Doug Orleans's Journal

At the beginning of this month, I binge-watched the show It's a Sin, a 5-episode miniseries on HBO. It's about a group of friends in London coming of age in the 1980s against the backdrop of the rising AIDS pandemic. It's semi-autobiographical by Russel T. Davies, who you might know from Dr Who and Queer as Folk.

It's a great show! I was expecting it to be heavy and morose, maybe akin to Angels in America. It does have moments that are deeply sad and tragic, and also infuriating as it demonstrates how the spread of this awful disease was made far worse by ignorance and prejudice in the medical and political establishment. But overall the show is lively and funny and even celebratory, not to mention having plenty of great new-wave classics on the soundtrack. Check it out if you get a chance.

After I finished the last episode, I glanced up at the wall behind my TV to see this self-portrait of my uncle, Dennis Orleans. He died in 1998, at age 43, of AIDS-related pneumonia. At the time, I was 27, and 43 didn't seem all that young, but looking backwards now from 50 it seems far, far too young! I don't know how long he had been living with HIV, but near the end I know it was affecting his mental health in ways not too dissimilar to how it was portrayed in one of the characters on It's a Sin.

Thankfully, when I think of Dennis, I don't usually think about how he died. My memories are about his life: his love of photography, and horticulture, and Fimo clay art projects; his dog Stosh, his little VW car (or Fiat?), the H.A. Winston's restaurant where he sometimes worked and where I think he also painted a wall mural? When I was a kid he'd sometimes put me on his shoulders, which was a little scary because he was 6'4"! But I know he relished being avuncular to me and his other nephews and nieces, and I'm glad we grew up knowing him.

Anyway, watching that show seems like a fitting way to have honored his memory for Pride Month. 🏳️‍🌈

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1. The White Tiger
2. Let Them All Talk
3. Palm Springs
4. I'm Thinking of Ending Things
5. The Father
6. Bill and Ted Face the Music
7. One Night in Miami
8. Malcolm and Marie
9. The Forty-Year-Old Version
10. Another Round

Status update: earlier this month I put in my notice at Wellist; tomorrow is my last day. After a year and half working there, it's time to move on, and I'm looking forward to working on my own things for a while. No solid plans yet, but my main goal is to have a finished project on my Github profile rather than the hodgepodge of undercooked things that are there now... I'd also like to contribute more to open source projects and participate more in that community. I am very fortunate to have the resources to take time off from working, and I think that would be a good use of those resources. Stay tuned!

I started working at Wellist just shy of a year ago. The office overlooks City Hall Plaza in the middle of downtown Boston. I like to get out of the office to get lunch, and there are tons of options nearby, so for fun I decided to get lunch from a different place every day and see how long I could go without repeating. I figured maybe a few months, to last me until winter, when the snow would probably make me want to stick with the Subway one floor down from our office.

This past Friday, on the summer solstice, I decided to end my streak at the 200th different lunch place, Ruth's Chris Steak House at the Old City Hall.

As the streak went on, I developed some ground rules:

1. Going out to lunch with the team for some occasion (e.g. to welcome a new hire) didn't count. I didn't want to be in the position of saying "sorry, can't join you because I've already been there".
2. When the company orders food in, that doesn't count. We usually order pizza from the same place, and it seemed silly to avoid lunch if it's right in front of me. Same goes for eating leftovers.
3. There are multiple locations of a chain within walking distance, e.g. Sweetgreen, Zo Greek, Dunkin', Starbucks. I counted each different location as a different lunch spot. (Yes, I got sandwiches from three different Starbuckses, because I had to spend a $25 gift card and I don't drink coffee...)
4. Boston Public Market and Quincy Market have many different food stands inside. Each of those counted as a different location.
5. Lunch trucks definitely count. I probably wouldn't have gone to the same lunch truck in different locations, but that didn't come up; lunch trucks generally get assigned to the same location all season. I probably would have counted a lunch truck separate from its stationary location, but it seems that none of the trucks downtown also have brick-and-mortar locations downtown. I also counted a few street carts.
6. A couple months ago, I discovered a Fooda had opened up nearby, inside 75 State Street (with an entrance on Kilby St). They have a different pop-up restaurant every day, with some repeats (e.g. every Thursday is Chick-fil-A, although I never went there then because of Chick-fil-A's odious politics). I counted each different pop-up as a different lunch spot, on the theory that it's basically like a food truck.

I still have another dozen or so places on my to-do list, and I could easily expand that-- for example, I only went to one place inside the Corner Mall food court (in Downtown Crossing). But that already seemed a bit too far to walk for lunch. My rough rule of thumb was that I didn't want to walk farther than back to the Park St T stop, since I usually walk from there to work every morning anyway. But I did break this rule a few times: I went to the North End a few times, and once to Chinatown to meet Jasper, and I even walked over the Longfellow Bridge to have lunch with Kristin in Kendall Square (she works at the NERD Center).

Anyway, 200 is a nice round number, and it happened to coincide with the solstice, on a Friday, two days before my 1-year anniversary. So it seemed like a good time to have a ceremonial end to the streak.

For the record, here's my full list, in chronological order, in case you're ever looking for a different place to get lunch in downtown Boston:

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#mylivejournal #lj18 #happybirthday

siderea

The US military, and probably all militaries ever, have a really quite low tolerance for fuckups. When somebody isn't dependable, when somebody doesn't exercise adequate restraint in their conduct, they get marginalized so they can't do too much damage, or simply gotten rid of.

All these youngsters join up, and have it drummed into them that they have these huge responsibilities to their fellow warriors and their nation, and they must do their jobs right. It's not just that they have to cover their squad mates in fire-fights, but things like, "If you don't clean this surface correctly, the guy who is going to try to land a plane on this deck will die and maybe take a bunch of us with it." And they discover, yes, they have it in them to do their jobs that well, that dependably. They are somebody who pulls his weight and can be counted on.

And furthermore, they discover they are in a whole society of people who are equally determined to be dependable, to pull their weight and be somebody who can be counted on. That can be a down-right rapturous experience; I know, because there's other ways to have at least some of that experience, such as through the performing arts, and having tasted it, I can attest it's positively intoxicating. It's like falling in love. Or maybe it is falling in love: this probably is more the basis of that intense camaraderie shared by veterans who served together than common adversity or common purpose.

Civilian society, as a whole, is, in contrast, replete with fuckups. People who can't get out of their own way enough to be depended on, people who don't take commitments seriously, people who are exploitative, who phone it in, to try to get away with minimal contributions, who don't care about those who rely on their work, who don't want to be relied upon, people who don't want to have self-restraint. We don't get to throw those people out of society, so there they are, being part of civilian society, fucking up, and their fucking up being tolerated.

People in the military, who subscribe to the discipline of speech and courtesy described above, are way, way, way, way, way too polite to actually come out and say, "We're different from civilians because we're not used to putting up with fuckups," but that is what it sounds like is lurking between the lines. It feels like they're trying to apologetically and politely say something that more bluntly put might sound like, "See, among us, fucking up is not okay; being a fuck up is not okay. We have these values and stuff which say it's not okay. And we totally get that that's okay in civilian life, where if you want to be a fuckup, that's your free choice. In our culture, the military culture, we see that as not a legitimate choice. We see that as bad – and comport ourselves accordingly."