Bleeding Fiction

Will had his digital camera with him when I saw him in Moscow, so I managed to walk away with these three pictures of myself and certain other people. (It took me a while to see Will after we both got back, hence the delay.) These pictures also serve to remind me how tremendously unphotogenic I am and how horrible I look when I try to smile.

Will and me in front of St. Basil's Cathedral (thought by many to be the Kremlin).

Natela and me. Don't we look cute?

Lena, me and Natela. A picture that reminds me I need to get a better picture of me and Lena together.

My good friend Brian and his wife are adopting a baby from China, which is pretty cool and more than a little odd. It's good that one of my friends is finally going to have a child. It's frightening that they'll be looking to me to teach her a lot about her homeland as she grows.

Anyway, they've set up a weblog to chronicle the process they have to go through to adopt. I wish they'd started it earlier, 'cause it's a pretty good use of a blog. Only two posts up there now, though I'm sure more will follow. Either way, it's really worth looking at.

Today was free cone day at Ben & Jerry's. It works exactly how it sounds, without any of that bullshit "buy X dollar value and get a" tacked on to the beginning or "with purchase of something else" tacked onto the end. Walk into the store, get a free ice cream cone. They do this every spring and it usually ties in with some charitable event. Last year they were collecting donations for some enviornmental cause or another and this year they had a voter registration booth set up. Love those aging hippie types.

Because of the huge lines and the lack of money changing hands, you get pushed through there pretty quick. Last year I panicked when I got to the counter. I couldn't think of a flavor to order - hard at Ben & Jerry's since they have some odd ones - and I went with the old standby of Cherry Garcia. This year, I planned ahead. I looked up my ice cream choices before we left and settled on Oatmeal Cookie Chunk.

The best part is that they just opened a new Ben & Jerry's not five minutes from my office. It's so close that I was able to go twice, once at lunch and once after work. I may have to stop back there tomorrow. Ah, sweet, sweet ice cream, in so many delightful flavors. I just wish so many of them didn't have chocolate chunks inside.

Constantine (also called Konstantin, Kostya, Kostyik and Kost) works in the office of our Moscow cooperator. He's the guy who they sent over because Lena couldn't come. He's flat out one of the nicest people I know and a funny guy to boot, so it's great to have him around. Even if he isn't Lena. He showed up yesterday and spent today in our office, doing whatever work it was he was brought here to do by the Work & Travel people. He popped into our office every so often to say hi and offer such quips as "New York's a great city; you wake up and you're already here," plus he ate lunch with us. In a way, it was a little bit like having lunch with Yakov Smirnoff ("You guys get a whole hour for lunch? Wow! Armen only lets us take twenty minutes and if we go out to get food he paces the floors if we're not back in ten. And we have to eat at our desks so we can answer the phones."). Plus he views Daffys as a shopping mecca, which is just too entertaining for words. It'll be a blast to have him around for the month.

Plus he's agreed to talk to Armen for me about letting Lena come to the States earlier. If there's anyone who can do it, it's Constantine. Or, as he puts it, "it all depends on Armen's mood. If things are going well, it'll be easy to break him."

Blog: Slightly wonked due to a hacker. Bastard. Host is cool, providing on-site visits and discussions of poetry. Also, she fixed the blog. Mostly. Last update along these lines lost to the digital ether. Good riddance, I say.

Vitaly: Got married recently. Yay! Nice wedding, very traditional, right down to the break-dancing-Brad-Pitt-look-alike rabbi.

Kiki: Now engaged. About damn time. She and Raphael have only been dating for eight and a half years.

Erin McKeown: Free show at South Street Seaport past Thursday. Excellent music, as always. Open air = poor acoustics but great breeze. Too much sitting, not enough dancing.

Visitations: Something Positive went pro; creator-dude Randy got mad donations and quit his job to do the comic. That's cool. Also, Bekah started a livejournal. Its bilingualness astounds me. Go be astounded too.

