If you said "Cry!" to me right now, I could easily do so on command. My tear ducts are bursting at the seams and I cried so much today and once you've already burst the pipes, they are just a little more fragile, more ready to burst again. Walking to the video store for the second time today because I just had to watch the last disc of Six Feet Under tonight, I could feel all the snot in the back of my throat and got weepy a couple times on the walk. Before this walk, I was not just weepy, but bawling during Episode 10 of Season 5. I occasionally might get weepy during a movie or show but even that is really rare. I cannot think of a time that I have ever during a tv show had snot dripping and tears soaking my face and making that stupid face that people make when they are sobbing because they don't know how to talk. The last time and the only other time in the past several years that I have cried like this was at my uncle Robert's funeral in November. It was the same sort of crying and probably provoked by many of the same issues that the tear fest was about.

And now I am done with this show and fuck, when it is hitting the right notes, this show is perfect. When I saw the first couple episodes of the first season, I was floored at how good this show was, and at the questions about life it managed to bring up and integrate into a good tv show. Those first few episodes may be my favorite television over. Those episodes are just so fucking good! The intial shock of its brilliance wore off, but not the brilliance of the show. It still asked important things and talked about death. I just had become accustomed to its doing so. So fucking good! Sorry, I think I am about to go to bed. I woke up at eight and am totally emotionally exhausted from watching this show end.

I really do not know what this problem means, this problem among many that are easy to identify, but it's this combination of foot shooting, of impulsive behavior, and social anxiety, and yet, I always have a good reason each time I do not go to an interview or do not show up for work. This is a problem that stretches back for years when it comes to jobs. One time I went the trouble of getting a job with UPS, only to never show up for the first day. There have been so many instances like this, it definitely points to me that I might have some sort of problem.

Today, I woke up early, was so energized and walked to my interview to work in a coffee packaging factory really close to my house, and I don't know what the hell I was thinking. I think I had some comical Lucy in the chocolate factory images in my head that warped me to the fact that factory work is pretty physical labor. And as I was approaching the place, this guy, this really meaty guy driving a forklift glared at me as he drove past me on the sidewalk. That sort of scared me and made me realize how unmanly I am and then I could see through the open warehouse doors how the few guys working there were that, were guys, big meaty guys who I was sure would laugh at me and hate me. And they were lifting and stacking really heavy looking bags, and I realized that sitting through the interview would be pointless because this was not something I wanted to do and I so just kept walking and headed right back home.

But this was not a totally fruitless morning expedition, because it's spring and spring cleaning time for some, and on the street, I found a couple of old paintings that look like a student painted them from Hollywood glamour photos. One of them, the girl in the swimsuit looks really familiar, and I think it might be painted from a Norma Jean photograph. I am not sure, it looks so familiar though. And so, my living room has some new stuff on the walls, which is good. I really want to paint my living room a more sedate color, like a light olive or a creamy brown, you know, get rid of the whole Mexican chain restaurant color scheme my living room has going on right now. But that will have to wait until I am not struggling to pay my rent. In the meantime, these new paintings. The trees painting which I have grown really tired of looking at has been moved to the kitchen where it pairs excellently with the Madeline felt board that was already there. Look:







Aside from the can of paint, I obviously need a new camera that is capable of taking non shitty pictures. But the only fun purchases I am allowing myself until rent is paid are contacts today and the David Mitchell book which was not at the Strand yesterday but which I should hopefully get a copy of real soon. Contacts again! David Mitchell! Sunshine! Six Feet Under! Running into friends before ten in the morning! Sunshine! Good trash finds! Spring!

Good day! Here are two links that entertained me on this sunny, sunny morning which I want to go be part of after I finish this coffee.

Remember when Michael Jackson kissed Lisa-Marie at the VMA's and you said Ew, because it looked so weird and you knew Michael was a homo, well here is something on par for your eyes this morning. Ryan Seacreast, a 'mo if ever there was one kissing Terri Hatcher. Ew.

Pitchfork wrote a review of a recent Clap Your Hands Say Yeah concert, and used the forum to talk about elitism and backlashes, and it is a really smart review that I encourage you to read. Here is a gem from that review to entice you: "It wasn't actually the music he hated, but aging out of the scene, his scene, now dominated by stylish teenagers more concerned with communal experience than elite authenticity."

Six Feet Under is amazing and I can't believe I only have eight or so episodes left until I am done with the show.

Also, amazing, The Supremes, which I am guessing you hopefully already knew.

hey hey charlie, sorry to be out of touch. sadly, i think i will not be becoming your neighbor. my brother is still out of town, and then i'm going out of town in a week, and the timing is just off for figuring out a move, sublettors for our places, etc. i wish this was happening in like 2 months becuase i really liked the place & nabe. thanks so much for helping out though, and it was fun to get to chat the other day. and good luck finding someone good to join you all.

are you going to the homo hip-hop hop on saturday? maybe i will see you there...

best
c

And so, the love of my life will not be becoming my neighbor, we will not fall in love passing each other in the stairwell everyday, and we will not live happily ever after. This is what his email to me means, and I know I am insane for thinking so, but what the fuck ever, I was really looking forward to him living in my building. Realistically, this might be for the best since I am kind of obsessed with him and would probably annoy him sooner or later, or would lose my mind seeing my crush all the time. It's spring and I woke up a couple times last night to catch myself playing with my dick and it's spring.

Fuck, Firefox just closed down as I was ending what I had just wrote and no, I am not in the mood to write again, and that is because I in a good mood, too good a mood to sit at the computer. I want to watch the final season of Six Feet Under which just came out on DVD today and which I am about to watch. In short, I want to thank those of you who gave me advice regarding that job in the Berkshires. I decided against it and wrote the guy telling him so.

I did a lot today, applied to lots of jobs and temp agencies. Bought household items, including new shower curtains to replace the grimey, soap scummy, moldy ones which we had had for way too long. I went and saw the guy on 96th Street. As I was getting off the subway, some guy came up behind me, grabbed my attention and asked me out on a date. I said no, I had a boyfriend because I wasn't attracted to him and he was a bit older than me. But what I had written (damn you, crappy computer) was furthering the analogy between myself and Saraghina that I had made a few days ago, about how good this made me feel, about how it's the first time a stranger on the street has ever asked me out, and then talked about how this surprised me because lately I have been feeling pretty unattractive, and then talked a bit about acne (which maybe is good that my computer crapped out and spared you that) and body image.

Trip to bank, where female teller was sort of hitting on me, and which might have just been because I might have had The Glow Bonnie and I have been talking about. The Glow = when someone likes you (or when you're getting laid), that is the time other people approach you and hit on you also because you project some more sexually confident, more happy glow. Then I got a call from Fuse and am supposed to strip during a music video next week and get paid 200 for this easy ten minute work that involves dancing, getting naked, and blurred bits. I am very excited about this. And then oh yeah, I bought a chain necklace with a dollar sign hanging from it out of the fifty cent gumball machine at Associated and I cannot wait to wear it.

All right, Roommate Drama has been resolved for the most part. When Jillian came home from work, Adele yelled "House Meeting" and the three of us sat in the living room and had a much more honest, civil conversation, and Jillian isn't moving out, but plans on moving out when the lease is up. I told her she could leave whenever because I plan on staying for another lease, and she said that she was going to talk to Josh and try to convince him to move in. And we talked about what annoys everyone, mainly me talking about how everyone annoys me, how this or that doesn't get done, and everyone agreed to do more. We made a bathroom cleaning list, with a different person cleaning it each week. Since right now, it gets cleaned about once every six months by me, this is major progress. I felt so much better after this talk and Jillian said she did also. So everything is again tranquil at 424 Grand, and rent may get cheaper, but who knows, who really cares at this point because there are songs that I love, I have a little playlist of fifteen songs that I listen to all day long and they all make me so happy, insanely happy. And after this chat, when I was cooking myself dinner, I was dancing and singing along to these songs even though my roommates were all home and normally I have a little more self control around them, but I was in such a good mood.

And I just rewatched Muriel's Wedding and that movie makes me feel so good. I love love love that movie. The playlist that makes me happy the way Abba makes Muriel feel:

"Oh, I" - Funkadelic
"Black Sweat" - Prince
"Best of My Love" - The Emotions
"Hung Up" - Madonna
"Got to Give it Up" - Marvin Gaye
"Gold Lion" - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
"Living for the City" - Stevie Wonder
"Hurts so Good" - John Mellencamp
"Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" - James Brown
"Old Time Rock n' Roll" - Bob Seger
"Temptation" - New Order
"Heartbeats" - The Knife
"Silent Shout" - The Knife
"Jack and Diane" - John Mellencamp
"Juicy" - B.I.G.

And fuck, Muriel, Mariel, Muriel - I get you so much right now. Why are all of my favorite movies about people who are crippled with a sense of ennui, of purposelessness, and then through good music, love, and friends find their way to happiness? Seriously, that is the plot of all my favorite movies. The Graduate, Swingers, Muriel's Wedding, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off (well, Cameron in that movie's storyline meets this). They are a good kick in the pants, a sign that yes, you may think you're life is the pits, but so did these people. Things change. Make them. Fuck, I am ready to dance and have got nowhere to go. Oh yeah, I've got headphones, am gonna put them on, blast these tunes into my ear, shut my door, and dance around my room.

