Doraville!

For about six months after I got married (and the three months before, shhh, don't tell my parents), my wife and I lived in the delightful Atlanta suburb of Doraville which was immortalized in song by the Atlanta Rhythm Section. Truer words have never been spoken than "New York's fine, but it ain't Doraville."

In Tom Wolfe's overwrought sprawling 1998 novel A Man In Full the Stoic (literally, he reads Epictetus) hero finds himself working as a dishwasher in a Vietnamese restaurant in Doraville. Wolfe goes into his trademarked level of detail about this Asian-American enclave. This came as a great shock to me since when I lived in Atlanta the only Vietnamese restaurant was a lonely outpost in Midtown. During the interim a thriving multi-ethnic corridor had erupted along Buford Highway.

Also, when I lived in Atlanta, the MARTA rail system had two lines, the East-West line and the North-South line which then ended at Brookhaven. Since then the North-South Line has been expanded and split to include a line north along the Georgia 400 corridor to Sandy Springs causing the original North Line ending in Doraville to be renamed the Northeast Branch. With there being another spur on the East-West Line, MARTA decided to ease the confusion with the compass point names and go with color coded lines similar to those used by Washington DC's Metro system or the Bay Area's BART.



Only when they picked the colors, they called the route ending in Doraville the Yellow Line, causing Asian-American advocacy groups to howl in umbrage. It seems the Powers That Be Were tone-deaf to the racial implications of the color. Other places haven't had this problem. For example D.C.'s vestigial and shrinking Chinatown is served by the Yellow, Red, and Green lines. But under a hail of bad publicity, the City Too Busy Too Hate has renamed it the Gold Line.

It's just funny to find my former little sleepy burb engulfed in such controversy. All I know is that when I am trudging down I-85 towards the Tom Moreland Interchange, aka Spaghetti Junction, I just can't keep myself from humming:

Doraville, touch of country in the city
Doraville, it ain't much, but it's home

Pi-Mile

In my BooksFirst post this month, I made fun of so-called "stunt journalists" that do things that they otherwise wouldn't just so they can write about the experience. I have to confess that I am a stunt blogger. I frequently pick activities based on their blogworthiness. I'm in Atlanta this weekend for Family Weekend. While the ostensible purpose of the trip is to see our son, who is showing a severe lack of homesickness in every way, I'm going to be able to squeeze several blogposts out of the trip, including this one.

While out of town, I try to vary my exercise routine to match what is available. The GT Hotel and Conference Center where we are staying so as to be within walking distance of all the activities, has a decent workout room, but the weather is too nice to stay inside.



In 2007 I blogged about Pi Day which is March 14th every year. I mentioned in that post that Georgia Tech sponsors a 5K race every year called the Pi-Miler because it is 3.14 miles in length. They have made it a year round activity with the creation of the Larry Brown Pi Mile Running Trail. The sheer geekiness of concept is just genius.

The trail is really just a route along existing sidewalks that goes around the campus and passes nearly all the major attractions including Bobby Dowd Stadium (at Historic Grant Field), the Tech Tower, the Student Center, the Campus Recreation Center (which was built around the 1996 Olympic Aquatic Center) and Alexander Memorial Coliseum (aka the ThrillerDome aka The Tit).

It seemed like a perfect route for a morning jog. This summer I started jogging some mornings and have built up to about a mile at a time. Over three miles just seemed to much to even imagine. But what a cool blogpost it would make. At first, my goal was just to get as far as I could without walking. By the time I had gone from Fifth and Techwood to the CRC, I realized I was over halfway there.

So I decided to see if I could make the whole circuit. Even when my iPod locked up, I resisted the temptation to stop and rest. The Fates were tempting me, but I refused to give in. The course makes it easy to set smaller goals along the way. There are sidewalk markers every quarter mile in addition to the arrow imbeds to make sure you take the correct turns. All you have to do is press on another quarter mile thirteen times in a row. By the time I reached the north end of Ferst Street in the shadow of Ted Turner's empire, I knew I could make.

