The show hasn’t done much of a service for gay people either. Applause for the show’s gay characters shouldn’t exceed a polite golf-clap. Kurt, the gay character with the greatest spotlight, is the spitting image of America’s unfortunately stereotyped view of homosexuals. Other queer characters are offensive (Sandy) or their relationships are weak (Brittany and Santana’s strange bisexual connection.) True, these relationships and personalities do exist in reality, but they’re over-portrayed in media and do a serious disservice to the majority of gay people who don’t fit those molds. America-at-large only sees these outlandish and promiscuous bitches obsessed with pop music and fashion characters. No wonder LGBT people aren’t seen as equals.

All that changed with tonight’s departure from everything we’ve come to know from Glee.

While I appreciate Blaine, the exceedingly handsome object of Kurt’s current fickle dreams (and the first one who is actually gay), I don’t think he is the big news from this episode.

I know I wasn’t the only viewer shocked when Dave, one of the show’s two core bullies, grabbed Kurt during a confrontation and kissed him. Just like that, prime-time has a gay kiss, and nobody expected it to happen. It wasn’t fragile or shy, it didn’t come from an interior designer, and the character was most certainly not comfortable with his sexuality. This was an angsty teenage football player, afraid of who he might be, losing control of his impulses momentarily before ducking back to safety. It’s the first time I’ve been able to sympathize with a Glee character. I was never a bully, but I did plenty of things to avoid confronting my sexuality growing up.

The rest of the show was typical, a few Aesop’s Fables sprinkled through corny humor and a handful of delightful albeit over-engineered songs. Maybe T-Pain can have his auto-tune machines back when Glee goes on hiatus.

Once upon a time I loved Apple, then I couldn’t stand them, then they embraced unix and I loved them again, and now I’m starting to really dislike them again.

The trouble isn’t that they don’t make products that people find useful, the fact that Apple’s market cap recently surpassed that of Microsoft would suggest quite the opposite. Actually the reason is they are becoming increasingly more like the Office and Windows giant.

I agree fully with Jobs’s notion that HTML 5 and open standards are the future of computing, especially on mobile devices. I’m immersed in the world of development and design and trust me when I say there are few things that anyone in my line of work would enjoy more than never having to consider cross platform compatibility again. Open platforms are beneficial to all involved: end users have a wider range of choice in devices; creators spend more time making great products and less time working around incompatibility problems; and platform developers, knowing the next big thing is a click away, work to make their implementation the most desirable to all parties involved. This isn’t some new idea, it’s the same model that has made the United States one of history’s greatest and most successful countries.

My disagreement lies in the closed platform that Apple has built with their iPhone OS. Apple’s customers (perhaps unwittingly through lock-in contracts) pay between $500 and $700 for their mobile device, and yet they are consistently thwarted in attempts to use the hardware the way they choose. From the App Store lockdown that keeps people from having access to applications like Google Voice and Gay New York 101, to preventing users from installing other OSes on the phone, Apple has blocked users at every turn from doing things that they want to do with a device that the user technically owns.

While I respect Apple’s decision to create an experience that is easy to use, well designed, and (mostly) devoid of poorly designed or malicious applications; I can’t say that I agree with the way they’ve implemented it or in how they pompously tell their customers what is best. I’m a firm believer that a good product can stand on it’s own, and doesn’t need a closed marketplace to survive. Hey Apple, what are you afraid of?

Footnote: The majority of this was written using a drop in replacement keyboard (Swype) on an open source build of the Android operating system that I installed on my Google Nexus One. Forgive me for any spelling/grammar errors, but I think this came out pretty good for something written on a train… I’ll get around to editing it when I’m not in the middle of work.

That’s just one of the many reasons that I try to bike to work at least a couple days a week. There are a lot of reasons to hop on a bike, but if you are going to ride in the city, watch out. Riding can be as dangerous as it is fun.

That is especially true this time of year; Trees and flowers are budding, people start running with their shirts off, happiness abounds, and everybody gets a little lost. I’m a very attentive biker. I stop (at least as much as the vehicles around me) at every stop sign, I watch for cars in all directions, I keep my eyes on the doors of parked vehicles to make sure one doesn’t swing out in front of me. Yet somehow I’ve still been nearly hit over five times this year. The reactions from drivers vary – some are mortified and apologetic, some are angry, and perhaps the worst, some don’t ever notice at all. So here, I present you with my tips for bikers and drivers on how to share the road and get where we are going safely.

