I’m glad that February is almost over. It wasn’t all bad, but it was much more stressful than I’d like. I hung out with Yolanda and his new Brazilian boyfriend on Friday night and again this morning. They spoke Portuguese most of the time, which reminded me that I’m two months behind in my plans to learn it this year, and it reminded me how much and how fast you learn a language if you just hear it and try to speak it all day. The boyfriend is very sweet but very incurious. He’s only interested in people and little comforts (like a big tub for his bubble baths at the hotel); sightseeing leaves him cold.  This is frustrating to Yolanda, who wants to know, see, and explain everything.

I’m turning into one of those people who get depressed on Sunday evenings as the thought of work comes upon them.

26 February 2004

Another day of painful meetings at work.

On another front, I survived the big rainstorm, though I did have puddles in my apartment from various leaks during the night.

At the gym tonight I worked up the courage to talk to an old trick, or rather a former trick, since he’s only about 28 now. He was 20 or so when we hooked up. My lust for him has not abated. He had the hot slim body of a boy/man then; he has a hot man’s body now; thicker, filled out, big daddy arms. He was alone today (and not with the guy I think is his boyfriend), and he always seemed to be near me or facing me as I worked out (shoulders and arms). When people ask me what my type is, I think of him. What else do I like about him? He speaks Catalan, he has a job that's actually helpful to other people, he has nice dark hair and eyes, and he’s serious about things. Next task: find out if he does, in fact, have a boyfriend.

23 February 2004

I saw my next husband at the gym this evening. He was leaving as I was changing. Dark hair, nice smile, slim but nice build. A project, perhaps, once my job situation has stabilized. Dating would bring too much uncertainty to my life now.

22 February 2004

My favorite kind of Sunday morning: I jump out of bed, open the curtains, turn on the heater, and run downstairs to get the papers. I get back in bed and read the Times and the Chronicle until I get too hungry to continue. I drag what’s left of the papers to the kitchen, put the kettle on, plug in the waffle iron, find the cornmeal and make waffles. By the time the first waffle is done, the tea is ready. I opened a jar of the strawberry jam I made last spring, sat down to enjoy the first waffle and the book review, and by then the apartment was not so chilly.

I’m going home this afternoon for a family dinner of chicken curry and rotis, just the way my Punjabi grandfather used to make them.

February 20, 2004

Last night at the restaurant, table 12 was occupied by a two couples who looked like they came straight offa his island. I wish I could have heard their voices; the Tri-State Italian accent drives me crazy with lust, perhaps because of my first boyfriend in New York, little Tommy. He lived with his mother in the Bronx, had great hair, worked at a fancy men’s clothing shop in the Village—on Charles Street?—and overspent on his credit cards, which his mother paid off periodically. He’s probably dead now, since when I knew him he was living pretty fast and snorting heroin (“It’s not addictive this way”). Dating me was convenient for him, since he could buy it at a number of emporiums just a block or so from my place in the East Village (that was long before it was colonized by NYU alumni). For some reason, he didn’t like the place across the street from me, the one mentioned in the Basketball Diaries.

How do you make up for forgetting (completely) the 40th birthday of one of your closest friends? He might be my ex-friend by now.

18 February 2004

So, I might end up cooking full time until this summer. It could be worse. It will probably be the last time for a long time that I work regularly as a professional cook. I know I’d come to resent it, but a regular job might be good for me.

The uncertainty of my future is driving me a little bit crazy. Thank god I have therapy in a half-hour.

11:30 PM: OK. I love Dr Melfi, my therapist. I also love having a good, hard workout when I’m stressed out. All those endorphins have carried me through the evening. I’ve made my peace with whatever happens with the big  project. I’ll be fine. I’ll make lots of money if it goes through, and if it doesn’t, I’ll just cook and look for temp jobs. In either case, it’s only for a few more months.

