Genuflect, while I'm playing with your heart

or: Rock on, in your Louis Vuitton

My life has been a bit out of control, well more so than usual. I spent the better part of Tuesday night attempting to force a sense of order…damn you entropy! I now have a clear sense of paid bills, money set aside to save/invest, and the fellas that I am in the process of dating. I do admit that it seems that I lead quite an active social life, at least from my blog’s perspective…and why not really? I am interested in meeting a nice guy, who happens to possess a supermajority of my desired attributes, and I see no reason to be lazy or half-assed in that pursuit. To that end, I seem to go on a fair number of first dates; and while I may not “click” with the person in question, I enjoy meeting new people, and there is always the chance to make a new friend. Or, better yet, and what I feel has become a gay currency of sorts, meeting someone cute who works at a store from which one wants a discount. Case in point, on my date with Tom on Saturday, I ran in to Scott, a cute guy I dated in 2002…at which time he was gainfully employed (with a 30% employee discount) at Ralph Lauren. Although he has moved on, career-wise, he is still cute and we are going out at some point in the near future.

I was dressed a bit provocatively on Saturday, the whole tight t-shirt routine, and from a modest perspective I was definitely looking rather cute…helped by my diligent attention to working the pecs, biceps, and triceps. There was a certain moment in the evening, apparent to me, when I could have cleanly ditched Tom and chatted up one of the guys with whom I had made eye contact. But I obviously did no such thing, because that would have been very rude, and I’m sure Tom would have been hurt by that. Now if he had been rude or a jerk or whatever, I would have had no compunctions with leaving him to move on. It seems that manners have been pushed to the side in this crazy gay world of ours. It has become quite acceptable, and I have been occasionally guilty of same, to go out with someone, and then instead of saying that you are not interested in a 2^nd date, just simply not calling. It’s so prolific, that it has become accepted behavior. Except of course, that it still smarts to be on the receiving end.

So I’m taking my parents and Hilary out to MK on Friday. It is sort of a quasi-celebration of my bonus, and also another futile attempt to fulfill the overwhelming debt I owe both of them, by writ of my having been born (kidding kidding). But I know that Mummy gets quite a kick out of playing the whole “proud mother” routine, and although we all know where that trope ends when played to its extreme, I am going along with it. And enabling, because I bought her a new handbag and wallet at Louis Vuitton…while picking up a sweet denim jacket there for myself. Fine, I realize no one is interested in my shopping exploits…well one friend, but she does not read my blog - lest she be too shocked by some of my very bad behavior ;)

I have been kicking around the idea of buying a car, because I always enjoy driving, and I do somewhat miss having one. My thought was to look at a used, maybe 10 year old, Mercedes or Lexus or something; a quality used car that would be fun to drive. Ultimately I decided not to; the insurance would be too much to justify for a car I would only use occasionally. As my Father pointed out, for the cost of insurance, I could rent a Jaguar for the few times I need a car, haha. I had a nice talk with my father, in which we discussed the car issue, among other things. He does amuse me; his brother and law partner, Roy Safanda, is purchasing a summer home in the Turks and Caicos Islands, because that part of my family quite enjoys diving and such. By contrast, far from buying a summer home, my Father never really goes on vacation, aside from the family summer home in Wisconsin. A creature of habits I suppose; and yet somehow he ended up with such a consumerist child (although a look in my Mommy Dearest’s shoe closet will indicate where I got that particular addiction). J

Well to wrap up this disparate blog entry, I will give my summary of my Watergate reading binge.

1). The Watergate break-in itself was Nixon’s fault, indirectly. He was so passionately determined to get information on his political enemies, and demanded results from his aides. As a result, Charles Colson, his go-to guy on political dirt, took it upon himself to setup the Watergate break-in, without Nixon’s advance knowledge (well that is what I have concluded, and I realize that some will disagree on that point), in order to tap phones and get inside information.

2).The break-in itself was doomed to fail, because the Democratic Party had advance knowledge that it would occur, and let it happen because of the obvious political fall-out. Likewise, the CIA observed the break-in, and had been tipped off well in advance by McCord, who was a current CIA operative at the time of his participation in the would-be burglary.

3). The subsequent cover-up was clearly what destroyed Nixon, and the reason it faired so poorly was that so many people were involved. While the cover-up actors all knew certain aspects, no one knew enough of the whole picture to orchestrate the effective plan to confuse, inveigle, and obfuscate that would have been required to protect the President.

4). Nixon himself did not know nearly enough about the break-in, and it was his lack of knowledge that doomed the cover-up. Nixon feared that Colson, and his Attorney General John Mitchell, were involved in the break-in, and he acted to protect them, without wanting to know any of the details.

5). There were steps along the way at which the cover-up could have been salvaged (i.e. if Nixon had offered John Dean immunity, allowing him to lie to the Senate Committee on Watergate), but it was again a lack of coherent and organized information. Nixon had tapped John Dean to accumulate all Watergate information and lead the cover-up, but once Dean figured out that his participation could likely land him in prison, and with no assurance from Nixon that he would be protected, he gave it all up to the Watergate prosecutors.

Hope everyone is doing well.

-PBS