I went to the wedding of a college friend over the weekend. Most of my core group of friends from college was there.

And everyone has kids.

Okay, not everyone. I don’t have kids. My lesbian friend and her partner don’t have kids. The couple that just got married doesn’t have kids.

But one of my friends and his wife brought their 6-month-old, and another friend and his wife also have an infant, and another friend and his wife have an 18-month-old and a newborn. And the two couples who weren’t there also have kids.

Another classmate has a 7-year-old and a 4-year-old.

After the reception, I anticipated a long night of drinking and card-playing in someone’s hotel room, because that’s what we’ve done in the past when we’ve all gotten together. But nobody brought cards. By 11:30, most of our group had gone to bed. It was left to four of us (including the groom) to play pool in the hotel bar, drinking a couple of beers, until the bar closed at approximately 12:45 in the morning. By 1 a.m. I was back in my extraordinarily comfy hotel bed.

The next morning at brunch we all sat around and I listened to everyone talk about kids. Should babies watch television? How much attention should you give kids? Little kids in restaurants all play electronic games today! Even the lesbians, who live near Park Slope, were able to chime in with a story about liberal Park Slope parents bringing their babies to bars and how sometimes people can’t into the bars because there are too many strollers in the way.

Who are all these people and what the hell have they done with my friends?

Sigh. Suddenly everyone’s in their early 30s and married with growing families. I look back on all the years I’ve known these people. There was college, when we all lived in the same dorm and saw each other every day and worried about mid-terms and extracurricular activities. There were the chaotic years after college, when we (well, they, not me) were young and making money and living in the big city — we’d all get together in New York or D.C. every year or two and spend lots of money on long nights of drinking at noisy bars, and my friend Doug (R.I.P.) would try to pick up girls.

And now it’s all about babies.

Whenever we all get together I feel so different. I feel like they’ve been travelling through the conventional stages of adult life while I suffer from retarded development. As the years pass it seems that my life diverges from theirs more and more. I live in a different world than they do. I’m a gay man in New York City, and although I have a partner like them, my life is not the same as theirs and it never will be. Straight people in their early 30s are not the same as gay people in their early 30s. I wonder if we’ll grow even more different as the years pass.

This isn’t good or bad and I don’t have any judgments to make about it. All I mean to say is that it’s, well, profound.

We’re three-dimensional creatures, we human beings, but sometimes it’s that fourth dimension, the one we can’t see – time – that causes the most wonderment.

While digging around in some of my old files this afternoon, I found two $25 savings bonds that were issued to me when I was a baby. They’re from January 1974 and November 1975, so they’ve both reached their 30-year maturity.

According to here, they’re worth a total of $262.94.

And according to the savings bonds, I used to live here and here.

I always feel so weird that I lived in Queens when I was an infant and toddler. I don’t feel like a Queens boy.

Anyway, the savings bonds windfall will be wiped out by the new pair of glasses I bought today…

What a clusterfuck.

(And I can’t believe I just learned about this today.)

It begins with a lawsuit and leads to the resignation of the newly-elected president of LeGal (The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Law Association of Greater New York).

Last month, Aaron Charney, a young gay lawyer at the prestigious New York City law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, sued the firm for alleged harrasment based on his sexual orientation. (Here’s the original complaint.) Among other things, he claims that one of the firm’s partners tossed a document at his feet and said, “Bend over and pick it up — I’m sure you like that.” The day after that incident, the same partner handed him another document and said, “I just took a shit while reading this, and some might still be on there for you.”

When Charney complained to the appropriate people, he allegedly experienced retaliation. According to a New York Times article last month, “Members of the firm suggested that he move to a foreign office and then fabricated reviews to accuse him of overbilling clients, among other things.”

Mr. Charney, who joined the firm in the fall of 2003 after graduating from Columbia University Law School, contends that hostility toward him because of his sexual orientation began in the fall of 2005.

In his complaint, Mr. Charney claims that a partner in the mergers practice, Eric M. Krautheimer, began to make lewd sexual remarks to him based on his sexual orientation.

