There is so much in this life to do. It is thrilling. The sun was out and the weather was in the fifties today and I woke up thinking about the same things, the same person I thought about when I drunkenly tried to fall asleep, to tell myself that it was unhealthy to think about this person for so long. I went to the Metropolitan last night with the Florida kids and it was the most crowded it has been in a long time. Everyone was there and there was even dancing going on. And I danced to Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)" with a mass of people whom I love. And fuck, I have about five minutes to write here and there is so much I want to talk about, but I have to go to some gallery openings that I am really excited about.

The weather was amazing today. I made food, and coffee on my stove (stovetop coffee is the best!) - coffee that had me on the verge of manic tears when I was walking around later enjoying the day listening to the Supremes, stopping in a used book shop and browsing forever before purchasing three titles I am really excited about. Before that I spent a couple hours sending out resume and cover letter after resume and cover letter to about fifteen different jobs, hearing myself say absurd things, that I was really excited about the most loathsome jobs and laughed a lot, and have an interview at one of those loathsome jobs I feigned excitement about on Monday.

But besides that, there are two things that I need to write for my own sanity and I have just not been finding the time to, but they are both important and fuck, time's up, have to leave this second. I love you!

So, yet again, I am without a cellphone and this made me terribly depressed not when I lost it, but afterward, when I was waiting for what seemed like hours for my train to arrive at Union Square, when I could no longer pat my pocket and feel my phone there, pat it and feel like I was, at least theoritically connected to my friends and to others in some definite way. Those ties seemed cut and the loneliness that I occasionally feel and normally am able to stifle came right up to the surface and I thought about so much, about my dad's death and about high school and social isolation, and about more recent events, and about even more recent events, this night's - thought about how I more than likely lost my phone while talking to some twenty year old boy who was only marginally interested in me, only in fact talking to me because his friend that he came with was making out with the friend that I came with. I was way too drunk off of vodka and rum, off of the drinks I drank during this open bar at Happy Valley, surrouned by really pretty scenesters and feeling pretty insecure while sober, and then while drunk, pretty judgemental.

Um, but yes, my phone is lost. And I cannot hold on to cellphones for more than three months to save my life. So again, I am unreachable, but there are so many things I want to do this week and I hope you will make the effort to still do these things with me. Also, if you happen to have an old T-mobile phone you want to throw my way, I have big wet kisses to give you in exchange, or you know, platonic love - whichever you prefer.

Fuck roommates! I seriously would kill to live by myself, and to be able to wake up hungover with a raging headache and go to make coffee and for it to be there, not as has just happened to find out that after your roommate replaced the coffee maker she broke, she uses all of your coffee in this new, nice coffee maker. Fuck! I do not want go get dressed and go get coffee. I want it to be in my kitchen right now. I want to live with someone that buys coffee and doesn't just use up all yours. Aahh!! I need a job that pays me money so I can live by myself. I would seriously live at Coney Island if I could do so by myself.

To constanly use my coffee and never buy any for their house is already pretty obnoxious, but to use the last of it is just so unthoughtful and ungracious, to not even leave me the last of my coffee to make for myself when I wake up is so dickhead. I have had it with words and actions lacking in grace.

saturday

Yesterday, I didn't do anything during the decent hours of the day, and it was awesome. I lied around various rooms of my house, chatting on my cellphone, reading a proof of this well written analysis of pro-wrestling, Slaphappy: Pride, Prejudice, and Professional Wrestling, watching episodes of Six Feet Under, and eating between these things, during these things, and just generally spending weekend days like they were meant to be spent. I cracked a beer around six, because why not?

Come eleven o'clock, I was already pretty drunk and made my way to Manhattan and met up with Ben and Gabriel and we wandered around Chinatown and Little Italy and then SoHo trying to find a bodega to get Sparks. It was drunk from straws once found as we walked to the Look. I don't want to say that the Look was awful because they did, as seems to be standard for this party, play "Meeting in the Ladies Room," but aside from that, it wasn't terribly fun. The bar was a weird set up and no one was really dancing. Gabriel and I were. And there was this giant Long Island/Jersey contingent sort of ruining any fun vibe with their aggressive hetero vibes they were sending out from their half of the room. At some point, one of the hets came up and danced mockingly around us. I continued to dance and then after this boy finished his little dance, his friend came up and shouted at us, "Now, are you going to calm down?" I don't like writing in capital letters, but this was said in capital letters, so aggressive, this dude telling, yelling at us to CALM DOWN because we were dancing and he was not, because two spastic boys dancing together is obviously a threat to the natural order.

