Jesus Christ. Okay, I think my site is back to normal now. I had more problems yesterday, but if you can read this, then things are fine.

We watched The American President last night. It was on TV the other night so we decided to TiVo it. I’ve seen it many times, and I always enjoy it. But it’s always jarring to see Martin Sheen playing the chief of staff instead of the president. It’s fun to look for other precursors of The West Wing (both the movie and the TV show were written by Aaron Sorkin, don’t you know). For instance, Anna Deavere Smith and Joshua Malina are in both the movie and the show. And there’s a politician named Stackhouse — governor in the movie, filibustering senator on TV. Here are more similarities. Huh. I never realized that Sydney Wade’s sister is played by the same actress who played Ellie Bartlett.

I’ve always wanted to write a paper about how movie portrayals of the President of the United States changed in the 1990s. When I was a kid, it seemed that whenever a movie featured the president, he was played by some bland, gray-haired, middle-aged man, and he was never a main character. He’d just appear for a few minutes, just long enough to make the agonizing-yet-tough decision to bomb Country X or to shake his fist and refuse to give in to the demands of the villains. He’d stand there in shirtsleeves and suspenders, make his gray-haired decision, and then we’d get back to Jack Ryan or Superman or whoever.

But in the 1990s, Bill Clinton took office. He was from a new generation, more touchy-feely, more idealistic, and the popular conception of the presidency changed as the barrier between public and president fell away. (Boxers or briefs?) This shift was reflected in the movies. Suddenly there were movies about being the president, movies from the president’s point of view. He was now portrayed as younger, friendlier, more idealistic, more vigorous. We were invited to identify with him, root for him. In 1993, there was Dave: Kevin Kline impersonates the president and tries to fix Washington. In 1995, The American President: the idealistic, witty liberal. In 1996, Independence Day: the president flies a fighter jet! In 1997, Air Force One: president as action hero!

I know there’s a paper in there somewhere.

This new book looks really cool and it’s right up my alley.

Jesse Helms has died.

I emailed a friend of mine:

I rarely feel this way about someone, but may he rot in hell, if it exists.

He wrote back:

Or if it doesn’t, may he have to be reincarnated as a crippled black Jewish lesbian living in Mississippi.

Amen.

As of today, there are 200 days left in the Bush presidency.

We’re getting there!

Susan of [tos] blogs about the reaction to last night’s preview: “Holy. Fucking. Shit.”

Thoughts swirling through my head today on only a few hours of sleep. Once again I woke up around 4:00 this morning. Why does this keep happening? We must get a new mattress and an actual bed.

As I drifted in and out of sleep I kept dreaming about [title of show]. Still thinking about the first preview the other night. I can’t get these lyrics out of my head today:

I’d rather be
Nine people’s favorite thing
Than a hundred people’s ninth favorite thing

I’m still thinking about our holiday weekend. It was really nice — we did at least one fun thing on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, which had not been the norm for us lately.

On Thursday night I opened up my cardboard box of memorabilia. I’d taped it up when we moved last fall and hadn’t opened it since. I wanted to dig through my old journals, but I wound up spending the evening looking through a few hundred photographs that have been sitting in various drugstore envelopes for years. Then I pored over words I’d written almost exactly 10 years ago.

On Friday afternoon we saw WALL-E. I loved it. Can’t recommend it highly enough. One of the most poetic and beautiful animated films I’ve ever seen. I want my own WALL-E to keep as a pet. I also realized that the shape of his head is similar to E.T.’s. I wonder if that was intentional.

After the movie, we went to a Fourth of July party at our friends’ place and watched the fireworks from their roof. It was raining, and the rain weighed down the smoke over the East River and kept it from dissipating, so most of the fireworks were obscured. That was kind of disappointing.

