When You Mean Well, but Not Well Enough

Over winter break, my family and I watched the film Philadelphia, which stars Tom Hanks as a lawyer who gets fired by his law firm due to his homosexuality and worsening case of AIDS (and Denzel Washington - go watch it!).

“Why does Tom Hanks have AIDS?” asked my mum.

My brother responded, “We don’t know. The film doesn’t tell us. Probably sexual activity.”

As if to scold Andy Beckett, the protagonist of Philadelphia, or perhaps to derive some kind of universal moral lesson for me and my brother, my dad said, “That’s why we should accept gays, but not promote it,” said my dad.

This isn’t the first time my parents have used this curious term of “promotion.” In my senior year of high school, I revived the LGBT club named the Spectrum Club, which had fallen into inactivity for a couple years. When I told my parents that I was involved in such activities, they immediately told me to stop. Despite my arguing and protests, we left off there with my parents saying that it didn’t have to be me who does the “promotion.” Since then, they have become a bit more liberal in their view points, thanks to the legalization of gay marriage in New York which helped legitimize the gay rights movement in everyone’s recent memory. Therefore, it was rather disheartening to hear my parents use this same language again a couple years later.

My friend O sometimes talks about irritations caused by her parents, but often digresses and defends them by saying, “they mean well.” To borrow her phrase, my parents mean well. They are not excessively ignorant, and they understand that there are oppressed groups in society. In fact, I’d regard my parents as very smart and enlightened people about many things who did a bloody good job raising me. Anyone can mean well, but you also have to think of how to make your thoughts and actions reflect meaning well.

What my parents mean when they say “promote” is not entirely clear. So how much should we actually “promote homosexuality?” How much is enough? From the legal perspective, there isn’t really a reason to exclude LGBT couples from the institution of marriage given that marriage is a contract in which two individuals enter. I believe that any two consenting adults should be able to get married, and I am willing to express this viewpoint through blog posts like this one and perhaps more importantly, through my votes. From the social perspective, LGBT individuals are people just like anybody else. We should be their friends and in some cases, we may need to stand as their allies. If I’m any good at this subtext thing though, I think my parents still hold the misconception that being gay necessarily implies irresponsible sexual behaviour, and that homosexuality is a thing that exists, but ought to cease existing rather than continue. But that isn’t possible because even though no one fully understands the origin of being LGBT, we will certainly stick around for a while. The way to pursue better sexual health among the LGBT community isn’t to condemn the sexual cultures that exist now and in the past, but to allow more to come out in the open so that we may continue to do whatever it is we like to do romantically without endangering our health.

To take a page from my dad’s book - here’s the moralizing lesson I’m going to take from this story and bestow upon anyone reading this: when it comes to the way you view an issue like LGBT politics, even if you do not want to be the loudest proponent, you still have a responsibility to re-evaluate the stereotypes you hold so that at the least, you do not perpetuate ideas like the conflation of homosexuality with HIV/AIDS. 

Mixed Massages

Let’s get something straight. Just because I gave you a friendly back rub does not mean that I am hitting on you. Consider the context for a moment. We’re eating out (at a restaurant) and I’m going around the table touching everyone, because we’re a touchy bunch touching each other and that’s okay. Well, except for you. And I respect your personal bubble and I’ll keep that in mind now, but hold on a moment my man - you thought I was hitting on you. I hate to burst your bubble but…

I am not bursting your personal bubble with the intent of popping your cherry. You’re a plenty handsome guy, but I am not trying to proposition you at all. There is a difference between showing affection and conveying that I fancy you.

You and I are both guys, and that’s why there’s that tension. While this does not apply to all males, it certainly seems like many guys are particularly afraid of the physical contact and proximity with guys who seem as if they may be gay. Why? Fear and pride – these two things drive all the problems in our relationships with people. Fear: it is the manifestation of ignorance, a lack of understanding. Many LGBT individuals are perfectly normal in their thoughts and feelings, yet the LGBT community is stereotyped as promiscuous and sexually deviant. By no means is this the norm, so understand that in the end we are all humans, not threats. Pride: don’t be so quick to think that someone is into you. Not every gay guy automatically fancies you, so don’t assume that. You’re not good looking enough for that and even if you were, your homophobia makes you uglier in my mind, I'm sorry to say.

I feel like there’s a sort of macho thing going on here that makes guys throw up the defenses a lot more strongly. Luckily, I don't hear "no homo" at Duke that often. Can someone comment on the extent to which this kind of thing might be true for females?  