The next month, he said, James C. Morphy, the managing partner of the merger group, gave Mr. Charney his semiannual review, in which he conveyed outstanding work evaluations that had been written by several partners and clients on Mr. Charney’s behalf.

At the conclusion of the evaluation, however, Mr. Charney asserts that Mr. Morphy said that several partners had complained about seeing Mr. Charney and another male associate in the group “walking the halls together” and “eating lunch together” and that this “needs to stop.” In his complaint, Mr. Charney said it was a thinly veiled and false accusation that the two were engaged in a gay relationship.

In May 2006, Mr. Charney lodged a formal complaint with David B. Harms, a co-managing partner of the firm’s general practice. A few days later, Mr. Harms said that Mr. Krauthemier and another partner whom Mr. Charney asserted had made inappropriate remarks denied doing so.

Mr. Harms assured Mr. Charney that making the complaint would not result in any change to his employment status at the firm.

But a few hours later, Mr. Charney said he learned he was not included on a mentoring list for the 2006 summer associate program.

Okay. So that’s where it begins.

The next part of the story is that an ABC News article appears in which John Scheich, the First Vice President of the LeGal, says the following:

“Sullivan Cromwell is far from prejudiced in any way,” says [Scheich], adding that the firm often buys a table at his group’s annual fundraising dinner dance. “I don’t know Aaron Charney or the details of his case, but if I had to line up on one side or the other, I would have to line up with David H. Braff [an openly gay partner at the firm] and Sullivan Cromwell.”

It gets worse.

First of all, it was irresponsible of Scheich to make such a comment to the press when he had no firsthand knowledge of the facts of the case. This is particularly true when LeGal’s mission statement includes, in part, “[p]romoting the expertise and advancement of LGBT legal professionals,” “[e]liminating homophobia and transphobia in the justice system,” “[e]ncouraging lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and people of transgendered experience to choose law as a career, and “[p]romoting solidarity among LGBT in the law.” Belittling a lawsuit alleging anti-gay discrimination seems like something that runs counter to LeGal’s mission.

But Scheich dug a deeper hole for himself. Several people e-mailed Scheich in response to his comments, criticizing him for his statements. And he responded by e-mail. Here’s one of his responses:

Who are we to believe? Mr. Charney who has never shown any interest in the gay legal community before this incident (he is not a member of LeGaL) or contributed to any of our programs as far as we know, OR Dave Braff, a member of LeGaL for over 20 years, also gay, and a big contributor to LeGaL in more ways than just money and buying a table at our annual dinner/dance.

We would welcome you into membership at LeGaL and any contributions both financial and otherwise you might choose to make. Shall I have our Administrator send you a membership application?

That whole response is just wrongheaded. (These law students agree. And that last part is just tacky.

Here’s an excerpt from another response he e-mailed to someone:

Let me explain the dilemma LeGaL finds itself.

We are constantly struggling at LeGaL to become better known and more respected in the Legal community, amongst the Judiciary, and City Council etc. Accordingly it is imperative that when the media seeks us out, it is important that we make comment, as we did in the Court of Appeals decision recently on gay marriage. People see we are part of the respected legal community just by speaking out…

So I had to comment. Of course, I could have said a very uninteresting thing like , let’s wait and see how the facts turn out. Or it’s too early to know what actually happened. Those comments probably would bot [sic] have been printed.

So I tippy toed through the issue as gingerly as I could, but made it interesting enough and accurate enough to reach print.

So he could have said, “let’s wait and see how the facts turn out,” but it didn’t seem interesting enough, so instead he decided to publicly prejudge the case in a way that makes it seem like if you buy tables at LeGal events, you’ll be insulated from criticism.

Scheich was recently elected the president of LeGal. But LeGal’s board of directors disavowed his comments:

Given the gravity of the allegations and the early stage of legal proceedings, we sincerely regret that an officer of our organization has been quoted as essentially prejudging the merits of the lawsuit and the veracity of Mr. Charney, and that the officer also made subsequent comments. That was wrong – plain and simple…

We are deeply sorry that an officer of our organization, which aims in part to eliminate discrimination and to encourage LGBT individuals to choose law as a career, made public comments dismissive of Mr. Charney’s claims. The views expressed by that officer do not represent the views of our Board, nor, we suspect, the views of our members…

In light of all this, Scheich resigned from the presidency last week.