Lena: What I said I'd write: Everything she says about why she and I should not be together makes perfect sense. But my life bleeds fiction and makes no sense, so there. Plus, I love fairy tales and happily-ever-afters.

Mother: In hospital for non-serious, non-diabetes problems. Yeesh.

Borges: My current reading. Witty and self-deprecating. Major images are mirrors, labyrinths and knife-fights. Very cool.

Saved: A movie. Pokes fun at very religious types. Funny as hell. Go see it. I want to see it again. And own it on DVD.

Work: Increasingly less busy. Or decreasingly busy. Whichever. Yay.

School: Registration papers to arrive... soon?

Writing: It's June. Leave me the fuck alone.

Back to a regular schedule presently.

Sorry for the silence, everyone. Things here have been a little more hectic than I expected. Last week was nothing special - a bit of City of Heroes, a bit of watching two great movies with Ogre - but once the weekend rolled around, things got a little bit nuttier.

Saturday was a surprise party for Bekah, which is an endless source of amusement for me. Dave and Bekah have been married for a few years now and for as long as they've been married they've been throwing each other surprise birthday parties. Every year. Without fail. Now, it's very sweet and therefore good, but after so long it's a wonder to me that these things still actually come as a surprise. I figure after a point you start to expect it.

Anyway, we went to the Cloisters where we had a good time and decided that the building would be perfect for paintball. Also, I discovered that there are certain people I shouldn't go to a museum with. Dave's friend Rob is one of them. He's a good guy, but... well, let's say that our opinions on European history differ and leave it at that. After the Cloisters we went to Dave's mom's house on Staten Island where we saw some cool people and had a nice deli-type dinner.

Sunday was a bit of a barbecue and some football (also my birthday, which, for the most part, went blissfully unmentioned) and Monday Lena and I went off to Massachusetts. Oh, right. Lena came back up from the shore on Sunday. We went to Massachusetts for camp visits. Cape Cod first, then through Boston and its dreaded Big Dig (which didn't seem at all bad to me, but what do I know? I'm effectively from New York. We have potholes the size of some towns.) after which we saw Marc and Rob and Katie. That was cool. We also visited some camps, where I received the gift of water bottles and a knit cap. And a frisbee.

The trip ended yesterday with a triumphant(?) return home, where I realized that I forgot to tell Erik that I was leaving. Oops. I've since dropped Lena off for the bus to Seaside Heights and I've got a few hours to kill until Kiki's engagement party. City of Heroes, here I come!

Kiki does everything with class. A small ballroom with a vaulted ceiling, a decorative waterfall along the back wall, waiters in bow ties with trays of crudites, wines both red and white; these are the things I expect when Kiki holds a party. Her engagement did not disappoint. Men, many of them stately, wore suits. Women, who we can say were dignified, wore cocktail dresses. Kiki looked wonderful, every bit in her element. Raphael (her fiancee) trailed along behind with an indulgent smile. The DJ (who we will refer to as "a crooner") had a great manner and an excellent voice. His name is Michael Roselli and I, in all seriousness, recommend him to anyone holding an event in this area. We had tiramisu, we had spiced lamb, we had a good time. To give you an idea of what this evening was about let me say that I actually liked the champagne.

I also saw a few people I'd met before, like Kiki's parents, her friend Dave and her friend Renee (pronounced, by me and Ogre and no one else, "Ri'-ni"), who has grown surprisingly (if only slightly) attractive over the years. I also met Bob. Bob is a real-life version of Gil, from the Simpsons. Bob has been through a series of jobs in the past few years, including stints in realty, car sales and (most recently) custom door sales. Bob's wife was stern and disapproving, his voice warbled, the creases in the skin of his face flowed in waves. Bob was desperate for approval, any approval at all, even from a pony-tailed man half his age, and for my part I was so tremendously amused to meet a walking bit of fiction that I just couldn't turn away.