So man up and tell me if I’m making you uncomfortable. But before you do that, think about why you’re uncomfortable.

feminism = feminism

I have three T-shirts that people will consistently comment on: 1. The green T-shirt that has the bloke riding a dinosaur; it says, “Real life would be much cooler if we all rode dinosaurs to work.” 2. My Lost t-shirt which is based on the show’s fifth season, so please don’t actually look at that shirt if you don’t want spoilers. 3. My green Women’s Centre T-shirt, in women’s medium size, which boldly and plainly says “feminist.” across the front of the shirt.

Several females (*exceptionally off topic tangent at the end of post) on random encounters commented positively on my Women's Centre shirt the various times I wore it. "Nice shirt!" said somebody I don't know as I walked through Central. So far so good.

Where I ran into more skepticism with my shirt was with a few (incidentally male) friends. “What IS feminism? Why do you feel the need to tell people that you’re a...feminist?” As if my proclaiming that opinion was the most outlandish thing ever. As tends to be the case with my blog posts, I will now flesh out the response that I wish I had prepared at the time – one that will show why I am an ally of feminism. This is why I believe in feminism, and why it’s a topic that we shouldn’t shoot down without a second thought, but rather, a conversation that needs to continue and be agreed and disagreed upon.

My first point is that feminism is a more inclusive term then we’ve let it become. Women’s rights have been an arduous battle – for rights, equality of opportunity, cultural recognition, economic standing, and fair media representation, to name a few. In the US at least, these are indicators that have changed for the better over the last 100 or so years. At worst, it’s not unreasonable to think that these are important rights for women that we should not forget. Assuming that the battle is completely over is wrong in my opinion. Moreover, to not recognize these struggles is to forget an important part of human history. I think many of us are too quick to say, “yes, feminism did the job in the 60s. It’s done; let’s stop talking about it.” I literally just asked my friend while writing this post what she thought of feminism. Her knee jerk reaction: “um, pointless.” I haven’t done my research so maybe I’m wrong and maybe everything’s okay. But I hypothesize that most of us have this instinctive reaction nowadays that even if feminism is a relatively agreeable thing, it’s nowhere near the top of the priority list of things to fix in this world.

However, feminism isn’t done. The US debate on sexual health policy on contraception and abortion is a significant piece of proof that feminism is still needed. In particular, members of the US government who are not only predominantly male, but also misguided, have been pushing for unreasonable policies. There’s more that could be said about this topic, but I will defer to the smarter and cleverer people – I just wanted to highlight one recent issue in which it makes sense for feminism to continue to exist as a movement.

Feminism runs into the problem that the word itself connotes a movement that is “too extreme.” Every movement has its extremists, but feminism is all the aforementioned rights that we would mostly consider inalienable. Feminism also certainly isn’t about making women better than everyone else. In my personal conception of the movement, a big part of feminism is about removing the barriers that we still hold over the women in our society. I arrived at this conclusion in thinking about sports. It used to surprise me back in high school cross country, the amount of girls who were faster than me. In my so called glory days, I was an average to better-than-average runner. I will not, however, try to tell you I ran a 2:50 marathon. Just like you can do with Paul Ryan, you can simply search my name on Google to find out my running records. (You won’t find a voting record though because the one thing I have ever voted on so far has been Amendment 1). Anyhow, there were a fair amount of girls who would be minutes faster than me – these crazy chicks who were doing six minute miles. Three times in a row. This was always a point of macho-joking amongst the sophomore boys on our team who were just starting to taste varsity racing and stop training with our fastest girls. We were never actually “fast” until we were faster than the girls. We’re men. We’re supposed to be better than them!

I do not mean to disregard that the average female is biologically different from the average male. Male athletes are indeed stronger and faster at many major sports (but not all of them!) However, our society has interpreted the biological averages without also weighing the possibility for humans to excel beyond those trends. Humankind has constantly outdone itself in every possible field (or track, pool, etc.) Everyone can do better. However, I would argue that on the whole, our culture assumes women will be less talented or less well-equipped in life. We fulfill that prophecy, and there are actual outcomes that result from this – the gender divide in CEOs of major corporations, for example. I’ve now heard multiple times from my friends, “My adviser [at Duke] keeps asking me if I’m really sure about biophysics because he says it’s a lot of work, but he never says anything like that to his male advisees,” or “I chose to study to be a nurse instead of a doctor because everybody told me being a doctor would be too hard for a girl” or “I don’t want to go to Wall Street because I always hear women can’t handle the stress.” By no means am I saying that every girl should become a soulless premed or enter the soul-crushing walls of Wall Street. Rather, we must remove the inhibitions and voices in the heads of women everywhere that they should not try to do something because their gender is expected to hinder them.

