Thursday, July 31, 2003

 

ENTRY 045


Obviously I've been dwelling lately on my sense that it's time for me to figure out where my life should be going, in areas ranging from my writing to my day job to my overall self-care. A choice that presented itself earlier this week gave me the opportunity to clarify my values.


While I was on my trip (which I will eventually describe to some extent), I got a voicemail from my recent almost-sex partner. Upon my return Monday night, we arranged that most oxymoronic of events, a "sex date," for Wednesday. He'd be coming over at a decent hour this time, so there wouldn't be the old "I'm too tired business" again. Plus, it was his idea, so I didn't have to do much of anything except agree. The whole thing sort of fell into my lap, no pun intended. After 15 or 16 months of celibacy, I was finally going to get some action.


Then on Tuesday I began to really think about what I had so blithely planned. Was it actually a casual hookup that I wanted? I remembered something I'd forgotten, which is my longstanding conviction that a great deal of the time, fucking around is a shoddy substitute for real affection. It's easier, less binding, noncommittal--and it's not what I'm about. I don't want a shitty secondhand excuse for human connection: I want the whole enchilada. Sex is the distraction that warps into the be-all and end-all in NYC, and I've let myself get lulled into believing the lie.


For me, at least, no-strings sex is emotionally and spiritually draining; I've dabbled in it a bit before, and I didn't like how I felt afterward. It's not a moral superiority/guilt thing; it's just the way I'm wired. I want to care about the person in bed with me, and I think the more casual sex one has, the more jaded one becomes. I can't do it with a stranger; it's unfulfilling. I'd pick a plateful of prime rib over a plateful of junk food any day, and Casablanca over Dude, Where's My Car?; why should making love vs. fucking be any different?


It's time for me to stop apologizing for the fact that sex has emotional meaning for me, even if it opens me to ridicule and disbelief and misunderstanding and, yes, celibacy. I'm on this earth to be authentic, not to live a big fucking lie. So many people are jaded and unfulfilled and have lost sight of what romance and vulnerability and real truth and feeling are; I don't want to be like everyone else, even if that's a lonely path. And it is.


But I can live with that, because, as far as I'm concerned, sex should be a means of emotional connection, not a substitute for it.


So I left my almost-sex partner a voicemail canceling our "date." And as I hung up, I knew I'd done the right and honest thing for myself. That feeling was far superior to the best casual fuck I could ever imagine.


Instead of getting busy on Wednesday night, I focused on something much more important: friendship. Jane and I had dinner at this great Italian place in Gramercy called Beppe. My medium-rare lamb sirloin rubbed with mint and served with mashed potatoes was damn good (and Jane liked her spicy Tuscan-style spare ribs, for once not ordering the wrong thing), but what I really loved, and had been thinking about since the last time I ate there, was the Pontormo, a "warm salad of field greens, tarragon vinaigrette, pancetta and softly scrambled eggs." The scrambled-eggs-and-bacon thing might make the salad sound oddly breakfasty, but it's so wonderful that Jane insisted on having one herself.


The dinner was arranged just that morning, when I had explained to Jane that I was disappointed by her conduct the night before. I'd come over mostly to see her, since I hadn't in close to two weeks, and to tell her I'm going to be an uncle. I actually did tell her as she was ushering Holly and me out the door with her date waiting in the living room, and she just closed the door in my face. Damn! She was quite apologetic and suggested we have dinner, so that was that. As for whether she thought I was joking when I said I was going to be an uncle, or was just being incredibly dismissive, I don't know; I'm not sure I want to, although I don't like to think the worst of people. But dinner went fine. My part of the bill set me back $58 (much more than my weekly groceries), but it was money well spent, for a number of reasons. I get so uptight with finances that I think it's good for me to let loose a little sometimes. There's probably a broader lesson in there somewhere, but I leave that to the philosophers among us.

11:54 PM

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Wednesday, July 30, 2003

 

ENTRY 044


It looks like The Accidental New Yorker has garnered its first official review. It's a good one! I think my favorite line from the review is, "I was so engrossed in this site that I kept putting off getting my dinner from the microwave, even after it kept beeping at me every 2 minutes reminding me it was done." Check it out if you've a mind to. The review, not the microwave.


The next few entries will be less than chronologically ordered as I try to lay out the sense of upheaval and change I've been experiencing. I realized I should backtrack to Saturday the 19th, when I had dinner with Hamilton. I talked about my mid-20s crisis and how I feel like I have to make some changes, about the rollercoaster I've been on and how it's hard to fight my inertia. It's hard to express succinctly how he responded, but he was helpful and we share a certain sympathy in our respective situations. I did something I've been afraid to do before: let myself be vulnerable with him. I laid my head on his chest and put my arms around him, and his heartbeat seemed to accelerate under my ear and the thought occurred to me that there might be some sexual something in the situation but I disregarded the thought. I simply missed human contact, and Hammy stroked my hair and it was all right to allow it. At least I'm not too New York yet to allow some closeness.


