Turning 26

I approached my 26th birthday with apprehension.
A year ago, I sat at at an outdoor table at the Maritime's La Bottega with about 10 of my best frends and my sweet hot boyfriend. It was a great night because I felt a lot of love, and I was in New York where I felt I belonged.
...BUT the EX and I broke up a month later. I now live in city I have mixed feelings about and I've been dating a string of "nice" but stupid guys.
So I knew right off the bat this birthday would be different.
No big party, no close group of friends, and no EX to carry me home after one too many shots of Patron.
What I had was two options.
1. Spending my birthday with my parents. Oh dear god.
2. Spending my birthday with my few friends in LA who all are on the brink of marriage and whose sense of adventures seems to have died.

So I looked at those two options and booked a flight to San Francisco...where at least I had Jake, my bartending hottie, where GAY PRIDE festivites filled the city, and where I thankfully DID NOT HAVE TO DRIVE.

25 was a hard year for me. I lost one of my best friends and my EX and I broke up. I left my bar job, and moved to LA.
So I sorta wanted a low-key birthday, and I knew that would happen in SF.

I slept alot and attended very few Gay Pride activities becasue frankly the event scares me.
I used to throw gay parties at Stanford for the gay community; so one of my best friends suggested that I should look into planning a city's gay pride event.

My response:
oh dear god jules, i hate gay people, i mean i like myself and my
friends, but the rest of them are awful.
if i planned gay pride parades, id have to institute dress codes and
exclude all sorts of ridiculous embarassments.
if you wear assless chaps, then you won't be allowed to march.
think more marc jacobs and less cirque du soliel.
----

But don't listen to this queen, because GAY PRIDE is supposed to be about loving thyself and self-expression...it's just that I find the whole affair to be tacky and slightly ironic.
And I'm all for costuming... but assless chaps?

Whatever.
I can't even write about GAY PRIDE without feeling conflicted about it. What's GAY PRIDE even mean anymore?
We're catty shits to one another. We propagate vicious body facism and elitism. We're fairly segregated along class and racial lines, and most of us live in gay ghettos.
And we celebrate pride over what? The new season of Queer Eye?

Most of the guys I know use Gay Pride as an excuse to go to big parties, get fucked up, and hook up with a couple of out-of-towners. Which I'm all for and while it is an excercise in faggotry, I don't know if its anything we should be calling Gay Pride.

But whatever, this rant isn't anything new to anyone.

I ran into my old hairstylist, Jay, at GIANT, the tea-dance, and he blessedly now seems off the crack because he has stopped shaking.
A hideous looking tranny walked by to which he remarked, "Look at the tranimal."

So that my friends is the word of the week, "TRANIMAL."

I woke up Monday morning to about 15 messages from friends, family, and my EX. All very sweet voicemails which reminded me that I'm a very lucky guy.

I may not have spent this birthday with my posse of friends, nor am I in the city in which I love, but after my stupid car accident last week, I'm very thankful to be alive and to have the great friends that I do in my life.

And SF was a suprisingly refreshing break from the ugliness of LA. Who would have ever thought I'd be happy to be in SF?! But I was... so I'm taking this opportunity to thank my friends for extending their love to me on my birthday. It means a lot to me.