The list of temp agencies in New York available to me gets smaller yet again. This morning, unsurprisingly given the thoughts I had about working last night, I decided that I actually did not need to work just yet, at least not at this job, and that I wasn't going to go, rolled back over into sleep, and that sleep, an escape from the working world, was such a pleasant sleep, running away from the world outside my closed eyes.

However, given freedom, I didn't put it to use. The onset of a cold occurred and so I spent most of my day in a fog looking at various things online, mostly though at Manhunt and at various sites about Mexico. I took a nap, attempted to do yoga, and ate a lot of food.

What will happen when I burn through all of these temp agencies? Maybe that will be the point at which I should move to another city. Maybe that will be the point at which I should actually seek a "real" job, meaning something I would enjoy and that a middle-aged staffing lady, surely someone's mom, didn't place me in. Despite my perhaps stupid behavior this morning, I actually think that I may apply at some other temp agencies later this week once this sickness resolves itself, that I actually should be saving more money than I currently am. I am going to be more assertive about working situations that I want, namely not accounting-related tasks, namely a 9-5 job as opposed to a 9-6 job, namely at least fifteen an hour, and if I am going to be so demanding, there is no harm in also trying to get placed with a job that is in walking distance of the L train.

Reasons for working (aka things I could purchase with extra cash) that I need to keep in mind next time I think about sleeping through a job include: glasses to replace the ones that my stoned ass lost in Amsterdam, nice backpack for Mexico, money to travel around Mexico, perhaps a trip to the dentist, perhaps TEFL certification classes, and perhaps trips and adventures to other places.

It has been drizzly all day, gray. It's spring. Showers supposedly bring forth flowers. I need to use this down time to bring forth some things. Tomorrow my day will be much different from this one with regards to productivity, sickness be damned. I need to start studying Spanish, need to get back into the habit of working out or yoga, need to write, and need to go somewhere pretty, need to get out of my house.

I start working in an office tomorrow. It has been quite a while since your narrator has had to be a member of the workforce, putting on adult clothes and riding the crowded subway with everyone else in the morning, heading toward an office, all of them basically the same, variations on a them, all boring, to do boring tasks for eight hours. I need to quit thinking of it in such negative terms if I am actually to last at this job. It is especially hard for me to be excited about working since I don't really need to, since I am doing all right financially without having a normal job, but would just like to have a definite source of income of a known amount so that I can save and plan for traveling this summer. I will be working two blocks from Central Park, which is a plus, though I am not sure it will be enough of one to counteract the tediousness that I am sure entails working in the purchasing department of a big company, doing data entry, typing numbers upon numbers into spreadsheets.

I also feel vaguely sexually frustrated right now and perhaps that is because I know I have to wake up early tomorrow and I am looking for some distraction - that, or it could be that these past few days without sex are the longest I have gone without it in a few weeks. Monday night I got into a bout of bitchiness with Diego and we ended up not getting off that night, instead just slept without really touching somehow in his twin-sized bed, both a bit mad at the other. And since that night, my feelings toward him have changed quite a bit and I am not sure why and am also not sure what it is I now desire from him. This weekend, I ran into him on both Friday and Saturday night and doing so certainly prevented me from being the slut I would have otherwise been, prevented me from probably being sexually satisfied now. Both nights it was clear that he wanted to go home with me, him looking sad when I told him that I was going to go home by myself. This boy is really sexy. He really likes me. And so it would seem so obvious that I would want to jump in bed with him, but both nights I most definitely did not want to and couldn't really understand why. I need to either get over this weirdness and sleep with him asap or tell him that I don't want to sleep with him anymore so that I can pursue other people when I find myself in the same bar as him.

For a while, prior going to London, I was really excited about him and crazy about him, but hanging out with David for a couple of weeks took away the singularness of that crush feeling that I had toward him and him telling me about breaking up with his boyfriend I didn't know about kind of brought me down to Earth a little also.

