Author Archives: Joel Derfner

So at cheerleading practice tonight the captains gave out the first ever spirit stick. They’ve decided that each month they’ll give a spirit stick to the squad member who’s worked the hardest, shown the most enthusiasm, been the most positive, etc., etc. I got very excited when they started talking about this, because it was obvious to me that I was going to get it. I’ve been working my ass off (by the end of last week’s practice I was doing standing back handsprings), and I’m so enthusiastic my friends are starting to worry about me. The coach even sent me an e-mail telling me how much he appreciated my hard work and what a valuable addition I was to the squad and he hoped I’d stay for a long time. So when the captains started describing (without naming names, of course) my dedication, my positive influence on my teammates, my general willingness to give 110%, I made sure not to look them in the eye and force them to betray ahead of time that I was going to get the spirit stick. They wound up their speech of appreciation and indicated that we should all do a drumroll, which we did. I shifted my weight to step forward and accept my award, the corners of my mouth creeping up in an anticipatory smile I couldn’t keep off my face. “And the spirit stick for February goes to . . . G.G.”

G.G.?

G.G. no more deserves the spirit stick than William Rehnquist does. God damn G.G. to hell. I hope he drops it and is cursed forever and goes to Hades.

And I’m going to start plotting now to make damn sure I win it next month.

He likes me!

I feel like a junior high school girl.

He likes me! He likes me!

I wish there were a way on the computer to dot the “i”s in “likes” with hearts.

Tonight I went on a date with vocabulary boy, whose name is L.

I like him.

I was so nervous the whole evening, in fact, that I barely said a word, and when I did manage to talk it was in strings of such absolute incoherence as to rival a Pentecostal speaking in tongues. I kept starting stories and stopping them midway upon realizing that the punch lines made me look stupid or judgmental or prissy or weird; this gave my conversation the grace and ease of, oh, say, the Hunchback of Notre Dame attempting to do the time step. I listened in horror as I uttered foolishness after foolishness, and when I was finally able to stop myself, it was only to lapse again into a practically Benedictine silence.

But he did pretty much exactly the same things, so maybe he likes me too.

I have eaten two pounds of chocolate chip cookie dough today and am incapable of forming grammatical English sentences, much less blogging. Besides, it’s far more important that everyone go here (via Useless! Worthless! Insipid!) to see and hear quite possibly the most extraordinary thing ever to appear on the web. (Warning: it’s not entirely work-safe.)

I have tried for about fifteen minutes to come up with something witty to say about this, but honestly I think it defies commentary. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio. . . .

Last night I got the following e-mail from the Republican I went on a date with last week:

“Am frankly surprised I have not heard back from you after an email, a phone call, and an enjoyable dinner. You seemed to have indicated or I seemed to have believed you had a nice time meeting and wanted to meet up again for something healthy and fun. Should I take this to mean you are happier ‘doing the slut thing,’ as you refer to it?

“For someone who professes to be such a unique individual, you exhibit the ultimate clichéd gay boy response. I certainly hope your musicals are more original than your response, or lack thereof.”

I’m actually in awe of how cruel and bitchy he felt the need to be. Let’s ignore for the moment that I was doing exactly what Miss Manners says to do in this situation. What did he want me to say?

“Thanks for your e-mail and call. I’m writing to let you know that I was actually just pretending to have a nice time and that in fact I found your person almost as repulsive as your politics and would sooner be forced to live the rest of my life in a Family Circus comic strip than spend another evening with you. 🙂 Have a nice day!”

I mean, come on.

Though it would almost have been worth sending that response to him simply to use the smiley face emoticon in that way.

The one small mercy in last night’s Hurry Date event was that I got a blue nametag rather than a red one, which meant that I was sitting down the entire evening and people with red nametags were rotating in front of me every three minutes.

The problem is that three minutes, while possibly enough time to be able to tell that you don’t like someone, is by no means enough time to figure out if you actually do like him. Out of the 25 men I met last night, there were about five or six with whom three minutes seemed like an eternity; I couldn’t circle “N” next to their numbers fast enough. The man who told me he’d recently left his alcoholic partner of seventeen years and said “I just love COMPANIONSHIP and SHARING” was one of these. For the remaining nineteen or twenty, I pretty much had to guess. I deliberated for a while about the guy who’d just released a CD and who, when I asked what instrument he played, said, “I play the skin flute,” but eventually I nixed him. I enthusiastically circled “Y” for the cute guy who is a publicist for All My Children but I suspect he circled “N” for me.

I was comforted to find that virtually everybody there seemed as bewildered and dazed as I was. There was only one guy who had clearly thought up a conversational tactic beforehand; this would have been effective if he hadn’t been so smarmy. “SO,” he said smoothly as he smiled and sat down in front of me. “What do you like to do outside of work?” I stuttered some stupid answer about going to the movies and eating out and he said, “I like to cook and travel. I like to blah blah blah blah blah” and kept on going and I wanted to put my eyes out with a carving fork.

Conversations generally proceeded along one of the following lines:

—where are you from and why did you move to New York? (Most popular answer: I’m from [insert midwestern state here] and I moved here because I’ve always wanted to live in New York.)

