Welcome to My New Blog!

As I sit on my patio, scribbling these ideas into some sort of coherent thought, the world is currently in panic over COVID-19. Every person on the planet certainly has been affected by these disease in someway and, since I am currently blessed with an abundance of free time, I thought I might finally throw my name into the vast blogosphere. I have no idea where this is going just yet, but I thank you for finding out right alongside me. Let's start with the best decision I made in the past year.

I gave up.

Let me explain. So, I was in a frustrating situation. I had lost a couple jobs in just as many years. The first one after a lot of harassment after coming out (the subject of another blog post, but feel free to Google that one and most of your questions can be answered in publications like USA Today, The Washington Post and the New York Daily News), and the second after a metric ton of budget cuts impacted my school district. I had been working for a little while as a professional actor but, while that was and is among the most exciting work I have had the privilege of doing, the money just wasn't the same. I was between contracts and feeling quite alone.

I tried dating. Like the rest of my generation, I tried the various dating apps. What I was finding there was...less than exemplary. Mostly young people in or right out of college that had very different things in mind when it came to a relationship than I did. Not my scene. I grew increasingly frustrated.

So on April 4, 2019, I did something I hadn't done in a long time. I prayed. Coming from a place of exasperation, it might not have been the best of prayers. Finally, I said "God, if you want me to be with someone, you're going to have to send them to me. I'm tired of it all. I give up." I went to bed, strangely comforted by letting this particular hurdle in my life go, even though it potentially meant living life like some sort of hermit (and I don't even like cats that much).

The next morning, I found a message from someone. Shortly after I had gone to bed, she had accidentally swiped left on me. For those of you that may not be part of the generation of social distancing...yeah, that's right, we invented that before it was cool... on many dating apps you "swipe left" for no and "swipe right" for yes. If a match appears, you have the option of striking up a conversation and even dating. But I digress. This young lady had accidentally said no when she meant to say yes. So her initial message to me was to let me know that she had immediately gone to buy a month of paid subscription to the app so that she could take back that decision. She then proceeded to "swipe up" (super like) on me so that she could message me directly rather than waiting for a match to appear. We had our first date the next day. We get married next week.

Meet Sarah! Also an actor and educator with a dark sense of humor and a disproportionate love of baby talk to increasingly confused canines, we've realized that we're each really just dating ourselves (probably both narcissistic and against more than a few religions...but it works for us).

The past year, despite the world throwing us curveball after curveball (many of which can be saved for future blog posts), has been incredible. On December 21, 2019, in front of many friends and family, we got engaged:

And then I went back to work... did I mention that this was during the curtain speech at La Comedia Dinner Theatre... where I was on contract for "Elf the Musical" at the time? Shortly after this video was taken, Sarah and I went on a two week vacation to Disney World as well as a Disney Cruise (where the first image was taken). We basically had our honeymoon before the wedding. Sarah was excited because she had been chosen for the Disney College Program at Disneyland in Anaheim, CA, and would be taking the next flight out to LAX right after our cruise. She adored her job. As I worked tirelessly to find my own employment to get out to California to join her, I was constantly reassured by the smiles I saw on her face every day that she came home from work and would Facetime me to catch me up.

For those of you who don't live under a rock, you can probably see some of the rest of this story coming. COVID-19 started rampaging worldwide just shortly into Sarah's program. Disney was among the first organizations to close down everything worldwide. This included the early termination of the college program. Everything was going to right, until it wasn't. I flew out to California and helped Sarah pack up the pieces of the new life she had started for us and shipped it back to Kentucky. We're still figuring all that out and, as this virus hopefully subsides, we absolutely see ourselves heading back to sunny Southern California for the forceable future.

But, in the meantime, we look forward to one very positive event in our near future. On April 6, 2020 (on the one year anniversary of our first date), Sarah and I will be getting married in a very small private ceremony (so as to cooperate with the current social distancing guidelines) in her parents' home in Kentucky.

So, giving up might not really be the right way of looking at this. Sometimes, as we bog ourselves down in layer of worry and anger, it's simply better to let go. Understanding that we cannot control everything in our lives. To make the best of what we can and put the rest in God's hands. That's what I did. And now I get to marry my best friend.