34 stories for my 34th birthday, installment 5

18. I am part of an elite group of people who do something rather difficult and amazing, and I am very likely one of the top 50 people in the world when it comes to this activity. (Is that mysterious enough for you) By the way, if you know what I'm talking about, please don't let on in the comments.

19. Last year Megs and I went down and toured Theo's chocolate. They are down in Fremont, in the old Red Hook Ale brewery. They are one of only a dozen or so places in the U.S. that produces chocolate all the way from bean to bar all in one place, and they are the *only* one in the U.S. that does it totally organically and all fair trade. Their chocolate is simply divine. It's also somewhat more expensive that brand name chocolate like hershey. But it's worth it--it's *so* much more delicious, and you know that no child or slave labor went into growing or harvesting the cocoa beans.

20. Van Gogh is my favorite painter. I didn't get much, if any, education in the arts during my growing up. So I don't have a wide knowledge of art, painters, and so forth. But Megs introduced me to Van Gogh, and I got to see several of his paintings at the big art museum in London, and I just find it .... real. His paintings seem to literally go beyond two dimensions in a way that other painters' works don't. he kind of applies paint like God applying reality to the universe. Yeah. And I feel like I understand, a tiny bit, his depression, being a dysthymic melancholy myself.

21. When I was about 24 or 25 years old, Chad and I got invited onto KIRO radio, one of the bigger AM stations in Seattle, to talk about why we were against a ballot initiative that have given minority status to gays. On the way over there, we decided that our two main points would be: 1. Homosexuality is just abnormal. Just look at the plumbing. and 2. Giving minority status to gays is like giving minority status to hot air balloonists. It doesn't make sense to give minority status to a group of people based on a certain type of activity that they engage in.

God, I was an obnoxious, blind little bastard. I'm not saying Chad was. I'm just saying I was. I just didn't, and still to some extent don't, have any understanding of what it's like to be a discriminated against minority. "Discriminated against" sounds so ... clean. But it's not clean. It sucks and sucks and sucks. And then it sucks some more.

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