As amusing as Bob was, however, the highlight of the evening was Kiki's brother, Sanjeev. San (the Man) speaks in short, controlled bursts, he punches every word home and he responds to jokes, yours or his own, with a short, staccato bark of laughter. San is a verbal assault given flesh. San is exactly the sort of person that I usually want to rip the tongue out of with lobster tongs. He's in pharmaceutical sales, which should basically put him only slightly higher than the mudwort on the scale of evolutionary progression. However, as it happens, San is an immensely nice guy and I'm tremendously fond of him. Have been for years. He's just one of those poor unfortunates whose demeanor fits into a certain bad stereotype but whose actual personality is the direct opposite of that stereotype.

He also has pink eye. This is interesting, in that you don't usually hear about adults getting pink eye. But San says that "I must have been in the gymnasium, doing a work out, and put my hand on some machine or weight that someone else had touched, and there you have it." Yes, he really did say "gymnasium." So San spent the evening in an already dimly lit room wearing sunglasses, a fact he apologized for with each new person he saw. San has a promotion interview on Monday. One hopes he'll be able to crawl out of the primordial ooze and make it a little further up the evolutionary ladder. He's confident that his confidence in the face of pink eye will be the key to his success. "I'll put the sunglasses on the table," he told me, "and I'll tell them that I have conjuntivitis, and if they'd be more comfortable, I can wear the sunglasses. For their benefit." That's the kind of guy he is.

Last night I had a dream about Jenna. In my dream, she was still alive. "It was all a misunderstanding," she told me, "just a mix up. I've been here all this time." Here could've meant either SoHo, where we were standing in my dream when she said this, or in dreams, where we both half-knew we were. I wasn't sure which. Jenna was a little sadder than when I knew her, but being alive when people think your dead can have that effect on you. We decided to drive to Hoboken, because taking the train was a waste of time, and once there to see what we could make of ourselves. She was an editor for the largest publisher of speculative fiction in the English speaking world; I was an international traveller cum graduate student. We fought crime.

I woke up from my dream already tired, and I've felt... haunted all day long. There are many, many people who knew Jenna better, longer and closer than I did. My claim to her friendship is minimal at best. This is to say that if there were such things as ghosts and Jenna was unfortunate enough to be one, she would have as wide a selection of people to haunt as a ghost could wish for and I shouldn't make the top fifty on the list. But dreams rarely do what you expect and I don't see why ghosts would, either.

Whatever way you look at it I feel weighed down. I want to drift. I want someone to make me tea. I want to lay my head on someone's lap, to get a back rub, to go to sleep pressed up against a living, breathing human being. I want this day to be over.

Ogre's got two friends visiting him this week: Shawn (or is it "Sean"?) and Sarah (or is it "Sara"?). Both are people he knows from his stint at William and Mary. Both are way cool. I've met them each a small handful of times now, on their various treks in and through the Garden State, but I get along quite well with them. They are, to put it bluntly, my kind of people. Tomorrow I'm playing hooky and the four of us (five, possibly, if Ogre's sister Jill comes) are going to Great Adventure, one of a series of theme parks known to the world at large as "Six Flags". It should be a blast.

The only thing that would make the day better is if Lena was with me. She's still visiting friends in Seaside Heights (as far as I know) and I miss her tremendously. No matter how close we are, I'm used to not having Lena around. She does, after all, live on another continent. But after a week together, just her and me, I really got used to her being here. It got to feel very comfortable. This past week's felt very awkward without her around. I hope she comes back soon.

Oh, and to continue with the theme, Lena's name, when Anglicized, is apparently "Helen." Which doesn't really suit her at all.

Ogre, Sarah, Shawn and I left for Great Adventure a little late this morning - rather, say we were casual about our departure. We didn't want to rush ourselves. We ate a little breakfast, we stopped at a deli to pick up some subs for lunch and we were on our way.

The drive down is little over an hour and we played Mad Libs most of the way. Remember Mad Libs? Weren't they fun? And since we're not twelve anymore we've moved past the stage of juvenalia where "tits" and "fuck" are good words to use. We're now on to the more sophisticated humor of using words like "veridian" and "pseudopod" - words that couldn't possibly fit into the blank but might twist it horribly nonetheless. I love Mad Libs.