I passed tailgaters setting up for the game and high school bands unloading for their part of the halftime show. And them I got back to Fifth Street and had just one uphill block to go. I poured out my remaining energy and tagged the sign where I had started and gasped in triumph.

It took me about forty minutes to make the full circuit, which is hardly a marathon ready pace. But I had never run more than a mile and a half at once before. And what kept me going was the thought of how lame it would be to blog that I had to stop and rest. By making it a continuous run, the stunt had become blogworthy. I had run 3.14 miles just so I could brag about it on the internet.

So who says that blogging can't be good for your health?

BlatantCommentWhoring™: What have you done just to have something to blog about?

Dorm Rat

Dorm rooms haven’t changed much in the twenty-five years since I went to Tech. In fact, they are the same exact dorms. All the new dorms built for the 1996 Olympics are on other parts of campus. My son’s dorm is one of the campus's old WPA era projects that may have been updated once or twice since FDR was president, not that they look it.

Let’s take a look at what a modern dorm has or needs.

1. Loft bed with linens. These dorm rooms are too small for all the furniture to fit. At about 14 feet by 10 feet, it is barely bigger than the room he had all to himself at home. Loft beds are the only way to fit everything in. All summer my wife lurked BigBoxOfSheets for all sorts of linens and towels and accessories. What you don’t see under this very stylish bedspread is the bedbug proof mattress cover that hermetically seals in all the bugs, mites, and cooties that may have been left behind by the previous resident.
   
   
2. Three drawer dresser. This sub-Ikea dresser is meant to hold all the clothes that a modern college student needs. For my son that means several pairs of jeans, carpenter pants, and lots and lots of black ironic tee-shirts.
   
   
3. Study Desk. As if this will ever get used. The drawers are stuffed with enough office supplies bought by my wife to last the entire four (or more) years. We got scissors, a stapler, printer paper, folders, binders, pens, pencils, and whatever else was in the back-to-school aisle of BigBoxOfOfficeSupplies.
   
   
4. Flat Screen Television. We grabbed this off-brand 720p HDTV from BigBoxOfElectronics under the rationalization that he needed a larger screen than his laptop for the heavy detail number crunching that an engineering student has to do. While it seems to be a luxury, it cost less than the VCR I bought to tape Live Aid with (and that isn't even adjusting for inflation).
   
   Behind the dresser is a cable outlet that funnels over a hundred channels including ESPN, CNN, four HBOs, and nearly a dozen foreign language stations that I couldn’t even recognize. This is the biggest shock and change in dorm life that I have to wrap my head around. If I had that many entertainment choices when I was in college, I'm not sure I would have ever made it to class.
   
   
5. Printer/Scanner. Something nobody had when I was in college. I had the old electric Smith-Carona that fit under the bed. Students now have more firepower on their desk than a Kinkos used to have.
   
   
6. DVD. When I bought the big screen TV and surround system for my living room I had a leftover DVD player that I had bought for forty bucks a couple of years ago. Rather than toss it out, we’ve handed it down.
   
   
7. Lamp. This one I will give my wife credit for. She found a five bulb lamp that has flexible heads so that the kid can illuminate the desk, the room, and the bed all from one central location. We even fitted it with compact fluorescents so that all that wattage doesn't turn the room into a sauna.
   




8. Wardrobe. The dorm room has no closet, so all the big and bulky items have to fit in here. The left side is for hanging clothes which includes all the clothes he is unlikely to wear since they aren’t jeans or black ironic tee-shirts. The other side has shelves so that includes all his toiletries and personal items. On the bottom shelf is a tool set from BigBoxOfLumber that has enough weaponry in it for him to build a room within his room.
   
   
9. Bookshelf. While my son was at band orientation, we ran out and picked up the items too big to haul from home. The bookcase came unassembled from BigBoxWithRedCircleOnIt. Took me about an hour to get it all put together and in place. Not seen in the picture is the several hundred dollars worth of textbooks that don’t even fill up the bottom shelf.
   