I am looking for something and I am not sure what, and if it didn't sound so embarrassing I would just be honest and say that I am looking for love, and I don't think it's here is the problem and I think that maybe I should try to find it with someone else. But then that also seems stupid - that this is a boy I like and find interesting and who is really attractive, that I should abandon these fantasies of what things should be and be happy with this actually really good thing.

Again, I don't know. I got stoned today and thought about these things a lot, read from this travel guide to Mexico, did laundry, cleaned my apartment, and ate a burrito.

From MTV Best of Mexico, the embarrassing travel guide to Mexico that I purchased today - deciding that with its "Partying" sections for each city and detailed info about gay things and cheap things that it would be more helpful than the Lonely Planet guide I had been considering also - some tips, true gems really, on saving "some pesos":

Tip #4: "Visit museums on Sundays or other free days: Many of Mexico's museums, like the Museo Nacional de Antropologia in Mexico City, are free on Sundays, so plan your time accordingly. Granted, museums here don't cost that much to begin with, but neither does beer. You do the math."

Tip #5: "Strategize your meals: Eat a large breakfast - it's the cheapest meal you can buy here - and then look for a late lunch at a comida corrida place to tide you over for most of the day. For dinner, you can simply have antojitos or snacks, and what you save can be contributed towards drinks."

I kind of love that this guide is geared toward binge drinking college kids. It's totally absurd and amazing in a way that I think is so great, but I am afraid the irony I partly enjoy it with is not understood, and is why I confessed to the person ringing up my purchase today that I was so embarrassed to be buying an MTV travel guide.

Last night, I made an obscene amount of money for sleeping over in some man's hotel room - far and away the most money I have ever made from a john. Tonight, with this money sitting in my bank account and after talking to Bonnie a lot, I bought a plane ticket to Mexico City and will be gone the entire month of July. The plan as I understand it is to spend a week in Mexico City and then to travel around to various areas, seeing the Pacific and the Gulf and spending time on the Yucatan and in Belize. I am so excited about this trip. I have for a long time daydreamed about moving to Mexico City, a city I have never been to, and so this trip will perhaps either dash my hopes, bring my fantasies of this city down to earth, or it will confirm my suspicions that this city is really amazing. I am really excited to see ruins and to spend time near water, to spend time on beaches, to spend time with Bonnie.

I had an interview at a temp agency yesterday to aide in my saving money for these desired trips I am dreaming about. The temp agency, despite their kind smiles and charm yesterday, did not return my call today. I had also been thinking about going to Europe in August, but given this Mexico trip and the expensiveness of flights to Europe during that month, that imagined trip is seeming more and more unlikely. And because it is, that is making me more and more think about going to Beltaine at Short Mountain at the end of April, however getting there does not seem the easiest feat.

Buying that plane ticket felt so good. Now I am committed to this thing that had been just a plan and now know for sure that I will be in Mexico from July 1-31 and that I need to start planing accordingly. I can now also commence a new level of giddiness.

Despite having kissed and had sex with many people, sometimes both can seem like something new, like an experience you have never had. Last night, this boy I had met at a gallery the night before came over to my house, and to be kissed by him was something new. His particular method of kissing slightly different from this or that person’s, and the result being this unexpected experience, sensations new, skin breathed against, brushed against with his big lips, taking me somewhere really nice. The blindfold removed and the sight a beautiful one.

Saturday night, after meeting in this gallery, he met me at this party in Union Square. We made out more there and I told him that we had to stop, that I was meeting someone else there. We didn’t stop, he didn’t and I couldn’t, deriving too much pleasure from his lips, his breath on my neck, feeling my body’s existence in a really visceral way. Diego, the boy I was meeting there, came up and said hi to me while I was making out with this boy. It’s not that either of us think we are exclusive, but it was pretty tacky to be caught making out with some boy when I was supposed to meet up with him. He had a weird look in his eyes, something resembling disappointment. I pushed the other boy away, having already made plans to meet up the next day with him, and talked to Diego.

