Things that might be decidedly odd…

Homebuying

Since moving to Seattle just over a year ago, the pressure from friends and families about when I’m going to buy a place to live have gotten steadily stronger. A year ago, I was planning to buy around now, but now that now is here I’ve lost almost all interest in doing so.

There are really two parts to the housing equation for me. The first part has to do with where I am in my life–what I want to be spending my money and time on, how mobile I want to be, where I want to live geographically. The second part is the financial end–what can I afford, how much do I want to spend, what am I willing to sacrifice with regard to price/size/ammentities/location.

On the first part, a year ago I thought I would be ready by now, but these days I’m not so sure. I enjoy living where I do on Capitol Hill. As much as I hate the traffic between here and work, I still have zero interest in moving to the Eastside to be closer to work because that would seem to be quickest way to nuke my social life. At the same time, I worry about the changes occuring in this neighborhood. Will it still be a place I want to live in 5 or 10 years? What will happen to gay nightlife nearby once several major bars are closed or redeveloped in that time frame? Will I still personally be interested in the nightlife offered in a few years? Will my friends who live here still be here or will they have moved on as well? Will I want to live in a sterilized, yuppified higher elevation Belltown?

On the second part, it depresses me when I realize how little I can actually afford where I want to be. Realistically, I’d be looking at smallish to medium sized one bedroom condos. Moreover, I have a hard time justifying paying at least $2000+ per month (not including maintenance or utilities) to buy what I’m now renting for about $1200 per month (including maintenance and certain utilities).

Somewhat intertwined in both parts are the effects of paying more to own on what I want to do with my life right now. An additional $10K per year in housing costs (at least) pretty much would mean no more vacations to far off locations, way less going out and way less eating out.

Hanging over all this are what I consider dubious housing prices as demonstrated by graphs like this one. It just doesn’t seem like a good time to buy right now in Seattle. Maybe I’ll see how things are in a few months or years and re-evaluate both components again. For now, I’m just trying to be better with my money by saving more. We’ll see how that goes though…

Weekend Update

Going into the weekend, I had no real plans. On Thursday evening I heard some friends of mine would be coming to town from Vancouver for the weekend, which pretty much instantly booked the weekend full of wandering around downtown, eating out, hitting up the bars and so on. It was a fun weekend, but I’m fairly tuckered out from it all now. Larry made an apropos quote this afternoon, “Straight people use the weekend to relax from their workweek, while we use the week days to recover from our weekends.” I think I need another vacation (;

I was considering going swimming this evening, but I know that when I swim while tired the workout just seems to drag on. I definitely need to go tomorrow though now.

Odd but Fun Night

Last night, I met up with Andy (a guy I met at Neighbors the week before I went to Mexico) and two of his friends at Canterbury over on 15th. We all had a few drinks and some interesting conversation. Later he and I played some pool, but pretty much as soon as we started the owner or bartender (some employee or another) loudly informed us that we all had to leave immediately because the bar was flooding and that he was very serious. Apparently, water started pouring down from the ceiling into the bar sometime around 1am.

We meandered over to Madison Pub to catch last call and ran into a group of three guys that both of us knew. One of them was a guy Andy used to date, one of them was a guy I used to date (Steven) and the third used to be the roommate of yet another guy (Jeff) that I dated. Even though I know that there are only at most 2 degrees of separation between any two gay men in Seattle, it still almost surprises me when situations like this arise that demonstrate how close knit socially we all are.

From there we headed over to 13 Coins for some late night eats. I wasn’t all that hungry, so I didn’t end up eating most of my omelette (which cost something like $15). It was nice chatting some more with Andy though and trying to decide if the entire wait staff was totally coked out or not. They all seemed way too chipper at 2am on a Wednesday morning.

PV Photos

My Puerto Vallarta photos can be found here. I’ve been off the blogging wagon lately and just forgot to post the link, but the photos have been up there for a couple days now.

Back from Mexico

After the first couple days in PV, I sort of fell off the blogging wagon. I’ll have to fill in some more of those details at a later date.

This morning, I got up, showered and packed my bags for the trip home. Between then and leaving for the airport, I had a couple hours which I used to sit around in my swimsuit on the beach one last time before heading off. Overall, the trip back to Seattle today went fairly smoothly, especially considering how truly insane the lines and crowds were at the airport in Puerto Vallarta. The airport was worse than any I’ve seen in my life, including Thanskgiving or Christmas crowds and excluding that time I flew on the day after that nasty east coast power outage back in 2003. For whatever reason, all the baggage inspection was being done by hand instead of with x-ray machines. That meant just getting luggage checked took forever. Then there was a LONG (although relatively fast moving) security line. Then they were hand searching every passenger’s carry on bags for contraband material that had been purchased in the airport (bottled water, hot sauce, etc.)

Since getting home I haven’t been able to get the pilot lit on my furnace, so my apartment is fairly cold inside right now. Quite the contrast from the balmy 85F highs and 65F lows in Mexico.

Still, it’s good to be home. Of course, I miss laying around on the beach all day, but there’s something to be said for being back in a real city with a broader variety of activities and people to see.

Puerto Vallarta, Day 2

Today, I slept in until about 9am. It was really nice to be woken up by the sounds of waves and bright sunlight coming in the window. After I got showered and dressed, I headed down to the beach. I stayed there with everybody from breakfast at around 11 until a little after 5pm. A lot of time was spent just hanging out and enjoying the company of those I knew and those I didn’t. I also spent some time throwing around the aerobie with Ryan and Texanna down by the water, followed by a brief dip in the Pacific.

