Author Archives: Joel Derfner

Today I went to a dance class that started (as, apparently, it starts every week) with a quote read aloud by the teacher and then posted on the wall. This week’s was: “Failure is only postponed success as long as courage coaches ambition.”

This means I am not failing to find a boyfriend.

I am simply postponing success.

The problem is that I don’t know if courage is coaching ambition and, if it is, what happens if it stops? Does failure, instead of being postponed success, become just plain failure?

Or does postponed success become actual success?

The class was way too hard for me and made me feel like a complete loser but the only way I will get the answer is if I go back next week.

My acupuncturist has put me on a liver-cleansing diet for a week. One might be led to wonder, since I don’t drink, why my liver needs to be cleansed, but she insists that it will do me a world of good, and since following her advice has so far cured me of my allergies to any number of unpleasant substances (including apples and cats but not, alas, Antonin Scalia), I have chosen to place myself completely in her hands.

The problem is that the main feature of the liver-cleansing diet seems to be that one isn’t permitted to eat anything that resembles food. No wheat, no sugar, no dairy. No eggs, no beef, no pork, no corn. Bizarrely, no peanuts and no oranges (though other nuts and citrus fruits seem to be okay).

So this is what I have had to eat today: puffed rice cereal with almond milk, carrots with hummus, celery with cashew butter, some dried apricots, and a piece of grilled chicken.

Understand that I usually have Coke and M&Ms for breakfast.

I feel as if I’ve died and gone to hell.

When I was four, I came home from playing with my across-the-street neighbor Meb and went looking for my father.

“Daddy,” I said, “what’s a nigger-loving kike?”

As soon as he recovered from his apoplectic fit, he asked, “Why?”

“Meb says that her daddy says that you are one.”

And people ask me why I’m never going back to South Carolina.

I was going to write a long and amusing post about the gay slumber party I had for my birthday last night, which involved watching teen movies, eating pounds of junk food, giving each other mud-mask and peel-off facials, telling fortunes, and talking about boys, but this picture of me from the mud-mask facial portion of the evening says it all:

If that isn’t enough to make men fall in love with me, I don’t know what is.

In less than twelve hours I will enter my fourth decade upon this sphere.

I can’t even think of anything witty to say.

Wish me luck.

Okay, next time I agree to go on a date with a Republican, will somebody please SHOOT ME?

I would have done it myself this evening, only I didn’t have a gun. As it was, I was within seconds of stabbing myself in the jugular with my fork or attempting to choke on my chicken biryani just to put myself out of my misery.

And, for the record, the correct pronunciation is ELL-ee vee-ZELL, though wee-ZELL is also acceptable.

I am translating an article about ecologically healthy farming from German for a friend of mine who works for a textbook publishing company. Now, I first learned German from singing a lot of Schubert and Bach; I studied subsequently at college and in Berlin, but my German (and, for that matter, my French and my Italian) has always been at its best with texts about broken-hearted lovers and the comfort the tender soul receives after death. So you can imagine my dismay when confronted with things like this:

The cattle’s position as consumer of field grasses and producer of fertilizer is the basis for a far-reaching, closed nutrient cycle.

The reason I am blogging about this, however, is that the article mentions, I swear to God, an annual Organic Potato Day.

It’s on July 16.

My new goal in life is to make Organic Potato Day a national holiday.

The only question is figuring out how to market it in our consumer culture. I mean, it’s not a holiday if they can’t sell things, right? I suppose Whitman’s could make little chocolate potatoes, but how would they make it clear that they’re chocolate organic potatoes and not just chocolate regular potatoes? Chocolate is a magical substance that can work all manner of wonders, but depicting the absence of carcinogenic pesticides might be beyond even its considerable powers.