Saturday night was [title of show], and yesterday afternoon we went to my parents’ house for a little family hangout. My dad grilled up burgers, chicken skewers, and steak, and we ate outside. My parents have done lots of gardening this summer and there were flowers everywhere, as well as a few bird feeders that attracted lots of birds (and some squirrels and, I think, a couple of rats). My parents’ backyard is surrounded by tall trees, which were fully green in mid-summer bloom. It was such a nice respite from the city. I think human beings need to commune with nature — it touches something inherent in us. It grounds us and reminds us where we came from. It slows us down, re-synchronizes us with the clock of the world. Trees, plants and animals are so much realer and truer than concrete and plaster and pixels and plastic.

Alas, all weekends come to an end. But I don’t want to waste this summer like I usually do. Matt and I should try to get away somewhere, even if just for a couple of days. I want to slow down and appreciate summer for once.

I know this is the fourth [title of show] post I’ve written in the last few days.

But I was just sitting at my cubicle listening to “Die Vampire, Die” on my iPod, and I got to the part that goes

The last vampire is the mother of all vampires and that is the vampire of despair. It’ll wake you up at 4am to say things like:

Who do you think you’re kidding?
You look like a fool.
No matter how hard you try, you’ll never be good enough.

Why is it that if some dude walked up to me on the subway platform and said these things, I’d think he was a mentally ill asshole, but if the vampire inside my head says it, it’s the voice of reason.

and I started silently crying.

Now I’m typing this entry and it’s happening again.

One thing I noticed when I stopped taking Celexa a few months ago after 4 1/2 years is that the spigots got unblocked. It first happened to me while watching “Enchanted,” of all things. I’d forgotten what it was like for tears to well up so easily. I hadn’t even realized I’d forgotten.

Emotions seem much more feelable to me again these days.

I’m getting a ton of hits today from people searching Google for “tin man’s first words in the movie,” or some variation thereof.

Can one of you tell me what this is all about?

Oh hell yes. It was only a matter of time until something like this appeared, wasn’t it.

I love Chuck Todd. Whenever he appears on TV, Matt and I say his name in a loud, fast, mysterious whisper. It’s just so much fun to say.

[Thanks, David!]

I decided I wanted to see [tos] again, so I got myself a ticket for tonight. I went online and it turned out there was a great seat available in the second row, center orchestra, so I snagged it. (Sometimes excellent seats pop up on the day of a show, especially single seats.)

I’m so psyched. I know I’ve sounded like an obsessed teenager this week, but so be it.

Last night in therapy I was talking about the show and how it’s reawakened these creative yearnings in me. An image came into my head of this long, sharp metal object piercing through the layers of skin and baggage and events that have accumulated over my lifetime, parting them like the Red Sea, and reaching down to touch my tender core, my truest yearnings and desires that have become encrusted over the years with so much other stuff.

I need to get this shit out of my system.

P.S. And oh my god, Jeff Bowen writes crossword puzzles.

Yesterday morning I woke up and decided to take a mental/physical health day. I wasn’t sure whether to call it a personal day or a sick day, because it was sort of both. I hadn’t been sleeping well lately, and I was feeling mentally drained and depressed and self-loathing, particularly about my ability to write, or even about my right to write. I just couldn’t bear the thought of going to work. I needed a day to recharge.

It was wonderful.

I got back into bed and turned on WQXR, New York’s classical music station. I couldn’t remember the last time I let myself just lie in bed listening to the radio. I fell asleep. I woke up. Fell asleep again. Finally got out of bed around noon.

Lay on the couch reading a couple of chapters of Joel’s book, Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever, which, despite the jocular title, is surprisingly moving.

Went to my computer to dig up old half-finished stories and pieces I’d written.

Got back into bed with The Artist’s Way, which I think I’m going to work through for the third time, and read the introductory sections.

Sat down in the kitchen to write in my notebook.

Went for a run in Central Park. I planned to run to and around the Reservoir so I could feel like Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man (which we rented a few weeks ago), but I got winded before I even got to the Reservoir. So first I started walking around the Reservoir, and then I started running again, and then I walked then ran then walked then ran then walked home.

