CNN’s Election Night results page is up and ready. I’m excited just looking at it. Beautiful, pristine, as yet unsullied by controversy.

And here are the poll closing times (prettier than in my previous link). There are polls in Kentucky and Indiana that actually close at 6, but the rest of the polls in those states don’t close until 7.

Here’s a printable Election Night scorecard, with closing times, number of electoral votes, and the author’s predictions of who will win each state. I think I’ll keep this handy tomorrow night.

TiVo Community Forum thread: Election Coverage – how are you going to watch?

I’m a bit stunned that some people don’t care what happens tomorrow. And I can’t imagine avoiding the returns and waiting to read the newspapers the next morning. Then again, I’m a political junkie; four years ago I stayed up until 5 in the morning watching all the agonizing twists and turns.

I spent most of today, from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., working at the Hudson County Administration Building in New Jersey, dealing with emergency absentee ballot applications and registration problems. It’s part of my job to do this every Election Day, but this was my first time doing it for a presidential election, and I was in awe at the long line of people waiting. Most of these people had first gone to their polling places, only to learn that their names weren’t on the registration books as they should have been. They then had to come to the county building and wait on line, at some points for an hour, to get the problem dealt with. Then I (or another person) would walk them down to a judge, who would hear the problem and make a ruling. Then, if the ballot or registration were approved, the voter would have to go back to the original polling location to cast a ballot.

I was inspired that all these people were going through all of these in order to vote.

Later in the day, I went to my own polling place and was disappointed that there was no wait. It wasn’t a peak voting time, but I’d still been hoping for at least a 10-minute wait or something. Instead there was just one person ahead of me. I’d be hoping to feel like part of a crowd.

I’d been feeling so inspired about voting today, but it was all over in a matter of seconds. It’s too bad I didn’t think to bring a camera with me like other people did.

Still — I’ve done my duty. When I see New Jersey’s popular vote tally on TV tonight, I will know that one of those millions of votes belongs to me.

Yeah — it is pretty inspiring, after all.

I’m sleepy, but I’m too edgy to nap. So now I go to Matt’s place to watch the returns.

All that’s left to do is wait.

I just got to Matt’s apartment. As usual, I walked right past Ground Zero in order to get there. Tonight, I stopped for a moment to look at it.

To look out at Ground Zero on Election Night 2004 — to look out at the place that, for better or worse, defines everything that’s happened to our country in the last four years, on the night when we’re hoping to define what happens to our country in the next four —

— was… wow.

Just… wow.

So many thoughts and emotions have been going through my head since yesterday. I hope to process it all in the next few days, and my blog will help me do that.

Matt and I were both depressed last night. We decided to have dinner in the food court at the mall at the South Street Seaport. I picked a table for us by a window overlooking the East River. The food court was desolate. Across the water, I could see the headlights of cars rushing up the BQE underneath the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. I had a sudden urge to go there — to leave the food court and run with Matt across the water to brownstone Brooklyn: beautiful, liberal, brownstone Brooklyn. Have a relaxing dinner in Park Slope or Cobble Hill or Carroll Gardens in a fun restaurant among the Jews and the multi-ethnic and lesbian couples with kids. I wanted to be around people who were feeling the same things I was.

I feel like a stranger in America today. Not because I’m a northeasterner or a liberal, but because I’m gay. I feel scared now. I really do. I don’t know if those who voted to ban gay marriage on Tuesday understand this. I don’t think they understand the message this sends to us: you’re not wanted, and we wish you didn’t exist. Certainly there are some who do understand and don’t care. But I think there are lots of people out there who, for whatever reason, feel it’s necessary to ban gay marriage but just can’t appreciate how it feels to be a gay person and hear such a message. To us, it’s not about protecting values; it’s about saying to us, we don’t like you, and we want to you to get out of our country, and you are a perversion, and we want to throw you in prison, and if you should happen to die, that wouldn’t be too bad either.

Perhaps it’s because I’m a Jew that I’m attuned to such things. Perhaps not. But I’ve been thinking about Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, which I’ve been wanting to read. It could happen here — perhaps not on the same scale as Nazi Germany (unfortunately, comparisons to the Nazis are too cliche today), but that still leaves a whole lot of room. I think of Orcinus and his recent writings about an emerging American-style fascism, which I’ve been meaning to read. Fascism is insidious, because it’s usually couched in an appeal to the values of one’s own nation. It doesn’t have to involve goose-stepping.

Basically, I feel scared and unsettled.

More later.

Ken Layne posts a hysterical map and writes the following:

Rove’s re-election strategy was elegantly simple: Scare the bejesus out of Jesusland. Faggots are headed your way! Satanic Muslims are hiding everywhere! That’s all it took to get Jesusland to do the job. Intellectual conservatives like the National Review staff are flattering themselves if they honestly believe Jesusland cares about conservative thought. The “reality-based” folks are learning that Jesusland doesn’t even care about jobs or the economy. In Jesusland, it’s all the will of Jesus. No job? No money? Daughter got her clit pierced? Jesus is just fucking with you again, testing your faith. Got the cancer? Oh well. Soon you’ll be with Jesus. Reality is no match for a mystical world in which an all-powerful god is constantly toying with every detail of your mundane life, just to see what you’ll do about it. Keep praying and always keep your eye out for homosexuals and terrorists, and you will eventually be rewarded … all you have to do is die, and then it’s SuperJesusLand, where you will be a ghost floating in a magic cloud with all the other ghosts from Jesusland, with Jesus Himself presiding over an Eternal Church Service.

More…

Salon.com Life | Waking up with the election blues

If there is such a thing as collective depression, then the circumstances of the election are just right to encourage it. At least the scandal in Florida four years ago gave people something to focus on; there was a battle to be raged. This time, despite some lingering uncertainty over the final result in Ohio, there isn’t the consolation of injustice, of having someone to blame. Depression is not a very focused thing and Wednesday’s mood was universal only in that it allowed people to group their individual reasons for cheerlessness around the huge disappointment of the election result.

Some of these reasons are seasonal: The clocks have been turned back, the leaves are coming down, the bloody Christmas stock has appeared in the shops…

Exactly. Tuesday’s results are only made worse by the fact that it’s almost dark when I leave work now.

Evan Wolfson cheers me up on gay marriage.

His various links are good, too.

How to become a Canadian citizen.

[more]

CanadianAlternative.com — “Welcome to CanadianAlternative.com. We invite you to get to know Canada. Explore the richness and diversity of our regions. And find out why Canada is the perfect alternative for conscientious, forward-thinking Americans.”

In 1972, the Republican ticket of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew was triumphantly re-elected to a second White House term.

By 1974, Gerald Ford was president. Nixon and Agnew were both gone.

I’m just saying.

It’s time to start impeachment proceedings.

How many students does it take to change a lightbulb at [various schools]?

“University of Virginia: 13. Ten to form a student committee to vote on whether changing lightbulbs is a violation of the Honor Code, one to change the lightbulb, one to hold the keg he’s standing on and another to attribute electricity to Thomas Jefferson.”

My college friend and fellow blogger Tim Jarrett is seeking employment in the Boston area:

I believe that somewhere in the greater Boston area there must be a software or Internet focused company that needs a software product manager who’s been at Microsoft, worked in a CMM Level 3 organization, has been a developer, technical architect, tech support team lead, business intelligence analyst, and sales support engineer, and is an authority on corporate blogging and content syndication. (See my resume for more details.) Anyone want to call me on that bet?

Contact him with any leads. Good luck, Tim!

Thom writes:

One silver lining to the election being over, though, whatever the outcome, is that now I can stop (or at least dramatically cut back) obsessively following every entry in every progressive political blog, every campaign-related article in every major newspaper, and every news item on NPR, thereby getting a huge chunk of time back out of each day.

Amen to that. I no longer need to click on Electoral-Vote.com each morning with trepidation. And The Note has been pretty dead lately. Thank goodness.

Now that I can stop trying to absorb mountains of new political information every day, maybe I can get back to reading this. I’ve had it for weeks and I’m less than 100 pages into it.

To Jim Belushi, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar

I normally don’t link to stuff like this, but for some reason I find this hilarious: Jim Belushi is suing Julie Newmar — his next-door neighbor.

Belushi, 50, claims in the lawsuit filed Nov. 2 that Newmar destroyed a fence and landscaping at the home in the posh Brentwood neighborhood and repeatedly made defamatory statements about him to neighbors and friends.

The lawsuit also claims that Newmar spied on Belushi’s family from her residence and caused a nuisance by playing loud music directed at his back yard.

For some reason this makes me think of the “Simpsons” episode where George and Barbara Bush move into the house across the street.

Anyway, Belushi should have just shone the Bat-signal.

“Short and sweet: Some reasons why smaller men rock.”

I’m 5-foot-6, so this article made my day. (And, bonus — since Matt and I are both short, I can usually borrow his clothes.)

The article includes a link to LuvShortDudes.com, “for gay admirers of men who stand 5’7″ and under.” (A quick glance at the front page tells me I should wait until after work before checking out that site.)

A couple of notes on my physical appearance.

First: my recent panic over perceived weight gain appears to have been misplaced. After panicking, I bought a pair of 32×30 jeans, but they turned out to be a tad too loose, and also a tad too long — I was constantly stepping on the pant cuffs, getting them all frayed. So this weekend Matt and I went to the Newport Mall in Jersey City, near my apartment, and I bought a new pair of jeans at the Gap. They’re 31×28 — 31 waist, 28 length. They fit fine. I’m relieved that I can comfortably wear size 31 jeans again. Not that I should be surprised — my dress pants for work all have a 31-inch waist, and I’ve been wearing them just fine. But the last time I tried on 31-inch jeans, they seemed a bit too tight. Now they’re not. I’m glad.

Second: I’m growing a goatee again. I began right after Election Day. Maybe I won’t shave it off again until we have a Democrat in the White House. (Matt always loves it when I have a goatee, so he’ll just have to figure out which is more important to him.)

This thin, short, goateed blogger will write more later.

There’s just one little request I have. If it’s not too much trouble, of course. Call me profoundly misguided if you want. Call me immoral if you must. But could you please stop calling me arrogant and elitist?

I mean, look at it this way. (If you don’t mind, that is.) It’s true that people on my side of the divide want to live in a society where women are free to choose and where gay relationships have civil equality with straight ones. And you want to live in a society where the opposite is true. These are some of those conflicting values everyone is talking about. But at least my values — as deplorable as I’m sure they are — don’t involve any direct imposition on you. We don’t want to force you to have an abortion or to marry someone of the same sex, whereas you do want to close out those possibilities for us. Which is more arrogant?

We on my side of the great divide don’t, for the most part, believe that our values are direct orders from God. We don’t claim that they are immutable and beyond argument. We are, if anything, crippled by reason and open-mindedness, by a desire to persuade rather than insist. Which philosophy is more elitist? Which is more contemptuous of people who disagree? …

Conservatives shouldn’t assert the prerogatives of victory and then claim the compensations of defeat as well. You can’t oppress us and simultaneously complain that we are oppressing you.

— Michael Kinsley in the L.A. Times

For more evidence that the red-state/blue-state divide is not as stark as we think, here’s a national map of the 2004 election results that takes into account the winner of each county in the nation, the percentage of victory in each of those counties, and the population of each county. Looking at this map, it’s easier to see the 51%-48% popular-vote divide.

[more here]

At some point, Matt and I will probably move in together. Until then, I need to somehow solve the little hassles inherent in renting my own apartment while spending most of my time in a different one.

My morning routine lately is that I wake up at Matt’s place in Manhattan, throw on whatever clothes I was wearing the night before, walk to the PATH train, take the PATH to my stop in Jersey City, walk home, bring in yesterday’s mail, shower and change for work, leave my apartment with my morning paper, walk back to the PATH, and then take the PATH to Newark for work. It takes at least an hour and a half, door to door. It’s too inefficient.

A couple of factors cause difficulty. One is that I need to stop at home at least once a day, or else my mail and my newspapers will pile up. The other is that if I stay over at Matt’s place, in order to go directly to work the next morning I need to have some work clothes to change into; it won’t do to wear the same clothes to work, day after day. But I don’t have enough work clothes that I can leave some at Matt’s place and some at my place. Plus I need something to put on when I get to Matt’s place in the evening.

Also, I use an electric toothbrush. If I used a regular toothbrush, there’d be no problem — I could own a couple, and keep one in my apartment (where I do occasionally spend the night) and one at Matt’s place. But it would be expensive to own two electric toothbrushes and a hassle to carry one around with me all day.

Maybe it’s not easily solvable — maybe two apartments just requires twice as much stuff. I guess I need to buy more clothes. But there’s still the issue of the mail and the daily newspaper.

How do other people deal with this?

Oh, hallelujah.

A few months ago, when I switched my blog to WordPress and also to a new hosting service, I somehow lost the first six months of my blog entries, from January to June 2001. They’d been made with Blogger, so they’d been in a separate directory from everything else, and somehow I’d forgotten to save that directory when switching servers. Six months’ worth of verbal creations and personal history, now completely lost, broken down into random ones and zeroes and scattered irretrievably throughout the universe. All those words and musings… gone.

But no!

I just went to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine — and it’s all there. All six months of it! So I’ve saved it all to my computer and soon I’ll put it back into the archives on my site. My world will be complete again.

I can also revisit my old site design from a few years and a few site designs ago.

I love the Wayback Machine.

These comics are brilliant. I think this is one of my favorites so far. [via MeFi]

The movie version of “Rent” tentatively opens in one year. (Well, a year from yesterday.)

I bought the “Rent” album during my first year of law school, before I ever saw the show, and I fell in love with it. For a year it was almost the only thing I listened to in my car. A few months after buying the album, I finally saw the show. I got to the theater at 7:00 in the morning to wait on line (this was before they started the lottery; the tickets for the first two rows went to the first 30 or so people on line). I waited all day, made some friends, and saw the show — and it turned out that both Anthony Rapp and Adam Pascal were out sick. I was disappointed (I’d especially wanted to see Anthony Rapp), but it was still great to finally see this show I’d listened to for months.

I wonder if the movie will be any good.

I had off from work yesterday for Veteran’s Day, so I went clothes shopping at Old Navy. I needed to buy some long-sleeve shirts and sweaters, because practically all my long-sleeve shirts and sweaters are solid black. Black is very New York, but it gets boring.

I bought this (in midnight navy), this (in heather blue), this (in heather oatmeal), and a long-sleeve polo shirt I don’t see online (navy with thin yellow stripes).

I also bought a winter hat and a pair of sleep bottoms. (Don’t you love that name?) The sleep bottoms seemed to fit fine in the store, but when I put them on last night, Matt said they “didn’t leave too much to the imagination.” They did feel a little too tight. The thing is, I tried on a particular pair in the fitting room but wound up buying a different color. Maybe I should have tried on the actual pair that I wound up buying.

In re the sleep bottoms, I’m trying to think of a snappy line, but I’m feeling too inhibited right now.

An explanation of conservative Christians, from someone who used to be one. Enlightening.

Matt and I were sitting on the subway this evening, on our way to see ‘night, Mother, when something disturbing happened. The C train stopped at 23rd Street, the doors opened, and we heard someone shout the N word — the racial epithet that begins with the letter N. A man came onto the train — a white guy, dressed neatly in a sweater, a pair of jeans and an overcoat — and he stood there, spread out his arms, and said the word again. No, it was more like he declaimed it, loudly, theatrically, as if he were reciting Shakespeare. The doors closed and the train started moving. Then the guy sat down and said the word again.

A black guy sitting by himself in the next row of seats told him to shut up, which only encouraged him further. The white guy stood up, walked over to the black guy — staggering slightly — and declaimed the N word in the black guy’s face. The black guy then stood up and pushed him into the row of seats opposite. The white guy got up and stumbled along the row, nearly falling into two people sitting together, one of whom pushed the guy away. He sat down again, and then another guy came in from another car and told him to move into a different car. The crazy man yelled the N word again, upon which the new guy slapped him across the face.

At this point, Matt and I and several other people decided to get up and move to a different car; I was worried things might turn more violent.

At 34th Street, the subway stopped, and it just sat there for a while. There was a commotion in the car we’d left. Soon a police officer arrived, and we heard an announcement over the loudspeaker that the train was going to be delayed and could the transit police please come to the northbound track of the C train. We were in a hurry, so we decided to switch to the A track, which required going down a flight of stairs and up another one. The A train didn’t come, and while we waited, we saw a crowd gather near the C train.

The C train finally left, giving us a better view of what was going on. The white guy’s arms were behind him (perhaps he was handcuffed) and a few authority-type figures were surrounding him, as was a crowd of spectators.

A new train finally came, so we got on it and took it one stop north to 42nd Street. Then we got dinner and saw our show, which turned out to be really depressing.

We have no idea if the guy was drunk, mentally ill, or what. But the whole experience was really disturbing.

New York is a strange place sometimes.

When bloggers date each other.

Just FYI: tonight at midnight, Jim McGreevey finally resigns, and the United States loses its first openly gay governor.

Gay group takes stand for equality at school. A lawsuit is pending in New Jersey regarding Seton Hall University’s refusal to officially recognize a gay student group, called TRUTH. I learned about it via the above newspaper article. Here are the legal filings and various documents related to the case. Of particular interest: a letter from Harvey Fierstein turning down a request to get involved.

Matt and I experienced one disappointment after another this weekend. Time and again, we planned to do something, only to see our plans thwarted by the evil gods of fate.

On Saturday we went to IKEA so Matt could buy a couch. We had planned on the Klippan, because it looked good on the website and it was in the right price range. But when we sat on it in the store, it wasn’t very comfortable. There was a comfier couch that wasn’t too much more expensive, but it came in only drugstore green and Matt’s walls are orange. The combination would have induced illness. And anyway, while we were looking at it, an employee came over and stuck a sticker on the price tag that said, “Temporarily Oversold.” So that was out. And all the other couches were too expensive. We wound up schlepping all the way out to IKEA and left with only a bunch of wooden clothes hangers and some wine glasses.

The trip wasn’t a complete wash, though. IKEA is enjoyable even if you don’t buy anything. I love walking through the store and imagining myself living in all the showcase rooms. I look forward to lunch — Swedish meatballs with ligonberry sauce, followed by dessert. Most of all, I love people-watching at IKEA. I love identifying the gay couples and watching them interact with each other as they shop. There’s a particular route you have to follow as you walk through the store, so you keep encountering the same people over and over again until they become familiar to you. There’s something so heartwarming about the pairs of men walking around the store.

Anyway — the next disappointment occurred on Saturday night. We didn’t have any plans and didn’t really know what to do, so we called a couple of people who both wound up being busy. We thought about seeing a movie at the nearby Regal Cinema at Battery Park, but when we got there, there was nothing worth seeing. So we decided to have dinner at the Appleby’s next to the theater, which wound up being a mistake. Sitting right behind us was a group of adults and children celebrating a child’s birthday party. Everyone else in the restaurant seemed very un-chic, and other than the children, the atmosphere was lifeless. I felt like I was in New Jersey. On top of that, the food took at least half an hour to arrive, and it wound up being unexceptional and overpriced. I don’t know what we were thinking by eating there.

Afterwards, we wound up going home to watch “Saturday Night Live,” but Matt fell asleep before 11:30, so I watched it with his head in my lap. He slept so soundly that my hysterical laughs at Fred Armisen dressed as an African parrot didn’t even wake him.

Yesterday was yet another disappointment. We decided to go to Canstruction, an exhibit of giant sculptures made out of food cans that we’d read about in the Times. We decided to make an afternoon out of it. First we went up to Grand Central Station, where we had lunch at Junior’s. Then we tried to visit the Grand Central branch of the NYC Transit Museum, but it was closed because a new exhibit was being installed. So we walked down to the New York Design Center to see Canstruction, stopping at a market along the way to buy a couple of canned goods (that’s the price of admission — it’s a charity event; we bought a can of creamed corn and a can of soup).

When we got to the New York Design Center, it was closed. We stood there with our cans of food and looked for an alternate entrance, but there wasn’t one. We soon saw a couple of other disappointed people, also with canned goods.

Turns out it’s only open Monday through Saturday.

Matt and I went back to his place, cans in tow (we’ll try again to visit sometime, because neither of us is going to be eating creamed corn). I wound up watching the first hour and a half of “Broadway: The American Musical” on Matt’s TiVo while he tooled around on his computer. Half an hour after I sat down, it got dark outside.

So it was a disappointing weekend in many ways. But it could have been worse. Before I met Matt, I spent many depressing weekends alone. On a typical Saturday night, I’d choose between schlepping across the Hudson to go to a gay bar alone in Manhattan, and sitting at home alone, watching TV or a movie or trying to meet new people in chat rooms.

There’s something to be said for a boring Saturday night in front of the TV while your boyfriend sleeps in your lap.

Google results for “It’s the… stupid” (as in the 1992 political catchphrase, “It’s the economy, stupid”)

The American Prospect on Colin Powell, from last April: “no backbone, even less vision.”

If there’s a tragedy here, it’s one mostly of Powell’s making. For all their success in cutting Powell down to size, Cheney and company have not altered one basic fact: Bush needs Powell more than Powell needs him. Powell could have crippled the administration had he quit at any point in the last two years. Given his immense clout, he was in a position to raise important doubts about the administration’s course on Iraq. In choosing not to confront Bush with his concerns, he not only failed his president; he failed the country.

What I saw this morning in the lobby of the state office building where I work: a cart holding a stack of framed photographs of ex-Governor Jim McGreevey, which had all been taken down from the walls. The old guy pushing the cart said, “And I still have a few more floors to go.”

I really wish I’d had a camera on me.

Gothamist interviews Uffish (my blog friend and also the creator of WYSIWYG).

You seem pretty immersed in the blog world, and to go back a ways with some prominent bloggers such as Choire Sicha and Jonno. How do you think the blog world has changed in the last three years, and have those changes been positive or negative?

There are a LOT more people doing it now, for starters. It used to be that we’d have these get-togethers with all the queer bloggers in New York and just about everyone knew each other…

This resonated with me. I miss those old Homo Blog Nerd gatherings. There are so many New York gay blog nerds now that it would be impossible to meet all of them.

Still, I’m more than a little envious of this party.

It just struck me that had history gone differently – drastically, drastically differently- we could right now be coming to the end of Bob Dole’s second term as president. At 81 years old, he’d be the oldest president in American history.

Things that make you think…

Little Minx writes beautifully about Tokyo.

I miss it.

I hate contributing to the spread of rumors, but I’m going to contribute to the spread of this one, because it’s so yummifying. It’s regarding Brandon Routh, who will star in the newest Superman movie, and I learned it from angst-ident prone, who cites this:

I’M SUPER, THANKS FOR ASKING

With Brandon Routh being confirmed as playing the new Superman, and all sorts of online speculation about his sexuality going round the message boards, I’d like you all to remember where you heard it first.

A few months ago, when I reported on the Millar/Knowles challenge and named it as, actually, a battle between Warner Brothers and Bryan Singer respectively, I also reported a rumour about the criteria for Bryan. That the actor be gay or closeted gay (and would come out during the promotion for the movie). That this would mirror themes within the movie, the concept of living two different lives, giving the project a meta-textuality. That Bryan would give young, scared, alone gay people a hero, an icon, a strong mainstream role model of their own. …

Has this rumour been made flesh? Watch the publicity as the movie comes closer to screening. If nothing has happened by then, you can start throwing the rubber chickens my way.

*Drool.* I don’t know why it’s always so titillating to learn that a hottie celebrity might be gay – it’s not like I’m ever going to have him anyway – but still: *drool.*

Andy writes on “Kinsey,” sex, religion and capitalism.

Why is sex so dangerous? It is dangerous because it is, in many ways, the most powerful form of self-expression, and a society that allows sexual self-expression must allow social and political self-expression, must open itself up to debates about the larger implications of the meaning of society and human behavior.

Great read.

Here are President Bush’s remarks about Bill Clinton at today’s opening of the Clinton Presidential Center.

Last night, Matt, Mike and I went to the Thursday edition of the Big Quiz Thing. It was less crowded than the more popular Monday night event. There were eight teams competing.

Of the five trivia rounds, one is always an audio round. We always do great until the audio round, in which ten music clips are played and your team has to write down the title and artist for each song. We tank at this point; none of us knows anything about music, and the songs are an eclectic mix of everything from ’50s rock to obscure ’00s hipster bands and anything and everything in between — except showtunes. If there were a showtunes round, Matt and Mike would kick everyone’s asses. But there are no showtunes. So, we suck. Our team is usually much larger than three people, and even so we still suck. (We used to have a team member named Greg who was great with the music stuff, but he moved away. If any music maven out there wants to join us for trivia some time, let one of us know.)

Last night was typical. After the first round, we were in second place. After the second round (the audio round), we were in last place — which, on the upside, entitled us to free drink tickets.

On our answer sheet for the audio round, we’d filled up the ample blank space with the words, “You’re killing us, Noah! More showtunes!” or something similar. Shortly thereafter, during a break in the action, Noah’s sidekick for the evening (who is not the usual sidekick) came over to our table and started chatting us up about showtunes.

We decided he was family. This was confirmed later, during the third round, when he made a comment that referenced his lack of interest in women.

Anyway, from the depths of the audio round, we managed a great comeback. The third round, “Vice President or Serial Killer?”, was done in an unusual way. Everyone had to stand up, and Noah read a list of names. For each name, you had to put your hands on your head if it was the name of a U.S. vice president and on your hips if it was the name of a serial killer. Anyone who got it wrong had to sit down. The last person standing would win three points for his/her team. Apparently I know my vice presidents (or perhaps my serial killers), because I was the last one standing — in addition to Matt, although it’s debatable whether he knew his vice presidents or serial killers or was just copying me. Anyway, I won our team three points, which vaulted us up to fourth place.

After the fourth and final round, the final scores were announced. We wound up coming in second.

So trivia was over for the night, and then the sidekick came back to our table to continue chatting with us.

Soon thereafter, Matt and I left, leaving Mike and the sidekick chatting alone at our table.

On our way out, we decided to guess the odds of whether or not it was going to happen.

I went to XL on Saturday night, for the first time in more than a year, for our chorus president’s birthday party. (Matt would have gone, too, but he was on call at the New School.) I hung out with a bunch of the chorus guys and had a couple of Absolut Mandarins with cranberry juice. Then I spotted my friends Peter and Brendan in another part of the bar, talked with them for a long time, and had another Absolut Mandarin with cranberry juice. Then I returned to the chorus guys. Then a few of us went to g, where I also hadn’t been in more than a year, and I had yet another Absolut Mandarin with cranberry juice. Then I was drunk. Then we went to a nearby diner, and after I sat down, my head swimming, I decided I needed to just go back to Matt’s place. Then I hopped on the A train, managed to make it back to Matt’s place in one piece, stumbled in the door at 3:30 in the morning, took off my clothes, took two pain relievers, lost my balance while trying to get into Matt’s bed, knocked into something — thereby waking Matt up — and then murmured myself to sleep.

It was fun. The end.

Last December, David of Abstract Nixon visited New York and went out for dinner and drinks with me, Matt and Mike. Yesterday he finally posted some photos he took that night. I think Matt looks particularly cute in this one, and David says I look “adorable” in this one. I think this one of me is kind of cool.

What’s oddest for me is that these were taken back when I had my old glasses.

David will be visiting again next month, and I’m sure he’ll take many more pictures.

Holy cow, we’ve finally got a Republican on our side! Yesterday, Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana said, “A concerted and forceful program of election-day fraud and abuse was enacted with either the leadership or cooperation of governmental authorities.” Maybe this will actually go somewhere.

Oh, wait. He was talking about Ukraine.

Never mind.

This week the New Yorker presents its annual cartoon issue, always a pleasure to read. Particularly poignant is this essay by Jonathan Franzen on growing up with the Peanuts gang.

(Related: my review of “Dog Sees God,” a play about the Peanuts gang as teenagers.)

Just a heads up: my chorus, the Gay Gotham Chorus, is having its holiday concert next Saturday night, December 4, at 8:00 p.m. It’s at the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew on West 86th Street and West End Avenue. Come see me, Matt, and a bunch of hot gay men (besides me and Matt) warble our hearts out.

Oh, and besides that, a handful of us will be doing some holiday songs at the next WYSIWYG on the night of December 14. I’m actually more nervous about that than about the concert.

Either way, I hope you come see us.

When I resumed blogging nearly two years ago, I promised myself I was never going to write anything mopey.

But I can’t help it. I’m feeling mopey.

Between the Celexa and Matt, my life is much better and much less neurotic than it used to be. This is very good. Excellent, even.

But it also means there’s less dramatic stuff for me to write about. And having less dramatic stuff to write about makes my blog less interesting to read.

It could be that back in the first go-round of my blog, I enjoyed exploiting the dramatic aspects of my life — the sex, the dating, the self-esteem issues, the self-doubt — in order to keep people coming back for more. And since then, I’ve learned better, and I haven’t wanted to sacrifice my sanity for the sake of popularity. So I don’t open myself up here as much as I used to.

But perhaps less chaos in my life doesn’t have to mean less interesting writing. I could still write interesting stuff, and still open myself up a bit, without exploiting myself in the process.

But there’s really something else going on here.

Okay, here’s the thing. The thing is, there’s this whole circle of gay New York bloggers now, and I barely know any of them. A few years back, there was this little group of homo bloggers, and I hung out with them every so often. But now there’s this whole other group of homo New York bloggers, and I don’t know them, and I don’t think they know me, but I want to know them, and I want them to know me. I want to, like, get invited to stuff and know what’s going on and all of that. I’m wondering if there’s something wrong with me.

I wanna hang out with, and be one of, the cool kids. And it’s bumming me out a little that I’m not.

That’s all, I guess.

Gobble gobble gobble. Gobble gobble gobble gobble. Gobble gobble? Gobble gobble gobble. Gobble gobble, gobble gobble gobble gobble, gobble gobble gobble gobble. Gobble. Gobble gobble gobble. Gobble gobble – gobble gobble gobble – gobble gobble gobble gobble. Gobble gobble gobble! Gobble gobble gobble gobble.

Gobble.

Happy Turkey Day!

VidLit. These are so cool, particularly this one, based on “Yiddish With Dick and Jane,” and “Craziest,” based on a short story about a Scrabble obsessive. (via Sturtle)

“I’ve slept with enough men to know that I’m not gay,” he tells me over dinner at Café Orlin as I cough on my tea.

— “Straight, With an Asterisk”

Maybe he should try it a couple dozen more times, just to make sure.

Thanksgiving weekend:

Wednesday night: Matt and I had dinner at Republic, one of my favorite restaurants. On the way, we stopped at Astor Wines & Spirits, an enormous wine shop, to buy some wine to bring to my parents’ house the next day. We also bought a bottle of the new Duboeuf Beaujolais Nouveau for ourselves. It may be a Kool-Aid wine, but it felt so good to do something trendy. After dinner: Matt got a cream puff at Beard Papa and I got some apple pie ice cream at Cold Stone Creamery.

Thursday: We rode the bus from Port Authority to the New Jersey suburbs. (We nearly missed our bus because the ticket line was so long; we got our tickets and then ran to the terminal. We had to stand on the bus, but as we were the last four or five people to get on, that was okay.) Thanksgiving dinner with my parents, my brother and his girlfriend, my aunt, my cousin and her boyfriend. Delicious (my mom’s an amazing cook), coma-inducing. Watched the one-hour “Will & Grace.” My cousin told us that her six-year-old daughter loves Sean Hayes and is always excited when Jack appears on the screen.

Friday: I went to see my grandmother with my dad. She’s 91 years old and lives in a nursing home and her mind is sharp as a tack. I didn’t come out to her, but my parents told me I can if I want to.

(My grandpa died two years ago on the night before Thanksgiving; the funeral was the day after Thanksgiving. It wasn’t until we were driving to visit my grandmother that I remembered this was that day.)

Evening: Matt and I took the train back to the city, two trays of leftovers in tow. At night, we saw “Sideways,” which is excellent. (Here’s a map of the main characters’ wine-tasting journey. The site also has a primer on wine-tasting.)

Saturday: We went to two museums on Museum Mile. First we went to the Neue Galerie, where we saw an exhibit called “Comic Grotesque: Wit and Mockery in German Art, 1870–1940.” Then we went to the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, where we saw some terrific exhibits on modern furniture and design and the like. I loved it. Fifth Avenue is lined with so many small museums such as these; you can bypass the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim and make a day out of visiting the small places. The only problem is that admission to each of these small museums costs between $8-$10.

Afterwards, we walked down Lexington Avenue for a while. Later, we went out for dinner and drinks with Mike. At the Duplex, we watched two couples simultaneously make out next to each other.

Sunday: We did nothing other than go out for brunch and watch TV.

All in all it was a nice, varied weekend.

I’ve also got some Thanksgiving-related thoughts, which I might get to later.

I lay awake in bed last Thursday night, my stomach full of Thanksgiving food. I was in a fold-out sofa-bed in what used to be my childhood bedroom. Matt lay asleep in my arms. This had been my bedroom from age 3-14, and I used it occasionally again from age 17-25 on visits home from college or law school. A few years ago, my parents finally decided to remodel the room completely. They tore up the carpeting and cleaned the original wood floors, put up new wallpaper and paint, installed dark-brown wooden blinds over the windows, put in a new ceiling light fixture, got brand-new furniture, and hung things on the walls. It’s now a sitting room.

I used to have nightmares about cartoon witches in this room. I used to play with my Super Powers action figures and my Fisher-Price toys here. I used to stare out the windows at the kids on my block playing together while I stayed inside. I had my first sexual fantasies here. I secretly read “A Boy’s Own Story” here. This was MY place. My locus of personal development. The source of Me. And then it ceased to exist.

I thought back to all the Thanksgivings of the past.

These past four or five years, making the short trip from Jersey City to the suburbs.

Before that, the one year after law school when I was living at home.

Before that, the eight years of living in Virginia, during which I’d make the six- or seven-hour drive up from Charlottesville, sometimes giving one UVA friend or another a lift home; a combination of confusing feelings — sad to leave my friends for a few days, but excited to go home for Thanksgiving, and sadness at knowing it wouldn’t last long; feeling at home, but not quite; looking forward to recreating the Thanksgiving weekend I’d had the year before, but knowing that no two Thanksgiving weekends are the same.

That very first Thanksgiving home from UVA, when I stepped into my childhood home for the first time in more than three years, because my family and I had lived in Tokyo during that time. Everything in the house seemed smaller than I’d remembered.

Before that, the three years of Thanksgiving while living in Japan. One year we’d gone to Kyoto for a few days; one year we’d gotten together with a bunch of American Tokyo friends to properly celebrate the holiday (I can’t remember if we actually had a turkey); one year we’d gone to Hong Kong.

Before that, Thanksgiving during high school and middle school. During my freshman year (the last year before we moved), there was a treacly movie on TV (must have been this) about a small-town heartland family’s Thanksgiving, based on a Norman Rockwell painting; it made me pine for a small-town life.

Before that, ordinary Thanksgivings during middle school and elementary school. School letting out at 1 p.m. the day before; getting off the schoolbus in the early afternoon, bringing home a paper turkey in the shape of my hand, as well as a hand-written story about a turkey.

Before that, occasional trips to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade with my dad; afterward, we’d come home to find my mom cooking. That one time, when I was two or three, and it was freezing outside, and my parents bundled me up to go to the parade in a snowsuit so thick that I could have rolled down a hill.

Before that, a couple of Thanksgivings I can’t remember, because I was an infant. Before that, Thanksgiving 1973, when my mom was pregnant with me.

And before that… and before that… Thanksgivings without me, endlessly into the past.

I’ve had nostalgia for Thanksgiving ever since that freshman year of high school, watching that TV movie — knowing that I was growing up, that childhood would end, that more would soon be expected of me. More than half my Thanksgivings have involved some element of nostalgia.

Looking forward to recreating the Thanksgiving weekend I’d had the year before, but knowing that no two Thanksgiving weekends are the same.

Matt lay in my arms in my childhood bedroom, and suddenly I couldn’t remember what year it was, or what room I was in.

I checked my Amazon.com wishlist today for the first time in a while, and I was surprised to see that seven new items have been purchased for me recently. I think I know who bought them, too.

The thing is, my Amazon.com wishlist has slowly mutated from a list of things I want into a fossilized, layered record of the rise and fall of various interests, enthusiasms and whims I’ve had over the last few years. There are a bunch of cast albums, as well as DVDs of movies and TV seasons, but the largest portion is taken up by books. Books on evolutionary biology; the history of Christianity; feature writing; musical-theater writing; American history; computer programming; Stephen Sondheim; the Smithsonian; gay rights; and a smattering of fiction. I’ve used my wishlist more for myself, as a bookmarking device for potentially interesting books, because I didn’t think anyone besides me really looked at the list.

Now that I’ve been proven wrong, I’ve gone ahead and pruned some things I no longer want, and I’ve used the ranking device to give priority to certain things I want more than others. The wishlist is now ready for use.

This is all (OK, partly) by way of pointing out that my birthday is coming up in 27 days. So if anyone would like to buy me a present, the wishlist is ready for your perusal.

Here’s a cute, short little movie.