We got to the park itself about half of noon. Admission was interesting. We had two free passes and one "buy one, get one free." So, in effect, we bought one and got 3 free. Which brought the cost of individual admission and parking down to $15 a person. Not bad at all. Once inside we hit two of the minor rides - some spinning things - and then Sarah and Shawn (right spellings, this time) got funnel cake. After that it was back to the rides. We rode some more minor rides, Batman and Nitro and were at the front of the line for Superman when the park closed.

Now, let me point out that when I say that we "were at the front of the line" I'm not being hyperbolic. I mean that we were about to climb into the empty seats of the car that had just discharged passengers when the ride operator closed the gate and announced that, due to the inclement weather, ride operation was temporarily suspended but we could wait, if we wanted, to see what might happen. We elected to wait. A few minutes later, the operator announced that the ride was indefinitely closed and we should all leave. We went to the parking lot to eat our sandwhiches. On our way, we saw that every other ride was also closed. Once in the car we appreciated, if only slightly, the foresight of the park's managers when the skies opened up and water poured forth.

Total cool rides: 2

Total park time: 4.5 hours

Total money spent on trip: $22

Not priceless, but well worth it.

Erik and I went into the City yesterday to meet up with Eric and Stefanie, whom we hadn't seen in over a year - which is far too long a time. Mostly we all just wanted to play catch-up and spend some time enjoying each other's company, and we figured the City was a good place to do that, equidistant from both of our houses. Also, the City has cool museums.

First we went to the Museum of Television and Radio. They are, as we were told when we walked in, not your typical museum. They don't (for the most part) have pictures on the walls or sculpture on the floor. What they have instead is an archive of over one hundred and twenty thousand television shows and radio broadcasts that a museum patron can select to watch or listen to. Which makes them more library than museum, I think

Currently, the museum has an exhibit on Superheroes. We got to see some animation cells from superhero cartoons, see an old underroos comercial and learn a bit about the way those shows were made. (Super Friends, for example, was rotoscoped - animation traced over film of live actors - which is less expensive and faster than regular animation, and therefore allowed the show to be made in the United States rather than Japan or Korea.) The exhibit was small, though, and left out a lot (in cartoons: Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Captain America and X-Men; in live-action: Spider-Man, Batman, three different Superman shows, Wonder Woman, the Flash and the Hulk. And that's only the big-name types.)

For our viewing, we skipped the scheduled superhero exhibits and picked four shows of our own: Earthworm Jim, WKRP, Jim Henson's Storyteller and Police Squad. Earthworm Jim was on the schedule, but we missed it due to lunch and we wanted to catch up. Eric said it wasn't as zany as he remembered; Erik said he hoped we were happy. I loved it. How can you not love a show that contains characters with names like "Professor Monkey for a Head" (or is it "Monkey Professor for a Head?"), "The Evil Queen Plusating, Bloated, Festering, Sweaty, Pus-Filled, Malformed, Slug-For-A-Butt" and "Princess What's-Her-Name?"

WKRP in Cincinatti must have some significance somewhere - I know it was an answer to some question on some test some friends of mine took when they went to Newhouse. We picked it because Stefanie's co-workers were always talking about "the turkey episode" and she hadn't seen it. It started slow but was funny at the end.

I'd never heard of Jim Henson's the Storyteller until I met Eric. I missed it when it was on in the eighties, which is a pity. The show retells some old fables and fairy-tales, with a more serious, darker edge than Muppets or Fraggles. This was the first time I'd ever seen it, and I loved the style. I'm thrilled that it's out on DVD.

Last was the final episode of Police Squad, the show that would eventually become the Naked Gun movies. I like the show, but I've also always thought it was a little uneven. This was a good episode, but nothing about it suggested "series finale." Oh well.

