Welcome

Yep, I’ve moved. You know how you start with a little idea and it spirals out of control? I was tired of the Blog*spot banner, tired of Blog*spot going down, tired of Blogger not working sometimes, et cetera et cetera et cetera. One thing led to another, and, well, here we are. So what’s new? In no particular order:

A visual redesign. Um, yeah, you may have noticed that. I knew that if I was going to get rid of the Blog*spot banner, I’d need something at the top of the page other than just big blue letters in Verdana. Well, I guess I didn’t really need it, but I wanted it. (“Mom, I need a cookie!” “No, you want a cookie. You need to shut your mouth.”)

So there’s a bit more color here than there used to be, and I’ve moved some things around. I also narrowed the main entry window, because studies show that it’s easier to read something when you decrease the distance across which your eyes have to travel. We’ll see how it works. I may continue to tinker with things. I don’t want the design to be too distracting or get in the way of the content. Maybe plainer was better? I don’t know. When the New York Times started printing color photos on its front page a few years ago, some people said it was going to detract from the quality of its journalism. Never happened, though. I don’t really know what I’m saying. Just enjoy the red heart and the upside-down funnel hat, OK?

CSS. Click on “View Source” and you will see that my HTML is now table-tag-free. I’ve been boning up on my CSS skills over the last couple of weeks, and in the process I’ve become sort of an anti-table snob! (Last week I removed table tags from the old page as well.) Table tags are actually supposed to be used for tables of data, not for page layout. Why should McGyver try to open a door with a quarter, a paper clip and a stick of gum when he’s got a key in his pocket? CSS is actually simple once you get the hang of it, as well as more elegant. And it makes your page load faster. If you’re curious, you might want to check out a couple of sites. Glish shows you CSS in action, demonstrating some simple but sleek layouts along with the accompanying code. If you prefer learning from the ground up, I found the Style Master to be clear and helpful.

Greymatter. No more Blogger for now. I was curious about Greymatter and how it worked, so I figured I’d give it a shot. It was a hassle to install it, set it up on the server, and modify all the templates, but maybe it will be worth it. It gives you lots more control over things than Blogger does, and since it sits on the server, I don’t have to worry about a Blogger outage. Actually, Blogger’s service seems to have improved lately — the site hasn’t gone down in a while, and so forth. But basically I switched to Greymatter out of pure curiosity. I’ll see how I like it.

Tinmanic.com. Oh yeah, that. Why did I move? Well, for one thing, you can’t run Greymatter on a Blog*spot page. For another, as I stated above, I wanted to get rid of the Blog*spot banner. (Of course, now it turns out that I could have done that for $9.95.) For another, I wanted a comments system that doesn’t go down all the time. For another… and so on and so forth.

Why Tinmanic.com? Because www.tinman.com, www.tinman.org, and www.tinman.net were all taken, and because I didn’t want a name with a hyphen, and because I wanted a dot-com. So what does the name mean? Take your pick:

1. It’s an adjective. “He’s like the Tin Man… in fact, he’s tinmanic.”

2. It’s a play on the word manic. “He’s not just manic… he’s tinmanic!”

3. Tin Man? I see. (tinman+i.c.)

There’s also a search box, but unfortunately you can’t search any of the entries from my Blogger days. As for the old Blogger entries, I’ll move them to the archives on this site soon enough.

I’ve also added some more of my older writings. These include some old UVA newspaper columns. Some of them seem to be precursors to my whole blog thing. Perhaps being a newspaper columnist is similar to writing these blog entries in some ways.

Oh, finally: there’s a new e-mail address on this page, but it just forwards everything to my Yahoo! e-mail account, so feel free to continue using the old address if you want.

I hope all the kinks are worked out. But if you find something that’s not right, let me know.

Don’t forget to change your links.

And, oh yeah, happy Mid-Year’s Day!

Apartment Envy

I don’t know what makes me more envious — the fact that Sparky‘s apartment got featured in the Apartment Envy section on nytoday.com, or the fact that he has an apartment that’s worth featuring in the first place. I love reading Apartment Envy, but I also hate it, because it only reminds me what a lame interior designer I am. The only area in which I’ve shown any creativity is my bathroom wall. The color scheme of my bathroom is blue and white, and I’ve put up these little shelves containing all the belongings I could find that are blue or blue-based: a blue keychain, a Charlie Brown pencil case with a blue sky, a little blue plaster horse, a couple of blue translucent D&D dice. That’s about it. Perhaps someday I’ll find myself living in an apartment that I want to keep, and I’ll dress it up all colorful and creative.

Way to go, Sparky!
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Twenty Years

One columnist in The Village Voice called it “the despicable attempt of The New York Times to wreck the July 4 holiday break for every homosexual in the Northeast.”

Twenty years ago today — July 3, 1981 — a legendary article appeared deep inside the Times: “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” The piece was about 900 words long and only one column wide.

Early in the movie Longtime Companion, written by Craig Lucas, there is a montage in which different characters read the article to each other after coming across it on that July morning. Apparently it wasn’t the first article about AIDS to appear in the mainstream press, but it is the most famous.

It begins with a simple paragraph:

Doctors in New York and California have diagnosed among homosexual men 41 cases of a rare and often rapidly fatal form of cancer. Eight of the victims died less than 24 months after the diagnosis was made.

From deeper inside the piece:

The medical investigators say some indirect evidence actually points away from contagion as a cause. None of the patients knew each other, although the theoretical possibility that some may have had sexual contact with a person with Kaposi’s Sarcoma at some point in the past could not be excluded, Dr. Friedman-Kien said.

Dr. Curran said there was no apparent danger to nonhomosexuals from contagion. “The best evidence against contagion,” he said, “is that no cases have been reported to date outside the homosexual community or in women.”

You can read the entire article here. In today’s paper, Lawrence K. Altman, M.D. — the article’s author — has a follow-up piece, “Recollections on the Age of AIDS.”

As someone who is enthralled by history, I’ve often tried to put myself in the position of someone in the past, to try to experience the unfolding of events without the benefit of the hindsight we all have — to experience the banality of the president’s trip to Dallas in November 1963, or the election of a new chancellor in Germany in January 1933. I can’t imagine how I would have felt upon opening the newspaper one Friday morning in July 1981 and reading that article in the New York Times. Would I have felt uneasy? Worried? Dismissive?

I think to myself how lucky I am that I was born in 1973 and not, say, 1960. Because if I had been born back then, there’s a strong chance that I would have caught it and that I’d be dead by now.

Pride Photos

Photos are up on the 20something website from the Pride March. You can see all the thumbnails, or you can start here and work your way through them all. I’m in a few of them. In this one I’m on your right, in the back, the second person from the edge of the photo. In this one you can see me in the background on the right, smiling, my chin partially obscured by someone’s shoulder. Here I am on the left. Here’s part of my face on the left edge (NOT the guy in the tutu). Here’s the back of my head (on the right). Finally, here you can see me — look between the “2” and the “0” and then look up.

Hey, I sort of feel like the mysterious guy who shows up in the background of crime scene photos. Pretty soon David Duchovny’s going to be looking at me through a magnifying glass.

Are any of you in the NYC area doing anything for the Fourth in which I can participate? I have no plans yet, and if I have to spend tomorrow night alone, I’ll flagellate myself. Drop me an e-mail or give me a call.

Plans for the Fourth

Happy sesquisesquicentennial, America. (That’s one and a half times one and a half times a hundred). Did anyone even remember that this Independence Day was our 225th?

I am pleasantly surprised at the number of people who don’t make July 4th plans until the last minute. I thought I was the only one, and it made me feel kind of lame. But I’m glad to know I’m actually normal.

Yesterday evening I had therapy. I’ve been amazingly crisis-free lately, and that’s when the good stuff always happens. The days when you walk into therapy with nothing specific on your mind are the days when you get some really good insights. I happened to mention to my therapist that although things have been so calm and relaxed lately, I’ve been getting tired of doing the same old things in Manhattan — gay bars, dinner, movies. And actually, the last movie I saw was Memento, more than two months ago. So she said to me, “I’m surprised you don’t do more cultural things — theater, classical music.” She knows that these are some interests of mine. And by George Washington, she was right. It’s almost absurd, but it’s rare that the idea of seeing a classical music performance or a play crosses my mind. Yet whenever I see a play, I tell myself that I have to do it more often. I love plays, and despite the fact that I’m in the best city for theater in the world, I always forget. So I’ve resolved to take advantage of where I am. I’m going to see more plays and concerts, either alone or with other people. Maybe I’ll start going on artist’s dates and writing morning pages again. Expand my soul, get some spiritual and cultural nourishment again.

After therapy I got a much-needed haircut and then went to Twentysomething. Afterwards, a bunch of us went out to dinner — there’s always a group that goes to dinner after the meeting, and I never go, because it’s too late. But since today was a holiday I figured I’d go. Nick even showed up at the meeting — the first time I’d seen him there in months — and he joined the dinner group. So did Wales. About 25-30 of us went to a Chinese restaurant. Then we all decided to go out. Half the group went to Monster, across the street from the Stonewall, and the rest of us decided to go somewhere else, because a couple of the guys were under 21 and the guy at the door was checking IDs. So we wandered around the West Village. It’s weird — Christopher Street and the West Village are iconic in modern gay history, and yet the area is so non-trendy and played out. Chelsea and the East Village are the places to be; the average age of the bar patrons in the West Village seems to be slightly older.

But it was kind of refreshing. We went to yet another restaurant, called Tiffany, and had dessert and appetizers. I just had a beer and a chicken finger. Then Wales, and this other guy, whom I’ll call Ontario, because he’s from Ontario (creative, eh?), and myself decided to go to the Stonewall, where none of us had been before. This British guy heard Wales speaking and he came up to us, but the guy was creepy and half-drunk so after we continued to ignore him he left. From there we went to the Hangar, where none of us had been before, either. We watched strange flirtations going on with various people, and then at around 3:30 we decided to part ways. Well, Ontario went back to Brooklyn, and Wales and I took the PATH back to Jersey City.

