blinker

I have been interviewed by

serenejournal. If you wish to be interviewed by me, leave a comment and I'll come up with 5 special and unique questions just for you.

1. Who was the first person you came out to? Why did you choose that person, and how did it go?

The first person I came out to was my best friend in high school. I chose her because it was senior year and we were both doing internships in New York City and I was stealthily reading The Advocate on the train ride home when she sat down next to me. I managed to hide the magazine, but I felt really weird about it so I wrote her an 11-page email in which I outed myself thoroughly and explained a lot of the nasty stuff that coming out was doing to my head.

It went fine. She was totally okay with it and had sort of figured things out by then anyway. She's still a very dear friend even though we're not as much in contact as we used to be.

2. What are the best and worst things about living in Boston?

The best: It's a beautiful city. It's small enough that you run into people you know everywhere. It's got great restaurants and bookstores. There's a lot more to the gay community than bars. It's a good place to be in my line of work because there's a lot of innovative stuff going on.

The worst: The trains don't run all night. The city's not been able to support a dyke bar in a very long time. We get about two months more winter than I really need. And being from New York, I suspect that there's a small part of me that may always feel like I'm from Mars here (unless I suddenly find myself rooting for the Red Sox, in which case I'll know I've been assimilated).

3. What's one way in which you would change your life, if your aim was to be living more in line with your internal dreams/hopes/ethics/integrity?

Definitely more time for volunteer work. I used to be better about that, but it's been harder to find opportunities that work well with my schedule for the past year or so.

4. Usenet: Timesuck or valuable life-enhancer?

Both. Nowadays it's far more in the timesuck category and I'm not reading very much of it. But a good number of my favorite people in the world are folks I met via Usenet.

5. Do you have any idea why I thought you were a lawyer for the first two years I knew you?

No! Was it something in particular, or did you just get that impression?

I sometimes joke that I was raised by lawyers, because both of my parents practice law. When I was in junior high, I was convinced that I wanted to be a criminal lawyer and I read voraciously on the subject. Had I not discovered computer science during my first year of college, I might have wound up going to law school.