Just the other day I was recounting the story of how I was being hit on by another man in, no, not San Francisco, but Denver. I couldn’t remember many of the details of the story, but today I happened to stumble upon something I had written about the event back in January, 2007. I thought I would post it here for the entertainment of my readers.

——-

This would be a fantastic people watching story… unfortunately, in this tale, I was the one being watched. This takes place at the Cherry Creek Mall in Denver, CO on December 28, 2006. I was in Denver visiting my dad just after Christmas and I happened to receive a wine opener kit from him. As luck would have it, though, I already had one, so I decided to return it to Sur La Table, from whence it had come.

So, my sister, dad, dad’s wife and I piled into the car and headed to the mall to make the return. When we arrived at the store, I walked up to the counter, placed the Rabbit Wine Kit on the counter and told the clerk that I wanted to return the item which I had received as a gift. When the clerk started speaking to me, it was quite obvious that he was gay. Now, I don’t much care for stereotypes, but the plain and simple fact of the matter is that some are true, and the mannerisms, speach patterns and demeanor of this particular sales clerk fit the classic mold of the gay man. In the past, I’ve never felt uncomfortable talking with gay men. In fact, I’ve had many gay friends… but this guy was different… this guy was hitting on me.

It all started innocently enough. He asked to see my ID for the return. No problem, I handed it over. He looked at it.

“California, I see,” he said, noticing, I imagine, that my ID says “CALIFORNIA” across the top.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Oh! San Francisco,” he exclaimed, “that’s a great city.”
“Yes, it is,” I answered.
He smiled, gave what I perceived to be a wink and then asked, “Can you take me home with you?”

OK, seriously, what am I supposed to say to that? I can’t say “NO” without seeming really rude and I can’t very well say “SURE WHY NOT” or “WISH I COULD” without making him think that his flirtations are welcome. Instead, I just opted to give a light chuckle and say nothing in response. Apparently this wasn’t enough of a cue to get him to stop trying to pick me up. He continued to talk about how much he loved San Francisco, and how much he wished he could live there, and how he often thought about how he could transfer from the Sur La Table in Denver to one in San Francisco. All the while he kept asking me questions about where I lived, where I worked, what I liked to do, how long I had been in San Francisco, where I like to go out, and so on. At one point my sister, seeing what was going on, came over and stood next to me, but after about 30 seconds she had to leave because she found it too difficult to keep a straight face. This guy was obviously & unabashedly flirting with me. Slightly annoyed with the whole affair, and really just wanting to get my gift card and get out of there, I glanced around and noticed that I was being spied on from several vantage points within the store – my dad from near the front of the store, my dad’s wife, Betty, from behind me, and my sister through a product display case off to the side. They were all in hysterics over this situation.

I’m not sure if I should have flattered, but I was mostly annoyed. After the whole thing was over, Betty kept on for the entire day about how I “still had it,” whatever “it” is. I opined that it wasn’t terribly great to have “it” when “it” was only useful with other men, but that apparently I was just in high demand.

Oh well, maybe someday “it” will be truly useful again.

Living in the SF Bay Area, I see a lot of interesting people – pretty much everybody in San Francisco has something interesting about them. I could probably make a living writing blog entries with all the great content people in this geographic region provide for me.

As is my usual custom while walking to work, I stopped for a cup of coffee and a muffin near the office. In the few minutes that I was in the ING Direct Cafe, a homeless man that I see frequently around the city showed up on the sidewalk. Not a big deal – he’s always been very friendly and has frequently commented on how well I dress (especially when I’m wearing a tie, which I’m not today). But today, he was a little different.

Now, it isn’t unusual to see homeless people acting a little, how can I be delicate… strange (?) in this city, so it doesn’t shock me when I see odd-ball behavior; however, I have never seen this particular homeless man talk to himself or yell at (seemingly) nothing. Not so today. As I was walking up the sidewalk towards him – his back toward me – I heard him start to yell. What was this about, I wondered? As I came closer, I could see that he wasn’t yelling completely randomly. He was standing only inches away from a parking meter and was yelling at it furiously, as if it were a human being.

“Are you listening to me?? I was in the United States Submarines, do you hear me? Answer me!!”

Clearly to his dismay, the parking meter did not answer and the homeless man became even more enraged by this defiance. He saluted (I’m not making this up) the parking meter. The parking meter did not return his salute.

“Is that all you have? I was a Submarine! We played a huge role in the United State Defense Attorneys!”

The parking meter was unimpressed. At this, the homeless man huffed and puffed, storming around in circles on the sidewalk, devastated that this parking meter was refusing to recognize the significant contribution that he had made to the US Defense Attorneys as a Submarine. The last thing I saw (and heard) as I turned the corner to head to my building was the man now yelling at a wall. I guess he’d heard that the walls have ears.

Research conducted by the Gallup organization shows that financial security has nearly three times the impact of income alone on employees’ overall wellbeing. Essentially, this means that it isn’t just the amount of money that a person has that influences their wellbeing; rather, it is the perception of how secure they are that has the larger impact on wellbeing and quality of life.

The concept of security is an interesting one. There was a time in my life when I thought I needed to own a home worth at least $10 million, have a chauffeured limousine, and fly first class everywhere I went with no regard for the cost. In fact, I even made a deal with one of my best friends from Notre Dame that, as soon as I made my first million in cash, I would fly him first class to visit me from wherever he was at the time. He made a reciprocal offer. Now, while I was fortunate to have successful parents who could provide for all of my needs growing up, I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth by any means. As such, by establishing goals of this nature, I was really just setting myself up to feel consistently unsuccessful. I’m certainly “wealthier” now than I was when I graduated from college 8 years ago, but I’m far from that dream. If I were still so focused on security as having magnificent material possessions, I would wake up each morning and be constantly disappointed that I wasn’t in my mansion yet. (Though, $10 million doesn’t go quite as far in San Francisco as it does in Utah where I was still living when i started telling people about my goal.)

I can’t pinpoint a specific time that it happened, but at some point in the last 5-10 years, I considerably shifted my focus. No longer does financial security look to me to simply be the accumulation of wealth; rather, financial security for me is knowing that I am simply making enough money to not have to worry about money. I hope one day to have a family, and I would like to be able to raise my children similar to the way my parents raised me – providing all of those things that they need to be happy, healthy, and successful, but also providing them with opportunities to learn the value of money and showing them how to make good, informed decisions about the things they buy.

They say that money is one of the most common points of contention in the married life. Having a low sense of financial wellbeing is linked not only with tension in the married life, but also with a host of other issues, including stress, anxiety, insomnia, headaches, and depression. It is sad to think that many of these issues could be avoided if people spent more time being thankful for what they had than focusing on the things that they wanted but didn’t or couldn’t have. Granted, if you’re not able to put food on the table or keep a roof over your head you have a real, serious grievance; however, for those people that have all of their basic needs met, I would strongly encourage you to spend more time being grateful for the good things in your life.

Running my own business and being self-employed, I’m in a unique position. Unlike most people who have jobs, in the good times, I have a greater degree of control over how much I get paid, but there are also bad times where I’m at much higher risk for not getting paid anything at all if we have a slow month or a slow year. Despite this added risk, I still do my best to maintain a sense of financial security. Part of this is accomplished by closely examining how I spend the money I do have. There are so many businesses and opportunities competing for our hard-earned money, and it is important to be very conscious of the choices we are making in where we spend those dollars. When I worked for UC Berkeley, my boss there, Michael, was fond of saying, “people vote with their feet.” And Fr. Xavier, the Pastor at St. Dominic’s, often says, “you can tell what is important to a person by looking at two books – their checkbook and their datebook.” I’ll examine the Lenten discipline of Almsgiving in greater detail in my post on Fiduciary Duty, but during this Lent, I would encourage to take a close look at the “vote” that you’re casting and then making sure you have your priorities in order. Controlling spending is one of the most important things people can do to improve their financial wellbeing, but it is even more important for those people who have seriously a limited income.

Again, I’ll address this in greater detail in the next post, but the Gallup organization also found that people can improve their wellbeing by spending on others or giving to charities instead of spending only on themselves! This may seem strange at first, but I have seen this in action time and time again. Those people who are the most giving and the most generous tend to be the happiest with their lives. Even those who seem to have very little, but who nonetheless give from what they do have, can be extremely happy because they aren’t placing all of their value on the amount of money they have; rather, they are looking to make sure that they have some level of security, and they make every effort to see to it that others can also enjoy the same or a similar level of security.

This is the third in a series of Lenten essays exploring different areas of the human experience. For more information, see the introduction.

The original theme of this post was going to be “Friends and Family,” but over the past two weeks, I decided that that phrase didn’t really do justice to the human person. Certainly friends and family present the most obvious relationships in our lives, but the human experience goes well beyond interactions with such people. We are often – maybe even daily – confronted with any number of other relationships. We are “in relationship” with each person we come into contact with every day. A cashier at the local grocery store, a bus driver, co-workers, the random person you pass as you’re running down the Great Highway, other drivers on the road, the thief that breaks into your car, members of an opposing team, the person next to you on an airplane, etc. Some of these relationships are fleeting, true, but the human experience would be vastly different without them. Since it is my goal to explore the human experience during Lent, then, and since Lent is a time to grow in our own relationship with God, it made sense to me to take a different approach.

At my parish here in San Francisco we are using a program developed, in part, by the Gallup Organization called Strengths Finder. For those of you not familiar with the program, it is an online inventory that you take and upon completion your answers are used to rank 34 broad themes. You get the top five for the cost of the book, and the rest are locked away on Gallup’s servers. Number three on my list is Relator. The Relator theme is described as follows, “You derive a great deal of pleasure and strength from being around your close friends. You are comfortable with intimacy. Once the initial connection has been made, you deliberately encourage a deepening of the relationship. You want to understand their feelings, their goals, their fears, and their dreams; and you want them to understand yours. You know that this kind of closeness implies a certain amount of risk — you might be taken advantage of — but you are willing to accept that risk. For you a relationship has value only if it is genuine. And the only way to know that is to entrust yourself to the other person. The more you share with each other, the more you risk together. The more you risk together, the more each of you proves your caring is genuine. These are your steps toward real friendship, and you take them willingly.”

This description seems to fit me perfectly. I am, in general, a very trusting person. In fact, some people have told me that I am too trusting in some areas of my life. The idea of being “too trusting” is foreign to me, though. I understand the need to be cautious when someone has a history of bad behavior, or when there is evidence of ill intent, but I tend to believe that the vast majority of the people I encounter day to day are good people trying to live their lives in the best way they know how. Consequently, I have a number of very important relationships with people with whom I may have very little in common. By taking the time to understand why people are the way they are, and helping them see the same about me, I am able to connect with them on a much deeper level, and that is important to me. In my life, I see several different categories of relationships. Since I was born into a particular set of relationships, I will first consider family.

My dad & me

You don’t get to choose your family is something that you’ve probably heard before. Individually, we have no control over whether or not we’re even born*, let alone control over who our biological parents are. I didn’t choose Roger and Kathy as my parents, and they, likewise, didn’t choose their parents. I didn’t choose Amber as my sister and she likewise didn’t choose me as her brother. I was fortunate to grow up in a loving home where I was well provided for, and where there was never any threat to my welfare. And it’s a good thing that my family loved me as much as they did – I was an absolutely awful child. I was diagnosed at a young age with Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Read the list of symptoms at the National Library of Medicine. You could put a tick mark next to virtually every one of those for me as a young child. I could write an entire book describing my misdeeds, but I’ll spare you the details for the time being. But despite my consistently bad behavior, my family still loved and supported me. Someone should really get the cause for canonization of my parents started. I know they’re not eligible, given that they’re still living, but there is not other explanation for how they managed to deal with me than a grace which enabled them to love in even the most trying circumstances. Looking back, I can see what a challenge I was a child, and it is something for which I have great remorse. But more than remorse, I am thankful – thankful for my family and thankful that I have been able to share my story with others, most of whom don’t believe it when I start a story with, “I was an absolutely awful child.”