Oh, and that’s not all. Apparently, Sullivan & Cromwell has filed a countersuit against Charney, alleging that he leaked confidential documents to the press.

This is getting uglier.

From the “Weddings & Celebrations” section of today’s New York Times:

Catherine Morrison and William T. Golden were married last evening at their home in Manhattan…

Ms. Morrison, 72, will continue to use her name professionally. She is a board member of New Yorkers for Parks, an advocacy group, and of the Greenbelt Conservancy, a preservation organization on Staten Island. She also writes a gardening column in The Staten Island Advance…

Mr. Golden, 97, is a former Wall Street analyst…

Wow.

Ninety-seven.

I can’t imagine it will be a very long marriage, but hats off to Mr. Golden. I hope I’m still living it up at 97.

That’s fricking awesome.

From the Times:

“There is distrust in Washington. I am surprised, frankly, at the amount of distrust that exists in this town,” Bush said. “And I’m sorry it’s the case, and I’ll work hard to try to elevate it.”

Sounds about right.

Two long years to go | Salon.com

On the same day that Bush — a president who has never vetoed a congressional spending bill — preached “fiscal discipline,” David Walker, the comptroller general, appeared before Congress to describe the nation’s financial future. “Simply put,” Walker said bluntly, “our nation is on an imprudent and unsustainable fiscal path.”

We have a comptroller general?

John Kerry bows out of the 2008 presidential race – and the world collectively shrugs, because he had no chance in hell of winning the nomination anyway. He would have been delusional if he’d decided to run again – but then again, don’t you have to be a little bit delusional to run for president?

Anyway – I’m glad he swallowed his ambition. He could do more good as a U.S. senator than as a presidential candidate again.

On Friday I had a free financial consultation at work to assess my personal financial situation. The result: I’m way behind where I should be as far as retirement and personal savings.

For the past few years I’ve been putting almost all my extra money toward paying down my student loans. I’ve always seen debt as bad, almost a moral failing. But the thing is: while credit card debt (which I tackled first and paid off a few years ago) is bad, student loan debt isn’t so bad, because it’s an investment. (Granted, in my case I’m not sure how much of an investment it was. I spend the first year after law school making a pittance and I never went to work for a law firm or made the big bucks.)

Student loan debt also has a lower interest rate than most “bad” loans. Given the low interest rate on my student loans, I should have been investing some of that money these past few years in something with a higher long-term interest rate. I just hate the idea of having thousands of dollars of student loan debt, but if I’ll make more money in the long term if I invest some of it.

I never knew much about my previous job’s pension/retirement plan and never contributed more than the automatic minimum. But now I know more. Since I wasn’t at that job long enough for the pension to vest, I have to take that money out. I might put it into my new 401(k) or into an IRA. I’ve been educating myself about all this stuff today – 401(k)s versus IRAs, traditional IRAs versus Roth IRAs…

I’ve also ordered Personal Finances for Dummies, which should arrive soon.

Maybe this will be my belated New Year’s resolution: to get my finances the healthiest they can be.

Yay.

Just two more years. Two years from today, George W. Bush leaves the White House.

GOD, TWO MORE YEARS OF THIS!

Sigh.

FYI:

As a loyal reader has reminded me, today is my six-year blogiversary. Not many blogs, percentage-wise, have been around for at least six years. Not that I’m one to talk – to some people, I’m probably still an uppity blogger-come-lately.

Here’s one of the articles that started it all for me. Ahh, the good old days…

I’ve been neglecting this blog way too much lately. I really should vow to write more often.