The three of us (with an important addition) might go see the fireworks on the East River tonight. It’s been years since I’ve seen them, and I figure, what better way to spend my first Fourth of July as a quasi-New-Yorker than going to see the famous fireworks? I will probably do that, although CanadaGirl left a message on my machine last night seeing if I wanted to get together with her and some other people tonight. If the idea of the crowds gets too daunting, I might call her.

You’re asking who the parenthetical important addition is, right? I met the cutest guy last night. He came out to dinner with us after the meeting, and we talked for a while. Actually, several guys were talking to him. When Wales and Ontario and I were talking later at night, we discovered that all three of us had been eyeing him, and Ontario pointed out that at the Chinese restaurant, about six guys had been competing for his attention. Isn’t that both pathetic and amusing? But he’s adorable, and he’s the type of guy I really go for — short, with short black hair and dark eyes, and Jewish. He also goes to Yale. What can I say — I’m a sucker for intelligent achievers. He’s 20 years old, which is kind of young, but at one point he gave me his e-mail address and he wants me to let him know what we all decide to do tonight. Makes me think of the line from “Good Will Hunting”: “Do you like apples? I said, do you like apples? Well, I got her number. How do you like them apples?”

I don’t know if I was being obvious or what. But when I got home, around 4:30 in the morning, there was an e-mail from Nick. Among other things, it said, “Good luck with the cute Yalie.” Hehehehehe.
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Help

I don’t know what’s up with my CSS, but one person tells me they can’t see any scrollbars on my page, and then there’s the whole mis-implemented box-model crap which makes the page look completely wrong in Netscape. I just tried to fix the stylesheet according to this but now there are no styles at all in Netscape. What the hell am I doing wrong? Could someone go through my style sheet and tell me exactly how to change it? I would soooooooo appreciate it.
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Soaked on the Hippest Train

My Fourth of July ended with me being crammed, soaking wet, onto the L train at Bedford Avenue. Did you know that the L train is the hippest train of the subway? It sure is.

I spent most of yesterday afternoon on the phone with one person after another, trying to figure out what I was going to do and with whom. Talked with CanadaGirl, talked with Wales, talked with Nick, talked with Cute Yale Boy. First I was going to pack myself onto the FDR Drive with Wales and Ontario and Yale Boy. But as the afternoon wore on, the idea of a crowd grew less and less appealing. Nick was possibly going to have people over to watch the fireworks from his roof, and CanadaGirl’s gay couple friends were going to do some grilling at their place, and both of these options seemed like better ideas. Furthermore, Yale Boy called me at one point and said that he was just going to stay home because he wasn’t feeling very well. I don’t know if he really wasn’t feeling well or if it was just an excuse, but that pretty much cemented it. I didn’t really want to hang out on the FDR Drive if he wasn’t going to be there. And Nick’s plans were off because his roommate was still around, and technically he’s just subletting from her. So I wound up going out to Williamsburg (near Sparky’s territory, maybe?) to hang out with CanadaGirl and the gay couple and CanadaGirl’s lesbian friend who was originally from Los Angeles but had an accent that sounded sort of French Candian and sort of an indescribable mishmosh of North American and European.

The guys have a great place — a spacious loft with an exposed brick wall. They’re artsy types; one is a photographer, and I can’t remember what the other one does. There are no cabinets, so their dishes and spices and everything are displayed on open shelves. Two butcher block tables in the kitchen. A washer and a dryer. Two smaller rooms at one end. And a big bathroom, by New York standards, with a Keith Haring shower curtain. And one window in the kitchen opens onto a roof.

There was a grill out there. It was drizzling, but that didn’t stop us. We grilled the food and took it inside: grilled chicken with some salsa that CanadaGirl had made, grilled corn and onions, potato salad, beer and wine, sliced pineapple. Yum!

The rain had stopped and we thought we might be able to see the fireworks from the roof. We went out there and saw cars speeding past on the nearby Williamsburg Bridge. On a neighboring roof about 30 people were standing with drinks and looking out over the sky — a view we didn’t have because it was blocked by a building. We decided to walk down to the river, each putting our Corona in a white plastic bag first; every so often we saw a couple of cops, but the white plastic bags around our bottles must have satisfied them. We walked along a street and still couldn’t get a great view, but finally we managed to find a spot that was only partially blocked by a building. It was an eclectic mix: black and Hispanic families, a few Hasidic Jews, and a few twenty-something white people besides ourselves. We could see flashes of red and green light against the dark milky sky, still filled with clouds. We only saw about half the fireworks — the ones that went higher up into the sky than the others — but it was enough to make my Fourth of July complete.

Afterwards, we went back to the apartment and talked for a little bit, and then I said goodbye and walked back to the Bedford Avenue stop on the L train. It was drizzling again and I had no umbrella, but for some reason I just felt like walking in the rain, doing something different. I just didn’t care. It was about a 15-minute walk, and as I walked the rain began to fall harder. By the time I got to the station I was soaked. My t-shirt had gone from light gray to dark gray and my glasses were dotted with water droplets. I walked down to the platform and it was packed with people, all of whom seemed to have come straight from “Real World” central casting. All these alternative Gen-X white people, half of whom were wet. Don’t they have any umbrellas in Williamsburg at all?

The train finally came, and as it pulled into the station, everyone on the train looked out at us in terror. We all managed to squeeze ourselves on board. The train just stayed there for a couple of minutes while more people ran down the stairs and packed themselves in like clowns in a telephone booth. Finally we took off underneath the East River and I was on my way home.

It was fun to be part of the hip crowd for a night. I often feel like I’m missing something by not being a part of it, so this was a nice change. All in all, I had a pretty enjoyable sesquisequicentennial, despite being soaked on the hippest train and all. Or rather because of it.

Serpentine

“To arrive late on a summer evening in Charlottesville — named in colonial times for the wife of George III — and see the original university complex (called the Lawn) for the first time by moonlight and lamplight, flickering behind luminescent magnolia blossoms, is to observe one of the most magical settings in America.”

I felt a wave of nostalgia and my eyes grew wet as I read this. How thankful am I for the fact that I spent eight years there? The Lawn and the Rotunda at the University of Virginia are architectural landmarks, internationally known, and they were part of my home during a period of great development in my life. Damn, I’m lucky.
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The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife

The greatest thing about living here is that you can be sitting in your office at 5:30 in the afternoon, getting ready to leave work, and suddenly say to yourself, “Hmm… I have no plans tonight. I think I’ll see a Broadway play.” That’s what I did yesterday. I tooled around on Playbill.com and came across The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, a play that my mom saw last year and said was hilarious. So I took the subway to Times Square, walked over to the theater and got a cheap ticket. It’s not a huge theater, so even though the seat was in the rear mezzanine it was totally decent.

I enjoyed it for the most part. Linda Lavin played the lead, and she was a real treat, although I swear she sounded exactly like Nathan Lane in “The Birdcage” — a nasal, reedy, drawn-out voice. The play was kind of sitcommy, and a couple of the characters were total clichés, but at the same time it was able to transcend those barriers and present something original. Having seen it, I might need to take a second look at Herman Hesse’s Siddharta, which I was required to read during the summer before I started college and which comes up during the play.

It was such a refreshing evening, much better than going home and boiling some pasta and turning on the computer. All this theater is right here, and I always forget! Like I wrote the other day, I’ve decided to do this more often, to the extent that I can afford it. If I can keep finding tickets for twenty bucks, it should be doable. Lately I’ve realized that I’ve been repressing my interest in theater for the last few years. Why? A few reasons, all interrelated. One, a little internalized homophobia, strangely enough. Two, when I got to college, I didn’t feel like I fit in with the die-hard drama people. I was probably scared of their openness. Three, I fear that if I start pursuing the interest again, it will once again take over my life and make me irrational and impractical and dreamy and flighty and unrealistic, like I was when I was a teenager. We fear what we desire.

When I was a kid, I thought Manhattan and the theater district were synonymous. From the time I was six or seven, my parents took me to lots of Broadway shows, beginning with Annie and Peter Pan, and growing up in the 1980s I got to see many others. I’m probably one of the few people in the world who saw the spectacularly awful Carrie, based on the Stephen King novel, which ran for 16 previews and closed after only five regular performances.

My (lately repressed) love of theater is really due to the influence of my mom. She’s loved the theater her entire life; when she was a teenager in the sixties, she’d take the bus into Manhattan from Queens and see whatever she could. She has a huge collection of Playbills that would probably give Mermaniac an orgasm if he saw it.

Anyway… I hope last night was just the first of many more trips to the theater. I’m reconnecting with a part of myself I neglect far too often. This is a good thing. And who knows where it will take me?

The West Side Club

Saturday night I met up with the Blogstalker and Sparky for a little East Village bar-hopping. I don’t know what happened to me, but I started to feel really lost. They seem to know multitudes of things about the city, and alternative art and culture, and Kiki and Herb and avant-garde Internet personalities and drag queens and 1970s porn and fabulousness. They seem to be so in-the-know. I felt like they were having their own witty and urbane conversation and that I was just watching. We were sitting at the Fat Cock, and I felt non-witty and non-urbane and about 17 years old. They were making various references that I couldn’t follow. My eyes closed and I began to drift off, partly because of alcohol and a lack of sleep, but also because I had no conversational reference points to hold onto.

I started to sulk. And then I just felt myself drifting further and further away and I closed my eyes and started to fall asleep. But, good guys that they are, they realized what was going on and they made valiant attempts to snap me out of it. Blogstalker even lifted me up off the ground and carried me around, all 125 pounds of me, which was, well, oddly arousing. Or maybe not so oddly. Anyway, it made me feel better.

Afterwards, Sparky went home, and Blogstalker and I went to a sex club.

A few days earlier we’d been chatting online, and he’d convinced me that this was something I needed to try, since I’d never done it before. He said he’d take me to the West Side Club on Saturday night. So we did the aforementioned bar-hopping and then decided it was time. Sparky declined to join us, so the two of us walked over there alone, stopping at a deli so the Stalker could get some coffee.

We walked into the lobby of this building, through a door, up a flight of stairs. There was a line of men waiting to get in. It was eerily quiet, like a doctor’s office. Finally it was our turn. Blogstalker went up to the window, paid, and went in. I had to buy a temporary membership. Temporary members aren’t allowed to get their own rooms, so I had to get a locker. I paid and then walked through the door.

