Twice in the last week I have run into (ahem) cute, smart, attractive guys with whom I hit it off like gangbusters. With each one, we realized at some point while hanging out that we have had completely tawdry, anonymous sex with each other at some point in the previous year. And each time, I had wished that I had gotten more of a chance to follow up and get to know the fella in question. sometimes, serendipity sends a nice curve ball just when you could use a little cheering up.
Month: November 2000
Modern Telecommunications
The one thing I don’t like about writing posts on the Palm Pilot is that they don’t go up according to when they were written, just when they were uploaded. The following are a couple of posts I wrote on the way to Sorrento. I’m back, I had a fabulous time, I’m way jet-lagged, and I’m processing some really horrible family news that has me reeling. More later as I settle down from everything. But for now…
Commentary from the road, Thursday: I’m on the train to Boston and sure enough this guy gets on at New Haven and starts in with the cell phone. He didn’t look the type at first — he raced on all out-of-breath, wearing cut-off sweats and looking like some mook. Next thing I know, however, he’s got the headset on, the phone in a little stand, and he’s making a volley of calls telling all his colleagues and clients where to reach him. He hasn’t stopped yakking away yet. Yes, chowderhead, a cell phone is a useful tool, but we’d all be much happier if you valued your privacy a little bit more.
Meanwhile, my own phone rings with a call from my landlord, warning me that there’s some danger of my 1200 square feet of basement apartment flooding if we get a lot of rain in the next week. Apparently, the pump that usually keeps all us cave-dwellers dry may have been damaged by some gas-line work. If all my things are destroyed by the time I get back from Italy, I’ll be one morose kid.
Cubicle State of Mind
Oh, sweet Jesus, no. Now my cube-neighbor is starting to hum along with the radio. Can’t she understand that don’t want to be part of her New York State of Mind? Needless to say, the off-key humming travels over the cubical wall without any trouble whatsoever.
Cubicle Creep
Please save me from Kenny G. And Luther Vandross. And whoever else is creeping over the cubicle wall from the radio tuned to some god-awful adult-contemporary or soft-hits or regurgitated-cud station. God, it can really suck to be a freelance contractor who can’t really getting away with telling someone to pipe down. Frankly, it’s better when she’s got the radio on than when she uses the headphones, because at least this way she doesn’t hum off-key to herself all day.
Aside from the horror of the music itself, the worst part is that it’s only the tinny upper register that really makes it into my cubicle. so all I get is the tenor sax or the keyboard fills or the star search wails. Oh, the agony.
On a more encouraging musical topic, I picked up a great maxi-single from Chicks on Speed after hearing it playing while I was at Other Music last saturday. (I was with friends who were on such a manic spending spree that I got caught up in the excitement and broke my long-running CD spending freeze.) The Chicks did these amazing deconstructed electronic covers of some of my favorite quirky songs from the B-52’s: Give Me Back My Man, strobelight, and song for a Future Generation. Totally fun and brilliant.
Just for kicks, write me and tell me what your capsule description would be if you had a part in song for a Future Generation.
Hi, I’m Sparky and I’m a Virgo. I love french fries and talking to cute guys!
We’ll Call Him Shawn
It’s amazing what a haircut can do to help morale. I think it’s because I cut my own hair (and have ever since I was fifteen — I’m solely responsible for all those asymmetric skater styles I wore in high school and college), and I usually end up doing on the spur of the moment when I feel the need for some kind of change that I can control. Or maybe it’s the feeling of letting go of excess weight. Or just the novelty of looking different after feeling a bit of a rut come on. Any way you look at it, I’m all easy-to-groom again and ready for the wash-and-go pace of my trip abroad.
Oh yeah, someone I chat with a lot pointed out to me that I haven’t even mentioned here that I’m leaving Thursday for a free week-long trip to Sorrento, Italy. [Insert warning of a week without updates here.] I’m helping a friend look after a group of her customers (among many other things, her company sells tour packages) in exchange for a week of free travel, food, and lodging in southern Italy. This is the same way I got to go to China and through the Panama Canal. It’s a sweet deal, and playing shepherd to a busload of tourists is a small price to pay for the change of pace.
But anyway, I shouldn’t suggest that I needed a haircut because I’ve been feeling rotten or anything. stressed yes, with sporadic mopiness, but not rotten. Amidst the frantic crush to get work and errands done before I leave for Italy, I had a fantastic weekend entertaining P.J. and Chris, who stopped by for a quick trip filled with record shopping, eating in bamboo-filled restaurants, and general carousing.
There were some moments of weird social dynamics to the whole situation. I mean, we all got along swimmingly, but P.J. and Chris are old friends who haven’t seen each other in a while, and who came to visit me after they had already spent a couple of days together in Philadelphia. 
To some extent, that left me a bit of an outsider to chunks of conversation they were having. Besides, they were in tune to the goings-on in all the record stores we visited in a way that I haven’t been in a few years, since moving from Boston back to New York threw off my connection to any flavor of musical scene. On top of that, I know them independently, through correspondence and phone calls and whatnot, so I also had to adjust to meeting each of them face-to-face for the first time. It’s an adjustment I’ve had to make many times when meeting on-line pals for the first time, but the extra layer of catching up they had to do threw me for a little while. I got over it, they got over it, we got used to knowing each other as meatspace pals instead of flirty online abstractions.
Them boys is fun, though, and we laughed a lot, looked at a lot of cute boys, bought a lot of records (well, all I got were a few zines and a Chicks on Speed EP of B-52’s covers), and goofed around.
Hallowinded
Well, Halloween was mostly a bust, but I guess I was expecting that. The day was one of the most irritating of my entire life for reasons too tedious to get into (let’s just say I’ll never do a project as a favor for a client again), I was pooped, my tonsils and a wonky wisdom tooth are acting up (which is making me very nervous about next week’s trip to Italy), and I just wanted to go out and start slapping people. Fortunately, there were so many people wandering around in decent costumes, or at least fun attempts at decent costumes, that I lightened up a whole lot. Outside of the parade environment, there’s something I find really invigorating about people roaming around in costume, especially when they’re acting as if nothing is unusual at all. Sometimes that jaded New Yorker expression really pays off.
Come nighttime, I indeed slacked off and found myself unable pull together a decent costume, so like I do every year, I just dove into my steamer trunk and my dresser and put together a half-assed “Bad Boy scout” theme with a scout uniform shirt, some leather pants, and a few accessories. I don’t think anyone got it except for one perky Belgian guy. After some dinner and a little time-killing at the Phoenix, members of my party gave way to fatigue, so we called it a night. Oh well. Better luck next year, I hope.