love and boringness and moving

It is a cold and drizzly Sunday in Buenos Aires, and I actually left the house to go about my day, and retreated home after about 100 meters, where I have spent the day eating popcorn and day-old facturas filled with dulce de leche.

I am in love, and part of me hates it. I hate the fact that last night my roommate had to practically beg me to go to a party with her because I kind of didn't see the point of going out if I wasn't going to pick up boys. I hate the fact that I was sniffly today and didn't want to tell Marido that it was because I did a bunch of coke last night. I hate the fact that I am perfectly sated to lie in bed and just think of him, or to spend an hour cooing with him over video chat. I hate the fact that I feel stupid and boring but I don't care because I am in love. I hate that I cannot work, cannot write, because the only thing going through my mind is: Aww! He's so sweet! Twelve more days until I see him again!

It has been a rather intense week apart since we parted ways at the Madrid Airport. Somehow we became absorbed into an email exchange this week that involved the words "sex" and "marriage" and "long-distance" and "non-exclusive," all terribly heavy things to be floated through Gmail with a person you met about oh, six weeks ago. But as intense and sort of unwanted as the emails were, I'm glad they happened. I feel as though we are on the same page, and this is a new feeling for me. We are in love and trying to be responsible and respectful with ourselves and the other. Even though we feel like breathless teenagers, we also feel very wise. It is exciting but also boring. I like you? You like me? Great! Great! Okay, great. Now what?

Well, the 'now what' part is actually a big deal in this case, seeing as I currently live about 6500 miles away from him. 'Currently' being the operative word, of course. That status is going to change in three short days. Then, I don't know. He's formally invited me to crash with him for the entire month of August that I'm in SF, and that sounds both lovely and crazy. Not crazier than going to Spain with him, but close. I know I've joked that he's my Marido since the day we met, but...I can't help but feel like I'm just getting caught up in this delirium. He's already booked a flight to come to see me in Chicago the following weekend. And instead of feeling overwhelmed by all of this, I am fanatically thrilled. Great! Great! Great! Snooze.

I find myself constantly thinking, "Is this really happening? I need a nap."

what to say

The day of my last post, Marido and I left Navarra and went to the coast. I think all the togetherness was wearing on me, because as soon as we got there, I left him in the pensión and went to work on my article, which was sort of a pointless thing to do on a Sunday afternoon in Spain, because everything was closed. I took a breather in the plaza and tried to soothe my nerves and to coax myself into the loving place where Marido seemed to be, mentally, and that I seemed to be dancing around like a scared bird.

When Marido showed up to meet me, he had some bad news. He'd gotten word--through Facebook, of all things--that his mother was in a coma.

We had a less-than-pleasant evening, where I tried to take care of him the best I could. But when you don't know someone very well, you don't know how they react to stress and what helps them. We talked it through a bit, but it was a rough night where we sort of hated each other and felt helpless. While we didn't fight, there was a moment where I sat on a street corner and cried because I didn't know what to do but I was sure that I wasn't making things better and was actually adding to his stress just by being there. When you are exhausted and stressed out, the last thing you want to do is worry about how your date is doing. His mother died the next day.

I suppose many people would define this as when the honeymoon ended, but with the uncertainty gone and the finality of death, we were able to mourn for a while and carry on. He wasn´t expected to return to Argentina for the cremation, and he was at peace with things, so we moved on. This would seem callous to a lot of people, but maybe this is just another reason why Marido and I get on so well. We have similar attitudes toward a lot of things in life, and death is one of them.

The rest of the honeymoon progressed without incident, so much so that there is little to report. We motored around and observed each other as closely as we observed the countryside and the people. But while Marido poured his heart out to me about how he felt, I kept my cards very close to my chest, so close that he kept asking me what I was thinking and why I wouldn´t tell him. The truth is that I spent a significant amount of time thinking about Ex and Joe, and during almost every night I dreamed of Ex. That is not something you want to tell your new boyfriend on your faux-honeymoon in Spain. Whenever he asked me what I was thinking, I didn't really know what to say.

Something amazing about Marido is that he is extremely open. He would explain everything--from why he likes me so much to why he was changing lanes. This could be tiresome to some, but for someone like me it is kind of perfect, because I never have to wonder what he´s thinking. It´s too bad that I can´t really return the favor at the moment, but I am doing the best I can. At times I felt pressured to echo some of the sentiments he was expressing, but it is a little fast for me. I am surprised I even let him hold my hand.

I adore this man and I miss him, but I am glad we have this time apart now to slow it down a little. I actually think that my heart is full and I have to let go of some people before I can be in love with him. Surprisingly, the person I have to let go of is Joe. When I go to see Joe in San Francisco, I can't have sex with him, and this makes me sad, because that is something we do very well together. The thought of seeing him and telling him I can´t or won´t sleep with him any more makes me terribly sad. I thought of this on the honeymoon, that this is not something I could do with a clear conscience, even though I slept around when I was with Joe. And it's not just the sex. I was always waiting for the moment to be in love with Joe, to admit that I was in love with him.

Timing is funny like that. It´s not just timing, of course. There are other aspects of Marido that have landed us together in a way that never worked out for me and Joe. And while I spend nights gflirting with Marido, I feel ready to give up others to be with him, but it is still sad. I know that Joe will be sad, too. And this whole time, I thought the reason we weren´t committed to each other was so we could avoid being sad. And here it is. Again.

Any advice on ending things with your favorite sex partner?

honeymooning

It's been a week of honeymooning with Marido, and things have been so luscious and perfect that I am not quite sure where to begin. He met me at the airport in Madrid and has been driving me around Spain, France, the Basque Country, stopping in at cute town after cute town, lying on crowded beaches, winding our way through sunny fields and tree-filled mountains. He is doing all the driving because I don't know how to drive manual transmission cars.

We figured out that I met him on Madrid exactly a month after our first date, but with our schedules this is probably one of the longest fifth dates in history. It is completely overwhelming and I am often silent on our long drives, in awe of it all, disbelief. I think I would have an easier time understanding if something was wrong---if he was giving me creepy vibes or if he were a terrible lover or if we were constantly having communication breakdowns. But everything seems so natural and easy that instead I feel confused and vaguely panicky, like I must be missing something. Because what?the?fuck?is?going?on? How did I end up on this French beach with this impossibly charming man who somehow always knows the right thing to say? Has he been cyber-stalking me all of my life, preparing for this trip together, anticipating exactly what I love, what I want, what is important to me, and what will make me fall completely in love with him? It sure as hell seems like it.

Sometimes I look over at him and am filled with an incredible sensation of being completely safe and protected yet terrified like never before. The day before I left, I told my buddy B that I was sure I would fall in love this week, and here it is, happening. He said to me, "Falling in love isn't the hard part." And he's right, of course. We can love most anyone, but it's making it work that is hard. And when we begin to talk about the future, which we dabble in at times during our long drives, it fills me with fear. It's not as though I have any specific plans at all, but I was happy before I met Marido. I have plans to go to Mexico, and plans to go to Budapest, to take photos and write books and fall in love. And I'm scared that I will wander off with this man and forget all of these plans. Because I feel like he could ask me to go anywhere with him, and I would go. I mean, he did talk me into crossing the ocean to run with the bulls with him. On our second date.

loving it

I'm back home in Buenos Aires but leaving Saturday for Madrid, where I will meet Marido at the airport.

I totally freaked out yesterday. I was tired but bursting with anticipation and I couldn't do anything but flail around in the whirlpool of anxiety and excitement. I just know that I am going to fall in love. I am like 85 percent there already. For some reason this made me very upset. I cried a few times this week when I thought about it. I don't know why, but I am terrified.

