My sons face became dry,flakey,and looked as if it had been burned with hot wax or something. I would not recommend this to anyone who is going to be seen in public. DO NOT PURCHASE THIS PRODUCT!!!!!
Tazorac reviews on acne.org

I have been reading these reviews and some have the effect of terrifing me and others then calm me. Ups and downs. Some people have no luck with it and some people do, but everyone seems to have horrible acne the first couple weeks. Saturday my face started breaking out and I was worried that the medication I had been taking (Retin-A) was becoming ineffective and I switched to this stronger prescription my dermatologist gave me when I still had health insurance, Tazorac, and right now, my face looks so awful, I almost can't believe it. Not that I have not had horrible acne before, but I thought it would slowly reemmerge. Last week and for the past couple of months my face was acne free. Today, oh my god, I think I counted thirty pimples. In addition, my face is so dry and at times, itchy. Yesterday, I had to leave work early because my face was itching and I just wanted to go home and scrub it. This site is really awesome because it is nice to hear other people complaining about severe acne, too hear people talking about how they are embarrased to leave their house, that many other people deal with the awful side effects of these medications.

I am wondering if those zits I got on Saturday would have just gone away or if this major flare-up was not going to happen anyways, or if it was indeed provoked by Tazorac. Reading all these horror stories though, I think it is the medication, and the people on this board say it takes weeks for that flare-up stage to subside. There is a Cinderella analogy that I could use here, about how midnight has struck, and I am back with my stupid old pumpkin, that I was not meant to have clear skin. This is bothersome for a couple reasons. The big one is that I most definitley cannot do sex work when I am so broken out, and I am going to need money after I pay my rent this weekend. The small, petty reason is that I wanted to go to Matt's opening next week, and don't want to go if I am going to be so pimply, so dry, so red.

But it hasn't been going on long enough to seriously effect my mood. I still am in a buoyont mood, and am trying to remind myself of inner sources of confidence, that this is a good slap to my face to not get arrogant, to not prize superficial things. But man, I don't like standing so close to my clear faced peers on the L train. I sort of hate that. I have been reading a book the past couple days on the train, losing myself in a world of text.

CQ + HB = TRU LUV

I am so exhausted and am still in a bit of a hangover from the activities of last night. I danced at the Slide, drank way too much rum, made lots of money, and was way out of control as I tend to get when I drink rum. For whatever reasons rum makes me lose the few inhibitions I do have, and basically, there are probably very few people that were at the Slide last night that did not see or touch my cock.

I went to the Armory Show today, hungover, and I am debating what is the best state to approach art in. Headphones are always a necessity to forget your surroundings. The choice of music is key. I have had some of best art encounters hungover because you are more sedated and your mind isn't processing twenty things at once. I also think not being sober helps when viewing art, as I have learned from enjoying works a lot more when I am at an opening and there is booze. I want to get stoned and go check out galleries soon, test other methods of viewing art.

There was some stuff at the show today that totally wowed me. The problem wasn't the stuff but seeing it. There was so much of it and people everywhere bumping into you if you stopped to look at something. Or if you were trying to move somewhere, you got stuck behind an immobile stroller. I saw so many fucking strollers at the Armory show, it made me sick. Ugo Rondinone and Marcel Dzama must be represented by about twenty galleries - I saw so much of their stuff throughout the show, and that is not a good thing for Dzama because the more you see of his work, the more cutesy it becomes. I think I might be over him.

I was shocked to see Tom Burr's "Blackout Bar," being used as a table for whatever gallery was showing it. It was outrageous and totally made the work something else, something far less awesome then when I saw it at the Biennial.

I told you I am still wiped and so I am just going to list the stuff I really enjoyed:
-Yeondoo Jung
-Michalangelo Pistoletto (I love art with mirrored surfaces)
-Juergen Teller's "Nurnberg Autumn" series
-Johan Zettequist's "Proposal No. 666" (art with a punchline surely will tire fast, but the joke hasn't worn off yet, and as of now, I really like this piece)
-James Reilly's painting of sullen kids
-Allison Smith's Muster project
-Roni Horn's "This is Me, This is You" photo series
-Nobuyoshi Araki
-and HERNAN BAS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (I love him so much as you may already know. He has a few paintings in the Daniel Reich booth that are lovely!)