He told me that he was feeling weird because he had just broken up with his boyfriend of six months. I nodded and made conversation with him, did not show my surprise at this news, tried to roll along. It has been four months now since I have been seeing him and we have had more than a few conversations about what it is both of us wanted, and that during these conversations he never mentioned having a boyfriend seems a bit weird and, thinking it over now, shady. I am not sure that it should, that we had said we weren’t boyfriends, but the lack of transparency has altered in some way my feelings toward him, thrown some water on to the excitement I had felt.

So it was a relief last night to hang out with Pedro, a person who is moving back to Buenos Aires in a day and for it to be this thing free of any future expectations (and what often happens with expectations – a disappointment in its failure to occur or to occur in a fashion different from how it was imagined). We drank in my living room, listened to the Cure and talked about Argentine writers (Cortazar, Borges, Puig) and the Cai Guo-Qiang exhibition at the Guggenheim.

Conversation was put on pause to kiss. It’s hard to talk when you’re mouth is engaged when your lips are busy feeling the surface of someone else’s – hard to talk in a verbal way, but something else is said, sometimes, in this case definitely, something more important is said, something language is too small, too limited, to ever contain. We moved to my bed, every so often an article of clothing being removed until it was skin against skin. It was this slow, sensuous thing, mouths running up and down each other’s bodies, this person knowing the right places to touch, the right ways to, and I was driven a bit crazy, at times had to pull his head off of me, that the sensations were sometimes too much.

He was proportioned in this way that I am finding myself more and more attracted to, a short, mildly stout frame with thick nice legs. His hands and feet were so sexy, cute things, evidence of his symmetry, of the world’s. I could not get enough of licking his feet, and that they were such pleasure points for him, him making more moaning when I played with those than any other part of his body, drove me wild. Eventually I started to fuck him and his face was so pained, a face I have had often, him trying to move past the feeling of pain, to ignore it. We paused, him trying to relax, and it wasn’t happening. Instead, this sexy boy with his talented mouth and oral fixation gave me a blowjob that was also new. Like his kisses, done with a touch and deftness unfamiliar, new in some slight way, and as a result, the experience also new, something unfelt before despite that particular act having been done numerous times before.

Sex is so amazing for that reason, that no matter how many times one has it, it can always be this new overwhelming experience, that different people have different touches, that even with the same people there are different touches, so many points on your body at which contact can be made. Beds are these magic boats, floating through wondrous nightlands, journeys through space – sense of physical space and time absent, left back there on the land you shipped out from, left with your clothes on the shore.

He had a nipple ring and afterwards, lying next to each other, I asked him about it. He said he had gotten it when he was a teenager and didn’t like it anymore. He asked me if I liked it. I said not particularly. Having wanted to not have it for a while, he took out then, deciding so rashly to change this thing about him that he had had for years. That was such a beautiful sight, something that almost made me a little jealous, this sureness of purpose and this will to enact desired changes.

Radio listeners in New York, what a joy this morning it was to be looking for some jazz at the bottom end of the dial to find out that KEXP now has a partnership with 91.5 and this New York station will now be broadcasting shows from this Seattle station. Some people are not happy for good reasons, thinking reasonably that local public airwaves should have locally produced shows, and I would agree with that more if I didn't use to stream KEXP online to listen to it, if I wasn't so excited to be listening to this on my radio right now.

The last two weeks were lovely in so many ways. I fell in love with London and some people that live there. I am listening to Leona Lewis right now and I really can't get enough. The particular track is "Bleeding Love" and it is quite fantastic. On first arriving there, I couldn't deal with the particular strand of pop music that is played in England, but now it is all I want to hear. I miss listening to "The Hits" station in a kitchen in Bethnal Green in the house of some lovely boys.