And that's all it takes, one thing that you do not like, one thing so venomous to you in a room full of people, to feel like you do not want to be in that room. And so we left not soon enough in search of gayer pastures, ending up at the Cock after some more Sparks consumed through straws while walking. We ended up bypassing the ten dollar cover somehow and I felt at such ease once in that bar, pressed against a sea of male, of gay bodies. Felt safe and unguarded, unashamed about the full extent of my desires. I drank a couple drinks, smoked too many cigarettes and stared at this naked go-go boy so hypnotized. Four o'clock came and everyone was kicked out, lingering on the sidewalk in front, last chance to hook up with someone, and Gabriel, because he is awesome, started asking everyone where the afterparty was. Asked this to a bunch of shrugs, until a group of three friends told us it was at their apartment, and so we walked there and I drank a beer in their living room and played show me yours, I'll show you mine and the cock we saw was large and pretty and it was shortly after this, that everyone started heading to the bed and that's when in this game of chicken, of trying to pretend that I am more sexually liberated than I am, that I said chicken and swerved out of the way of the oncoming car.

I said good-bye and quickly left, made that long walk to the J, and only a block or two away from that apartment, I was already regretting my impulse to flight, that surely, spontaneous orgies with mildly attractive people are not that common, at least in my life, and that I perhaps had missed an opportunity that might not present itself again. It was a long walk to the train and those long solitary walks so often become searching questions one on top of the other, this brilliant, often melodramatic monologue. One night only. In town for only one night. Only chance to see it. And I wish there was a way of somehow recording the curves and progressions of those trains of thought. I can tell you where it was that this reverie, at least momentarily, ended. It was after walking down Avenue A and crossing over Houston Street right by that park there. A homeless man that I walked past called out to me, "Foxy Thing!" And it was the nicest thing anyone had said to me all night and even knowing that this drunken comment was probably yelled at every shape walking past, made me so happy still.

WTF?

I was very confused, looking around the kitchen for the coffee pot that goes in my coffee maker. Quinn, Adele's houseguest, saw me looking around the kitchen and surely, must have known what I was looking for. She went into the bathroom. The pot was nowhere to be found. I call in to the bathroom. Um, Quinn, have you see the coffee pot? Oh yeah, apparently, it fell or something.

Uh. I don't know what that means and am grade A unhappy that I am unable to make my daily pot of coffee. Granted, I had been meaning to buy a new coffee maker, but I want to know how it fell. I am assuming someone is responsible for its fall, and I am hoping that said person buys me a new one. I have kind of had it with Quinn. I am pretty sure she is the person that made me sick. She was up at 8:15 this morning making a decent bit of noise out here in the living room, banging away at the computer, and coughing violently and loudly, obviously knowing she was waking up everyone. And I did not appreciate her curt explanation about the coffee pot. This is one houseguest that needs to leave. She is leaving on Monday and then no longer will I be woken up to her coughing.

Metropolitan Life

I am drinking coffee because I didn't yesterday, because I told myself that I was going to treat my body right, coddle it until this sickness was out of my system. And the thing is, it is the smallest amount of sickness, just a sore throat, but something that I feared would snowball into something larger, more painful, and I thought I could nip it in the bud, kill it with cold medicince and lots of warm liquids other than coffee. I woke up this morning and still have the slightest tickling sensation in the back of my throat. And Quinn, this morning was hacking up a lung in our kitchen, and I forgot that she was sick and realized that she was probably the person who gave me this little bug that I have now.

So yes, coffee. Yes, to work. And yes, to probably drinking tonight with people whom I love.

