Category: ultrapersonal

Social Niceties

Another public apology to Jonno: I’m sorry I ran out of Fat Cock 29 so soon after you arrived last night. It was great to finally see you again, and I certainly wouldn’t have been so impetuous if I didn’t know we’d be boogeying at P.S. 1 with Dori and the Minx later today. It’s just that I’d gotten there early and ran into my friends Alan and Vincent and then Alan introduced me to some friends of his, including this cute, cute boy I couldn’t stop staring at. You know the one, the one I introduced to you. Well, you can imagine my surprise to discover he was staring at me the whole time, too — that kind of stuff doesn’t happen to me that often, especially in bars full of delicious downtown hotties. So we were chatting, and then pushed together by the crowds, and then flirting, and then kissing and stuff. Since you guys hadn’t shown up yet, I figured you may have decided not to deal with the long line outside. So when this fetching young man suggested we beat a hasty retreat, I was all over the idea. Then there you were. Doh! I didn’t mean to be rude or anything, I swear. I’ll make it up to you.

Re: Dear John

It’s a very modern, very Internet-enabled thing to have someone break up with you via e-mail and AOL IMs, but it doesn’t feel very savvy. It still sucks.

I was waiting for this one to happen, but I’m still sad. And yes, I feel dopey for being sad, since I was expecting it, and since nothing had even gotten serious yet, but still…

Boys Suck

Either he’s been kidnapped or he doesn’t have the nerve to start that Final Conversation, because there hasn’t been any response to my messages. I have a pretty good idea which of the two it is. I’m sad, because I thought we may have been on to something. He was scared for the same reason. Or maybe it was the both-of-us-having-the-same-name thing. Who knows? Yeesh! Kids these days!

The Ugly Truth

Despite what you may think, things are not very glamorous here in the Rumpus Room. After reading Tim’s theory that we designers work in incredibly pristine areas, and then going to look at the impossibly sexy Apple G4 Cube, I took a look at myself and my desk. This is the sad truth about why I don’t want a webcam recording me (not for the squeamish):

  • I sit here in boxer shorts, black socks, and a Hanes t-shirt, because I never bothered to put other clothes back on after stripping off my office wear today. My eyes were hurting, so I’m wearing my glasses which are held together with a dab of hot glue in one of the hinges. sexy!
  • I am slaving away at my old and dusty PowerMac 6500, which rises out of a heap of junk on my desk. I have just enough room to place a glass of Coke and a plate of cheese and crackers to have for dinner while I work. The pile of junk includes a stack of bills I am ignoring, marked-up proofs of a few jobs I’m doing, bunches of Polaroids, all the mail I’ve gotten in the last two months, and nail clippers to use during long downloads. sleek!
  • I have a stool made from a bicycle seat next to my desk chair. The stool prevents me from walking over the weak spot in the floor that is about to collapse, because I don’t want to step in the dirt floor below the rotting plywood. Glamorous!
  • I look over the top of the laptop I use for all of my porno…er, journal-writing, and I see a pile of previously worn pants and shorts growing on top of my dresser. This is next to the pile of dirty laundry on the floor, which sits there because I haven’t removed last week’s clean laundry from the laundry bag yet. That is sitting in the middle of the TV-watching area, by the Chinese take-out menus. sophisticated!
  • I can hear the whispers of the dust bunnies as they grow in size, strength, and number. Send help if you I ever disappear altogether. Swanky!
  • And I don’t even want to get started on the biological disaster area that is my kitchen.

This, That, Other Things

Oh god, it’s happening again. I’ll warn you all right now — you won’t be hearing much from me for a while. This is not a vacation from dealing with the website, this is just a hunch that I’m going to be sitting in my uncomfortable deskchair sweating bullets for a few days while I try to crank out a few projects before deadline. Here’s a few topics for you to mull over and e-mail me about in the meanwhile:

  • I suspected that X-Men wasn’t really that good a movie, but I was so pleased that didn’t fuck it up as much as they could that I wound up really enjoying it. Plus, they got Wolverine right, which was the most important thing in the movie. How much, though, did you have to choke back YOUR nerdy instincts because of the ways they played fast and loose with the continuity of the comic book? (For example, why were Iceman and Jubilee students at the same time in the movie? Why, the very idea…!)
  • New York may not be the best city in the world in everyone’s eyes, but it has its perks. I was riding the Metro in Washington, D.C., yesterday morning, and everyone just looked so boring. Hardly anyone cute or funky or insane in sight. What fun is that?
  • Is it the jinx effect that’s making my life so aggravating right now?
  • I caught about ten minutes of Sex in the City this weekend, a sequence in which Miranda and her impossibly sexy (because of the dork factor that I love so much) boyfriend and she were talking about the number of sexual partners they had. that’s always a thorny issue to bring up with people you date, isn’t it? I always worry that if I tell I may come across as a total trashcan, or some prude who’s passed up even more opportunities than I took. Not that I worry so much about what people think on this issue, but I have my own conflicted notions about whether or not I’ve been too free-wheeling over the last few years. Sometimes I think I have, but more often than that I just regret all the chances I’ve passed up over the years because I was feeling too prudish or too unattractive or too shy.

