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Sun.Apr.30.2006

1:55 am EDT        57°F (14°C) in Burley, ID

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This final day of April finds me making my first-ever visit to the state of Idaho, specifically to get a load that has to be hauled literally all the way back across the country to the “Southern Tier” area of New York state. I will have until Friday morning to get all the way back over there, some 2,200 miles (3,540 km) from where I am now.

Tonight, I have to ask, what is it with my fellow twenty-somethings, especially my fellow gay male twenty-somethings, and their extremely cliquish and stuck-up behavior? Lately, I have been noticing numerous examples of this, even though only one of them has had any direct effect on me at all. An online-specific example of what I’m talking about is this: on social-networking sites such as LiveJournal, MySpace, etc., it seems like people make no sense at all in the choices they make regarding who they will list as “friends” on their profiles. A lot of people will add others to their “friends” lists for no reason at all, or because the person in question sent them “omg ur hott lolz11!!!11 add me!!111” or some other such line, while at the same time completely ignoring coherent, more thought-out responses and requests for addition to “friends” lists.

I’m not going to name names or even reveal the person’s gender, as the other party involved has the right to anonymity, but this happened to me earlier this week. While searching through the school listings on LiveJournal for all the various schools I have attended, I found a journal maintained by a gay person who had attended one of these schools several years after I had been there. Since the person’s LiveJournal profile listed an e-mail address, I contacted this person to introduce myself, giving some details of the highlights of my time at the school in question. This original e-mail yielded no reply at all, but a few days later, I discovered one more detail of life I shared with this person, and I sent another e-mail to mention that; at the same time, on my own LiveJournal, I added this person to my “friends” list — I dare say I had pretty legitimate reasons for doing so, as I have detailed in this paragraph.

My second e-mail finally elicited a response from this person, essentially to the effect of “I’m not going to tell you I want nothing to do with you, but I want nothing to do with you.” The response was so self-contradictory from one sentence to the next that I honestly had no idea what the hell to make of it; it took me a couple of days to come to the aforementioned conclusion. I might not be as annoyed with all of this if the person had just come right out and been explicit about not wanting to have contact with me — Jesus fucking Christ, I’m not so fragile that being told off immediately is going to make me go crawl off in a corner and cry. What gets on my nerves is people trying to tip-toe around the truth and humor me with bullshit.

Additionally, I finally got around to doing a much-needed, rather sizable purge of my own LiveJournal “friends” list earlier this week. I don’t go listing people as “friends” willy-nilly; I have to run across a person who is particularly intelligent, or funny, or thought-provoking, and then I always tell them in a comment that I am adding them and usually ask them if they would return the favor. This is where people seem to get insanely cliquish: on such requests, I have gone 0-for-God only knows how many — that is to say, because I’m not part of their little clique, these people (most of whom are gay guys) want absolutely nothing to do with me.

If there is anything I have found in life, it’s that expanding your horizons and always trying new things (within reason) is what really makes life interesting. You can’t close yourself off to the unfamiliar, the strange, and the unknown if you want to experience the full richness of life. Although there are days that I just … fucking … hate driving a truck, believe me, my life is more complete for having seen 43 of the lower 48 states than it would otherwise be. Additionally, you never know when somebody you meet in the most random and unsolicited fashion could end up being a huge positive influence on your life, like a close, trusted friend or possibly even more.

This is a lesson that seems to be lost on most gay boys, especially those who are younger than 25. (Trust me, I’m not just bitching about gay boys — I am well aware that if I were straight, I would have the same problem with girls, and the experiences of my straight friend Marc pretty well prove me right.) I know I sound like such a fucking old fart for being 26, but Jesus Christ, people, grow the fuck up and realize this isn’t fucking high school anymore. We’re never going to get the mainstream social acceptance we so desperately want as gay people, if we don’t stop artificially dividing ourselves on the bases (note: that’s bay-SEEZ, plural of basis, not BAY-sez like first, second, and third) of membership in a clique, age, looks, body type, monetary income, and, God forbid, even penis size.

I’ve just been notified that I am done being loaded here, so it’s time to bring this to an end.