—what do you do? (Most popular answer: I’m in investment banking.)

—why did you come to Hurry Date? (Most popular answer: because online dating can’t tell you if there will be any chemistry between two people.)

When a guy who sat down in front of me was a slow starter, I generally said one of two things: either “I’m SO BEHIND!,” frazzledly indicating the sheet of paper on which I had to circle “Y” or “N” for people, or “My head is SPINNING!,” shaking my head in charming and good-natured befuddlement. I said “I’m SO BEHIND!” six times, with exactly the same vocal inflection and desperate grin each time, and “My head is SPINNING!” eight or nine times. I was a little worried that somebody I’d just said it to might hear me and realize that, rather than the original product of my charming psyche, this was just a line, but the place was loud enough that I figured I was probably safe. At one point the guy who sat down in front of me pointed out that the seat next to me was empty. I was so taken aback by this departure from what had become the standard script that I said the first thing that came into my head, which was, “He was too cute, so I killed him. Eliminating the competition, you know.” I should have stuck with “I’m SO BEHIND!”

So in a day or two I’ll get an e-mail from the Hurry Date people with the names and e-mails of my matches, but it actually doesn’t matter anymore, because I’m in love with the guy from gayjews.net who just sent me an e-mail in which he used a word I didn’t know. This has never happened to me before. I’m already picking out suburbs to live in and names for our two dogs.

N.B.: I posted twice yesterday, in an attempt to make up for accidentally not posting on Sunday. I get so confused. . . .

Tonight is the Hurry Date event I signed up for. I don’t want to go. I don’t ever want to meet anybody ever again, much less 25 men, which is what the organizers claim will happen. I want to stay in my room and never come out and eat nothing but chocolate and get monstrously fat and then die.

Which means it must be Tuesday.

But I’ve already paid for the event, so I’ll suffer through it somehow. At the very least it should yield some good blog material.

Is it possible for me to be on a search for love and have lost all desire to find it?

N.B.: This is today’s second post.

This year I decided that, since new year’s resolutions offer far too many opportunities for failure and self-loathing and punishment, I would make new month’s resolutions. I have been remarkably successful at keeping January’s, which is “I will not leave dirty clothes on the floor.” Today I came up with February’s, which will be “I will not leave little pieces of paper in my pockets.” My intention and hope is that the effect will be cumulative, leading me to become, by the end of the year, a reasonably tidy person. I’m pleased, because both the plan and the resolutions themselves are specific and manageable.

But my friend L.N.’s new year’s resolutions are masterpieces of inspiration.

Two years ago, her resolution was “I can open anything.”

Last year, it was “Between any two options, pick the one more likely to make me pregnant.”

This year, it is “No thinking.”

Unfortunately, she is already failing miserably at this year’s, and last year’s wasn’t a great success either, but still, I bow down before her.

Note: This is the entry I thought I posted yesterday. Somehow I failed to do so. Perhaps it’s the Alzheimer’s setting in. Consider this today’s first post, to be followed later in the day by a second. Because God forbid anybody should miss a single word I write. I mean, what if Colin Farrell is reading this and today’s second post is the one that would make him realize he is my soul mate but he didn’t know to read it because he didn’t know there was going to be a second post and we would never be together?

—

On Tuesday I am going to a Hurry Date event. This means that over the course of an evening I will have 25 three-minute dates. Apparently a whistle blows to tell you when your three-minute date is over and it’s time to move on to the next one.

The more I think about it, the more absolutely ideal this whole setup seems for real dating. Because although three minutes isn’t enough for you to find out if you like somebody, it’s often more than enough for you to find out if you don’t like him. For example, if he says any of the following things:

“It’s not that I disagree with you. I just think you have a lot to learn, is all.”

“The Log Cabin Republicans meeting last night was really great!”

“I’m not racist. I think lots of black people are nice.”

With the hours I would have saved by having a whistle blow to end these dates then and there, I could have written Pride and Prejudice.

Or at least Emma.

A chance examination of my site statistics has revealed to me that I may be in the running for a Bloggy Award. I am thrilled at the prospect of winning a Bloggy, but the knowledge that it’s a real possibility has given me the worst case of performance anxiety I’ve ever had, even worse than when I played the part of Litter in the second grade Arbor Day pageant and at the climax of the piece, when I was supposed to throw a piece of litter at the hero (a move I executed with great panache in the dress rehearsal), I missed him and threw the litter in the garbage can instead, thereby ruining my character’s credibility and the dramatic arc of the whole play.

Not that I’ve been beating myself up about it ever since or anything.

Anyway, the possibility of winning a Bloggy Award has caused me to develop a horrible case of writer’s block, which in turn makes the pressure to write well even worse, because of course people are judging me now, not that people aren’t always judging me, of course they are, aren’t they?, because I am certainly always judging everybody else, but there’s an actual AWARD at stake now and writing badly could RUIN EVERYTHING and mean the difference between living a happy, fulfilling, glamorous life and dying friendless, unprotected, and alone.

God, I wish I did drugs.