Biscuit: Tasty Doesn't Get You A Date To The Prom

I have received dozens and dozens of emails from concerned readers over the past few days, eager to know whether or not I bit the bullet and bought the boots. In answer: Yes. My new boots are burgundy. They are 10 holes tall. If you see a spiky-haired boy wearing burgundy 10-hole boots, it may be me. Consider yourselves warned.

One of the above statements is completely false.

Last night found me keeping company with the ex-boyfriend/best friend who formed part of my charming chain of coincidences. He reminds me sharply of Chris Kattan, and at one point he declared me to be "the shit," which I took as a compliment. A bunch of Israeli boys showed up too. Then we all ate peanut butter pie and I spilled my wine on it.

All of the above statements are true.

I just bought a ticket home for my mom's birthday. I am homesick in a vague indefinable sort of way lately -- which is rare for me. I tend to be almost violently independent, so to tell my mom that "I wish I were back in Colorado too," and mean it is nigh unprecedented. I will cook her a turkey when I visit. And I will sing songs to my niece.

All of the above statements are probably true, but that is liable to change without notice.

Excitement for my Thursday date continues to build. Plans now include dinner and a Letdowns concert. I have already begun to clean my apartment, on the off chance that we visit Brooklyn. To date, I have failed to contact Hercules with my request to divert a river through the place and start me off fresh. I am also carefully planning my shaving schedule: I need enough stubble to look good in, but not enough to chafe. It is a subtle science. Perhaps making me wait until Thursday to see him is part of his secret plan to keep me interested.

The above statements are also true, except for the one that is purely conjecture, which may or may not be.

I have gained a new appreciation for people who stand on slanty things. I do not know who these people might be, exactly, nor do I know why they might be standing on slanty things. Nevertheless, I am certain such people exist, and for their slanty-standing efforts, I applaud them. This observation arises from my subway ride this morning -- 20 minutes standing in the car, motionless, while the subway ahead of mine dealt with "door problems." We had just been rounding a bit of a corner, banking around a curve. Maintaining an upright posture for so long under such slanted circumstances was more physically taxing than one might casually imagine.

On a more exciting note, my tenure at this particular job has been extended by a month, relieving me of a great deal of financially-oriented stress. You know how it is said that people spend a total of a year of their lives standing in lines, or this many years asleep or that many years eating? I shudder to think of how much of my life has been devoted to pointless worrying over money -- time that I could have spent much more profitably pursuing other interests, such as boys. (ha ha.)

Speaking of boys. A confession. I do not know how to "play it cool." I cannot help but wear my heart on my sleeve. I worry that I say too much. I worry that I compliment too often, that my very enthusiasm damps the enthusiasm of others. It is the basic nature of fledgling romance that upsets me -- their thoughts are obscured, their attitudes relaxed (falsely or no), because they do not want you to think that perhaps they are secretly as excited as you are. I am sad when others are not as willing as I to throw themselves upon the pyre. It leaves me reduced to mystical augury: I find myself reading horoscopes (insert gasp of feigned surprise here) for clues into my romantic future; I tie knots in straw-wrappers and pull, using the status of the knot as an indicator of whether or not the boy is thinking of me.

All I know to do is to keep on as I have been; I am incapable of changing my modus operandi at this point, and to be honest, I would not want to. I do not wish to be opaque, hidden; I will not play games and pretend to be laid-back when I am just the opposite. All I can hope is that someone is willing to take what I say at face value, to accept that I can be good for them and they can be good for me; that someone is willing to lose themselves in a kiss, to paint the town a blazing red, to laugh and not worry about what they sound like when they sing.

(sigh)

In case you were wondering, that was one of the good kind of sighs. A happy-dreamy sigh, not a grumpy-bored-tired sigh.

The fact that someone would take the time to soothe my prickly Leonine ego makes me purr. I suppose that on reflection, my last entry was as much a request to hear something reassuring as it was a declaration of my thoughts. That someone recognized that and acted accordingly leaves me smiling and sigh-ful. Consider me reassured.

