I have a new crush. It’s the soup guy.

There’s this soup place around the corner from my office. You know, those places that make everyone think of the Soup Nazi on “Seinfeld.” All they sell is soup. They have different soups each day, and you get on line and choose a soup.

I went there for the first time yesterday, and I noticed one of the two employees behind the counter. He’s really cute. He wears a backwards baseball cap. He has pale skin and brown hair. He has nice eyes. He has a little soul patch on his chin. And his lower lip is adorable.

Yesterday I got chicken noodle. Today I got minnestrone.

The guy is all business. “What can I getcha,” he says. He takes my order, fills up a container with soup, gives me a hunk of bread, sticks it all in a bag and says, “Four seventy-two.” All this with barely a glance.

Clearly he’s secretly in love with me but is just too shy to say anything.

I will be eating more soup from now on.

Goodbye, East/West. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Because there were two of you, and because you guys knew how to make yourselves stand out from the crowd and garner attention, and because of the time and energy you guys put into finding links and writing thinks, you guys became the de facto center of the gay blogging community. The one-stop shop for tops and pops and mops. Philo’s warm squishy new-agey Californianess always contrasted nicely with Choire’s crunchy nutty New Yorkathon. It was like a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup on crack and alcohol.

I’ve only met Philo once, and he seemed like a really nice guy. As for Choire, he’s really nice too. Ever since I first met him about two years ago, though, I’ve never been able to get a good read on him. I thought he was one thing, and then he turned into another thing, and then he turned into something else entirely. In fact, this part of his tribute to East/West leapt out at me:

Sometimes there were so many levels of irony in the East West soup I didn’t even know what I actually thought. Neither did readers, sometimes: irony, like sarcasm, doesn’t always play without vocal intonation or facial expression. I also didn’t know after a while if I was making fun of myself or not. Finally, I stopped caring, and let the good times roll.

Maybe it’s all those layers of irony that confused me.

Good luck in your future endeavors, guys. I’ll be reading.
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I have been addicted to Friendster the last couple of days. It’s fascinating. If you don’t know about Friendster, it’s essentially a networking tool. You invite your friends onto it, and they invite their friends, and you can see who your friends’ friends are, and who your friends’ friends’ friends are, and so forth. Eventually, you acquire a network of people; anyone within four degrees of separation is included in your network. You can see how you’re connected to various people. You can contact them for dates, job leads, and so forth.

I love the social and mathematical implications.

Currently, I have seven people designated as friends, and my network consists of 9,281 people.

Within my network, the person with the most friends has 541 of them. I guess he’s the biggest Lois Weisberg of my network. (That’s a link to a fascinating article by Malcolm Gladwell, if you’ve never read it.)

Within my network, there are 116 single gay men in or near New York City.

I looked up a friend of mine in Los Angeles to invite him into the network as my friend, and it turns out he’s already in my network — only we’re separated by three degrees.

In New York itself, there are a few people to whom I’m connected via two different friends of mine, neither of whom know each other. This just goes to show that when it comes to gay people, New York really is a small town.

Another weird thing is that so many of the single gay New York men in my network are buff and shirtless in their photos. I didn’t know I was connected to so many people who would choose to present themselves that way. It kind of irks me, for some reason, even though I’m sure they’re good people. Well, you can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friends’ friends’ friends.

I’m also surprised at how many amazingly hot guys some of my friends and their friends know.

Anyway, I’m just waiting for Sleepster, which will let you see all the people who have slept with all the people you’ve slept with, and all the people who have slept with them, and so on.

Now that would be scary.