So, remember those shirts I was talking about at the beginning of this blog post? One shirt that does not make that list is my green Love = Love shirt. That’s an amazing thing really, that I have walked around the Duke Campus and downtown Durham wearing a pro-LGBT shirt without getting a single comment on it. When it comes to the LGBT community, defining a feminine identity is another spectrum to consider. I won’t go into that because that would mean trying to speak for too many people I don’t have the right to speak for. However, one idea still applies here, always – there is more that brings us together than drives us apart. Both feminism and LGBT advocacy are movements that want to equalize the mainstream and the marginalized group(s). For example, I especially believe that we should try to erode the pervasiveness of heteronormativity because in the end, why should two blokes getting married and adopting a kid be considered abnormal? Yet along the way, the LGBT community and the feminist movement have forged their own identities and subidentities through the persistence of their resistance to marginalization, or at least in their escapism from the mainstream. These identities of course, lead to stereotypes, you know, the flaming gay or the Femnazi.

Many of us have internalized the most extreme images of the activists for our respective causes. We’re all guilty of it, but I’m not going to try and point fingers and say that women have been wronged more severely than LGBT individuals or that the subcultures associated with oppressed racial, ethnic, gender/sexual groups should not exist. Instead, I want to put this out as an open question to those who are reading this – is it somehow more socially acceptable or fashionable to say you’re an LGBT ally than it is to be a feminist? My impression is that because the legal gains of women and feminism are on average, more advanced than those of the LGBT community, people are more likely to assume feminism is no longer necessary. And for whatever reason, we also think what is left of feminism are just vestigial extremists, caricatures and stereotypes. As I hope I’ve convinced you about by now, there are still reasons why feminism or something similar to exist.

 “Well I’m an equalist,” said a friend in the LGBT Centre, somewhat humorously. Equality is indeed what we should be striving for, but there are only three ways to create equality – A. bring someone down, B. bring someone up, or C. make everyone better off through trade. Now option A. certainly is not optimal. I’ll also note here that I believe affirmative action is a dangerous thing that has been abused although the motivations behind such policies should not be disregarded entirely given that people indeed originate from different contexts on the basis of race, gender, and sexual orientation (this in itself is also another talk to be had by smarter people than me). The need empowerment is why we give the names we give to these marginalized subgroups – that’s why it’s LGBT, feminism (referring to women), etc. This is why I’m not so quick to shoot down “feminism” as an overly generic term and how I’ve come to rationalize the acronym LGBT as a term that highlights some (but unfortunately not all) the groups that want and need to be empowered.

So that leaves us with B. and C. Empowerment is a very powerful force, but those who hold power in our society will naturally want to hold on to their power. Feminism is in a transition state where the movement has gotten oh-so-close in many ways but is lacking in others - making it particularly prone to the pushback by those who might not necessarily want to see women empowering themselves. Within the way I am talking about this, it’s hard to really have any one-sided endowment of power. That brings me to C. When I talk about trade, I’m not talking about meat and potatoes because I’m a vegetarian, so let’s go with potatoes and beans. Bringing more women to the game means a lot of things. The reality is that there are certain short-term sacrifices that need to be made to accommodate for the empowerment of more people.

A friend of mine tells me that she’s afraid of medical school since she wants to be married by 25 or 30 and having kids. Residency would be a nightmare, no? There’s a brilliant article by Anne-Marie Slaughter about the challenges facing women today in terms of the doubled expectations to be successful as professionals and as family-starters. Some scientific literature actually suggests the transition to two working parents has helped contribute to a decrease in healthy eating in the US. In other words, we need a multidimensional solution – labor laws and work culture need to change to accommodate for a more gender - equal workplace and home setting and men in mainstream heterosexual marriages need to assume some responsibility over the traditional housewife realm, to name a couple changes that could help this issue. Optimizing this scenario could potentially benefit families and couples, allowing any young person to grow into a world where they don’t have to do everything (get a job, save the world, have a family). If we can integrate this type of thinking into our politics and culture, that we need to optimize not only for profit, but also for resource allocation and lower social cost given feminist considerations, then we can do what humans were made (evolved?) to do: exceed everyone that came before us.