Varied observations regarding muscles:

a) Muscles are weird. On the subway ride home today, I somehow managed to actually get a seat. Wedged in as I was, I did not realize until I stood to disembark that my entire lower back had fallen asleep. In fact, until that point I did not realize that one's lower back could fall asleep without the rest of the body following suit. As I walked home, I discovered that without sensations from my pesky skin getting in the way, I could actually feel each of the muscles of my back sliding against each other. This was particularly distressing, as I had just read Michael Marshall Smith's description of "pushing through a loose mountain of meat that moved and flexed and smothered. It was like trying to run through a sea of dismembered arms in the dark, through arms and legs that filled every inch around me and slipped and squirted as I fell forward though them." This word adequately describes the feeling of revulsion I felt at that moment: Guuh. Say it out loud and you will know what I mean.

b) Muscles are weird. When I got home, I went to pick up my laundry. (Side note: The idea of dropping off one's dirty things and picking them up later in the day, clean and folded, has to qualify as one of the Most Tremendous Concepts Ever.) As I have in recent years metamorphosed from owning a pair of jeans and a few polo t-shirts to being a ridiculous clothes horse, I ended up carrying home sixty-five pounds of laundry. This was not a very easy task, but my muscles rose to the challenge. Do you know what it was they did to help me in my time of need? They made me sneer. Every time I carry something heavy, a muscle in my face twitches, the left side of my lip curls upward, and I sneer. Utterly involuntarily. I try to control this, so I do not sneer at random passersby, but I cannot smooth my face into passivity. Perhaps you are much smarter than I and you realize why it is that sneering is supposed to help me carry things. Good for you.

In conclusion, muscles are weird.

P.S. T minus 23 hours and counting.

Any visitors to my apartment last night would have witnessed me in a flurry of activity. I felt almost like a Maenad, frenzying, out for blood, where the vital fluids I sought were contained within the heaps of detritus that formerly filled my bedroom. A six-hour cleaning extravaganza. I bounced around (corybantically, perhaps?) listening to my particular brand of Bubblegum Europop, letting Aqua and Toybox and Eiffel 65 spur me ever onward. The worst of it is that my room is still not clean. It is not even particularly tidy. I take solace in the fact that the floor is now visible, and everything has been sorted into discrete categories. I have a book pile, a blanket pile, a paperwork pile, a hat pile. (As for the last, I do not know why I still own that many hats. I never, ever wear them -- but they were obtained on vacations and such, and have rather pleasant associations as a result. It all goes back to me and that inanimate objects problem.)

I have spent my morning alternately making small tweaks to this blasted website I am being paid for, and sneaking peeks at restaurant guides on line. The official plan at present is to wander around the city tonight and just find somewhere that looks good for dinner, and while I think that is a good plan, I would like to have a few offhand suggestions available so I do not appear quite as clueless about Manhattan as I actually am. My official discovery of the morning is that the much-lauded Zagat Guide is completely, utterly worthless. When I read a review, be it of a movie, a restaurant, or anything else, I would like a few specifics. Zagat's references are but a sentence or two long, and while they helpfully inform me that a restaurant is "quirky" and "offbeat," with "lots of charm," they completely neglect to explain (for example) what sort of vegetarian options are available, or even what is available, period.

In a review, or in a menu for that matter, I look for key phrases. "Avocado," "braised," "creamy," "brie," "pan-seared," "wild mushroom," or "pecan-crusted" rate high on my list. I like imagining what food tastes like based on its description (which explains why I spend so much of my life watching the Food Network). I have decadent tastes; I shall go spend my afternoon looking up reviews that cater to them.

PS: T minus 7.25 hours and counting.

I feel absurdly nervous when I have no reason to be.

I just hope that my stomach, which has been flip-flopping all day, does not commit the ultimate rebellion and pop everything inside it back out again. You would think I had never been on a date before. I know that as soon as I get to stop with the waiting and start with the talking, everything will settle down. Still, I can't help thinking that throwing up on my date would be the most pants thing ever.

Think good thoughts regarding my continued gastric stability.

T minus 1.5 hours. And counting.