Today is fucking beautiful and if you don't think so, you are an idiot! Um, why am I about to drink another cup of coffee today? So much time spent just walking in this lovely weather, taking in the sights of buildings and other people on the street, of used books, none of which were the ones I wanted, the books, I mean - of course, there were some, several people I wanted out there - but all these books and not the one I want, the ones I want to read. I saw someone about my age, young and hot in the East Village, and he was weird, told me I had to be quick and felt like something furtive, like something in the bathroom of Circuit City rather than someone's apartment. The encounter lasted less than ten minutes before he rushed me out of his apartment.

And I just talked with this guy on the phone about a job that I actually am considering taking. 60 percent thinking no, 40 percent thinking yes. It would be working at this retreat in the Berkshires for at least the next three months. I would be a potwasher, and room and board are provided and I get paid 65 a day, which is nothing, but if I am not spending any money at all, and I don't see where I would, it's awesome. I'd get to live in the Berkshires! But also sharing a bedroom with two other people, not so awesome! Washing pots not so awesome! But woods, and quiet, and not being here, all awesome sounding right now! I don't know what to do and I have to decide soon because training is April 7, so I need to tell him within a couple days, and uh uh uh, any thoughts (besides, of course, laying off the coffee)?

Drama. I don't like drama and don't even like the word but I really think it is the most apt word to describe what is going in my house right now. So as you may recall, earlier this week, I shit talked with my roommate, Adele, about Josh and Jillian, about how Josh needs to start paying rent since he is here all the time, about how they never do dishes, never take out the trash, never buy toilet paper, never clean the bathroom. Etc. Later in the day, there was a Round 2 of this talk when I sat on the couch and talked to Ethan about how awful they are and I hate them and wish they would move out, all histrionic ranting, which you are allowed to do with friends when frustrated with roommates. You should do this though when your roommates can't hear you. This rule I know and usually follow and thought I was following, but Josh apparently didn't go to work that day and was right on the other side of the living room all day unbeknownst to me or Adele. It was way embarrassing when he emerged from the bedroom.

But, he seemed polite enough and I apologized and told him that he is here all the time and that he should move in and pay rent. This situation has been going on for two years. They aren't a new couple or anything. And he is no joke here 29 out of 30 days in the month. He said he would need a couple days to think about it, but said he thought it made sense. This was on Tuesday. Since that date, he has taken pains to avoid interacting with me or Adele, racing from the living room door to Jillian's bedroom, and quickly closing it behind him. Patience wearing out for him to tell me his decision, I asked him what he was going to do when he finally emerged from his bedroom this morning with Jillian and started theri sprint toward the bathroom. I stopped them much to their dismay and asked Josh if he was going to move in. He said, "No, I don't think so."

My reply: "Oh, so you're just going to continue to live here and not pay rent?"

At which point, Jillian jumped in and said she didn't understand where all this fucking animosity was coming from, that it had never been a problem before, and that it is fucking bullshit that I sit in the living room and say I hate them. It got heated way fast, and blah blah blah all boring details, my argument, the sensible one, that two people are living in a room more than twice as big as Adele's and paying the same amount of rent. And on and on, tit, tat, tit. Jillian said something about how she doesn't need this fucking bullshit, that she was planning on moving out in four months anway, which was news to me. She then continued that she might just move out now if it's such a problem that her boyfriend stays over, saying she would move into Josh's. Who knows if that is really going to happen? I sort of hope so since it is going to be a tense four months otherwise, and it would be easy as all hell to find someone else to move into this apartment for super cheap, and that both Adele and I would then have much bigger rooms, and really, she's an idiot for turning down our very reasonable offer that her boyfriend move in here and that they each pay 300 a month to live in a gigantic room. Yeah, good luck finding another place that will let your boyfriend live there and not pay rent and clean up your dishes and deal with your rude antisocial behavior of not saying a word when you come in the house, and good luck finding a place for even close to the price you paid here. Fucking idiot. Sorry, I had to vent. I was shaking after my argument with her earlier today and had to leave the house for a while to yell into my phone and quit shaking. So, I might be looking for a roommate soon, which is awesome news.

8 1/2

It was the third or the fourth time that I attempted this movie last night. The first time, most likely in 1999, and I don't think I made it that far into the movie before falling asleep. There was at least one more attempt, maybe two in the following years to watch this movie so well regarded by the type of people that cream their pants when they can start throwing around the term meta.

It's a gorgeously shot movie and really I think that every time I tried watching it, I was just tired to begin with, but it's really puzzling to met that I find this movie so hard to stay awake in since I am not the type of person that drifts off during movies. It's a really rare occurrence when it happens, and that it has happened a few times with this movie makes me think this this movie has some secret soporific powers. Even last night, at only eleven o'clock, I found myself starting to drift into that sleepy state and had to sit up straight on the couch, reposition myself. It took several sofa repositionings, but I did manage to stay awake long enough to see the end credits finally roll on this movie.

And there were parts of this movie that I really did love, the scenes with Saraghina, I found totally enthralling. There are some characters from old films that come across as apparitions, their screen time is brief but they totally own the scenes they are in. Saraghina was the most beautiful woman in the whole movie. It seemed almost John Waters/Divine like when she danced for the little boys on the beach. And their relationship is amazing to me and made me think about my own relationship with older men, how I am Saraghina in that situation. With her, you can see in her eyes how happy she is to be considered this beautiful woman, to be desired, even if it is by a pack of schoolchildren, and how happy and human she looks when dancing. That scene is amazing!

And of course, there is that amazingly sad and absurd harem scene. When the showgirl is told to move to the upper floors because she is too old to live on the ground floor and resists, tries to start a coup, asking for just one more year, there is something terribly sad about that that gets at everything depressing about this life. Her voice, her cries sting me, it's such a sad voice this aging showgirl cries out when she pleads that her ass is firmer than any of the other girls, and one of the girls says to her:

"Hey girl! Just look at your rulebook: Whoever passes the age limit shall be removed to the upper floors, where she shall be treated equally well, but shall live basking in her memories."

Which, of course, is what this movie is all about, about being stuck with memories of past moments in our life and never being able to recapture them, or only being able to do so, as Guido tries, through the process of art making. The rest of the movie aside from these two scenes because of the choppy nature of it all was something I had a hard time settling into, becoming invested in, and thus the constant need to rearrange how I was sitting to prevent myself from falling asleep. The last five minutes of this movie, however, totally brought it all together and made this for me, a really great movie, everything after the gun is fired, the bit of dialogue that occurs then about trying to make an honest film. It amazes me how much of a film or a novel's power rests upon the ending, that it can be amazing until then and have a weak ending, which will then throw your previous high evaluation of the rest of the movie into doubt. Andrea Diminio talked about this, referring to this as "privileging the ending," and with this movie, I totally came to love it just because of the ending. So take heed, artists, make sure your endings are awesome, that that can make a great movie out of something that you otherwise would not have labeled as such.

I am still reading Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet and it is brilliant. It's wordy and has question upon question about human beings in every paragraph, it is staggeringly intelligent and makes most writing seem like total muck. It makes me a bit uncomfortable for some of what it is saying about race, but apparently in the current printing of the book (I have an old used copy), there is a forward by Stanley Crouch that examines this aspect of the book, putting it within the context of Black-Jewish relations, so after I finish this, I am going to have to go to B and N and sit there and read that forward. I don't even know how to talk about this book because I like it so much, it had me laughing so hard out loud an hour or so ago. Books occasionally make me chuckle politely, but never, or rarely, laugh out loud for such a sustained time. The humor comes from this generational conflict between this older Jewish man who escaped the Holocaust and who has a seriousness about him and his having to navigate his way around the New York of the 70's in which he lives where everyone seems criminally hell-bent or totally wacky. This passage struck a chord with me so much this morning, it isn't the one that made me almost cry from laughing, but it the one where I said, "Oh my god," as I am wont to do when I come across a phrase I think particularly choice. The phrase being, "Desires incapable of useful fulfillment," because that phrase is just so perfect and hits at everything tragic and amazing about life, and of course, made me think of my desires for boys, and how this phrase is such an apt description of those crushes.

"And partly he was right, for humankind kept doing the same stunts over and over. The old comical-tearful stuff. Emotional relationships. Desires incapable of useful fulfillment. Over and over, trying to vent and empty the breast of certain cries, of certain fervencies. What positive balance was possible? Was this passional struggle altogether useless? It was the energy bank also of noble purposes. Barking, hissing, ape-chatter, and spitting. But there were times when Love seemed life's great architect. Weren't there? Even stupidity might at times be hammered out as a golden background for great actions...." And on and on with the questions never fully answered, their being asked themselves a sort of answer to the mindlessness Sammler believes surrounds him.

Two living writers whom I would not hesitate to list as some of my favorite writers, whom also write intelligent books that ask lots of nice questions are both putting out books in the coming months that I am really excited about. David Mitchell's Black Swan Green comes out April 11. And my favorite writer, Philip Roth, is releasing Everyman on May 5. Consider my calender marked.

Craig was just in my living room for a little over an hour waiting for Greg to get here to show Jamie's aparment. In my living room. An hour. I love him. He is so beautiful, such a pleasure to look at, and we talked about artists and writers and how both us were bored silly at the Biennial. I really hope he becomes my neighbor. I mean, I really wish he was my bedmate, but neighbor will do also. I want him in my life all the time.

Any large, shuttered building always inspires daydreams in me of what the place used to be, of the life that might have hummed inside the thing, and also daydreams of restoring the place, of if I had a couple million dollars lying around, how I would rehabilitate the place, what I would convert it into. And more often that not, the dream is always the same, converting it into an old time, grimy roller rink that played bubblegum pop. I don't know why I have this dream. I imagine that the day to day running of a roller rink would probably become really tiring really fast, dealing with bratty tweens and hearing the same pop songs over and over. But maybe I could just own it and have someone else run it and skate there. These are the paths my thoughts wander down when I am walking past abandoned buildings, when I walk past one especially, the old building on the corner of Broadway and Marcy, only a few blocks from my house and which I walk by just about every time I ride the JMZ.