I finished that Fran Lebowitz book, Metropolitan Life, last night and I don't like her much at all. Her humor is so insular, all these New York is the only place on Earth jokes, and her humor is so dependent upon one liners. There is also lots of dated humor that just seems offensive now, cracks about lavender gays and cracks about women's liberation, I guess written when there were people that still earnestly used that phrase. But these jokes are too easy. I think I rolled my eyes more than I laughed reading this book. I like stuff a little more nuanced that can build and sustain itself for more than two pages. Most of the pieces in this collection are between two and five pages. The longest one is only nine pages and that one is mainly just a list of things. She is witty, for sure, but I have no clue why she is held in such high regard by so many people. Surely, because those people holding her in high regard are confirmed that their insularness, their smug belief that New York is the only place that matters, that this is the case, comforting them that this is so, and that they are not the provinical twits they really are.

Coming home last night after spending way too long waiting for the J train since the L train was not running, I had my headphones on and was listening to the Cranberries, Everyone is Else is Doing It..., my new favorite album of this past month, my new favorite album meaning the one from high school years that I have rediscovered and listened to all mopey and sentimental and thought about the differences into time and the lack of differences, how little has changed. And it was lightly drizzling during this walk under the train tracks along Broadway, and I stepped out from under them to be more in the fall of the drizzle. It suited the music better.

And I thought about boys. An update: There is nothing to update. I am a loser. So nothing new, really. I called Eric a few days ago, left a message, and have not heard from him. The Missed Connection boy is not aggressive enough and I am tired of emailing him back and forth and it not going anywhere, so I am not emailing him anymore.

Getting home after thinking about these thoughts, thinking about boys and loneliness and life, I saw I had a new Friendster message from Quentin and then I felt like a jerk, for thinking that boys don't like me, which is not the case, that it is just the boys I like that don't like me. There is normally always some nice boy that for whatever reason I am not attracted to, and I was braced to read another flirty email from Quentin, him telling me he liked me or something. No. This time, a request to do porn with him:

charlie
was wondering if you would like to take porn pics
with me...my friend is a great photographer...she
needs models and i thought of you...checkout her
stuff...www.brendastaudenmaier.com.great back to me
qui

And this message just creeped me out, made me lonelier still. I wrote him back with a curt "not interested," took some Nyquil and passed out until about two this afternoon. It was amazing deep sleep.

Oh yeah, I saw Match Point last night. It was amazing. And now I have seen every Allen movie. I am tempted to go see Munich tonight since I called in sick to work and I don't feel like going to Beauty Bar. I have a friend date on Saturday afternoon to see The New World. We are going to meet in front of the Opera House. He was the one that said it was very Woody Allen. I love it when you have a friend crush, where you think a person is so awesome, so genuine and want to be closer to them, not in a sexual way (maybe that's there) - but really, just wanting to be someone's friend really bad. I think the best example I can think of is Megan Cooney. I had a friend crush on her for a long time, for some reason really wanted to be friends with her, found something really rad about her. And there is something really delicate when you hang out with these friend crushes, like you try to be your best self and it is awesome.

The Da Vinci Code; The Adventures of Pete and Pete, Season 1

The problem is that books, more so than most other forms of popular entertainment, are often thought of as art, that literature should do something for us, enrich you in some vague way. I thought about this today because I was reading something that is dismissed by lots of people, that was dismissed by me for the last two years, but which I finally read today, The Da Vinci Code. And so I wondered what it was then that I was reading, if not art? Simply entertainment? And where is the line that demarcates one from the other, and how often is that line drawn by some form of class anxiety, of needing to distinguish yourself from common tastes? And so when you read something, like this book, a page turner, you are slightly embarrassed by it, that there are so many levels of pretension associated with reading, and to read something like this, to read this book that is a best seller, you, or at least I, and lots of my friends have unease about it, about our own tastes. So far this entire paragraph is evidence of that. There is always the need to somehow distance yourself from that mass of people for whatever reasons we feel superior to, the general reading public, and make it clear that you are aware of what it means to read this book, somehow trivilize it, read it self-consciously.

