Fluidity, Coming May 27!

My new book Fluidity is scheduled to publish May 27. A link to purchase this title via JMS Books will be posted as soon as it's available.

Fluidity tells the story of Scott Parsons, a thirty-five-year-old Chicago non-profit worker who is kicked out of his boyfriend’s Chicago condo and forced to move back to the suburbs with his widowed mother. Scott fears that his life is in a permanent downward spiral, but everything changes when his mother announces she and her boyfriend Dennis were secretly married during a trip to Las Vegas and Scott finds out he has a new stepbrother, an attractive twenty-six-year-old Stanford grad named Alex Brennan. Alex has recently returned to Chicago from LA in order to pursue an MBA and Scott soon discovers that Alex has a thing for him. Scott knows that getting intimately involved with his stepbrother is a bad idea, but sometimes a bad idea is just too good to ignore.

Say It Ain't So, Ronald!

I read today that McDoanld's will be discontinuing orange Hi-C as a beverage choice. This angers me. Orange Hi-C was one of the few non-carbonated beverage items offered at Mickey D's and I, personally, enjoy it. Now what will I drink with my double cheeseburger combo? Iced tea I guess since I'm not much of a pop/soda drinker. I hope the backlash against this move makes McDonald's management reconsider dropping orange Hi-C. I certainly plan to complain to Ronald et al myself. The sad thing is they're replacing it not with another non-carbonated beverage, but with some kind of flavored Sprite. Ugh. You'd think at least they'd offer lemonade or fruit punch or something else that isn't carbonated. So sad, too bad.

Basic Needs

I read an article in the NY Times a few days ago about female inmates who are not provided with sanitary napkins and/or tampons when they need them. These women are often not given the number of sanitary items that they need, they're forced to pay for these items, or they're reduced to bartering for them for prison officers and other inmates. It's amazing to me that women in this country are denied these items. It's also embarrassing that our prison system operates in this way and treats women so poorly. I was downright angered when I read the story in the Times about this. Any prison system that denies women tampons and pads that they need on a monthly basis (and sometimes more than a monthly basis) should be ashamed of itself for allowing this poor treatment to continue. I know prison isn't supposed to be a country club, but it is supposed to provide basic needs for prisoners and pads and tampons are basic needs for many women. We don't live in a third-world country. It's not like these prisons don't have the funds to provide basic needs to female inmates, because I know they do. Maybe the Times story will provide the exposure needed for many of these prisons to change their ways. One can certainly hope.

Beyond Caring

I went to see the play Beyond Caring yesterday at the Lookingglass Theatre in Chicago and I largely enjoyed it. The play focuses on the four temporary janitorial workers (all minorities: two black women, one black man, and one Latina) and their white male supervisor. Beyond Caring shows how low-level employees are treated by management and by each other in the workplace. Doing menial work should not mean that you're a menial person, yet too often this is the perception. The play originated in the UK and was changed somewhat to reflect the challenges that American low-level workers face (mainly the racial aspects). I found the play interesting and occasionally funny. One funny part was when the white supervisor instructed the temporary workers to come to the factory where they worked on their own time to attend a party with the "regular" employees. Oh, and the temps were expected to bring a dish and dress in a superhero costume of their choice. These people, who worked for minimum wage, were supposed to come to their workplace on their time off, bring a dish to share, and dress up in a costume. Yeah, right.

Oh Really?

So O'Really (pun intended) is finally out at Fox. The man who made a living telling the rest of us how to live our lives in a so-called morally responsible way while doing the exact opposite himself has finally been shown the door. And, once again, there are no winners here. Fox and Bill both can go pound sand. I fully believe nothing would have happened to Bill if sponsors hadn't pulled their ads from his show which goes to show everyone once again that profits matter and people don't. There are many things that annoy me but hypocrites really make my eye start twitching. Preachers who stand at the pulpit and tell congregation members that they're sinning left and right while failing to acknowledge their own sins drive me crazy. Don't come to my house and tell me how to clean my own yard when yours is full of weeds and debris. How can you sit in judgment of others when you know you're hitting on women in the workplace (while you were married) and threatening them with retaliation if they refused your advances while, at the same time, you're telling people nightly (usually people who aren't male or white) that they're failing in life because they refuse to adhere to your so-called moral compass? Ridiculous.

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter. I'm glad the weather has been nice and warm for this year's Easter weekend. Living in Chicago, April can be cold and snowy, warm and sunny, cold and rainy, or some combination of all three scenarios. You're never quiet sure what kind of weather you'll be in April. Whenever Easter rolls around, I start to think of the church songs I grew up with. One of my favorites is "Low in the Grave He Lay." It never fails to remind me of the Easter services I grew up with in the Lutheran church. It's such an uplifting song and I enjoy hearing it.

In other sort of Easter-related, but not really news, I watched the movie Night of the Lepus last night on TCM, a ridiculous "horror" movie about huge killer rabbits who kill people in a rural town. These huge fur balls burst through windows and go for the jugular of the townsfolk. Killer rabbits. Yeah. Okay. Whenever I see the wild rabbits that are hopping around Evanston, especially if there's more than one gathered, I think about Night of the Lepus.

RIPs and Other News

There's so much bad news out there right now. Where to begin? How about RIPs for Charlie Murphy and David Letterman's mom Dorothy. I enjoyed watching both of these people on television. Charlie's skits on Dave Chappelle's show were often great and Dorothy was a ray of sunshine on Letterman's Late Show especially when she did her pie thing around Thanksgiving. 

In other news, I'm glad to see United changed its tune about the handling of the passenger who refused to be "re-accommodated" from his flight to Kentucky. I guess once their stock price dropped and they started losing some serious money, they decided to take a more apologetic approach to try and stop the bleeding. Had they simply handled the passenger in a more humane way, the company wouldn't have found itself in this position.