Okay, I am just now catching up on this season’s episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, and I have one thing to say:

If Chris O’Donnell and Patrick Dempsey both wanted to spend their time having sex with me, I know exactly what I’d do.

E.S. would be free to join the three of us if he wanted to, but really I wouldn’t care one way or the other.

If I were a pessimist, I would insist that these images from the Times online edition (yesterday and today, respectively) indicate that our society really is beyond redemption.

However, I am an optimist, and I am choosing to believe that the two different misspellings of à la, along with the lack of italics, are the result of nothing more than gremlins in somebody’s computer somewhere, and that the print edition gets it right.

Note that I have no intention of checking the print edition to find out whether my belief is correct or not. I’m an optimist, not an idiot.

The other night, after E.S. and I had sex, I dropped my head onto the pillow and shut my eyes.

“What are you doing?” he said.

I did not open my eyes. “I’m going to sleep.”

“No,” he said. “We have to stay up and talk about our emotions.”

I really should have pushed him in front of the N train when I had the chance.

Okay, if I am not the last person on earth to have found out about “How Not to Act on J-Date,” then you must go here at once. Have the sound on; you’ll need it.

The man who has never been seen in the same room as me is participating in a reading in Soho this Friday evening along with some other LGBT writers. He will be reading a short story that he thinks is grim and pretty funny but that I suspect isn’t nearly as accomplished as he believes it is.

If you’re interested in coming, the relevant details can be found here.

I have it on good authority that he’s going to wear something tight.

Update: The reading starts at 7:00.

Every couple years or so I switch from a shoulder bag to a backpack (or vice versa). When I weary of a shoulder bag, I long for something that will distribute weight more evenly across my back. When I tire of a backpack, I yearn to carry my things in something that won’t make me feel as if I were in seventh grade.

A few months ago, I decided it was time to retire the trusty shoulder bag that had seen me through good times and bad since 2004. However, my search for a backpack to take its place in my affections proved to be more frustrating than I had expected. The bag store where I had bought my shoulder bag had closed, and every time I went into a sporting goods store I was overwhelmed by the complexity, size, and technological subtlety of the backpacks on offer. They had pockets and zippers and straps whose purpose I could not fathom, and/or they were capacious enough to hold any number of corpses I might not wish to leave in plain sight, and/or they featured heated compartments or MP3 players or built-in emergency flares. I was interested in none of these (except for the room for the corpses, but those ones really looked ridiculous on my rather small frame). I had almost given up and resigned myself to a life of back problems.

Then I walked into Staples and saw this:

I bought it at once. I am now happier than I have been since learning that Tycho Brahe died not from accidental mercury poisoning via his alchemical experiments but because he was poisoned by his protegé Johannes Kepler, the father of astronomy (among other things).

E.S. expressed his concern that the people living in the crack house two doors down might not react with unmitigated enthusiasm to a pink and silver backpack. Here I played my ace in the hole: the people in the crack house two doors down love me. They call me Jimmy, after Jimmy Olsen, Clark Kent’s enthusiastic if not overly penetrating sidekick at The Daily Planet. Whenever I walk by, they tell me to have a blessed day. They will love the pink and silver backpack too.

Now I just need to find some unicorn and rainbow stickers to put on it, preferably puffy ones.

Friday morning, E.S. and I went into Manhattan together, he to go to work and I to the gym. As we waited in the Atlantic Avenue subway station, he said something incredibly annoying–I can’t remember what, alas–and I made as if to push him onto the train track. Then we had the following conversation:

E.S.: In front of the N train? Is that really how you want me to go?
FAUSTUS: No. It’s not nearly painful enough. But it’s what’s available.
E.S.: I just don’t want my last thought to be he won’t get the insurance.
FAUSTUS: I won’t get the insurance anyway. Your sister is your beneficiary.
(Pause.)
E.S.: Never mind.
FAUSTUS: Oh, look, here comes the train.

I had a delightful lunch today with a friend who works for O, The Oprah Magazine, which has its headquarters in the Hearst building. On our way out, we saw a group of male models sitting in the reception area, apparently waiting to audition for something or be photographed in something or advertise something.

And I realized I didn’t know the collective noun for a group of models, regardless of sex.

I have been searching for the proper term since I got home, and I’ve found nothing, which seems ridiculous. I mean, come on. You’ve got a neverthriving of jugglers and a sequitur of logicians (okay, Bertrand Russell made that one up, but still) and nothing for models?

So I propose that we adopt the collective noun a vapidity of models.

All right. Now that I’ve done my intellectual heavy lifting for the day, please excuse me while I go watch last week’s Biggest Loser.