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I wrote a post this morning about how stupid it is that the news media follow George Bush, Sr.’s lead in calling the president of Iraq by his first name even though they call the leaders of every other country by their last names, and how this was confirmation—as if anybody needed it—that the media never tell us anything the government doesn’t want us to hear, but then I reread the post before publishing it and realized that it was too angry and bitter even for me. Which, as those of you who read me regularly might realize, is really saying something. This happens every time I try to talk about politics: first I get incredibly angry and bitter, and then I get depressed and eat ice cream. So, in the interest of maintaining my waifish figure, I deleted the post and went to the gym, where, for the first time, I ran into an old trick. (This was not, of course, the first time I’d run into an old trick; simply the first time I’d done so at the gym.)

I remembered his name (first and last, thank you—T.D.) and he remembered something sort of like my first name. The interesting thing about T.D. is that several months ago, after the first of our few trysts (he wasn’t that good), we realized that he was the ex-boyfriend of a guy I was casually dating at the time who insisted on calling himself my boyfriend even though he wasn’t he wasn’t he wasn’t (those of you who have been reading me for a while may remember him as E.S.). So this morning T.D. and I talked about E.S., and how I quit my job, and my cool headphones that filter out noise so that I can listen to music on the subway, and then he went to go do cardio and I went back to my weight lifting (pec flys, to be exact).

I tried to feel dirty and ashamed for a few moments, but then I glanced in the mirror and realized that the weight lifting had actually started to have an effect, and I forgot everything else in the wave of elated vanity that washed over me.

So I was in therapy, talking with my therapist about my obsessive fear that if I’m not perfect in every way then everyone will hate me. He told an illuminating story about walking with a friend in Central Park and looking up at a tree that at some point in its long life had had a chunk taken out of it or been struck by lightning or something and had therefore grown in a really interesting way.

“The point,” he said, “is that when something is imperfect or marred, it can grow with that fault into a thing of beauty. I mean, you don’t look at a tree and go, ‘Yuck!'”

And I was like, “Speak for yourself, buddy.”

At cheerleading practice on Monday I threw my first real back handspring. That is to say, I’ve thrown them before and landed them, but I’ve always managed to bounce off my head in the process. Monday, my head didn’t touch the floor.

And the moment was captured on film. Unfortunately, the digital camera was set so that the image was microscopically tiny; I’ve enlarged it very slightly, so there’s a corresponding reduction in quality, but it should still give you an idea.

This is me doing a back handspring:

Apparently, now that the coach has seen me do this, he’s going to make me do it many more times at the Gay Business Expo this weekend. If he figures out how to work his digital camera by then, I’ll post the pictures.

I hope the expert gymnasts among you will refrain from judging my form too harshly.

On July 14, 1980, my father sent the following letter to one of Charleston, South Carolina’s two daily papers.

Even though you probably get lots of criticism, there are still some of us out here who stick up for you. Whenever my friends say, “Have you seen today’s editorial? It’s the dumbest thing they’ve ever printed,” (which happens about every two days), I always read it and say, “No, it’s not the dumbest thing they’ve ever printed.”

Just thought you’d like to know.

They printed it the next day, under the headline “Faint Praise.”

In 1996, I plagiaristically sent the same letter to my college’s excuse for a newspaper. They, too, printed it the next day, but edited it so that it read, in part, “Have you seen today’s [Name of Paper] editorial? It’s the dumbest thing it’s ever printed,” thereby both ruining the joke and making me look like a stylistic barbarian.

O tempora! O mores!

Please forgive the extraordinary length of this post, which quotes, in full, the text of an article from Saturday’s New York Times. I’m reprinting the article here rather than linking to it on the Times web site because after articles have been on that site for seven days you have to pay to access them, and what if somebody discovers this blog eight days from now and wants to read the article but is so impoverished he or she can’t afford the $1.50 it takes to gain access?

And so, without further ado, “Fish Talks, Town Buzzes,” by Corey Kilgannon.

EW SQUARE, N.Y., March 13

At one point during Friday night’s dinner, the couple next to us called the waitress over.

“Why did you change the glass size on our cranberry juice refills?” asked the man in a voice dripping with accusation. “These glasses are smaller than the old ones.”

The old ones were sitting on the table. They were shaped differently, it’s true, but if they were bigger than the new ones it was by a nanoliter.

“They actually hold just as much,” said the waitress. “The other ones are water glasses. But I’ll bring you some juice in the water glasses.”

After she left, the couple continued to talk about how appalled they were that the restaurant would try to cheat them like that. The waitress brought them new glasses of cranberry juice, and, to top it all off, told them she wasn’t charging them for the juice. After the couple paid and left the table, I surreptitiously checked to see how much they had tipped her. It was a woefully insufficient amount, by any standards.

God, I hope she spit in those refills.

Last night I saw Daredevil and then didn’t have sex with my date even though he was totally hot and wanted to have sex. But he’s a cheerleader, and he is looking for a relationship, and, while I am also looking for a relationship, I am not looking for a relationship with him, and when that’s the dynamic between two people one of whom lifts the other one up in a standing position onto his shoulders and then supports him there, perhaps sex is best left out of the equation.

N.B.: Here is the entry I thought I posted yesterday. Evidently I was wrong. And now I am woefully backed up, since I have both Tuesday and Thursday to make up. I’m not quite sure how I’ll manage this, but rest assured I will remedy the situation.

Last night, while catching up on blogs I read, I got to one that I have always secretly hated with a white-hot passion because I think it’s funnier than mine.

Then I caught not one but two grammatical errors in recent posts.

This filled me with an ineffable, almost palpable joy. He may be funnier than I am, but he is guilty of both hypercorrection (he used “whomever” when he ought to have used “whoever”) and a subject-verb-mood disagreement so egregious it could only have been committed by mistake or by a madman; either way, whether he’s careless or insane, I win.

Sometimes I think I should try to stop being so insecure and petty.

Then I see somebody I’m jealous of fail in a completely insignificant way and think, no, it’s too much fun to give up.

Don’t you love it when you look at somebody you’ve known for months and all of a sudden you realize he’s totally hot?

And then he realizes you’re totally hot?

And then, because the guy you like seems to have lost interest in you, you end up arranging to have dinner and go to the movies with him this coming Friday?

This is all hypothetically speaking, of course.

But don’t you love it when that happens?

I am in agony.

Today I went to gymnastics class, where I suffered my first ever sports injury. Then I worked out. Then I went to cheerleading practice.

My body hates me.

I guess maybe I shouldn’t have taken the sentence “I’m going to get fit if it kills me” quite so literally.