I sent an email to my girl, the bride-to-be, seeking some words of wisdom and she really came through for me. I was all upset and unsure and feeling sick. In addition to the teary eyes, I have had trouble eating this week. ME--the girl who wakes up in the middle of the night, hungry. But I was just sick at the thought that I might fall in love--for real in love, and that Marido could be the last man I love--either because I will love him forever, or he will hurt me really badly and I will never love again. But bride-to-be had some great words for me, about trusting your body and yourself. And she said: it's not your job to know what will happen, or to control what will happen.

It's not? Somehow, I thought it was. Really. But she's absolutely right. All the craziness has been me trying to anticipate what will happen and be ready for it. But that is not love, and that is not life. I need to love in the same way that I live...with gusto, and with the knowledge that I can handle anything that comes my way.

And now I am just giddy!

this is what crazy looks like

I am totally insane this week. I have not been able to sleep, but I don't feel tired or even irritated. I wonder if I am just not used to being this happy. It has been hard to breathe without the aid of cigarettes.

Marido returned to Buenos Aires a few days early so we have been hanging out a lot. I was very excited to see him, to see if I would still feel the same about him. I did. It is not the excitement of meeting someone totally new and strange and beautiful. It is the strange sensation of being with someone who seems to understand you completely, without really knowing anything about you. I don't really get it, but I don't know if there's really anything to get.

During lunch of our second date he asked me if I wanted to go to Spain with him. Of course I want to go to fucking Spain with him. But whether I can, that is another story. And whether I should--well, I don't really traffic in those terms anymore.

Basically, this is what my brain and blood and body has felt like for the past three weeks--



Of course I have reservations about going on an overseas trip with a man I have spent a total of like 12 hours with. I asked him, "Is that a good idea?" And he said, "If we don't do crazy things like go to Spain with someone you just met--who will?"

You can see why I like this guy. My finger is on the trigger. But I am nervous--not because I think anything bad will happen, but because I'm pretty sure if I do go, I will fall completely in love. What a terrifying notion. I wondered aloud what the chances are of him being totally psychotic and he said, "I think you are more likely to be psychotic than I am."

I also just turned my remaining 5 weeks in Buenos Aires to 4 weeks, because I have to go to Montevideo next week to shoot another story (or two, hopefully). Jumping a plane to Spain would cut the 4 weeks down to about 10 days. That is just weird. It is all so much to handle that all I can do is lie awake and think about it until the sun rises. And the thoughts start with, "I need to sell at least three stories in the next three weeks," and then end up with "Hm, perhaps you should get the elastic fixed on that cute black dress of yours."

I have no idea what the hell is going on, but I only feel partially in control.

planning for the future

My computer is out of commission and I just wrote this long blog and then accidentally erased it because I´m not used to the foreign keyboards. It happened in an instant! Meh.



Anyhow, I was talking about all the dangerous thinking that´s been going on during the past extremely insomniatic two weeks. I´ve been in this utopic state of mind where I can do no wrong, and nothing bad can befall me, and so of course I´ve been entertaining all sorts of ideas that involve Djibouti, Dakar, Micronesia, Bucharest, Budapest, Macau. You know.



I was stressed out because I have six weeks left in Buenos Aires and a decision has to be made concerning my apartment--whether to sublet it, or to leave it completely--and I am terrible at making decisions more than a few weeks out. I have basically tabled my plans to return to San Francisco in the fall, seeing as that would doom me to a happy life surrounded by the people I love most, and decided to strike out into new territory. The two top contenders at the moment are Mexico City and Budapest. Dreaming about places I have no knowledge of is great company for insomnia. But I also took a long time puzzling over if I have totally forgotten how hard it was when I first moved here, deaf and dumb and lonely and wandering. Yet I haven´t forgotten. I suppose I am just so surprised that I found so much peace and happiness here, that I want to look for it everywhere.



There are plenty of people who can understand this point, of not wanting to just sit back and enjoy beautiful something they´ve discovered, and would much rather move onto the next heartbreaking challenge. I am just now beginning to get this. But with people, it seems, and looking for love--I´m not sure how similar these things are. It seems to me that looking for a perfect place to call your home is kind of like looking for your true love, and it is especially true when you think of it in terms of finding those perfect pieces and truly "settling down." I mentioned my Marido last week and I wasn´t kidding---I know I say that a lot---but what is up when you know you could be happy with someone and somehow just aren´t ready for it? What does that mean? That you prefer to be single? Or just that you love the thrill of the chase?

I have been looking for love for so long that I think I may have forgotten that there was a goal to all this dating...and it wasn´t just for free drinks.

it must be christmas

The dinner with Dimples was absolutely perfect, and the fact that he didn't stay over didn't bother me at all. I don't want to deal with his complicated romantic situations, but I am okay with crushing on him as a friend. That is my greatest M.O.

Anyhow, things don't seem so serious when you have a Plan B, and last night I went out with this older guy (40) who contacted me last month. He's a photographer as well, and if anything, OKCupid has linked me up with several cool photographers down here. I also thought it would be refreshing to go out with a guy who (hopefully) would be old-school enough not to mention an ex-girlfriend on a first date. And older guys usually pay for dinner.

I was haggard by the time we met up. I was so high on life Friday night that I couldn't sleep until almost six a.m., and then spent Saturday stressing over my malfunctioning camera, and then lugging all of my gear around town, trying to finish this story. I didn't think I would be very good company, but stick a few drinks in me and I'm pretty good to go.

The only reservation I had about meeting up with this guy was that he is from Argentina, and my dating experiences with the porteños have been less than ideal. But he has been living in my beloved San Francisco for the past decade-and-a-half, so that was another plus. He turned out to hit all of the right notes with me. While there wasn't wild chemistry or crazy sparks, I felt really comfortable around him--maybe it was the fatigue, the whiskey, or maybe I have finally gotten the dating thing down. It was weird. We talked about a lot of things and it was like nothing really needed that much explaining--what I was doing down here, why he left Buenos Aires, why his marriage didn't work out--same wavelength all around. It was a completely different dynamic than the one I have with Dimples, who I just find fascinating because I don't understand him at all.

The 24 always figures into these stories. He was being a gentleman and didn't invite me over, so he walked me to the bus stop and waited with me. We waited and waited and waited and when we finally spied it cruising down the block, we said our goodbyes but then the bus just blew by without stopping. He asked me back to his place, and I said yes.

He's leaving for Spain in a few days, and I doubt I'll see him again before he leaves, but I promised to be in touch in San Francisco.

Oh, life. When you're in love, you're in love. With everything, everyone, all of it, more more more.

being single means falling in love a lot

YES it is my second post in two days, but I treat you to so much doom and gloom that I thought I might share my latest ascension into manic excitement.

WELCOME!

I went out with the most fucking adorable, dimpled Berkeley boy yesterday. Where do I find these boys? Well, he found me on the interwebz several weeks ago, hit me with the disclaimer "I'm not looking for a best friend or a girlfriend, but..." and then a chain of emails ensued. He is 25 years old.

We went out for lunch and chatted for three hours. I wore a new dress that made me feel pretty and he maintained this beautiful smile the entire time, but also was unable to really maintain eye contact with me, which could mean either "I'm not into you" or "you make me incredibly nervous," something that I can still never tell on a first date. Of course I always think it's the former, because I just don't think I'm very intimidating.

When we parted ways, I...almost...skipped. I know it seems like I fall in love every other week, but I think the last time I felt this way about a boy was with that Guy With Girlfriend in New York, well over a year ago. I certainly don't feel this way about my new 24-year-old lover. I really felt aglow and high and I wanted nothing but to smile at everyone, the same way he had smiled his way through lunch. That kind of happiness both puzzles and infects me.