Today is not a day remarkable for my mental acuity. I feel hazy and blurred about the edges, and my thoughts continuously revolve around one particular topic. My mind keeps sitting in last night, rooting through conversations and events, picking out one biff thing after another.

I cannot stop humming showtunes -- yes, I realize that is about as queer as it is possible to be, but I'm too busy laughing at myself to care that "I'm as trite and as gay as a daisy in May / A cliche coming true." And you know how much I hate being cliche.

It is 8:29 am on Sunday and I cannot help but wish that it were only 7:29. I feel like an hour has been taken, stolen, from my womb untimely ripped. Granted, I have no womb from which to rip things, but as I was a C-section baby and could have, therefore, theoretically killed Macbeth, I feel a need to include that pseudo-quote wherever possible.

I got home from a birthday party a few hours ago. I should have gone home a few hours before that, with Art Student. She was mad that I didn't trek back with her, but once I got to the party I felt much more alive, much more vibrant, much more energetic than I originally thought I would. I changed my mind about wanting to come home and speak quietly to her while she made artistic things. I feel badly about changing my mind this way sometimes. But to be honest, I feel that I have kind of earned the right to change my mind on occasion, to do something that I would like to do. It goes back to what I said a few weeks ago - I am tired of doing things solely to make others happy. I really enjoy doing things, and staying places, and going places, that make me happy. She and I had a bit of a tiff in my friend's living room, scaring off another friend in the process. Then she came back again and we superficially made up -- but I am not looking forward to talking to her tomorrow, because last night will still be sitting inbetween us.

The website I have spent these past few weeks working on is finished. If you have a desire to be bored with financial information, by all means, check out the new and exciting Global Asset Management site. Weeeee!

I have spent my morning so far reading about the Queen Mother. I have sorely neglected my Anglophilic leanings in recent days -- I feel vaguely guilty that I did not do this sooner. There is something about royalty that fascinates me; I enjoy reading about their marriages and duties and titles and coats of arms. It is probably just the fact that I want to be one of them. I have even gone so far as to see what one has to do to have a British coat of arms issued to them. Americans do not often get one, but with recent ancestors hailing from Blackpool, it is still at least a distant possibility. A boy can dream.!

A birthday party this past weekend yielded a passel of new digital photos of me and my friends. See the entry for April 7 here, and try to guess which one is me. P.S.: I do not know why my head looks quite so long, nor why I look quite so pale.

I have just been informed by a reliable source that the photograph linked to in my previous entry does not, in fact, look like me. Please, therefore, do not use that photograph as a visual aid should I ever get kidnapped.

I am so unfocused at the moment, I can safely file everything I have done at work today under the "Worthless Waste Of Time" category, and cross-reference it to "Will Have To Be Completely Redone." Yay!

I remember now what I like about Daylight Savings Time. I left work and the sun was shining, the air was warm. The world was still awake, and had not left me scrambling for cover of a subway in the dark.

I felt magic in the air tonight. I walked outside. I felt power in the breeze. A world of action, where everything crackled with dreams. I laughed for no reason, smiled at people I passed, made them smile back. I could do anything. Fly.

Even now, sitting in my room, the smell of green things and spring and warmth running from one end of my apartment to another, I can feel it. It is a pity, then, that there is nobody here to share this. Everyone I could talk to is either asleep or in the city, or too far away to call, now, when a single word could fulminate against the barriers of the night and leave memories.

All that unrealized potential, all those sparks I jumped through, going to waste.

Pity. This could have been a night to make gods tremble.

All the words in my brain are hiding.

Maybe if I am very quiet and very still, they will creep out to see what everybody is being so quiet about.

And then I can jump on them and catch them! Haha!

My words are no longer hermits, hiding out in a cave in my mind where I could not reach them. I did not even have to be secretly silent to regain use of them, as I had thought of here. Instead, I merely had to get them drunk.

