Monthly Archives: September 2005

Warning: This may be the most unamusing post I’ve ever written.

So does anybody have any experience with WeRecoverData.com? After examining my hard drive, they have just quoted me a price only slightly less astronomical than the other company I spoke with. (Apparently I suffered a level 4 crash. I don’t know what this means but evidently it’s very bad.) For the sake of convenience I’d just as soon stay in Manhattan–the home of WeRecoverData.com–but if anybody has had a bad experience with them then I’d rather send the thing to the place on the west coast I mentioned a few days ago. It’ll take roughly the same amount of time in either case.

So if anybody knows anything about WeRecoverData.com, or, you know, just wants to comfort me, feel free to comment.

My hard drive is still totally in limbo–hence the dearth of postings lately–but I had to duck into a copy shop and pay the exhorbitant computer-use fee to reveal that, after a conversation with my friend A.N., I have the best drag name ever.

It’s Ann Hedonia.

Next time you see me, I’ll be singing a concert of break-up songs in a dress made out of a burlap sack.

The good news is that there’s a very strong chance I’ll be able to recover the data, which represents everything I’ve written over the last two years.

The bad news is that, in order to do so, I have to send my hard drive to San Francisco and pay more than it would cost to get a new computer.

It’s really enough to make one want to devour a cake made of nothing but chili paste.

Blogging may be light for the next week or so, as a) I am computerless, and b) my hands will be too busy wringing themselves to shreds to deal competently with a qwerty keyboard anyway.

It would have been okay if my computer had just crashed in a horrible, horrible way, making it unclear whether I’m ever going to recover any of my data, none of which was backed up.

It would have been okay if my computer had just crashed in a horrible, horrible way and I’d spent the last four days in a Chicago suburb where people said things like, “oh, it’s just two blocks that way” and I started walking and three miles later I still hadn’t gotten there.

But to suffer these things all while staying in a motel where there was no gay porn on the pay-per-view–well, really, it was more than I could bear.

Tomorrow I am attending a Mexican-themed dinner party to which I have been assigned to bring dessert. Unfortunately, I have no Mexican cookbooks, so I was forced to turn to other sources of inspiration. After scouring the internet for appropriate recipes earlier in the week, I settled on Boca Negra Chocolate Chipotle Cakes with Sweet Tomatillo Sauce and Vanilla Custard Sauce. This would involve toasting dried chiles, halving vanilla beans, blending tomatillos, cutting up unrefined brown sugar–a substance I have never encountered before–and generally making a big fuss in the kitchen, which is something I love to do above all things. Well, above most things, anyway.

And so by 9:00 tonight, having acquired none of the requisite ingredients and realizing that I have no free time at all during the day tomorrow, I accepted that there was absolutely no way it was going to happen, so I just made my regular chocolate cake recipe and tossed in a quarter cup of cinnamon and three tablespoons of chili paste. I was so flustered by the fact that I was making up a recipe that I forgot to put any eggs in; I rectified the omission, luckily, before it was too late.

If the batter was any indication, this cake is going to burn people’s tongues off.

Which just goes to show you I should just do what the fucking cookbook tells me to do.

If a) serial killer humor tickles your funny bone, and b) you’re not already familiar with Chopping Block (“because serial killers are people too”), go here. (Thanks to him for the link, even if he’s no longer blogging.)

When I was applying to colleges during my senior year of high school, one institution I considered was Oberlin, in Ohio; it had a terrific college and an even better conservatory. I planned a visit there during the winter. In South Carolina, the weather is warm and mild almost year round, but even then I knew enough not to expect this to be true in other parts of the country. As I packed, therefore, I thought, It’ll be cold in Ohio in January. I’ll take a sweater.

So I spent three days in Ohio in January with a cotton sweater.

The admissions office had housed me with a hockey player named Topher, who graciously loaned me a down jacket so I wouldn’t die of frostbite but whose conversation was hopelessly tedious.

I could have stuck out the bitter cold and the unscintillating conversation, but he also had an unattractive ass.

I went elsewhere for college.

Here is a conversation I had the other day with E.S.:

Faustus: Oh, my God, have you seen Celine Dion’s crying plea from Larry King Live?
E.S.: No, I haven’t.
Faustus: It was totally moving. She was so impassioned. She gave a million dollars to relief efforts and then she attacked the administration for its lack of response to Katrina and for the war in Iraq and then she sang a beautiful song. I cried.
E.S.: Now there’s a shock.
Faustus: It made me want to buy a Celine Dion CD.
E.S.: Really? What would you do with it?
Faustus: Shut up.
E.S.: Do you even know who Celine Dion is?

Sartre was wrong. Hell is not other people.

Hell is looking for an apartment with your boyfriend in New York City.

Compared to that, other people are–well, perhaps not a walk in the park, but something much closer to purgatory.

Last night was the first night of the musical theater writing class I teach at NYU. All of my clothes were in the hamper, so I had to throw together an outfit at the last minute from whatever I could find; I ended up making very felicitous choices, and I looked really good.

After class, I got to E.S.’s apartment and we had the following conversation.

E.S.: You’re totally the hot professor.
Faustus: I do look good in this outfit, don’t I?
E.S.: All the girls probably loved you. And the boys loved you even more.
Faustus: There’s one girl in the class. Everybody else is a boy.
Pause.
E.S.: I absolutely forbid you to teach this class. You have to drop it.
Faustus: It’s okay. The boys are more your type than mine anyway.
E.S.: What, no tall blond Australians?
Faustus: If there were, do you really think I’d be here right now?