Matt and I have been enjoying “Brothers & Sisters” on Sunday nights after “Desperate Housewives.” If you haven’t seen it, it’s a one-hour drama about four adult siblings and their mother and uncle who all live in California and run a family business together, a food company. The executive producers are Jon Robin Baitz, Greg Berlanti, and Ken Olin. The show is well written and funny, and in addition to a great cast – Sally Field, three “Alias” alumni (including Ron Rifkin), Calista Flockhart, and Rob Lowe, it features one of the more realistic portrayals of a gay character I’ve seen on TV – Kevin Walker, one of the siblings, played by Matthew Rhys.

Matthew Rhys neither overplays nor underplays the character’s gayness; he’s neither a mincing queen like Jack McFarland or a sexless priss like Will Truman. And while he doesn’t play to stereotype, he does queen out every once in a while like many gay men would. You can imagine that straight people wouldn’t guess that Kevin was gay but that he might set off a gay man’s gaydar. I like it.

Kevin is out and confident and he has a sexual appetite. He gets an interesting romantic life just like the other characters do. Every so often, there’s a gay kiss on the show – and what’s remarkable is that it’s not a big deal. Ten years ago it would have been. The same-sex kisses on “Roseanne” and “Ally McBeal” were hyped beyond belief because they were considered so controversial; today, two men kiss romantically on network TV and nobody bats an eye or even hears about it.

Granted, it’s a 10 p.m. show, but still… we’ve come a long way, baby.

Here’s my favorite letter from yesterday’s New York Times:

To the Editor:

Re “Democrats Plan Symbolic Votes Against Bush’s Iraq Troop Plan” (front page, Jan. 10):

So the Democrats are planning symbolic votes against more troops for Iraq.

Actually, when I and many other Americans cast our votes against this war, even before the prospect of escalation, they were for real.

Daniel England

Fairfield, Conn., Jan. 10, 2007

The Democrats won Congress and they still have no spine.

I’ve been a member of the working world again for two days now, and I’m dog tired. I feel like a walking zombie.

It’s not because of the job. It’s because I’m not used to waking up at 7:30 in the morning. I haven’t been getting enough sleep. I don’t think it helped that I had a piece of chocolate cake last night an hour before I got into bed.

I’m still finding my bearings at work – I haven’t been there long enough to get a sense of things yet. But my new office building is very close to my old office building, so I keep having to reassure myself that I’m not a lawyer anymore. Whenever I remember that, I smile inside and feel a little rush of pleasure. No longer am in a career in which people thrive on adversarial relationships. No longer am I in a career for which I’m not suited.

I’m so used to having a job that’s totally wrong for me that’s it going to take a while to get used to the new state of things. Call it post-lawyer trauma. Even though I was by no means a slave in my old position — I was a government employee, after all — I never really liked that job. I’m glad it’s over.

No chocolate cake for me tonight; I’m going to try to get a good night’s sleep.

Here are links to the 50 greatest cartoons of all time, as voted on in 1994 by 1,000 animation professionals.

Happy New Year!

A year of New Yorker covers.

The end of another year.

Tomorrow we enter the late part of the decade. The late ’00s. Weird. The decade still feels new sometimes, and yet we’re already in its final third.

What I will remember most about this year are losing my job and spending a majority of the year unemployed – a period that is at long last coming to an end. Losing my job was good for me, because it initiated a long period of self-assessment. I hope all the assessment pays off.

Matt and I also lost a social circle over the summer. I still get to hang out with some of those friends on an individual basis, even if it’s not the same as having a regular weekly gathering.

I finally joined a gym last January – a belated New Year’s resolution that I actually kept. I work out regularly, and even if I haven’t gotten all big and muscly, the gym is still a great help to me.

Also this year, my brother and his fiancé got married. It was a beautiful, lavish wedding – a real highlight of the year.

There were also numerous theater outings, books, movies and TV shows.

So I’ll kick off 2007 with a new job and a blank slate. Blank slates are always nice.

Happy New Year.

This is the view from my dad’s office in Penn Plaza in Manhattan, looking south.

It’s my birthday today. I’m 33.

I like it when it’s my birthday.

But, ugh! 33!

Ages 30, 31, and 32 went by too quickly. I want the rest of the decade to slow down.

In the meantime, time for cake and ice cream and Pin the Tail on the Donkey.