   
10. Refrigerator. The dorm doesn’t allow anything bigger than 5 cubic feet. After doing comparison shopping at all the BigBoxes around town, we settled on this hundred dollar 3.2 cubic foot one that would seem capable of holding all the beer a college student should ever need.
    
    
11. Storage Box. This was left behind as the empty holder of all the other junk we hauled down. Perhaps it will fill up with something else. Perhaps not.
    
    
12. DVD Collection. My son took his pick of the family movies that he decided he wanted. Included in the list is Catch Me If You Can, The Matrix, Ferris Buehler’s Day Off, Accepted, School Of Rock, and Flight Of The Conchords. And I haven’t even watched all the episodes of Conchords.
    
    
13. Water Jug. For marching band practice. It gets hot in the Georgia sun.
    
    
14. Family Picture. To remind him what his parents look like.
    
    
15. Movie Poster. You have to have a little wall flair for decoration. I prefer not to read too much into the selection of this particular movie.
    
    
16. Big Comfie Chair. I expect this to be the second most used piece of furniture in the room.
    
    
17. Proud Dad. What can I say?

What is missing from my days as a dorm rat is the big honkin' stereo. Those have been replaced by iPods with micro-speakers.

BlatantCommentWhoring: What else does a dorm need?

The Peachtree Run

It's hard to believe that it has been twenty years since I grabbed the sheepskin, pulled up stakes, loaded up the wagon and moved my mixed metaphors out of Atlanta. I only lived there five years while in college, but I still consider it home. Every year or so I find an excuse to come through and stay a day or two. When I do, I frequently find myself doing something I call the Peachtree Run. Not to be confused with the famous Peachtree Road Race (which I understand is having some drought related site issues).

No, the Peachtree Run is a drive up or down THE Peachtree Street (my son counted 42 variations of Peachtree in the GPS database) between downtown and Lenox. I look out the window and try to notice all the things that have changed as well as remember the things that are still there. The population sign at the Darlington is still there but not lit.

On this trip, the prominent trend was vacant lots ready for new highrises. A big one was in Buckhead across from the Cheesecake Factory where the last of the storefront Buckhead bars used to be. It's about to become a luxury shopping development called ironically enough The Streets of Buckhead. In my college days, and for much longer, Buckhead was the cheap drinking district where one-price drink and drown specials were prevalent. On a Friday night, I was much more likely to be found further south at Oxford Books, but plenty of people I knew knew which bar had the best specials which night. My brother's bachelor party was spent bar hopping through every faux dive within stumbling distance of Rio Bravo Cantina.

One of the landmarks was a building with a bump-out that used to hold a ferris wheel. At one time it was called Buckhead Beach and used to change names and themes annually. It settled down for a long time as Tex-Mex place called Three Dollar Cafe. Now it's an abandoned husk waiting for the wrecking ball.

In midtown right near 14th street a strip of gay bars is similarly shuttered with construction activity imminent. My favorite place around 14th Street was Steve's Ice Cream which got renamed Gorin's after a trademark dispute with the Steve's in Boston. It began as a walk-up ice cream stand featuring Ben and Jerry's style ultra-rich ice cream with odd flavors. My favorite was amaretto almond. You could nearly get drunk off the amaretto in it. When the developers bought the block, Gorin's became a diner featuring gourmet sandwiches. There's now a high-rise on the original site, but we found a Gorin's franchise in CNN Center. Alas, ice cream has been completely eradicated from the menu and it serves only sandwiches.

The Peachtree Run is metaphorical and applies to all the parts of Atlanta I used to haunt. We had Sunday brunch in Little Five Points, which has maintained it's hippie counter culture vibe, at a place called Front Page News. While the waitstaff had all the mandatory levels of ink and piercings, the clientele was buppies and families with multiple strollers in tow. While walking back to the car, I noticed that famed feminist bookstore Charis Books had moved off of Moreland Avenue itself into a house just off the main road. Even the landmarks start to shift subtly.

