Polar Coordinates
Sam and I had gotten invites to two very different events yesterday. Our good friend, Lee (Skittles...'Taste the Rainbow, bitch!'), invited us to a tattooing convention, where he was getting more work done on his newest tattoo. Matt and Brian invited us over to a pumpkin carving party, and since I didn't yet know about the tattooing thing and I really really wanted to finally meet Matt & Brian in person, and to spend some time hanging with Pete, who I don't get to see nearly enough of, we chose punkins.
This bears repeating: on the one hand, we had the opportunity to go to see "a bunch of gay and straight tattooed freaks", as Skittles put it, or carve pumpkins with a bunch of gay male couples and their adopted children.
God(dess), I love San Francisco.
So, like I said, we chose the latter. It was a lot of fun. I love kids. I often think about having children of my own—of our own. I think I'd be a damn good father. I think there aren't enough kids who grow up imbued with the notion of the Possible, suffused with Hope and Opportunity instead of shot-through with "hard reality" and clipped expectations.
Lee and Sam and others have asked me why I never got a tattoo. My answer is typically that I haven't thought of something that a) applies to my immediate life and b) also means something I can carry with me indelibly.
It turns out that just the other day I thought of something—or at least the possibility of something—that satisfies all criteria: in getting to know Soonae and Jong at Cafe Commons, I have also learned a great deal about Korean values, Korean food and Korean culture. I've asked them to think about the Korean language, if there's a glyph or set of glyphs in Korean that may have no equivalent in English, but mean something along the lines of "open-ended future" or, the last words from Sunday in the Park with George: "White. A blank page or canvas. His favorite: so many...possibilities." Which, I suppose, brings us back around to children.
And how two very different things, when given the right context, can be profoundly simliar.