This is a story about anniversaries and the strangeness of August 4th.

It was four years ago today that I moved back home to the New York/New Jersey area.

It’s been an interesting four years. I can’t believe it’s been that long, but at the same time I can’t tell whether it’s gone by slowly or quickly.

On August 4, 1999, after one final summer of hanging around the University of Virginia and studying for the New York Bar Exam — and one week after a short trip up to Albany to take the exam — I packed up my car, accidentally dropped and splattered a bottle of shoe polish in the street, hit Interstate 64, came back up north, and ended an eight-year chapter of my life.

The next few months would be rough. Living at my parents’ house in northern New Jersey while looking for a job. Being confronted by my mom about my sexuality, and dealing with my parents’ anger and sadness while still having to live with them. Eventually getting a totally random non-law-related job near Princeton, 90 minutes south, and then inexplicably moving down to that utterly lifeless town, where I lived with an asshole roommate for four months. Subsequently moving into a good friend’s guest bedroom in a town near New Brunswick for six months. Finally, in May 2000, I was offered a law clerkship up in Newark, and several months later I moved up to Jersey City, right across the river from Manhattan. It had been a weird detour of a year.

But back to August 4, 1999. That evening, I came back home. That night, I went online, and I wound up meeting Biosphere Boy — perhaps the first gay man I ever really and truly fell for, head over heels. I eventually realized it wasn’t mutual.

Exactly two years later, on the night of August 4, 2001, I met Wes. Ahh, Wes. That didn’t work out, either. That was okay, though; since coming out, there are only three guys for whom I’ve really and truly fallen, and Wes wasn’t one of them.

I wonder if I’ll meet anyone exciting tonight. I guess it’s possible, but things like that don’t usually happen on Mondays.

I took the day off from work on Wednesday. It was partly a mental health day, and partly a there’s-no-way-in-hell-I’m-dragging-myself-into-the-office-today-because-I-couldn’t-fall-asleep-until-3:30-in-the-morning-last-night day.

I wound up going to the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. All week I’d been obsessed with the Oxford English Dictionary, and I just desperately wanted to peruse it. I didn’t want to spend hundreds of dollars for my own 20-volume edition, or a little less for the compact one-volume version with tiny print and an ineffective magnifying glass or the CD-ROM or a $550 yearly subscription, and my local library didn’t have the latest OED in any form (although it did have the Oxford Latin Dictionary, which I perused and which seems just as drool-worthy, or would if I knew Latin). So I went to the main branch of the New York Public Library in midtown, sat down at a computer terminal in the enormous, ornate, high-ceilinged Rose Reading Room, and accessed the OED online.

I’ve been really interested in the foundations of the English language lately, so I looked up really basic words. I looked up the, I, be, have, do, the letter W (one of the most recent additions to our alphabet), and the diphthong th, because English used to contain separate characters (thorn and eth) for that sound.

Each of the definitions was really long, going into the origins of each word. (For instance, the various permutations of “be” — am, are, is, was, were, be, been — originally come from three separate verbs.) The OED online has an e-mail function, so I e-mailed each of the definitions to myself for printing out and perusing later. It was a pretty neat afternoon. Also I got to look at hot guys.

On a completely unrelated note, I’m trying to figure out why my social life sucks lately.
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It’s been a strange three months.

There was a guy. Now there’s not.

It’s been interesting. And educational. Likely the lessons will just seep into me and I’ll find myself unconsciously applying them in the future. But if I had to enumerate some of them, I’d say — Be less tolerant; be less willing to put up with certain things. Be less blind; learn to recognize the portents sooner — or, learn to act on them sooner, and once you’ve acted, stick to your guns. Listen to your gut when it’s telling you something’s wrong. There are too many guys out there for you to do otherwise.

The fact is, every situation is different, and life’s too murky to make concrete rules for yourself. But I can remember what happened. And I can hope I’ve become wiser. And I can hope I’m not so blind next time.

I don’t regret that any of it happened, though. Things happen and you move on. We are accumulations of experience.

The upshot is that I’m totally on the market again.