Ack!

Oh my God! I was number 6000 at East Coast/West Coast. But it says they want a screenshot. How the hell do you make a screenshot? I went to the Windows Help menu and there was nothing about it. I didn’t think I was technically challenged, but maybe I am. And my dog didn’t eat my browser. I don’t even have a dog. I don’t even have a ferret. I have dust mites under my bed, but they don’t eat. And remember, guys, I’m an attorney, and attorneys have ways of making things happen.* (Unless they work for Al Gore.)

*Disclaimer: Not to be construed as a threat under the laws of the United States or the States of New Jersey, New York, or California.

Different

I saw the apartment in Williamsburg last night. Not my cup of tea. The neighborhood is a little too alternative for me; not only that, but the apartment is in a pretty run-down area. Kind of industrial, warehouses, and so forth.

So afterwards I was riding the train back to my apartment in Jersey City and I was thinking, you know, my place isn’t as bad as I thought it was. I have a fan now, which pretty much drowns out nighttime noise (especially when I run the fan while wearing earplugs), and my apartment is huge, and I have a very nice kitchen. If only my apartment were cheaper and in a different area.

What is it that I want? I want to live in Manhattan. I want to live as a yuppie, on the Upper East Side or the Upper West Side or maybe even in Chelsea, although Chelsea is way expensive and I don’t know if I could handle all the gay clones every day. But what is it that I really want? Sometimes, more than anything else, I just want to be typical. God, I just want to be like everybody else! I want to be a typical 27 year old. I want to have moved to New York immediately after graduating college and gone to work in the corporate world for a few years, instead of graduating college and spending a year drifting around my old college campus and then staying there for law school. Or, having gone to law school, I wish I’d gone to work for a law firm afterwards. But I just couldn’t do it. I just didn’t want to do it. I don’t know if I should commend myself for sticking to my principles or berate myself for being so stubborn and impractical. Tens of thousands of dollars in debt and I didn’t try harder to get a $100,000/year job? Even just for a couple of years? What was I thinking?

But you know what — I’ve tried. I tried during law school, I tried after law school. True, I could have sent my resume off to many more law firms, thus increasing my chances, but deep down, I just didn’t want to do it. And in interviews with law firms, I’ve never been able to convey a genuine interest, and I’ve never been offered a job by a firm. Well, once I did, a year and a half ago, by a very antiseptic suburban law firm, for 35K, but I had no desire to work there. Usually, in an interview, some lawyer will be talking to me and I’ll find myself just nodding and smiling, not really saying anything substantive, drifting off into la-la-land despite my best efforts not to, not listening to what’s being said, not really feeling like I belong there. Law firms seem filled with heterosexual back-slapping ex-frat-boys, or at least that’s always the impression I get, and I never feel like I’d be comfortable around them. Deep down I feel contempt for them, I do. Or maybe resentment because I’m not like them. Not to mention the hours. But dammit, if other people can be so flexible, why can’t I? Why do I have to be so protective of my individuality?

But I want to be typical. I want to be like some of the other people I saw lying out in Central Park on Sunday. I want to live in Manhattan so I can go running in Central Park. I want to be able to afford a cell phone and a Palm Pilot. I want to have a close group of friends and have people call me up and ask if I want to go do this with so-and-so and so-and-so on Saturday night. I want to be mister Yuppie Straight Guy, going to parties and straight bars with his colleagues and his friends and meeting women.

At the same time I know I’m wrong, right? Even if I do move to the Upper East Side or wherever, I’ll find something wrong with that. And I still won’t be Mr. Typical — I’ll still be me. I will always be me. I don’t even think Mr. Typical is really Mr. Typical. Everyone’s got issues, everyone’s got problems; people just put on good faces. We all think our neighbors have more verdant lawns, but they don’t. Even if the grass really is greener next door, the indoor plumbing is broken and there’s a termite problem. Right?

Maybe, maybe not. I think Mr. Typical has advantages. Mr. Typical Straight Yuppie is inherently more normal, taller, tanned, better-looking, more outgoing, more practical. He went to work after college or law school and has been building up his savings. He has a life of tanned success ahead of him. He and the world move in the same direction. And Mr. George Fucking Dubya gets to become president of the United States.

What do I have? I’m gay, so there’s a big strike against normalcy right there. I have an expensive law degree that was a waste of time. I’m living in an expensive apartment, I’m rent-poor, I’m not saving anything, I’m paying off my loans on the 25-year plan. I know someone my age who has his first book coming out in June; I’ve never even completed a short story. I want to be living a full life. I want to be following my calling. Time has gone by too quickly, I never had enough fun, I wasted too much time being afraid to move forward. I was too different to be like everybody else but too afraid to be myself. I wish I could just pick a fucking direction and go with it. What are you so afraid of?

As I write this, I realize that I’m probably exaggerating the bad and ignoring the good. But I’ve written it, and these are my frustrations, and they sting.

Equinox

I lay out in Central Park again this afternoon, soaking up the sun, staring at all the eye candy and reveling in the fact that it’s spring. This has been the weekend of Central Park sun. This was the weekend it really became spring.

I’m tired but I can’t sleep. The sun drained me of energy and I have a slight sunburn on my face and arms. With the sunburn, and the whooshing of the new fan I bought on Monday in order to drown out any nighttime noise, I’ve been tricked into thinking it’s the middle of August.

Winter and summer might be the extreme seasons, but fall and spring are the ones that herald change. Never mind the solstices; it’s all about the equinoxes. Perhaps I’m just conditioned from years of living on the academic calendar, but when September arrives and autumn begins, everything feels new. And I can already see down the horizon, one straight path, following an arc through new TV shows, crunching leaves, colder weather, Halloween, Thanksgiving, the holiday season, all culminating in a climax on New Year’s Eve. Similarly, when spring arrives, a new narrative arc begins — warm weather, May, June, summer arrives and the rhythms of the world change, students work in summer jobs, college kids come home, businesses slow down, people go to outdoor concerts, we fall in love and stay up late with our fleeting romantic interests on stifling hot summer nights.

Then summer ends, September arrives and another new season begins.

I’ve been craving a boyfriend this weekend. It’s been two years since I’ve had someone whom I called a boyfriend; that ended two Aprils ago, after two short months. I sort of dated someone long distance last year, but not with much enthusiasm. I’ve forgotten what it’s like to have an automatic Saturday night date, to have someone who’s thinking about you, someone to sleep over in your bed, someone else’s bed for you to sleep in, someone who’s always there.

It’s the beginning of spring but I can see time stretching before me, I can see the summer in the distance, like the horizon of an ocean, with the potential for so much to happen, things I can’t even begin to imagine. Back when I was in high school, I’d sit on the airplane at the end of August, returning with my family to Tokyo, where we lived while my dad worked in his company’s Japan office; I’d sit in the airplane seat, a magazine pocket in front of me, headphones on my head, thinking about the beginning of a new year at the high school I loved: new arrivals from the States with their families, new people to meet, some to befriend, some to develop crushes on; new plays to try out for, new activities to try, so many new experiences awaiting me, new, new, new.

I feel like that now. It’s warm, it’s spring, we’re on the cusp of a new season, so much to anticipate: I will meet new people, visit new places, feel new emotions blaze inside me; there will be misunderstandings and happy moments, new things to feel and to write about and someday to remember, all against a mythic background of the echoes of the ocean and the taste of ice cream.

This is a pregnant moment.