Author Archives: Joel Derfner

Oh, dear. This is very, very bad. Not only was yesterday’s post a complete repeat of a post I already made, but it was a repeat of a post I made less than six months ago.

My friends have all gotten used to my telling the same stories over and over again, but I’m mortified to have revealed this character flaw to people with no first-hand knowledge of my virtues—such as they are—to balance the scales of judgment.

Excuse me while I go play in traffic.

In my junior year of high school, I had a birthday party and invited my whole class. I got really excited and decorated the house and baked a terrific cake and planned lots of fun things for everybody to do.

Three people came.

I would have been absolutely fine with the whole thing

On the one hand, surgery to correct my umbilical hernia would mean that I would never again have to go through two hours of agonizing pain such as I suffered last night.

On the other hand, it would mean that I’d have to stay away from the gym for six weeks, during which time lack of exercise coupled with a natural tendency to despair would slowly but surely cause me to assume the shape of a sphere, at which point I would have to retreat entirely from all human interaction.

Then, of course, once I was a sphere the patch (or whatever it actually is) would pop out, and I’d have the hernia again.

So really in the end it hardly seems worth it.

I came very close to having to spend the night tonight in the emergency room, after a narrow brush with an umbilical hernia that became more and more excruciatingly painful as the evening went on. Luckily, I was at dinner with a friend in medical school, so we went back to his apartment, where I lay down and he told me how to perform a manual reduction, after which all was well again.

I wanted him to perform it himself, but he demurred.

I am working 10-6 for the next couple of weeks, assisting a composer during rehearsals of her show

This is the first time in a very, very, very long time that I have had anything even remotely resembling a full-time job with a regular schedule (as opposed to the patchwork of part-time and freelance work with which I currently keep body and soul together), and I’m so exhausted I want to die.

I don’t know how anybody manages it.

Things I thought about while I was in London:

1. Their chocolate is much better than ours. Of course, I’ve known this for years and years, but when you’re completely surrounded by good chocolate, you can hardly be expected not to think about it.

A very clear explanation for the superiority of English (and, for that matter, continental) chocolate can be found in The Emperors of Chocolate. I haven’t read it in years, but, if memory serves, the story goes something like this: Milton Hershey was an early corporate spy in chocolate factories in Switzerland

It is I, Faustus. I have returned, only to find that I seem to have been nurturing a viper in my bosom. I’ll take the high road for the moment and deal with the pretender later, as I have a question to ask:

If you leave the country and stay with the music director of your show and his partner and they foil all your attempts to be a helpful guest by tricking you out of doing the dishes or arranging the cushions back on the sofa or any of the other things that you as a good guest would sooner lose an arm than neglect to do, and then you sleep with them, and then the next morning after a delightful breakfast, when you go to wash the dishes they don’t lift a finger to stop you, does that mean they thought you were bad in bed?

Hypothetically speaking, I mean?

Emperor David here. I have been making a list all week of things I need to accomplish. You know: usurp Faustus, install my boyfriend as liege lord over Upside-down Hippopotamus, train Goblin as elite bodyguard . . . that sort of thing. In my imperial ambition, at least, things are going rather smoothly. It is the rest of my life that is overwhelming.

Drop off laundry, pick up laundry, go to the grocery store, go to the grocery store to get everything I forgot the first time, send invoices, pay bills, vote, write six pages of this, write three pages of that. These are the things that vex me. These are the things I can never seem to get done, the things that I transfer, unaltered, from one day of my to-do list to the next. They mount and compound, and before long, I am drowning.

But instead of worrying about them (or, god forbid, doing them), I will tell you a story. Gather close to your computer monitors, my precious angels, and read a true tale of suspense and terror.

Picture it: Towson, Maryland, a couple of years ago. My ex-boyfriend, Michael, and I took a visiting friend to visit one of the country

This is David officially announcing that, in the spirit of Faustus

This is still David, since Faustus is off in fabulous London. I realize that I posted a broken link yesterday to my own blog. If you couldn