Monthly Archives: October 2002

In a disastrous attempt to complete my Hallowe’en costume (I intended to go as Buffy), I dyed my hair blond.

It is now bright orange.

Would that it were possible to decapitate oneself.

I have a new crush. He is so cute I can hardly stand it.

The problem is that I can’t blog about him effectively, because there’s a small chance he might read my blog. I gave him the URL a few weeks ago and, though he has given me no indication that he’s actually read it, he could be either a) reading it and not telling me about it or b) waiting to read it until he gets a chance to enjoy it, so I can’t write anything that will uniquely identify him, or he might read it and know it’s him, or this other person who happens to work with him in a professional capacity might read it and know it’s him, though I don’t know if that person is reading it either, but if he is then that would be an unacceptable invasion of my crush’s privacy, and furthermore since I have no way to know whether my crush is actually reading it or not (because of course I can’t do something as sensible as asking him), I would be constantly tortured by uncertainty about whether he’d read what I wrote about him or not and realized what a NEUROTIC FREAK I am.

Don’t you wish you were me? Then you could be this healthy all the time.

He is so cute I can hardly stand it.

This morning I woke up to find a chewed up piece of gum stuck in my ass hair.

Last night I had a lovely date, but no stretch of the imagination allows me to understand how this could have happened, since neither one of us took any clothes off. And, for that matter, neither one of us chewed any gum.

My ass does not chew gum, either.

Forgive me for the grossness of this post, but I am afraid of what the universe might be trying to tell me.

After I broke up with N.T.—or, more properly, after N.T. broke up with me, that fucker, not that I’m bitter—I had a stunningly obvious realization.

Every book we’ve ever read and every movie we’ve ever seen has told us that love is something you feel for someone who is the perfect best friend, the perfect roommate, the perfect lover, the perfect intellectual companion, and the perfect conversationalist.

Clearly only a raving lunatic would expect to find all these in one person. So, just as clearly, this can’t be what love is.

That was my realization about love. My question now is: so what the hell is it?

In an effort to bring clarity into my life, I renamed the hard drive of my computer. It used to be called Beelzebub, after the Father of Lies.

Now it is called Elizabeth Bennett, after the heroine of Pride and Prejudice.

Unfortunately, things are as murky as ever.

When I was six or seven, I joined the Cub Scout den run by the Jewish Community Center. I remember very little about my tenure as a Cub Scout—which, as I recall, lasted about two weeks—except that at one point we put on a play about the plight of Soviet Jewry. The play consisted of three pairs of vignettes: an American praying in synagogue, and a Russian praying in synagogue and getting carted off by the secret police; an American printing a Jewish newspaper, and a Russian printing a Jewish newspaper and getting carted off by the secret police; and an American teaching Hebrew, and a Russian teaching Hebrew and getting carted off by the secret police.

In every pair of vignettes, I played the Russian who got carted off by the secret police.

My college friend N.K. told me that he was a member of a progressive Boy Scout troop that performed a musical written by the Scouts’ parents. N.K. played the part of a Capitalist and sang a song called “When I Need a Friend, I Buy One.”

When N.K. first told me this I was wildly jealous, but then I realized that I had clearly gotten the better deal, since I was the one who was manhandled—not once but three times—by men in uniform.

On Monday, running insanely late for work, I got out of the shower and realized the worst thing had happened to me that could possibly happen to a gay man.

I was out of hair product.

It was either leave for work right then, however, or get fired, so I pretended I was in an action movie set somewhere in the jungles of Laos, where there were far more important things than hair product, like saving the lives of thousands of innocent civilians.

This pretense failed miserably, however, since deep in my heart I knew the truth: there is nothing more important than hair product.

Within two minutes of my getting to work, three people had complimented me on my hair and said I should wear it like that more often. Since I make all my decisions based on getting other people’s praise, I have not worn hair product since then.

I feel so naked and vulnerable. What’s to protect me from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune if I can’t knock down a concrete wall with my hair?

Tonight my friend N.N. came over and installed the Tivo I bought last week.

I can’t wait to become a Tivo zombie. Then I will never have to worry about anything ever again, or even leave my house.

Which sort of obviates the need for Tivo, but still.

I finally posted my Drip personal ad. (If you don’t know the back story for this one, read the original post before continuing—this will be very confusing otherwise.)

I quote my ad here, verbatim, in its entirety.

sex: m
seeking: m
age: 29 (born Jan. 12, 1973)
occupation: spy
education: yes
interests: civil rights, chocolate, the undead
neighborhood: Mr. Rogers’
favorite vacation spot: the Land of Nod
favorite time of day: Actually, I prefer parsley, sage, and rosemary.
favorite drink at Drip: Oreo milkshake
musical preference:the soundtrack to Powertool 2.
biggest turn-on: revolution and wonder. Also when a cute guy licks my ears.
biggest turn-off: avarice of spirit, poor spelling
ideal weekend plans: go to Venice, spend a carefree weekend among the canals, and return to find my enemies gone to rack and ruin
typical weekend plans: play with my dog, wish I were important enough to have enemies
looks: matter/don’t matter/shouldn’t matter but they do Oh, Mary, please.
self-description: [Refer to “about me” section on the right-hand side of the blog. There are only so many amusing things I have to say about myself.] Also, I am [height suppressed], [weight suppressed], [hair color suppressed], and a bottom.
looking for:

So that’s done, graven in photocopied and laminated paper, as it were.

With my luck, the guy I was after with this will find some unpardonable solecism in my Middle Egyptian and be totally turned off.

Either that or he will have fallen madly in love since placing his ad and moved with his partner to Saskatchewan.

One night when I was in Prague I mustered up the courage to go to a gay bar, something I am terrified to do in the United States, much less in Eastern Europe. But I was so plagued by my non-functioning gaydar that I felt I needed to go to a place the sexuality of whose denizens was not in question.

I selected the most innocuous-sounding establishment I could find, which was a video bar called “Friends.” As it was early in the evening, there was only a handful of people there, some of them quite attractive. I realized with delight that two of the most attractive guys in the place were openly staring at me, eyes brimming with admiration and excitement. The possibilities were countless: which one of them was interested in me? Or were they both interested in me and preparing to fight over me? Or was a threesome worthy of a Bel Ami video in the offing? Clearly I had made the right decision in coming here. My existential loneliness would be quieted for the evening, my doubts about my suitability as a human being assuaged, and I would find brief but joyous companionship in an affirmation of the universal brotherhood of man.

Then I realized that they were staring at Madonna singing “Holiday” on the TV screen above my head.

I gulped down a hot chocolate and fled.