“Mommy, they are just like me.”
My oldest son is six years old and in love for the first time. He is in love with Blaine from Glee.
For those who don’t know Blaine is a boy…a gay boy, the boyfriend of one of the main characters, Kurt.
This isn’t a ‘he thinks Blaine is really cool’ kind of love. It is a mooning at a picture of Blaine’s face for a half hour followed by a wistful “He’s so pretty” kind of love.
He loves the episode where two boys kiss. My son will call people in from other parts of the house to make sure they don’t miss his ‘favorite part.’ He’s been known to rewind it and watch it over again…and force other to, as well, if he doesn’t think people have been paying enough attention.
This infatuation doesn’t bother me or his father. We live in a very hip-liberal neighborhood, many of our friends are gay, and idea of having a gay son isn’t something that bothers either of us. Our son is going to be who he is, and it is our job to love him. End of story.
He is also six. Six year olds get obsessed with all kinds of things. This might not mean anything at all. We always joke that he’s either gay, or we have the best blackmail material in the history of mankind when he’s a 16 year old straight boy. (Take that naked bath time pictures!)
Then the other day we were traveling across the state listening to the Warblers album (of course), and in the middle of Candles, my son pipes up from the back seat.
“Mommy, Kurt and Blaine are boyfriends.”
“Yes, they are,” I affirm.
“They don’t like kissing girls. They just kiss boys.”
“That’s true.”
“Mommy, they are just like me.”
“That’s great, baby. You know I love you no matter what?”
“I know…” I could hear him rolling his eyes at me.
When we got home I recapped this conversation to his Dad, and we stood simply looking into each other’s eyes for a moment. Then we smiled.
“So if at 16 he wants to make a big announcement at the dinner table, we can say ‘You told us when you were six. Pass the carrots’ and he’ll be disappointed we stole his big dramatic moment,” my husband says with a laugh and hugs me.
Only time will tell if my son is gay, but if he is I am glad he’s mine. I am glad he has been born into our family. A family full of people who will love and accept him. People who will never want him to change. With parents who will look forward to dancing at his wedding.
And I have to admit, Blaine would be a really cute son-in-law.
cwnl:
Isaac Newton’s Personal Notebooks Go Digital
Who says you can’t hoard anything in this now technological world? Here’s something for the science history buffs:
The largest collection of Isaac Newton’s papers has gone digital, committing to open-access posterity the works of one of history’s greatest scientist.
Among the works shared online by the Cambridge Digital Library are Newton’s own annotated copy of Principia Mathematica and the ‘Waste Book,’ the notebook in which a young Newton worked out the principles of calculus.
Other of his myriad accomplishments include the laws of gravity and motion, a theory of light — pictured above are notes on optics — and his construction of the first reflecting telescope.
Newton was also notoriously idiosyncratic and irascible, obsessed with the occult and vicious towards scientific rivals; a full account of his life and science can be found in James Gleick’s Isaac Newton, and a partial but entertaining fictionalization in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. But the papers come straight from the master.
“Anyone, wherever they are, can see at the click of a mouse how Newton worked and how he went about developing his theories and experiments,” said Grant Young, the library’s digitization manager, in a press release. “Before today, anyone who wanted to see these things had to come to Cambridge. Now we’re bringing Cambridge University Library to the world.”
Approximately 4,000 pages of material are available now, and thousands more will be uploaded in coming months.
This small clip from Seinfeld does an incredible job of explaining why Facebook, and frankly all social media, is such an irresistible life-resource hog. (via Jerry Seinfeld Explains Facebook’s Success in 1992!)
