Tomorrow it’s off to LA and from there to Thailand. I’m so happy to be leaving on this trip, I think it will be a great one and the Good Doc and I can certainly use the time together away from the hectic life we’ve been leading since I started attending NYU in New York.

What an amazing year it has been. The Good Doc’s company merged with another and then shut down operations, leading to him getting a better job with a smaller bio-tech located closer to our home in San Francisco. I was accepted to NYU and moved to Manhattan in August and just completed my first semester. My 10 year-old niece spent a month with us in June and gave us a good reality check on what it would mean to become parents. We met new friends, lost some old ones, hung out all over the country, enjoyed the waters off Maui again, had a nice weekend in Prague together and thoroughly enjoyed the blessings and curses of knowing each other as well as we do now that we’ve been together for 3.5 years.

I sincerely hope everyone reading this enjoys the same level of blessings in their own lives that I have in mine. The New Year is shaping up to be an interesting one with it’s own peculiar challenges and rewards. I for one am looking forward to it. Happy holidays to everyone!

After getting back to San Francisco Thursday afternoon (on-time for once) I immediately met with the electricians who were removing the track-lighting from our house and installing recessed lighting in its place. This project, in combination with several others I’ve arranged, has gone a long way towards making our home feel like our own. Now I’m having the interior painted after the exterior was done in October. I’m meeting with the painters on Wednesday to chose the interior colors.

Sadly I had to terminate our maid. When I arrived home Thursday I discovered that the dishwasher was clogged and wouldn’t drain properly. It had been in this state since I left for NY on Dec 1st and the reason why is because the maid continually loads it with dirty dishes and because she can’t speak English there’s no way for me to explain to her how NOT to do this. This time the clogging was severe enough that I had to call a repair person and after doing this I made the decision to fire her the next day.

Firing her wasn’t easy but it was necessary. I want my house to run well while I’m in New York and it’s proving impossible to do so when you have someone working for you who won’t learn English, despite you offering to pay for a course for her. The expense of the dishwasher added to ruined clothing, bedding etc… was just too much. So now we have a new person starting this Wednesday, just in-time for us to leave for Thailand knowing that our house will be well-taken care of in our absence.

Other than all the meeting with contractors etc… I’ve made Hanukkah dinner, went out Saturday night with friends and gone to the gym. I need to make a point of going tanning because I’m worried I’ll get burned in Thailand as pale as I am. It’s been cold here, especially at night. Last night it froze and I don’t think it’s gotten really cold in New York other than once or twice since I moved there. So much for warm California weather!

Today in a rare burst of religious fervor I decided to head out into New York’s rainy streets and visit Borough Park in Brooklyn. My goal was to visit a hasidic bakery and purchase a number of kosher baked goods to bring back to San Francisco with me tomorrow.

I succeeded and in the process got to see a part of New York few people ever do. The hasidim are fascinating to me and being surrounded by them as I picked and chose my bakery goods was intense. One thing I realized very quickly - hasidic women have A LOT of babies. I’ve never seen so many baby carriages in all my life.

I think I badly offended and made terribly angry one of my professors last night, and frankly I could really give a fuck if I did.

This professor is well-known and highly esteemed for his work in several administrations, both Republican and Democrat. He’s of Ukrainian descent and predictably that colors his view of the strategic threats facing the United States. He views Russia as THE major problem in the future and is particularly upset at alleged Russian poisoning of former spies as well as the killing of that Russian woman journalist, who was a personal friend of his.

All fine, I agree with most of what he’s saying but his Ukrainian heritage colors everything he teaches in class. He ties everything back to Russia and constantly berates the United States for not going to war with Russia after WWII to win the freedom of Eastern Europe, the Baltic States and predictably - Ukraine.

He had us read a book in which the author savaged FDR for his “appeasement” of Stalin and then went on to minimize the destructive nature of Joseph McCarthy, a senator who went out of his way to destroy so many lives that it is almost incalculable. Now this is when I got pissed off. I said that the book we were reading was biased, that I thought FDR was one of the greatest American presidents and that McCarthy wasn’t doing anyone a favor with his witchhunts of communists and gays in the State Department.