Whew. After all of that, we went to Queens to see another museum - the Museum of the Moving Image. They had an exhibit on the art of Tim Burton. The museum is mostly a series of exhibits on how movies get made and how film cameras work. Cool, I suppose, but when you already know most of that stuff the exhibits lose a lot of their impact. (Or, as Erik said on the third floor "oh look, an editing bay. This isn't entertainment for me; this is work.") What I will say is that the museum had a lot of video and audio displays and, unlike in other museums, theirs worked. The Tim Burton drawings were cool and creepy, as you would expect, but there were too few of them. Also, I would have loved to buy prints of some of them in the museum store, but they were sadly not available.

That done, and it now around six, we headed back into Manhattan for dinner and parted ways with promises to meet again soon. All in all, a very good day.

Writing this post intimidates me. Living out the next few years of my life intimidates me. Tonight was Ogre's last night in town. Seven hours from now he leaves for a distant point on the upper peninsula of Michigan, a seventeen and a half hour drive from here. He'll be there for the next five years. I don't know what I'm going to do without my best friend.

Does it make sense if I say he's my mirror? Does it work for me to say we're shadows of each other? Do you understand me when I say he's my compass? I rely on him in a thousand little ways, for words and gestures and sounds and looks and silences. There have been times when I didn't see Ogre for a while, and those were times that I didn't always recognize myself.

We're both leaving to find the things we need to help us become who we want to be. It's possible that when we're done we'll be back here. But it's not very likely. I have, I will have, other friends. I have a great and towering romance. I will have more. I will have a wife, I'll have a job, a home and children. There will be flashes of brilliance in my life, the flashes that shine off of the people I love like sunlight shines off of precious jewels. But there will be fewer of those flashes without Ogre. Distances are small things. I, I of all people, know that this is true. But I know, too, that small things are the things that can hurt the most.

I'm crying now.

I miss my best friend.

Last night was the going-away party for Will, one of my (now former) co-workers. It was also Adi's housewarming party. The two events took place a ten minute walk from each other, which was very convenient.

Will's party was at McSorley's, an old Irish pub on the lower east side. The place is about as authentic as you can get and has all of the charm you would expect. It was opened in 1854, the walls are covered in old maps and pictures, the floors are covered in sawdust and women weren't allowed inside until 1970. The boasts exactly one drink: beer. It's brewed on the premises and it comes in light and dark varieties and that's it. It's very good.

The waiters at McSorley's dress in grey button-down barber's shirts and are some sort of beer-serving super-men. I saw the eldest among them, a white-haired, crag-faced man, clench no fewer than eight beer glasses in each of his massive, stoney hands. Unfortunately, that feat of dexterity is pretty much all the waiters are good for, since beyond that they're a pack of assholes. The rules at the bar include: you can't stand, you can't take chairs from other tables, you can't take chairs from the back. If you aren't lucky enough to have a chair available to you, you'd best just turn invisible until the busy waiters have time to bring a chair for you. And in the meantime, pray that they don't hit you in the head with their reaching, beer-filled hands.

The Delightful Jeni Garber, sadly, lacks the ability to turn invisible. So she got yelled at more than was reasonable. Not asked politely to move, mind; actually yelled or snapped at. And I lost count of the number of people who the waiters spilled beer on.

Jeni and I left McSorley's pretty quickly to head over to Adi's, where we had to take our shoes off. to be allowed into the room. It's a nice place, a studio, but entirely too hot (Adi lacks an air-conditioner). I got to see John and Adi (of course) as well as Aaron and Jen and even Steve Miller (not Steve Miller), who I haven't seen in years and is now a doctor, occasionally working with Eugene by some strange stroke of serendipity. We had a few drinks, lamented that some of our friends were missing, talked about this and that, ate some very, very spicy (and quite good) Indian food and had several toasts.

We toasted because Aaron and Jen are now engaged. Woo hoo! Yay!