Then I decided to do my first Artist’s Date. I decided to do something I’d never done before: bake a pie.

I bought blueberries last week, and that made me wonder about making a blueberry pie, so when I got home I found a recipe in my all-purpose cookbook, bought the ingredients, and baked a pie. I had to buy a bunch of things we didn’t have, so the pie wound up costing me 40 bucks. But that included a pie pan, cinammon, allspice, sugar, cornstarch (when I will ever use cornstarch again? better bake more pies), lemon juice, butter, and a seven-dollar tub of vanilla ice cream, because you can’t have pie without ice cream. Matt came home from work just as I started unpacking the ingredients, and he asked me why I didn’t just go out and buy a pie for less money, but then he caught himself and realized that that wasn’t the point for me, that the experience was the point for me.

Here’s how it came out.

Very oozy and drippy. But I was proud of myself, because I’d never done it before.

So we ordered in Thai food and ate pie and watched the latest episode of “Legally Blonde The Musical: The Search For Elle Woods,” which has an awkward and unwieldy title. I hate reality shows and avoid them on principle, because (1) I think they’re putting writers out of business and (2) I think a good narrative story engages the creative part of our brains better than a contest where mean people are exploited. But I actually like this show.

(I wonder if that’s why reality TV does so well: we all say we hate reality TV except for that one show.)

We watched a little more TV and then went to bed.

I still woke up too early this morning, but I feel better than I’ve felt in several days.

Sometimes, when a voice inside is telling you to take a break, you really need to listen.

A writing coach I’ve met with a few times, Nancy Rawlinson, has just started a blog about “books, literature, publishing and the creative process.” Some good stuff up there so far. She links to a piece by writer Anne Enright, who says:

Over the years, you learn to keep your emotions in the place where you write. With practice you can wrestle them down to something roughly the size of the page.

I saw Tony Bennett last night. I was coming out of my therapist’s office in the Village and started walking down the street, and across the street I saw Tony Bennett standing on the front stoop of a brownstone. He was just standing there, wearing a suit, facing forward and smiling, looking totally at ease, talking with a couple of people who were standing on the lower steps. He seemed to be holding court.

I don’t know what he was doing there. I’ve seen functions going on in the living room of that brownstone before. I think it’s owned by an organization.

This was actually the second time I’ve seen Tony Bennett. The first time was in 1996. I was walking into the men’s room at the Art Institute of Chicago and he was walking out.

If this temporal and geographic pattern holds true, I will next see Tony Bennett in November 2020 in the middle of the Atlantic.

This is an important anniversary for me.

Ten years ago this week, I finally accepted that I was gay.

I had struggled with my sexuality for years — doing mental gymnastics, filling page after page in my diaries and journals, arguing with myself, talking with therapists. I didn’t know whether I was gay or straight or in between or whether I should be gay or straight or in between. I spent year after year analyzing myself, trying to think my way to the answer. It was like trying to argue a symphony.

In July 1998, I was 24 years old, living in the Glee Club house while working as a research assistant to a law professor for the summer. It was the summer after my second year of law school at UVa. Most law students did such jobs after their first year of law school; after the second year, you were supposed to work as a summer associate at a law firm somewhere. But my interviews hadn’t gone well, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my degree, and at the last minute I’d found this mind-numbing research job. Stuck in Charlottesville for the summer — again. I hated the job and I wondered what the hell I was doing with my life.

I was living in the house with several other guys, including my gay friend Jim, with whom I’d privately shared my confusion a few months earlier, after I’d fallen hard for a straight guy — harder than I’d ever fallen for anyone before, so hard that I’d had to tell someone. It had been five years since I’d had a gay friend that I could talk to about these things.

Now, one summer night several months later, Jim was sitting in the living room, talking with another guy who lived in the house, a straight guy, about what it was like to be gay. I sat there and listened. I couldn’t say anything, because the other guy didn’t know about me. It roiled me inside; I was living in the same house with a gay friend of mine and I was feeling all these things so intensely about my life and I didn’t know what to do about any of it.