While driving to work this morning I had the distinct impression that I was driving to a funeral.  I stopped at Rulli in Larkspur and loaded up on $20 of pastry so that we’d have something to eat during the autopsy in the afternoon.  Last night I was planning my job search strategies. I was convinced that I wouldn’t have work after today. I’m broke. I paid the rent only two days ago. I’m overdrawn at one bank and barely solvent at another. Grim. For a long time I had a stash of fuck-you money so that I’d always be able to walk away from a job if I had to; I’ve spent all that. After the gym tonight I made myself a nice big Manhattan (with rye, not bourbon, of course) and since it tasted so more-ish. I had another one.

And as for your musings on friendships in lieu of boyfriends: that works for me. I don’t want the chaos dating would bring to my life, and I’m not sure I can deal at this point with being expected to have sex with the same person more than once or twice. I’d feel imposed upon, and I can rarely cum after the first or second time with a guy unless I resort to some baroque fantasy. Sometimes, when I know it’s not going to happen for me, I just help them have their fun and then propose a lovely hot shower. My friends will always be there for me; boyfriends, maybe not.

The other issue is that I'm so much more confident in both my jobs than I with guys: I can butcher and spit roast a whole pig to general acclaim and I can make a presentation to high-powered clients without breaking into a sweat, but it takes me so long to work up the nerve to approach a guy who seems like boyfriend-matieral that he's already dating someone else.

12 February 2004

I complain about San Francisco almost every day, but today, O!M!G! I am so proud to live here. Fuck you, backwards vowel states. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported:

In a historic act of civil disobedience, San Francisco defied state law and issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples Thursday, a move expected to ignite a constitutional showdown starting today. The city's action marked the first time in the United States that gays and lesbians could wed and have their marriages recognized by a government body.

The first same-sex marriages in the United States! I’m just waiting for the sacred unions of heterosexuals to begin unraveling. Will Our Leader start to fool around with interns? Will our married governor start acting like a cad whenever he’s around pretty women? Will divorced men stop paying child support? Will engaged couples cancel their weddings at the last minute? Will civilization end? Fasten your seat belts. It could be a bumpy ride tomorrow for your heterosexual neighbors. The thumping you hear in the apartment next door is the sound of flying fry pans. 

I’m glad I voted for Gavin Newsom. We all know that his nutty opponent, the oh-so-lefty Matt Gonzalez, would have had a commission to study the matter until it came to some kind of useless consensus (i.e., that marriage was an outmoded, patriarchal convention of the bourgeoisie), and nothing would have happened.

OK, there will be a backlash, but we have to start somewhere. Especially beautiful is that the first same-sex couple to marry in the US is Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon. They’ll celebrate 51 years of being together on Saturday.  Memo to Britney, Liza, Liz: here are your role models.

My boss’s little brother (age 47) came in to help us with the presentation we’re making tomorrow morning. Watching him was a master class in negotiation strategy (and in Excel). Something about working with your sibling means you can blast through things at lightning speed: the bond of trust is so strong that you don’t always have to explain your motives or view of a situation; the other one just trusts that’s it’s OK if you think it’s OK. I learned from working with my little sister that the bond means that if you can present yourselves with one voice, you’re actually far, far ahead of anyone else; two smart people together have already leapfrogged over the difficulties of the situation. It’s more than working together as a “team”; your loyalties are to each other, not the company or the client, and they can’t be broken apart by the temporary and mundane demands of work or lucre.

I’m trying very hard to keep my mouth shut about something, because I know from experience that what’s lukewarm analysis in my mind is scalding, life-altering criticism to others. The advantage of growing up in a family of thick-skinned, sharp-tongued vipers with volcanic tempers is that you can instinctively find and pierce the sole, unarmored interstice, and then everyone moves on. Eruption, lava flow, and then it’s over. Not good in a business situation. I’ve been unemployed before. Big whoop.