This means that something like 70% of my friends are now either married or engaged. More, it means that every one of my friends who is in a relationship (that I know of) is in a serious, long-haul, ring-bearing type of relationships. Wild!

And now a few long-overdue pictures of my summer, including commentary.

This is Kostya, the Konstantin that I mentioned here. He's totally cool.

This is Lena down the shore. I wasn't there for this picture, but Lena gave me a copy anyway because I said it looked cute.

Here's Lena while we were on our camp visits. We were at Camp Kingsmont, which is one of my favorite camps, and it was their carnival day. Lena's painting a frisbee, which she was very fond of once it was dry.

My turn to paint a frisbee. I think of all the frisbees that got painted that day, mine came out the worst. No picture of the finished product, though, which is all for the best. Is looks like a blob of paint.

This is me and Kingsmont's director (and very cool guy) Marc. I think Lena was more taking a picture of the big inflatable obstacle/race course than us, though. This is an important picture, because Lena and I raced on this thing and I won. Kicked her ass, actually.

Again, I think Lena was more taking a picture of the dogs than she was of my ass.

I went off yesterday to a wedding. A camp wedding. It was the second best wedding I've ever been to, and yes, I do keep track of these things. I want to say it was great because the bride was beautiful and the groom was handsome. I want to say it was because Melissa and Yves, bride and groom, are so close to me and it was a joy to see them married. I want to say all of these wonderful things and not comment at all on my being able to tackle the high ropes course after breakfast this morning. But I did tackle the high ropes course, so there you have it.

The ropes course at Camp Hilltop, the camp where at the wedding took place (and the camp Melissa's family owns), is a thirty-five foot high course spanning some four-hundred feet of distance and we ran across six distinct challenge elements. First was the climb up the initial tree, with handholds that spaced further apart the higher you climbed. Next came the multivine, where we walked across a cable, supported by a long rope suspended from a top wire. That rope dipped down and crossed with another at the mid-point, which we switched to to reach the end. The hardest part here was keeping my feet under me (the trick: lean forward slightly). Third was the Mongolian Steps, a series of 5 wooden planks suspended from a line by triangles of rope. The challenge here was a challenge of reach, as we had to stretch ourselves between the different steps. The course got easier from there, with a simple catwalk (balance beam) and burma bridge (tight rope with guide-cords) and then the three-hundred and fifty foot zipline. What a blast!

Don't think, though, that the weekend was dominated by the ropes course. It wasn't. But the ropes course is a good example of why Melissa and Yves' wedding was so nice. One small sample among many: held at Melissa's family's camp, with guests staying in camp cabins; rope belayed by Melissa's father and zipline run by her brother; decorator, chef, photographer and band all old friends of the family; the bride and the groom stayed in the dining hall (come-banquet-hall) until the soft hours to talk with their friends and then met us for breakfast (and ropes) the next morning.

And the speech, God but if the best man's speech wasn't the second-best I've ever heard, too. Delivered by a French friend of the French groom in some of the hardest-practiced, most sincere English I've ever heard, because Frederick wanted to be sure he got it just right, it hit every note. The speech was just a little embarassing, but never baudy; it was wry and funny, as Frederick explained that we need not worry, no matter what we had heard, Yves wasn't actually French (he was never late, for one, showers every day and doesn't like wine); and it was always deeply personal.

And there's the key to the success of the wedding: everything had a personal touch, every element made us feel at home. We were never rushed, never felt out of place. We didn't have to ferry ourselves from site to site and we got to spend some good quality time with the bride and groom.

If I came back with a strangely inflamed bug-bite and a black-and-blue mark on my foot, that's just the price I pay for the second-best wedding I've ever been to. After this, Rob and Katie have a lot to live up to.

After my last post came another distinct and obvious silence. This is due to Rob and Katie's wedding, which took place in the Boston area this past weekend.

The wedding was pleasant enough, but I'm going to gloss over the details - the bachelor party of combat both foam and laser, Rob's cool other friends, the punctilious arrangement of time, the rain, the after party at Jillian's that stretched until the happy hours of the morning - and instead say that I had to say goodbye to too many friends this weekend.

