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August, 2000NEWS FLASH!! I did it! I climbed Mt. Rainier! At 8:00 a.m. on Wednesday, July 27 I was standing at 14,410 ft. (a little over 4000 meters) on the summit of Mt. Rainier. It stands as the single greatest accomplishment of my life so far. I made it back down safely, and was back home in Monterey on Sunday evening. Monday was a quiet day off spent with Brent, and today I'm back at work. XOOM is still behaving like a cranky two year old, but I'll update this with much more detailed information and photos from the trip later in the week. There are too many great memories from the week past to let them slip away undocumented.
Tuesday, August 8th 2000
I had dinner at my parent's house last night. It was my opportunity to regale them with stories of high achievements on a big mountain. They were duly impressed, I think. It was exciting to relive the time again as I showed photos and explained the circumstances in which they were taken. Mom and Dad both asked good questions and were interested. I'm still not sure if they appreciated the difficulty involved in such a thing, but I've been getting a lot of that.
I didn't go on the climb to impress anyone other than myself. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do something that difficult and that real. I'm now puzzled by my own reaction to being home. Somehow, I seemed to need my parents' approval and praise for the accomplishment. In fact, I've observed myself wanting praise and validation from my friends too. It doesn't seem right. I know I shouldn't feel this way. The climb meant a lot to me, but why should my friends and coworkers see me any differently? None the less, I'm actually disappointed when I see someone for the first time since the trip and they don't ask me about it.
When I drove back into Monterey last Sunday, I was really hoping for a big party with all my friends. I wanted a big dinner out and toasts in champagne. I wanted all the things that str8t people get when they announce a marriage or a pregnancy. That's how monumental and life changing the experience of climbing Rainier was to me. It was definitive time and certainly the finest moment of my life. Instead of a party, Brent came over to my place after a while and we had a quiet dinner together. It was nice, but where's the bubbly and the confetti? It's not fair that some guys get all that for the simple and pleasurable act of knocking up some chick and here I go and do something really special and all my friends can come up with is, "Oh, hi Rob. How was the hike?"
So fine, dear readers. Go ahead and flame me for having a bad attitude. You'll be right. I didn't climb the mountain to show off for others. I climbed it for personal growth and achievement. The personal rewards far surpassed my most optimistic expectation. Perhaps I shouldn't have told anyone about the climb; just kept it all for myself. Then I wouldn't expect anything from others. Right now, I'm just disappointed that no one else seems to get it.
I wanted this entry to be my long narrative of the experience. That is still coming, but it's taking quite a bit of time to write, so I thought I'd just start writing for the present again. Yesterday's accomplishments will be journaled in the fullness of time. I'll probably insert the story back in the July section where it belongs. Speaking of stories still coming, my little fictional piece I mentioned last winter has been on hold while training for Rainier. I'd expect to see a version of it here maybe in late fall. Also, my news story on the astronaut Gene Cernan is nearly through the editorial process and will appear here in the next few weeks. I hope you all enjoy it.
The biggest news in my life, since climbing Mt. Rainier, is that my new job as the Alumni Relations Director has been approved. I've been hired for a one year term in the new job which I can renew each year for four years. I've been working 2 hours a day in my old job and 6 hours a day in my new job for the last month. In September I'll start full time on the new job! Yay! I like it much better already. What's more, this Friday I'm being sent to Williamstown, NY for a week to study alumni relations in a special seminar for people with jobs like mine. I haven't been to New England in ages. It should be a fun trip indeed. I'm working on getting a laptop up and working so I'll have connectivity there. I wonder if I can find a laptop videocard that will let me run the webcam from NY?
Friday, August 11th 2000
I'm on my way to Williamstown for my alumni relations seminar. Brent is staying the night at my apartment to give me a lift to the airport early in the morning. He'll also be taking Oreo with him to look after whilst I'm away.
I'm looking forward to the trip quite a bit. I've spent the last two weeks since the climb just tooling up for my new job; Taking care of all the human resources stuff, getting qualified as an official buyer, getting linked to the Sequel database, etc. The next week while I'm away I'll be thinking long term thoughts about my new job. I'm the only one in it at the school, so I get to decide just what an Alumni Relations Office should do. So I'll be working on something like a five-year plan.
