NO MORE WHINING... REMEMBER?

I went to visit my grandmother while en route to my birthday attendance of the Bear Event. We talked about a lot of things, she said I looked much better, and I told her I was in love. She has been so supportive all along the way that I thought she would be glad.

I actually got the opposite impression. When I left she gave me a long stare and said that I probably knew what she wished me for my birthday: she hoped I would do better in the coming year. Those weren't the exact words, but there was something about the way she looked at me, and the way my news failed to elicit any response but that, that made me think she did not hold high hopes for her birthday wishes. From my own point of view, it's hard to see how things could go any worse...

That makes me think twice about taking the Goat Man to visit my mother, which he has sort of expressed an interest in doing, and I had sort of offered to do. There are a couple of hurdles here:

1) Telling my mother I'm "seeing someone." She is not an idiot, and knows what that means. We all lived through my sister's shopping around for a man after her divorce, and many were the comments on the men she chose... I'm not looking forward to all that chatter behind the scenes. And I have a pretty good idea of how happy any of my family will be for me if it requires them to actually contemplate what we do. It's been made pretty clear across the board that they'd rather not, thank you. (sigh) Leave the rest of them out: how many 81-year old people really want to know about their children's sex lives?

2) Introducing the Goat Man to my mother. He has many sterling qualities, and actually shares many of them with my mother [how weird is that?], but he is a Surfer Dude at heart. It could be a bit of a stretch for my mother.

3) Introducing my mother to the Goat Man. This could be almost as hard, just from the other end of the telescope...

4) Travel: It's bad enough getting the Goat Man to come here. Now glue on several more hours travel to make the meeting of mountains happen, and, no matter when it happens, it could be a weekend about sitting in a car. Hmmmmmm.

5) The real barrier for me, I think, is the resultant "chatter." My family, and especially the bits of it that live close to my mother, are Complete Gossip Hounds. It will take about five minutes for them to settle on the official post mortem on our visit, and about ten more for the rest of the scattered siblings to get an update. SHEESH.

Well, as someone once remarked:
sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof...

My friendly StatCounter tells me that I have had passing visits from the US Navy, Portugal, Egypt, Venezuela, and Billings, MT. Best Gay Blogs sent me someone from Uruguay. And someone from Stanford University came looking for Francois Sagat. It's a small world, after all.
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