In the name of progress and renewal, big chains come in and start to make everyplace look like White Marsh or Tysons Corner or some other ersatz small town center. Ponce de Leon Boulevard which had tons of quirky restaurants is now littered with chains like Chipotle and Moes. Even along gritty Moreland Avenue, someone put in a giant big box center with a Best Buy and Target and Barnes and Noble. It's an improvement to the area, but the parking lot looked just like the strip malls in Alpharetta. The Ma(u)lling of America rolls on in fits and starts erasing the old and paving over anything independent and unique. That is the way time just chips away at your memories.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: What favorite place have you seen change with time?

College Cold Showers

Since I spilled the beans about those frisky geezers, it’s only fair that we check out the other end of the demographic. This is back to school season and parents of college kids are fearful that they are dropping their kids off at a four-year orgy and footing the bill for it. They have less to fear than they think according to the writers of the IvyGate blog. In their Sunday Washington Post Outlook piece called College Sex: Going Home Alone, they let on that perhaps things are not as wild as all those teen sex comedies make it out to be. In their words:

But as the Class of 2011 settles in on campus this month, we're betting that the students are discovering the cold-shower truth: The type of action they're likely to get is more hanky than panky.

I have no idea how the hanky line got past a clueless editor, and they also turn “heat up a Hot Pocket” into an innuendo-laden metaphor I really don’t want to explicate. Still, it’s good to know that things haven’t changed much since my college days.

One of the college secrets they let leak is the complete ambiguity of the phrase “hook-up”. At least two books have been written raising the alarm. WaPo writer Laura Sessions Stepp, who discovered the phrase “wingman” about a decade after beer commercials did, wrote Unhooked about on-campus lust. White-suited Tom Wolfe wrote a completely clueless essay about Hooking Up that later formed the base research for his instant classic I Am Charlotte Simmons. I recommend Charlotte Simmons to all the parents of female high school seniors I know. The rather over-the-top set pieces are typical Wolfeian masterpieces, but the overall level of hysteria is Reefer Madness hilarious. But it still terrifies parents of teenagers.

These parents spend the high school years wishfully thinking out loud “I don’t think my daughter is sexually active because she would tell me if she was.” Once their daughters become college coeds and legally able to sign Girls Gone Wild releases, the parents lock down into don’t-ask, don’t-tell mode even as the kids bring newly found boyfriends or girlfriends home on the weekends. Fortunately, statistics are on their side:

In a 2000 Zogby poll, 40 percent of students nationwide reported that they were not "sexually active" -- a term left vague enough to include everything from kissing to soliciting strangers in a Minneapolis airport men's room. At the country's top schools, the dry spells approach levels not seen since 1930s Dust Bowl Oklahoma. Harvard's health department reported last year that 47 percent of students there said they had not yet had vaginal intercourse. (Numbers not adjusted for homosexuality, apparently.) At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a 2001 survey found that only 51 percent of undergrads had lost their virginity; at Princeton the same year, the student body was 44 percent pure.

Parents and other interested parties often confuse having had sex with having sex regularly. One landmark 2000 study found that kids have an average of 10.8 hookups in college. That seems like a lot. But the math works out to only 1.35 hookups per semester -- and remember, some of these incidents are merely make-out sessions.

In 2005, a survey of four universities found that...80 percent of students had had one sex partner or fewer in the previous year.

So if those kids are having sex, they are keeping too busy with studies and activities to get TOO busy. These stats aren’t that much better than the numbers for kids in high school, meaning that if you didn’t get laid on prom night, your odds don’t improve much in your dorm room.

Of course, like the similar binge drinking stats, these beer glasses are half-full or half-empty depending on your situation. The primary purpose of sex surveys is to make you think everybody is having more sex than you. College students already erroneously think the other guys (and gals) are getting three times as much action as they really are.