Until that point no one had ever said anything in class, it was nothing more than 2.5 hours of lecture, lecture, lecture. But after I said that the floodgates opened. We all engaged in lively debate over many issues but the underlying theme of whatever my professor said was the usual “Russia is bad.” In addition he called me a “pinko,” a “leftie,” a “crazy from the west coast” and more. All of which I can take and I know was at least partially in jest but all incorrect. I am hardly a communist and my foreign policy outlook is far more neoconservative than most people would suspect.

So last night he was droning on and on about Vietnam and how the parallels between the war in Iraq and Vietnam were strange and eerie, but not in the way you might suspect. He was saying that the war in Vietnam was lost because of a failure of will on the part of the American people as well as a strategy of “Vietnamization” of the war, in the same way we’re trying to “Iraqize” the war in Iraq. Then he went on to savage people who didn’t serve in the war in Vietnam for this reason or that.

That was the last straw. After his speech on serving in war I asked him “So what was your excuse for not serving in Vietnam?” He replied “I had a student deferment and then my draft number was too low and then the war ended” and he asked if I was satisfied with that answer. I replied “No, but why don’t we talk about how it seems like everyone who is in favor of war and carrying out offensive actions using military force never seems to have served in the military. Why don’t we talk about that?”

Now when I said that I was mainly thinking about Cheney and Bush, not him. But he got all red in the face and raised his voice and started rambling on about him carrying information to Solidarity in Poland in 1981 and blah, blah, blah. Then he told me he loved me but I was a “real pain in the ass.” I replied that class wasn’t an exercise in propaganda and as a student I was going to ask anything that came to mind - no matter the consequences.

I turn in my final next week, which I’ll have to Fed Ex to NYU because I’ll be leaving for San Francisco this Thursday. I hope he grades me on the quality of my analysis and writing but I can’t help wondering if he’s going to give me a lesser grade because I dared to challenge him in class. And the really funny thing is - I like this professor a lot and I’m considering asking him to be my faculty advisor next year!

While chatting with a friend in Seattle today I realized something: Since I moved to New York City I have never been to a gay bar/club in New York City. Not a single time.

UPDATE: A reader pointed out an earlier post from September where my friend Perry dragged me to The Eagle. I had forgotten about that! I stand corrected.

It’s not like it’s hard to find them - I live on Christopher Street after all - but it’s more that I don’t like the music in those places, the hyper-sexualized atmosphere, the rampant, obvious drug use, the sweaty half-naked bodies. It all brings back a lot of memories from the 5 years I lived in Seattle. I had a good time then and enjoyed living that life but now I go out to hang with friends in a civilized manner, I”m in a relationship and don’t need the temptation and I prefer places where we can get a table and chill while meeting new people in a non-sexualized way.

I’ve always been post-gay but I’m really post-gay now.

Earlier this year my blog site was receiving more than 25,000 hits a day due to people confusing me, Shane, with that other Shane, Shane Keough from The Real Housewives of Orange County Season 1. My hits went even higher after Jeana Keough mentioned (wrongly) my blog as the site that claimed her son was gay.

Well the hits are increasing again as Bravo begins promoting the second season starting on January 16th 2007.

Reading the new bios on Bravo’s site is fascinating:

Shane is home recuperating from a back injury.
Jeanna still hasn’t realized that the camera is adding way more than 15 pounds to her frame.
Psycho wife-beater (and probable closeted homo) Slade Smiley will soon “make serious life changes.”
Slutty Jo is “partying at the Playboy mansion.”
Frozen-face Botox-addict Lauri is dating an “extremely wealthy and conservative” man.
Rabbit-face nouveau-riche Vicki is still bleaching her ragged mane, trying to life down her past life as a frizzy-permed mother and hasn’t yet managed to lose her annoying midwestern accent.

