Several years ago, I tried to teach myself to juggle.

I bought a book Juggling for the Complete Klutz (which came with a set of three bean bags to practise with), and tried seriously to learn how to do it. I never got beyond the second chapter. I just didn't have the coordination for it. No big surprise, really. Even in comparison to white heterosexual men, I'm still just a marginal dancer. It's not that I can't feel the rhythm deep down in my soul... I just can't shake my groove thang, get footloose, and do the hand-jive, all at once. It's too much to keep track of.

One of my friends used to refer to me as "the absent-minded professor", which is both an affectionately patronising stereotype and a Disney movie starring Fred MacMurray. To this day it bugs me that I've never actually achieved professorship, but I find the moniker endearing, because it acknowledges my (objectively confirmed) brilliance, whilst recognising my greatest weakness: my inability to keep track of things.

This wouldn't be so much of a problem, except that I have a tendency to let my life become more complicated than I can handle. I have a lot of interests. I'm into computers. And not just one operating system, but several (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, Netware, BeOS, etc). I like the visual arts. Not just drawing and graphic design and photography, but a little interior design and interface design as well. I love to write. Whether it's factual information on Wikipedia, insightful commentary here on GodsExBoyfriend.com, or creative storytelling, I think (and I'm told) that I'm pretty good at it. I have an aptitude and interest in the law. I scored better than 90% of law-school applicants when I took the entrance exam on a lark. Which is to say nothing of almost minoring in Philosophy, considering a career in politics, and a stint serving as an amateur social worker for gay and lesbian teenagers. Hell, just look at the categories for this blog! There's too much that I want to get involved in!

A big part of my problem is that I don't trust people to do things for me. Mostly that's because I've been burned when I did. Hell, I'm probably smarter than them, and with my diverse interests, there's a good chance that I could do the job better than them. So I do.

I host my own web sites, running my own server, using an operating system and other software that I can configure and modify myself. Hardware failure? I replace it myself. Power failure? I have my own generator. There are still a few links in the chain that I'm powerless over (e.g. the internet itself), but for the most part, I have the ability to keep my own systems up, all by myself. Which means that when there's a problem, and my systems aren't online... it's entirely my fault... and my problem.

I have more domain names registered than I'll admit. I get an idea for a site I'd like to develop, discover that no one's registered the domain yet, and I grab it. But I don't have time to actually develop it. Earth-Zero.com just sits there. GraphicNovels.info was just a place-holder until recently. And against my better judgment, I just volunteered to be webmaster for yet another web site.

Meanwhile I'm trying to get around to realising my childhood dream of writing and drawing comics. I have scripts for half a dozen different stories, and ideas for a few dozen more. Some are downright brilliant, if I say so myself. But how and when am I going to produce them all?

Which is to say nothing of my day job, which I'm trying to get converted from a simple not-quite-full-time techie gig, into a full-time position in which I'll help to set direction and policy, and work on a more creative level. Like I need a reason to stay later at the office.

What I need to do is to focus. I need to simplify my life.

The irony is that I've already done that - or allowed it to happen - pretty extensively. I don't have a family (except the parents and siblings I was born with). I don't have a spouse, or even a boyfriend. I have few friends. Dumped the church ages ago. I don't even have the activism-based social life that I once had. And even without all that, it's still too much.

Which is a somewhat round-about way of getting to the point (because I wasn't really sure of it when I started writing this) that I'm officially deprecating God's ex-Boyfriend. It's obviously been neglected a bit for a while now, and I need to acknowledge that and let it go. I'm not going to take the site down, and I'll probably still post things here from time to time as the spirit moves me. But it's officially off my "current activities" list.

Thanks for reading. Cheers!

Last week I was surprised to see a killing take place across the street from my house. I was sitting on my porch reading the newspaper when it happened. At first I didn't even realize what I was seeing. But a few moments later, there was no mistaking it. I'd just seen a hawk kill a mouse.

I'm not used to seeing birds of prey here in the city. My neighborhood is home to lots of squirrels, chipmunks, the occasional racoon, some mice, a fair number of crows, and more songbirds than you can count. We even had an honest-to-god wild turkey roaming the streets here several months ago. But not a lot of hunters. Which is why this took me a bit by surprise.

The hawk took his meal to a nearby tree and proceeded to eat it. I didn't have a great view of it, and I don't actually know a hawk from a falcon, so I can't be any more specific about what kind it was. It was fairly small, about the size of a crow, which is why I didn't immediately recognize it as a bird of prey when it touched down on the lawn across the street, then took off.

OK, so last night I turned on the TV to see what TiVo had recorded for me, and in among the new Fall-season episodes was a program that had been on PBS about the family of red-tailed hawks that took up residence in Central Park back in the 1990s. It was an interesting program, describing how the couple nested on one of the buildings that surround the park, how their children learned to fly, and so on. It also talked about the phenomenon that surrounded them, the throngs of people who gathered to watch them, follow their progress week after week, and generally treat them like a movie-star couple or British royals. These people gushed about how amazing it was to see something so truly wild in the city.

I thought about the hawk I'd seen the week before. And my own reaction to it.

Yes, it was noteworthy, and I thought some of the same sorts of things that these New Yorkers said. But after watching my hawk for several minutes as he ate, and snapping a few photos in hopes of identifying what kind of hawk he was... I moved on. Because it really wasn't that big a deal. I see hawks out hunting all the time on the highway between here and Lansing. It's not that unusual to see them along certain roads around here, like the one going around the nearby lake. I've even seen an eagle. We have wild-ness here. It's part of our lives.

But apparently the people of New York City are so separated from it, that when it does appear in their lives, it's a huge Event. How sad.