And if you want a squeaky clean look at the travails of a college freshman as hot as Amanda Bynes, I heartily recommend the silly flick Sydney White. The film is loosely based on Snow White but also steals shamelessly from Revenge Of The Nerds toned down to a family friendly PG-13. And if I had to choose between fairy tales, I would have to guess that Sydney is much more true to life than Charlotte.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: College sex, over-hyped fear mongering or not that big a deal?

Baby Blue Blues

Yesterday, Joel Achenbach blogged about the terrors of having a teen driver, which is a very blogworthy topic I will get to someday, but like anything in the Boodle, it veered slightly of-topic into tales of learning to drive and first cars. The first car I drove regularly was a pumpkin orange VW Super Beatle I discuss briefly here and here, but the first car I owned in my own name was a 1979 Toy-auto Corolla.


I had gotten a co-op job in Atlanta but needed some transportation to get back and forth to work since freshman. My dad in sincere generosity (that’s you, flyboy) found me a car and told me to come and get it. I took a sixteen hour bus ride to Tampa and drove it back to Atlanta, the first of many times that car would make that trip.

It was a two-door with a 1200cc engine, black vinyl seats and no air-conditioning. The black-seat/no-AC combo always made a trip to Florida a test in logistics. I either traded fatigue for daylight and drove the eight hours at night or built in extra time to stop at every Dairy Queen on I-75. Several times I investigated adding AC but I think you had to have at least 1.6 liters under the hood to have enough spare horsepower to drive the compressor.

That car went all over the place. I took it to Cherry Hill, New Jersey one year just to mooch some Thanksgiving turkey. It wore ruts in I-85 going back and forth between Atlanta and my wife’s college in western North Carolina. It was on these trips that I learned all the words to every track on Hotel California. One time I ferried four other people at my wife’s college up to an away football in eastern Tennessee. Going up hills on I-40, the speedometer would sag until it bottomed out at about 45 miles per hour. The eighteen wheelers would downshift to pass and honk at me.

After about a year of owning it, I noticed another Corolla in the parking lot whose roof had faded through to the primer was beginning to rust. I got proactive and took the car to Earl Scheib for the any-car any-color special. The dirty secret at Earl’s being that ninety-nine dollars didn’t include colors found on cars in the wild. I picked baby blue, which made my car very easy to find in parking lots.

With the engine being so small and simple, I did most of my own minor repairs. I dutifully changed the oil, distributor cap, and spark plugs as needed. Once right before leaving work for the swingshift run to Tampa, it threw a fan belt. Amazingly, I happened to have a spare in the trunk. I changed it in the parking lot and didn’t even lose any time. For bigger jobs like the water pump, alternator and brake master cylinder, I found a shade tree mechanic that worked for cash. The car was nearly bulletproof.

After three years and 100,000 miles on top of the 50,000 it came with, my beloved car came to an ignoble end. On a rainy morning I was cruising in rush hour traffic to get to class and I hit a huge puddle on I-85. The car bounced off the median jersey wall and spun 540 degrees at it slid across four lanes of traffic and landed facing backwards on the shoulder. The only person I nearly hit was an eight-month pregnant lady on her way to the doctor. She gave me a ride to a pay phone and I had the car towed to a dealer.

They wanted nearly a thousand dollars to replace the bent axle. I made the sad decision to take the car behind the barn. A junk dealer gave me two hundred dollars in cash and a ride back to campus. He claimed he was going to have to break it for parts since there was no market for the nearly indestructible Toyota engines. Three months later, at a traffic light on Buford Highway, I saw a baby blue Corolla with a distinctive rust patch by the trunk key hole. I had been lied to by the junk dealer, but I was glad to see my car back on the road.

Cars hold a special place in a guy’s heart, somewhere between faithful pets and old girlfriends. They may have faults, but they always bring back fond memories. Mine are colored baby blue.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: What was your first car and what happened to it?

