $4.95 for an entire short flight, or $12.95 for 24 hours all seem reasonable. Once you have an account, signing in is simple and your payment info has already been saved for you (no taking off your seat belt and fumbling for a credit card). You can even hop from one device to another during your flight.

The size problem, basically, results from the fact that the frame is too vertical — there’s not quite enough front-to-back tube length to accommodate my long legs. I’ve slid the seat back on its rails as far as it goes, and also lowered the seat a couple inches, and now my knees just clear the handlebars on the upstroke. However, this is only sustainable if my backside is hanging off the back of the seat platform and I’m pulling back on the handlebars to steady myself. I showed it to the experts at Metro Bicycles, and they told me that if I put on a seat with longer rails, given my weight, I’d probably torque the bike apart.

So it’s not comfortable for long distances, but it is rideable. I can do the 2 1/2 miles to and from work on it, and it’ll be nice for trips.

It wasn’t that hard. I had to go to 3 Apple Stores to find AT&T stock, but Grand Central had plenty, so I was up and running last night.

First impressions, keeping in mind that I skipped the iPad 2, and this was an upgrade from the original iPad:

The process of transferring content from the old iPad’s backup to the new iPad is pretty close to seamless. I had to re-select the apps I wanted to transfer in iTunes, and reorder my home screens, and I had to reenter application passwords and reestablish Google 2-step authentication and redownload some Kindle books, but aside from that, everything pretty much moved itself over automagically.

The improved display quality is spectacular. I couldn’t really tell the difference in the store, but in real use, e.g., while typing this review, the difference is obvious and very significant. Text is sharp and the edges of letters are brightly defined, and as a result eyestrain is reduced and the whole usage experience is vastly improved. As someone in his mid-40s who has trouble with tiny text, I can really feel the improvement.

The iPad 3 is actually a tiny bit heavier than the iPad 2, while much lighter than the iPad 1. I always felt the iPad 3 was a tad too flimsy, so I’m happy with this size.

The 4G LTE service provided by AT&T, here where I’m currently sitting (in lower Manhattan, in a cafe) is faster than the wireless signal I normally glom onto at this location.

Finally — the magical magnetic cover, that Apple sells, which folds over into a support stand — well, I get it, but I won’t say I love it. It’s too flimsy to be genuinely protective, awkward to leave on while you’re using the iPad in your hand (fortunately it pops right off), and the support it provides in typing or display configurations isn’t really that great. But it’s always there when you want it, which is something.

There’s a young married couple, him in a dress shirt and glasses reading his New Yorker and her in her velvety sweatsuit reading the WSJ — and they look so pinched and uncertain, like they’re here because they had to get out of their house but they aren’t sure why. To their left is a slightly younger guy reading his own copy of the WSJ while he shops for long underwear on his iPad, and he too looks like he’s here because it’s Saturday morning and where else is he going to go? And the young dad (ridiculously young, 20 years younger than me), looking totally awkward as he tries to hold a squirming three-year-old.

I recognize the way these people look like they feel. I felt that way all through my twenties and partway through my thirties, constantly wondering Is this where I’m supposed to be today? and Am I doing this right? and Is this what I want? and Can people tell I feel this way? (yes) and, in my more meta moments, This feels like happiness, but is it really, and how will I know?

At some point, though, the frenzy tamped itself down, or more accurately I would say I stopped paying attention to it except in my most anxious moments. And then, at a moment in my mid-forties I can just about exactly pinpoint, it just disappeared. And now, aside from quick little flashes that I can almost ignore, I never feel it at all.

It’s not only about age, although partly it is. Some of it is about reaching a point where you make peace with the choices you made (and failed to make), accept that you can’t do everything (but can do a lot of things, and have already done some), and start to like the person you’ve evolved into being. I recognize that I’ve had lots of advantages, and used some of them. I also know I’ve squandered others, and that’s fine. I’ve blown opportunities because I was too nervous to take them on, wasted great things that happened to me with no purpose and no warning, hurt people and been hurt back, lost money due to my own stupid choices, but on the whole things turned out okay.

Half of me wishes I could say to these people across from me, hey, relax, this thing you’re terrified you’re doing wrong is your life, so you might as well just live it. But the other half goes, hey, that’s how people figure it out, they suffer through, so let them suffer.

Meanwhile, three more people have walked into this cafe with their own subscription copies of the WSJ. What’s up with that?

In any case, 1668 (my neighborhood’s faux-Swedish-country coffeehouse) is full of tedious wealthy people in their 20s and I’m now full of espresso, so the trip wasn’t a total loss.

I bought another bike, as I noted on Twitter — a Strida LT as you see above. I’d been coveting one of these, and I got a deal. I mostly wanted it because it’s the smallest bike that it’s practical for a 6-foot-2, 240-pound person to ride, and because it folds up into a size that (theoretically) fits in a golf bag and can be airline-checked. At least in theory, that will make it possible for me to take a bike with me when I go on a multi-day trip to a place where I’d like to have one but may not be able to put my hands on one locally.

It’s belt-driven (so no grease or mess), and it rides very nicely for a one-speed, although I’m almost too big for it — in order to ride it without knocking my knees against the handlebars, I have to lower the seat a bit more than I would prefer and slide the seat itself all the way back on its track to the very last millimeter. But it’s doable, certainly for short distances or occasional use, so it amounts to another option.

For various reasons, I brought the Gary Fisher hybrid (my “original” bike) out of storage this week, pumped up the tires, and rode it for two days. And after several months in which the heaviest bike I rode was the large-but-light Public, and I spent more than half my riding time on BMX wheels, getting back on the Gary Fisher (which, remember, was my main bike until less than a year ago) felt like getting behind the wheel of a Ford Explorer after a year of driving a Civic.

It’s heavy (which is good and bad — heavy means sturdy), the frame is really stiff in potholes (which means, hold on tight or you’ll bounce yourself off the handlebars), and so forth. This means that when you load up the rack, it really drags — you’ll ride steadily, but maybe not so fast. I can imagine situations where I’d want to have that kind of ride — if I’m pulling a trailer full of furniture, for instance, or crossing Donner Pass. And I like it in wet weather. But not for everyday riding.

In other bike news, I still hate the Presta valves on my Public, which require special handling (yeah, I carry the adapter on my keychain but it’s still a pain in the ass).