Charlie

I wonder how many consumers are aware that the Sudafed they pull off the drugs shelf at the supermarket does not contain the same ingredient as the Sudafed they can get from the pharmacist at the same store, although the packaging looks very similar? And how many of them are aware that the ingredient in the pills on the shelf has been shown by tests to be much less effective than the one in the pharmacy? I wouldn't have wasted money on the former product while doing my grocery shopping last week if I had known they were different.

Sic transit gloria mundi. (I always thought Gloria Mundi would be a great name for a drag queen.)

I didn't realize until after I used Sudafed the other day that the Sudafed one buys off the shelf contains phenylephrine, not the pseudoephedrine that one gets from the pharmacist counter. No wonder it wasn't effective for me.

No comment on the Phillies' 10-0 win over Arizona last night in the playoffs?

I loved A Gentleman in Moscow, which was recommended to me by a friend in the publishing business.

I read obituaries every day, and you would be surprised how many people die on or close to their birthdays. (All four of my grandparents died shortly before or after their birthdays.)

I used to enjoy going to the bars there in the '60s.

I had no way to know of your physical incapacity. However, it would still be cheaper to use an Uber. than to maintain a car.

Yay, lacrosse!

Considering how much you have probably spent on insurance and registration (and perhaps on a parking spot) during the last decade just to drive 1200 miles/year (i.e., only 100 miles/month), it probably would have been cheaper--and healthier--to buy a bike.

My partner and I stayed in Ogunquit about a quarter century ago, because we had heard talk about it being a gay resort. We couldn't find any action at all, and left after two days.

That story reminds me of one my old friend Harold told me. After his wife discovered that he had hired a provider, whom he found from this site, they decided to separate after more than 40 years of marriage. She called each of their three adult children and told them they had to come back home for a weekend for a serious family conference to explain why their parents were separating. His daughter, who lived hundreds of miles away, responded to her mother, "I'm not going all the way back there if all you're planning to do is tell us that Daddy is gay. We figured that out a while ago."

And you call yourself gay?!! Even an old fogey like me picked that up instantly.

A 20 year old Russian-speaking gayboy traveling around the US on his own? I smell something (cat)fishy here.

But some people--particularly when young--like the role of rebel outsider and want to be recognized as such. I think calling oneself "queer" is part of that.

Some of us think of the 60s and 70s as an era of rebellion against the status quo. Many want recognition for being different as well as acceptance.

Well, some people are proud of "not fitting in." That's another topic altogether.

"F-g" unfortunately cannot escape its historic British usage as a label for an inferior male whose purpose is to serve a superior male. It's not an ID I would embrace.

I also remember hearing myself referred to as "one of the English" when I was dating a girl from Lebanon County whose family were Church of the Brethren.

In other words, it is not specific enough about what it is that you object to in the sexual realm. I believe that the A in the acronym that Lucky mentioned stands for "asexual," someone who doesn't identify as interested in sexual activity. NOTE: Technically, LGBTQIAP" is not an acronym but an abbreviation, because a true acronym should be pronounceable as a word.

To me that sounds so overarching that it doesn't tell me much about an individual. (Maybe that's the point.)

The word "gay" when I was young was an adjective that described a person or event that was light-hearted and jovial. "Our Hearts Were Young and Gay" was the title of a popular film in the 1940s, based on a memoir by two famous women writers who described their youthful social adventures in Paris before the war. I didn't learn a new use of the word until I became sexually active in 1960, and discovered that "gay" was a code word used among male homosexuals to describe their secretive social community. I had to laugh when I lived in a "Pennsylvania Dutch" area in the early 1960s, and found out that "gay" was the code word that the Amish residents used to describe any non-Amish neighbor, so if they said, "Oh, you're gay," it didn't mean they knew I slept with other men. (I don't imagine they use that term any longer.) Post-Stonewall, although "homosexual" was still the formal descriptor, it seemed that everyone learned that "gay" meant anyone who had same-gender sex partners. I remember a lot of debate over the use of the term in the 1970s (lesbians thought it was restricted to men, bi-sexuals thought it was too limiting to refer to them, etc.), but it seems to have become the default word used in most public discourse, if one doesn't simply use the LGBTQ monogram. More often, however, I am seeing "queer," which used to have a very negative connotation, being used by younger males who are not strictly heterosexual, to describe themselves. I've been "gay" for so long that it is my automatic response, if asked. But what about you?

The price of gas here in Riverside County fell by about 3 cents this week, but that was attributed mostly to the state of CA switching to winter blend gas, which is a bit cheaper to produce.

I came out to myself when I was about 15. I realized that I was more attracted to guys than to girls. Had my first sex with a young man who picked me up in the men's room of the Port Authority Bus Terminal in NYC when I was 17. When I told him he was the first, he was very informative about the "gay" world (I had never heard the term before--it was only used within the gay community in those days). I came out to my best friend the next day by telling him about the experience, and he admitted that he had been having sex with older guys since he was 12! However, we were never sexually interested in one another. (Like me, he was attracted to more physically mature males.) Came out to my parents when I was 19. I had had a minor nervous breakdown at college, so they sent me to see a psychologist, who told me that hiding it from the people I loved was causing my emotional turmoil. I broke the news to my parents, whose first question was, "How do you know?" At which I burst out laughing. When I then told my steady girlfriend that I was sexually attracted to men, she said, "Is that all it is?!" But she agreed that we should probably not consider marriage, and I never had another steady girlfriend. After college, I went to graduate school in a big city and lived in a gay neighborhood rather than on campus, so most new acquaintances probably assumed I was gay. I came out to all my new friends. When I started teaching, I came out to most of my colleagues if they asked. I came out officially at work in the mid-1970s, when I proposed to teach a class on gay literature, and the dean didn't question my competence to do so. I came out legally at 70, when I married another man.

My housecleaner describes his symptoms rather vaguely as "sniffles," and says his partner tests negative for COVID. This is usually allergy season for me, and as usual I have been suffering from itchy eyes, sneezing fits and sinus congestion. Since we have also had constant "air quality alerts" and "dust advisories," with high winds for the past month, I have been assuming that allergies are the problem. I don't have any other symptoms. I haven't seen the housecleaner in two weeks, but when he texted me this morning that he had self-tested positive, I decided to test myself again, just in case. I have never tested positive, including the RT-PCR, in the past three years, have had all the boosters up until the latest one, and I am rarely in situations where I might be exposed, so I think It is unlikely that my current symptoms are due to COVID.