I am fully aware of how fucking ridiculous I am, but I just.can't.help.falling.in.love. The flipside, of course, is that horrible feeling that you were just completely bowled over by someone who could give a shit about you, and that after three days of hoping to hear back from him, you will just be left with the sad thought that no one you like will ever like you back, because what is life if it is not unrequited love? And even after that vitriolic post yesterday about being single, the pursuit of love is really the biggest thrill of all, even if it is not, I repeat NOT, the gateway to the only known means of happiness. It just happens to be the most addictive.

I just want to see him again. Well, see him again, coerce him into falling in love with me, move back to SF together, and live happily ever after on Ocean Beach. Done.and.done.

wander:lust

It has been an eventful two weeks.

I met my Little Brother in Lima, where transit strikes canceled our first set of plans. This wasn't such a big deal. We managed to make it to Machu Picchu, despite some serious train problems, and then once we got there, we were stranded in the town of Aguas Calientes for almost a week with about 2,000 others. It was a really intense week--a slow roller coaster ride, to borrow a choice phrase from my friend Chris. Every day we got up hoping to figure out what the hell was going on, sort of hoping we could get out and continue on our journey to Lake Titicaca. But that couldn't and didn't happen. We were finally airlifted out on a helicopter on the sixth day.

So much went on that it's hard to figure out where to begin. There was a weird breaking off into tiny communities of nations: the Argentineans, the Brasilians, the Canadians, the Japanese, the Chileans, the Australians, the Americans. There was the animosity that developed as nation-centric rumors of corruption and bribery rippled through the town. And then there was the underlying panic concerning shortages of food, water, and level-headedness. But nobody really knew what was going on. With no organized way to disseminate information, everything was just hearsay. On the other hand, the stranded tourists were mostly 20-something backpackers, so every night was kind of a party. It was a very strange dynamic--something like Lord of the Flies meets Woodstock.

In the midst of all this, you'd think I would have some very interesting things to rant and rave about. Like how cool it was to ride in a Peruvian military copter over the Sacred Valley. Or what it was like to live in limbo for a week in such an international community. Or how the guy from the U.S. embassy in Lima sent out to mitigate Argentinean-American conflict looked kind of like Orlando Bloom. And I do...but somehow the biggest thing standing out in my mind from this hugely dramatic experience is that when I finally got to check my email somewhere around Day 4, I'd received a 30-word email from a boy I met in Uruguay just before New Year's, which sent me into a complete state of ecstasy despite the tenuous circumstances. And this, instead of all the other tremendously more interesting things that happened this week, is all I really want to think about.

I'm just as fucked up as so many of us in this regard. More than natural disasters and states of emergency, what fascinates and excites us the most is the possibility that there could be someone out there who finds us as appealing as we find them. And this is where the real excitement begins.

last minute freakout

I got pulled over (again) today. Welcome back to Illinois! It did not stay my day off right.

This is going to be a somewhat frenetic post. I've ingested a lot of coffee and cigarettes.

Packing tonight was a tricky maneuver. I want to bring nothing and everything. I am obsessed with my summer dresses but cannot bring them all. And, more like, I will end up going out how I went out in New York, in disgusting cutoffs and dirty tee-shirts. I almost don't want to bring them to force myself to look better. But somehow I crammed a bunch of clothes into a bag and am now contemplating this obnoxious thing of beauty, my tripod. It is a separate piece of luggage. I can't not take it and yet I can't imagine taking it. The tripod has become a metaphor for all of my problems with this endeavor at all.

Got home last night after twelve intense days in California. Top 10 Highlights: 1) Eating a burrito with the dog in Dolores Park an hour after landing at SFO, 2) crashing a City Hall function with booze and schwag and hors d'oeuvres, 3) seeing that Ex is still adorable, 4) a 24-hour date with my peripatetic life partner that included a) biscuits, gravy, waffles, and crab for breakfast, b)watching the Heimlich Maneuver performed at dinner one night, and c) Point Break Live, 7) tailgating with Raiders fans and getting drunk by noon, 8) a sleepover party with Joe, 9) spending soft time with my friends at my old apartment, and 10) the idea of family time.

Bottom 5 buzzkillers: 1) breaking my very-needed cell phone my first morning in SF, 2) a return to the serious boozing and ensuing sicking, and 3) witnessing the fallout of a long-standing friendship gone bad, 4) helping a bloodied, beaten up man to his feet just down the block from my apartment, about an hour after I passed him drinking what smelled like cologne with his buddies, and 5) pissing all over myself in a port-a-potty.

I slept a blessed eight hours last night and then set about freaking out today, starting with getting pulled over. Tomorrow I get on an airplane and fly for fourteen hours. I think what I like best about airplane rides is that the act of booking a ticket and then actually going somewhere works well with my mentality of shoot first, ask questions later. I hate obsessive anxiety, which is going to party out tonight with the three shots of espresso I had earlier this evening. I know it wasn't the wisest move, but I had a lot to do, and I was on a date with a sweet boy who I will probably marry. I will tell you all about it some time. The date had two purposes: the minor one was to take away four hours of pre-trip anxiety. But the real reason I had to go out on a date today is because one thing about me that you probably don't know is that right before I make a big move or decision, I have to fall in love, have sex, (and not necessarily with the same person), then leave. This way, when I leave I can direct all of my obsessive, cyclical thoughts to dramatic romantic fantasies rather than putting myself through the wringer of decision-making anxiety. I recommend it highly. Why second-guess yourself when you can just escape to a fantasy world where everyone is in love--it's just the timing that is off?

Timing: It is everything that matters, completely out of our control, and, in the end, completely inconsequential. It's the perfect abstract concept to take the blame for everything.

See you in South America.

thank god for mountain time

I meant to write when I was in San Francisco, to keep on top of things, and now I have to write this bumbling post that will take us through the past into plans for the future. San Francisco was a marvelous time. The weather was amazing, very un-SF. Definitely my favorite part was just doing very low-key things with good friends, tooling around town, gorging on things, and talking about life. I also caught up with past lovers--Ex, Love Affair, My New Best Friend, and even Joe showed up in town unannounced, though I couldn't really say I was surprised. I "celebrated" six months of sobriety in San Francisco. I ate many great meals, went for long walks on the beach, and remembered how and why I love San Francisco so much. Strangely enough, I also do not feel compelled to move back there at all--at least for the moment--I think mostly because it is so loving and familiar. The two weeks lolling about SF only reminded me that I have a tendency to lapse into hedonistic complacency in such circumstances. Right now, though, I am looking for some slightly masochistic adventure.

I think I've mentioned before that I hate my psychiatrist, but when I went to get a refill on my shhh-don't-drink-just-sleep pills before taking off for the west coast, she casually asked about my post-graduation plans. Because I don't take her very seriously, I just-as-casually responded that I had a crazy plan to travel around the world and do whatever the fuck I pleased, but it probably wasn't going to happen and would secretly drive me insane. It's something I've never mentioned to my detox doc/therapist, the one I love, because I do take him seriously, and I don't like to waste our time with my fanciful notions (of which there are many). But the funniest thing happened, which is that she said "Seriously, I'm a psychiatrist--and I don't give advice--but I want to say that your plan doesn't sound crazy." And we talked it through and she convinced me that it was worth pursuing, and that I should talk it through with other doc. After hearing her so unequivocally merit my plan not crazy, I pretty much decided that I was going to do it, though of course I've been secretly thinking of it all along.