Drivers

1. Before you turn, look both ways and check your blindspots. Really, this is a given, but surprisingly not many do it.
2. Put down the cell phone. If you were that important, you’d have an assistant. Whatever it is, it can wait until you aren’t putting anyone’s lives in danger. Pull over for five minutes if you need to.
3. Leave a safe distance between you and anything else on the road. For bikes, that means a few feet.
4. Keep in mind that bikers often can not ride as far to the right as you think they can. People opening car doors in parked cars pose as much of a risk to bikers as moving vehicles do. Now you know why cyclists will be a few feet away from anyone parked.
5. For that matter, when you open your car doors, check for approaching vehicles – powered or otherwise. This is for the safety of your door and your body as much as anything approaching.

Bikers

1. When you are on the road, you have to follow the rules of the road. If you break the rules and get hurt, your just an effing idiot.
2. Have and use the proper equipment for biking. At the very least have on a helmet and have a strobing headlight and taillight.
3. Bear in mind that even when a driver is wrong, they’re still in a 2,000lb+ vehicle that propels itself with thousands of explosions. You might have tree-trunk Apolo Ohno legs, but that car is still going to win if you go to battle.
4. (Chicagoans) avoid the Lake path during peak times. It’s the wild west of dumb behavior. I highly suggest biking to the path and going for a run or taking a walk instead!
5. If you listen to music while biking, keep the volume low and only use one side of your headphones. Listening to what is happening around you is as important as seeing it.

Okay, I’m going to sleep now so that I have the energy in the morning to bike to work Be safe!

That may seem a bit harsh, but I hope you agree by the end of this post. You see, life can very easily become one mundane blur of beige. The problem with beige is people generally don’t hate it, so it ends up painting more than just the walls of living rooms. It ends up in our wardrobes (figuratively and literally), diets (hopefully only figuratively), jobs, relationships; it ends up permeating everything.

How do beige and NYC relate? Unfortunately there is a lot of beige in NYC. Go to any tourist area and you’ll see it all around. People travel around the world to visit and where do they end up? In bigger versions of the same places they frequent at home. Safety. Familiarity. Did you really expect to find wonder at Gap and TGI Friday’s?

But NYC has a lot that is vibrant, too.

One afternoon, three years ago, I was on a business trip in NY and decided to get lost in the city. I hopped on Yelp, looked up the best places in NY to get cupcakes, plotted a course that took me to three of them, and set out. Several hours later I had the sugary evidence to prove that I’d explored the city: a quarter-sized dollop of chocolate buttercream proudly displayed on my (literally) beige jacket. At the third bakery a rather handsome twenty-something took the opportunity to flirt with me while pointing out that I was a wreck. A year later my friends were asking why I disgustingly hadn’t washed the stain out, but I left it as a reminder to not get stuck in a rut.

So while I could recount my journey in diary form, I’ll save you the boredom. You’ll learn nothing from my stories of magic in bars, walking through Central Park until I had blisters on my heels, running into Zachary Quinto, or deliciously stumbling upon some of the tastiest Asian food I’ve ever had. If there is one thing I wish to share with you from a week in NY, it is purple gingham.

In other words: don’t live beige. When life is an adventure, you’ll always have a response when you are asked “what have you been up to lately?”

You might not thing that this is something that people need more education on, but you are wrong. Public restrooms are, perhaps, some of the most annoying places on earth. I aim (pun!) to enlighten at least a few people in my new quest to make it a little less… nasty.

• Upon entering the bathroom, find a stall that is not immediately next to one that is occupied, if at all possible. If there are 10 urinals, for example, why are you peeing right next to me? Actually, I know the answer to that question so please don’t answer it. This goes for the sit downs too. I don’t need to hear your poop. Thanks.
• Don’t talk to me! Save the chatter for outside the restroom. Unless there is toilet paper stuck to my shoe, please remain quiet.
• Wash your hands – with soap! I seriously don’t know what planet people come from where they teach their kids to slop up their hands and then get it wet but if you aren’t using soap you may as well just skip the whole process. The exception here is if there is nothing to dry your hands on…
• Dry your hands! What’s more gross than grabbing the handle on the bathroom door to find it wet with some strangers ghost? NOTHING!

Finally, what inspired this whole rant is a rather curious practice. Most bathrooms have one of these:

They’re wonderful, but what do you do when you get to the door? You just cleaned up and now you have to touch a potentially very nasty door. Oh, look how handy, they’ve placed a bin right next to the door so you can open the door with a piece of paper towel and then toss it out! Except they usually look like this:

Well what the hell is the point of that? Trading one dirty touch for another? BAH.

BONUS!

Cottonelle’s survey of America found that over is by far the preferred way to roll your toilet paper! Finally, something that makes sense For all the reasons why over is the right way, check out Current Config.

So now that I’ve vented and shared all of my bathroom pet peeves with you, share yours in the comments!

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Thank you for posing for this picture.