Another fabulous movie review from Steve Hayes, ‘Tired Old Queen at the Movies.’ You can read my interview with him here.]]>

By Mark McNease Yesterday Frank and I spent an afternoon in New Castle, Delaware. It’s a lovely town not far from Wilmington, about two hours from our house in Stockton, NJ. Once a year they have a homes and gardens tour, the oldest in the country, with some of the residents opening up their historic old homes and their still-immaculately kept gardens to the public. Frank had been there before but this was my first, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. There are cobblestone lanes, the Delaware River to one side of the town, and a dozen or more very old houses. The first one we toured (a brief tour since it’s a small house) was owned by a black man whose family had lived in the house for generations. His great-great aunt was a freed slave whose attempted kidnapping for return to slavery caused the townspeople to arrest and convict the kidnappers. It was quite a story, and quite a man – he told us that he was the only African-American who opened his home for the tour, because he thought the history was important. You’re supposed to buy tickets for the tour but no one stopped us. We walked through several of the gardens, the local cemetery (I have a thing about visiting cemeteries when I’m travelling) and enjoyed all the people in period costumes. You can spend the day there, or, as we did, a few fun hours. “A Day in Old New Castle” is worth the drive and highly recommended for a spring day’s outing. See a slideshow here.]]>

I over-reacted as usual. It’s something dangerous but also admirable about me: beneath an exterior others have described, to my puzzlement, as calm all my life, is a cauldron of emotion. Some anxiety. Plenty of hair-trigger indignation – it doesn’t take much. (It wasn’t until I started making videoblogs and clips with myself in them that I saw this apparent calm others have always seen, a sort of lethargy; I attribute it in part to my roots as a Southerner, and in part to my determination very young to conceal my feelings.) I’d been waiting two weeks to find out if I’d get a job I interviewed for at my company. My boss is leaving in just over a week, and I’d been sitting in my cube every day doing precisely nothing. Okay, well, blogging, which isn’t nothing, but it’s not what I’m paid to do here. Yesterday I left early and met my friend Rick, who’s visiting from Shreveport. We got back to the apartment after having coffee and bagels, and there on my work BlackBerry was a message from my friend Denise, also an executive assistant. “So sorry to hear about the job,” she wrote. Huh? She clearly knew something I didn’t, so I called her and asked her what she was talking about. Someone else got the job I’d interviewed for and they had told Denise, no doubt thrilled to be moving to the upper echelons of executive assistantdom. That’s when the fuse reached the explosives. I emailed human resources and let them know what a mockery this made of company policy. I’ve been here ten years, she’s been here six weeks, having been hired to work for someone else. I was humiliated and insisting they initiate my severance package immediately. Then, about a half hour later, I got an email from the man who’d interviewed me. He praised my skills and experience, explained that they had hired Jean, and promptly offered me another position, assisting people I’ve known well for some time, in one case for a decade. I said I’d be delighted. While the chickens aren’t yet hatched on this job offer, the whole experience was an emotional roller coaster. I made assumptions, went quickly to my default position of being wronged, and let the indignation fly. I was wrong. I made an ass out of me and me. Today the landscape is quite different, and while I may not end up with this job, what I assumed to be true was not, and I was left once again with the lesson that waiting a few hours at least before reacting can make all the difference.]]>

I look for positive things to post, I really do, but these are difficult times in a difficult economy. A recently released annual survey reveals that the buying power of seniors has declined 32 percent since the year 2000. From Reuters: WASHINGTON, May 19, 2011 WASHINGTON, May 19, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Seniors have lost almost one-third of their buying power since 2000, according to the Annual Survey of Senior Costs, released today by The Senior Citizens League (TSCL). TSCL is one of the nation’s largest nonpartisan seniors advocacy groups. To view the multimedia assets associated with
this release, please click
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/seniors-have-lost-32-percent-of-their-buying-power-since-2000-122205249.html In most years, seniors receive a small increase in their Social Security checks, intended to help them keep up with the costs of inflation. But since 2000, the Social Security Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) has increased just 31 percent, while typical senior expenses have jumped 73 percent, more than twice as fast. In 2011, for the second consecutive year, seniors received no COLA. Prior to 2010, seniors had received a COLA every year since 1975, when the automatic COLA was introduced. Seniors are forecast to receive a very small COLA next year.]]>

