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31 March 2004
I finally got accepted by a trade school I half-way want
to attend. This brightens the picture a bit. Still waiting on UCLA and NYU. I’m on the waitlist at Berkeley, which is
my first choice.
29 March 2004
I am enjoying the brandied cherries I put up last June. I want to make enough this summer to get me through trade school next fall. The sketch
of a recipe: wash the cherries and discard any with bruises or tears. Snip the stems to about 1 cm in length. Prick each cherry
with a pin just once. Add a cup of sugar and the cherries to a quart jar and fill with a nice vodka or brandy. Screw on the
cap and shake gently once or twice a day to dissolve the sugar. After a week, park them in the fridge. Wait a month.
I saw my next husband at the gym Friday evening. Blond, foxy,
buzz cut, nice smile, a little shorter than me, but more muscular; just the way we like it. He was wearing loose clothing
so I didn’t realize just how built he was until I saw him reaching up for his locker, and his shirt suddenly stretched
tight across his lats and rolling shoulders. He gave a me wry smile when he saw that I saw that he had forgotten his combination.
I thought of him all day Saturday and what I’d say to him if I ever saw him again. He was there on Sunday, but this
time he was with his Daddy—the man he'll look like in twenty years; I'm still trying to keep my Lenten vows, so I moved
on. As Rimpoche would say, it’s time to practice empathic joy, i.e., be happy (not envious) of other’s good fortune.
I went to a housewarming at S’s new apartment. She
has lots of cool gay friends, but none of them were there. Her straight friends are mostly very cool, the champagne was chilled,
and the conversation rollicked from real estate, the collapse of the Arab Summit in
Tunisia, the unflappable Richard Clarke, Maimonides, and on to gossip about those who weren’t there. Catty things may have been said about someone’s current rebound
boyfriend (whom, coincidentally, I have taken on a pony ride). I was cajoled into making blini (to go under the caviar). Fortunately,
I am a trained professional, and I managed not to get any buckwheat batter or melted butter on my smart white Zara shirt (last
season, but not ill-fitting, in case you’re wondering).
6 AM
I'm still here. Suffering from insomnia. Shaved my head again, since I
missed another appointment with my hairdresser. By Wednesday I'm going to have to tell some of the trade schools that accepted
me that I don't want to go there after all, even though I haven't heard from my top choices. If only the postman delivered
mail more than four days a week.
25 March 2004
It hasn't rained in over a month; the air is full of pollen; my eyes itch,
and my big nose is full of snot.
Here's a glimpse of me in a half-baked homage to him:
22 March 2004
The change in weather made me a little melancholy yesterday.
I read the papers and learned about Our Leader’s fearful, futile attempts to smear the character of Richard Clarke,
the latest insider to spill the beans about Captain Ahab’s Iraqi monomania. The puppet masters are worried that it will
all slip away from their fingers come November; they might end up out of power, but their cronies will surely reward their
malfeasance (treason?) with some cushy corporate sinecure. The $38 million invested
in an undisclosed location has certainly returned a handsome profit for Halliburton, hasn’t it? Just coincidental, I’m
sure.
After the gym I made a little piggy of myself (twice). Details another day. Piglet two
took me on a very pleasant trip down memory lane.
20 March 2004
I’m just glad that we’re so much safer today
than we were a year ago, and I want you to know that if I were a supreme court justice, I’d still be impartial even
though a named party in a lawsuit I was about to hear took me, my son, and my son-in-law on a duck-hunting trip.
Another hot day, but there’s still 18 feet/6 m of snow on the ground at Mount Shasta . The farmers’ market is getting crowded with flower-buying stroller-pushers in $175 haircuts, so C. and I will have
to start going earlier. I got: little artichokes, sorrel, chard (I see a creamy gratin coming up), ground pork, and some more
tulips.
Since everyone—my sisters, my friends, casual acquaintances,
my therapist—has been encouraging me (read: nagging and whining) to date someone (what are they trying to tell me? Why
is everyone ganging up on me about this?) I went to MAX SF cocktail party last night at the Gay & Lesbian Center. It’s
the first time I’ve set foot in that building, even though it’s technically in my neighborhood. I was hoping it
would be a place where I could meet nice single guys (instead of other people’s boyfriends), but there were only two
other guys within a dozen years of my age: the bartender on the low side (he was so young that I know I seemed contemporaneous
with his grandfather), and many gentlemen in their 50s and 60s on the other side. The two guys my age were a “life coach”
(a profession, which, despite its altruistic goals, attracts the Massively Self-Absorbed and boundary-obsessed) and a software
guy whose grandfather emigrated from India at the same time as mine to study at Berkeley. They probably knew each other back
in the 1920s. There is no escape. The life coach got offended when I suggested that Geminis rule the world; apparently he
believes in astrology, and his little Leo feelings were hurt when I told him that the secret to managing Leos was to give
them the impression that they were the center of attention (it's true).
