Justin's Life... June 8th - 28th, 1999


If you're an avid Justin's Life reader, bookmark the Justin's Life Gateway to keep track of when the last update occurred
Who Are These People?The Diary Index

June 8, 1999 - Tuesday

10:06AM

I'm fairly frustrated. I've been working on the web site redesign, but it's going no where fast. The problem is the diary.

On one hand, I want to give this section a new look, but on the other, I like the look it has... but mainly, trying to figure out what to use as the "theme" is the aggravator. It's like saying, "What one 2-dimensional item would you put in a time capsule to represent you?"

At first, I created a page which matched the new initial start page (with the theme of paint buckets), but this was just too sterile:

And then I scanned my hair, and tried a pair of boxers, and now I'm just frustrated with the whole thing. What one object or small series of objects can I use to represent me? That's quite a question...

June 10, 1999 - Thursday

6:30PM

I miss David. I miss calling him on the phone. I miss getting his e-mail. I miss him. I've still got his messages on the machine... but I can't bare to listen to them. Needing to clear some space, I briefly cycled through the 20 messages on the machine to find the ones I could delete... none of his.

That's the problem with photos and answering machine messages and recordings in general... we get rid of the bad and keep the good and looking back, it always appears to be better than now. And in some ways, I'm sure it was better than now. Shakespeare (or one of his characters) once said, "It is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all"... but I don't really agree. Ignorance is bliss. I'll think that to my dying day. If I'd never have known David, I wouldn't be missing him now. That's a completely different thought than "I wish I never met him."... but I guess that's what Shakespeare meant.

I'm better off for having known and loved him... and I still do love him.

I've tried not to think too much about David, actually. And meeting Dan in San Diego sorta took away some of the "down time" where I would have been thinking about David... but this past weekend, we were in La Jolla, Dan was back east, and the addition of Grandma and Grandpa to the picture made David's absence all the stronger.

There were a lot of weekends spent in La Jolla with "David Wayne"... I miss being the one who called him David Wayne... I miss saying "David Wayne, David Wayne, you're driving me insane." I miss the little things.

Friday night, I wrote him an e-mail, hoping for any sign that things might somehow return to something closer to what they were...

I would put it here, but somehow that cheapens it. It was my heartfelt expression to David. It was for David... yet the response it got was that he couldn't respond the way I must hope that he would, and that was it. Two lines, to say that, and that he would e-mail later this week. It's Thursday and I've yet to hear anything.

How does someone go from being such an integral part of someone's life one day... to an I'll get back to you a week later.

June 11, 1999 - Friday

2:19PM

After driving myself nearly crazy the other day trying to think of one object which I could use as representative of the diary and me, I happened upon it.

This photo was in my closet. I bought it a month or so ago, thinking that perhaps I'd create a page with a vintage gay theme to it. Sure, there's nothing inherently gay about these six young men, but that's why it works. That's my life. My life is like their lives, only mine's taking place several decades later. In the newness of our "now" society, we hardly ever realize that our lives have commonalities with those who lived long ago. Believe it or not, we are not the first guys to ever be gay. Not the first to ever deal with taxes or love or friendships.

From their attire, they were upwardly mobile, something I like to think I am, and they're at that age where they're getting ready to "take on the world", something I feel akin as I'm in the midst of starting my first real company. They represent me, and I represent them, even though our lives never crossed and our time here on earth probably didn't overlap. That's amazing... and much better than my hand any day.

June 13, 1999 - Sunday

4:00PM

Today is Pride in Los Angeles, I think, and that's where Dan is this weekend. Friday night, he wasn't sure whether he was going to come up from San Diego to go to LA Pride, so I didn't want to stay in town... as I knew waiting around for him to show and him not showing (even if he never really said for sure that he was going to show) would have left a bitter after taste. Had he come, it would have been nice, but had he decided to stay in San Diego, it would have screwed the weekend.

So, Larry, Katie, Spencer, and I are here at the ranch house. Actually, they're at the pool while I'm here at the house, playing on the computer. And I just finished responding to forty-some e-mails, so I'm ready to "sign off" and go swing in the hammock chair out on the deck.

June 14, 1999 - Monday

5:54PM

It's amazing how we can completely lose ourselves inside a darkened movie theatre. Earlier today, I went to see Notting Hill, the latest Julia Roberts movie, and for those two hours, I didn't worry about any of the problems that drove me to the theatre in the first place. For those two hours, I was enchanted with someone else's life. I occasionally interchanged my life for that of Julia Roberts' character, envisioning myself as the star having an entourage, but I didn't worry about the things that waited for me back outside. They completely disappeared. That's quite a drug for $5.00.

Don't get me wrong. My life is not bad, but I have my problems, too. Today, after several months of working with a programmer, I had to pull the project. Not only did I lose the $1250 which I'd already paid him, but, more importantly, I lost the months. I lost the time. And, in short, I'd been dicked around while nothing had really been done.

"I SPENT FOUR DAMN MONTHS!" I want to scream... four damn months and not a single thing got accomplished. Four months... and nothing!

Adding insult to injury, this is the second time it's happened. I try to keep business/finances separate from here, but this is the second time it's happened... the second time it's happened. Another programmer spent several months (eight, I think) working on it before this guy... but at least he did something. At least progress was made. At least, at the end, there was a lot more there than when he started. His day job just didn't allow him the time to work on my project to finish it.