A couple of nights later I was doing a writing exercise from The Artist’s Way. I was working my way through the book that summer, trying to get in touch with my inner creative self. In this exercise, I was supposed to write about my ideal day. As I wrote, I found myself dreaming up a boyfriend and including him in my fantasy.

It hit me.

In my ideal life, I had a boyfriend.

It was an epiphany. This was what I wanted. This was what would make me happy. After all the years of confusion, all the pages and pages of tortured logic, the answer turned out to be comically, painfully simple.

This is what I want. And it’s okay.

That day or the next, an image came into my head: I was standing on a flat rocky plain, watching the enormous sun rising in the distance as it turned the sky a mixture of deep purple and orange and red. I would be going toward that sunrise. I would have a happy future after all.

That night, I went out and bought a book by Michelangelo Signorile, Outing Yourself. It was time. I was ready.

While I occasionally had doubts over the following weeks, nothing could shake that initial epiphany. I’d forever changed. I knew who I was and where I was going.

Last week I pulled out my journal from that time, because I wanted to make sure I had the right date.

Saturday, July 18, 1998

9:30 pm

This evening I bought Michelangelo Signorile’s Outing Yourself. I think I am realizing that I am gay. That seems strange, to just be realizing that, because I am no stranger to my sexuality. For at least seven years I have known myself. Over the last seven plus years I’ve had various experiences, not necessarily sexual. August 1991: I wrote it in my diary. April 1992: I came out to Kirk. [etc. etc. etc.]

Over the past seven years, and more, I have gleaned information from books, newspaper and magazine articles, TV segments, TV programs and TV movies. Furtive glances, shows watched in solitude, things read alone. Therapy. Talking with people. I’ve identified myself as “not straight,” “non-straight,” even “queer.” Possibly “bisexual.” But I have had the hardest time really figuring out what I am.

I haven’t wanted to deal with the responsibility…

I wrote on for a couple more pages and ended by saying I was gay.

I wrote again the next day.

And then the next.

And then that week I discovered gaycollegeboys.com, which led me to IRC, or Internet Relay Chat. Gay chat rooms.

I didn’t write in my notebook for six days.

After that, I didn’t write in my notebook for a whole month.

I was too busy living.

So it’s been 10 years. In 10 years I’ve had lots of gay sex and lots of gay dating and lots of gay heartbreak. And I’ve fallen in love.

If anybody had told me 10 years ago that in 2008 I’d be living fully out as a gay man, living in Manhattan with a man I love, my partner of four and a half years, a man whom my family embraced as one of their own — well, my head would have exploded.

Happy Gayversary.

Interesting essay on writer’s envy. I deal with this a lot.

The Starbucks in downtown Newark, which is right next to my office building, is among the 600 stores the company is closing. And people are not happy, including the city’s leadership.

I’m not really a coffee drinker, and I don’t think I’ve ever set foot inside the store, but I’m annoyed that it’s closing. It’s usually crowded and it makes downtown Newark feel like a real place. Already the FedEx/Kinko’s has closed. More importantly, the Duane Reade closed last year, so there’s no place to buy sundries during the day. (Duane Reade is like CVS but worse.)

Oh, and I would give my left arm for a big chain bookstore nearby. There are practically no bookstores in Newark.

I’d never heard of Elaine Donnelly, but apparently she caused quite a ruckus at yesterday’s congressional hearing about “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Donnelly treated the panel to an extraordinary exhibition of rage. She warned of “transgenders in the military.” She warned that lesbians would take pictures of people in the shower. She spoke ominously of gays spreading “HIV positivity” through the ranks.