I've discovered a nice little personal goal to accomplish while I'm in MA. I've found that I've got Monday afternoon off next week, and that not far from Williamstown is a little 3,500 ft. mountain. It is the highest peak in MA. I'm going to climb it, just in case I decide I want to climb to each of the highest points in all 50 states. It turns out it's not quite a mile hike from the trail head to the summit and less than 400 feet of elevation gain. It's not really a climb or even a hike, just a gentle walk in the park. But it will be fun and it's a record.
I don't know how connected I'll be this week. There's no modem card with my laptop (Doh!) so it's pointless to bring it. I'll be staying in a dorm at Williams College, so there's got to be connectivity around somewhere. I'll do what I can.
Want to follow my travel across the country? Use the following link to see a graphic display of my plane as it makes it's way through the sky. All you need is my flight numbers, which I shall provide. The link is: Flight Tracker. Here's my flight data:
Date Flight Dept City Arv City 11 Aug 00 UA5451 0546 MRY 0625 SFO 11 Aug 00 USAirways 44 0740 SFO 1543 BAL 11 Aug 00 USAirways 3532 1620 BWI 1745 ALB 17 Aug 00 USAirways 493 0935 ALB 1055 PIT 17 Aug 00 USAirways 69 1200 PIT 1414 SFO 17 Aug 00 UA5100 1515 SFO 1600 MRY
Home again, from Williamstown. It was a useful and fun trip. I was surprised by how different the Northeast is from the West. I almost felt like I wasn't in America anymore. When comparing Massachusetts with California in things like climate, vegetation, road systems, architecture, and cuisine, I often found myself wanting to use the phrase "back in the States" because it was so different. Some key differences were the lack of big, fast, freeways, the dense jungle of deciduous trees, rain in August, and almost all the cars were American built. That last one was a shocker. I didn't know anyone actually bought American clunkers anymore. Here, only perhaps one third of vehicles on the road are American and those are pretty much all SUVs or pick-ups. The other two thirds are imports.
While in Williamstown I spent the days going to lectures and workshops with 145 other new Alumni Relations professionals. In the evenings a core group of ten of us would go down to the local pub to have fun. I drank a lot of Guiness, but never missed a scheduled class. I guess I spent a lot of time building up a network of colleagues while I was there.
I flew back home on Thursday. The airplane ride was fun, as always. I didn't have a window seat on the long haul from Pittsburgh to San Francisco and it was mostly cloudy in any case, so I used a lot of the time reading and working on programming my new Palm 3c organizer. If you know me, you know I'm a sucker for gadgets like that. Brent was working Thursday, so I called Mark from San Francisco and asked him to collect me at the Monterey airport when I arrived there an hour later. We went out to pizza after I unpacked so I could tell him stories of the East.
One of the stories was Greylock Mountain. Really just a hill, but it's the highest place in Massachusetts and it's not far from Williamstown, so naturally I had to go up it.
It was rainy, windy, and foggy as I made my way up the hill - by car! The parking lot for the park is about 100 ft away from the summit. I couldn't see a thing but white misty clouds all around. It was wet and miserable, so I stayed long enough to get another visitor to take my picture beside a plaque which showed I'd been there, then I bailed. Two days later, I had a few hours to visit Greylock again. The weather was nice this time, so I drove only about two-thirds the way up and hiked the last mile or so. That made me feel a lot more worthy about reaching the summit. Mark thought so too. How can you call it a summit if you can drive there?
This weekend in Monterey was the famous Monterey Historics Weekend. It was the biggest meeting of historic sports and race cars in America. Friday night, Brent and I stopped by the car auction downtown to see a few of the spectacular offerings there. The best, in my opinion, was a 1986 Ferrari Formula One Grand Prix car. Saturday, we went to Laguna Seca to watch the Historic Races. I think only the Goodwood Festival of Speed in the U.K. can rival this event. We stayed long enough to enjoy the Formula One group, do a little shopping (my friend Brian was selling T-shirts in the vendor area so we stopped to say hello) and left early, around 3:00 p.m. to get ahead of the traffic jam.
Sunday was Brent and Rob's movie day. We watched DVDs of Blazing Saddles and The Iron Giant at Brent's house. Then, Sunday evening, we went back to my apartment and watched a video tape I had recorded. It was The Lathe of Heaven. The Lathe of Heaven was a movie adapted from a book by Ursula LeGuinn (she also wrote A Wrinkle in Time as Madeline L'Engle - one of my favorite books) made in 1980. I remember seeing it on PBS way back when, but they haven't shown it in years. I was all excited about finally getting to see it again. It still delivers a powerful message, even if it does look a little dated now.