Given my conversational maladroitness, is it any wonder that I’m single?
17 March 2004
I worked out with one of my closest friends this evening,
and he kept pointing out guys whose blogs he has been reading. Yikes! He doesn’t know about Cunégonde, I don’t
want him to know about it, he’d be mad at me for not telling him about it, and he’d be reading about himself.
I’d like to point him to some blogs that he’d enjoy, but then, since he’s a bit compulsive, he’d probably
check out every one of their links until he came across mine. Even though there are no pictures, he’d know it’s
me in a second. He’s not the kind of friend who’d just read it without telling me; there will be hell to pay when
he does find out.
And since I am in a fourteen-year-old-girl-with-her-diary
mode, here’s today’s Crush Report:
-
no sign of the Catalan (though his boyfriend was there)
-
Blackbird seemed to be having himself a nice long sauna,
with all that that entails
-
Tall & Freckled was working out with his boyfriend;
I circumspectly ignored them on the gym floor and noticed that T&F seemed indifferent, but then, as I walked into the
showers, he gave me a nice, warm smile as he was drying off. His boyfriend was nowhere in sight. Maybe he’s not so indifferent
after all.
-----------------------
So far I’ve received the thin envelope from trade schools
at Columbia, Michigan, and Stanford. I’m still waiting to hear from Berkeley, NYU, UCLA, and USC (would I even go?). I have no idea where I’ll be living six months from now.
14 March 2004
I spent a nice afternoon in Dolores Park reading the NY Times and
delimiting my tan line.
What the heatwave has done to my tulips:
13 March 2004
Of course, all that wine last night meant a blistering headache
when I woke up. It’s a small town: at the farmers’ market this morning, one of the vendors asked me if I had enjoyed
my dinner last night at the Liberty Café. How did she know I had been there less than twelve hours before? She was too busy
to explain. After the market, C. and I headed over to Caffè Greco in North Beach for our usual cappuccino and gossip. Who
else came for coffee? The Catalan and his boyfriend, hand-in-hand. They had that lazy post-coital Saturday morning glow about
them. So sweet.
12 March 2004
It’s something of a relief to actually be working on
the big project. We got off to a rocky start.
I started the day at the jobsite south of Market, got our
crew started, buzzed up to Marin for a few meetings, and came back to the jobsite to reconnoiter and run the weekly progress
reports. The IT guy trusts me to run scripts from a DOS wndow. I love it. I was a self-taught programmer. I have
programmed Fortran on punch cards (yes, kids, I am that old). I cut my teeth on UNIX systems; the command line is still my friend. The
whole icon-driven Xerox PARC/Macintosh/Windows paradigm is just mollycoddling clutter for illiterates. We’ve traded
ease for efficiency. All those damn icons convey so much less information than
actual filenames (with their extensions). [Of course, lurking in the background
as a counterweight is Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game (I’d supply a link, but most of the ones I found missed
the irony of the novel. Try to find Lewis Lapham’s essay or read the book yourself.)]
I ran into B. at the gym. We compared notes about each of
our Secret Boyfriends Nos. 1-3. The Catalan was there, still my No. 1; I saw
his boyfriend; they weren’t working out together, but the boyfriend was keeping a close eye on him. I wonder if the
Catalan gives him much cause for jealousy. (Hmm.) I kept my distance; it’s
useless to try to talk to a guy in a situation like that. Since I'm working again and have rejoined the bourgeoisie, we went
for dinner at the Liberty Café up in Bernal Heights. We started with a glass of Pineau des Charentes and then a bottle of German Riesling; a lovely turnip and sorrel soup for B.; a squid and chicories salad for me; and
a delicious braised beef (chuck eye, the best cut for braising). I can’t wait to go back. I loved the unfussy attention
to detail; the chef gets the point: fresh, seasonal, local, and delicious.
And I saw one of my longest crushes, J., sweet, mellow, talented,
hunky, blond J. He got a little chunky for a while, but now he’s back in better shape than ever. He’s earnest,
but in a good way. I haven’t seen him for a few years; all my old feelings for him came rushing back at the first glance.
I realized that I’d love to have a boyfriend if he could be like J. He’s what I want. If only he were gay.
8 March 2004
Earthquake weather! It was 82 today, and it’s still
warm at bedtime.