I am really excited though about coffee again. It is the one thing that drove me crazy there - the lack of decent coffee anywhere, of drip coffee, of filtered coffee. If a place does sell it, a rare thing, it is terrible, surprisingly so since it is such an easy thing to make, but rather most places just sell espresso drinks and an Americano is passed off as a cup of coffee. Cafe Bustelo, ah, how I have missed you, your garish red and yellow can, your lovely dark taste.

The weather was gray and often drizzly while I was there but it made those bursts of sunshine all the more exciting and there were buds, little greens buds on trees, forecasting spring, and on some trees even flowers, spring already there. I have that to look forward to here, the trees still barren.

It was also nice to have another short fling with David, a boy I had one with about two years ago for a week when he visited New York. I wasn't sure what it would be like to visit him, what that would mean, whether or not we would be sleeping together or just be friends. Things were super nice, better than I had anticipated. There were occasional moments of awkwardness early on, but after spending a weekend with him in Amsterdam, spending one of those nights sleeping outside in a park and in a bus shelter, those moments were long gone and what a joy it was to have this boy every night to sleep with, to go curl up in bed next to him and either have sex or not, and either way having a nice night's sleep, it being with a boy I like. I am daydreaming/scheming about maybe doing some traveling with him this August and need to find some more streams of income so I can make that happen.

Toby also was a dream, this nice pleasant boy who liked to cuddle and dance and go out all the time, a sort of gay tour guide, taking me to nice places, sex places. One of my last days there we went to Hampstead Heath together and that was really fun after its initial moment of scariness, being chased in a big circle through the woods by a scary old man who I guess I was sending the wrong signals to. The sun was setting in a really majestic way, its last gasps, as I was exchanging blowjobs with this sexy blonde man.

I drank lots of vodka from Tesco. I ate lots of candy bars and cookies. I danced a lot. I saw lots of art and pretty old buildings. It was a very lovely time. My last evening there we went to this really fun dance party, "Dirty Fairy," that played really fantastic music - a dream mix almost for me. I danced a lot despite feeling a bit ill from having drunk so much for basically two weeks straight. Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop Thinkin' About Tomorrow," was played toward the end of the night. I was really excited that that was the last song I danced to in London. It seemed very apt and too full of symbolism. However, after getting our coats, I heard Ida Corr's "Let Me Think About It," and though maybe not as cinematic a choice, it makes me lose my mind and so that was the last song I danced to there, danced really hard, making these new white shoes totally grimy and gross. And maybe there is symbolism in that, the dirtying of a new clean surface. Maybe not.

pictures from the last two weeks

Lion candy bars are really good. In the drizzle of yesterday, I had two. My sweet tooth is going wild here, all these new candy bars I am unfamiliar with and want to try. Yesterday, I saw a lot of art and some pretty old churches. I went back to Tate Modern to see the Duchamp, Man Ray, and Picabia show with David's Tate card. I had never heard of Francis Picabia or seen his work for whatever reasons, but his stuff, especially his layered paintings and kitschy nudes, are fantastic. Duchamp has always bored me, and yesterday was no exception.

I went to the Temple Church and St. Paul's Cathedral yesterday, both really beautiful, particularly the latter, astoundingly so. I went to the National Portrait Gallery also, looking at all the old royals, vaguely remembering bits of tenth grade European history. Man, so many beautiful things to see here!

Last evening, I saw Cabaret with David, Toby, and this man from New York and his boy toy. It was kind of weird, the circumstances, but the musical itself was so fantastic, so much better than I was expecting. The last scene and the way that it was staged brought forth such interesting questions, making the audience complicit also in this decadent scene, of people too busy looking for distractions, sex, drugs, spectacle, to notice, to care, about other things.

Drinking on the street in Soho and then in this cute park in Shoreditch before again heading to Joiners Arms, this really lovely neighborhood gay bar that is basically the London version of the Metropolitan. Um, there is a lot on my agenda for today that I need to get to doing before this day escapes me anymore. Reflection might have to happen later. There is no time to write, to record these things and experiences, am instead too busy having them. Tomorrow morning, David and I are going to Amsterdam for a couple of days.