Today, doing some research, I have found out quite a lot about this building which has a really interesting history and which has shed light on histories of my neighborhood I was unaware of. The building is the Commodore Theater, and even though now it looks like it has been abandoned for many years, it apparently was an operating movie theater right up until 2002.



If you read the thread in that link, there have been lots of failed efforts by movie buffs to reopen the theater or to get it declared a landmark, so that the current owners can't demolish it or gut it anymore than some believe they already have. Scenes from Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway were shot inside the theater. The theater is the last one remaining of the many that apparently used to run up and down Broadway (not the B'way of Manhattan, but the one that runs through South Williamsburg). Even though I would imagine the roar of the elevated JMZ tracks running down Broadway would make it a bad place for theaters, there used to be quite a few movie houses and vaudeville stages on this street now dotted with nothing but fried food shops, check cashing places, and 99 cent stores.

The Commodore is a really beautiful building and one that even though I have passed it countless times, it has always sparked my imagination each time I've seen it, wondering why such a gorgeous space has remained shuttered for so long. I have a thing for old movie houses.

This lead to reading about multiplexes making their way to Williamsburg, which surely will happen soon enough when the waterfront is developed and a new 40,000 residents call this place home, making catching a train at the already overcrowded Bedford stop a nightmare. There are all these changes that are thrilling to observe and then to read how this neighborhood has been constantly shifting from one thing to another; the story of this movie house puts the current changes on some continuum at least, rather than a massive blip.

Rumor has it that Loews was set to build a multiplex on the vacant lot at the bottom of McCarren Park on N. 12th and Bedford, another prime piece of land that has been vacant for a really long time. What used to occupy that lot, however, was a paint factory which left a toxic imprint on that land, thus its disuse and its being fenced off. The clean-up is going to have a big bill and there is a fight about who should be responsible for the paying of this large bill. Isn't that really nice to know that the land right next to the park where people sit for hours on the grass breathing in the air is a toxic dump? Lovely! This, of course, though - the toxic land - the heated speculation of various message boards, so take it with a grain of salt.

In other interesting news, "qi" is apparently now an acceptable word in Scrabble. So is "zzz" and lots of other nonwords. And "za" means pizza? In what world? I know if I play these words with people that aren't Scrabble zealots, they would totally think I was out of mind and trying to cheat. There is also debate on message boards about "qi" and "za" and whether their introductions makes it too easy to play those letters, and that their value should no longer be at ten points. Message boards are awesome is today's lesson.

So earlier this afternoon, I not only sent out a cover letter with a typo, misspelling the word museum, but sent it out twice! I typed it really fast in Word, which underlines typos in red, and yet despite this, this glaring red line at me, I still failed to catch this until I was rereading what I sent. Then I shook myself, said "Charlie, get professional. Do this right. Quit fucking up. Slow down. Wake up. And PROOFREAD!"

Two minutes ago, I just mailed out another cover letter and not until I hit send did I realize I misspelled agency, again not seeing that red line, not proofreading, and this for an entry level job at a literary agency. What the fuck? How am I not seeing this red line staring at me? Well, those are two jobs that I am pretty sure I am not hearing back from. The only two jobs I would have been excited about to actually work it. The rest are all boring, boring data entry jobs. One is working for the cirus, but it doesn't pay anything, doesn't start for a month, and is on Randall's Island. But yet, I still applied. Because as you may witness from this big errors, that I don't put too much effort into changing around a cover letter, copying it into an email and hitting send, and so why not take the ten seconds it would take to apply for a low paying circus job?

I need to clear my head. Perhaps I shouldn't be applying for jobs after I have had a couple beers. Maybe I should wait until tomorrow after I wake up, shower, and drink coffee, lots of it. Maybe.

flashback, or yet more about craig

Rereading old diary entries now from when I first moved to New York, I found myself really missing those days, and really missing working at the Strand. I occasionally daydream and wonder if I would ever be able to work there again, what it would be like, but I don't even think they'd rehire me so the daydream normally ends quickly.

The reason I was going back through old entries was because I was curious to see what I wrote about Craig back when I first met him, and I found the first two entries that mention him, and here they are:

8/5/2003

8/12/2003

And in that entry of the twelfth, I tell about how I failed with Craig and then met this other crush on the subway, Christopher. That is amazing to me that both of these really sustained crushes both made their appearance at the same time.

I need a job like I don't know what, so that I will
-stop spending time online like this
-have money to pay rent
-interact with people other than my roommates who I am beginning to hate
-live
-live
-not die

cleaned my room today, did laundry, listened to music as I sorted through papers and CDs and photos and tried to make my room look somewhat presentable to this imaginary person I imagined was going to come and inspect my room. For the first time ever, I have a picture of my family, a picture of anyone on my dresser. My mom gave me this photo a couple months ago from my sister's graduation in the spring of the three of us together and someone, some relative, at some point gave me a picture frame which I had never used. So I put the two together, and the product is now on my dresser and it makes me feel further from my family and also closer in some way. I feel a little more normal, more comfortable, that bedrooms should have this feel and it's about time that I stop living like I am just crashing here for a while with clothes, books and papers all scattered together on the floor. It's still not perfect, but my room to me feels a lot homier right now with this bookcase I put in there today and with this picture and because I just did laundry, all my clothes folded and not on the floor.

When I am a little less desperately broke, I am going to buy a closet rod and also curtains and will make my bedroom seem even more like one. And then, after that, or probably something that should even be done before that is putting some foam up on my glass door, to block out the light from the living room and muffle some of the sound going back and forth, so that I can masturbate a little more comfortably, and also sleep more so, not hear every step taken in the living room anymore.

Jaymay is moving out and I am really sad about that, but in really good news, Craig, the long, long, long time love of my life emailed me and said that he might be interested in the apartment downstairs. I would lose my mind were I able to live right above Craig and see him probably something closely to daily, as opposed to my seeing him every three or four months, which is now the case. Emails from him sort of make me swoon. I have been in an incredibly good mood lately, and I don't want to have sex with boys but I do want to have crushes on them and talk to them really excitedly. That's the part I want.

I wonder if Jillian and Josh hate me. I watched Casino last night, and it is amazing, so good, such a pleasure to watch. The only thing that bothered me about it was the busy soundtrack. There was some familiar pop or rock or disco song played about every fifteen seconds it seemed like, sort of like Forrest Gump and Boogie Nights and it's so easy, it seems to build a mood and invoke pleasure in the audience by playing all these hits, that it seems almost cheap, too easy, and the practice is beginning to annoy me, but other than that, this movie is really good and Sharon Stone gives an amazing performance. Tonight, another C movie, Capote.

I lied. I want everything. All of it. I love looking at old pictures and letters and cards and some of those - the greeting cards - I threw away today. I filed the program from my dad's funeral, my tax returns, and other things. Keeping some things, letting others go, making things neat, orderly and feeling good about those choices, really good. And my room's all clean and that imaginary person I was cleaning it for might have been a real person, an imaginary boy who would be in my bed and not think my room was totally disgusting, maybe.

Can we say "Embarrassing"? I am redfaced. So all day long, Adele and I talked in the living room about Josh and Jillian, how he's always here, how they never do their dishes, the good old fashioned bitching one is prone to do about an absent roommate. Then later in the day, I talked to Ethan on the phone on the couch really lately about how I sort of hate them, and want Josh to pay rent, or even better if they would just move out of the aparment into Jamie's apartment. God, the schemes I hatched on the phone for them with Ethan.

Then five minutes later, sitting on the couch, stuffing my face with chips and salsa, watching Oprah, their bedroom door opens and Josh comes out, because apparently his temp assignment is over and he was in there all day while I bitched about him really loudly in the living room to anyone that would listen. And he was really friendly and apologized and said that we should talk now so I wouldn't have to worry about this confrontation I was fearing. I felt like such an asshole, but he said that he had been thinking about moving in and that he is here all the time, and so he probably will move in, and man, oh man, I am a dickhead. Whatevs. Problem solved.

Next problem: Jaymay is moving out by the end of this month, there will be a big empty two bedroom apartment underneath me. The rent is 1500. It could concievably be configured to a three bedroom, since there are two big living rooms. I want people I know to live in the building. No more psychotic drug addicted Irish men beating down my door, offering me liquid cocaine. Please, move in!

News:

I am still getting Cinemax. And even though I am getting a "premium" station for free, I still cannot find the pleasure in this without looking at the negatives, asking myself and my tv, "Why couldn't it be HBO or even Showtime that I get for free? Cinemax?"

I went to Trader Joe's today and while they do sell the fun, cheap things I was expecting, I think this might have been my last trip there for a while, at least until the liquor store opens and I can experience the cheap wine. Yesterday, according to Gawker, there was a line down the block of people waiting to get in. Today, no line to get in, but an insane line at the checkout that snaked around the aisles of the store and took me about twenty minutes to move through.

I still need a job.

Adele and I plan on confronting Jillian and Josh tonight, telling them that Josh has to pay rent if he is going to be every night. Call me an asshole, but I think they are. It's been going on for two years, him here every night. Supposedly, he has another apartment that he pays rent at. I don't fucking care anymore. I am tired of seeing him here all the time. Either they need to spend some time over there, or he needs to start helping with the rent. This is not going to be a fun conversation. I am already nervous about it.