Feminism represents the new compromises and trades that we need to make across genders to make sure everybody is empowered and endowed with equal opportunities.

If nothing else, please give me more free shirts. They’re more empowering than you’d think.

*Tangential discussion point – Can someone comment on what the most neutral but also not-awkward-sounding words for “female” and “vagina” might be? I find it rather telling that we have nice-sounding informal words that are accepted for males and their genitals – “guy” and “dick.” Woman is too formal, girl is too condescending, and lady just sounds off for some reason. There isn’t really a word for vagina that isn’t an anatomical vocabulary word, a huge swear word or doesn’t sound plain ridiculous. Why isn’t this a part of our vocabulary? Are vaginas just that icky? 

I’d Like to See…

There’s a Tumblr blog that my friend follows and reblogs, thereby making it show up on my News Feed. This blog, owned by someone named G, involves lots of photos and animated GIFs of sex – the kind that frames as an artistic and intimate thing. In other words, softcore porn that seemed nice to look at.

However, upon when I opened it up and skimmed through, I noticed something interesting. All the sexual images that bombarded me were of men and women doing activities of the sexual nature. Wait. Men and women. Only men and women. As I scrolled down into hands and hair and such, I realized each photo always contained white heterosexual couple. Being a Tumblr troll, I sent a message to the creator of this blog in question. I asked why a blog that celebrated the intimacy of sex focused exclusively on heterosexual sex.

The response? “Cause this blog is about my relationship and I’m in a heterosexual relationship, sorry.”

As a sort of open-letter response to you, G of Tumblr, I would like to say that there’s a lot more to love and intimacy than what you see in the photos you post. It’s not a cliché yet, so I’ll say it: Love = love. Rethink the message that your photos send. Just because you’re in a heterosexual relationship wouldn’t make your blog any less relevant or legitimate. You’re in a good position to make a small dent in what other people see. Therefore, I think you have a vague responsibility to better associate great sex the way it is normally espoused in marketing with LGBT community members.

his translates to what I feel is an issue in media. Most people still seem less comfortable to show and see the sight of two men kissing or two women kissing, or any other combination of non-heterosexuals. LGBT characters themselves don’t make a huge part of media. In addition, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any physical sexuality in mainstream television shows. Overall, I don’t think we’re done being afraid of portraying LGBT characters in media. So that leaves us with a set of archetypes that are fairly straightforward (gayforward) and unidimensional.

With that in mind, I just hope everyone notices and thinks more that our contemporary images of love, romance, intimacy, and sex don’t yet apply to LGBT relationships of equal magnitude.

A Proposal

“If things don’t work out with you and L, will you marry me?” W said.

W asked me to marry him if we end up separating from our respective girlfriends. He seemed pretty serious about it, actually. I asked him if he was attracted to me, and he said no. That it was my companionship he valued above all else, and even with his girlfriend. Nonetheless, W identifies himself as straight.

Interestingly, W acknowledged the multi-spectrum interpretation of sexual orientation and sexuality, that orientation can be deconstructed into separate emotional and physical parts. I won’t try to contest or argue what I reacted to as a slightly inconsistent identification as straight given at least one indicator pointing towards bi- or homosexuality. So I’ll only go so far as to use his proposal as a jumping point to think about where I am as a bisexual.

As of now, I think I see males and females equally as companions, but I still find myself checking out somewhat more females than males in a sexual context. Despite this though, I’m equally willing to marry a person of any gender (I honestly haven’t had enough experience with those outside of the male and female boxes to try to claim to be pansexual or otherwise – though in principle, I should be one). Given these parameters, I identify most with the description of a bisexual, and I don’t see this changing any time soon.

The next goal for me is to come out to my parents and to my roommate, if he hasn’t figured it out already, since a number of laziness-related excuses have prevented these things to happen. However, I think more than ever before, I’ve felt more legitimate about my bisexuality and the way I see others sexually and romantically.

In any case, W and I registered to vote in North Carolina – we’ve agreed that we’re going to spread Santorum!

Nice guys showing up on the gaydar

My friend T is a “nice guy.” And I mean that without any of the not-as-good connotations it might have (see Develle Dish’s controversial post, “Dear Duke Guys…”). T fancied a girl Ample Cushion (mind you, this is a reference to the amount of space you have in a car to travel if an accident occurs, which is why small cars can be so dangerous).