After a few unanswered emails over the past couple weeks, one of them even signed "infatuated," I finally responded this morning since I do have his sweatshirt and he does have one of my favorite albums. Bonnie asked me last night if the fact that this boy (and possibly another one) clearly liked me was the reason that I was not into him, that I will only like people who do not like me. I mean it may be true. I should like Paul I tell myself just because he is a cool artist and smart. But I don't know. I just didn't feel sparks of any sort when he slept over a couple weeks ago and so I have been just trying to not contact him but sadly, we have some of each others things, and so I have to meet with him to give him back his sweater.

Paul:

Sorry I haven't given you a call back. I find myself easily distracted. I started working at the Princeton Review again and so that is what has been partially distracting me, but I will give you your sweatshirt this weekend, tomorrow or Sunday.

And to answer your question, I am not interested in being anything more than friends and sex usually tends to negate that possibility. But yeah, I would be fine with hanging out so long as that is understood. I have this problem with homos where friendships might form but spending the night always happens and then I find myself distancing myself from that person never sure how to make clear without being rude that I am not interested in sex. It is why I have
so few gay male friends because sex or the desiring of it forecloses that option.

But yeah, I am going to have lunch with my mom and then am going to work so I will try to give you a call tomorrow to exchange things.

Charlie

i am totally going to regret writing this to charlie when i wake up tomorrow. damn, friendster.

dude, really. how am i supposed to try to make out with you if you are not at karaoke on tuedays at the metropolitan, like tonight? i mean, really.

ps: are you so excited about the armory show?

first and third

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Pamela Anderson plays a character who "is tired of her non-stop partying lifestyle and bad choices in boyfriends. Wanting a major life change, she wanders into "The Stacks," a small family-run bookstore." A TV show about a bookstore involving Pamela Anderson. Will there be a Nancy evil boss character? Will they get asked stupid questions all the time? Will they be paid horrbly low wages? What will this show be about? I am so excited. Oh yeah, it is called Stacked. I am so excited!

wrapped up in books

Walking around in the cold night downtown, I was on my break, getting a slice of pizza with some of the last of my dollar bills, and high on coffee, thinking about Cloud Atlas, trying to think of the last time I had been so awed by an author's writerly prowess and I think it may have been Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, that that was the last time I said to myself, Wow, Wow, Wow, how he is weaving all of this together? That was three summers ago. It was one of those trains of thought, quick association to quick association, swinging from tree branch to remembered tree branch, so happy, somehow managing to cross streets and not get hit by cars, so in a mental daze. Three summers ago in Madison, Wisconsin, I read that book. My thinking back to the book tonight conjured not so much India's independence, its plot, as it did that midwestern college town and my time there, my time working that temp job where everyday I brought that book to work and managed to only read about ten pages a day.

Then I thought to other books I loved and realized that this is how I separate periods of time in my life, with good books. I thought to A Heartbreaking Work and remembered that summer working at Yes! Organic Market in DC and how I rode the metro to work everyday reading that book. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was another metro book from that summer.

And now, I am going through them all mentally and I just hit Middlesex and said Aww, Cypress Circle, remember the three of us reading it at the same time in Sarasota. These are all finished love affairs, decent chunks of time where I was emotionally involved with something. That quote again: "A half finished book is a half finished love affair." And maybe other people think back on relationships and where they were at that period of time in their life, but tonight, I was thinking to books and to the places they evoked, where I read them, the circumstances, how I reacted to them at that time and what I think of the books now that time has given us a little bit of space for feelings to cool and mutate. I can think of so many of the books that we had in our little room in Madison, what they were, which ones I read, which ones I never even touched. And you probably don't know what I am talking about and I am not a good writer because that is what they are - good writers, I mean - people able to translate those quirky memories well enough so that they you understand and feel them too, but I don't even know how to begin to try to evoke those books, just their covers in my memory and how they don't really signify anything in particular, nothing more so than the period in time and that is all too much to try to convey, or at least to try to do so right now.