I have a headache, partly induced by this, by my lack of job, by this insanely difficult new payroll program that the Princeton Review is instituting and which I am supposed to log in by five today if I ever want to get paid again, but which I don't know my login to, and which no one else seems to either and five o clock is approaching quickly and Adele is watching Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey on that stupid Cinemax, and that too is adding to the headache.

By the way, Mr. Sammler's Planet is amazing and I will tell you about it soon. This book is exciting me more than anything I have read in a long, long time. I love that feeling of an amazing book, where I scream, as I did yesterday, Shut the Fuck Up! because I cannot believe this writing is so good. But that'll have to wait til this headache cloud passes.

knee deep at the npl

For whatever reasons, I get Cinemax today, maybe one of those free trial weekends, maybe a huge error on the part of Time Warner. Whatever the reason, Jake Gyllenhaal is now on my tv screen in the movie of his I refused to rent, The Day After Tomorrow. Surely, this is a sign, an omen that this love is a true love. Even though this movie is free, I still cannot even stomach to watch it, it just being too loud, too blockbuster. I have the sound turned down and the twee sounds of Camera Obscura playing and this movie is so much better this way. Jake Gyllenhaal looks even more pretty running about, trying to save the world from nuclear winter to the question sung really nicely: How I can be falling in love with you?

i thought that if you had an acoustic guitar, it meant that you were a protest singer

I woke up at nine today, incredibly happy and despite the slight hangover I was feeling, incredibly energetic. It is a sunny day and that is part of it and when I was taking a shower, belting out The Smiths "Panic" loudly and singing the same lines over and over again because I didn't know the other lyrics despite my thinking I did, during this shower, I laughed and asked myself, why, how could I have this much energy since I didn't leave Metropolitan until around two and didn't go to bed until three something because I was eating ice cream and reading and daydreaming about a boy, and even then in the shower despite knowing why I was up so late last night, I still wasn't able to tell myself why I was so giddy on this morning after.

After my shower, hair still wet, I walked to the bank in this sunny morning down Grand Street and that's when I got it, understood why I was so excited. I was listening to "Panic" on my headphones then, feeling like I did know all the lyrics so long as I had the song playing along for me to sing to and I was so happy and memories of a past happiness, of past happinesses came back, the associations for this current happiness and it all was sort of tied to last night and the last nights of years ago.

The night, St. Patrick's Day, started out with Ethan in my living room, watching Frisk, drinking cheap beer, and then I got a call from the 96th Street regular and so went to see him, brought Ethan along since this regular takes about ten minutes and I had Ethan wait outside so we could go to bars afterward. And being on the Upper West Side, we went to 8 of Clubs, which was a major letdown. It was a gay bar in a small town, a small thing on an industrial strip, something tragic and desperate about the atmosphere. There were very few people under forty there. The music was so bad, the type of music gay people in small towns think gay people listen to. It reminded me - everything about gay life is reminding me of this lately - of this recurring sketch on Little Britain with this small town homo, sadly proclaiming that he is "the only gay in the village," and yet despite his supposed isolation from gay life, possessing all the cliches of gay dress and attitude. And gayness fascinates me so much, how this identity emerges, this listening to cheesy "gay" music, from whence do these things spring? And how and why what constitutes "gay" is so different in places outside of New York, or even apparently in the Upper West Side?

But yes, getting far sidetracked from the discussion of the happiness I felt this morning and where it came from and what it evoked, but one more thing about this part of the evening: The Smiths were listened to very, very loudly before heading uptown and this happiness carried me through most of the evening, the echo of Morrissey's voice saying, "I am going to meet the one I love."

After the debacle that was 8 of Clubs, we headed back to Brooklyn, headed to Metropolitan, which was crowded with lots of homos, all so different from what was witnessed at 8 of Clubs, all so different from "the gay" on Little Britain, and Ethan went to pee as soon as we got there and so I was left not yet having found people to talk to, standing amongst all the cute homos engaged in conversation, waiting not so patiently for Ethan to emerge when I saw the boy who I cannot shake despite it being 2006 and multiple resolutions to quite obsessing over people, especially people who are not interested in me, and have made that perhaps too explicitly clear (read meanly) on many an occasion. I saw Matt. And I wasn't ready to talk to him, and so I ran and hid in the back, went to the bathroom also. And really, it didn't matter. I should have said hi then, because obviously I was going to at some point and perhaps then I could have gotten it out my system, this desire to talk to him, but I was trying to suppress this desire, trying to be 2006, but then of course, I was at a bar, and so got incrementally more drunk as the evening wore on and despite being engaged in conversations with several people, could not think of much but him. I was positioned a few people away from him somehow, for some reason, and stared at him as much as I could get away with. He was in boat shoes, and was this where this obsession with boat shoes came from? Is my obsession with boat shoes and boys in them a transposed, a redirected, confused love of Matt? Very probably.

And when I finally did say hello to him as he was passing me by, he stopped, touched my shoulder and said hi with a smile. He is one of those people that is really friendly and makes casual body contact to put other people at ease, and I love that, and it was the briefest exchange of hellos and I was giddy afterward. My body was emanating a glow circling out from the spot on my shoulder where he touched me. Most people make me really uncomfortable if they touch me in any way, and I tell myself that that means something that I do not get uncomfortable if he touches me, but get totally comfortable, totally happy. I tell myself lots of things. Example A: This, what you are reading.

And so, to try to bring this back to the original point is that this is what I remembered this morning, that even that hello and brief contact was enough to make me giddy, so giddy that I could not even stay asleep this morning. I realized this because I was making a walk early in the morning that I used to make when leaving his house in the morning a few years ago, that I could never sleep past eight or so with him, would be too giddy to sleep in, and would wake up as the sun was still beginning to shine and walk home down Grand Street positively thrilled with life and that, because I am one fucked up individual, is where I was this morning. I began to realize this when I put on my boat shoes this morning. I thought of him and I am totally out of my mind. You will have to forgive me.

It is so sunny outside still and I need to go the bank yet again and so will put on these boat shoes and walk in this sunshine back down Grand Street, perhaps even again listening to the Smiths, and daydream about boys and their shoes and I drank so much coffee between then, that earlier walk, and the one I am about to embark on, and so I am going to be an even more emotional, nostalgic mess.

I would love to go back to the old house.

Oh, Morrissey, not today, please.

As Bonnie was very correct in predicting, I did not go to the interview I had this morning for a dreadful job. It was to work for a medical answering service in Long Island City, and really, I would rather fret about not having money than having to work in a less than ideal location doing a less than ideal job. To be honest, though, much of the reason was because I didn't want to get out of bed when my alarm went off.

Instead, I drank coffee and listened and am still listening to Sing it Again, Rod, an amazing album that my mom used to play a lot before she started playing Rod's new albums in which he sings the American Standards. Seriously, every time I have been home recently she has played those albums and I find them slightly dreadful. But man, listening to this good music with my windows open even though it is rather chilly out and having the sun shine brightly through my living room window, through my kitchen window, the sun soaking my apartment, meeting somewhere near me layed out on the couch, this music, the coffee, the Arts section of the paper.

When I finally did wake up this morning, not too terribly late, at nine, but too late to shower and make it to this interview, I felt my hair, how frizzy, dry, and haylike it was. I was really discouraged. Even though I know what type of hair I have and what happens if I let it grow beyond a certain length, that is just forms into a big ball of frizz, not even a decent 'fro. And for some reason, I always think that I will be able to grow my hair out. I see other people with thick curly hair that they have managed to grow out and think that I can make my hair like that. It takes too much effort to even make my hair somewhat like that, lots of conditioner, Frizz-ease, and yet still by the time I wake up, there is a bird's nest on top of my head. So after I ate breakfast and with music blaring in the background, shirt removed, standing in shorts, I let my chopped off hair fall all over my shoulders and it felt so good. This might be why I grow my hair out, or try to, just so I can experience days like today, that free feeling of seeing a couple inches of curls, a thick pile of them no longer on your head, feeling so much lighter, so much better, new, clean.

And yes, my haircut is no good, and not even a hip bad haircut way, it's just no good, but I don't give a shit cause I feel good. Damn good. This music, this sunshine, this haircut.

I watched Goodfellas last night, and holy motherfucking shit, that is one good movie. Everything about it. The opening credits, the editing, the constant freeze frames, the acting, the soundtrack - so fucking good - Joe Pesci! Man, I think I might have to watch it again before I return it this afternoon. I am in awe of Scorsese right now for orchestrating all of this and making it not only work, but fucking soar. I love when human beings make amazing things and make it look easy. That Steadicam shot of the couple entering the Copacabana is crazy that that was pulled off so perfectly. Seeing other humans do things like this makes you realize how lazy you are and that greatness is possible, that we, as humans, are capable of a lot more than we sometimes imagine. It's a really good feeling. I don't know. I have to watch this again right now.

I hate how roommates can totally play out an album and make you hate, hate, hate that band, singer, album. The only record Adele plays is Sufjan Stevens' Greetings From Michigan, and man, my neck totally tensed up as soon as I came in the house ten minutes ago to hear this. I really fucking hate his voice, and really fucking hate this album.

It's sort of the effect that Tori Amos used to have on me in college, when everyone was all about playing her. It made me really violent and mad and made me want to storm out of rooms it was playing in. That is what Sufjan does to me, even despite Pitchfork's high regard for him.