10 February 2004

I made it home just in time for my first babysitting assignment. My sister dropped my nephew off with me while she went to get her first haircut since he was born. We had some fun moments—he’s just learning that he can use his hands to grab things that he sees—but he also had to do a lot of screaming. I worried that the neighbors might think that I was doing something untoward to him. It was warm enough to go outside on my deck, and the fresh air seemed to calm him down, and I was glad to be able to exhibit him periodically as clothed, safe, intact, and contented. And then the screaming would begin again. I’ve never wanted to have children, but I am going to be the world’s best uncle.

8 February 2004

Thank god for Sugar at the Stud. Freaks and fat chicks and friends and scruffy guys. I hung out with the Pale Canadian again, and he ended up at my place again. Since he’s a regular at the Stud, the bartenders made our drinks extra strong; the headache this morning from what seemed like a half-pint of bourbon was not pretty. If all goes well, next month I will have two former gay lovers DJing at the Sugar.

Whether it was the hangover, Ovid's post-coital tristitia, or the modern post-coital anxiety syndrome (PCAS), I was in a foul mood by the afternoon. A good workout and another lentil soup experiment helped a little.

Just give me the sunshine.

7 February 2004

B. took me out to sushi last night (I had the cooked fish option, of course) and to a  play, In These Times by John O'Keefe, at a Traveling Jewish Theatre. It reminded me why I don’t like going to the theater. Maybe I would have hated it less if it had been half as long and if the acting hadn’t been so overwrought. Screaming and tears and shouting and impassioned whispers, all delivered with ripe, plummy mid-century theatrical accents. Also annoying were the knowing, ironic chuckles in the audience at any foreshadowing of the rise of the Nazi party in Germany in the 30s: the pseudo-intellectual equivalent of nudge-nudge, wink-wink.

It must be spring: I had lunch and a gossip outside in the sunshine today on Hayes Street with yet another person suffering from a breakup. She knew that it was over when she saw that her boyfriend had changed his Friendster profile to "single." And then the other sign of spring: an allergy attack: a half-hour of snot and sneezes. I’ve learned just to go with it and have myself a nice blowout. It feels so good afterward; my mood drops into depression beforehand and then lifts skyward when I wipe the last rivulet of snot from my face.

“West End Girls” at the gym this evening brought a smile to all the men of a certain age. One of my housemates in college had been to London and brought back the single; we featured it at one of our legendary house parties (perhaps it was the party where I almost got seduced by a woman (she had me on a bed in a locked room), or the perhaps it was the party where I was a don’t-miss featured attraction, passed out next to the toilet in the downstairs bathroom (it took me years and years to be able to tolerate gin again, and even now I can’t finish a gin-and-tonic without getting queasy)). We were impudently smug about WEG when it became a hit here months later.  O, to be young and chic again!

I wish I had a party to go to this weekend. Next weekend I’ll stay safely and warmly indoors: San Francisco hosts the International Bear Rendezvous, which coincides with Amateur Night (I volunteered to work Valentine’s Day at the restaurant). No, I’m not bitter about being single, and yes, my future husband will have a hard time finding me that way. 

4 February 2004

I wish that I could write that I’m simply savoring another palindromic date, but I’ve been swamped with work, I’m sick, and I got locked out of my apartment last night. The low-I.Q. turd of a handyman changed the front door and lock of my building yesterday while I was at work, but “forgot” to arrange to give me a key. I got home at 11:15 last night, sticky and stinky from grilling lamb for six hours, and spent the night on a friend’s couch. Your Cunégonde applied the glacier approach* with the landlord and handyman this morning when they said that I’d get the key by about 9:30. I had the key in my hand at 8:30.

I’m so busy that I had to cancel my haircut and therapy this week. Thus the inside and outside of my head are unkempt.

I found out today that two couples broke up; one was a new one for which I had high hopes; the other is an older, established couple, famous among their mutual friends for their apparent happiness. Their personalities and interests complimented each other; significant differences in wealth (and the possibilities that it provided for one of them) may have contributed to the break up. I was friends with P long before he became boyfriends with S. In the aftermath of the divorce, I think I will become better friends with S, and P will move out of my univers affectif.

_________________

* polite, icy, and hard enough to cut through solid granite