Oh my god, let's not even talk about The Marabou Stork Nightmares and tenth grade. Not tonight, okay? But man, I can feel these things, those moments in time, am back there, just by calling off book titles from my past. Nausea! Wow, it's such a sensation. Aloud!: Voice from the Nuyorican Poet's Cafe! I can't get over it. I can't believe I never noticed this or thought to much about it until tonight. And I wonder if I will associate Kafka on the Shore with my months of unemployment, mild depression, and peeing on people. I know I will and I love that - that books so easily evoke periods of time for me. Wow. Wow. Wow. Sorry, I am going through book after book, through more phases of my life, being sixteen, twenty, eighteen, and things you'll never know.

And this excites me more than it may you - say, if you were suddenly able to recall large chunks of your past with the snap of a finger - because I have such a difficult time quickly evoking periods in my past. People will ask me about high school and I will have a hard time remembering that far back, and this may be a coping mechanism, forgetting these things intentionally, but by doing this rollcall of books, I am so able to bring these things up again, these moments of time to mind and that really amazes me. Perhaps, you have an easier time evoking your past and think that this ability is totally normal and nothing to gush about it, but for me, it is not and I need to gush. The only other thing that surefire evokes past memories for me is music. Put on Spacehog, Smashing Pumpkins, or If You're Feeling Sinister, and oh my god, Time Warp, I can tell you specific things, what the tile looked like in our house then and I want to cry because I can feel those moments that in other times I have such difficulty evoking. And I don't know why I love these memories, my memories so much, why I would rather spend my night, tonight, thinking back on past years rather than going out and perhaps doing something that I might remember in future years on similar nights. It might be because I have three dollars and cannot afford to go out and do things here in this town, but I don't think so - I think there is something more intense in this - in thinking back on these things and looking at that stream of time past, where it has led, maybe even ask why those things led to this - maybe not, maybe just missing things. I don't know. You know I like these things. You do too. That is why you, why we do these, writing here in our little diaries, recalling past moments, even day old ones, bringing them to life again and again - novice necromancers.

I am a lazy bastard and apparently have not done any physical activity besides jacking off for the past two months. The proof of this is that I worked a six and a half hour shift yesterday at the Princeton Review, not all of it on my feet and came home so exhausted, laid in bed massaging my feet and my legs, feeling so sore. I imagine David Brent standing over me, saying, "Pathetic," in that British accent, in that tone of dissapointment. I am working a stretch of nine days until next Saturday when I will have a day off. This is all my own choosing too since I am so broke and am trying to work as many hours as they will allow, trying to get forty in each week. In the short term, I have six dollars and fifty cents in cash, a negative ammount in my bank account, March rent still due, a past due phone bill that is getting turned off any day now, and a shocking ConEd bill that has been due for months. Tonight and tomorrow, I am going to try to do some sex work if at all possible, if it is not too late by the time I get out of work.

There is kind of good news, kind of I'm-a-dunce news from the job also. I got "promoted" to quality control which means that I now have a set schedule until at least May - Monday through Friday, 3-10. This is how this job was offered to me - with the guarantee that I would be able to get at least 35 hours each week regardless of if there is work. It's the same pay rate though, which is still a decent 14/hr, but it is also a decent bit more of work. What this means is that you probably won't be reading any of those long diary entries composed while I watched a scanner grade scantrons. Now, I am going to be making sure things go right, fixing problems, and doing database work in Excel, lots of tedious tasks that require a sharp eye, i.e. no more puncing around on the www for seven hours. I was excited about this while at work yesterday, not really thinking through the implications of this, excited to be "promoted," but now, I see that it is more work at the same pay rate. Maybe - a big maybe there - I will be able to get a permanent job there from this, probably not though, and I have to work Thursdays and Fridays, the fun gallery opening days. I still have Saturdays, but I am going to miss the Damien Hirst opening next Friday that I was really excited about going to.

