“itchy, scratchy seek poochie”

my new salon personals profile has reaped me an invitation to be the playmate of a 30-something new jersey couple. i don’t know between which lines about dorothy parker or lars van trier these people read “swinger” but i got a kick out of it anyway. at least they can quote the simpsons.

i’m back from the beach. it was beachy-keen, you could say, if you were lobotomized, for example, or a cheery redfaced fella. i came the nearest i’ve ever come to buying a two-piece. that is to say, i tried one on. it was bright red, the idea being that people would be so dazzled, or blinded, that they wouldn’t notice my not-quite-washboard stomach.

the primary drama of the trip occurred last night as we wound our way home from delaware via new jersey and pennsylvania. my mother called my grandmother and discovered that something was wrong with my grandfather. immediately my father shifted from Speed to Fly. immediately my not-quite-sturdy stomach reacted. when we finally made it to our house, merely a stop for my parents on their way to the hospital, they discovered that no one brought the new keys to the new locks on our new door.

ultimately we had to ask a family friend, an ex-priest and present sociology prof at umd, to break into our house for us. you wouldn’t necessarily think that an ex-priest or a sociologist could possibly be useful in the real world. but believe me, this one is a lifesaver. this morning he and his wife served us brunch.

counter culture

it’s a common correction of a common misconception that housefraux in the fifties had sex drives. but even better, sez this article, apparently they had sex records and went to hear sexy stand-up routines. not bad for a generation of women in bobs and girdles.

i’m off to the beach for a week. hopefully our power will manage to stay on throughout. & i will manage not to think about grad skool or the GREs even once.

shaken, not stirred

the fucking gres, man. why didn’t anyone tell me they were hard? or was that what people were telling me implicitly with their raised eyebrows when i told them i didn’t feel like studying?

well, at least they’re over. i did fine on the verbal, which is what counts. but it’s hard not to be affected — and by “be affected” i mean “have your eyeballs leap from the sockets and plummet to their gooey deaths on the keyboard” — after seeing your beyond-pitiful score on the math section. they need to make up a new word for how pitiful my math score was. & by “they” i mean the assholes responsible for putting clearly imaginary words in the verbal section to trip me up.

sigh. let’s just hope it gives the admissions people at iowa and nyu a good chuckle before they admit me.

personal

i updated my profile at salon. i’d completely forgotten i had one; i posted it in 2001. it was completely out of date. still, i can just hear the naysayers now: internet is on its way out, who would answer a personals ad, don’t you already have a boyfriend? what’s next, friendster?

i say, you can never be too careful.

past

a random oldie, revised:

you are a cat

No matter how many times

I kill you off:

drop you out of poetic windows;

drown you; chloroform you; then

wipe my hands

on a page,

you come back, dripping, merry,

your eyes greener than ever,

and your fur still soft

You curl up against me, purring,

and though I hear it�s bad for cats,

I feed you warm milk words.

the pillow book

last night i dreamt that henry ward beecher walked in on me hugging a boy, pulled a gun and shot the boy six times through. i screamed and screamed but didn’t wake up. for the rest of the dream, in which i was supposed to be under beecher’s control, i had to pretend that boy hadn’t been murdered and that i didn’t keep seeing replays in my mind.

it couldn’t have been what i was reading before i fell asleep, because i was reading sei shonagon, a copy of which i only just located at second story books years after i stopped looking. the snicket books are lodged close enough to the forefront of my mind to potentially cause nightmares, and so are ehrenreich’s nickel and dimed and c mcc’s member of the wedding, both of which i began recently. but holding literature responsible — isn’t that what nazis and censors do?

it couldn’t have been what i was eating, because i had fruit salad for dinner, and nothing bad ever happens on account of fruit salad.

i suppose it could have been what i was watching. the sopranos are notoriously violent and they showed the episode last night where dr. melfi gets raped in the parking garage. but i watched sex and the city immediately thereafter and the wedding was so cute that surely it gooed and cooed over the morbid residues in my subconscious, rendering them harmless.

or it could have been a result of the general recent topsy-turviness. my grandfather’s still in the hospital, recovering from kidney failure. my house still seems to expect my dog to return. the house itself is in the midst of a face-lift. and i’m applying to mfa programs.

i managed to write a draft of my Who Am I, What Do I Want admissions essay today. perhaps that will inspire dreams of satisfaction and optimism tonite.

all about the gay

as occasionally happens, when one is lucky, my train ride — which extended an extra hour, as often happens when one is NOT lucky, or every tuesday and thursday — was brightened by the presence of a stranger. i did not handpick my gentleman companion. friday afternoon amtrak rushes wrest the power from your hands and put it in fate’s. but fate’s hands deposited me gently beside an elderly distinguished african-american man, a man who revealed himself to be, once we began to talk, once of the gayest adults i have ever met in my life.

he dressed as though awaited the second coming of the 70s. he wore three chunky silver rings on one hand and two on the other. one after another he mentioned his “friends.” he said, “the other night, when i was watching sex and the city…” he quoted dorothy parker. or, misquoted, actually — i got to correct him. mostly i listened, starry-eyed. he invoked lana turner. in fact when i confessed i hadn’t seen imitation of life he nearly leapt from the moving car and with me in his well-maintained hands marched to the nearest blockbuster in aberdeen, maryland. he told me about living in miami. he told me about working in television. and last but not least, he picked up on a subtle reference i’d dropped into the conversation and said, “that’s right: i pulled a scarlett o’hara.”