Tale Of The Tape Of The Techs

I spent much of my son's Spring Break doing college visitations. Spring Break is a popular time for high school juniors to do this and both of the colleges we visited were packed with prospective students. From a number of sources you can get all the facts and figures about specific colleges, but it takes some feet on the ground to form misguided opinions based on a quick walk-around with a student guide.

Since this trip was restricted to colleges on the eastern seaboard with “Institute of Technology” in their name, I felt it would be useful to make some comparisons that you won’t find anywhere else.

Big Logo On A Building:


Administrative Building Subject To Frequent Pranks

MIT: The Great Dome has been subject to many legendary hacks such as the infamous 1994 fake police car put on the top.

Ga Tech: Stealing the “T” from the Tech Tower is such an attractive nuisance that upgraded security has taken much of the fun out of this life-endangering staple.

Overlit Neon Corporate Logo Visible From Campus:

MIT: Boston's famous CITGO sign sits on just the other side of the Charles River.

Ga Tech: The Coca Cola World Headquarters, just off campus, reminds you to not even try to purchase a Pepsi product on campus.

Building named after Ford:

MIT: Building E18/19 houses various administrative functions. photo from web.mit.edu

Ga Tech: Ford Environmental Science and Technology Building is a 287,000 square foot academic building that opened in 2003.

Most Phallic Looking Building On Campus:

MIT: The Green Building has the proportions if not the shape. Runner up: The turrets on Ashdown House.

Ga Tech: The campus centerpiece carillon inexplicably called the Kessler Campanile is only truly phallic if you are a bifurcated marsupial. Runner-up: The steam plant smoke stack fits the shape, but is rather mundane.

Building Most Closely Resembling A Female Breast:

MIT: The two domes on the Infinite Corridor make a grand if mismatched pair. Runner up: The Kresge Auditorium has that perfect 1/8 sphere roundness to it.

Ga Tech: The Alexander Memorial Coliseum is more commonly known as “The Tit” even if sportscasters insist on calling it the Thrillerdome.

Cleverest Tee Shirt In the Bookstore:

MIT: Why go with the school’s initials when you can allude to them with scientific formulas.

Ga Tech: Sadly deficient. Lame football slogans are the best they can come up with.

Best Off-Tour Observation:

MIT: There were over three hundred students crammed into Room 10-250 for Calculus 102. MIT likes to brag about their 7:1 student faculty ratio, just don't expect that your freshman year.

Ga Tech: The co-ed group headed up to view a “typical dorm room” in Glen Hall got a clear illustration of what is meant by “traditional community bathrooms” passing the guy brushing his teeth while wearing nothing but a towel.

Best Self-Deprecating Slogan:

MIT: None. I don’t think they know how to do humility at MIT.

Ga Tech: "The North Avenue Trade School." In defense of their egos, they also call MIT “The Georgia Tech of The North.”

I hope none of this has been helpful. If you want to see more pictures, you can look at my Flickr sets of either Cambridge or Georgia Tech.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: Feel free to add your random observation about either of these schools or add an entry to any of these categories from a college you are familiar with.

Dorm Cooking 101

The starving college student subsisting on a diet of ramen noodles and powdered macaroni and cheese is a cliché strongly based in reality, but it doesn’t have to be. When I started college nearly 25 years ago, microwaves were rare in a dorm setting and few students had access to real kitchens. I refused to subject myself to dining hall food, so I came up with a plan where I could cook for myself and save all that meal plan money.

Since space in a dorm room is at a premium, simplicity is the key. I ate well my freshman year in college while cooking on just a hot plate. Here is my spaghetti and meat sauce recipe for dorm cooking.

Dorm Room Spaghetti

Required tools:
Medium skillet (10”).
4 quart sauce pan
Electric hot plate
Spatula
Colander
Plastic plate
Fork

Ingredients:
½ box dry spaghetti
4 oz ground beef
¼ jar spaghetti sauce

Note: If you have a weekly shopping list of 1 pound of hamburger, two boxes of spaghetti and one jar of sauce, this recipe will last for four days.