I know even with my busy schedule at NYU I’ll be watching. I’m fond of trash TV and like the hit-whore I am I’m hoping more controversy brings more readers to my site.

On election night I heard an analyst say that if President Bush didn’t listen to the voters and change course in Iraq we were” heading for some real problems in this country.” Given that it’s looking like the president, bolstered by the usual blowhards of the right - the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Rush Limbaugh, The Weekly Standard etc… - is ready to reject all the suggestions of the Iraq Study Group the prediction of this particular analysts may come true.

A recent poll showed that 71% of the American people disapprove of the president’s handling of the war in Iraq. Republican Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine recently said “To ignore the message sent in the last election is to do so at our own peril, because the message was a resounding repudiation of the status quo with respect to Iraq.” Republican Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon said “I am at the end of my rope when it comes to a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up by the same bombs day after day” and then went on to call the president’s policy on Iraq “Absurd…. criminal.” And these are Republicans.

It appears the President has fallen back on the policy that has always served him well - to hunker down, keep the right-wing with you and let the storm blow over. But that policy failed him in November and led to Democrats taking control of both houses of Congress. Why would be think it’s going to work any better now?

Because the President is still living in a bubble, surrounded by fawning sycophants who feed him data designed to sooth his troubled temper and bolster his opinion that “we’re winning in Iraq.” Of course they don’t want to take the advice of the Iraq Study Group. To do so would expose them all as liars and worse - criminals. Taking the advice of the Iraq Study Group would mean they would have to start listening to the advice of “surrender monkeys” and they’ve shown time and time again that they will listen only to the echo chamber of their own opinions and those who agree with them - truth be damned.

We will be heading for real problems in this country and it looks like those problems will be arriving sooner rather than later. We have a president who has stated that he will do whatever he wants to regardless of what the American people say or want and that is going to be a recipe for disaster and violence and in the long-term is going to spell the end of the Republican party as a political force for years to come.

I recently ran across a list of the top 100 ranked Universities in the world. I was pleased to see that California universities represent 40% of the top 10:

1. Harvard University
2. Stanford University
3. Yale University
4. California Institute of Technology
5. University of California at Berkeley
6. University of Cambridge
7. Massachusetts Institute Technology
8. Oxford University
9. University of California at San Francisco
10. Columbia University

But I was shocked to learn that my old school, the University of Washington in Seattle, beats NYU by almost 20 places:

22. University of Washington at Seattle
23. University of California at San Diego
24. Johns Hopkins University
25. University College London
26. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne
27. University Texas at Austin
28. University of Wisconsin at Madison
29. Kyoto University
30. University of Minnesota Twin Cities
31. University of British Columbia
32. University of Geneva
33. Washington University in St. Louis
34. London School of Economics
35. Northwestern University
36. National University of Singapore
37. University of Pittsburgh
38. Australian National University
39. New York University

Scandalous. And for what I’m paying at NYU each semester I could attend UW for two years. Now THAT is quite disgusting!

I can’t believe I used to party every weekend like I did on Wednesday night/Thursday morning. Last night I went to bed at 10:00 PM and woke up thirsty several times. Each time I got up I felt as weak as a newborn kitten. I could barely pull myself out of my bed. Plus my brain isn’t functioning at its usual top-level, my triceps are extremely sore and my nose hurts.

Lesson learned - the days of Shane doing all-night parties involving massive amounts of drugs and drinking while much fewer than they used to be, must come to a complete halt. 35 is too old to be doing this kind of thing. While the venues have changed from Spintron and Neighbors to Bungalow 8 and Cielo the game remains the same and I’m taking myself out of it.

To celebrate the official end of classes a friend and myself went out to Cielo last night for Roots. Great fun and good times were had by all. I left before everyone else and met them back at my apartment. Accompanying my friend Raul were two Spanish guys - Rodolfo and Ruiz.

Ruiz’s passport was stolen the day before and his flight was today so we spent the morning calling Air France and the Spanish Consulate-General in New York to find out how he would get a new passport. They all left at around 9:45 AM after which I was finally able to get to bed.