The sunset was amazing tonight. I've got a video I am really exciting to watch. I spent the day reading and that is all. Lovely!

stop me if you've heard this one before

All right, I know that I am in the habit of making frequent resolutions, quite often the same ones over and over again. I know there are people that think pretty lowly of the whole practice of making resolutions, but I find them helpful, even if it is true that more often than not, I tend not to hold to them for very long, if at all. But, it's the season of Lent and I was raised Catholic, so this stuff comes naturally to me.

I just wrote a miserable sounding email to a friend and as I was finishing it, even while I was writing it, I could hear how awful I sounded, how pathetic, how whiny, how much like someone I would not want to listen to. And the reason for this is because I am a little annoyed with myself right now for wasting this day in such an unmagnificent fashion, for wasting so many of my days in such a fashion. If someone I didn't know asked me what I did today, I would have to make some lies or say the vague: "nothing much." If someone I was friends asked me such a question, say you, I would confess that I wasted my day looking at porn for hours and masturbating the day away. Some Roseanne, some local news was watched. A History of Violence was rewatched. Junk food was ate. Lots of coffee was drank.

If I know that I have the house to myself, my tendencies toward masturbation will always win out over any other possible options for how to occupy my time. I did not apply for one job today. I did not even look at job listings. I really must exercise some more self-control in this matter so that 1.) I will get a job and not be broke, and 2.) So I won't be depressed that I wasted my day. And so we move on to the resolutions mentioned at the beginning of this.

Resolution #1: No more masturbating during the daytime. Do this only when going to bed or waking up in the morning. Keep my time in bed all together in one chunk.

Resolution #2: No more television during the daytime, not even the morning news while you are eating breakfast. No.

That's it for resolutions for now, the hope is that those two will lead to other changes, that by not doing those things I will be productive during the daytime and apply for jobs and maybe write and definitely read and maybe even go on walks, find a form of physical activity other than masturbation, and the hope, the constant hope is that I will be a happier human being and that I will be able to write you livelier emails and that I will have things to talk about on the phone to my mom, will be able to say that I did something with my day, something other than "nothing much."

___________________

PS - People, friends in Austin, Jaymay is playing a show for SXSW this Friday. You should go see her. She's a really good performer and sings really lovely songs that will make you sad, but more so, happy.

And whether or not you live in Austin, you should know that she just put out an EP, Sea Green, See Blue, which is really good and which you can listen to tracks from on her website or MySpace page.

I know that this isn't a funny story, but this lede had me in stitches, as did the second and third paragraph:

The sleeping pill Ambien seems to unlock a primitive desire to eat in some patients, according to emerging medical case studies that describe how the drug's users sometimes sleepwalk into their kitchens, claw through their refrigerators like animals and consume calories ranging into the thousands.

___________________________

In news concerning me, the Princeton Review ran out of work yesterday and so I am out of work for a couple weeks again and need to find a new job ASAP. That is the bad or the good news. Right now, bad. If I find another amazing job tomorrow because of this, that would be good news. But that's a big if. Unambigious good news is that I am going to have a very short story published this fall in Userlands, an anthology being printed by Dennis Cooper's series with Akashic Books, Little House on the Bowery. The real exciting thing is that the collection is being edited by him. This is exciting because Cooper is someone who I think is a very principled artist and because of that, someone whom I admire immensely. Here is a picture of the cover.

The weather is amazing again. I am going to drink some coffee, put on some deodorant since for some reason I can smell my body odor even though I just got out of the shower, and then I guess, you know, listen to the Rolling Stones really loudly and during the songs I don't love, try to focus just a little and apply to some jobs.

Raging Bull is amazing. Except for that epigram at the end. But other than that, amazing. That On The Waterfront reference is amazing. Joe Pesci is amazing when he goes totally batshit psycho. I sort of love how Pesci can get so violent for someone so small and shock you. I cannot believe that De Niro put on that much weight throughout the movie - he is amazing. Some of the shots! My god! Amazing! I am sorry. I have had two beers and am kind of tired and normally am capable of saying things other than "amazing." Maybe I'll try again tomorrow.

more links

Mar. 12th, 2006 at 6:06 PM
Today, I listened to The Bubble Puppy's A Gathering of Promises, and enjoyed it a lot, another great old band that I had never heard of that Jordan has exposed to me to. Googling to read their biography, I found a video that Paper Rad did for "Hot Smoke and Sassafrass." In case you didn't know, I love Paper Rad, and if you don't know them, you should check out their site and watch all their videos. They are one of my favorite art groups, which you know makes me really typical, loving this hipsterish, colorful, ironic art, but you know, whatever.

In his blog yesterday, Dennis Cooper talked about this old porn star, Gary Wilde, whom I had never heard of. I was really fascinated by the brief bio Cooper gave and so googled to find a more extensive bio, which is truly amazing and you should read it also. These seventies gay porn stars are apparitions, they appeared out of nowhere situations, young hustlers, were captured on celluloid and then disappeared with no one knowing where they are these days, presumed casualites of the AIDS epidemic. I really want to find out more about Donald Sherin, the pornographer who discovered him, but this website about Wilde is the only reference to him I can find on the internet using Google. His story sounds equally fascinating and I want to know more about him.

My current favorite porn star who used to sort of occupy the space Jake Gyllenhaal now occupies in my head and in this diary, Pierre Fitch is to star in a new porn with his husband, Ralph Woods, The Big Dick Club, which I want to see really bad and need to figure out a way to see. I am thinking an ad on M4M.

Here is an article about this marriage between two obscenely, hot, and very young gay porn stars. And both have nice penises, obviously, being porn stars, but man, Ralph Woods cock is enor-mous!

Here are pics of the bassist from Fall Out Boy playing with his cock.

And Christian Holstad has what sounds like an amazing project, a leather store in midtown, installed for what I imagine to be a really short time. I need to go see this real soon. I am mad at myself for not going to the opening last night and instead goind to Williamsburg galleries which were terribly unexciting and which led to me getting drunk real early with Ethan at Greenpoint Tavern.

And I am listening to Capsule's Lounge Desingers Killer album right now and it is fun and amazing and making me lose my mind!

I do and I do not like that Adele subscribes to The New York Times. I like it because it is nice to have a paper to lounge on the couch with and drink your coffee with. But I don't like it because I will have a second and third cup of coffee with it, will eat my lunch as well as my breakfast with this paper, spending so much time reading articles about umimportant things just because they are there when I could be reading other things, books that I have yet to, or even doing things other than reading. But one major plus is the New York Times Style Magazine which comes out quarterly or so, and which the most recent issue, the one that came with today's paper is the Men's Fashion issue. I love fashion magazines for men and don't really get the chance to read them anymore, now that I can no longer filch copies of L'uomo Vogue from the Sarasota Barnes and Nobles, and I can certainly not pay twenty dollars or so for each issue. And certainly, the NY Times Style Magazine doesn't even come close to the hipness or homoeroticism of that magazine, but since I don't have access to it, it is a very nice substitute. So many glossy pictures of dreamy males for me to stare at on this drizzly day.

There is a small little feature about something or other, but which features the gayest lede ever. It is amazing:
Mention the word descamisado — Spanish for "shirtless" — to most men's-wear designers, and they're likely to conjure up visions of Puerto Rican go-go boys at the Roxy.

I just consumed two cultural products of 1996, both of which seem of a very nineties sensibility. I am beggining to realize that there is such a thing, and it's very fascinating. Seventies American cinema has a very specific feel - dark and gritty shots, socially isolated characters. Eighties cinemas has less of a feel for me, surely thanks to Jaws and Star Wars totally fucking up that glorious moment of American filmmaking. There are, of course, those Brat Pack and John Hughes movies. You can usually peg an eighties movie due to the look and haircuts of the characters and the cheap video like quality of the images, but there doesn't seem to be something that you could easily declare as an eighties sensibility running through most of the movies of that decade. But when I watched Doom Generation a couple of months ago, I was so aware of it as this nineties movie, that nineties movies are also really dark, but in an affected manner, that that darkness, that blase, ironic usage of glossy shots of violence and cruetly is something that seem really 90's. Think Natural Born Killers, Pulp Fiction, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels.

This line of films seems so unique to the nineties, this stylized violence that is pretty empty behind the veneer. There were countless of these movies that came out after Tarantino opened the floodgates, so many that I saw and remember really liking, but now am sort of bl

--

I just talked to Peter for an hour or so about Austin and New York and what I am and not doing with myself and what I'd like to and so really, I don't even have the energy to see where I was going with any of the above, or to edit it for readability, but nor the will to delete it. I was trying to lead up to a discussion of my thoughts on AM Homes and the state of mind I am in these days where I don't think she or Murakami are good writers and how I used to love both of them at the same time, how her book which I just finished, The End Of Alice, is so nineties, is pornography (for me to say that is a lot), and boring, tries to shock, and whatever, I have been shocked before by these things. It doesn't do it. Shock me with displays of compassion, of unreal beauty, of amazing writing. I also watched Freeway last night, which is of a similar, a nineties sensibility to The End Of Alice, but which I enjoyed a lot, because it's a slick movie, a joy to watch and because Resse Witherspoon is amazing as a crazy killer in this movie. Now, let me eat a bagel and ponder the points brought up in that conversation, about what I am doing with my life.

The thermostat, not that I have one, but that metaphorical one that weathermen (and women!) refer to - that thermostat was in the sixties today as spring teased us, letting us know that it is not too far away and I saw quite a few people in flip flops today, one in shorts, and lots of people in hoodies or t-shirts.