Directions:
Fill sauce pan half full of water out of gang bathroom sink. Set aside. Turn on hot plate, place skillet on hot plate and fry hamburger in skillet. Use spatula to chop ground beef to desired fineness. Once beef is done, remove skillet from hot plate. Place pan of water on hot plate. Take skillet of ground beef and spatula to bathroom and drain grease in the shower. Do not spill ground beef. Return to dorm room.

Once water is boiling, place spaghetti in pot and cook for 8-10 minutes. Once spaghetti is al dente (sticks to wall), remove pot from hot plate and place skillet back on. Add spaghetti sauce and reduce heat.

Take pot of spaghetti and colander to bathroom. Drain noodles into colander over sink. Pick a sink not clogged with hair. Return to dorm room. Transfer noodles to plate, pour meat and sauce over noodles. Enjoy jealous stares from roommate returning from dining hall.

Repeat four days a week for the entire ten week quarter. Refuse to eat spaghetti again for ten years.

The downside of this meal plan is that in only takes you through four days. For the weekends, you need a little variety. If you pocket the savings from the full meal plan, you can afford to buy the ingredients for my other college recipe:

Hunch Punch

Ingredients:
1 fifth grain alcohol
2 quarts fruit punch (Hi-C or equal)

Combine ingredients in an empty rinsed milk jug. Start drinking Friday afternoon and continue until milk jug is empty, you pass out, or Monday arrives.

Bon Appétit!

Blatant Comment Whoring™: What is your economy meal?

Greatest. Roommate. Ever.

Every gay man has a “coming out” story. A narrative of how and when he knew he was gay. I have the opposite story. I know for a fact that I am straight and I know how I know. I have my college roommate to thank for this. My roommate in college came out of the closet in the middle of my sophomore year. I didn’t need to, since straight people don’t have that ordeal to go through, but but his experience sure changed my preconceptions and perceptions.

I met my roommate because when he and his current roommate wanted to live off-campus and needed a third person to split the rent. That was me. The two of us didn’t know each other, but we shared the two-bedroom townhouse for an entire summer while the other roommate was back home working a summer job. I drew the lucky straw and had a room to myself. When school started in the fall, the other two guys would go shopping together at Ansley Mall Krogers, which was the closest grocery store to our apartment. I would kid them about what a cute couple they made since many of the other patrons were gay.

In the middle of the year, something about my roommate changed. My other roommate and I were noticing some rather anvil sized clues, but couldn’t quite put the pieces together. He broke up with his girlfriend of two years. He would often stay out all night on weekends. He bought “It’s Raining Men” as an extended dance mix single. I read in the paper that his favorite bar won the Southeast Gay Softball Tournament. We couldn’t quite figure out what was causing all this new behavior. Remember, this was the mid-1980’s and not many people had their gaydar as finely tuned as today.

He finally sat down one evening and explained that he had come out of the closet. As part of that process, he was admitting that he was gay to people he thought ought to know, including, of course, his ex-girlfriend, me, and our other roommate who he had a crush on. The other roommate decided he was moving back in the dorms to become more active in campus life. My roommate needed to know if I wanted to keep the apartment when the lease was up. After some soul-searching, I decided that we got along together too well for me to go looking for someone new to live with.

Over the next couple of years, I picked up a lot of gay culture. My roommate would tell me all about his weekends. He’d explain things I didn’t understand in the gay nightlife magazines he’d bring home. A “Labor Day Parade” is very different event at a gay bar than at a union rally. He would point out people on campus he knew from the bars but wouldn’t talk to him at school. He wouldn’t bring tricks home, but I met a lot of his platonic friends. We would all occasionally go out to eat or drink together in the evenings before he hit the bars. He lived his life and I lived mine.