“We’re talking about real consequences for real people,” Donnelly proclaimed. Her written statement added warnings about “inappropriate passive/aggressive actions common in the homosexual community,” the prospects of “forcible sodomy” and “exotic forms of sexual expression,” and the case of “a group of black lesbians who decided to gang-assault” a fellow soldier. …

Rep. Vic Snyder (D-Ark.) labeled her statement “just bonkers” and “dumb,” and he called her claims about an HIV menace “inappropriate.” Said Snyder: “By this analysis . . . we ought to recruit only lesbians for the military, because they have the lowest incidence of HIV in the country.” …

Donnelly returned to the case of “Cynthia Yost . . . assaulted by a group of lesbians.” She neglected to mention that the incident was alleged to have occurred in 1974.

Fun reading.

Sometimes at the end of the weekend, or on Monday morning, I think back to Friday night and wish I could just freeze a moment from it. On Friday after work, Matt and I rode a New Jersey Transit train out to the suburbs to have dinner with my parents and some old friends of theirs. The train was bright and sunny and filled with relaxed commuters. When we got off the train in the ‘burbs, we walked to a nearby wine store and brought my parents some wine. Then we walked to the house, had wine, went out to the deck and sat at a table underneath an umbrella surrounded by trees and ate delicious food.

When I was a kid, I often liked to just sit at the table and listen to the adults have interesting conversations. Now I can actually be part of the conversation.

Just as the best part of a vacation is often the very beginning, when you’ve come home from work (or, way back when, from school) and realized that you have a wonderful stretch of time ahead to look forward to, sometimes the best part of the weekend is the very beginning. At the end of a vacation I wish I could go back to that moment at the beginning, when I was anticipating everything to come, and just hold the moment.

The rest of the weekend was unexciting. We spent most of it indoors, watching TV. Yesterday I made a recipe from a cookbook: curried chicken salad. It’s tasty and I brought some for lunch today.

The problem with doing nothing but sitting around watching TV is that it doesn’t create any memories. One hour runs into another and you’ve just stared at a screen the whole time. You haven’t experienced anything new or hung out with interesting people. One thing I’ve realized in the last few years is that I’m more of an extrovert than I used to think. I’m still an introvert in lots of ways, and sometimes I’m nervous about meeting new people — but I do need people in my life. I don’t have very many friends whom I see regularly. It’s my own fault for not taking the initiative. And since Matt is more of an introvert, it’s pretty much all on me.

Watching TV wasn’t all bad. We downloaded and watched the crazy season finale of “Doctor Who.” We re-watched the last few episodes of “Mad Men” and then watched the season premiere. I watched parts of “The Wizard of Oz,” which happened to be on TV. That movie never ceases to be special.

But sometimes I worry that I’ll look back on my life and see that I haven’t done enough fun things. I’ll see a succession of empty weekends. A few thousand of them.

Oh, well. Another weekend is just four days away.

I would love to watch this trailer in a crowded movie theater and hear the reactions.

It’s awkward when you work in an office with really long hallways, and you’re walking down one of the long hallways, and then you notice someone else walking toward you from the opposite end of the long hallway.

I’m never sure at what distance you should start to make eye contact, and what to do until that point.

There’s also the awkardness of whether or not to acknowledge the person in the first place, which depends on how well you know the person and on whether you even know the person. Sometimes I don’t even know whether or not to make eye contact, particularly if it’s a person who seems intent on not acknowledging you. But of course you’ve already acknowledged the person and made eye contact from a distance, because you’re both walking down the hallway and you can’t help but notice each other.

These are some of the things I think about.

Maybe it’s best to work from home.

The season premiere of Mad Men, which aired this past Sunday on AMC, is set on the day and night of Valentine’s Day, 1962. In a neat bit of historical accuracy, several of the characters wind up watching parts of Jackie Kennedy’s televised tour of the White House, which really did air that night, February 14, 1962. (It got 56 million viewers! Can you imagine anything getting that kind of viewership today?)

Well, AMC is now hosting the entire television special on its website. (More background here.)

Here’s how the New York Times covered it, and here are the TV listings for that day. (Unfortunately, I think you need to be NYT subscribers to see the pre-1980 archives.)