So, anyway, today I had to pull the project from the latest programmer... and now I have to once again find someone to build the back end to my Bill Gatesian idea. Not fun... and largely another crap shoot. So, I escaped at the movies for a bit this afternoon.

June 15, 1999 - Tuesday

6:24PM

Ever just have one of those days where you're feeling lonely? Where everyone else in the world seems to have friends, places to go, and things to do... except you. And I don't mean that when you call, they say they have something else to do. I mean, they don't exist, so you can't even call them.

I'm having one of those days.

And curiously enough, I find myself in a cyclic pattern. I don't have friends that aren't guys I'd like to flirt with. And when someone, like Dan, doesn't give me the "eye", it's what I want... but then that eventually leads to a place where someone gets hurt, like David... where I call and leave a message to say that I miss him, and he doesn't even call back (which happened today).

It's like I realize that I'm sub-consciously wanting to put Dan on the same path that David took, but the realization doesn't change anything. If David and I hadn't taken the boyfriend path, we wouldn't be where we are now. We'd still be friends, calling each other on the phone, talking to each other, etc... but that intimacy we shared when he and I, and he and Larry and I were hanging out was so great that thinking perhaps that I might end up where I am now, I still would have gone for it.

Sure, I'm not making complete sense... that's the point. It doesn't make sense. It's that "a little of ABSOLUTELY GREAT" versus "a lot of 'good'". It's that Herbert Ross line, said by Julia Roberts in Steel Magnolias, "I would rather have thirty minutes of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special." My life is certainly not nothing special, as I treasure my family and love Larry... but in my relationships with people, I take the thirty minutes of wonderful rather than days of good.

And it's days like today when it comes back to bite me on the ass.

June 19, 1999 - Saturday

11:36AM

Things have been pretty relaxed since I last wrote. On Wednesday I went to the mall and bought a few shirts and a couple pairs of shorts in a get-out-of-my-general-funk attempt. It, and Rich coming over Wednesday night, worked. Rich, you may remember from way back when, was Larry's boyfriend when I first visited California.

Anyway, Rich has come over to the house a few times since way back then, but he's been busy with chiropractic school... so we haven't seen him much. Dinner at a restaurant downtown and a drink at the top of the Westin Hotel's revolving bar were nice. Afterwards, back at the house, we took a quick dip in the hot tub before Rich headed back to his place to get up early the next morning.

Oh, and as for those clothes I bought, the clerk forgot to remove the security sensor on a pair of the shorts. Normally, I would have just cut it out myself and lived with the small hole, but it was an exploding ink security sensor. So I went back to the store Thursday and was immediately noticed by the salespeople when I walked into the store and the alarm went off (as opposed to when I bought them and I thought I heard the alarm but kept walking... and no one came after me). Anyway, a lady apologized for the error and removed the sensor. (On the drive to the mall, I was busily concocting scenarios whereby how I'd prove I'd actually paid for the shorts instead of going back in the store, picking up a new pair, and trying to use my receipt for them as well. )

In other news, we're came to La Jolla last night. This afternoon I'm meeting with a couple of potential replacements for the above mentioned programmer, and after that, I'm supposed to call Dan so that we can see his new apartment and go help him pick out an area rug.

AND this morning I used Ticketmaster Online to buy three floor level tickets to Cher and Cyndi Lauper's August 21st concert. Who would have thought Cher or Cyndi Lauper would have ever done a concert again... let alone together. I'm pretty psyched about that, too.

June 21, 1999 - Monday

10:16PM

The rest of the Saturday went as planned, and we met back up with Dan again on Sunday to go see Tarzan. It was a nice, low key weekend.

Today I've been here at the computer for around twelve hours straight, working exclusively on the Justin's Koool Page redesign. Most of that time has been spent creating who, what, when, where, and why subsections for the diary and in reformatting the original 1995 entries back to as close to their original publication as possible. -- With no foresight that the site would ever be redesigned, the early diary entries linked to other sections of the site outside the diary (which have since changed or been removed). Moreover, in the 1997 redesign, the early entries were reformatted into the then-current style and the links to different areas of the site were removed, irregardless of whether the section still existed. I've subsequently decided that each section of diary should keep the look and HTML-style in which it was originally written. And I've gone back and adjusted the links so that items no longer present on the site, such as Justin's Interactive Search For His Red Headed Knight, are viewable as they were when the particular diary entry was written.

It should be nice when it's done... but that may be a while.

June 23, 1999 - Wednesday

4:53PM

I spent the entire day yesterday, and most of today, scanning photos for the site redesign... and I'm starting to feel like a guy posing for pictures that no one's taking. It's just that I haven't gotten much e-mail as of late (since engulfing myself with the redesign on Monday)... and certainly no heart renderers. Though I know better, it just feels like I'm spending hour after hour working on site which no one cares to see, know what I mean?

I know that sounds selfish, and it doesn't really come off the way I feel it, but the effort I put into the site is rewarded primarily by the e-mails I get. Having spent a lot of effort as of late, and getting less "reward" than normal, I'm just a little down on the subject.

Anyway, if you feel so inclined... like you just today found the site and think it's "neat"... go ahead and e-mail me.

In other news, in sort of the same here-comes-change vain, I had all my hair cut off today. Looking at the pictures as I searched for ones to scan, I decided I looked a lot better with short hair. So I called the hairstylist, made an appointment with her for an hour later, and went from this mop top: