cripples. oh, god.

this weekend michael and i escaped the city...to another city. albeit, it was a much smaller city with much friendlier people, nicer roads, and free parking everywhere you looked--a magical land called durham, NC. we saw three gay movies at the north carolina gay and lesbian film festival. two were extremely bad--like, make-you-angry bad. find-out-the-director's-phone-number-and-prank-call-him bad. buy-a-camcorder-and-fire-up-imovie-because-apparently-anyone-can-be-a-director bad. we ran into the director of the second bad movie we saw, a high camp little number that pissed michael off more than it did me, at raleigh's gay bar that night. he was making googly-eyes at someone who was with us, we just couldn't decide who. maybe his eyes were just googly. the third movie we saw, the only good one, was a documentary about fire island pines; all it did was make me more desperate to get out there some summer while i'm still young enough to enjoy it. the problem is, being young enough to enjoy it also means that you're too young to afford it.

now, i'll relay a little story to you that i hope will make each and every one of you pity or even loathe me. as some of you may know, i'm on somewhat of a one-man mission to de-p.c. society just a little bit. not a lot--i understand that there's no room in our society for hate talk, that hateful talk leads to nothing but hateful actions. so i say things like "homo" instead of gay; "native american" instead of "first-nations people" or whatever they want to be called now. and, ok, so sometimes i call handicapped parking spots "cripple places." every time my grandparents said the word "cripple" i'd die laughing inside, and i do it more to be funny than anything else.

sometimes, though, it's not so funny. (foreshadowing!)

when we were at the bar on saturday night, someone came up to george's friend zach, who walks with a cane, and hit on him by saying, "you look really hot with that cane." YOU LOOK REALLY HOT WITH THAT CANE. i'm sorry, there are a lot of bad pickup lines, but that's not only a little offensive, it's creepy. ew. we were leaving the bar, all of us having had a few drinks, and were rehashing zach's suitor.

"could you believe that guy!?" i laughed. "'i'm really into cripples!'"

that's right, folks. cripples. not crippled, the verb. CRIPPLES. i'd meant to say "i'm really into canes." what'd i say, though? cripples. i called a handicapped person a cripple to his face.

"that's what you get for always saying those things jokingly," hilary told me. "it serves you right." i know.