Gay Shame

It’s Homo Overload…whoops, I mean Gay Pride Week here in New York, so I guess it’s only fitting that I chime in on the subject. But before I do, I just want y’all to think about this question posed by the Paris ACT UP chapter: “Proud of what?”

Gay Pride doesn’t inspire any particular pride in me. In fact, it makes me cringe with embarrassment and loathing. Not the idea of it, but the actual event in all its glitzy, our-way-or-the-highway madness. I don’t even know where to begin. (Paul Baker’s Burn Your Jockstrap site articulates my frustrations with gay culture much better than I ever could, anyway, so go look at that.) The homos are pretty homogenous — at least within each of their cliques — and it irritates me that there’s a parade to prove it.

The thing to keep in mind is that I love being gay. I mean, there’s no question about it. I’m really, really gay. And yes, I’m proud of it. I don’t mean that I’m a prancing nancy, or a pumped-up pretty boy, or straight-acting bear (all of which are terms that could be used to describe people I love). I’m Sparky. I am, among other things, an enthusiatic lover of other fellas. And goddamn I’m proud of that! It’s a part of me, and a pretty significant part, one which influences a lot of the other parts.

Coming out wasn’t a huge dilemma for me, even though I did it at the ripe old age of 21. I did it when the time was right for me, when I had the insight and energy to deal with that aspect of life. No trauma, just a couple of awkward conversations. But to get to that point, I had to figure out some stuff about my life and the world around me, and that’s good. If I weren’t gay, I may not have thought as much about what makes me the person I am. I’m proud that I had to ask myself difficult questions, and proud that I sorted out some sort of direction in a sea of conflicting opinions. I’m proud that I chose for myself what I want, and didn’t hold myself to what my folks or my school or my friends naturally assumed would be the way things worked.

I didn’t shut off that way of thinking when I confronted gay culture, which is why I get so incensed by this feeling that the so-called gay counter-culture would, if it could, impose the same kind of rigorous expectations on me as the so-called mainstream. screw it. I’m not any more likely to go to the gym to beef up my tits than I am to marry the girl next door and settle down in a house in Nutley, New Jersey, or shoot heroin in a crack den. I said “no” to all that. And I don‘t wish to be told I’m a loser for not making any one of those things a priority.

For me, gay pride is an everyday fact of life. An excuse to say, “That’s me, dig it or ditch it,” just like any other aspect of myself. I don’t want to be like every other gay person in the world, especially not if they’re trying to be just like everyone else (except, of course, for more inherently fabulous because they’re gay). If I were to let that happen, I’d be a whole let less Sparky, wouldn’t I?

Wilting in the Heat

As you may notice, all those software demos didn’t kill me, although I did get an extra nine hours of them that I wasn’t expecting. Every once in a while during the meetings, I would be amazed that people were actually deferring to my analysis of one damn thing or another, and it seemed just crazy. Who am I that I should be expected to have a reliable opinion about anything? Then, of course, I’d remember that I am almost thirty, after all (despite my boyish good looks), and I’ve been working in some variation of the same field for about 10 years. Then I would ask why I’m not more successful, and then I would remind myself that I purposely kept switching gears to learn or to do cool new things instead of just plodding ahead, and…

Oh well, you get it. The mind wanders when one is tired, right? But it’s been a week like that. Too poor to go out much. Too hot to have much sex when the opportunities present themselves (seeing as they’ve only been presenting themselves in places where it’s much too hot). Too much work to just hang out in the hammock and catch up on this month’s magazines (Wired, Paper, Metropolis, Emigre, Wallpaper, Nest). so all the mind wandering squeezes itself the little nooks and crannies of my attention span, forcing itself its way into my jam-packed mental space.

Today’s entry is dedicated to my faithful Manservant Hecubus, as a reminder that he’s still aces in my book, even if I have been too big a lazy bastard to write and catch up lately.

Room at the Inn

Things could get wacky here this summer. I don’t mean “here” as in this site, although there could be spillage into my online life, but “here” as in my house, since I’m taking in a lodger for the summer. My old roommate David, he of the Twine Tour, is going to be in town for the summer working on a movie and we figured that we could solve the problem of his accomodations and my rent increase with one fell swoop. I haven’t had a non-romantic roommate in a long time, and I have no interior walls in my loft, so this should be kooky.

Of course, things have always been kooky for David and I. When we first met, small-world factor reared it’s ugly head when he realized that the year before a good friend of his had been telling him about a guy (me) he met at a movie who also had a copy (just like David’s) of the photo-novelization of Can’t Stop the Music, the Village People movie. Kismet! Our kitsch-loving paths would be forever intertwined from then on.

In other news of kookiness, the new episode of Ooze is finally out, much to the dismay of the easily offended everywhere. My oldest pal Eddie and his cronies continue to spread the word of juvenile antics. Be sure to check out their promotional video for PWEETA, People Who Enjoy Eating Tasty Animals.