But now put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and foul talk from you mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old nature with its practices and have put on the new nature, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.
- Colossians 3:8-10

So how do we grow in our family relationships this Lent? I would suggest, first and foremost, that we can grow through the practice of humility. Isn’t it pride that causes so much strife between family members? When I was growing up, I was always right. To be clear, I was probably wrong much of the time, but I was convinced that I was always right, and I would fight tooth and nail against anyone who challenged my “authoritaaah.” When we strive for humility, we will start to shed with those things that St. Paul calls us to put away. Why? Humility and truth are cousins, and it is the truth that all human beings are created in the image and likeness of God, and that even when we are in conflict, our family members deserve to be treated like kings (because they are kings). And so, in our humility, we put away malice, we put away foul talk, we put away slander. Instead of these, I encourage you to enter into an open dialogue with your family. Come to understand why they feel the way they feel. Bear with them in love, and rather than try to win the argument, ask yourself, “how can I help this person that I love, how can I lift their burdens, how can I help lighten their load?” Can you imagine if everyone began to act this way in their family? Divorce rates would plummet, abuse would decline, families would eat dinner together again!

Limo ride with Daniel, Adam, Keith, and Amber

But relationships don’t start and end at the family. In fact, we probably have more relationships outside the family. Think back to your earliest memories of school. How many lessons can you remember from pre-school or Kindergarten? If you’re like me, your mom kept everything you ever created as a child and you might be able to look back and see what you did, but do you actually remember the class? More likely, you remember people. There are some people from my childhood that I have very fond memories of – Daniel Winfield, Heather Japlit, Carrie Pace, Keith Gardner, Adam Acosta, Dan Owens, Lesli Mozaffari, Raeanin Simpson, Travis Leaf. These are all people that I met before I was even a teenager, and while some of them I knew through high school and beyond, a number of them I haven’t seen since I was 10 or 11 years old, but I still remember them because those relationships were important to me. Friendships are important. They teach us how to love other people that we don’t “have to love.” Sometimes, friendships blossom into romances, and romances into marriages, and marriages into new families, but more often, friendships are just those special relationships in which we encounter others with whom we share at least some mutual interests. Friendship is the main reason that I left the film industry to move back to San Francisco. While working on the film version of RENT, I made so many wonderful friends at St. Dominic’s that it was hard to leave. I did, though, and I moved to New York to work on another film, Across the Universe. When that ended, I went back to Los Angeles, and I found myself missing my friends and the community at St. Dominic’s so much that, without a job or a permanent home, I up and moved back to the Bay Area. And I haven’t regretted it for a moment. My life wouldn’t be the same had I stayed in New York or Los Angeles.

So, in this Lenten season, how do we grow in our friendships? One thing that I would recommend is to let your friends know how important they are to you. Take some time to affirm your friends, to tell them how much you appreciate their friendship. In his homily on New Year’s Day, Fr. Garry Cappleman offered this advice, “We can, with love, mirror back God’s love for others in our acts of affirmation. Do you realize how much people are starving today for one simple kind word. One word of encouragement. One compliment. We ration that out, like we’re in the desert, we have only one drop of water. Acts of affirmation, acts of encouragement, and sometimes, yes, even a simple smile, but a smile that comes deep within, that says you’re accepted, you’re valued, I love you.” Read those words again and ask yourself if it isn’t true. How many times have we been so caught up in our world, in our own lives, in our own problems, that we have failed to affirm even those who are closest to us? I know I’ve missed those opportunities before. During this Lenten season, then, I am trying to focus in a very particular way on the affirmation of my friends. I encourage you to consider some way that you can affirm your friends, as well. You could call a friend each day and tell them a way they’ve touched you, host a dinner party for your friends to say thanks, or offer a friend each day at daily Mass and send them a Mass card to let them know.

What about those people with whom we have very contentious or even negative relationships? I’m fortunate that I don’t have many of these, though there have been a few. For instance, each on a separate occasion, I have had two people e-mail me telling me that we couldn’t be friends for various reasons. While I understand where both of these people were coming from, I do feel that their reactions were a bit over the top, and I believe that there are deeper issues at play in both cases. The easiest way I have found to deal with people like this is to simply act with extreme kindness towards them and to pray for them.