Having a high tolerance for alcohol is both a blessing and a curse. One one hand, it takes a lot of drinking to get me drunk. On the other hand, it takes a lot of drinking to get me drunk. It boils down to getting sick quickly versus spending a lot of money quickly. On the whole, I would much prefer to throw down a few extra bucks than to throw up my dinner. After a Bass, three Guinnesses, two martinis (one apple, one French Cosmo) and a Maker's Mark on the rocks, however, it does not matter what kind of tolerance one has -- you'll be fairly well schtonkered (a word I learned from an Australian friend of mine -- I'm trying it on for size, seeing if I like it well enough to enter it into permanent rotation).

After my night of drinking and debauchery with this one, somehow my brain decided that it had discovered the perfect time to re-bleach my hair. It actually turned out fine, if perhaps with a bit too much blond to properly call it "highlights." I have to decide now if I will add some other color to the mix or not. The jury is still out. On reflection (well, on staring at my reflection for a very long time this morning) I have decided I rather like the look I drunkenly created last night, even if on the subway a bright light on the outside of the car kept catching my eye as it reflected against the window -- and I realized it was not a light at all, but my hair. Call it my lion's mane, if you like.

Today beckons. Lunch with the boy, games with friends after work, and then more boy after his concert. The fun never stops 'round here, I tell you.

I hereby roll my eyes at the world at large. And flip it off, while I am at it.

To make a ridiculous story short, those of you who were living vicariously through me can now safely desist.

The drama comes in two flavors: straight up, and with a twist.

First course: lunch, Friday. A standard helping of break-up talk, seasoned with traditional phrases such as, "You're a great guy, really," and "It wasn't anything you did," followed by slightly more tasteless sayings such as "I know how you feel," which carries the slightest aroma of condescension, and "I don't ...regret... anything we did," which smacks of faintest gall. It is rather the prerogative of the recipient of such talks to criticize the manner in which they were delivered -- and while I know it is never easy to say these things to someone, at least have a decent reason. Honestly.

Second course, wherein lies the twist: dinner, same night. Interrupted by a common friend, who has apparently already heard the news, fresh off the grapevine. Heard that, as well as how the boy's best friend apparently has an absurd misguided crush on me. How the best friend told the boy about the crush. How the boy then broke with me. I considered it a reasonable possibility that the two events were connected. Either way made no difference to me, but I never turn down a mystery. A phone call confirmed, in no uncertain terms, that he said what he said because he "meant it," no relation to the best friend.

The rest of the weekend was spent in hedonistic pursuits with my friends: creating a head of hair that resembles a metallic sunrise, birthday parties for complete strangers, brunching solely for the unlimited mimosas, and curling up in a nest of down comforter. Holy cats, I have cool friends.

I would like to take a moment to express my appreciation for a few simple things:

1) Large coffee cups

2) Really strong coffee

3) Listening to Aqua on full-tilt blast-level at work, thanks to the miracle of headphones

4) The Emperor's New Groove ("Is this my voice?!?")

5) Direct sunlight

6) Not swimming in pennilessness for the first time in a year

7) Bars with garden patios

8) My apartment's roof

9) Chocolate Powerbars

10) The guy in my office who sounds like John Goodman

11) Salads with walnuts

12) Dill

13) The telephone

14) Pilot's Precise V5 Extra-Fine rolling ball pen, black ink

15) The Brak Show

16) Hierarchical menus

17) Riding in cars

18) People-watching at St. Patrick's Cathedral

19) Down comforters

20) Online airline reservations and the fantasy of flying anywhere in the world at the drop of a hat

I am tired of my dreams.

I do not mean this in a world-weary, woe-is-me sense. I mean it literally. My dreams. The ones I have while I am asleep. I am tired of them.

When I work on a particularly involved project (such as the web programming job I am currently taking a break from to write this), that project tends to be reflected in my dreams. My subconscious is speaking to me in HTML. I have not been seeing actual faces while I slumber -- rather, I have seen what a particular face might look like, were it to be rendered in a table format. Once I could not speak unless I created the words in a headline graphic (UBSHeadlineRegular, 24pt, Crisp, #FF6600) in Photoshop first. I wake up and have already done a full day's work.