Last night I went over to Jane's apartment to watch the premiere episode of Boy Meets Boy, which I had some thoughts on previously. Jane's friend Holly had a key and was there when I arrived--but Jane wasn't. She had gone on a drinks date with some guy she met at a fancy Bill Clinton fundraiser last week. She called shortly after the show began to inform us that she wouldn't be there to watch it. Holly and I were sort of flabbergasted that Jane invited us over and then didn't show up herself. Then it got worse: when our Mexican takeout arrived, we realized that we only had $10 between us for $17 worth of food. The delivery guy kept buzzing while we ran around the apartment, pawing through Jane's drawers in search of spare cash. Nothing. Then we found her checkbook, so Holly started forging a check while I answered the door for the Chinese delivery guy. I asked him if he took checks, and he said, "Ah, yes." When I tried to hand it to him, he said, "Oh, no." I asked if they took credit, and he said, "Yes." So I pulled out my Visa, and he said, "No." At this point Holly was out-and-out ransacking the place for any sign of money, and I joined in. This went on for a good 10 minutes while the delivery guy stood in the open door shouting unintelligible things at us. In the meantime, Jane's nosy neighbors were gawking, until I finally looked at them and said, "What? You got a problem?" Frigging Gramercy snobs.


All this time we were missing the show, of course.


After I tried to ask the delivery guy if we could just buy the quesadillas and not the fajita combo--a request far beyond the ability of either party to overcome the language barrier--we used sign language to reach a different agreement. Holly and I locked up the apartment, took the food, and went to the nearest ATM, with the guy on his bike right at our heels until we surrendered the cash. It was so very embarrassing.


We managed to catch the last 15 minutes of the show, and right afterward Jane showed up with her (significantly older) date in tow. Awkward! Especially when Jane and Holly started calling each other "you cunt" because Jane had stood us up and then Holly gave her shit about it. Oddly enough, it's a weird term of endearment of sorts between them. I was just glad I'd eaten beforehand. I pitied the Older Gentleman, who looked a bit dismayed at the whole display. Thank God I'm not a straight man.


The bottle of wine Holly and I drank between us probably didn't help. At least there's a silver lining: the Boy Meets Boy episode is being rerun, and this time I won't be ordering takeout.

11:47 PM

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ENTRY 043


There's so much to say that I'm not sure where to start. Finding out I'm going to be an uncle, as well as turning 25, has jolted me. Life is stepping on the gas, and I have to make my stride purposeful if I don't want to be left coughing in a cloud of dust.


I recognize that I have lost focus in many ways. Work has bogged me down and frustrated me, mostly because of the toxic people I have to deal with, and my foundering social life has subdued me even when I feel optimistic about meeting new people. I haven't been finding the inner resources to work on my novel. Maybe that's too tall an order with this much unrest. When I'm so often left to my own devices, it can be hard to summon up the energy for what my ambitions require. I feel like I am so much more than the actions I'm able to effect right now. I want so much to be able to love something or someone without reservation, but everything seems to disappoint me. Right now I'm reading the novel Everything Is Illuminated, and a passage from it really resonated with me on the plane ride home yesterday: "Brod's life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release....None of it moved her. She addressed her world honestly, searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her, but to each she would have to say, I don't love you....Nothing felt like anything more than what it actually was. Everything was just a thing, mired completely in its thingness....So she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love--loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved having love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for."


All these things frighten me. I want not to know, to be oblivious and innocent, unjaded and without pain. But I have always had an obsession with the truth of things, with the authenticity of my experience, as much as I wish sometimes that I didn't know anything. This kind of question arose in my college philosophy class: Is the man who loves his cheating wife wholeheartedly, without knowledge of her many affairs, truly happy or not? If he is an unwitting cuckold at whom his wife laughs behind his back, does it really matter? Would you rather know, or not know? I always thought I'd rather know, and that's still my answer. I have always paid a high price for the truth. And I still do.


The earth isn't sunlight solidified, and it isn't tangible despair. As my plane crossed the arid beige Colorado mountains yesterday, I looked down at the world in which I had been born and in which I would die, where my roach-infested apartment awaited and where there were all varieties and degrees of love I will find if I wish to survive, where my nephew or niece is quietly gestating from a tiny seed. And I think it was that idea of the relentlessness of new life that brought tears to my eyes.

To be continued

1:53 AM

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Monday, July 28, 2003

 

After more than a week's absence, I've crossed three time zones today to get back to Manhattan. More to follow shortly.

10:00 PM

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