my family greeted me at the train station and we all went out to dinner. we parked, as usual, in a church lot next door to a family friend of ours. he pays for the parking lot lights; we get to use one space.

after dinner upon returning to the car we heard a distinctive voice. “mr xxxxxx?” i said, turning around, and my brothers turned too. there, standing next to us, was our old science teacher & our unanimous favorite. born a catholic in the wild, he converted to judaism later in life and got a position at our school for spoiled jewish kids. he used to urge us to embrace our faith with, well, a convert’s zeal. if my friends and i, the good kids, talked when we were supposed to be praying, he would approach us and beg, “if gold rusts, what will iron do?”

and here he was, in dupont circle, on shabbes, in a church parking lot, standing very close to a man who looked like he belonged to the church. (he didn’t seem amused when we explained our deal with the lights.) mr xxxxxx exclaimed, we exclaimed, we said hi and made introductions. but the awkwardness was palpable. we knew he was gay, of course, but i never would have imagined that even in his other life he would not wear a kippah.

i’d never had granola for breakfast before. that shit is strong! first i couldn’t even finish the 1/2 cup. then it knocked me out: having contact-ed and everything, i fell back into bed and slept until 1. there should be a warning on the bag, or something.

what prolly assisted the granola was that i spent yet another night meaning to go to sleep straightaway and instead staying up all-hours talking to el(she who once was lazyqueer)iz. with no apparent desire to accomodate our need to Would You Rather… each other til the early a.m., her alarm went off both this morning and last. ugh.

of course i should be doing stuff to prepare for my departure on friday. so far i haven’t been able to motivate myself. but instead of focusing on the negative, i should be proud of what i have done:

• watched the first part of kissing jessica stein and the last of american pie 2
  

• went up to the counter of the cafe where i ate lunch yesterday to ask for a doggybag and had the guy at the register ask, “what, do you want my number?”
  

• crossed the brooklyn bridge on foot
  

• nailed down 2 recommendations for the grad skool process
  

• learned from my parents i racked up a whopping $450 cell phone bill because (heh heh!) no one told me the plan wasn’t an unlimited one (heh heh!)
  

• spent only change on lunch today
  

• made plans to visit hipster brooklyn so i can cross that off my to-do list too
  

• bought a train ticket home. bye bye ny …

that’s relatively extensive, don’t you think?

i think i’m having a blog identity crisis. i’d call a specialist for help but my phone mysteriously stopped working. i’d turn to my constant companion for advice but tragedy whirlwinded him away to his family late last night.

my life is neither boring nor depressing. somehow i just can’t seem to write about it. maybe cause the issues occupying thoughtspace are at once weighty and banal (death, for example. and the future. ha! what’s to say?

except, i miss my dog. i’m bracing myself for going home and for the first time in 12 years not having her smiling goofily and wagging her tail, shedding, looking vacant, or plopping melodramatically down on the carpet. my family’s had to cope with her sudden cancer and sudden death up close. i’ve had the luxury of condoling via telephone and letting my last days in new york city distract me.

right there, that’s guilt, see? a domestic species: familial, it says. don’t tap on the glass, you’ll wake it up. just look.)

i’m still doing stuff, running around research, reading screenplays at work. but it’s all winding down.

birthday cake for breakfast

most recently, in my series of action/adventure-packed days, i returned from the plymouth congregational church where henry ward beecher preached during the 2nd half of the 19th century. in his day preachers were like movie stars. people came from all over the country to hear him, as well as from manhattan in droves, to the point where some ingenious fella christened “beecher’s ferries” specifically for the purpose of bringing congregants across the river.

my tour guide in the church, a woman who looked remarkably like what i may look like at her age, plus 80’s glasses and a muumuu, made it abundantly clear at the outset that she would not discuss the scandal. “that was a bump in the road of a long glorious career,” she said sternly. “it would be like judging clinton’s presidency by that thing with the intern.”

i refrained from pointing out that clinton’s thing with the intern did happen, and consequently that parallel was not necessarily one she wanted to draw. i got an hour and a half’s worth of hwb’s life apart from the scandal, which involved some amazing abolitionist work and some very touching stories. but mlk jr. had an affair too, didn’t he? a man can still be a rightfully revered man and have committed adultery, or even still be a hypocrite in some senses.

on a non-morally-relativist note, i had a dream come true moment last night. my broadway faithful aunt marjy took me to see bernadette peters play mme rose in gypsy. since i was 12 years old, i wanted two things: to be bernadette peters, and to see her onstage. she was entirely as breathtaking as the above review makes her seem. my aunt, a veteran of shows and star showcasings, called her rose one of the best musical theater performances she’d ever seen.

and this came, in my case, on the heels of a weekend-long folk music extravaganza. everyone and their mother was there: swatties, high skool friends, their magically reappearing ex-boyfriends. white but diverse, as masses of 15,000 white people go. friendly and cheerful as always, and well staffed with happy leftist performers from dar williams to tracy grammer to arlo guthrie.