I know, today's entry was a bit of a boring time-line kind of thing. I just had to get you all updated quickly so I can go on with more typical stuff. I don't have any great travel plans for a while, so I should be updating much more often again.
Monday, August 28th 2000
I'm on my last week of working for the Ocean Acoustics Lab. Today I spent a fair amount of time clearing out my desk. It really hit me, what I was doing, when I had to start thinking of my desk, in my office, as community property which someone would replace me at. Well, I don't know if someone can really replace me at it, but someone else will be there one day doing something. My dear friend Bryan seemed a bit worried I was giving up a job I really loved. Not so. I loved going to sea and collecting data, and I liked administrating a network of Unix computers, but it wasn't entirely a job I loved. I wasn't my own boss. I was a lackey for someone else; Prof. Chiu.
My new job as Alumni Relations Director has me thinking about my own goals for the office. I get to define what success is, and then execute my own plan to achieve it. That's leadership. That's creativity. That's the kind of thing that's been lacking in my work for a long time. I'm my own boss now.
The Ski Program is spooling up. I've had a short meeting with a few of the returning Senior Guides and assigned them to projects to work on to assist in training the new class of guides when we assemble them in September. I'm not going to have the time to spend on the program that I did last fall on account of my new work. I'll be relying on the Senior Guides to help me a great deal.
Remember my friend Mark from the Ski Program? I'm not quite sure how, but he has become my best friend over the last few months. Don't worry, there's no competition for Brent. Brent is my love. Mark is still as straight as they come, but we hit it off very well and he seems to understand my homosexuality unlike any other straight friend I've ever had. At my age, you'd think the era of 'best friends' was over. Nope. Now, I'm exploring the new world of having a boyfriend, and a best friend. I think this is similar to what straight guys experience in high school or college when they find their first serious girlfriend, but still have their best male friend too. Once again, I contend that my emotional development has been retarded by 10 years because of the closet. Am I bitter about that? Yes, I am.
Tuesday, August 29th 2000
Some of my gay friends are in a panic, thinking that if George W. becomes President then civil rights will be taken away from gay people. They see dangerous trends in government and point to things like the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act and the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the Boy Scouts is not a place of public accommodation and may discriminate against gay scouts and leaders. While both are blatant acts of State sanctioned and enforced bigotry, I'm not overly worried for the long-term.
I don't think that the Federal Government in Washington is as important or as relevant in the daily life of Americans as the government officials like to think they are. For instance, the Boy Scouts are starting to suffer because of their institutionalized bigotry. Major donors, such as the United Way, are reviewing their own anti-discrimination policy and ceasing to fund the Scouts because of their violations. Washington D.C. is, as usual, years behind public social opinion, and is unable to stop or change the social climate. America has woken up to the fact that homophobia is simple, naked discrimination and to the fact that it is wrong. Another good example of this is that Motel 6, Radio Shack, and SAAB have withdrawn their sponsorship of Dr. Laura Schlessinger upon the realization that she is a hate-monger. Her show won't last too long, and we don't need the Government to make her go away.
The civil rights movement for GLBT people was not initiated by government officials in Washington D.C. It was started by brave individuals who, at great personal risk, decided to put an end to homophobia in America. The heroes of the Stonewall rebellion began that fight in the 60's. It was continued in San Francisco's Castro District in the 70's. In the 80's the GLBT community rallied to fight the AIDS epidemic, again without support from Washington.
I would like to see the Federal Government take positive steps for GLBT equality and civil rights, like it did for African American rights in the 60's and 70's, but I don't expect it to happen. If gay people want full civil rights, we've got to make it happen ourselves. We've got to come out to our friends and family. We've got to come out at work and in our social groups and clubs. We've got to get out of the gay ghettos and assert ourselves as productive, respectable people - without any apology or shame for our same-sex orientation. The rest of America has got to realize that they know, love, and interact with many gay people everyday. Assimilation into society is the key. We must insist on living as fully qualified and worthy citizens. If we do, Washington will eventually come around and back us up on paper.
I'm undecided as yet in this year's Presidential race. I will take the candidates' records on civil rights for GLBT people into account, but I won't weight it very heavily. I don't look to D.C. for leadership in this area. It's not going to happen, so why worry too much about either candidates' opinion on the issue? There are far more important things to measure them up on, such as taxes and spending.