Overall, it was a pretty nice and relaxing day. I still find the whole thing a bit overwhelming at times, but in general I enjoyed myself much more today. I’ve noticed it in the past, but it’s become clear that situations like this (i.e., lots of gay men anywhere for an extended period of time) seem to really hurt my self-image and self-esteem. I feel like I have to compete with all the beautiful guys on the beach (even if they really are in the minory), but I just can’t really do that without spending my whole life shopping for expensive clothes and working out in the gym. I think it’s just my competetive nature to either do something really well or not do it at all. It’s hard to break old habits though, but I’m trying.

I spent most of the day just sitting quietly enjoying the weather, the eye candy and an occasional conversation. I’m not comfortable meeting people I don’t already know unless there’s some obvious commonality that can be used to start a conversation. I just don’t know what to say and when I do say something it often comes off as forced and disingenuous. It’s easier to just not worry about these things and relax in solitude, but in an environment like this one I’m constantly confronted with my friends successfully doing these things I just don’t seem to be able to, which I tend to find frustrating.

Still, I don’t want to give the impression that I’m having a bad time. Today was actually really nice. These circumstances just cause me to analyze my own weaknesses and failings, which tends to lead to a certain degree of angst and soul searching. Either way, I feel like I’m at least getting something out of this trip so far.

Puerto Vallarta Arrival

It’s been a long day of travel and I’m too tired to go into much detail, but thought I’d just give a quick update.

I got up at a little after 5am this morning to catch a ride to the airport for our 8:30am flight. Unfortunately, the plane was delayed by an hour, but eventually we made it to PV safe and sound. Because the plane was late, we missed getting the keys to our condo and had to go through some waiting before everything got straightened out.

We then headed off to the Blue Chairs for drinks. The long day of traveling plus the difficulty getting settled in the condo had put me in a touchy mood. Upon arriving at the bar, I was completely overwhelmed by a packed rooftop patio with loud, blaring music. That combined with having not eaten (I’d had some orange juice and two Clif bars the whole day and it was about 7pm) sort of pushed me over the edge. Fortunately, I calmed down after getting a couple of beers and moving to a less crowded part of the patio. After that, we went to grab some dinner at a sidewalk cafe, which was just what I desperately needed. From there, we went back to the condo where Robert, Ken and a bunch of other people were staying for drinks before heading out to the clubs and bars.

Eventually, we ended up at Mañana, which had an interesting outdoor space in the back (pool, dance floor, lots of standing room) plus some strippers off to the side indoors. At first, I was enjoying myself, but after a while I started to get really irritated. More than anything, I didn’t like the fact that all sorts of guys kept leering at me. It just really left me feeling unsettled. I’ve been told this is something I just need to get used to, but I really don’t care for it all. I just feel like the youngest person in this entire city (which says a lot being that I’m only 27) and fairly intimidated by guys with nice clothes and good bodies. Combined with the long travel day, again I sort of went over the edge and found myself really grouchy. Making things worse was that I couldn’t leave because there are fewer sets of keys than roommates at my condo, which means I was obligated to wait until one of my condomates wanted to leave.

So it’s been a very mixed day. The city is beautiful, the weather is warm, I do like hearing the sound of the waves from the ocean in my room and some of the food has been great. I was going to post a photo here that I took from my balcony, but the internet connection seems to slow to upload photos.

However, I haven’t been too impressed by the general atmosphere of the place so far. It seems like a total tourist trap–everybody seems to be an aging tourist, everything’s in English, and nothing is really all that cheap. Hopefully, tomorrow will be better or I’ll have a really difficult time staying the whole 8 days here I think.

Yesterday

Yesterday morning I managed to drag myself out of bed in time to go to Frontrunners at 9am. I’ve been better about this lately, now having gone for two weeks in a row. Unsurprisingly I’ve found it helps when I don’t go out the night before. It’s a bit lonely staying at home Friday nights, but these days I just don’t really care for going out to the bars more than once a week. It’s just too much of the same old, same old when I go to the same clubs and see the same people and dance to the same music more often than that. Moreover, I appreciate the socializing before, during and after the run more than at a loud bar or club.

After getting back from running and cleaned up, I ran some errands. Another great thing about getting up to go run by 9am is that by the time it’s all over, it’s usually only about 11am, leaving plenty of time to get other stuff done on Saturday. Since I’ve vowed to dramatically reduce the number of days a week I commute in my car over to Redmond, I decided I should take advantage of the relatively light Saturday traffic to pay a visit to my credit union (the branches around here are only on the Eastside) to take care of some business. The place was a zoo as was the Trader Joe’s I stopped at in Redmond, but I managed to get everything done.

Saturday night, I met up with Brian and Chris, who I’d seen earlier that morning at Frontrunners. We started at Brian’s place with some impromptu prepartying before moving on to Purr (where I lamely spilled the remaining third of my drink all over my pants) and then of course the Cuff. Initially, there had been some talk about going to the Eagle. The Eagle is the one gay bar in Seattle (well, except Changes in Wallingford) I haven’t been to. Chris wanted to go as well since there was supposedly a decent DJ that night, but somehow it never materialized in the process of satisfying the desires of everybody in the large group we were with.

Superbowl

Somehow, I wasn’t paying attention to the coming of the Superbowl and only yesterday did it really hit me that it’s today. Perhaps strangely, I wasn’t really invited to any Superbowl parties either, so I’m just at home doing my own thing instead.

Beeping

There is some incessant beeping coming from somewhere outside my window. It just keeps going and going. It almost sounds like a smoke alarm going off in an apartment in an adjacent building or something. Ugh.