Today, I will try some new candy bars.

Rain and wind, strong winds, cold winds. Hands numb, face wet, still happy. The weather, aside from today, has been lovely. I just came home from the Tate Modern, which was really nice and most of the galleries were hung really well, aside from the Surrealist stuff - messy and too busy, much like surrealism itself - perhaps intentional. I got lost watching a Jonas Mekas video diary, "Walden," from the late sixties I believe. It was beautiful and spoke to me in a way nothing else there came close to doing. It was a bunch of quick cuts, all making me nostalgic, for moments I have lived, moments I have yet to, and moments I never will. It also furthered a resolve I have gotten here to take my life more seriously, to write and spend time alone and do things that mean things to me and with people that do. It was so fantastic, this work, and hit at lots that I care about, lots of what any art I might make would hit on also, the recording of one's life and making something out of that, finding the thing that is there, in doing so making it.

I have been going out a fair bit here to some nice bars, talking to cute Europeans, nice accents. It is also nice to be among these nice British boys, David, Sky, and Toby. It is also nice to grab David and make him giggle nervously, to sleep next to him, with him. I went to my first bathhouse yesterday, went with Toby, and had a really fantastic time - swam, sat in the steamroom, played with a bunch of men in a darkroom, fucked by some guy in a booth, and then had a lovely threesome with this really sweet and sexy married couple.

It is weird to be here and to be myself at moments, to be in a land I don't know and in a land where apparently I don't even know how to order coffee. It is a humbling and thrilling feeling. It has made me completely fearless about talking to anyone and that is another thing I am going to try to take home with me, this freedom and lack of inhibition. Here, I don't know anyone and so don't really care too much about the impression I may make on them, on that I will see this person again and things may be awkward. It is such a bullshit fear and way of thinking and I am really happy to experience this freedom and excited about taking it back with me.

This video said everything and I only sat through part of it, but a long part nonetheless. People came and left, groups and groups, as they do when looking at video art in a museum, checking it out for a minute, getting an idea of the thing and then moving on. I could not get up, did not want to. It was so fantastic.

I had another emotional experience yesterday looking at the Rosetta Stone and the Greek antiquities in the British museum. It was totally different aside from its impact, flooring me and making me feel open and part of something and alive.

Tomorrow night, I will fall asleep in London. I am really excited. I am also really tired and need to wake up in a short five and a half hours to make the journey to the Newark airport. The weather is getting nicer here, warmer. I watched a good play yesterday, U.S. Drag, and then after feeling weird around my friends, I went to Diego's house where I felt totally comfortable and vulnerable and unafraid of that. That's such a great feeling. The comfort I feel around him is so nice at this moment in my life. I would be a very sad person without it. We talked about how I cried the last time I slept over. We talked about other things. We talked about Peru.

This afternoon I pissed in a guy's mouth. This guy is someone I have known for years and is going to be in London at the same time I am. I am really glad that I saw him today, glad that I will probably now see him in London also. Some things are working out really well. Some things aren't.

I love classic rock and the soles of my feet are really dirty. That is a statement of fact, not symbolism.

was listening to 2pac nostaligc even then, something in his voice, something lost even then?

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bohemian rhapsody

Our house has been without power for three days. This morning, waiting for the Con Ed guy, Niki and I got stoned and cleaned our apartment. Ten minutes ago, we heard the Con Ed guy arrive. We screamed in excitement. We waited eagerly to hear the fridge rumble back on. When it did, we screamed, New Year's, a celebration. Niki flicked on all the light switches to celebrate having power again. The radio was turned on - the first music in days in a house that normally has music going non-stop.

Loud guitar chords. We recognized the song. Thank god it wasn't a car commercial or some stupid song. Instead those familiar loud guitar noises and the expectation of Freddie Mercury about to interrupt it all. And there it was. We sang along, screamed along, excited about electricity.

"So you think you can stone me and spit in my eye,
so you think you can love me and leave me to die..."