I doubt I would have taken this book on the subway to read, despite how much I enjoyed it and how much I seriously could not put it down. I would have been too aware of being one of those people reading Dan Brown. There is nothing artful about the language of this book. There is often not anything artful about the language of lots of popular fiction. There was not one passage that I wanted to star and for that reason, I brush these books aside normally, but man, there is something at the very least, skilled, about being able to write something that has you racing to the end of the book, that can get its hooks on you. And maybe that is not what art is supposed to do, that art should somehow make you slow down, reflect, and take things slower, but fuck, this book had me from the first ten pages. I started it yesterday afternoon, put it down for five or so hours to watch the first season of Pete and Pete with Ethan and then picked it up again, not putting it down until I finished it this morning.

I really enjoyed it a lot, the book, and I wish I wasn't so hesitant about admitting that, wish I did not have to preface it with all of that. It's a lot more interesting than I thought it would be, and I understand why so many people read it, are reading it. And so maybe some of the art history and Vatican history isn't totally right - I wouldn't know, but so I have heard - but it is a fun read. And maybe that's what I want, to have fun and listen to pop music and dance close to other human bodies.

I have really been incredibly horny ever since New Year's Eve and really wish there was a boy in my life to ease this loneliness. Work ended up getting canceled today; however, the regular contacted me and so I am about to go see him and get a blowjob and that could ease some of this horniness, but also could have the opposite effect of being the taste of the meal I can't afford, will make me long for the rest of the entree, the never entirely clear set of emotions that accompany sex with a person you like.

Also, I have been thinking a lot about this one episode of Pete and Pete, "A Hard Day's Pete," and it was amazing, that episode, it said so much about memory and pleasure and art, that we can remember these moments we spend with rock and roll, but we can only hold on to them for so long, that slowly the song fades from our mind and we have to search the radio airwaves hoping and praying to come across it again, and if desperate enough, will try to recreate that song, will start a band to keep that song alive, to keep it playing. There was something so beautiful about the theme of this episode, a beauty that is still with me on this day after, the memories, and how long till they fade as little Pete also wondered, and what to do with this beauty, this inspiration we have come across, that has entered our lives?

I had a great New Year's last night. I love all of you, I really do, and I was so excited this morning waking up, saying twenty oh six, because that's the proper way to say it, not two thousand six, but twenty oh six, and I felt such glee despite my pounding headache from drinking so much last night, a glee about a new start of some sorts that got me out of bed reasonably early and into the arms of a hot, hot shower.

Let's do amazing things this year and love each other like these are our last days here on Earth. That's my resolution in a nutshell, to love unguardedly. I am not going to smoke cigarettes. I am going to say no more often to bullshit, to vapidness, and to the desire to be cool. I am going to say yes to other things, lots of things. I am going to listen to really good music and am going to try to smoke pot more often. I have a list of day trips I want to take in this year, and I am going to do it. I am going to be more graceful, grateful and more righteous, will not tolearate elitism, racism, or classism, will try not to take part in things that I think contribute to these.

There's an article in the Times this morning about NY1 with a picture and mention of Bobby Cuza, that dashing reporter who captured my heart during the transit strike. The one other thing I logged on here to mention was that last night I downloaded Sinead O'Connor's new album, Throw Down Your Arms, and it is fucking amazing. It is what I listened to writing this, thinking about changes I need to enact in my life. It is so good, this album, and people that say otherwise are not people. Basically. It is an album of covers of all these beautiful reggae songs and it is what I listened to last night before going out, preparing for this year, this oh six, and if oh six has an influence so far, it would be this album, these twelve songs.

Ugh. So drunk and yucky feeling. I made out with 6 people, four short of the ten I for some reason was aiming for. Charlie and Christopher both told me no though and made my night somewhat sad even though I did make out with some cute boys, just these two saying no that I wanted so bad. Um, and one boy's number, an Eric, who I might call tomorrow. So, decent New Year's - far better than last year's. First song heard of twenty oh six: Madonna's "Hung Up." That is a good omen in case you didn't know I am kind of obsessed with that song. I didn't get dick and am home by myself watching Goonies and so am mildly sad, because there were so many people there, but getting someone to come home with me seemed so difficult. This movie is awesome.