And I could feel in those streets, on Varick Street especially, that thing that makes me love this city. This city is my favorite when it is warm because there is some energy that takes hold of these streets. I don't know how to describe it. It whispers of sex, though. And on the street today, the sight of people just in t-shirts turned me on. It has been too long since I have seen males display skin so wantonly, so publicly. It's amazing how after winter, these clothing choices seem sexy, they turn me on so much, and by the end of summer, they will have become routine, desexualized and mean nothing, and this is why I love these first few warm weeks when the sight of exposed feet seem tantamount to someone having their dick hanging out of their jeans, that it is this skin I haven't seen in public for months. Oh, it made me so happy and made me feel so much better that I had been this morning.

That is, of course, until I got settled into work and tried to keep myself awake and entertained, but failed miserably, and I am working again at eight tomorrow, which means I should really try to get to bed soon since I can't even nap when I get home from work because I have to wait for Myrna to come fix our toilet then. I can't even dilly dally in parks after work and take in this nice weather and feel good because I have to come back to this apartment and wait for a little old lady to try to fix our toilet. I am pretty certain I am going to galleries after she fixes it and getting totally hammered if I am still awake. That sounds like a brilliant plan.

Right now, I do not want to be here and I am not sure where I do want to be, but the flusher on my toilet was broken sometime this morning by one of my roommates and so now you have to reach your hand into the back to lift the chain to flush the toilet. The basin back there is nasty and looks like it has never been cleaned and dipping my hand in that everytime I flush the toilet just makes everything about the bathroom seem gross. I notice the moistness of the bathmat I am standing on, the dust and mold gathering in the corners of the wall, the peeling floor, the soap stains on the shower curtain. And I am really so tired of this shithole apartment where stuff is constantly breaking, where the landlords are idiots. I just have grown extremely tired of this physical space and all its flaws. My lease is up at the end of August and I really need to move somewhere else, which means I need to work until August so that I will be able to save money and prepare for a move. Right now, I am seriously itching to get out of the city. The cramped nature of my apartment makes the whole city seem cramped and I know that I will yearn to push beyond walls in any apartment where I can hear my other roommates on the other side of my door, where I can't just go sit outside in my backyard. The only apartment I have really loved that I have lived in in New York was when I subletted my first summer on N. 1st Street and my building not only had a stoop for me to sit on in the evening, but also a backyard for me to hang out in.

The chances of me finding another apartment besides the one I live in now that I could even afford in this city (right now, I pay 500, up from 400 the prior two years here), but one that I could afford and that would have a backyard - those chances are slim to none. Yesterday when I was at work, the sun was setting and I don't know if you know, but I work on the twelfth floor of this building in SoHo that overlooks the Hudson River, a fucking gorgeous view, and I was sitting next to the window and just stared out it for hours, watching the gray clouds get just slightly pink as the sun set and then as the blues of the approaching night got darker and darker and I was listening to Joni Mitchell for some reason, even though it makes me totally weepy now when I put in on these days, since it was what I listened to nonstop after my dad's death, and watching the sun set and listening to this music, yes, of course, things got scratched and I got weepy again and thought about past places I had lived, friends from those places and how much I loved those times and I really am not terribly happy here in New York. I have worked shitty jobs that I could work in any town. I am no longer excited by the art scene or the scenester party circuit, which for a good long time, kept me thrilled about this town. I have had just as much, if not more luck with boys in way smaller towns, so New York's gay life doesn't even mean that much to me.

The places at the top of my list are Austin and the Bay Area just because friends I love live there and so I would know people there and both seem like gorgeous areas of the country. Other, less realistic options are Greensboro and Miami. I am sure I will change my mind quite a few times before September, but my resolution to myself is to work, work, work and save money so that that way come September, I will not be forced to stay in this apartment again if I don't want to live here again, that I will have money to decide what to do with myself.

I know. I lied. I said I would only talk about Gyllenhaal for a while, so here's the daily dose: Last night, I watched October Sky, which is another sentimental unoffensive movie that the whole family could watch together. And yet, I still really enjoyed this movie a lot, because movies about young boys, about boyhood are always fun to watch, especially when presented as some Rockwellish Americana dream, setting it in the fifties and having lots of good old tunes as the soundtrack. And I was caffeinated and itching for something to let me loose, to help me escape, and so it was real easy looking at Jake last night. I got totally giddy and squirmed up into a ball with delight quite a few times during the movie. And the question begs, why, oh why, when I am so emotional already would I put on Fleetwood Mac? Today is going to be fun.

Sometimes Jake Gyllenhaal has that stupid, spaced out look on his face and I wish I would have never tried to figure out who or what it reminded me of, because once I figured out that that doofus look reminded me of Tobey Maguire, I couldn't stop noticing its appearance, and kept on tying it to this actor who I am most definitely not in love with, whom I really cannot stand. The problem with looking too long at someone close to perfect is that you start looking for those imperfect things, trying to take this person down a notch or two or three. Pretty people are a little boring too look at after the initial thrill of their beauty wears off on the viewer and they tend to make me a little annoyed after a while, their prettiness something offensive, a power over me that I refuse to cede willingly, and perhaps this is why I have liked and I still do like pretty not pretty boys, boys that are attractive in untypical ways, boys with some flaw or some flaws that make everyone who doesn't have those flaws, flawed, and those flaws of the crush, perfections.

I watched Moonlight Mile last night, which might be my least favorite movie he is in. Even Bubble Boy is better. He is still his attrative self in this picture, gets lots of screen time, and has a gorgeous haircut, but this is one sappy, flawed movie. And why is Dustin Hoffman so incomprehensible in recent roles? He has taken to this habit of slurring all his words together a la Bob Dylan except way more neurotic sounding. But, back to Jake. I have a thing for big noses as many of you may know, and in this movie, I noticed that Jake has a more flat bridge to his nose and he is a fleshy faced guy and that is part of the attraction, but in this film, I was sort of losing interest, his haircut perhaps making his face seem even pudgier, pig-faced.

But again, the results of looking too long at someone, the results of watching five Gyllenhaal movies in a row - that this was bound to happen, it had too, otherwise, I would have lost my mind. I still love him and think he's gorgeous and would suck his dick in a heartbeat - and really, part of it, I am blaming on this sappy, sappy movie. I don't know, I am realizing that he is really cool and really hot and really aware of both and that sort of for me at least, mitigates in some small way that coolness, that hotness. I don't want to build your tower even higher just because it's already so tall and poking out of the skyline and everyone can see it and wants to keep on building that one. I want to build some new towers.

March 17 is going to be bananas. That is the day Trader Joe's opens and this store is getting so much hype, there is no way that the place will not be constantly packed. The two dollar wine will be three dollars here in New York. There is a massive article about the company taking up the front page on the Dining Out section of The Times today.

I am going to work today, in an hour, for the fist time in over a month. Thank god.

The Jack Gyllenhaal Fan Club had its first meeting last night. Which basically means that Ethan came over to watch movies and Adele was in the living room doing her homework and so thus, the Fan Club. The first movie screened was The Bubble Boy followed by The Good Girl. Bubble Boy is bad and not in a good way. Its level of goofiness is on par with that of a Pauly Shore movie, and JG is in a bubble for the whole movie, so you can't even get any good unobstructed staring in. This, perhaps a way of commenting on the problems involved with developing crushes on screen idols, that they are all behind this bubble, untouchable to us. This tv screen I find Gyllenhaal constantly trapped in, beyond my reach.



I am glad we got the junk out of the way first, because The Good Girl was suprisingly really good, maybe just seeming so excellent for being watched after a really loud, juvenile movie. Jennifer Aniston and John C. Reilly are both amazing in this movie, but they are not who the Fan Club is devoted to, that would be Mr. Gyllenhaal, who was creepy and amazing, and even with his creepiness, I still wanted to run off with him and was cursing Aniston for being hesitant about it. It's Jake Fucking Gyllenhaal, you dumb idiot! Who cares if he's psycho and disturbed? Throw your life away and run away with him! There is a scene early on in the car, their first hesitant contact; Jake reaches out his hand and places it on Aniston's thigh, on my thigh.



I squirmed and melted a bit, that hand on my leg. His hands. God, so beautiful. The proof that this is a beautiful man. It is always the hands. People have control to some degree over every other aspect of their appearance. Hair can easily be made to look good. Weight can be lost. Muscles can be built. Unseemly bodily and facial hair can be plucked or shaved. Hands are really the only part of your body that you can't do to much to alter. Hands and feet. If someone has stubby fingers or long, frail witchlike ones, there's nothing you can do. I am sort of obsessed with hands and base so much of my attraction to people based on their hands. I can recall the hands of just about every crush I have ever had. There is a very specific type of hand that I like. Long fingers, but not frail. No nails to speak of. And seeing his hand on her thigh, seeing them down there on my thigh, I knew that this was the right crush. This man has such beauiful hands.



The internet constantly amazes me. There is a site dedicated to male celebrity hands, and of course, there is page for the beautiful hands of Jake. But, of course, the hands are just one aspect, but which would be enough to probably make me like him without any of the other attributes. But he has all the other attributes, big eyes, brown hair, cute nose, that boyish grin - fuck, he is so dreamy.

This afternoon, the Fan Club consisted of just me as I watched Jarhead, which was an all right movie, but again, we are not here to talk about the quality of the movie, the director's efforts, or the other actors, we are all here because of a young man who is only six months older than me, Mr. Gyllenhaal. He is sans his cute brown hair in this film, which obviously is a large part of my attraction to him here, and he is a little too buff in this movie. He looks much better without all that bulk, but he is still pretty dashing in this movie when he flashes that grin. There are also a few shots of Jake's ass in this movie, which you know, I do not mind seeing, not at all. Tonight, Lovely and Amazing. Tomorrow, the Princeton Review. But don't worry, I'll keep the talk here focused for the next couple of days on our love, Jake. I haven't even brushed the surface of all the things I want to talk about, that will come later when I have seen more, sated my appetitie both visually and literally. I am fucking hungry and need to make myself some food right now.

