That stranger he has found, this man could be my chance--

Day two of Project: Actually Graduate From Grad School. I think that I've actually found a method that works for me. Rather than trying to work as much as possible, I'm limiting how much I'm allowed to work. When I get to that time of day, I set the time on my cell phone for one hour, start it ticking and then set it down next to me and let the screen go dark. At that point, it's a race against a clock, since I know that when that timer goes off, I have to stop working, no matter how little I've accomplished.

Golly, but it seems to be working so far. Rules, limitations and punishment! Oh, yeah!

I've been being a pretty distressingly responsible, well-rounded person in general lately. Start the day with a workout! Read the New York Times and Merriam-Webster Word of the Day while eating breakfast! Practice piano for an hour and a half! Do an online Spanish lesson because I bought six-month's time with a Groupon and I'm going to get my money's worth, by tarnation! Get other stuff done in the time in between! Don't touch those online recreational activities until any earlier than 9:30pm!

And keep writing those fucking blog posts! Speaking of fucking blog posts, I'm sure that a lot of people have Anderson Cooper fatigue by now. I don't care. More on that later. But first...

Breakfast for lunch! A grilled sweet sausage (store-bought), homemade home fries and a leftover homemade buttermilk biscuit. After having picked up the sausage because it was discounted, I've been looking for a reason to use it, and having a bowl of rendered bacon grease, pairing it with home fries seemed like the natural way to go. I love a good hot breakfast, but damn, I am so not into actually cooking a breakfast that takes more than 10 minutes to prepare. Breakfast for dinner is great, too, but I prefer to have relatively light dinners, with my mid-day meal being the largest. And so: breakfast for lunch.

The home fries were pretty much perfection. I washed and chopped up three medium-sized potatoes into tiny chunks, no more than a quarter-inch thick. I gave them a rinse in cool water because some website said to do that, and it seemed like a really easy way to seem like I knew what to do in a kitchen. It probably washes off excess starch or something. I honestly have no idea.

The small size was key because I didn't want to parboil the potatoes, and cooking too-big chunks of potato takes forever and risks them ending up undercooked. I basically heated the potatoes in as little oil as possible -- just enough to coat the pan surface and keep thing from sticking -- until they were just about cooked through. Then, I dumped them into a separate bowl, refreshed the pan with just a little more oil and put the chopped Vidalia onion in. Those got cooked until they were turning transparent.

Then: the bacon grease. Lumped in a big, generous spoonful, then added the potatoes back into the pan, stirring them up to get everything coated and evenly distributed. Sprinkled some oregano and coarse black on top and stirred it all up again. (At least, I think it was oregano. At one point, my mom sent me a couple of ziploc baggies of dried herbs. I'm sure she told me what they were, but I never labeled the bags and have forgotten. Once in a while, I just throw a bunch of one of them into something because it seems like a good idea.) Then I just let them be still for a while over the heat so that they could brown and crisp up. When the sides in contact in the heat were looking good, I stirred things up again, so additional sides could brown. Two chopped red bell peppers got added last, since I wanted those to stay fairly crisp.

I used my grill pan to cook the sausage, which takes longer than expected to get it cooked all the way through. Any grease still on the sausage was soaked up by the biscuit.

As for that sausage, it had been on sale at the co-op due to being at its sell-by date, so I'd bought it without knowing a single thing about it. It turned out to be too salty for my taste, which isn't surprising, since I use hardly any salt when cooking. (Generally, I don't add any salt to anything, except when baking because I'm afraid that things will explode if I don't follow baking recipes to the letter.) There are leftovers, and I'll probably only use half a sausage for my next meal, chopping it up and mixing it in with the home fries.

Which are, I feel I should restate, pretty much perfection.

Speaking of perfection, I've long considered Anderson Cooper to be pretty close to it. He's one of the points in the triangle of the person I want to be (the other two being John Barrowman and Tracy Letts). Smart, professional, stylish, and just so very classy and cool. His officially coming out has been the buzz of the internet for the past couple of days, and the last thing the world is interested in hearing is yet another nobody offering up their opinion on the matter.

Here's mine anyways.

One of my pet peeves when a public figure comes out are dismissive comments that are meant to show how just how clever that particular member of the peanut gallery is. "So-and-so is gay! In other news, the sky is blue."