T took AC to dinner and baked her biscuits. But she said she didn’t want a relationship, so she friendzoned him by telling him that she didn’t want a relationship at this time even before he asked her to be his girlfriend. This sent T into a questioning fit, that search for explanations through questions that don’t really have answers. I liken this to a microcosm of the grief cycle, in which we blame ourselves more than we need to. It can very much be applied to college apps, I might add. “Am I not doing the right things?” “Why don’t they like me?”

T asked all the archetypical questions, culminating in this one: “Is it because I seem gay?”

The rest of this blog post will attempt to address this question as I did when we were talking about this. What makes T seem “gay”? He’s a hugger, wears purple a lot, and has many female friends. In other words, he vaguely fits the stereotype for a gay person – lukewarm flaming, perhaps? I obviously let him off the hook for asking such a charged question in his emotional down-time, but this is an example of a rather irrational fear of being perceived as gay (or another sexual orientation that precludes a relationship). For one thing, this shouldn’t even be an issue given open communication. Moreover, this is analogous to thinking a Duke student hates Duke because they’re wearing an Alabama shirt (okay, they probably do). But I think we should ask ourselves, “What is it that should actually set off my gaydar?”

Nothing but the words, “I’m gay.”

I would argue gay and queer cultures exist as something distinct and somewhat nested in sexual orientations themselves. Gay pride and the culture that has since developed among the LGBT community is something that originated through the common resistance to the divisions and prejudices of mainstream society. I am not against the LGBT community’s existence, but I believe that as a result of mass media underrepresentation and a need for more progress to social equality, we have internalized stereotypes of queer culture to the point that we are still making too many assumptions about what is gay or not.

Straight Until Proven Guilty

“Now imagine Y has a gorgeous girlfriend.”

‘A’ was setting up a joke over dinner, but before he reached the punchline. K, J, and I (me) had to stifle our giggles, somewhat judgmental giggles. The three of us know Y probably won’t be having a girlfriend anytime soon because he’s gay.

We were having a mini-awkward-fest on our side of the table while A continued the joke obliviously. I don’t mean to attack or accuse him, considering he had just met Y and didn’t know that he was gay. Rather, he is my jumping point to discuss what this implies about our interactions and what assumptions we make when we meet people. We tend to jump to the conclusion that people are straight, but such an assumption both indicates and reinforces the underlying prejudice associated with heteronormativity.

Heteronormativity, the idea that heterosexuality is the societal norm, can lead to a sense of mental segregation between straight people and LGBT individuals. Before I continue I will make one concession that probabilistically, any random person you meet has a 90% chance of being straight. That’s just the facts of the numbers. But consider that I am a part of the Asian population of Duke – there’s only a 22% chance that I’m actually Asian, yet anyone I meet will most likely be culturally aware enough to clarify that within looking Asian, I am actually Chinese. (It’s plenty funny when the odd person mistakes me for an Aztec Indian though. True story.)

What happens when we assume? We put people in awkward situations where they feel the need to explain their sexual identity. I would argue that this puts an unfair amount of social pressure on LGBT individuals to have to come out, therefore setting them apart (though I admit I can’t speak for how much autonomy we would like to inherently have as members of the LGBT community). Jessye’s post, “On Equality” does a good job of explaining the ways in which our society remains heteronormative and therefore, inherently having inequalities with respect to sexual and gender identities.

I believe that in certain respects, sensitivity towards LGBT can be treated the same way as racial sensitivity. When we meet someone, things go okay until we hit the awkward “What ARE you?” question. You mean, “What ethnicity are you?” or, “From what planet do you hail?” Going into a social interaction, most of us will keep in mind that our initial perceptions of a person’s skin colour, manner of talking, or clothes do not always tell us definitively where they are from and what ethnicity and nationality they belong to. We’ve reached a point where compared to some fifty years ago, the colour of your skin doesn’t matter that much. Stereotypes certainly exist, but on average we’re less predisposed to outright racism.

It’s much trickier since sexual orientation is not always as evident as something like skin colour. But part of being more racially sensitive is not just about having an understanding of what cultures are out there, but it is also keeping in mind that race isn’t something that should cause us to judge somebody. Similarly, we should not ignore the fact that not everyone is straight. There are two things we really need to do here then – first, we need to understand that for every person out there, sexual orientation is an additional and unique layer of identity and second, given a better understanding, we can then internalize sexual orientation as something that we don’t need to worry about in the first place (unless you fancy that person.)