I spent a lot of time talking through these new post-graduation plans in San Francisco, which are to spend an indefinite amount of time traveling and writing and shooting photos, and to do so ostensibly under the cover of research. More to come on this later, but every night now I have been falling asleep thinking of this, and it frightens me and excitens me so of course I know I have to do it, and I plan to leave in September. There is so much to plan and to worry about obsessively that it is almost enough to distract me from the overarching question of "is this really going to happen?"

Because it is. I stopped looking for jobs and decided, fuck, I'm going to employ myself this next year to do whatever it is I want to do, and I'm going to do a great fucking job at it. Also, I will hate myself forever if I back out of it now, and so this is why I've told everyone about it, including my family (and weren't they excited about it...).

The first person I called (and saw) when I came back was My Friend, whom I missed while I was away. I actually talked to him several times because we were finishing up a project together, and had to go over some stuff. I'd gotten him a graduation gift in SF and wanted to give it to him right away, so I scooted over to his place and we went for a walk. We talked about shit, plans, jobs, and as I sat there with him I felt both relieved and incredibly anxious. I wasn't sure what the feeling meant, maybe just relieved that I had made a decision of what to do and glad that we would have the whole summer ahead of us to fuck around, but anxious that I hadn't actually made any concrete plans. Then I wondered if the feeling had more to do with him and New York, because I'm not ready to say goodbye to New York just yet, or the people contained in it.

The next day we graduated. I hated graduation, but Mom came in to attend, so I had to go. My Friend and I were the only ones in our department who didn't buy graduation regalia; I appreciated his solidarity. Afterwards, Mom and I had dinner with My Friend, his roommate, and our families. It was cute. When dinner was winding down, My Friend squeezed himself between Mom and me and we chatted and I felt good until that weird feeling returned, the feeling of relief and anxiety, and I attributed it to having just graduated and being around proud parents and declining prosecco with a forced smile, and I tried to relax, but something was weird. Then our friend left, and I realized what was weird did in fact have more to do with my friend than the overall situation. The relief, I realized, was like this calmness I get from being around him, and the anxiety is the feeling I get that he is about to leave. It is like...being in love...why I hate being in love...why I have been quoted as saying "When I think I feel myself falling in love, my first impulse is to get into a car and drive as far away from the source as possible." The love-feeling is weird when it involves a friend, particularly when it comes at a moment when you are with your parents and theirs, and you could be getting married or something. Oof. The thought made me blush deeply. And then, in that moment, everything about our relationship flashed before my eyes and came into scrutiny.

Everyone knows I had a crush on My Friend way back when we'd first met, but then our relationship became completely desexualized because I never felt like the feeling was mutual at all, and I am pretty good at changing course. We are so safely couched in platonic-ville that it really can't go back there. But sometimes I feel so fucking attached to him that I wonder. Even more so than Joe, My Friend has been there for me this year. It's actually quite remarkable that we've not gone..there...because I do love the shit out of him. But rather than wanting to go there, I balk, because it's a desire that's completely asexual and I'm really not used to it. Because now it's just in a weird place of wanting to be a marriage without ever having been a romance.

After dinner, as Mom and I were walking home from the subway, I said, "I think I'm in love with My Friend." She just laughed. And that night, I did the typical girl thing of attributing every weird interaction between us to him being in love with me while simultaneously recalling every conversation in which we had specifically talked about various incompatibilities. I stayed up very late that night. The funny thing is that I actually thought everything through to a logical solution, which is to do nothing different and just to love on him the way I do. I love the way our relationship is now. Raising the stakes when I'm about to leave has always been my modus operandus, but I think that has changed. I really don't want to lose him as a friend, and will continue to get my kicks elsewhere if that's what it means. It's going to definitely be on my mind every fucking time I hang out with him now, which is weird, but I have owned this decision not to act on it.

I am now in the Catskills with Mom and Dad, staying at a hotel owned by the B-52s. It pretty much rules. There is no cell phone service up here, but of course there is wireless Internet. Tomorrow I am coming back to New York and I will have two guests waiting for me, kids I met in Bolivia who have been traveling through South America all this while. I have no idea how long they're staying with me.

I've just been bumbling around for a little while now, and I have work to do. I guess I better get used to all this motion and lack of structure.

Seeking Sebastien

I've regressed into cruising online dating sites the past few nights. I blame it on spending the weekend surrounded by intensely cute couples, and talking to Joe this week for the first time since he left New York. I miss him, and I'm just now understanding just how important he was to me this past year. I don't think I could have survived the winter without him, and I don't think there is anyone else on the planet who could have played the role that he played for me.

But I'm so primed for my next great affair, and as I peruse a thousand profiles (including coming across My Friend online, which was funny) I realize it's just not going to happen this way, because I'm just clicking through them halfheartedly, because none of them are Sebastien. None of these preconceived setups can measure up to the cliched backpacker romance I had on my Spring Break Sobriety Tour 2009. If you're up for a long, self-indulgent story, let's hop to it.

Ever since my romantic intrigue with The Hitchhiker, I have had a fondness for intense, short-term love affairs. Psychoanalyze me if you want to, but I don't care. They are perfect because they can never be flawed; they are always over before their time, and you are always left wanting more: perfect masturbatory material.

*

It's a little after sunrise and I'm attempting, in my typical, disheveled, insomniatic fashion, to board the wrong bus.

"Cor-di-llera" the bus operator reads off my ticket. He then points at the bus I am attempting to board. "Col-que."

I don't take this too seriously because I know all the buses, regardless of the operator, are going to the same place: Bolivia. Even though I've only been in Chile for a few days, and am ill-prepared to brave the cold heights of Bolivia, I am determined to get there. Last night I stayed up late at the hostel, watching a charming young Swede kill a bottle of cheap rum and break the $700 lens on his SLR after showing me some beautiful pictures from his expedition into Bolivia. I’d spent the day running around town trying to rent a motorcycle to drive to the nearest town, about an hour away, just to pay the $130 fuck-you-because-you’re-an-American-reciprocity-fee needed to cross the border with no luck, but was going to find a way into Bolivia somehow. I wanted to go to Uyuni as well, to shoot the train graveyard.

I have not slept much, and I blame my haplessness on this as I wander down the road to find the Cordillera agency, where there is no bus whatsoever, just the now-familiar sight of pairs of travelers rummaging through each others' backpacks and feeding each other. I’m past the stage where couples make me feel lonely, but have now moved onto the hunger stage where I just long for their increased variety of food. I've spent the first few days in San Pedro de Atacama scraping by on the bodega diet of pitas stuffed with greasy wrapped cheese and salami, an assortment of chocolate cookies, and Nescafe.

At the same time that I am excited to get out of this tiny town for a few days, I am kind of dreading this excursion because I will be with a tour group. I hate tour groups so much that I almost killed myself in the desert yesterday, in an attempt to do something I hate even more--bicycling--just to get away from the tour groups. I kind of hate people lately. I only want food, the desert, cigarettes, and water. But I can't do Bolivia on my own, and so I've signed myself up to be bound to a small group of strangers, most likely these charming backpackers feeding each other around me. I just might kill everyone. Particularly alarming is the fact that I have only two cigarettes on my person, and I don't know when I'll be able to purchase cigarettes in the next four days. I am also the only person here without a sleeping bag, but I am more concerned about the cigarette supply, because while cold weather will only kill me, lack of nicotine will endanger everyone in the group. This was not well planned. This entire trip was not planned at all, actually, but that’s what makes it exciting. And the group, though I hate them without even knowing them, will not let me die.

When the bus boards, the one lone traveler sits down next to me. We are the only non-couple on the bus. I wondered if he will make my life better or worse for the next few days. Men have a way of forcing these kinds of issues. I can’t tell if he is cute. All boys kind of look the same here: bearded, sunburned, and hungry. I wait until he finishes his juice box before asking him, "Como te llamas?"