First of all, if you don't know the individual personally, I'm sorry, but you don't know. Now, realistically, it can be pretty clear if there's something in a person's life about which they're not being open or honest. But the implication that, well, obviously, you could just tell that someone is gay? What does that mean? That you can check off a certain number of items on a list and if their score is over 50, bingo, they must be gay? Yes, yes, there's that certain je ne sais quoi as well as certain recognizable actions that a person usually takes when they're not revealing a particular something to the public. But you know what? You really didn't know. Not for sure. And your cleverness that your guess was correct is actually not impressive.

Second of all, maybe you don't care. And thank you for taking the time to let all of us know how much you don't care. It really shows how much you truly don't care. But even if you don't care, there are a lot of people who do. And while I firmly support your right not to care, I also believe that it's important for you to understand why some other people care very, very much.

The fact is, for all of the progress that has been made, it's not a welcoming world out there.

And we're not just talking about the "Kill the Gays" bill that garnered so much attention in Uganda this past year, something which many of us can mourn how tragic that is while emotionally distancing ourselves, telling ourselves that it's somewhere so far away, so foreign. (PS: it's not.) And we're not just talking about kids being driven to suicide because of brutal bullying due to their perceived sexual orientation or gender identity, where that's not nice, of course, but it's something that doesn't just affect gays and besides, it's a social issue. (PS: none of that changes the fact that it's fucking terrible and needs to stop.)

Right now in Ukraine, a bill is coming around that, "If passed, it would amend existing laws on ‘the protection of morals’, media and publishing, as well as the criminal code, banning virtually all information on gay and bisexual issues and criminalizing LGBT human rights work in Ukraine." The spotlight has been on Ukraine lately, especially since a gay-rights organization's leader was brutally attacked after the first Kiev pride parade was cancelled due to threats of violence.

(You can sign an online petition protesting the bill here.)

This comes after a law was passed in St. Petersburg, Russia, outlawing the "promotion of homosexuality among minors" -- where people, gay and straight alike, have been arrested just for protesting said law.

Those are just a couple out of many, many things that can weigh on a person's mind.

It's not a welcoming world out there.

If one has any interest in the matter, I think it's owed to Mr. Cooper to actually read his entire thoughtful statement, which is included in a blog post by Andrew Sullivan, rather than just the second-hand headlines announcing his announcement.

"I’ve begun to consider whether the unintended outcomes of maintaining my privacy outweigh personal and professional principle. [...] I do think there is value in standing up and being counted. I’m not an activist, but I am a human being and I don't give that up by being a journalist."

It means a lot to know someone, and to know that someone isn't ashamed. The fact that people have reasons for coming out goes hand in hand with the fact that people have reasons for not coming out. And there's something to telling those reasons for not coming out -- fear, shame, being abandoned by family and friends, having one's career be negatively affected, having religions tell you that you're evil, having the government tell you to your face that you're not deserving of equal rights under law -- to go fuck themselves.

And it means a lot to know that you're not alone. And not only are you not alone and not only are there people who are like you, but there are people who are like you who are fucking awesome.

And it means a lot to have other people -- people who might be creating or voting on those laws that affect your rights, or who might just be the neighbor who will be either more or less welcoming to you -- see those fucking awesome people, some for whom they feel they have some sort of personal connection, even if they don't actually know them, and to maybe now feel like they now know someone like you. Because even when it's not a matter of principle for some, a matter that's personal can suddenly take on a whole new meaning.

It's difficult to imagine what coming out must be like for a public figure. I've never come out- wait, no. I've come out twice, neither time with negative results, but the experiences were nevertheless so emotionally distressing for me that I repressed the memories, genuinely blocking then from my mind to the point where I believed that they never happened until, years later, I was pondering the fact that I had never come out and realized that that was, in fact, not true. At least I'm pretty sure that it's not true. Honestly, those memories are still incredibly surreal to me, in a nightmare-ish sort of way that keeps on encouraging me to go back to forgetting about them.

But coming out is a moment of intense vulnerability. You're exposing something that you really don't have to. So why do it? Because it does mean something. Maybe not to everyone, but to someone, it can mean so much. And maybe even play its part in changing the world.

Living an honest life requires courage.

That's something that I respect and don't want to forget.