Robert StGenis Voice empowered

I was on the phone with someone at USAA about my insurance and he asked me "how do you like L.A.?" Noting his genuine curiosity, I paused for a moment. I responded "it's a perfect place to have a love/hate relationship with; if you have never been, you should come." I gave an explanation of how it was vast and amazingly different than most anywhere else, but hard to get around, expensive but you at least most often convinced yourself worth it, and usually the weather is amazing. I have lived here most of my adult life, with brief times in the city of Riverside (the Inland Empire a large extension of L.A.) and the Coachella Valley (Palm Springs), a nearby getaway. A friend of mine from Berlin whom I have known some 30 years said to me years ago visiting me that L.A. was "one of the most unique cities in the world." I don't think that it was his first trip to L.A. when he said this to me. He has been back multiple times and repeated it since and he...

Most recently, I've been writing almost exclusively on my junior and senior years of high school. While laws and in turn, parents, were more permissive, my experiences were not the ordinary; good, bad and otherwise up for discussion. The 80s were all about excess and our generation probably screwed it up for future ones, or saved you, depending on how you look at it. There were a great deal of questions about testimony given and statements during the hearings... I thought it was highly questionable then, all the more now, that most people remember without a doubt who attended a high school party 30 years ago, let alone what might have gone on in a bedroom they were not in at the time. I do believe and have had experiences where certain things stand clearly in my mind. If you read Being a Junior , I remember that the guy that entered my bathroom stall had a classic London Fog or similar rain coat and black or dark brown curly hair. I remember I had a patchwork patterned sweater w...

This will not mean much unless you first read: Summer 1986. Part Two. In Liberty & Reality The lower right photo shows 2 bad decisions on my part. A horrible perm and smoking. I first started smoking as a freshman in Cross Country when my friend and I would sneak into the woods and smoke during a run. A few of us also tried chewing tobacco while cycling in the same period. Difference then, at my private school, they simply had designated smoking areas for students. We were told it was bad, not that we couldn't under any circumstance. Meanwhile, the video below was being shown during the school year in NYC public schools. It most definitely was not in the Morris School District.

The Hudson River waterfront in the 80's was nothing like it is today. There were piers that were collapsing into the river, others in varying states of decay. The Intrepid was a new attraction and I believe became part of the Smithsonian while I was in high school. I recall a handful of years later attending a huge Gay Pride event that included I believe my first foam party. This doesn't sound like a big deal now but it was hugely symbolic at the time we were fighting for the right to serve in the US military. Hell's Kitchen in Midtown Manhattan was mostly still hellish with gentrification in its early stages. I lived there for a brief period in 1990 and will write about it in a future entry. Crime in New York City was also on another planet. There were 1,907 murders in New York City in 1986 vs. 562 murders in 2018. The homeless population was out of control and the smell of defecation and urine in subway stations sometimes made it nearly impossible to not vomit before...

Please be sure to read  AIDS 1. Junior year  and  AIDS 1-Senior Year. Part One  prior to this entry. It brings my story all together. You may also want to watch my short  It Gets better  video which is also a blog post on here as well. Then, you will have my years as a teenager, the fun, the sad, the good and bad. The collection of these posts bring together a formative part of who I am, as it is an important period of growth for all of us. You will likely find some of my story shocking, some entertaining, interesting, doubtfully boring. I didn't overall spend time writing about time on swim or soccer teams, or even much about going to school except a bit more in this last one. I wrote mostly about what you aren't expecting to hear from a teenager. My girlfriend Laura and I will also spend a great deal of time in New York City. Because Laura lived down the shore in Toms River, she was about 90 miles away. Getting together was never running up or down t...

We moved to New Jersey for the beginning of my junior year of high school. I was transitioning from Cranbook , a private school with a exquisite 600 acre campus designed by  Eliel Saarinen that is largely the birthplace of mid-century modernism among other things, to Morristown High School , a large public high school with 3 mish-mosh institutional buildings put together. Morristown had a very diverse student body, as opposed to Cranbrook where at the time diversity was like a few spare sprinkles on a white frosted cupcake. There were no bells at Cranbrook. Now, I had buzzers, guards, and an Attendance Czar who sent computer generated letters to your parents about your "illegal absence" if you missed a class. We had cubby holes at Cranbrook (which really needed to be changed as I had things stolen from me) but now I had a locker with random locker inspections, sometimes with the Morristown PD. ESL was something I had never heard of before, and teen pregnancy was something ...