I would rather go back to my usual dreams, infrequent though they seem to be. Ones in which I might be able to slip to another dimension pursued by Donald Sutherland; fly once I learn how to tack into the wind; create things with a thought; run up a flight of star-stairs to trap the evil aliens who moved in next door; cry over the body of my dead father, Atticus Finch; even that old nightmare where I watch my Claymation friend get his Claymation legs squished, while (inexplicably) Huckleberry Hound provides narration.

Yes, so my normal dreams are sometimes pretty weird. Blame it on my brain; it never listens to me.

Brooklyn continues to amaze me. Last night, Union Worker and I were out for a drink. (I try not to think about how many of my stories involve some variation on this theme.) In the corner, I saw my local sandwich guy -- he runs an amazing deli directly across the street from my apartment, where about 4 times a week I go to get tuna salad sandwiches, stuffed peppers, lasagna, chocolate cannoli, sour cream potato salad -- you get the idea. After a few minutes, he comes over to the table and for the next three hours, four of us guys (another friend joined in) talked nonstop about living in New York.

Deli Man has a unique perspective on the area -- he certainly sees more people in it than I do, given his job -- and he told us about all kinds of stock characters taken directly from the pages of a sentimental Brooklyn-centric novel, except they are from real life. In between stories of his Uncle Sal, old women in housecoats, ladies "running numbers" in back rooms of their shops, and gruff firemen with hearts of gold, we talked about how he has known my landlady for years and used to show off her apartments (i.e., my apartment) to prospective tenants as a favor to her. My sandwich guy knows my landlady. That feeling, that interconnectedness, where people sit on stoops and fire escapes and actually (gasp) know their neighbors is virtually unheard of back in Colorado. THAT is why I love this city. THAT is why this is home.

I feel terribly guilty about not writing anything for so long. Every time I check in to read about other people's lives, I see the my counter increasing: Updated 2 days ago. Updated 3 days ago. Updated 4 DAMNED DAYS ago.

When I get home tonight I'll give you something special. Promise.

So I lied.

I shall attempt to put that nasty business behind me now. Do forgive me.

I have spent the better part of a week stuffing myself full of as many unhealthy things as I could find. Interspersed, of course, with nights of exhaustion and falling asleep at 7 pm. Even when I get to a point where I know that adding more chemicals to my system would not be a beneficial proposition, I pile more into the heap. I think I am trying to find some sort of optimal balance -- somehow, the extra shots of espresso will balance out the extra vodka will balance out the extra line will balance out the extra cigarettes. I am the last person in the world to argue against excessive debauchery, but I think a small break is in order.

Of course, ask me again tomorrow night when a friend asks me out for a drink, and you are likely to hear a completely different answer.

Part of it is the fact that I almost feel like I am making up for lost time. I never did anything "bad" in high school or college, and I kind of feel like I missed out on a lot. (A friend has even officially inducted me into the Late Bloomers Club.) I am sure that the reality of the experience would have been much different, especially considering the person I was then compared to the one I have miraculously changed into, but it does not stop me from imagining.

I have been moved.

I am sitting at a desk in a different wing of the 14th floor. This desk is rotated 90 degrees in relation to my old one, and it is really throwing me off.

Aside from that, I can feel myself on the edge of a hibernation. Every so often I hide in my room like a mountaintop hermit, eschewing outside contact in favor of my down comforter. It is usually preceded by a week or so of frantic social activity, with which I think I am just finishing. Part of the situation is the fact that all of the people closest to me are very involved in being smitten with someone at the moment. Bravo to them, I say, but there is something about proximity to the "haves" when I am a "have-not" that turns down my mental volume. Remind me not to hibernate this time.

Now! On to positive things! First, I have new music to listen to. It was probably the queerest purchase I have ever made, and that includes the time I bought Spandex. Dig it: The Circuit Party Vol. 4, full of oooh oooh yeah yeahs; Happy 2b Hardcore Techno Dance Anthems, full of boom-ch boom-ch; and Cher, full of vocodery goodness.

Second, check out this website. Honestly, who has time to make something like this?

Third, and possibly most important, I just realized that the board that details available ingredients at the salad bar across the street from me has a listing not for "chick peas," but for "chic peas." Who knew that legumes could be so fashionable?