Perhaps the answer to the marketing issue is to create a mascot, like the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus. Of course Mr. Potato Head is the first thing that occurs to me, but that seems far too obvious. Maybe he should be a negative mascot, like Mr. Yuk or the evil genius in the dishwashing powder commercial in the late 70s (his moniker escapes me at the moment) who left glasses streaky until a savvy housewife used Cascade to flush him down the dishwasher drain. For Organic Potato Day we can have the DDT Monster and his evil but bumbling sidekick, the Potato Aphid. Starting weeks before Organic Potato Day, stores can sell organic-potato-growing kits. The kits themselves can vary in ornateness and therefore in price—sterling silver pots for rich kids, clay ones for middle class kids, and ugly plastic ones for poor kids. When the day arrives, children can put the potatoes they’ve grown in all the windows of their houses as talismans to prevent the DDT Monster and the Potato Aphid from getting in and destroying the potato crops and giving everybody cancer and birth defects. Then, in the morning, assuming the potato crops have made it through the night and nobody has gotten cancer or birth defects, families can celebrate by frying up the potatoes into yummy organic latkes.

Clearly I am onto something here.

Last night I ended up speaking on the phone with two of the three interesting-seeming guys from gayjews.net. One of them, it turns out, is actually the most boring person on the face of the earth; just in case this isn’t bad enough, however, he’s also a bankruptcy lawyer FOR THE CREDITORS. He spends fifty hours a week hounding lower middle class people who have been taken advantage of by evil credit card companies.

So I have a date with him on Saturday.

I am looking forward to this with all the anticipation one might feel for, oh, say, liposuction performed without anaesthetic, but since we had already said we’d meet, I didn’t know how to get out of it once I found out what he did for a living.

The other is even worse. I spent half an hour on the phone with him and he actually sounds incredibly sexy, so of course he is going on Thursday to his FIRST MEETING OF THE LOG CABIN GAY REPUBLICANS CLUB.

Plus he mispronounced Elie Wiesel’s last name.

Jesus Christ, I sure know how to pick ’em, don’t I?

So three interesting-seeming guys have responded to my ad at gayjews.net. I called them all yesterday, left messages, and then instantly lost all desire to meet any of them—or, for that matter, anybody else, ever again.

I am utterly baffled by this paradigm shift.

Perhaps my subconscious, having watched me make a total mess of my search for love, is taking over and following the lead of the eponymous Carmen in Bizet’s opera:

L’oiseau que tu croyais surprendre
Battit de l’aile et s’envola.
L’amour est loin, tu peux l’attendre;
Tu ne l’attends plus, il est là!
Tout autour de toi, vite, vite,
Il vient, s’en va, puis il revient.
Tu crois le tenir, il t’évite;
Tu crois l’éviter, il te tient.

The bird you thought to take by surprise
Beat his wings and flew away.
Love is far away, you can wait for him;
You stop waiting, and he’s there!
All around you, quickly, quickly,
He comes, he goes, he comes back.
You think you have him, he escapes you;
You think you’ve escaped him, he has you.

I can only hope my subconscious knows enough to diverge from Carmen’s path before my lover stabs me to death at a bull fight.

I have been trying in vain to figure out how to mark my upcoming 30th birthday, which is now in less than a week. Last night at dinner, my friends B.N. and D.R. and I had a brilliant idea.

I’m having a slumber party.

We will sit around, eat pounds and pounds of junk food, watch teen movies, give each other facials, tell each other’s fortunes, and talk about boys.

I can’t wait.

A few loose ends:

1. Add Jim JM J. Bullock to the syllabus for Gay 101.

2. If anybody can help me figure out how to get the sitemeter counter down below the “visitors” tag rather than up where it is now, I would be most appreciative.

3. Nominations are open for the Bloggy Awards. For those of you who don’t know, these are the blog versions of the Oscars/Tonys/Emmys/etc. I have hesitated to write anything about them, because of course my intense desire to win one—over the smoking corpses of my competition if need be—has been warring fiercely with my intense fear of not winning one, which would mean of course that nobody loves me and I will be alone forever. But desire won out over fear, so if you like my blog, go and nominate me before 10:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Sunday, January 12. (You can nominate more than one blog per category, so you won’t be slighting anybody else.)

I believe I am eligible for the following categories:

best lgbt weblog
best american weblog
most humorous weblog
best-kept-secret weblog (though I don’t know what the criteria are for this one)
best new weblog
weblog of the year

I will tell you frankly that I am angling for “best new weblog.”

That way, if I don’t win that one, I can spend all year wondering how I wasn’t good enough for you.