The key was we were still roommates struggling through college and still friends. I would help him with his homework. We would fight over stupid things. We would have long philosophical discussions over religion and philosophy. I was very active in the campus Catholic group and he attended an Episcopal gay/lesbian ministry. We’d make late night runs to Krispy Kreme on Ponce De Leon together. Since we are both redheads, we would frequently get mistaken for brothers.

Over the next year we had a revolving door of third roommates, straight, gay, and undecided. Each was a trip and story unto themselves. When he graduated, we refigured the rent so we would each have a room to ourselves. When my fiancée and I started planning our wedding, I asked him to be my best man. He threw me a very traditional bachelor party at the world famous Cheetah III. As the only straight guy in the group, I tipped the dancers while the rest of the party just sat back trying to figure out what the big deal was.

After I go married, the lease on our apartment was up and we were both searching for new apartments. We ended up renting places next door to each other. He had a washer and dryer and gave us a key to his place. For the next year, it was like a sitcom where the wacky neighbors are always barging in.

After I graduated and moved to Florida, I would look him up whenever I was in Atlanta. One visit when we came through town, there was no answer at the last phone number I had for him. We went by his townhouse and no one was home. That was about ten years ago. I don’t know where he is now, but I still remember what great times we had in college.

I lived with a gay man for three years and have now been married for nearly twenty. As a member of the school band and drama group, my son meets people that learn and accept their sexual orientation much earlier than when I was his age. I have raised my son to be tolerant and accepting of all people. I only hope that his roommate in college is as great a friend as mine was.

Go Jackets!

Updated (5/27/2008): The University Barbie image I used to link to has gone 404, so I've substituted a picture of my actual Barbie.

The Georgia Tech football team pulled off an upset victory over number 3 ranked Miami last night. I know this because I accidentally tuned into ESPN with 1:40 left in the game just after Georgia Tech intercepted a pass that crushed Miami’s comeback hopes. This victory came as the good news in an otherwise bad week for Tech athletics. The NCAA imposed two years of sanctions over the academic eligibility of 17 athletes including 11 football players during a six year period. This link has the official GT press release on the issue. Also, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports on a football player under indictment for conspiracy to distribute marijuana who won a court order to be returned to the team.

These latest events have been tarnishing Georgia Tech’s otherwise sterling reputation for academic integrity. A few years back at a meet-and-greet event with the women’s basketball team, they were asked what they found most unexpected about playing at Tech and they said the academic rigor. Georgia Tech has no “jock” majors. Industrial Management is about as wimpy as it gets and many athletes attend because they do want an engineering oriented education.

In some ways, I would appear to be a superfan. I drive a white Camry with gold trim in the school colors. I have the state affinity tags for Georgia Tech. In my cubicle at work I have a mint-in-the-box University Cheerleader Barbie™. Being a fan of Georgia Tech sports requires a certain amount of distance because the system is capable of producing national championship football teams and Final Four basketball seasons. Other years, the performance can be completely dismal. During my years at Georgia Tech, we lost to Furman and the Citadel.

Ups and downs in the athletic program do not affect my devotion to my alma mater which is one of the finest engineering colleges in the country and an incredible bargain as a quality state run university. As an alumnus, I work with the local alumni chapter to recruit students and award scholarships. The Presidential Scholarship Program is open to all students that apply by the end of October in their senior year of high school.

Georgia Tech is not for everyone. If you do not have a strong background in math and science, you are better off somewhere else. Nearly everyone takes some level of calculus no matter what the major. The school heavily recruits strong female students and the “ratio” has plateaued at about a 70/30 male/female ratio. I’ll save you the rest of my recruiting pitch, but give it a thought if you are or know of prospective students.

So the yellojkt is a Ramblin’ Wreck from Georgia Tech and a helluva engineer. And while I do not gnash my teeth over the travails of the “student-athletes”, I have one sentiment that unites all Yellow Jackets, past and present:

TO HELL WITH GEORGIA!!!

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