His name is Sebastien. Did you know that's quite possibly my favorite name in the whole world? No, I did not say that out loud! God, I'm not some 14-year-old girl. But seriously, I had the biggest crush on Adrien Grenier before Entourage when he was in The Adventures of Sebastian Cole. We poke at some awkward Spanish, switch to English for a few minutes, but that just feels disgusting so we move on to French while we wait in line at the Chilean border. The Swiss are smooth like that. The last time I spoke French was in Morocco, the summer I moved to New York. I feel like an idiot, but it’s okay. My Spanish is even worse, but at this point, I just don’t want to speak English, then I have an excuse for sounding like an idiot.

I honestly don't think that anything of the sort is in store for me and this guy, even though I think that about most people I meet. I am in hyper defense mode from traveling alone, and I imagine I am getting solo-vibes from him as well. Before running into the Swede last night, I was stood up by a local guy for vague dinner plans, and so I am a little wary of people at this point. Particularly when it comes to setting up for intense time together in cramped quarters under uncomfortable conditions, I think it’s best to keep things very aloof, formal even, like rooming with strangers instead of friends. We should maintain boundaries and such.

When we cross into Bolivia, I spy a burned-out bus and confess to him that I have soft spot for rusty photography, which is why I’m looking forward to Uyuni. I’m not exactly in conversation mode, but I think I say it because I know how to say it. To my surprise, he says he wants to shoot the bus as well, and he makes a plan for us to grab a quick bite at the chow line before sneaking off to shoot the bus and making our way through the pandemonium at Bolivian immigration. It's nice when someone makes it clear where you stand with them, that you're in this together. I'm so used to people being vague: you can do this, if you want to...I'm going to do this. You know. With Sebastien, from this moment on, we are in it together.

This, however, is threatened when the Cordillera agency attempts to split the bus into groups of five for the next few days. You know that panicky feeling you get when, say, you get to a movie with a group of people, or to a long dinner table at Thanksgiving, and you realize that whatever seating position happens in the next four seconds will determine the outcome for the next four hours? That's what is happening at the Bolivian border, only it is happening in Spanish, with an angry man holding my backpack hostage, and trying to stuff me into one beat-up Land Cruiser. He is telling Sebastien to go to another. I don’t look at Sebastien, because it is pointless. I look at the man holding my backpack and prepare to accept my destiny.

"Es mi amiga," Sebastian tells the man, pointing to me. The man looks furious. At the agency, we'd been two solo travelers. "Juntos," he insists. He looks at me and smiles hopefully. My little heart melts. The man hands Sebastien my backpack and directs us to the same car.

After being packed into the Cruiser with a Brazilian-Spanish couple and a Chilean-German couple, we make many pit stops at some amazing locations in Bolivia. We sit in the back together, struggling to keep up with the rapid Spanish going on in the front of the car. Each time we make a stop, Sebastien holds the door for me, waits on me, and we scout the location together, pointing things out, in perfect step with one another. I am shooting wide-angle landscapes; he is shooting mostly telephoto wildlife photography. It is a great pairing. Later in the day, after they deposit us at a remote outpost with no heat for the evening, Sebastien asks if I want to go for a walk. Most of the group, myself included, is suffering from some degree of altitude sickness, but of course I say yes.

The fondest moments of my life always involve desert photography with a cute boy. I can't help but remember the amazing trip I took with The Ex to Baja. It was a beautiful adventure that involved camping, puking tequila in the desert, and fjording a stream in a borrowed Mercedes, and we never spoke about the infidelities that had made the trip feel like such a necessity. This trip is cleaner, with no tinge of anything like that. We clamber over rocks exploring the desert, taking turns deciding which way to go in the wide open. He helps me scale walls and navigate the rocky canyon we discover, and I point out good lighting angles, offer him water. I think, “This is what a partnership feels like.”

As the sun sets, we return to the chilly camp and meet some of the other people from the other three cars, who turn out to be mostly French speakers. Sebastien pours me tea and when dinner arrives, serves me. I am exhausted. I try to hold my own with the French speakers, but am content to just try and understand.

That night the six of us sleep in an unheated, cement room, but I don't sleep at all for the second night in a row. I know I’m not going to freeze to death, but I feel like I’m going to come close. I think about three things in a continuous loop for seven hours: (1) my stubbornness about not taking drugs, not even the sleeping pills I have in my backpack, partially because then I’d have to take my hands out from under my layers of clothes, (2) Sebastien, sleeping not two meters away from me, (3) life amazing life.

I wait until dawn and wander out into the desert to shoot the sunrise. We are truly in the middle of nowhere. Off in the distance, I see a figure emerge from the hillside and I see that he has come out to check on me. Inexplicably, I hide. Sometime during the night, I have already started to feel separation anxiety. I don't like it when people leave. Yet, you say, you like short-term love affairs? How does that make any sense? Shut the fuck up.

In late afternoon, we come to another remote location, a building constructed completely out of salt in the middle of what appears to be an exploded minefield. Sebastien and I get a room to ourselves. Everyone is in good spirits that night because there is one working shower in the salt hotel, and it is a good ten degrees warmer and 1,000 meters lower. There is even wine at dinner, which makes me extremely uncomfortable, but it doesn't matter, because I was able to buy cigarettes during the day. We are fifteen people in the middle of nowhere I am the happiest I think I ever been in my entire life. I can only communicate good things, so it's like I can only think good things. I have a sneaking suspicion I'm going to have sex in a building made completely out of salt, completely sober, with a Swiss boy named Sebastien, in the middle of fucking Bolivia.

All of this is very charming and swell, but what really gets to me is when I am sitting next to Sebastien at dinner and I overhear him telling a French woman the story of how we'd met crossing the border and how he'd insisted we stay together. She thought we were a couple. She asks him what language we speak in, and he says, without hesitation, first in Spanish, then in English, then in French, and now, in all three: "Mira, une llama! It's cool, n'est-ce pas?"

I almost die. Or, rather, I immediately set to killing myself in the typical manner, by excusing myself to go outside to smoke a cigarette.

Admittedly, it doesn't take much for me to fall in love. I fall in love at least once a week. But at the same time that I use the word, I use it haphazardly, fleetingly, convinced that love is something that can't really be had, just glimpsed. I'm like that. I suffer from an affliction where I believe that anything truly worth having can't really be had, and so I think that the best kind of love is ephemeral. But at moments like those where things seem so fucking precious, where you can't help but think to yourself, "I want to hear that story told on my fucking wedding day," my first reponse is to get up, go outside, and yep, that's right, smoke a goddamn cigarette. I don't know why that's my response. It's like I can't believe it's happening, or I don't think I should be there, or my personal being can't handle that kind of perfect moment, so I have to fucking leave. I wish I was the kind of person that could like squeeze your hand under the table and gaze at you sweetly back, but instead my response is to try and light a stick of cancerous toxins on fire and inhale the poisons as rapidly as possible in seclusion in the freezing cold. My body can handle pain all right, but it repels perfect moments with absolute disgust.