Thanks to Chum Howe for providing this comic, entitled "Ethnicity."

“Does he bat for the other team?”

“Does he/she bat for the other team?”

“Does he/she bat for both teams?”

What is this other team? Are we trying to beat them? Are they trying to defeat us? What bases are they on? Who’s on first? What’s on second?

“Batting for the other team” is a euphemism for being homosexual (or bisexual when used with “both teams.”) I bring it up because, barring whatever sampling biases I may have, this is an expression I’ve heard quite a bit. And as far as language clues go, I think this one is very telling of an underlying discomfort that some of our society has with discussing LGBT issues.


Granted, there may be a good intention to be politically correct when saying “batting for the other team” rather than going for the numerous pejoratives out there. However, the expression is inherently offensive because it implies that homosexuals are on another team, that is, they are the enemy. But it’s fairly self-evident that the LGBT community is not a group of rebels bent on destroying society (okay, maybe some are). Being homosexual or otherwise is not something that is meant to undermine anybody else’s rights. A handful of us also want equal legal protections such as the right to marry, but such changes would not infringe upon the rights of others. However, the use of this expression carries with it a slight division between homosexuals and the rest of society. I would argue it has the same connotation as “in-laws.” Family, but never friends.

In this day and age, a basic understanding of some of the terminology relevant to LGBT community removes the need for using a derogatory expression like “batting for the other team.” I guess I’m addressing this post to those of you out there who are not the massive bigots, but rather, the rational-minded people out there who may not know completely how they feel about LGBT issues. I remember too when I was a bit uncomfortable about talking about it, but if you’re someone who does not think homosexuality hurts our society, then you should think again. The usage of “batting for the other team” underhandedly feeds the us vs. them mentality against the LGBT community. I’m not necessarily arguing that we should bleep out this expression or demonize it as the next f-word. Rather, I’m saying that it’s a part of our vocabulary that we no longer need when more than ever before, we have the chance to move forward and talk about these topics openly and rationally because there ought not be fear or shame, only understanding.

Besides, only physics problems use baseball, the most incomprehensible sport, to get a point across.

Is there anybody out there?

[Editor's note: Please welcome our newest writer, Julian, to the blog!]

“Is there anybody out there?” yells Chris Martin at the beginning of Coldplay concerts. I can share in the eccentric and self conscious question, both as a musician and slightly-out-of-place Brit in a now-larger world.

Music critics tend to criticize Coldplay as being too middle-of-the-roadsy. Not as soft as acoustic feel-good artists like Jack Johnson. Not as hard as their edgy South England counterparts Muse. And I think for the same reason, I’ve had trouble figuring out what my identity is, as one of the middle-of-the-roaders – I was born in England to Chinese parents, but spent the majority of my life in the United States. I sound British, look Chinese, and act American, roughly speaking. I can be pretty indecisive (or maybe I’m not), yet I’m completely obsessed with music, Lost and running, among other things. And the reason I’m on this blog - I am bisexual.

The problem with being in the middle of the road is that all of us are guilty of only seeing one road. A certain chum of mine once told me that she is sexually attracted to none, and romantically attracted to any. Being the dense block I am, my knee jerk reaction was, “having her cake and eating it too eh?” But rather, she’s just on different ends of different roads, because it’s illogical to lump your preferences into one linear item. Speaking of myself, I find myself somewhat more attracted to females than I am to males sexually, but equally romantically. But being in the middle of the road is a completely valid identity.

A friend once asked, “Does that create like jealousy issues if you’re dating a girl or what?” I prefer not to toot my own horn (or use clichés [or speak in parentheses]), but I think my response is as good as any, “If I’m dating you, then that means I picked you over twice as many people.”

So what if Coldplay isn’t a soft downy blanket of acoustic guitars or a spear-tipped wall of noise? So what if I haven’t yet figured out what I want or what I believe yet? I am living my life as I believe it is meant to be, and in my case, and I believe many others, there is no compromise or hypocrisy in being who and what I am. Though I do have to apologize for making this post more about Coldplay than me. Expect more of this.

[Pictured above is me and my best friend from back home in the San Francisco Bay Area, Andres. Back in a smaller world, we were part of the Jolly Green Giants.]