The lights were dim. Blogstalker was nowhere. I felt all alone and started to feel kind of nervous. But I went to my locker and changed out of my clothes and put on the white towel they gave me, kind of excited about what lay ahead.

Blogstalker managed to find me again, and, both of us betoweled, he gave me a quick tour of the two floors. There were rows and rows of little rooms, some doors open, some doors closed. A typical room had a man waiting for someone to come along so he could invite him in. There was also a room that showed porn. A sauna. A steam room. Showers. Blogstalker had a room of his own, so we parted ways.

The corridors were filled with men walking around in white towels. Men of all shapes and sizes and ages and ethnicities. I’d look at guys with big chests and then I’d catch a view of myself in the mirror and realize how unmuscled I am. Usually when I look at my body in a mirror I think I look pretty decent, but if I were someone else, and I saw all these buff men, and then saw me, I wouldn’t want to have sex with me.

I felt like I was in a crypt of walking zombies. It was so surreal. The lighting was dim and there were no windows and I had no idea what time it was. Just like in a casino, you know? I wandered the halls, admiring some bodies, trying to make eye contact with anyone, anyone. But I was unsuccessful. When I’d get tired of wandering, I’d sit in the porn room or go into the steam room, and then walk out of the steam room and wipe off my fogged-up glasses with the corner of my towel and then wander around again. I’d peek into open rooms and look at the guys. I was afraid to linger too long in front of any one doorway for fear of rejection. Finally I did manage to linger in front of one and made eye contact with the guy inside. He looked at me and calmly shook his head “no.” I walked on, chastened.

I started to feel tired, just another walking zombie. This was becoming less and less appealing. I didn’t even feel like having sex with anyone anymore. It was like an auction block, heartless, cold, judging, mechanical, like so many other aspects of gay urban life. I suddenly wanted to crawl underneath the covers with a sweet, caring boyfriend, and smooch him, and look into his eyes, and smile, and fall asleep in his arms. I was feeling more and more disgusted by where I was. This wasn’t for me.

I’d paid for four hours and I wondered how much time had passed, so I went back to my locker and looked at my watch. It was 4:30 in the morning. Only two hours had gone by! Cripes. I found the Blogstalker and told him I’d probably be leaving soon. I wandered around again, and then finally I couldn’t take it any more. It was time for me to go.

I went back to my locker, changed back into my clothes, waited on the line to get out. The guy at the window gave me the drawer where I’d put my keys and my wallet and my temporary membership card. I looked at the card. It said it was good for four more visits over the next month.

Will I go back? I don’t know. I think maybe I’d rather spend twenty bucks on a cheap Broadway ticket. If I want to feel humiliated and shameful and gross and out of my element again, I can probably find a way to do that for free.

From Kameko:

What more could a bloggin’ guy ask for? Kameko, you made my day!

Complaints to the Management

1) It’s hot and humid out.

2) I called the Division of Law this morning to find out why I haven’t received a hiring decision in the mail yet, and it turns out that there are rumors of a hiring freeze. I might not get a decision for another two or three weeks. And my last day of work at my current job is August 17. I could wind up having no job a month from now. Or what if I get hired but I get put in Trenton? I have no luck when it comes to finding jobs. I have a LAW DEGREE FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA and I practically live in NEW YORK CITY and nobody ever seems to want to hire me, and I never know where to send my resumé. I’m going to be poor for the rest of my life and I’m never going to make anything of myself. Yeah, I can write, but I’m lazy.

3) Yesterday I got an e-mail from Yale Boy, asking me how my Fourth of July was and suggesting we get together for coffee sometime. Cool, I thought. So last night I called him and we talked for a little. I have plans tomorrow and Thursday, so I suggested Friday night. He responded, “Well, I was planning to go out on Friday night, and I kind of meant this as a weekday kind of thing.” What the heck does that mean? I’m not good enough for a weekend? Is there some sort of hierarchy? It feels like something out of “Seinfeld.” Anyway, it made me feel like crap.

4) Last night I got together for coffee with the tall red-haired guy. He’s someone I hooked up with about a month ago. I ran into him on the street over the weekend and he suggested we get together for coffee, so we did. He’s 29 years old and he just moved out of Manhattan and bought a place in Jersey City. He knows how to put down wood flooring. Not me. He seems world-capable. Not me. I told him I hoped to move to Manhattan, and he told me it requires a salary of $100,000 to live in Manhattan. With his words he caused me to realize how poor I am and how empty my life feels. He seemed kind of judgmental, to be honest. Didn’t seem to be much of a positive thinker. On top of that, no sex happened afterwards. At the time I was kind of disappointed, but in retrospect maybe that was a good thing. I should stop having sex when what I really want from someone is emotional intimacy.

5) Lately I’ve been reconsidering the idea of playwriting. I took a playwriting course in college. I’m very good at writing dialogue but I know nothing about structure or ideas and I wouldn’t know what to write about. And last night I went to Barnes & Noble and browsed through the drama section. And I thought, there’s so much competition out there. What the hell do I know? People with more talent than me write plays that never even get produced. And when they do get produced they get savaged by critics. And even if they don’t get savaged by critics, people enjoy them and then move on to the next guy’s play. So what’s the point in trying to write one? Especially when I don’t even feel like I have the talent?

6) This morning I accidentally swallowed half a mouthful of sour milk.

The Irony Toolbox!™

Usually I’m kind of careful about what I write here, because I don’t want to come across looking stupid or petty or resentful. But I really want to confess a deep, dark secret that nobody who has a blog is supposed to talk about. Here’s the confession: sometimes I worry about how popular I am.

Isn’t that stupid? It’s totally stupid. And yet unless you’re a Zen Buddhist monk, you worry about these things, because you’re human, and humans have emotions, and humans deal with self-esteem issues, except for maybe George W. Bush, because he doesn’t have a self-reflective bone in his body. But here at The Tin Man we don’t care about him, because we’re Democrats.

I’ve noticed that the number of people who read my blog has not increased significantly in the last couple of months. I know that I shouldn’t be concerned with popularity. I should be doing this blog for myself. That’s what art and writing and self-expression are all about, right? Doing it for yourself. And yet… see previous paragraph. We wants to be popular. We wants it, my Precious. Cruel hobbitses.

Why are some blogs much more popular than others? Why do some bloggers routinely get 20-25 comments appended to their entries, whereas some people get none? What do I have to do? Do I have to write short, snazzy entries? Do I have to sell mugs? Do I have to think up a witty ironic slogan?

I hate witty ironic slogans. I’m sorry, but I think Witty Ironic Slogans are a symbol of the laziness of our culture. It’s like you’re selling a product. It’s a sign that television and its attendant consumerism really have pervaded our lives. TV commercials have had Witty Ironic Slogans for a long time, but now even movies have them. Let’s say there’s a movie called “Ghost Passage.” When you see a commercial for “Ghost Passage,” they don’t just say “Ghost Passage.” No, when you see a commercial for “Ghost Passage,” words will flash up on the screen one by one: DON’T [flash] FORGET [flash] YOUR LIFEBOAT [flash]. Oooh! Scary! Is J Lo in it?

But does it have to happen to blogs, too? Is that the only way to be “creative” in our culture today? If it’s merely an attempt to be ironic, then, well, I’m sorry — the Witty Ironic Slogan isn’t ironic anymore. It’s faux-ironic. It’s surface irony without any ironic substance underneath. Irony is supposed to make a point about something in society, not just look cool. The Witty Ironic Slogan has passed into cliché. It’s like it’s 1986 and you’re still carrying around a Return of the Jedi lunchbox. The Witty Ironic Slogan so clearly says, “Look, I’m trying to be cool.” You may as well just use metatags: <attempt at coolness> </ attempt at coolness>. It’s just as blatantly obvious. If you’re trying to be cool by staying within the predetermined boundaries of coolness, then you’re not really being cool anymore. You’re playing at being original. It’s like David Foster Wallace and his incessant footnoting. It’s gotten stale. Witty-Ironic-Slogan-as-irony is so 1990s. Yes, we know we live in an advertisement-saturated culture. Point taken. Get on with it.

Your blog doesn’t need a slogan. It doesn’t need a signifier. It just needs to be.

Unadorned sincerity starts to seem refreshing. I don’t want to get all Jedediah Purdy here, but I guess I resent the fact that people who write short, snappy entries with links to computer-industry-related stories or things in the news, or people who set their sites up to look like postmodern ironic faux-advertisement things, seem to get more readers than people who write heartfelt, detailed entries about their personal lives. But on the other hand I guess that makes sense. This really isn’t a general-interest blog. I mean, who the fuck wants to read about an anxiety-ridden gay man in the New York metro area? I probably wouldn’t want to read about me. More people can relate to a short, snappy link-‘n’-commentary™ about something in the general interest. And it takes time to read long blog entries, whereas most people in our multitasking/attention-deficit-disorder culture can’t bear to spend more than 30 seconds reading something without finding something else to do.

Did you notice that trademark symbol I used in the previous paragraph? That was straight out of the Irony Toolbox. And capitalizing the initial letters of Witty Ironic Slogan is straight out of the Irony Toolbox also. And so is capitalizing the initial letters of Irony Toolbox. It’s happening to me, too! We can’t escape the Irony Toolbox. Even worse, we’ve forgotten what the tools are for.

I understand that people may not want to take the time to read my entries or just may not relate to them. Or maybe I’m just not entertaining enough for the masses. That could be.

Oh, well. I guess I’ll just keep on doing what I’m doing and not worry about what other people think. But if that’s the case, I might as well go back to putting my thoughts into spiral notebooks that I keep hidden away. Like that’s any fun.

Now this is more like it. Proper use of the Irony Toolbox. (Read previous entry to find out what I’m talking about.)

A Clarification

I take back some of what I said yesterday about witty ironic slogans and so on. I’ve realized that some of the blogs I enjoy actually have them. I do, in fact, find it interesting intellectually that slogans are so popular in blogs, because it’s evidence of television’s influence on our culture and on the ways we express ourselves linguistically and artistically. But I think I was just using that idea as a vehicle for expressing some personal envy about some particular sites. I kind of wish I could take back that entire entry, in fact, as well as a couple of e-mails I wrote yesterday, because now I feel like I was being a great big one-man pity party. Thanks for all the comments, though — I appreciate them. I guess I was feeling emotionally needy and I needed that kind of validation.

These last few days my self-esteem has felt a bit more fragile than usual. I don’t know why. But I’ve been in this funk, and the two may or may not be related. I’m worried I might not have a job next month, and I’m going to have to send out some resumés, just to be safe, which requires more effort than I’d care to put into the matter. And I haven’t been able to concentrate on my work again. For about three weeks after I came back from West Virginia, I was being so productive, but sometime last week I stopped again. And I can’t seem to stay out of Internet chat rooms late at night, due to a combination of arousal and boredom, and that shames and troubles me. Most of the time I don’t wind up meeting anyone, either because they’re not interested in me or because I’m not interested in them (I do have standards, after all), but I’m still troubled that I can’t seem to tear myself away. Sometimes it feels like an addiction.

But lest you think that’s all I do at night, my social life is improving lately, thanks to both the blogging world and Twentysomething. Last night I went to a Twentysomething group dinner, and on Saturday there’s a group trip to Fire Island. I’ve never been there, so I might go. And tonight I’m doing a little theatergoing with Mike, whom I haven’t seen in about four months.

The whole idea of writing about one’s personal life on the Internet is pretty absurd if you think about it (and you probably shouldn’t think about it). Everything is amplified. When you’re happy, you can share your joy with the world. But when you’re not happy, you can come off sounding pitiful and/or pathetic. What’s even worse is when you come off sounding resentful and envious, like I did yesterday, because it might piss some people off. But what I wrote yesterday really wasn’t about other people. I was feeling a little crapped out about myself. And that’s what envy’s all about, really; it’s not about other people. It’s about yourself.

Tick… tick…

I’m writing this from my parents’ house. I took the day off from work today so I could watch my parents’ new puppy. They just got her yesterday, and she’s small and cute, but it just makes me miss our old dog more. Hey, what are you doing eating there? That’s where my dog used to eat! That’s where my dog used to sleep! Oh, well.

I’ll tell you why my parents needed someone to puppysit for them.

My parents have these friends, a 48-year-old couple from New Jersey who lived in Tokyo at the same time we did. Their 25th anniversary is at the end of the month, and to celebrate, they decided to go on a two-week safari in Tanzania. They left for Tanzania last Tuesday. On Friday night they were staying at a hotel in a remote area of the country. In the middle of the night, the husband got up to use the bathroom, collapsed on the bathroom floor, and called out to his wife. She called the front desk and they sent two people up immediately, who carried him to the bed. A few minutes later, he died. Just like that. The autopsy showed that it was a heart attack. He was forty-eight years old, with an active lifestyle, and no history of heart trouble. Out of the frickin’ blue.

So a couple of days later, more than a week before they were to return together, the wife had to fly back to New Jersey alone. The body had to stay in Tanzania for a little longer because they needed to get international clearance in order to release it. And today was the funeral. A couple of weeks before their 25th anniversary, she and her two daughters watched her husband being buried in the ground.

It’s absurd, it’s insane, it’s crazy. It’s life. My mom was on the phone with my aunt — whose husband died of cancer four years ago — and told her what a nice guy this man was, how active he was, how much he loved his family and friends and how much he was loved in return. And my aunt responded, “And you know what? That doesn’t buy you anything.” She’s right. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how nice you are, how good you are. It doesn’t matter what goals you have, or even if you have any at all. It just doesn’t matter.

Last night Mike and I saw tick, tick… BOOM!, which Jonathan Larson was writing at the same time he was working on Rent, back in the early nineties. Larson, you might know, died of a sudden aortic aneurysm less than three weeks before Rent premiered — and just ten days before his 36th birthday.

Tick, tick… BOOM! was originally written by Larson as an autobiographial one-man musical, but it’s been reworked into a three-actor show, with two men and a woman. It takes place in 1990 on the eve of Larson’s 30th birthday. He’s all young and idealistic and ambitious — he wants to be a hit Broadway composer. But he’s neurotic and stressed and worried because he’s about to turn 30 and he’s afraid he’s running out of time. Tick… tick… time is passing, time is passing. He constantly dreads the arrival of the BOOM, which he always fears is just around the corner.

The Jane Street Theater is very small, with a tiny stage, but it’s the perfect venue for a three-actor show. The lead role — Jonathan — was played by an understudy. I wouldn’t have known, though — he was filled with warmth and heart, with an endearing personality. In fact, he kept reminding me of Scott Bakula, because he looked and sounded and even acted just like him. The other two actors, who each played a number of roles, were great as well — particularly Amy Spanger, who sings a rock-on, balls-out (as it were) number towards the end of the show.

It was hard not to make comparisons to Rent in my mind. The music was in the same style — rock-and-rollish with quirky lyrics. As in Rent, the band was onstage, although this one had only four pieces: bass, guitar, drums, keyboard. At times they drowned out the lyrics, but perhaps that was because the band was so close to where we were sitting — we were on bar stools in the balcony, on the side, directly above the stage. (Not bad for twenty bucks.) The sets were minimal, but clever and economical — a small table opened up to become the front seats of a BMW and back again, and a rolling stairway became a rooftop. It worked.

Mike has reviewed the show as well.

I think I might see it again. It resonated with me, particular the portrayal of Larson. Ever since I turned 27 I’ve felt 30 looming closer and closer. I know it’s an artificial number — you don’t have to tell me that — but it feels like a big one. In fact, I feel like I might as well be 30 already. I keep forgetting that I have two and a half years to go, because like Jonathan Larson, I think about what I haven’t done. And how can you envision your future when it contains the unknown?

Who knows what can happen in that time? In 1997, the New Yorker ran a front cover that showed a long, meandering, squiggly line going off into the distance, travelling from 1997, to 1998, to 1999, and ending at 2000. Ultimately, not much wound up happening before we hit the big 2K, right? Just a presidential impeachment, a war in Kosovo, the return of Hong Kong to China, and so on. Plus I came out to the world and had boyfriends and real gay sex for the first time and graduated from law school and worked as a writer and editor for an online magazine. Not much, right? Heheheh.

Okay, so I guess there’s a lot that can happen to me between now and 30. Two and a half years. But it’s coming up sooner than I think, and I want to make the most of the rest of my twenties. When I reach 30, I don’t necessarily want to have accomplished a great deal artistically, although that would be nice. But I want to be able to say that I’ve lived as fully as I could have.

Yeah, it’s just a number. But I mean, why not pick an artificial number? After all, you never know when your number is up. It could come at any time.

Tick… tick… tick… tick…

Effluvia

So Beijing has been awarded the 2008 Summer Olympics. That should be around the time President Lieberman is seeking reelection, I guess.

I remember watching the live announcement of Athens as the host of the 2004 Games on TV four years ago. Unfortunately, the announcement was kind of overshadowed by other things — namely, Mother Teresa dying that same day, and conductor Georg Solti, too. And an hour earlier, Queen Elizabeth had just made a rare live television address. It was during that long, long week between Princess Diana’s death and funeral. So Athens being awarded the 2004 Olympics sort of fell through the cracks. I still have a tape of CNN from that day. “Let’s go live to the United Kingdom… let’s go live to Athens… let’s go live to Calcutta…” Whew. It made me dizzy.

Athens 2004… Beijing 2008… New York 2012?

In other news, it turns out that my parents saw Follies the same night that Blogstalker did. I can’t believe Blogstalker was in the same room as my parents. I’m just glad they didn’t recognize each other. Not that my parents even know I have an online journal. Still, I can just picture it: So, Charlie, we hear you took our son to a gay sex club. That’s nice. How was it?

Tomorrow there’s a Twentysomething trip to Fire Island. I think I might go. There are just a couple of concerns I have. One, I hope there’s a bathroom on the train, because it will be the morning, and… well, I never trust my stomach in the morning. So many times has it betrayed my trust. Two, there’s the whole back thing. I don’t have a hairless back. I figure I should get over that, but I know it’s gonna make me incredibly self-conscious anyway. Still, in some ways it seems weird to make an issue out of something so silly. Even though I’m already doing it anyway. Even though I shouldn’t. Even though I am. Even though I shouldn’t. Even though I am.

I have little else to write about today. Maybe I’ll attend another show tonight. We’ll see.

Enjoy your weekend…

Fire Island

I don’t know what the heck I was worrying about. I went to Fire Island yesterday and had a terrific time. It felt great to be alive.

Getting there is a convoluted trip. First you have to get to Penn Station. Then you take the Long Island Railroad out to Sayville, switching trains at one point. Once you get to Sayville, you get into a van that takes you to the ferry. Then you wait for the ferry. Then you ride the ferry across the water, and, finally, you’ve arrived at the Gay Valhalla. Er, Fire Island.

The mental associations that my mind had made with Fire Island kept returning to me during the day. Didn’t Terrence McNally write a couple of plays that take place on Fire Island? And didn’t someone once remark on how the AIDS crisis was leaving the summer homes emptier and emptier as the 1980s went on?

There were about 25 of us in all, and we found a wide swath of beach. It was less crowded than I expected. We all lay our towels out, and people began taking off their shirts. I was struck by how un-porn-star-ish everybody looked. They all looked like normal guys — a couple of them overweight, most of them completely unmuscled. This was not a group of gym-going guys, and nobody cared. So I decided I had nothing to worry about. Like a jump into an ocean of cold water, I took off my shirt.

And nobody gasped.

In fact, nobody seemed to care, or even notice. Heck, I didn’t even care. And I didn’t even have trouble getting people to put suntan lotion on my back a few times throughout the day.

We lay on our towels, we talked, we walked, we sunned, we swam.

The water was cold. Walking into a chilly ocean is terrifying at first, especially when the icy water starts licking at your balls. Yikes! But eventually I decided, as I always wind up deciding at the beach, that the shock of the cold water won’t hurt ya, just go for it. So I dunked myself underwater, caught my breath sharply, and jumped around like a maniac, trying to shake off the chill. I felt all tingly. But eventually I got used to the water.

There were these two guys with us who are a couple. One of them is an officer of the Twentysomething group. The other one isn’t. They’re both nice guys. I’d met them both several times before. And perhaps I was imagining it, but I could have sworn that the other one was taking an interest in me. I sometimes have trouble distinguishing friendliness from sexual interest, so I could have been wrong. But it was fun anyway.

We seemed to hit it off really well, and we spent lots of time talking to each other. He gave me his Snapple and some of his strawberries. Wales and Ontario and a couple of guys had gone off for a walk, and my towel had been with theirs, so instead of sitting there alone I decided to move my towel over next to the boyfriends’ towels. Why not, right? It’s the beach, have fun, relax.

In the afternoon several of us went into the water again. The waves were so big — piston-driven, monstrous, scary creatures. A couple of the guys took off their swimsuits, and then I did too, and then a few more did. I was swimming nude in the ocean with a bunch of gay guys. It was liberating, and sexual, and electric, and awesome.

Later in the afternoon the boyfriend told me we should go into the water again. So a group of us did it again, and took off our swimsuits again. The tide was even stronger than before, and the big waves aggressively pounded my naked body into the sand. Eventually I couldn’t feel my toes and I knew it was time to get out again.

Me and the attractive boyfriend and a third guy decided to go for a quick walk before we all packed up and headed off for dinner, but the quick walk took about 25 minutes. When we got back, the boyfriend’s boyfriend and another guy were waiting for us, saying that everyone else had left. So we quickly changed our clothes, and then the five of us left the beach and made our way from the Pines to Cherry Grove, passing through the Meat Rack, as I believe it was called — the place that Blogstalker referred to in the previous entry’s comments as “The Enchanted Forest.” I wasn’t sure what Blogstalker was talking about, but now I get it. Heheh.

You go through this area of woods. All these narrow winding paths among the trees. I felt like I was in “The Lord of the Rings,” making my way through strange places on an important quest for adventure. But we weren’t looking for adventure — we were just trying to find a way out of there. We took some wrong turns and saw condoms and condom wrappers on the ground, and at several points we’d see a solitary horny man, waiting for whatever excitement the woods and its denizens might bring. The men weren’t very attractive, and it was kinda creepy, so eventually we made our way out of the woods and walked along boardwalks past summer homes with names like “Old Yellow” and “Thimk Pimk” and so on.

We met up with the rest of the group for dinner. Afterwards, we all hung around and then went back to the darkened beach. And then we went back to the ferry landing, where we hopped on board and did the reverse trip back to the city. More than three hours later, at 1:00 in the morning, tired, sandy, smelling like suntan lotion, I got home. Hopped into the shower, scrubbed myself clean, went to bed. During the night I kept waking up, still charged up with energy and excitement about the great day I’d had.

God, I didn’t realize I missed the beach so much. It was so nice to get away from the city. Where is the summer going? Here it is, the middle of July, and I’ve just now made my first trip to the beach this season. Where is it going?

It would be so great to have a summer house on Fire Island, or a share in one. I think this is now a goal for me. Sometime in the next ten years, I’d like to be able to afford a share in a summer home on Fire Island, so I can go there every weekend and hang out on the beach during the day and enjoy the summery windswept chilly nights, listening to the waves crashing in the darkness.

And I will be able to afford it… and I’ll have great times… and my job situation and my financial situation will turn out fine, and everything else in my life will turn out fine, because none of the really stupid little things matter at all. I mean, so I’ve got some hair on my back. It’s just hair! What’s the big deal? I spent the day on Fire Island, and I had a great time, and that’s all that matters.

Sun and the City

Saturday’s trip to the beach got me enthusiastic about the sun again, so yesterday I decided to go to Central Park and lie out on a towel for the afternoon. First I went to the Strand — this huge secondhand bookstore — in search of Terrence McNally’s play set on Fire Island, Lips Together, Teeth Apart. And wouldn’t you know it? They had a copy of only one McNally play, and it was exactly the one I was looking for. Bought it for six bucks. Then I bought a container of fruit and sat in Union Square and ate it, staring the whole time at some guy’s shirtless muscular back. After that I took the subway up to the park and lay out on an area of grass behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sunning myself, looking at all the runners running and bladers blading, listening to snippets of Gen-X/thirtysomething midtown yuppie conversation coming from the blankets around me. When I was tired of lying in the sun, I walked through the park, from the East Side to the West Side and over to the Barnes & Noble in Lincoln Square. Beautiful weather, a healthy lunch, a relaxing afternoon, sights and sounds and people everywhere. It was a great day to be out and about in Manhattan.

Later in the evening I settled down for a postprandial nap, and I’d just begun to doze when the phone rang. It was Tall Red-Haired Guy, inviting me over to his place (a 10-minute walk away) to watch “Sex and the City” and “Six Feet Under” on HBO. It had been a year since I’d seen the former, and I’d never seen the latter. Thumbs up to them both. And you know, “Sex and the City” just seems like such a summer show — lighthearted, fun, sexy — just as “The Sopranos” seems like such a winter show — heavy, kind of dark, a little depressing sometimes. Or maybe after a couple of years I’ve just become conditioned that way.

After watching TV, well — I guess you could say that Tall Red-Haired Guy and I had a little “sex and the city” of our own.

Like you couldn’t see that one coming.

What a body, what a body, what a body. But really, the nice thing about him is that we can actually have a conversation afterwards. And he has these cute intellectual tortoise-shell glasses. We talked politics. He even offered me food, but it was almost midnight and I wasn’t hungry. Still, we sat around talking for a little while, and then I headed home.

Not a bad way to end an eventful weekend.

I haven’t posted a plain old link in a while, but here’s one: Smartertimes.com, a one-man daily critique of the New York Times. “Smartertimes.com is dedicated to the proposition that New York’s dominant daily has grown complacent, slow and inaccurate. Even an ordinary semi-intelligent guy in Brooklyn who reads the newspaper carefully early each morning can regularly notice errors of fact and of logic.” And check out the letters.

This inspires me to write about my own little pet peeve regarding the Times, but I’ll save that for another post.

Biosphere Boy

I met up for dinner last night with a guy whom I hadn’t seen in over a year.

During the winter break of my third year of law school, I was at my parents’ house in New Jersey, spending a lot of time on IRC — Internet Relay Chat, a form of online chatting. One evening I checked out this one guy’s profile and was instantly smitten. He was a very cute 21-year-old Ivy League college student and a Westinghouse Scholar to boot; a scientific genius, practically. Back then, overachievers turned me on. But I was too shy to open up a chat window with him. A few minutes later I forgot about him, and eventually I went back to school and months passed. In the interim, I graduated from law school and studied for (and took) the New York Bar Exam.

On August 4, 1999, I left Charlottesville for good after eight years and came back to my parents’ house. That night, I was hanging out in a gay chatroom when I got an ICQ message from someone. It turned out he’d seen my profile online, and since it contained my ICQ number, he decided to write me that way. It turned out it was the same guy. I couldn’t believe it. I’d been interested in him, and yet he’d contacted me. We wound up chatting until 4 in the morning and decided to meet up the next night.

He was only about 40 minutes from my parents’ house, so I drove to his town to meet him. We got coffee, we sat and talked, and then we went back to his parents’ house to get his telescope. We took it out to an open field and he set it up, and on that cool August evening, we peered up at the stars. I was falling for him; I was feeling things that I’d never felt for any other gay man before. He’d even spent a semester studying in the Biosphere, for goodness’ sake.

We became friends, and I kept wondering if he felt the same way I did. I was constantly looking for hints. I wound up telling him how I felt, and he said that although he wouldn’t say that it would never happen, he didn’t feel the same way about me. He told me that he usually liked to get to know a guy before he started dating him. I grabbed onto that tiny shred of hope and kept holding it. It was a painful few months — we kept hanging out as friends, and I kept hoping that something might happen. But nothing ever did. Not even a kiss. It was completely platonic.

We had a few misunderstandings, and then he began dating someone whom he’d known for two weeks. I felt hurt. He invited me to hang out with him and his boyfriend and a few other people for the millennial New Year’s Eve, but I really didn’t want to meet the boyfriend, so I declined. We lost touch with each other and months went by without any contact. I realized that although he was cute and smart, we didn’t really click in important ways. I was okay with that.

In June 2000, I had just broken up with someone else, explaining to him that I just wanted to be friends, and we decided to conclude the evening by having coffee. We were sitting at the coffee shop, and who should come in but Biosphere Boy and his tall blond boyfriend. We briefly said hi, and that was that. More months went by, and then around last Thanksgiving he found me online, and we chatted for a little bit. A few months later the same thing happened. Then last week it happened again, and we decided to have dinner.

So last night we went to a chain Mexican restaurant and had fajitas and caught up. He has another boyfriend, someone he’s been seeing for seven months. He’s finished college and soon he’ll be going off to grad school. Still cute. I’d forgotten how cute he was, and in fact at first I felt an old pang for him. But that was it. I seem to have become immune. Or maybe I realized it just wasn’t worth wasting the energy on someone whom I’d previously come to realize wouldn’t have been right for me anyway.

There’s always been this wall between us, this stiffness. Oh, he’s always had a surface charm. But something has always been missing. He’s always seemed to be holding something back. Rarely have I ever heard him say something self-deprecating, or express self-doubt, or exude imperfection, or display a hint of real human warmth. He’s never delved into human emotions, or at least he’s never displayed them in front of me. He never seems to have questioned himself. Too perfect — a perfectly scientific android. He seems as hermetically sealed and impervious as the Biosphere itself.

We had a perfectly nice time last night, and after dinner and coffee, he drove me home to Jersey City. We said we’d hang out again before he goes off to grad school. He’s an intelligent and charming conversationalist, and I’d probably hang out with him again. But I can’t talk about deeply emotional or insightful things with him, because there’s no organic response from him. We just don’t click that way. We’re speaking English from different centuries; we can communicate, but only up to a certain point.

So two years ago I fell for Biosphere Boy, and a year later I fell for Nick. There’s a common thread here: both are charming, very intelligent, high-achieving guys who look great on paper but lose their luster once they’re exposed to the open air.

(On the other hand, neither of them ever wound up being interested in me. If either of them had been interested, maybe I’d be singing a different tune today. But maybe not.)

I’ve often looked for someone who was larger than life, someone better than me, someone whom I aspired to be, someone whom my parents could be happy with; if my parents couldn’t be happy with me, at least they could be happy with my boyfriend, right? And if I could find the perfect guy, maybe some of that perfection would rub off on me. Or at least I could show my parents that I had good taste.

In slightly different ways, Biosphere Boy and Nick are both the guy whom I’ve aspired to be at some point in my life. But I think I’ve learned to stop chasing the guy whom I aspire to be. The guy whom I aspire to be is hiding right here (tapping my chest).

If I keep chasing guys who are larger than life, it’s only going to make me feel smaller. So I want someone who impresses me — but not someone who’s perfect. Someone who’s self-deprecating — but someone who has self-esteem. Someone who’s talented — but someone with a hint of self-doubt. I do want someone who’s exceptional, yes — exceptionally human.

Katharine Graham and Watergate

Why is it that people loom largest in our culture only when they die? Katharine Graham, the legendary, classy former doyenne of the Washington Post, died yesterday at 84. And one day later, her Pulitzer-Prize-winning memoir, Personal History, is ranked #1 on Amazon’s best-seller list. I placed my order today. Should have placed it yesterday, I guess. If there were a bookstore near my office, I’d look for it there, but I’m sure the bookstores are already out of stock anyway.

Unsurprisingly, the Post’s website has set up a tribute page about her, containing her obituary, lots of coverage from today’s issue, excerpts from her book, and a few special articles she wrote for the paper. I’ve always been fascinated by the newspaper business and particularly by Watergate, so two sites are particularly interesting to me: her story of her experience leading the Post through Watergate, and a website the Post set up for the 25th anniversary of the Watergate burglary in 1997. What I particularly enjoy is the you-are-there feeling you get from reading some of the original Post articles covering the scandal. I love this one, in which the Post famously quotes former Attorney General John Mitchell saying, “Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published.” The quote was cleaned up a bit for the paper to read, “Katie Graham is gonna get caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published.” Hee hee hee.

Almost makes me want to become a journalist.
—–

Too Close to Call

Once again, no exciting narratives of my personal life. Sorry to disappoint you. Instead, I present the RealAudio archives of all of National Public Radio’s Election Night 2000 coverage, all ten hours of it. I can’t believe I didn’t know until today that this stuff was out there. (I’ve been hoping to find a videotape of NBC News’s election night coverage for a while.) You may think this is weird of me, but I love this stuff — I love reliving exciting events in the news, experiencing them again as they happen, minute by minute. I’ve always been interested not just in the news but in the coverage of the news. And I salivate every four years as I anticipate settling in front of the TV on election night, so you can imagine how excited I was this past November. I stayed up until 5 in the morning through all the twists and turns, my eyes glued to the TV, my stomach muscles twisted into a pretzel.

Listening to these archived NPR broadcasts, I can feel a mid-autumn chill once again as the days get shorter. I can see the brown crunchy leaves on the ground and the blue and red campaign placards mixed in with orange and black Halloween decorations on front lawns. Once again I remember how in October and into early November I’d check the Reuters tracking poll online every morning, having hoped that the debates would give Gore a boost, but in vain, seeing the candidates remain in an unmovable tie; but then, in those final three or four days before the election, hearing about Bush’s old DWI arrest and learning that undecided voters were tending to settle on Gore, and thinking to myself, holy crap, maybe he’ll actually win this thing after all; and then, on election night, seeing Gore win the coveted trifecta of Florida, Pennsylvania and Michigan, and feeling happy and excited. Now that we’re six months into the Bush administration, it’s hard to remember that on November 7, Gore had an even chance and this thing could have turned out either way.

It’s amusing to hear Robert Siegel on the East Coast tell Elizabeth Arnold on the West Coast that she’ll still be reporting at midnight California time, while on the East Coast, he’ll be fast asleep by then. Hahahahaha. If only he knew.

Oh, by the way, if you’re thinking of running for president in 2024, you’ve already got competition. (Scroll down.)

Happy moonlanding anniversary.

If only we could put the same amount of government determination and resources into, say, curing AIDS. But I guess you can’t plant a flag on a vaccine.

This is kinda cool.

Spotted!

On Saturday night I went to a party in Brooklyn with Wales and Ontario. We were sitting in one part of the apartment and talking with each other when a guy approached us very slowly. He came up to me and said to me very softly, “Excuse me… are you Tin Man?” Wales and Ontario looked at me. They have no idea I have a blog. As far as they were concerned, the guy might as well have been saying, “The Eagle rises at midnight.” So I got up and went over to another part of the room and talked with the guy and it turns out that he reads my blog and had noticed me earlier and had been pretty sure it was me. His boyfriend was with him, and the boyfriend said that this was the first time he’d heard of this blog thing, and he might have to check it out. I think I said something stupid like, “Well, don’t worry, it’s not a porn type of thing.”

They were on their way out the door, so after they left I went back to Wales and Ontario and told them it was just a friend of a friend.

Anyway, I feel like such a celebrity now.

Road Fever

Where is the summer going? Technically we’re only a third of the way through it, but it seems like it’s moving quickly. It wasn’t until the Fourth of July that I even realized it was summertime. That’s a far cry from my college and law school days, when the summer essentially began in the middle of May. Now here it is, almost the end of July; I’m trying to hold onto the days, but they seem to be slipping through my fingers like sand. I haven’t scheduled any vacation time, but now I wonder if maybe I should; it would be nice to spend a week at the beach or something. I think back to my childhood, when my family would go down to Long Beach Island on the Jersey shore for a couple of weeks and lie on the beach during the day and go to seafood restaurants at night. (Who am I kidding — I spent most of the day inside.) Or the summer we drove all the way down to Disney World, or up to Cape Cod. I miss family trips. I miss car trips.

Summer really is the time to drive on the all-American highway. Ever since I read The Majic Bus, the idea of hopping into a car and driving off to places unknown has made my heart race. It’s weird that even though I lived overseas for three years, the most exciting trip for me is the one that doesn’t require a passport. I don’t agree with House Majority Leader Dick Armey, who said idiotically, “I’ve been to Europe once. I don’t have to go again.” On the other hand, there really is so much to see here in the good old U.S. of A. Staring through your windshield as mile after mile of asphalt rushes underneath you… what a great way to escape yourself, to be rootless and identityless and placeless and timeless. It’s something that seems so impossible in the age of the Internet. Can you really escape when all your friends and your hometown newspaper are just a mouse-click away?

It’s funny — I’ve almost finished re-reading The Lord of the Rings, and that’s the story of the ultimate road trip. Characters leave home… go on long journey… visit unexplored places… meet Elves and Ents and Orcs… come home completely changed. When I was a kid I used to imagine myself like Frodo — walking up to the top of our street, turning left, and disappearing into the wide, wide world.

I love road trips. There was the time my friend and I took a spontaneous overnight trip from Charlottesville, Virginia to Gettysburg and Reading, Pennsylvania. There was the day I decided to drive from northern New Jersey up to Boston — just for the afternoon. And then there was the summer I drove out to Colorado by myself to visit a friend of mine for a couple of weeks. Drove clear across the states of Iowa and Nebraska, and on the way home drove straight across Kansas and Missouri. The United States is blessed with miles of empty land.

I think I need to hit the road again at some point. In the meantime, maybe I’ll make my own U.S. highway signs (this is cool as hell). Maybe I’ll watch some road movies (“Thelma and Louise”, anyone?). Or read up on the history of the interstate highway system. Or check out some interstate highway trivia.

There’s also Road Trip America, founded by a couple with a fantastic story. Their house burned down in 1993, and they lost all their stuff and wound up hitting the road — and staying there — in this. Imagine losing everything you own… scary but liberating, no? If there were a fire and I could grab only one thing, it would be my handwritten journals. My writing. My words.

Finally, there’s the National Scenic Byways Program, run by the Federal Highway Administration in the U.S. Department of Transportation. (Don’t forget — Dubya’s cabinet is politically diverse, thanks to Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, a Democrat. Now that’s bipartisanship! Thanks, Dubya!)

I’m thinking it would be really cool to rent a car and take a big road trip across the country, pledging to stay each night with a different person who reads my blog. Bloggin’ my way across America, day by day, taking pictures, writing up my travels, meeting different people… that would be kinda cool. Of course, I have no idea where most of you live, so the pledge might be hard to fulfill.

Anyway… just an idea.

Mermaniac’s comment to my last entry got me curious. So I did a search for online diaries of road trippers and other worldwide wanderers. Here are a few of the better ones:

letmestayforaday.com

walkingtom.com

roadtrip2000.net

petersamericandream.com

Those and many others were found here.

Tupperware

I have five empty Tupperware containers on my desk.

Well, most of them are actually made by Ziploc, but Tupperware is right up there with Jell-o and Kleenex.

Each of these containers at one point contained food, and they’re all sitting there unwashed. A couple of them have been sitting there for at least two months. Strangely, there’s no mold growing in any of them. I was hoping to create new life forms, because then I’d be a god.

Anyway, other than the dirty Tupperware, there doesn’t seem to be any disorder in my life lately. I spent most of last night’s therapy session narrating events that I’d already narrated to myself — there wasn’t really anything to sort through. It wasn’t until the last five minutes that I realized that deep down I want a boyfriend who’s just like my mom. Well, except male. And younger.

Things just seem… good. Not wing-flappingly wonderful. Not incredibly awful, or even bad. Just… pretty darn okay. And that’s great. Okay is great.

I’ve haven’t really felt like having sex lately. It’s not that I’ve lost interest in sexual pleasure — I still look at attractive guys, and despite the crumbling economy, my right hand has been gainfully employed (which, come to think of it (so to speak) is strange, considering I’m left-handed). But I haven’t felt a need to feel someone else’s bare skin against my own, or to lick and nibble on someone’s neck, or to explore the insides of someone’s mouth with my tongue. And I’m going to have to stop writing about this, or else I’m going to want to do it again.

I guess that lately, sex seems like more trouble than it’s worth. I don’t feel like having false intimacy. I don’t feel like exposing my body to someone. I don’t feel like quick awkward goodbyes. So I guess I’ve snapped myself closed, just like… just like… well, just like Tupperware.

Speaking of sex, apparently someone ended last night’s Blogmeet with some blog meat! I’m trying to use a combination of math and logic to figure out who the other guy was. Hmm… when I left the Phoenix, there were five bloggers remaining besides Michael. But it’s none of my business, so I think I’ll just let it go.

Anyway, here’s a photo of eight American bloggers, two British blouggers, and RJ’s hands in front of his face. Enjoy.

Tunnel Vision

I think I deserve the award for the stupidest thing ever to happen to a living being.

So tonight my friend Nick and I went out for Thai food a few blocks south of Union Square. It was disgustingly hot and humid out, and we were sitting by the window. We had just finished eating when who walked by? RJ! RJ and two other guys were walking past, and we made eye contact and he waved at me. A few minutes later he appeared at our table to say hi. I made some introductions, et cetera, et cetera. It was nice. Then RJ went on his merry way.

A little while later, Nick and I left the restaurant and parted ways. I started walking north towards 14th Street. It was like a sauna outside. Both my undershirt and my work shirt were drenched. Suddenly I really had to go to the bathroom. So I started walking towards the Barnes & Noble at the opposite end of Union Square, nonchalantly at first, and then briskly. Very briskly.

I finally got there. Went up to the third floor. The bathroom was closed, with a sign that said, “Closed for cleaning — please use restrooms on the second floor.” Dammit. Took the escalator back down to the second floor. Walked briskly into the restroom.

I went into a stall, shut the door behind me, unbuckled, and sat down on the toilet. I was sweating like a maniac. My clothes were drenched, my face was wet. It was brutal. My glasses were sliding down my face, so I took them off, folded them up and put them in my shirt pocket.

I did my business, finished, stood up, tucked and buttoned everything back together, and leaned over to flush the toilet.

It happened so quickly. Or so slowly. I’m not sure which.

As I leaned over and pressed down on the handle, my glasses fell out of my shirt pocket and into the toilet. A split second later — although it felt like an eternity — I thrust my hand into the toilet bowl to try to grab them before they went down in the powerful watery vortex. But they were gone. My two-hundred-and-fifteen-dollar pair of glasses, with stylish, narrow frames made by Vogue, with featherweight lenses containing anti-reflective coating, a pair of glasses I’d bought in November — had gone straight down the toilet. Along with the contents of my bowels.

Those toilets have really powerful water pressure.

I felt dazed. Not angry or upset, just dazed. Frankly, I was just plain stunned. I stood there gaping, staring into the toilet for a few moments, running the possibilities through my mind, wondering if anything I’d learned in kindergarten or college or law school could help me out here. Maybe I should find a manager? No. My glasses are probably out of the building by now. Maybe I should contact the New York City Sanitation Department? No — we’re talking one pair of glasses amid the contents of several million people’s bowels. There’s nothing I could possibly do. They’re gone.

I walked back to the PATH station, surrounded by blurry shapes. Sat on the PATH train, reading; I can see close up with my glasses, just not far away. Came home, found my spare pair of glasses. Yeah, at least I’ve got the spares. But they’re not nearly as stylish, or as comfortable.

I also have contact lenses, so I think I’ll be wearing those for a few days. And hey, I guess I know what I’m going to be buying with my $300 tax rebate! (But I still think this tax plan sucks, because the members of “the wealthiest one percent” are getting tax rebates, too, and they can already afford all the pairs of glasses they want. With gold frames studded with diamonds, even.)

Coincidentally, according to this week’s issue of Time Out New York: “Some 6,000 miles of sewer tunnels transport 1.5 billion gallons of waste and runoff out of NYC each day.” One and a half billion gallons! I’m screwed. There’s also this more detailed explanation of where the water goes. None of this helps me now.

Anyway, if anyone in the greater New York metropolitan area gets a clogged toilet in the next day or so, you’ll know whose fault it is. Go easy on me, though.

You wouldn’t hit a man without glasses, wouldya?

More Transatlantic Gay Blogmeet Photos.
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A Night at the Starlight

I’m in awe.

Last night I finally went to see Troy perform at Starlight, and it was revelatory. He’s been playing there every Thursday night in June and July, and since last night was the final gig, I figured it was time for me to see that swingin’ hep-cat perform. Wow. His voice is velvety, or like rippling cream, or both, and he can hit those high notes like a bell. He’s got great stage presence, with droll wit on the one hand and self-deprecating charm on the other. He won me over when he told us that his mother — who was in the audience — had come into town and had bought him an air conditioner. Cute.

Fortunately, I got there early and was able to get a stool. Standing next to me was a couple (a straight couple — I forgot they have those in New York) who consider themselves to be some of his groupies. They’ve been fans of his for five years. And the lounge was filled with people who obviously love him, coming back week after week. Understandably so.

Sparky and Michael and David and Jonathan were there, too.

Troy, Troy, Troy. You rock. And swing. And schmooze. And perform. And write terrific music and lyrics.

Oh, what am I trying to say? I’m not doing him justice. I’ve never been good at reviewing. He’s just wonderful. Before a song, he patters with witty understated irony, and then he starts to sing and winds up tapping directly into your veins.

Actually, that makes him sound like Count Dracula. But again, I’ve never been good at reviewing.

Go see him.
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The Weblog Review

Oh my gosh. Moira, I’m sorry your site fell victim to the people at The Weblog Review. (Yours too, Adam.) Ugh.

To be honest, Moira, I don’t think their review of your site was at all harsh, or even negative. But still, it’s kind of fun that you turned the tables and reviewed them right back (although I think you were unnecessarily mean to the innocent bystander whose blog they liked).

What I love is what happened next. After posting her counter-review and sending them an e-mail, Moira got responses from both the Weblog Review’s webmaster and the reviewer. The webmaster wrote:

Your insults on minx’s site are rude and inappropriate. Her site is right now, the best site that we have reviewed. And the reason I say that is because her site has gotten the most traffic from us. [Traffic equals quality. Nice.] Her humors posts when I reviewed her site were very detailed and very good which caught me right up in the site. [Huh?]

I don’t know what the webmaster’s like in person. For all I know he could donate money to UNICEF and read books to little blind children. But I have to ask, Mr. Webmaster: can’t you at least make sure all your reviewers can write? And spell, for chris’sakes? These people can write and spell. Why can’t your people? Are you trying to be ironic, or did it just turn out that way?

The webmaster also wrote:

You said you would not recommend my service to anyone. I hate to break it to you, but you posting that big huge rant on your weblog is a recommendation. Any publicity good or bad is publicity.

Hey, we don’t care if we make a good product, as long as we’re famous. Wonderful, wonderful. Because here in America, it’s all about attention. Pub-schmucking-licity. If I get enough publicity, maybe I can get a book deal or start a handbag company like Monica. “Bad publicity is better than no publicity,” eh? Yeah. Tell it to “Seussical.”

If you want to create a website that recommends some good weblogs, go for it. I’d love to find some good reads. But I don’t see the point of disparaging someone’s weblog. “The goal of my site is to get more people to other people’s sites. So what if it is a bad review or not. The guy who has the worst review has gotten more traffic than your average review.” Yeah, I’m sure the guy whose weblog you’ve ripped to shreds really appreciates what you’ve done for him.

How does this sound:

“Hey, everyone. John doesn’t dress too well, and he could be more exciting, and I really don’t like the way he holds his fork when he eats. And his farts smell. You can find him in room 213.”

Who are you, and what gives you the right to point out all of John’s faults? That’s tasteless. By the same token, it’s tasteless to disparage people’s weblogs. Weblogs are an extension of the self. They’re like personal art projects. They’re not out there to make money. This isn’t the theater business or the book industry; these are just ordinary people who have decided to create spaces where they can express their thoughts and feelings and interests.

You’re not doing any good by telling everyone what’s wrong with someone’s personal weblog.

I really don’t see the point of The Weblog Review.

I give it two shrugs.

Five-Minute Blog

I’m about to head off to central New Jersey for another overnight stay with a dear friend of mine. We’ll probably hit New Hope tonight or something.

You know how they say that when you start taking Prozac, the anxiety goes away but your life becomes more boring? I’m not on Prozac, but I’ve been feeling less anxious, and consequently my entries have seemed less angst-ridden and more boring, I’m sure. Sorry about that. I guess I’m sort of feeling like an inadequate blogger lately. The green monster lives under my bed, seems to visit me all the time, and when I read someone who’s really, really good, it makes me feel inadequate. As if there’s only a limited amount of talent or recognition to go around. Of course, by making these feelings public, I’m not doing myself any favors. I may be doing you some favors… but not myself.

I bought new glasses this afternoon. They’re the same brand as my old ones, and pretty similar. Unfortunately, the old ones are no longer being made. When I left LensCrafters, the woman said, “Don’t flush these.” Thanks.

This morning I had brunch with someone who reads my blog regularly. He lives right here in Jersey City, and he’s a lawyer. He’s lived here for many years, and has much more life experience than me. We got together in order to go over my resume and figure out what to change and where to send it to. Unfortunately, we snarky twentysomethings think we own the world, so when someone comes along and tells us we’re doing things wrong, that’s hard to swallow. That’s especially true when you’re a high achiever like me — someone who grew up thinking he was perfect doesn’t really like to hear that he’s naive and is insulating himself and that his writing needs editing and that so-and-so’s blog is better. Oh well. I’m one of those stubborn types. When someone who’s of a different generation than me gives me advice, even if it’s terrific advice, which it was, I always interpret it as… patronizing? I don’t know. It makes me feel like a little kid, like an incapable little kid.

And to be honest, I was acting really shy, and when it got to working on my resume, I was being pretty passive-aggressive and tense and so forth. Doing job-search-related activities is one of the things I hate more than almost anything else.

Well, this inadequate blogger is going off to central New Jersey. Bye.
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A Friend’s Dilemma

I spent Saturday night at my friend Mack’s place in central New Jersey. We drove out to New Hope, Pennsylvania, to party at the Cartwheel, a place I’ve written about before.

Mack is 35 years old and gay. He’s an attorney, and he works as an in-house counsel for a big company and makes a lot of money. He lives in an anonymous condo in one of those anonymous housing tracts that litters central New Jersey. He spends lots of time looking for sex, but other than that, he doesn’t really have any hobbies. Also, he’s on medication, something in the Prozac family I think. I guess RJ would call them “crazy pills.”

We were standing on the patio of the Cartwheel, holding our drinks and talking. He’s frustrated. At 35 he’s never been in a long-term relationship, and he can’t seem to find someone who wants to date him. He can find people to have sex with, and he can find people who want to be friends with him. But he can’t find someone who’s interested in him romantically. He’s overweight — he’s got a paunch, and his face is kind of fleshy below the chin. But he has no desire to go to the gym. Oh, and he only wants to date guys who are under 30 and sexually attractive.

Why can’t he find someone? His body might be part of it, but I think there’s more. Frankly, Mack can be hard to take. He has a loud nasal voice, and he likes to talk, and he laughs at his own jokes and looks at you as he does so, but he looks at you a little too long, as if he’s waiting for a response. It’s annoying. He can also be a know-it-all. Not just that, but he repeats himself. He’ll tell me about something he knows, and then he’ll tell it to me again an hour later, having forgotten that he’s already told me.

He’s actually a smart and funny guy, but he’s insecure and he seems to need an audience. And when I’m with him, I have to be that audience. After a few hours with him it gets annoying, and I become passive-aggressively quiet. He doesn’t know when to shut up.

Last summer, he and I went to a Fourth of July party, and someone asked me what my job was. I hesitated, because I wasn’t sure how to explain it, and then Mack stepped in and explained it. In detail.

He’s my friend, but he can be a tad obnoxious. He just comes on too damn strong. He tries too hard.

He asks me why he can’t find someone who wants to date him, and I suspect that this is the reason. But I don’t know if I should tell him. He’s my friend, and I wonder if I owe him the truth. But who the heck wants to be the bearer of bad news? He’s insecure and I don’t want to hurt his feelings. On the other hand, I don’t want to patronize him.

I don’t know what a friend’s supposed to do in these situations.

Dot Org

Well, I have no idea what I want to do with my life.

I wasn’t worried about this until I met with a particular reader of my blog this weekend, and now I feel like if I don’t have everything sorted out by next week and don’t find a job that pays me at least $70,000 a year, I’ll be working beneath my potential and I’ll be screwed and I’ll be dependent entirely on Social Security when I get old, except that Social Security will be bankrupt by that point so I’ll wind up on the street living out of a refrigerator box with alcohol on my breath and muttering to people as they gingerly step around me and pretend not to see me as they chatter into whatever holographic telepathic telekinetic devices will have replaced cellphones by 2060.

Apparently my assignment is to go online and look for “foundations” that relate to computers and the Internet, which apparently is distinct from “non-profits.” Apparently through the use of the World Wide Web I’m supposed to be able to find 500 foundations to which I can send my resumé. I think I’ve found five. Anyway, I don’t even know if I want to work for a foundation, and I can’t really think straight because my new glasses are bothering me right now. I think they need to be tightened. Or they might be a tad too big for the bridge of my nose. They’re not as comfortable as my old glasses.

Anyway, if this stupid position I’ve been waiting and waiting to hear about doesn’t come through, I don’t know what I’m going to do once my current job ends on August 17. Maybe I’ll have to give up my apartment and move back in with my parents. And even if I do get this job, I now feel like it will be the wrong move, because it will only be paying me in the mid-40s and apparently I deserve to be making in the 70s. At least. Deserve? I don’t know whether I believe that.

I don’t deserve a salary in the mid-70s, because I don’t work hard enough. And I’m sure potential employers can see right through me anyway. I know that people look at my resumé and see how unimpressive it is, see right through my degree from a great law school and focus instead on the fact that I have skimpy job experience. And I’m never enthusiastic about any particular job prospect, because I’m scared and I can find things wrong with any potential job, and this lack of enthusiasm comes through, too.

I know that this isn’t totally true. In some ways I probably do deserve to be making a salary at least in the 70s. In fact, it’s probably not a question of “deserving.” It’s probably a question of what I’m capable of doing, and I’m in fact a smart guy.

Yeah, my self-esteem could kinda be higher.

Cripes, I’ll get through this, I guess.

A Big Piece of Trayf

I don’t know if I have sex with the alarming frequency that it might seem, especially lately. But when I got home from a movie last night, there was a phone message from Tall Red-Haired Guy asking if I wanted to “hang out.” I was tired, so I called him up to politely decline, but he convinced me to come over. Here, twist my arm.

I’m flattered that he apparently finds me sexually attractive. Physically, we’re so different — he’s 6’1″, with red hair and fair, smooth skin, and, as I’ve mentioned before, his pecs are amazing. Chiseled out of stone. I’d think he’d be able to find someone just as tall as he is, with just as great a body as he has. But hey, he likes me, and it’s flattering. (He has also highly complimented me on my skill at a particular act, and he’s not the first to do so. That’s flattering, too. Hee hee.)

If you’ve read Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (and if you haven’t, you should — it’ll soon be out in paperback), remember the relationship between the scrawny Sammy Clayman and the big, brawny, all-American Tracy Bacon? That’s what it reminds me of. Sammy took Tracy home to Brooklyn to meet his Jewish mother, and Tracy was “the biggest piece of trayf she’d ever seen,” or something like that. (Trayf is a Yiddish word for non-kosher food.)

He even invited me to stay the night, but for some reason I didn’t want to. He’s only a ten-minute walk from me, but I felt like sleeping alone in my own bed.

Memories of Summer Camp

I mentioned that I saw a movie last night. It was Startup.com, a documentary about the rise and fall of an Internet company and the strains on the friendship of the two co-founders, Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman. I was kind of bored at first, because the whole dot-com thing is so passé, but the film turned out to be an absorbing business story and a good human drama.

Halfway through the movie, I realized in shock that Tom Herman’s parents used to run my old summer camp! They appeared in a scene, and I recognized them immediately. The memories started flowing… I loved that camp.

But I used to have major homesickness there — and I mean major homesickness. It was so intractable that one day one of the camp directors, Susan Herman (Tom Herman’s mother), had a talk with me. In her New England voice (which the movie brought back to me in startling recognition) she told me it was best for me to keep busy, and she suggested that I help wash dishes in the dining hall. I didn’t see how manual labor could make me feel better — in fact, I thought it would make me feel worse — so I declined. My homesickness went away eventually. Oh, did I mention I was twelve at the time? Twelve years old and still getting homesick.

Located in bucolic Hillsboro, New Hampshire, Interlocken — not to be confused with Interlochen, a music camp in Michigan — was not your run-of-the-mill sleepaway camp.

The camp schedule was unusual in that you had a choice of activities. Each week was divided into two three-day blocks with four activity sessions each day. At the beginning of every week there was a big meeting where all the counselors creatively presented explanations of the activities they were going to lead, and you’d fill out a sheet, checking off your first, second and third choices for each block of time. The next day in your mailbox you’d find your schedule, which contained some semblance of your preferences.

It was pretty cool. If you weren’t a sports person (which I definitely wasn’t), there were plenty of arty or cultural things to do. One of my favorites was working on the Interlocken News, which would be performed once a week at Morning Meeting. I got to be the anchorman twice. I remember when the tetherball mysteriously disappeared from the tetherball court, and I wrote up a little story about it that I was going to present during the news. The night before the news, the tetherball mysteriously reappeared. So the next morning, I did the stolen-tetherball story anyway, but at the end, I pretended that someone handed me a sheet of paper, and I said, “This just in… the tetherball has been returned. I repeat, the tetherball has been returned. So never mind.” Everyone laughed. Ohhh… the Interlocken News.

Another of my favorite activities was going on the medieval quest. There was this big guy on the staff named Howard (beer belly, mustache, mop of hair) who was a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, which means that he was really into medieval history and heraldry and so forth. Every summer he’d organize this quest. If you were lucky enough to be part of it, it was a blast. We’d spend the first two days inventing identities for ourselves and learning how to wield “boffer swords,” these big swords made of foam and covered all around with duct tape. On the third day, he’d take us into the woods to complete a particular quest, usually finding some sort of treasure with the help of clues along the way. A few other counselors would play characters or monsters that we’d meet in the woods, and sometimes we’d have to fight them. Howard himself played a few different roles. You’d be walking along and suddenly you’d realize that he was gone, and a few minutes later he’d appear in a costume, pretending to be someone else. Creepy.

(Howard also could sing a three-minute version of Hamlet, which I loved it so much that he gave me the text. I memorized it, and I can still recite it to this day. Ask me about it sometime. Preferably when I’m drunk.)

Interlocken was big on multiculturalism before multiculturalism became a buzzword. The counselors came from all over the world. It was such a folky, granola, Ben-and-Jerry’s, 1960s-but-hold-the-marijuana-and-double-the-idealism utopia. We learned so many folk songs. It’s where I learned Blowin’ the Wind and Rocky Top. Isn’t most of rural New England like that? I love New England. But that’s for another post.

I learned so much at Interlocken. I learned how to perform “California Girls” in sign language. I met a blind woman who loved animals and played the banjo. I got to see the sun rise at 4 in the morning at Bacon Ledge. I ran in a 5K race and got to the finish line at the same time as Melissa Herman, Tom Herman’s sister. I had my first real crush on a boy. Oh, and counselor hunts. Remember counselor hunts? There was the legendary Joe Cornberry, who, if you found him, was worth 200 points. But he didn’t really exist.

Now I’m an adult, and I spend my summer days in an office building. I type at a computer. I go to lunch. I come back to my office. I answer the phone. I look out the window. I hop onto the PATH train at the end of the workday. Just like I do on every other day of the year.

Right about now, I really wish I was back in summer camp. I miss it.