I’m outta here for a few days, will post when and where I can. Thanks for all the encouragement, you know who you are. I will try and leave my neuroses at home, I’m sure New York has plenty of its own. Have a great week.

Something that never seems to go away, no matter how long I have been blogging, is this almost constant desire to delete every post I’ve published. I read over them the next day, and suddenly I feel like such an asshole. My feelings about Pride now read like an annoying lecture given by the kind of guy who’s no fun at a party. Suddenly I can imagine every valid argument against my opinion, and they all sound more intelligent and more funny. Suddenly a minor quip about party boys sounds self-righteous and arrogant, and I want to change everything or just hit delete.

The posts I write about the past, the little stories from memory, are less prone to this, as they deal with past feelings and events. I still feel raw when I post them, vulnerable and anxious. I’ve gone too far this time, I think, every time.

But let me emphasize the final words of the previous post: that I am the dorky one. I am the one who is more worried about how to get to campus from La Guardia than I am about writing well during the workshop (at least, that is how I feel today. When I get there, my worries will naturally morph into new worries). I am the dork who is more worried about lifting weights during the workshop than writing during the workshop because I want to look good for when I return to SF and the space monkey finally lands. I am the dork who worries that I won’t be cool enough for New York, that all my clothes will be stupid and too casual and that I will just have to deal because I don’t want to be carting around two or three suitcases of clothes in cabs and on the subway. I’m the dork who is afraid to meet people I’ve been corresponding with for over a year or two because, well, I am a dork. I am a self-indulgent dork who can only write about himself and the dumb past.

But take all this with a grain of salt. I am a dork, but I also exaggerate everything to cover my ass. If I was really all that worried, I’d just stay home.

When the majority of those in the Stanford University lecture hall decide that a man with hissy s’s and precise articulation is gay, the professor pronounces them correct. The lesson: You can determine a man’s sexual orientation after simply listening to him talk for 20 seconds.

Junk science, or telling the truth? (via Arts and Letters Daily)

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Will be in New York City for Gay Pride soon, looking forward to seeing the city for the first time in about six years. It’s become somewhat fashionable to diss Gay Pride, for all of the commercialization and the party boy atmosphere. I know a lot of people who won’t go to their local Pride celebrations for these reasons; reasons I understand.

But I always think about something my first boyfriend once said, that we owe it to ourselves, and to those who came before us, who fought for the rights we enjoy now, we owe it to our visibility, our past, our future, to show up and be counted. My experience with the past few Pride days here in San Francisco, at least from my perspective walking in the parade with all the shelter dogs, is that the majority of people lining the route were from out of town; people who might live in towns where there won’t be any Pride celebrations, people who are out there in their cheesy rainbow clothes and fanny packs, with yards of plastic beads around their necks, having a total blast. They make me smile, they make me grateful for the life I lead. (Which is not to say that the cracked-out boys don’t annoy me, sobriety has certainly dulled their limited appeal for me. But that’s a minor loss). I will miss SF Pride this year, I look forward to seeing New York’s Pride with new eyes, to being the dorky one from out of town.

The currently page has been updated and is worth checking out not because my current interests are very interesting, but because Jim’s design skills are beautiful. He kicked it out in two hours, and it makes me feel like an art museum or something. I better work on producing content worthy of such display.

To films I would add Capturing the Friedmans, which I saw last night. Ever since my hours at work were cut, I like to find movies late on Sunday nights to check out, when the rest of the world is getting ready to go back to work on Monday. I like driving through the city at night, the half-empty streets, the parking spots, the quiet theaters.

The film, which documents the true story of a family’s destruction in the wake of sexual abuse allegations, is easily one of the best I’ve seen in the last couple of years. It explores notions of truth, and leaves no easy answers. It is heartbreaking and infuriating, and very funny.

I’ve been a little quiet around here lately. Maybe it’s the summer, maybe I am storing up all of my creative energy for the workshop next week. I’m excited and nervous, flying across the country to a school I’ve never seen, where I don’t know anybody, to work with a writer who is well known in the world of nonfiction, who edited an anthology I read for class last year. As I commit myself more to this, whatever it is, it feels as though the stakes are raised. The possibility of failure becomes more intense, more frightening. And two questions repeat ad infinitum through my neurotic skull; Who am I, and why would anyone care to read about me? I suppose these are the kinds of questions that I have no business asking, the point is to keep writing, and not look down. I mean really, it’s too late now, I won’t find happiness in a normal job. I have to do this.

I know I quoted her before, last year sometime, but because I am reading her again, and because it is so appropriate, I once again give you Joan Didion:

When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off the DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again.

- “Goodby to All That”

Met up with Mr. Geekslut for coffee on Friday night. I always get a little nervous when I am about to meet another blogger for the first time, like a blind date of sorts, but he made for great company, and he wasn’t too bad to look at, either. His weblog has a distinctive voice, a unique combination of writing style and subject matter, the kind of blog I visit frequently. Which doesn’t mean that I always agree with what he says, I’m a little more idealistic in matters of love and devotion, but it makes for good conversation, and good reading.

Woke up Saturday knowing I was going to spend the weekend in bed; one of my 48-hour flu’s that hit me once or twice a year. Spent a few hours watching a John Hughes movie-thon on TNT. I didn’t realize that I knew all the dialogue in The Breakfast Club. It was rather sweet, actually, seeing Mollie Ringwald again. Something almost naive about all those stories of love across school cliques, the freaks and the losers triumphing in the end. Something that plays the violin to my naive, romantic heart. I always wanted, at the end of the movie, to leave the church and find a handsome man leaning against a red Porsche, waiting for me.

And indeed he is. Maybe it was the movies, I don’t know. I get these musical obsessions, where a song from my past or present infects me, and I must find it and play it over and over and stew in the blissful melancholy it usually produces. So yesterday the song was “Space Age Love Song”, by yes, a Flock of Seagulls. I searched in a fevered haze for a free MP3 somewhere, with no luck. I told the Space Monkey about this today, and later he uploaded it for me, and here I am writing to you, blissfully stewing. May someone say to you, someday:

I saw your eyes
And you made me smile
For a little while
I was falling in love

Vince has moved into some new digs, so go bring him a casserole, or as we called it in Minnesota, a hot dish.