G1

So I caved and bought a G1 yesterday. It is interesting that the phone store employees and the guys at Frys all have this phone. One even said his boss traded in an iphone for it. The newer version doesn't have the keyboard but I didn't like it nearly as much.

Now I can update from my phone, take pictures of gold lame animal print wearing shoppers and read my email. Awesome.

That memory is extraordinarily vivid, eighteen years later.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/magazine/27out-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine

“When I first realized I was gay,” Austin interjected, “I just assumed I would hide it and be miserable for the rest of my life. But then I said, ‘O.K., wait, I don’t want to hide this and be miserable my whole life.’ ”

I asked him how old he was when he made that decision.

“Eleven,” he said.

I cried all the way through this. I was eleven, sitting on the wall outside of the first middle school I attended, looking at a girl in the window of one of the buses. Sitting there, I turned over and over the thought about how attracted I was to her, how I wished I was a boy so I could ask her out or hold her hand. I thought about how I was never going to be able to tell anyone that, much less the girl. It was the loneliest, most bittersweet feeling I had ever experienced then and there wasn't anyone I felt I could tell.

Long before then I knew I was profoundly different from other people. I think I knew when I was five, when going to school made the enforcement of gender roles much more prevalent in my life. But I was eleven when I first felt that sense of desire for another person.

My teenage years were awful - I was raped, I went through a dramatic and abusive relationship, I was harassed by my peers, two people I knew committed suicide, and my high school experience was shortened to three years due to a psychotic school teacher and a suicide attempt. Most of the time I felt profoundly alone and unable to talk to anyone. I did try that route of "talk to an adult you trust" a few times, though it ended in disaster, forced psychiatric visits, medication and disbelief. For a long time I was certain I would die before I was twenty.

Survival came as a great surprise, and a heavy cost. I've spent years questioning every part of my sexuality, worrying that my inclinations desires were somehow warped or twisted by being raped so young. It's taken more than a decade to come to terms with the life I didn't get to have thanks to my cluster fuck high school situation nearly killing me and substantially limiting my options. Knowing that I will never be able to trust my parents or feel accepted by them is hard.

Just thinking that some of the kids out there now are not going to have survive alone is heartening.