One of the joys of living in San Francisco is that a muscle-impaired, but not hideous, guy like me occasionally gets leered at. Granted, the leering is always done by men, and sometimes they are skanky smelly men, but you gotta take your validation where you can get it. This would be better for me if I were gay, or even single, but still I eke joy out of this.

Once, soon after I first moved to San Francisco, the not-yet-wife decided to make some fudge, but we didn't have a recipe. While she decided to wing it, I browsed the cooking magazines in the supermarket looking for a fudge recipe. So there I stood, in a semi-upscale supermarket in San Francisco, perusing Gourmet magazine. When a fireman approached me and struck up a conversation, I thought nothing of it. He asked me about cooking for a few minutes (which, stupidly, confused me until I realized that I was holding that magazine) and then handed me his phone number. "Give me a call sometime," he suggested and walked off. It was right at that exact moment when I realized that he didn't really value my cooking advice.

Woo hoo! I got hit on by a fireman, and a cute muscly African American one at that. That, at age 25, was probably the first time in my life that I got hit on by anyone anywhere. I strolled over to my wife with a newly-found cocksure swagger to my gait. She was impressed (not by the swagger, but by the fireman incident).

These days I don't do as well. Yesterday I went out for a run and passed by some disheveled little troll of a man. "Nice legs!" he barked at me when I ran by. It had been a while since anyone had hit on me, so I still managed to enjoy it. Sometimes validation comes from unlikely places. On the way back, I passed by the same man again, curious to see if he'd remark upon my obviously spectacular legs.

He spotted me and exclaimed, "I'd like to squeeze those...." and that was all I heard before the wind obliterated the rest of his witty come-on. We'll never know exactly what he wanted to squeeze, but this being San Francisco, we can assume the sentence probably ended with "...Republicans in a headlock!" Political discourse takes unlikely forms here.