The Catalan really does have a boyfriend. Why am I wasting my time on this one? It's
much easier than dealing with someone who's available.
7 March 2004
I think I’m forgetting someone else’s birthday
today. Forgetfulness is going to earn me another ex-friend. The seventh of March. Who could it be?
Friday night I went with B. to the opening of the POP! show at SF MOMA. Unfortunately, the museum had hired a DJ to play period music, which meant that even two bourbons could not ease the torture
of the Doors, Lou Reed, and most painful, the Beatles. In fifty years, when all the Baby Boomers are dead, no one will have
to hear the Beatles again. They’ll fade into their deserved status as a novelty act, like Stephen Foster (“Camptown
Ladies,” anyone?). The trite tunes (all their songs sound like variations on “Yellow Submarine”), the portentous
and incoherent lyrics (e.g., “Imagine”) – all of that will just disappear to all but puzzled musicologists.
It’s something to look forward to in my old age. In any case, the exhibit only took 15 minutes to buzz through, since
most of it is just re-presentations of clichés, pixilated versions of newspaper clippings (i.e. Lichtenstein, Warhol). You
don’t actually need to see a real Ed Ruscha, Jasper Johns or a Warhol to appreciate it. The thumbnail version is just
as good; there’s no technique or nuance to get lost in reproduction. I was pleasantly diverted by being cruised every
so often by a shaved-head hottie who was on a date with a woman. Hold on tight to your love, baby. It was warm when I woke up this morning,
and stayed warm enough that I could go to Black Sands Beach. The water was cold, the tide was high, but I needed the day to
myself. I’m not used to spending the whole day at work with other people; I had forgotten how draining that is.
I hooked up with the second-cutest guy at the beach; the first cutest was the young boyfriend of some guy I know from the
gym, so he was off limits. The SCG lives part-time here, part-time in LA, where he makes little movies. He was one of those
tricks who, by a chance remark or random personal trait, set you off in a different direction. I met him a few years ago at
the Stud; I liked his build and confident little smile (the kind of smile I’ve learned is an almost infallible sign
of a big dick). I took him home that night. He had a very nice body indeed, and seeing him made me realize that I had been
slacking off at the gym; because of him, I’m in much better shape now than I otherwise would be. The SCG complimented me today on my progress; I complimented him on his, and then we went to the little
cove and admired each others’ physiques as much as the waves would allow.
6 March 04
I’m back, but this time with a shaved head. I had to
cancel another yet haircut, and since my hairdresser couldn't schedule me for a week or two, I avoided a complete meltdown
(and four weeks of bad hair) by walking home and shaving it all off. It's now shorter than my beard stubble. I think it looks
very fuck-me, so we'll see if someone wants to go for the pony ride.
His post about guys in airports reminded me of the time Steve and I went
to Santa Fe about ten years ago. We had to change planes in Phoenix. We were sitting in the holding pen by the gate; I was
reading a magazine, oblivious to the world; Steve began insistently nudging my leg with his. I knew that he wanted to tell
me something but didn’t want to say it aloud. I followed his gaze. Standing before us in profile was a pair of faded
Wranglers encasing like a calyx an amazing butt and a huge basket. We admired this vision in worshipful silence until it was
time to board. You know you have a great boyfriend when he doesn’t want you to miss a sight like that. We didn’t
see the pair of Wranglers on our flight, but he was waiting with us at the luggage carousel in Albuquerque. He picked up a
duffle bag and then a well-used saddle and hoisted it over his shoulder (we almost fainted). He was whistling as he left the
terminal.
And there's Lionel, a French kid who sat next to me
on a long night flight out of Houston, but that’s another story.
2 March 2004
I’ve worked 24 of the last 48 hours. It was a two-uniform
day: office togs from 8:30 to 5:15, then chef’s whites from 5:45 to 11:15 (catering in Pacific Heights). The drive down
through Marin back to San Francisco was incredibly beautiful. After all the rain and wind, the air is so clear that you can
see from Mount Tam to Mount Diablo; everyone brakes for a second as they exit the Waldo Tunnel to savor the view of the city
before heading down to the Golden Gate. I love living here.
I did figure out what I'm giving up for Lent, but I'm not sure I can write about it
here; it was so obviously a problem that it's kind of painful to admit that I even had to think about whether I should
stop doing something that's so clearly detrimental to my well-being. (Was that enough negatives in one sentence?)
1 March 2004
Almost a week
into Lent and I still haven’t given up anything. I once tried to give up yelling at other drivers; I failed almost every
day. It worked, though.
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