Jake Gyllenhaal Fan Club Meeting

tonight
my house
basically just me watching
Bubble Boy and The Good Girl
others welcome
we can talk about his
dreaminess and drink cheap
beer

and talk in line breaks
about our love
our desire
for unattainable things
and what
this means

ask does this make us
american, or just
human, or just
gay

oscar notes

Here is the problem, one of many, but the big one that tends to encapsulate them all with Crash: accepting the award for best screenplay, one of the writers cited a quote by someone's name I had not heard of, a quote that inspires him and apparently is his own motto toward art, "Art is not a mirror, but a hammer to shape society." Um, no. That is what art is not. That is why Crash is not art, but a hamfisted, didactic piece of shit with nothing to say but the grossest of generalizations, probably a problem you are going to encounter when you make a souped up version of Short Cuts and Magnolia but excise any subtlety and art those movies had and try, oh how they tried, to up the dramatic factor by making the theme Race, with a capital R, of course, but which you know, maybe is going to come off as nothing but vapid generalizations when the writers and the director are all white.

Has the world gone mad that anyone thinks this is a good movie, let alone Best Picture? I am not being dramatic when I say that I really think it might have been the Worst Picture of the Year. Surely, that could be because I didn't see too many new movies in 2005, but also, it's just a bad movie.

Other Oscar notes:
Jon Stewart did all right, not as amazing as I had hoped, but still as charming and funny as you can probably be given the format. It was nice when even he, the host, ripped the pointless montages that happened every ten minutes.

Mastercard and their Priceless campaign are now blatantly trying to piggyback on the popularity of the New Yorker's Cartoon Caption Contest, with some horrible corporate version of the fun with their Fill in the Blank commercial contest.

Jake Gyllenhaal. Oh my fucking God. I haven't had a screen crush in what seems like years, the last one I can remember is twelfth grade, Ryan Phillipe in that 54 and Cruel Intentions era. But, oh man. Jake. Whenever he was shown on screen, I totally got nervous and giddy, even heated up a bit, started to sweat, felt like this was some crush I encountered in a bar. I shied away from making eye contact with him even though he was just on my tv screen. Whoa, I cannot wait to rent Jarhead on Tuesday and stare at my boyfriend some more.

Gyllenhaal, I want to have your babies!

the music that plays when we walk with heads held high, heads bobbing

I think the reason that last night I was imagining my life as various movie scenes buoyed by an awesome soundtrack was because just a couple hours earlier, I had seen a night from a couple weeks ago edited together with a soundtrack. Jamie's friend, Daniel, made this short little video of Ethan, Jamie, and I wandering Chelsea galleries drunk. The video is really cute and it's so fun to see your life played to a song, with a soundtrack.

Around eight thirty, I found myself heading up to the regular's house on 96th Street. While there, he asked me if I wanted to get stoned, and I said, of course, because getting stoned sounded like heaven. And stoned, I did get. After three hits, I told myself that I should stop if I planned on still going to Daniel's white party later that evening, a party which I had even went and bought pants for at the thrift store earlier in the day. And I was already terribly messed up from this amount of pot, and this man, I don't know how he functions so stoned because he smoked so much more than I did and seemed pretty together. He insisted that I take a few more hits and help him finish the joint. Man, I was out of my fucking head, to say the least. I got a blowjob from him and have never orgasmed stoned and fucking hell, that was weird and amazing. After I came, I was falling apart more and more. It took me so long to get dressed. I wasn't sure if I could get my arms through my sweatshirt and meanwhile, this guy is making normal conversation with me and I am trying not to let him know that I am in outer space and have no clue what he is talking about and I just need to focus on trying to get my arms through my jacket.

I got dressed and left so that I could fall apart in true fashion without worrying about what someone else thought of me. The L wasn't running last night and so it was a long, long, long ride home last night totally messed up. On the downtown 1 train which I took to 42nd, I stood up holding one of the poles and don't even remember what I was listening to at this point, but do know what I imagined I was hearing. I looked at my reflection in the pole, how skinny and rectangular it made me, and I imagined myself as one of those rectangular cartoon characters in that Dire Straits' video "Money for Nothing." I put on some chapstick, only to drop the cap from it on the ground. I looked down, and said Oh no, and saw all the faces of everyone around me, and I was sure they knew I was stoned and were going to see me have to try to pick this up. I started giggling nonstop and then quickly picked up the cap with lots of concentration and tried to stifle my giggling.

I switched to the N train at Times Square and also switched the music I was playing to Funkadelic, which was amazing music to listen to in that condition. "Lunchmeataphobia" was playing, and put that track on and tell me that it does not sound like the score to The Warriors. Before I had gotten on the train, I had passed a human statue in white paint. On the train there was a young mohawked teenager with his girlfriend. And the N train has that orangish glow, that grimy atmosphere and I totally felt like I was trying to make it back to Coney Island safe before the other gangs got to me. I was living The Warriors on that N train. The mime and the young punk seemed such perfect scenery to this shot that I was a part of.

Then once I had finally made it on the J and was riding over the Williamsburg Bridge, "Oh, I" came on and it is such an amazing song. I am not sure I had ever listened to it fully before last night. But it is probably the most soulful of any Funkadelic song - oh, it's so good - and listening to this looking at the skyline of my city and all the annoyed faces of the people on the train who just wanted to be home, I felt so good, this good music playing, this jamming soundtrack to my movements, this music to live by. There are all these various rhythms and that is what happiness is - when we have found one and are in sync to it, and strut down the street because somewhere in our head this tune is playing and there is that camera in the bushes and life is amazing and so will this shot be - and unhappiness, those are the moments when we are not finding a groove, when we are arrhythmic and are not sure what to do with our limbs to this song, that we just aren't grooving. To say the least, I was grooving last night, was terribly happy.

I came home, really inspired by all these thoughts about music and really in love with Funkadelic and plugged my Ipod into my computer speakers and cranked that shit because no one else was home and I was going to listen to this amazing music and dance and live and sit on the couch and stare into space and eat all the junk food I had just picked up at the bodega. Then a song or two into my rocking out, I heard some noise from Jillian's room and paused my music to hear that Jillian and Josh were indeed home, were watching a movie which they must have had to turn the volume up on because I was rocking the house to Funkadelic and thinking out loud. I was way embarrassed and turned down the music, faded it out of the shot and watched a bit of a movie until I felt tired and ill from all the crap I ate and went to sleep, lullabied to sleep by the memories of Funkadelic playing.

whitney biennial 2006

I am not sure if this Biennial is really that boring, or if it is not, if I have just lost somewhere along the way the enthusiasm I was able to muster only two years ago toward art. Two years ago, I was still wide eyed about New York and this exhibit then seemed to contain all those thrills I saw contained here in this town, an intellectualism, a concern with beauty, a visual busyness, art - God, this was what I moved to New York for. I was hanging out with snotty art fags (Matt and Kevin) who probably made me take it a lot more seriously than I do now with no friends approaching anything close to the level of snottiness they were able to muster toward contemporary art.

I went yesterday to the Whitney, got there shortly after six and was surprised that there was no line at all, the day after the opening on the pay-what-you-wish night. Last time around, every Friday evening when I came, there was an obscenely long line that circled the block. Has everyone else grown bored with this stuff also?

I didn't feel like taking my headphones off, wanted to continue to listen to the Smiths as I wandered around the exhibition, which of course, since Chrisse Iles was one of the two curators, turned out to be a problem, since so much of the space was devoted to video art. I wasn't in the mood for video art. I rarely am. The demands it makes on your time and attention are something that have always bothered me. That it is the most totalitarian art form in its demands of the viewers - with other objects - writing, photos, painting, sculpture - you can approach it with whatever amount of time you want to devote to it; your thoughts aren't bullied by both sound and images and a darkened room; you have a little more wiggle room in how you choose to approach the piece. And so, I said Fuck you, Iles! Told myself that I would come back another time and look at the video stuff then. When you don't look at the videos, you slice off about half of this exhibition. For some reason, the Whitney seemed smaller than I remembered - is half of the floor space walled off or something? Or am I totally insane?

Or is it like when you go off to college and come home for Thanksgiving Break and find your bedroom and your house and your parents much smaller than you had remembered them? Has that much time past in these two years, that I think the Whitney has also shrunk?

Oddly, two of the artists who really struck me in this show were exhibiting photographs. Oddly, since I like to dismiss photography. Robert Gober's and Amy Blakemore's photographs are beautiful and haunting and touch something, some memories in me. Jamal Cyrus's pieces also touched me and made me happy because it was after wandering a floor totally bored looking at things that said nothing to me, that I rolled my eyes at, and which they didn't even notice because they were too self-absorbed. One of Cyrus's sculptures is a protective vest with all these dog eared black power paperbacks taped to the front (Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, etc.), and this piece touched me so much, because it is what I protect myself with, that I have all these dog eared books guarding my own heart, protecting me from the world. X's autobiography used to be one of those, back in high school, it probably still is there, just buried underneath all these other books I have come across since.