Of course, we’re also in relationship with many other people, on a day to day basis, even if those relationships are only fleeting. Fleeting or not, though, all people that we encounter have equal dignity which deserves our utmost respect. I think that then-Fr. Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) said it well when he wrote:

Being a Christian means essentially changing over from being for oneself to being for one another… Accordingly, the basic Christian decision signifies the assent to being a Christian, the abandonment of self-centeredness and accession to Jesus Christ’s existence with its concentration on the whole.
- From Introduction to Christianity

This concept of being “for” others is crucial when we think of relationships. In fact, isn’t this really what I’ve recommended above, already? Thinking about how we can bear the burdens of our family, acknowledging and affirming our friends, greeting those who hate us with a smile – these are all things that are done “for” the other. Fr. Ratzinger also wrote, “Christ’s existence, as exemplary existence, is fulfilled and perfected in being opened on the Cross.” If Christ opened and gave himself to us on the cross, and if we are called to follow Christ and to love one another, are we not also called, then, to open ourselves, to live lives “for” the other?

Today the Church commemorate St. Frances of Rome. In the optional Office of Readings for the day, we read this:

God had not chosen her to be holy merely for her own advantage. Rather, the gifts he conferred upon her were to be for the spiritual and physical advantage of her neighbour. For this reason he made her so lovable that anyone with whom she spoke would immediately feel captivated by love for her and ready to help her in everything she wanted. Divine power was present and working in her words, so that in a few sentences she could bring consolation to the afflicted and the anxious, calm the restless, pacify the angry, reconcile enemies and extinguish long-standing hatreds and animosities. Again and again she would prevent a planned revenge from being carried out. She seemed able to subdue the passions of every type of person with a single word and lead them to do whatever she asked.
- From the Life of Saint Frances of Rome by Mary Magdalene Anguillaria, superior of the Oblates of Tor di Specchi

St. Frances truly lived a life for others, and I think that there is something that each of us an learn from her example. Recall the story of the rich man and Lazarus from Chapter 16 of the Gospel according to Luke. Read the story carefully and notice that Luke never actually writes that the rich man did anything specifically wrong; rather, it seems that the rich man’s sin was primarily in what he did not do for Lazarus. Let us not be like the rich man, then. Let us always act for others, that, at the end of time, we may find ourselves enjoying the beatific vision together with our family, our friends, and all other people with whom we are in relationship.

This is the second in a series of Lenten essays exploring different areas of the human experience. For more information, see the introduction.

* The idea that God sends us into the world without our consent has been a topic of many discussions that I’ve had with one of my friends, but that deserves its own article.

Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home –
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene — one step enough for me.
- John Henry Newman

Today we explore the concept of faith. What do you think of when you hear this word? For many Catholics, I suspect that the Creed, or Profession of Faith, comes to mind relatively quickly, if not right away. But is this faith – a series of statements about the things I believe?

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty
I believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ
I believe in the Holy Spirit
I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church

Certainly these are components of faith, but during this Lent I want to look even deeper than this. It is not enough to simply “believe” to say that I have faith. I believe in gravity. I believe that I need to drink water to survive. I believe that friends are important. These are things that I believe, but I wouldn’t say that these are things in which I have faith. Why? Because faith goes beyond mere belief. Faith is defined by St. Thomas Aquinas as, “the act of the intellect assenting to a Divine truth owing to the movement of the will, which is itself moved by the grace of God” (II-II, Q. iv, a. 2). Look closely at this definition. Faith is actually an act, something we do. It is the willful act by which we say “yes” to the truth of God. To assent to this truth, though, is beyond our natural capacity; we rely on the gift of God’s grace to move us and enable us to give this response. So, I believe in gravity, water, and the merits of friendship because these are things I can observe, test, and understand through solely natural means. Faith, though, is supernatural, and is, ultimately, an act of total trust.

Faith requires such complete trust that sometimes it might mean placing our trust in something that we aren’t even certain we truly believe. Do you recall the story of the