Luckily, the night wears on, and my sober ass is forced to bask in the glow of this ridiculously wonderful evening in the middle of nowhere, largely because there is nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. I forgot about my clunky French and miserable Spanish with this charming Swiss boy and this international crew of travelers, and just remembered that like them, I had wanted to be there so badly that I had forgone my comforts, almost frozen to death the night before, gnawed my way through some pitiful means, battled altitude sickness, incomprehension, and indigestion, and am still ecstatic as all hell to be there, and savoring the last hour of the power generator like it is our last night on earth. Indeed, although we feel like we are in the lap of luxury compared with where we stayed last night, it also feels like a movie set for some apocalyptic fantasy. It is, in a way. The next day we will all go our separate ways—some, like Sebastien, will venture further east into Bolivia, many are going into Argentina, and I am going back to Chile. But during these few evenings we’ve shared in the heights of the Bolivian desert, I really feel like I’ve come to understand and appreciate myself in the context of the world—or, at least, in the context of these people. “Sometimes,” one of the men says, “we have to go so far away to meet our true neighbors, those who are really like us…at home, everyone thought we were crazy to leave for so long. But out here, to meet so many people traveling…so many people who will take care of each other without question...who do the same as you...it feels right.”

Part of me wants to have a long, meaningful conversation as I snuggle up with him that night, but it is going to be sad, so I just tell him I will miss him and I kiss him. I've done this so many times now I know how to do it. After we have sex, he holds me tight and simply says, "Vas dormir." Go to sleep. And you know what, I finally do.

The next day, we part after shooting the train graveyard in Uyuni. I am so distraught about leaving him that I also leave behind my most critical piece of clothing after my favorite pair of jeans: my crucial hoodie that I've had for almost a decade. Talk about major losses.

And I'm not kidding at all when I say that as we leave town, the next song I hear is Roxette's "It must have been love," but en espanol.

*

I saw Ex when I returned to New York, and I told him that I’d met the guy I want to spend the rest of my life with. Let me clarify: maybe it’s not literally Sebastien, the same exact Sebastien I met two weeks ago on a bus in San Pedro de Atacama, but the guy I spend the rest of my life with will be Sebastien, because I will look for him in whomever I seek to date. When Ex asked me to describe him, I couldn’t do it. I missed a lot of nuances of his personality due to him being Swiss and all. All I knew about him was that I trusted him from the moment we crossed the border into Bolivia, that he took care of me, and that when I was with him, I felt like we could do anything together, like we were unstoppable.

When Ex and I were together, I also felt like we could do anything together. It’s such a high, this feeling. But he was never good at taking care of me. I never knew I wanted someone to take care of me, that this was a priority. I try to take care of myself. But it’s nice to have someone else looking out for you as well, without you asking them to. Because I look out for other people without them asking me to, so I guess I want them to do the same for me. And the trust got eroded between me and Ex as well, which is an entirely different story. He didn’t really value me after a while. I don’t think I ever heard him tell a cute story about us.

A character from college, Fentry, once said, “the key to a successful relationship is to marry a foreigner.” He went on to elaborate that cross-cultural relationships breed tolerance, which is largely lost in today’s customizable society, where we demand everything to be just so, down to matching lifestyles, compatible music tastes and so on. When you marry a foreigner, you chalk up all the differences to irreconcilable cultures, and are more forgiving from the get-go, he explained. You can then focus on what’s really important, like respect, family, taking care of one another.

But these things, I realized tonight, are hard to look for when perusing ads on OkCupid and craigslist.

I know I'm a dreamer. I know that vacation affairs are different than real-life relationships, but I want to hold onto this one. I don't know how, and that's why I've held off on writing about it and have just been thinking about it a lot, and what it means to want to hold onto something without holding onto it at all. I want my dream-life and my real-life to be one and the same. I think things will be less schizophrenic that way.

Spring Break Sobriety Tour 2009

I´m going to try and make this quick because this Internet booth seems to be filling with gas fumes. Tonight I was going to go on this space tour, where they show you all the constellations. It´s amazing how many stars you can see here. I forget about the stars sometimes in New York. The tour, however, was canceled because it is cloudy, and it is actually raining a bit in the driest place on earth. Amazing!

The trip has been incredible. There has been a good mix of Serious stupidity (typical move of getting ripped off by a cabbie after many hours of traveling and not knowing the exchange rate), serious sunburn, excellent romantic intrigue, language lessons, sweeping landscapes, freezing temperatures, contemplation, sober conversations with drunken individuals, and more. The one thing that hasn´t been happening has been SLEEP.

Yes, that´s right. I´m on fucken vacation andI haven´t been able to sleep more than a few hours a night. I brought with me a bunch of my knockout pills but refuse to take them. I don´t know why. I guess this kind of insomnia just doesn´t bother me that much, because when I get up, I can face the day because there´s so much to do and it´s exciting. I guess I don´t want to take the pills because I don´t want to be groggy. The other night I couldn´t sleep and I lay awake thinking about this boy, and how much I love the desert and photography and traveling and blah blah blah and wondered if I could possibly make this my life. Like, how can I make a living like this? And will I ever see this boy again after this trip? How can I make my life all about travel and photography and cute boys? That´s what I want my life to be like.

It wasn´t until the next day that I realized...huh...this is my life. At least, for the moment. That´s the big human condition though, isn´t it...not being able to enjoy the moment...struggling to prolong it always...staying up late at night wondering, worrying about how to make it last...

I will write some more about this romantic intrigue but I can´t now because it still feels like a fresh and lovely gift and if I write about it I think it will start to feel like a loss. So I will say that the desert is so humbling. I will have to ruminate on it some more, but it makes me feel like an idiot for living in New York. It makes me realize that so many of my most important and enjoyable moments in life happened in the desert.

I realized this as I wrote this in a postcard to Wonder Woman that I came here to figure things out, and all I´ve figured out is that it is pretty misguided to think that you can just sit down and think things through and come up with solutions...at least for me. I can´t just sit down and make plan that will work for me. All I can do is tell myself that as long as I have my wits about me, and can continue to wander the way that I want, everything will be okay. No, better than okay.

Solo travel is incredible. I don´t know what I was so worried about. Now that I´m away, I remember the scariest part of traveling is returning home, or¨re-entry,¨as Sharp calls it. I miss everyone, but I miss this feeling too...

manning up II

Something strange happened the other night at Joe's and I'm not sure if I can explain it right, but I'm going to try. I showed up around half past midnight and he was playing cards with his neighbor and a guy I'll call Roger, who I've met several times but have never really had a real conversation with. He is a nice enough guy, but he is hard to connect with, and hard to understand because he tends to be a low talker and he is always drunk. He is so drunk all the time that he wears that expression of squinty eyes and stuporous grin and when he talks it's like a wad of gum is falling out of his mouth. But he is very genial and harmless in general, although he seems to have a serious drinking problem and a tendency to want to drive home, even when he is passing out at the same time.

I was trying to talk him out of driving home and a little frustrated with Joe and his neighbor for not being more forthright in just taking Roger's keys from him and putting him on the sofa, particularly given a history of certain episodes, but he was just mumbling something about me needing to go to sleep. Joe and his neighbor vacated the room for a moment, and then Roger suddenly said, "You should wait for Joe." It was an odd thing to say, and I didn't know what he meant, but when I asked him to explain it, he just repeated it, over and over, sometimes adding, "Joe's a good guy. You should wait for him."

This struck me as hard because just last week I got disgusted with the Joe situation and decided, in light of his leaving, that I wasn't going to see him anymore because it was going to make me sad. I informed a friend of this decision and she said something pretty elegant to me that put it all into perspective: Seriously, you're going to be sad anyway. You might as well spend time with him.

Then this past week Joe and I have taken our "relationship" to the next level. This means several things. It means that I am actually engaging with him, talking to him, telling him things. It's pretty amazing how long we've been faux-dating and how much I've managed to not tell him. It's also pretty humbling to see how transparent I am...to see how much he's discerned just by osmosis. It also means that I am allowing myself to actually like him, something I haven't let myself fully do this whole time. It is scary and I am remembering what it is like, just trying to enjoy the moment. Hearing Roger, who is someone who is known to me, but really a stranger, just say to me point-blank that I should wait for him, was quite surreal.