Again, I have to make the comparison to two years ago, this 2006 exhibition is so small, so hush voiced, so tame. It seems like any museum show, so much white space on the wall, so much quiet in the gallery spaces, small little pieces hung from walls. 2004 was big and loud and cluttered and there was something nicer about that, even though that is why it was critiqued. I can still remember some of those big pieces from 04 - Assume Vivid Astro Focus, Yayoi Kusama, Sue de Beer, Terrence Koh, Tom Burr - there was just a busyness with all of these big, beautiful installations. There are only two pieces that immediately grab you with their size and beauty - Paul Chan's "1st Light" and Urs Fischer's blown apart walls and circles of wax.

That is five artists that I remember, out of an exhibition of so many - that's not saying much. Maybe I just wasn't in the right mood. I am going to go back at some point and give it another chance. I only spent about an hour there before I was totally bored and got back on the train. The downtown 6 train was so crowded and there was this beautiful man standing about two people away from me and I kept staring at him off the reflection of the window, and occasionally for brief glances looked at him directly. I was so excited and felt such a sexual charge from this glancing and started to get a bit of a boner, which doesn't really happen to me from just looking at someone, but for some reason, I was so excited. This was a local train all the way to 14th Street, a long ride, and that sexual giddiness I was experiencing was too much, the sustained nervousness and happiness made me smile and feel something that I had wanted to feel when I went off to the Whitney earlier, a thrill towards life, and this man, this stranger revealed more to me than the efforts of two curators and countless artists were able to.

woody allen ranked (I'm watching Manhattan and realized I never did this)

1.Stardust Memories
1.Annie Hall
3.Crimes and Misdemeanors
3.Shadows and Fog
3.Husbands and Wives
6.Manhattan
7.Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex
8.Celebrity
9.Hannah and Her Sisters
10.The Purple Rose of Cairo
11.Match Point
12.Zelig
13.Another Woman
14.Deconstructing Harry
15.Bananas
16.Sleeper
17.Bullets over Broadway
18.Alice
19.Sweet and Lowdown
20.A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy
22.Love and Death
23.Manhattan Murder Mystery
24.September
25.Broadway Danny Rose
26.Interiors
27.Take the Money and Run
28.Everyone Says I Love You
29.Mighty Aphrodite
30.The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
31.Anything Else
32.Small Time Crooks
33.Radio Days
34.What's Up, Tiger Lily?
35.Hollywood Ending
36.Melinda and Melinda

Roger Dodger

What is this? Update #4 today? I think I already once talked about in more detail than I am willing to do so right now about the correlation between the frequency of posts and the boredom of the poster. Right now, it is not so much that, although I could very well just be telling myself that, and also telling you that to leave you with a better presentation of myself before you head off to bed, or, if you are there already, to leave you a better picture waiting for you early in the morning.

Hi!

I am listening to the Knife's Silent Shout right now, and this album I have done a total turn around on with regards to my critical perception of it. Actually, this is the third time with this album. On first listen, a month or two ago, I dismissed it right off the bat as bad electronica that I would hear late at night on one of South Florida's radio stations. I still think it is that type of music, but now I really like it. But that is getting ahead of the detailing I am trying to undertake of the evolution of my thoughts on this album by a band whose last album I really enjoyed for its sheer pop exuberance which still makes me dance like a fucking gay maniac and get the fuck out of my wayness. Then there was that Pitchfork review a couple weeks ago which listed this album as "Best New Music," better than even their "Recommended New Music," and I say that that publication doesn't have too much impact upon my own critical perceptions of new music, but I have to admit, after reading that review, I felt like I was missing something, that if this authority on music thought it was amazing, well hey, maybe it is. And I listened and again thought it just sounded like music I had heard a million times on Ecstasy that Anne or one of her DJ friends would have playing as I rubbed Vicks under my nostrils, and I was mad that this Pitchfork writer was giving all this credit to the Knife for doing "new" things with electronica, was certain that they never spent any QT in South Florida. Pitchfork patted itself on the back for referring to it as "haunted house," and I have heard scary dance music before, anyone on drugs has. Though, that is clever, that haunted house phrase, that I will give you credit for PF.

And that opinion of Eh-it's-allright was in place until yesterday when one of the songs from it came up when I had my music on random. It was just what I was in the mood for and then I listened to the whole album and rocked the fuck out. And today, when I rode the subway and waited for what seemed like forever for it, going to see the regular after flaking out on my interview, I listened to this album and it sounds so good through headphones, really fucking loud on the subway.

I think the reason I didn't really take to it so much before was because I was too aware when hearing it on my speakers of how it sounded to other people, how Adele might have thought I was listening to cheesy dance music, but with it coming through my headphones, I don't give a fuck and dance and bob like a crazy person to this music. I couldn't imagine dancing to these songs in public though, have an image of Anne doing some goofy glowstick dance when I hear some of the songs and try to picture it being played somewhere. And then I started to follow another repeated thought pattern I have already elaborated upon here earlier, about the type of music the bars I go to tend to play. That Deep Cuts seems a little more suited to New York dance floors than the slow, dark rhythms of this album, and that's why I am digging this album so much because it is allowing me to move my body in ways that I have not been doing so in a while, because when you are dancing to Pulp's "Common People" (which I like, but still, give it a rest) or whatever standard song that every douche bag with a CD booklet plays, that you do the same sort of dance to it and let's do new things, move our bodies in laughable, awkward, uncool ways. Because I am so tired of playing it safe, of playing these roles, these dance moves. I want to think of my body in new ways, of new relations to sounds, basically, I want to be alive and this album makes me feel a little more so these days.

a beastie boys video

The main one you know, the Spike Jonze directed one, parodying seventies cop shows - listen all y'all, it's sabatoge.

I sort of knew writing that entry earlier today that I was going to not go to this interview. I don't know why I can't admit these things to myself, rather than scheduling interviews and then just not showing up for them. Surely, one of these employers, I might at some future point want to be employed by and this not showing up for interview after interview can surely be no good. And, at two, I told myself, I need to get dressed and leave by two-fifteen at the very latest. And so what do I do? I tell myself I am just going to look at this crossword puzzle for five minutes and man, crossword puzzles make me feel so impotent sometimes and I kept spending more and more time past the five minutes I had allowed myself to look at it, had spent the fifteen minutes I was supposed to be getting ready, had spent another fifteen past that point, telling myself, I could still make it on time. So 2:30, I throw the puzzle aside for the moment, telling it it isn't over between us, and that we would have to finish this fight on the train. 2:40, I am dressed and ready to go and as I am opening the door to leave, I ask myself what I think I am doing, that there is no way in hell, I will make it to midtown and find this office in twenty minutes and that I am not going to show up twenty minutes late for my interview and get this job, so I asked myself why I would even waste the four dollars in subway fare to get there. I told myself I wouldn't and depressed, took of my bag, my jacket and began to catalog all the mistakes made in this day.

The first, asking a john who wanted to pay me 300 to get together at noon if he really wanted to get together in this shitty weather. Why would you do that when you have sixty dollars in your bank account? Uh, no fucking clue. Cue that Tina and then later Missy song, "I can't stand the rain a do do do do..." Then scheudling this interview for today when I had a choice between today and tomorrow even though I hate being in crappy weather. Then getting a call from the regular at one and telling him I couldn't get together then because I had to go to an interview soon. So there's an easy 150 for ten minutes of work I also threw away. And then that interview I did not go to that actually paid lost of money.

In case you did not know from me never leaving the house and watching more and more tv, I am a little depressed these days and I can't really pinpoint any reasons and I do not like it but do not know how to find joy as easily as I am used to finding it.

I am realizing that I have a thing for over the top analogies. There are some people that I probably otherwise would not like but who talk in such excessive pronouncements that I find them totally charming. Sometimes, it falls flat though when people try and I am not sure why sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Today's example that works, that I think is brilliant is from an article about Fred Segal by Alex Kuczynski:

I enlisted another clerk, who was helpful, but only in a wan and distant way, as if I were the stepchild she was tolerating while secretly planning to send off to military boarding school.

I've got a bullshitting hat that I am about to put on and wear under my winter cap. I don't really want to go outside, since it looks pretty yucky, this snow, rain mix that is coming down, but I have an interview at 3 in midtown to do data entry at some financial services company. Doesn't that just scream fun? Thus, the bullshitting cap. Yes, I would love to do data entry. I would be thrilled. Yes, tons of experience and qualifications. Totally.

I already lied on the phone to this guy when he said that they were looking for people with experience doing seven-eight hour days of data entry, told him that lots of my days at the Princeton Review were spent doing data entry, when maybe two half days were, and God, how boring those were, how I checked the time on my phone every five minutes. But the job pays 35K, which sounds like a million dollars to me since when doing my taxes, I learned that I only made 5K in taxable income last year. That shocked me, that somehow I survived off of that and the odd sex work jobs I got.

I am doubtful that I will get this job since I don't have banking experience, very little data entry experience, and tend to get nervous and make typos when under the pressure of a timed typing test, but since I need a job, I need to start actually attending these interviews I get.

I should probably start looking around the house to see if I can find an umbrella other than my garish purple one with flowers on it to bring to this interview. Yesterday, I daydreamed for hours about moving to Miami, looked at apartment and rental listings online for the better part of the day. I don't actually intend to move to Miami, at least not anytime soon, but daydreaming is all I want to do. This morning before scheduling this interview, I lied on my couch, drinking coffee, reading the paper, listening to Morrissey and that's where I want to be, in la la land, but it's the way of the world, people have to go to work and do something so that they can be enabled those hours of la la land. I love playing music in the daytime in my umemployment really loud, and I do spastic exercises for an hour or so, feeling my tummy at the end of the session and imagining that it is tighter, these daydreams, God, can you tell how unexcited I am about leaving my house this afternoon to go talk to some boring person about some boring job that would bore me to tears.