Cloud Atlas is totally amazing, by the way.

some might point to this as an example

I look at his profile just about every day on Friendster and stare at pictures of him. I notice when he changes it up and puts a new picture on his profile. This one, for instance. And then, I will stare at it, not in a horny way where I mentally or physically masturbate to it. But sort of a Magic Eye image where I just stare almost past the image, thinking really nothing, hoping to see something, giddy, imagining just talking to him. This is how crushes work for me. I really do believe that I take crushes more seriously (more scarily?) than other people. And then five minutes will go by with me staring at my computer screen and I will ask myself rhetorically what I am doing, because really I know the answer to it, have always known the answer whenever I have pretended to ask myself the question about crushes. I want to go the Metropolitan right now and hope that he is there.

Instead, I am going to lie in bed because my throat is sore so I shouldn't drink, plus there is the fact that I am broke and shouldn't for that reason also. I have been reading a book I have had for six months or so now sitting beside my bed, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, and so far, I love it. I just read, "A half-read book is a half-finished love affair." And not that I have experience with love affairs or anything, but man, I loved that line and felt it to be true.

I downloaded the new Daft Punk and Bloc Party albums today. I just want to dance to Daft Punk until I die. Also, tickets to NIN go on sale on Friday and not that I have forty five dollars to be blowing on loud, industrial bands, but I really want to go. I took a shower this morning blaring The Downward Spiral and feeling so good. I am a glutton for these things, these pleasures and I love it that there are these things capable of providing pleasure to me, that there is so much of it. Quick, name that song lyric: It's neverending. I've got pictures of crushes thanks to Friendster, Daft Punk, loud music from high school to shower to, David Mitchell. What more could I want? PS, my Free Will horoscope has confirmed that this is going to be a very good week. Geminis, rejoice:

Events in the coming week may be difficult for some of you to deal with. They will include intense encounters with peace, love, joy, and understanding, as well as possible brushes with extravegent beauty, lyrical delight, and inspiring discoveries. There will be a dearth of story lines the feature betrayal, abuse, pettiness, greed, extortion, disease, and explosions. Therefore, Gemini, you should proceed with extreme caution if you're a jaded hipster who's suspicious of feeling really good. Ask yourself: "Am I ready to stop equating cynicism with insight? Do I dare take the risk that exposing myself to uplifting encounters might might dull my intelligence?" If you doubt your ability to handle all the relaxing breakthroughs, you'd better take strong measures to evade them.

And if you're not a Gemini, you can go ahead and pretend this is for whatever sign you are. Isn't this the best horoscope ever?

PS - Isn't he the cutest boy on Planet Earth?

Four Things

1. Eric Rohmer's A Summer's Tale: I rented this because Neil LaBute referenced Rohmer in his interview with Soderbergh on the sex, lies, and videotape commentary track, and I was intrigued. Sometimes the right movies catch you at the right time, and this movie, I might have fidgeted through on another day, but I loved it on the slow day I watched it, loved the main actor, Melvil Poupaud. I want to watch more Rohmer films, especially the earlier ones, but they only have one other one, also a recent one, on DVD at Reel Life and that one is a period piece. Me and period films do not get along.

2. Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore: I finally finished it last night. It was good, and if I had read it at a different time, I would have loved it and been unable to put it down. Our paths didn't cross at the right moment.

3. Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar: This is another product that was consumed at the right time. After the bland, translated sentences of Murakami about cats and coincidences, it was just what I needed, precise, biting sentences of someone with labored prose. Gay men and Brits have that sharp, mannered tongue that is so fun to read. The ending was a bit much and so, I am curious to find a copy of the original 1948 version of the book that has an even more melodramatic ending (gay man strangling his straight crush).

4. David Lynch's Eraserhead: Our paths didn't cross at the right time. If you are not in the mood for a Lynch movie, you shouldn't even try, because your rhythms won't sync and it will be an effort to slow your pace to the film's. I rented it because it was a major gap in my knowledge of cinema that needed to be filled, and it was interesting to see Lynch exploring the same themes in his first feature that he would pursue throughout the rest of his career.