I am having difficulty believing today is Friday. It just does not feel very Friday. There are two ways I can be sure that it is, in fact, the end of the week: 1) today is Bagels-At-Work Day, and 2) Cheryl was bartending by herself last night, which only happens on Thursdays. Not the most reliable method of marking the passage of time, to be sure -- but it serves its purpose.

Last night was...interesting. It started as a lovely evening with the Shiv and Company, including a whole steak just for me. She is three kinds of moony about a boy, but seems to insist on speaking ill of the situation, which in turn necessitates me forcing her to knock on wood. (My superstitions are rather randomly selected from those available, but the ones that have somehow managed to grab hold of my brainstem are almost painfully ingrained.)

After I had finally made it to my bed, Union Worker's friend called. Seems he had missed a train and needed a place to sleep -- so, our apartment being the flophouse it is, the Klaus was offered. A few hours later, he appears with friend in tow, and I was reluctantly dragged out of bed by my own libido. Damn boys for being pretty and being in my house and being alluring and slouched and half-lidded and spread-legged and lazy-smoking and slow-smiling. And double damn boys for stripping down for sleep, stretching, sultry, while framed in my bedroom doorway after I had finally retreated to my down comforter. And triple damn my own hormones for never, ever, just shutting the fuck up.

At least I have my "Breakbeat Techno Anthems" to comfort me.

I finished reading Becoming A Chef a few days ago -- it was recommended by the Director of Admissions at the French Culinary Institute. Being generally fascinated with food, it was a fairly good read. It made the point, several times over, that to be a good cook one must constantly learn and taste and examine new gustatory experiences. In light of that, eating my lunch at McDonalds seems like a pretty morally bankrupt thing to do -- but the siren call of the double quarter-pounder with cheese is a hard thing to resist.

I find myself with little to do at work today. This is due mostly to computer malfunction -- that, and the fact that the people who are supposed to fix my machine have been called into a meeting on what to do when someone's computer malfunctions.

Will wonders never cease? My computer is once again among the legions of the useful. There is hardly a point in starting a project at this point in the day, but as my contribution to the office thus far has involved standing around and reading magazines that have been left on filing cabinets, extolling the virtues of the Macintosh, and thinking whether or not I would, in a perfect world, like to buy a new BMW Mini Cooper (the answer turned out to be yes), I have to do something to justify my salary.

My greatest achievement today shall be...The Making Of Several Simple Graphics! Followed by, but certainly not eclipsed by, The Reading Of A Comic Book On The Way Home!

Hey diary -- what should I have for dinner?

For a reason I have yet to fathom, both "Out" and "The Advocate" are regularly delivered to my apartment. These glossy queer magazines are usually chock-full of underwear ads, interviews with Melissa Etheridge, and reviews of the latest episode of Queer As Folk. It is not the sort of thing I would buy off a magazine rack (unless someone really hot was on the cover), much less anything I would spend money on for a full subscription, but they show up wrapped in their opaque plastic envelopes (which I assume conceals the fact that a homo lives at the offending address) all the same. My only hypothesis is that some mysterious benefactor with a penchant for throw pillows has decided these magazines are something I need.

Normally when one arrives I flip through, perhaps skimming an article on the gay boys in "The Real World," reading about some queer-friendly celebrity, or casually looking for underwear ads. Last night, however, was different:

Spider-Man's Gay Hands.

There was an article in The Advocate about the fellow who supplied Tobey Maguire's stunt hands for the upcoming movie. The fellow mentioned at the bottom of the page here, in fact. The fellow who kissed me at a birthday party a few weeks ago during the heyday of my last nebulous relationship and said "I only wanted to do that because now I can't have you." I have been kissed by someone in The Advocate. I find that more than passing strange.

I do not think I will look at those innocent color spreads on gay funeral directors or singer/songwriters or what-have-you the same way again -- I will always think that there is someone reading it and thinking, "Whoa, freaky -- I've kissed someone in The Advocate."

(Side note to all concerned parties: I ended up having moo shu chicken for dinner last night, although spaghetti was seriously considered.)