I’m a tweaker, I can’t help myself. I toyed with MadeMark.net over the last few years, always trying to find a layout I liked, a color scheme I liked, a banner photo I liked. After many changes, great and small, I finally settled into one that I think I’ll be happy with for a while. So, too, with lgbtSr.com. I tried WordPress and hated it. I started a shopping cart at Go Daddy, only to be aghast at the price tag: they seem to insist you do everything for five years, including domain registration, so by the time I got to the checkout it was over $200, and I hadn’t even seen what my layout options were. Let’s face it: I love Blogger. There are pros and cons, lovers and haters, but Blogger is extremely user-friendly. You go into the design function and there’s your site, all laid out exactly as you would want it to be. It’s all click-and-drag. And, frankly, just about every website out there is a variation on a theme – columns and rows. Move them around some, but it’s all the same palette. For my modest ambitions with my sites Blogger is the best choice. I did want to make lgbtSr look a little different, since it is different, and today I settled on the green scheme. For many years blue was my favorite color, but sometime in the past decade I’ve come to love green. The road that leads from the highway to our house in rural New Jersey includes a stretch of dense forest I call the Enchanted Forest. It’s gorgeous, a canopy of tall trees arching from one side of the road to the other, covering the cars driving through with a lush green overhang. Nature has so much green for a reason: life is green, from tiny sprouts to the last leafs of summer before they turn a burst of yellow, red and orange. Green is ideal for lgbtSr.com. Green is all of us, in our many shades. I hope you find it as pleasing to the eye as I do.]]>

Who would’ve guessed? We’re getting there, slowly but surely. Places like the military and sports are lagging behind, but progress is made every time something like this happens. The president of the Phoenix Suns basketball team, Rick Welts, has come out. From the New York Times: Last month, in a Midtown office adorned with sports memorabilia, two longtime friends met for a private talk. David Stern, the commissioner of the National Basketball Association, sipped his morning coffee, expecting to be asked for career advice. Across from him sat Rick Welts, the president and chief executive of the Phoenix Suns, who had come to New York not to discuss careers, but to say, finally, I am gay. In many work environments, this would qualify as a so-what moment. But until now, Mr. Welts, 58, who has spent 40 years in sports, rising from ball boy to N.B.A. executive to team president, had not felt comfortable enough in his chosen field to be open about his sexuality. His eyes welling at times, he also said that he planned to go public.
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Blogger went down for 24 hours and my Thursday posts vanised. Now some are back up, at least one is missing. Maybe it will show up again, maybe not. Apologies.]]>

This story’s been out a couple days. Sojourners, an organization that brands itself as the nation’s premier progressive Christian voice, has rejected an extremely benign ad welcoming a family of two mothers and their son to church. It’s as sad as it is disgraceful. What a terrible message to send, and exactly the message the not-progressive churches want to hear: that even a forward-thinking Christian organization can’t see past the end of its frightened nose. Sojourners explained its decision by saying it “did not take sides.” To welcome someone, anyone, to church is not a “side,” it is a requirement of anyone who takes Jesus seriously as something other than a political tool. From rd Magazine:

It can be argued that Mother’s Day is the most popular secular holiday in our churches. Attendance increases, special music is featured, pastors pay particular attention to crafting messages that affirm the place of motherhood in keeping families and communities faithfully knit together. So it seemed fitting that Believe Out Loud, a trans-denominational effort to promote LGBT equality in mainline Protestant congregations, focused on Mother’s Day to launch its new campaign to invite one million believers to “sign up” for full LGBT equality in our churches and society-at-large. [SNIP] Taking sides? What are the sides here? That young children who have same-gender parents are not welcome in our churches? That “welcome, everyone” (the only two words spoken in the ad) is a controversial greeting from our pulpits? That the stares the young boy and his moms get while walking down the aisle are justified? I can’t imagine Sojourners turning down an ad that called for welcome of poor children into our churches. So why is this boy different? I called the folks at Sojourners and asked what the problem was, what the “sides” in question might be. The first response was that Sojourners has not taken a stance on gay marriage (the ad is not about gay marriage); or on ordination of homosexuals (the ad is about welcome, not ordination); that the decision, made by “the folks in executive” (why such a high level decision?) was made quickly because of the Mother’s Day deadline. The rationale kept shifting. The reasoning made no sense. By the way, if you want to see what a true progressive Christian looks like, see my interview with Rev. Pat Bumgardner of MCC New York.]]>

I’ve often thought New York City was a place I didn’t want to grow old in. It can be a difficult city, with stress coming in a hundred different ways, from the swarm of people hurrying to nowhere, to the constant background noise. But if we do stay here (as opposed to moving to rural New Jersey where our house is) at least we’ll have plenty of company. The most recent census bureau figures show an increasing population of baby boomers and seniors, while at the same time the number of children is dropping. From WNYC.org:

The latest census figures show New York City has far more baby boomers and seniors and fewer children. According to the 2010 figures, there were 941,313 children between the ages of 5 and 14 across the five boroughs, a 14 percent drop from the 2000 census. At the same time, 890,012 New Yorkers were between the ages of 55 and 64, a 30 percent increase in the last 10 years. [SNIP]

The median age is 35.5, up from 34.2 in 2000, and several years under the state’s median age of 38. Within the city, 47.5 percent of the population is male, and 52.5 percent is female. Just under 1 million, or 31 percent, of the city’s three million housing units were owner-occupied, up marginally from the previous census. While baby boomers experienced solid growth, the city’s 85-plus age bracket also grew — by 16 percent. [emphasis mine] On a related note, who thought Palm Springs could get any older?]]>

I knew there was a reason I feel depressed and compressed after sitting in my chair, boxed into a cubicle, for seven or eight hours. Sitting, as it turns out, is a deadly business.]]>

I wrote recently about having two mothers, one who gave birth to me, and one who raised me. Mom, who adopted me at the age of two, passed away Christmas day 1999. My birth mother, Helen, remains alive in Natchez, Mississippi, along with six of my seven siblings by birth (one sister is in New Jersey). I learned in an email this morning from one of my sisters that our mother is in the hospital with an infection and will be going into a nursing home from there. While she’s had the support of six very grown children there (I’m the only non-grandparent, though I am a great-uncle many times over) , it’s become too difficult for them to keep her at home. As much of an absence of emotional connection as I’ve had with my birth mother since being told I was adopted at seventeen, this still comes as a sad day. My other three parents were spared what can be an okay experience, or can be a nightmare of fear, frustration and loneliness. My birth father, a stranger I never met, died from a heart attack when I was in my 20s. Mom died in 1999, and Dad died just a year and a half ago, from pneumonia, “the old person’s friend.” He’d had worsening Alzheimer’s and under those circumstances a fairly quick death is a blessing. My mother will not lack for company, that I’m sure of. Her children, despite her history of having given six of us up, were devoted to her. My two brothers lived on the same street until recently, and my sisters there are constantly at her house. There is some comfort in knowing she will not be housed in a nursing home and forgotten, but I still wish she could have finished out her days at home, as we all hope we can.]]>

No surprise here. We were visiting some of Frank’s family in Coral Springs/Ft. Lauderdale a few weeks ago. We stopped to pick up lunch at a massive deli that was packed with shoppers, none of whom appeared to be under the age of 80. I felt like a spring chicken. From the list of 10 states with the oldest populations: 1. Florida
2. West Virginia
3. Maine
4. Pennsylvania
5. Iowa
6. North Dakota
7. Hawaii
8. Montana
9. (a tie) South Dakota, Rhode Island]]>