I gave up trying to understand what he meant and tried to refocus the conversation on the merits of not driving drunk, when Roger asked me for a hug. I obliged. I sat back down across from him and watched him drink his water. He continued looking around us in a glazed fashion with that grin on his face, and then he mumbled some kind of question, something like, "What gives?" I didn't know how to respond to this, and told him so, and then he suddenly became very lucid and articulate and told me he was really attracted me.

I've noticed that since entering Soberland, there have been so many instances in which I've been rendered completely speechless. This was one of those times.

Then he returned to the "You should wait for Joe," mumbling, adding, "Joe is more of a man than me."

The mood in the living room, which had been all jolly and sleepy and drunk was suddenly so intense and dark. It was really fucking shocking. He began saying very intense things, punctuated with mumbling more "what gives," which confounded me. He finally said, "I don't know how to talk to you. I'm just attracted to you. How should I talk to you?" I completely ignored his remarks about being attracted to me and said he'd have to ask me a real question that required an answer that was more than "What gives," so he said, "What are you looking for?"

This was a question that really begged for a response, but the whole situation was confusing me. Not five minutes ago, this guy had been passing out upright. And not fifteen minutes ago, the card game had ended because he had lost his hand...literally; he misplaced his cards. And yet right then and there we began to talk to each other in a deeply personal way, leaning over the coffee table. I told him about how I always looked for things that I thought I wanted...only to find out that the things I thought I wanted...weren't really what I wanted. And he started to tell me about how everything he wanted always turned to shit.

He stopped talking the second Joe walked back into the living room. He sat down next to me and said something like, "What's up, guys?"

At that point, Roger leaned back into his chair very easily, and his dark expression disappeared, the drunk mask resumed, and he just shrugged and smiled at Joe and mumbled "Eh?"

I felt like I was fucking insane.

I couldn't tell Joe about it. Would you have? In our previous realm of keeping him at arm's length, this wouldn't have been an issue. But now that we are talking to each other, I feel like I have to tell him things. I tried to let it pass. Then the next day, Roger called Joe and asked him to apologize to me for him. He kind of wanted to know.

I don't know why this is bothering me so much. But really. That exchange made me feel like I was fucking insane.

manning up

Coming back to New York has been taxing. Sharp always refers to it as "re-entry," a terminology which to me accurately portrays how difficult it is to readjust. I find re-entry and readjustment to be very difficult. I guess I am not as good as an adapter as I'd like to believe I am, and this week has been one of "fuck first, ask questions later." Or, more accurately, "fuck first...then go to sleep." When confronted with details that don't seem to fit with my reality, I find it easier to just go ahead and have sex...and then...go to sleep. This happened to me twice this week. The fallout the next morning is harder, only now I can't blame my actions on boozing. Now it's just my inability to deal with reality. The first was with the lawyer when I woke up in the hotel room the next morning: "Wait, did ACLU imply that he's...married?" (Goddammit, Little Brother, why are you always right?) And then with Joe this week, in a more prolonged state of confusion: "Why am I still sleeping with you if you are leaving?"

Yeah, so Joe told me when I got back that he's moving to California probably at the end of next month. This news made me incredibly sad but also somewhat relieved. I was beginning to wonder how long our relationship could continue in this balance. The day after he told me this, we spent most of the day together lounging around in my apartment. In our now 9 months on and off of not-dating, we have never done this. I am not good at chilling with people really, only by myself, and I was only able to do this after getting up at 730 to go to a yoga class. Usually I kick him out of my apartment, but I told him he could stay and that I wanted him to help me chill that day.

I realized, after that day, that I felt closer to Joe, just because I had spent time with him, doing nothing, forcing myself to be still with him and not go anywhere. Maybe the reason why I haven't been able to get serious about anyone is because I haven't been able to sit still with anyone for long enough. But nobody has ever demanded it of me, including Joe. He has never demanded anything of me. He has never demanded more of my time, better treatment, anything. I think he was probably scared of scaring me off. But honestly, I really think, looking back, that had he demanded these things, I would have given him these things. We'll never know, I guess. Maybe I would've just told him to fuck off.

Anyhow, now it just feels even weirder to be around him. I've always kept him at arm's length to avoid giving him the impression that we were getting more serious than we were, but now I feel like I can suck the marrow out of him before he leaves. Is that fucked up? Like I want to be really close to him now and I feel like it's safe because he's going to go. I want the intensity without the commitment, I guess.

newest crush: life

After a twacky morning with Detox Doc numero uno, I spent the day with Joe, the human tranquilizer, and for the first time in ages, felt...relaxed. Joe and I are in this weird place of dating-land that I have never been in before. It is nice. It is totally no pressure since we have been doing this for so long. We hung out all day at his house while I worked on secret plan 437b, and I took portraits of his roommate's dog. I'd almost forgotten how soothing animals are. I think my anxiety levels dropped 90 percent. Then I came home and slept seven glorious hours.

Today, awaiting the arrival of WonderWoman, I decided to throw an impromptu dinner party so I can spend the day indoors, cooking my favorite foods. In a bummer turn of events, some of my favoritest people cannot make it, so I invited a slew of random inviduals, including New Crush. Let's talk about this for a moment. Yes, New Crush broke my heart several weeks ago when he dropped the g-bomb, but I won't let that stop me from admiring him, because he is so fucken cute! Every time I see him I can't help but...stop breathing. I kind of love it. Anyhow, last week he made a pointed issue of asking when I'd be in the Chi, and getting my number so we could hang out there next week. I'm so excited for our dedicated day of hangout in the Chi! I'm convinced that I misconstrued the g-bomb situation. I haven't heard back from him, but that's okay. Gap model and Curly are coming, which will be nice. I haven't seen them since Red's going away party. I was thinking that I probably wouldn't see them anymore because Red was a crucial organizer in that crew, but this makes me happy.

Speaking of romantic intrigue that has nothing to do with Joe, I almost had a heart attack Tuesday after leaving the Guggenheim (the Catherine Opie exhibit is great) because Love Affair called me and we are meeting up tomorrow for coffee. I haven't seen him since my golden birthday. It's very exciting. It will be nice to see him.

Sobriety has been good to me this week, despite the sleeping problems. Yesterday when I was working on secret plan 437b, I had a not-so-minor flash of understanding about what life was all about, and it had to do with the tiny slivers of reality that can be brutal and painful, but the more we deal with them, the more we can appreciate this struggle between love and freedom and the desire for a Viking funeral.

iPodic (extremely long post)

When things start to get really crazy in my life, I find it intensely comforting that no matter what happens, the songs in my iPod pretty much stay the same. That's not because I've been listening to the same music for years or anything, it just means that I'm too busy/lazy/distracted to swap out any of the songs on the limited space on this 4GB machine. So in times of extreme duress, when the world goes for a continuous assault on my cranium, I listen to the same 777 songs over and over again. It reminds me that oh yeah, yesterday when I listened to this same exact song, my life was like "this" and four days ago, it was like "this," and seven days ago, it was like "this." So they help to form some kind of stable backdrop to the WHA!...WHA!..WHA! that the world keeps pouring in.

Ah. Please note that I am blogging from Teacher's College, sitting across from one of the finest specimen's of male existence I have seen in several days. So if I seem a bit more distracted than usual...mmm...it's because I'm ovulating and there's an extremely hot man wearing a grey thermal shirt and a bandana pheremone-sniffing distance away from me.

