{"id":8281,"date":"2015-04-27T07:46:26","date_gmt":"2015-04-27T12:46:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/?p=8281"},"modified":"2015-04-27T07:49:00","modified_gmt":"2015-04-27T12:49:00","slug":"expectations-message-in-a-bottle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/8281","title":{"rendered":"Expectations (Message In A Bottle)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was at the NOM March for Marriage rally on the Mall last Saturday, and I should post some of my thoughts here rather than my Facebook page, along with the photos I will eventually upload to the photo gallery here, because that sort of thing is what I created this website for. Which I will do later this week.  \u00a0But there is another rally tomorrow (Tuesday) at the Supreme Court I will also be documenting so that&#8217;ll have to wait a bit. For now I&#8217;ll just say this about NOM: You simply cannot overstate the level of religious extremism and outright kookery that was on display at that rally. As I wandered the crowd with my camera I kept wishing H. L. Mencken was still alive to file a report on it for the Sun.  \u00a0Strange as \u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/bactra.org\/Mencken\/the-hills-of-zion\/\">The Hills of Zion<\/a> were, they&#8217;re stranger still when transplanted to a patch of Mall directly in front of the U.S. Capital.<\/p>\n<p>In the meantime&#8230;this came across my Facebook stream just now and I&#8217;m rolling it up and putting it into another bottle to toss into the sea for a certain someone to find eventually&#8230;maybe&#8230;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><a href=\"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/expectations.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"expectations\" src=\"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/expectations.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>I did that to myself too, once upon a time. The bars were made of the low expectations placed on a kid being raised by a divorced single working mother. Family gave me those bars.  \u00a0And teachers. And well meaning members of the churches mom took me to. But I put them in place myself. I&#8217;m 61 years old now, and just celebrated the 25th anniversary of the launching of the Hubble Space Telescope with my co-workers here at The Space Telescope Science Institute&#8230;we got a group photo taken of ourselves and I&#8217;m there at the front with my camera and some of the astronauts and Matt Mountain who handed me a special service award last year&#8230;and I&#8217;m still trying to pry some of those bars down and free myself.<\/p>\n<p>No matter I didn&#8217;t let them put me in the closet like other gay kids back in the day. That&#8217;s just one of many prisons people let themselves get talked into. There are all kinds of ways a kid can get talked out of believing in themselves.  \u00a0But ultimately we are the wardens of our own internal jails.<\/p>\n<p>We have to learn how to let ourselves go, so we can become the people we were always meant to be. It&#8217;s a struggle&#8230;but a noble one&#8230;because you can&#8217;t be the best you can be for others, until you can be all that you can be.<\/p>\n<p align=center> <a href=\"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/hubble-gang.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"hubble gang\" src=\"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/hubble-gang.jpg\"\/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was at the NOM March for Marriage rally on the Mall last Saturday, and I should post some of my thoughts here rather than my Facebook page, along with the photos I will eventually upload to the photo gallery here, because that sort of thing is what I created this website for. Which I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[145,81,12],"class_list":["post-8281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-a-life","tag-message-in-a-bottle","tag-the-struggle-for-our-lives"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8281\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}