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Here is an excerpt from an iChat conversation I had yesterday with this man.

FAUSTUS: I want to do something nice for E.S. to celebrate the end of the medicine part of his residency and the start of the psychiatry part. So I decided to arrange for us to go camping. But here’s my question: how do you go camping?
DAVID: I don’t know. Don’t you have to have a tent or something?
FAUSTUS: I just spoke with my brother. He doesn’t know how to go camping either, but he has a friend who does.
DAVID: I think you’re supposed to go to the Catskills.
FAUSTUS: I know you’re supposed to do things in nature.
DAVID: You didn’t say anything about nature.
FAUSTUS: That was the point. E.S. wants us to go to nature. But if I arrange it, I can ensure that any contact with actual nature is minimized. Then we never have to do it again. Whereas if he does it, he’ll want to, you know, use a compass or something.
DAVID: How would you get to nature? Isn’t it far away?
FAUSTUS: I’m looking that up now. Oh, here’s a place that has “tent camping” and a “pick your own” farm nearby.
DAVID: Pick your own takeout Chinese food?
FAUSTUS: Pick your own falafel, maybe.
DAVID: Isn’t nature cold these days?
FAUSTUS: I could wear a sweater.
DAVID: I wore a sweater today. It was stunning.
FAUSTUS: Oooh, what kind?
DAVID: A new wool cardigan with argyle. You should wear the sweater you knit yourself. I’m sure everyone else who’s camping will comment on how it flatters your coloring. It really does.
FAUSTUS: Why, thank you. Oh, here’s one near a lake. But I think E.S. wants us to be in a forest.
DAVID: What on earth would he do in a forest?
FAUSTUS: I think he would walk around and look at trees.
DAVID: Faustus, you’re being ridiculous. No one in his right mind would walk around and look at trees. And if someone REALLY needs to look at trees, he can go to the Barnes and Noble and buy a calendar with pictures on it. I think I saw one with trees once. “Tree a Day” or something.
FAUSTUS: I really think E.S. wants to go look at actual, physical trees. Perhaps he’s been lying to me this whole time. Perhaps he’s not actually a psychiatrist, but a psychiatric patient.
DAVID: That would explain an awful lot.
FAUSTUS: He might even want to touch them.
DAVID: Really! I can’t think of anything less pleasant.
FAUSTUS: I should thank my lucky stars I’m not planning this in summer. He’d probably want us to put bug spray on.
DAVID: True. But I suppose that’s better than the alternative. If a bug touched me, I don’t know what I’d do. I really don’t.

The other day, E.S. and I were watching the dreadful American version of What Not to Wear and got into an argument over what country Nick Arrojo was from. I leapt out of bed, slipping like an eel out of E.S.’s grasp, to go look it up online, at which point he made a noise of frustration somewhere between a sigh and a snort. “Why do you always have to win?” he asked.

I stared at him, agape. “How can you have known me for more than three seconds and ask me that?”

“You just always have to win, and I want to know why.”

“Do you also want to know why I have to breathe? Do you want to know why I am a carbon-based life form? Or why I have two legs?”

How can I be dating someone who doesn’t understand me at all?

Somehow the sky seems not to have fallen even though I told E.S. two nights ago that I loved him.

I just had the following Columbus-Day conversation with my very funny friend N.F.:

Faustus: Hey, N.F. Happy Subjugation of Indigenous Peoples Day!
N.F.: Thank you. I’m celebrating by keeping some poverty-stricken Dominicans locked in my closet.
Faustus: Well, I don’t want to take you away from that. They might escape while we’re on the phone.
N.F.: No chance. They’re bound and gagged.
Faustus: I think you should force them to piece shoes and garments together for pennies a day. You could install them in the nursery until your wife’s baby is born.
N.F.: Well, there’s really not a lot of room. Besides, I’m planning to sell them this afternoon.
Faustus: But you’d make more money over the long term by using them as sweatshop labor. You could keep them in line by playing on their native superstitions.
N.F.: I did catch one of them trying to steal, so I cut off his hands. I could use one of them as a hand of glory.
Faustus: You hanged him by the neck first?
N.F.: Naturally, but not until dead.
Faustus: But the hanged felon whose hand you use has to be dead.
N.F.: I think he can just be very, very sick.

Everyone who has iTunes must go immediately and watch this extraordinary video.

Everyone else must go immediately and buy a Mac, and then go watch this extraordinary video.

Edit: if you don’t have iTunes, go here to watch it. Thanks to him for the link.

It would almost be worth training to be a designer just so I could join Elite Designers Against Ikea.

Well, last night I told him I loved him more than I loved the internet.

It’s a start, at least.

(See here if you don’t know what I’m talking about.)

Somehow, something here seems not quite right:

From a conversation I had with E.S.–no, I haven’t told him yet–after a brief spat on Saturday (as I am a southern Jew, and he is a Protestant psychiatrist, clearly we have a lot of these exchanges to look forward to):

E.S.: I just want the lines of communication to be open.
Faustus: Open is fine. Open I have no problem with. Buzzing with electricity 24/7 is another story.
E.S.: But what you said hurt my feelings, and so I wanted to talk about it.

(Faustus says nothing.)

E.S.: Or I could just pretend it didn’t happen and push it down and let it come out in some other, unrelated way.
Faustus: See, that’s totally where we need to get you to.

Tonight I almost told E.S. that I loved him.

Then I didn’t.

Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant only taste of death but once.