"Sometimes The Truth Is Surprising..."

I ran across this article on Yahoo and at first I didn't know what to think of it.  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized, I support him... be what you want to be - we should all follow our dreams as long as they don't hurt us or anyone else...  And by the way, although it's buried deep in the story (as it should be), he happens to be gay.  I think my "gaydar*" picked my interest in the story when I saw his photo.

Eric Ducharme: The Real-Life Merman

Like any other 22-year-old Floridian, Eric Ducharme loves to swim, except when he dives into the water, he trades his swim trunks for a floppy tail.

Ducharme is a self-proclaimed merman, a mystical male counterpart to the mermaid. As the legend goes, these seductive sea creatures with the upper body of a human and the tail of a fish, make themselves visible to ships during thunder storms and would lure the opposite sex into the water with their siren-like singing.

According to a story in The Daily Mail, Ducharme says he eats, sleeps, and breathes mermaids and mermen and tries to impersonate them whenever he can. "It's a lifestyle. It's a path in life that I have chosen," he says during a Wednesday night episode of TLC's "My Crazy Obsession," a reality show that follows people whose adoration for objects has become an obsession.

Read the rest of Eric's story here: YahooShine

"Fear Eats the Soul"

* By the way, research on the gaydar phenomena shows that the most significant clues that we pick up on are found in our facial structure and expressions and not generalized stereotypes that many people believe in.