Cheryl Lynn - "Shake It Up Tonight"

When the white's all done, then you move on to the red. Or, whatever else you can find in the kitchen.

I hung out with Nik last evening, worked off a hangover with the best cure anyone's come up with yet: the hair of the dog. We drank some Charles Shaw and had a double feature at my apartment, watching The Birds, which was fairly underwhelming compared to the other Hitchcock movies I've seen lately, and then Before Sunrise, which was, as always, amazing, and left me, as Linklater so often does, fingering the memories of old failed romances and feeling real, real sentimental. Blame Charles Shaw too probably.

Nik left. I ate some flan from Gran Morelos and somehow conflated my love of flan, which is very strong thing these days, with another infatuation I am feeling these days, this cute guy Nick. I was drunk and the two swirled around in my brain. I was blasting Janet Jackson and writing insane messages to people on Facebook. Luckily, perhaps too late to save me from my own self-sabotoging impulses, Diego came home, and that's when I started drinking red wine, and we hung out in our backyard, it late September and feeling like mid-summer. We are all going to die, the world is - one of us said this. Him, I believe. Global warming and all. We talked about life and food and wine and work and aging and all the things people drinking wine out in the night are prone to talk about that have known each other for quite a few years.

This morning, the hangover, which I had outrun for a bit, was back, back in full force. I went to the gym, spent about two hours there, trying to outrun it again, sweating everything out, trying to forget about my love of this person, my financial troubles, my hangover. Run, run, run on that treadmill. Escape it all. Exhaust yourself until you're nothing but a body, a human body in motion, sweating, struggling, a machine. It felt amazing. My body felt so good afterward and I told myself that I was going to cherish this feeling, to treat my body kinder, to feel this way all the time, to feel healthy, in control.

And here I am drinking an energy drink mixed with vodka before I go out again, someone texting me to go to Bath Salts with them, and me, full of energy, aware that this is my last week of unemployment, my last chance to go out on weeknights with zero cares about work the next day, said okay. I said okay. I also said: Try to get your dreamboat roommate to come.