Buzzedblog

I’ve come home from one of the best evenings I’ve had in a long time, and I’m still kinda buzzed. I went to that Valentine’s eve dinner at a Mexican restaurant called Mexican Radio. We had a whole basement room to ourselves, about 30 of us, a big group of gay men in our twenties. I’d been to several 20something meetings before, but this was the first time that I hung out with the group over the course of a good meal and several drinks. Even before the alcohol, I felt more relaxed among these people than I had in the past — I think because I decided to make it an enjoyable event and because I said to myself, “to hell with the pressure of finding someone I’d be interested in dating.” I don’t know why it took me so long to get to that point. But it was the right attitude to take.

After mingling for a long time, I wound up at a table with three other guys, all of whom I’d already been talking with, and we continued to have ourselves a good conversation and a good time. One of those guys I’d seen before at a gay reading group at the Center, and we’d smiled at each other once, so that made it easy to strike up a conversation. At the end of the evening, he asked for my phone number, so we exchanged our numbers.

One of the other guys at our table was beautiful — brown hair with blond streaks, nice eyes, completely clear skin, slim nose. And it turned out we went to rival colleges. This guy and the fourth guy at our table already knew each other. Anyway, the four of us really did have a great time; the alcohol certainly didn’t hurt.

I’m 27 years old, but I still haven’t gotten over the fact that on a Tuesday night, I can go to a restaurant with a bunch of people, get a nice buzz going, and come home around midnight. Ahhh… adulthood.

Glances

I just came back from the vending machine, where I bought a bag of Peanut Butter M&M’s, and on the way back I made eye contact with a kinda-cute teenage boy. He must be 16 or 17. I work in the state court system, and random people are in the building every day to attend hearings. This boy has been here with a small group of people all day; I’ve seen him three times, and twice we’ve made eye contact. Hmm… the age of consent for homosexual sex in New Jersey is only 16… not that I’m going to pull a Brian Kinney or anything, but still, it’s kinda fun to be looked at.

I’m so bad at cruising, though. When I catch a guy looking at me — on a subway train or at a bar, for instance — I usually tell myself that he just happened to be looking around and that our eyes just happened to meet. After all, that happens, doesn’t it? Common scenario: you’re at a gay bar, or some other place where there are lots of gay people. You’re looking around the room, and somehow your eyes land on a guy whom you have absolutely no interest in, usually someone twenty years older than you, and then he catches you looking at him. So you look away, trying to show that you weren’t really cruising him. But then a minute later, you’re once again looking around the room, and no this can’t happen twice can it but your eyes accidentally land on him again, and again he catches you looking at him, and he gives a knowing smile. Again you look away quickly. But by this point your embarrassment has made you hyperconscious of this guy, and so you look at him yet again, and yet again he looks at you. At that point you move to another part of the bar where you’re out of his line of sight, you sip your drink, and you concentrate really hard on a point on the far wall.

Or maybe these things only happen to me.

Wonder of wonders… The New Yorker website now contains content. This feels almost as momentous as when the New York Times finally began using color photographs on its front page in 1997. This is what is known as getting with the program.

The site’s navigation is a little clunky, and it only has a few articles up there, but still, yay!