Y'all got my email about Neighbor's accident, which meant that I spent eight wondrous hours in the "step-down" floor, which means "a step down from intensive care," but not yet in a regular room. Hospitals don't freak me out as much as a lot of people because my parents work in them and I spent some time in them as a kid wandering the halls, and lived in one for a week. I'm just intensely grateful that she is going to be okay and I'm glad that I can be here for her in whatever capacity possible. I can't help myself from making the cliche mention of how fragile life is, particularly when enclosed in a metal box zipping around at obviously unmanageable speeds. Have I mentioned how terrified I am of cars?

I love you, my friends. I cannot do anything without you, and the thought of losing any one of you makes me sick with anxiety. Sometimes I get so scared about things happening to people I love that I want to vomit or booze it away, and I was in a cold-sweaty state of paralysis for the ride out to the farthest fucken hospital in the five boroughs to find Neighbor. Of course I had to run from the main lobby to the emergency department, back to the main lobby, to the recovery floor, to the "step-down" intensive care unit until I actually laid eyes on her, and I attribute my two-week mark of sobriety to being strong enough not to cry and to deal with her family. Poor thing was doing a remarkable job of doing that herself with a goddamn neck brace and breathing tube on. She is so fucken strong.

I felt sad and vulnerable that day and I wanted to be coddled by a man, so I texted Joe. I felt a little sheepish about it because I thought I'd broken up with him that cuntly Friday two weeks ago that marked the end of some serious boozeness an the beginning of sobriety. I was a little surprised that he was down to see me again, but happy nonetheless. I promised myself to be good to him as his reward for coming to see me.

After eight hours in the 90-degree hospital, I went from Flushing, Queens to the Flushing G stop for Red's good-bye party, which was in his unheated warehouse loft space. It was difficult for about twenty minutes to not stare longingly at all the beer, which did not even need to be refrigerated. But then I had a good time. I kept an eye out for Joe, and did not even have to be anxious that he would show up because he is Joe, and Joe is dependable and sweet and he likes me. We had a good time dancing and that night I think we reached some kind of understanding, both independently and together.

These are the big realizations I've made about my feelings toward Joe:

1. I completely trust him. This should say it all. I've never felt this way about a boy since Prince, my very first boyfriend in high school.

2. I don't find him exciting at all. Or particularly funny. This is also the way I felt about Prince. Obviously I am drawn to guys I find exciting or funny, guys that provoke me in some way. With Prince I was just always excited to see him because I was in love with him. This definitely has something to do with the fact that I'm not intensely physically attracted to him, though I know for me that can change over time so I'm not particularly concerned about it.

3. I'm incredibly attracted to his stability and positivity. I particularly want to see him when I'm in bad mood or when I'm stressed out. When I'm feeling hyperactive or really good about life, I don't really think about him as much. I have no idea what this means.

4. I only want to have sex with him like once a week. I don't know what this means, because he's great in bed and I love it when we do have sex.

5. I complicate everything and he simplifies everything. If I were to send him this post, he would probably laugh and say, "Don't worry about it, dude. Things are good, right? Let's go for a walk and look at the river."

Joe makes everything okay. And he sings this kind of silly song that is so beautiful and comforting and hopeful and I want to listen to it all the time. If you go here and click on song #5 (There's a Place), maybe you'll agree with me. (oh god...hot boy distracting me with mannish sighing...bwahaha) It is nice to think about love today, because it has gotten cold and I am stressed about $chool and Neighbor and sober Thanksgiving but I feel good about things with Joe because when I left his place yesterday I didn't flee, as I am usually wont to do.

I think now that I am sober, I am actually ready to fall in love. And I got Joe to give me an mp3 file of his song that I'm obsessed with, so now I can put it on my iPod and incorporate it into my mental loop, so I think this will work out quite nicely.

Soberland

In honor of my five-day sojourn into Soberland, I got a haircut at Arrojo Studio. It was fun. Student haircuts rule! It was $20. Check out www.salonapprentice.com.

Soberland is a weird place to be. It's kind of like this world, but with more headaches, more sleep, and more deep sighing. At times I feel very optimistic and other times I think that I must be seriously masochistic. Another weird thing that has happened is that cigarettes don't taste as good, and I haven't been able to consume anything but white bread and water since Sunday. Oh and coffee. My new detox psychiatrist is really expen$ive and I kind of hate her. But maybe it's just because she took my booze away from me.

I have followed through with my plan to have an email affair with ACLU lawyer. It's so fun! I'm going to marry this guy. Or else just sleep with him in random locations across the world. Either option seems good to me. So does the email affair. If I have to give up everything else in life, I can still have this, can't I? Today he casualy invited me to meet him in Miami in January. Coincidentally, Miami--like Charleston-- is also a part of secret plan 437b...

I can give up everything except cigarettes and boys.

serious sobriety

I'm on Dry Day 3, only this time I'm being sponsored by Ativan and I'm not feeling as panicky as I was on that horrible week in Sober September.

Doctor $400 (how much she charges for an hour) says that maybe the low-grade fever (101) I was running last night was a result of withdrawal. So now I'm on Ativan, which is a benzodiazepine drug, meaning it's like a muscle relaxer/anti-anxiety medication. I'm feeling quite a bit funny, which is better than FREAKING OUT by a long shot. Last week Doctor 4 said to me that maybe I should think about going sober as an adventure, to not be afraid. He said, "Can you think about it the same way you thought about going to Charleston? Like, 'I'm going to Sober-land!'" It made me laugh so hard. But now I'm enlisting the help of DJE to turn "Funkytown" into "Soberland" so I can listen to it in the mornings. Rad!

Ysterday I was shocked to get a voicemail from John, whom I spurned pretty hard several weeks ago. To try and excise all men from my life, I wrote both John and Joe a message and posted it on Missed Connections.

My MC to Joe and John

I usually think that my intense conversations with people are enough, but then they call me later, so hopefully this will be okay.

But you know me, I go crazy without boy drama in my life, so I've decided to have a long-distance email love affair with ACLU, who emailed me this week. It was such a charming email, and I wonder how I am going to respond to it. I think it'll be fun.

I'm not sure about sober-land, but Ativan-land is so far, so good.

serious cuntliness

In anticipation of more serious sobriety ahead, I kind of went balls-out last night, in a mildly boozey evening bookended by coke and pot and filled with serious cuntliness. I slept through the entire rainy day and got out of bed at 6 p.m.

I finally returned Joe's phone call Thursday night and so he met up with me and Dolly and came with us to the party. I was feeling super amped and decided to call Curly and Red because I haven't seen them in so long and I thought that maybe having them around while Joe was there would put me on better behavior and pave the way for friendship.

Enter B, whom keets warned me away from about two months earlier, which landed me instead with John. I think B is cute, if not a little strange, and around 4 a.m. I ended up pulling him aside and telling him I wanted to make out with him, but I was there with Joe. We ended up making out in the hallway and I gave him my phone number and told him to call me next week.

I didn't go home with Joe. I honestly planned on doing it, but then I didn't feel like it. He got upset. We went outside and he basically told me that he didn't understand what was going on. I told him that we had talked about this before and that I'm not exactly relationship material right now, and that I just wanted things to be exactly the way they have been: casual, sporadic, and completely under my control. He was like, Yeah, I know. I thought I could do that too. But I don't think I can.

Joe and I have been nothing but honest with each other. I know exactly how he feels about me, and he knows that I cannot be as reliable as he needs me to be. He is the sweetest, most understanding guy ever, and I keep jerking him around like a little bitch and he doesn't deserve it. We were hugging our goodbyes on Grand Street when Strong popped her head out the window and took a photo of us.

I really wish I had a transcript of what was said last night.