I don't need to tell you how it works. You've been there, or someplace similar. Saying goodbye is never easy. I know I'm not saying goodbye forever, that it's more of a "see you later," but that hasn't made it any easier. I'm going to get maudlin if I go on much more, so let me stop here and say only that it was a fun, but difficult weekend.

I had dinner (of a sort) with Jeni and her friends tonight. It was a sort of "welcome to Seattle Jeni" party. I use the word "friends" loosely, since about half of the people there were actual friends of Jeni and the other half were friends of those friends, but it's all good. "Any friend of yours" and all.

It was fun stuff; Jeni's friends are good peoples. They've invited me to participate in their new Sunday night dinner; everyone gets to bring one dish, based around some theme to be decided earlier. Should be fun, since I haven't had a chance to really cook in a while and I do sort of miss it.

Jeni also said that she's interested in learning Russian. If she's serious about it that would be really cool, 'cause I could use someone to practice with. It'd help me out immensely.

I don't expect to see her all the time, but it'll be cool having Jeni in town. I hope she enjoys it here.

Another week gone by and another strange dinner party over at the place where Jeni be living. Again I say that Jeni's friends are pretty cool. Everyone got pretty creative, so we had yam fries, quesedillas, and some sort of pear-and-bree-on-bread thing. I brought a chocolate cake. We're doing it again next week, I think, so I hope I'll be ready to cook something by then.

The highlight of the evening was when I got to hear the story of a pseudo friend of Jeni's friends (so, a dude who's fairly removed from here) one of them who donated his sperm to a lesbian couple so that they could have a child. He did this, I'm told, because he thought they'd do this whole "pregnancy" thing through the time-tested method of hot lesbian sex. No such luck. But they didn't use a doctor, either. Just a turky baster.

Moving on, I... well, I got nothing. I mean sure, there are a few other things going on, but how can you top the turkey baster?

Here's why Bekah's cool:

She's Bluff

1. Rough and blunt but not unkind in manner.

I've never seen Bekah afraid to speak her mind, even when she knows it's going to get her in trouble. But she's never a bitch about it, she never does it to hurt. She does it because she sees something wrong and she feels the need to speak out.

Bekah puts her money where her mouth is, too. "You should move to Philly," she said to me one day, "so you can hang with me and Dave and Jill and Nicole more often."

"That'd be cool," says I, "but I'd need to get a job there."

So Bekah spends the next few weeks clipping want-ads for appropriate jobs out of the newspaper and sending them my way. It didn't work out, in the end, but she tried.

That's why Bekah's cool.

Here's why Gus is cool:

He's Dedicated

1. Wholly committed to a particular course of thought or action; devoted.

Gus sticks by his people, wherever those people are. He cares, even when they're gone, or he is. "Do you still see anyone from the old days," he asks. "How are they?" And when he wants to, he tracks them down. Hell, he did it to me - popping up in my email one day, not letting my busy few weeks discourage him.

I can see how he does the same for his family every time I talk to him. The man just cares about people. Even when he doesn't like individuals, he tries so hard to care about them.

That's why Gus is cool.

Here's why Brian's cool:

He's waffles

A light crisp battercake baked in a waffle iron.

In terms of physical number of years upon the earth, Brian's my oldest friend. He's been married fewer years than others, but as far as the world of career and "adult responsibility" goes he's got a lot. For all of that, though, he's one of my friends who's grown up the least. And not only is he short, but he's also child-like. Not childish, child-like.

I became friends with Brian while he was driving at ninety miles an hour to get me to my driver's road test and back to work before anyone noticed we were missing, most notably the parents of the kids Brian was meant to be watching - the parents' whose good will would transform into the more sizable portion of his salary. The story's longer, but the cruz of it is that even with all that he still had the guys to joke with me about the car breaking down.

That's why Brian's cool.

Here's why Bard's cool:

He's debonaire

2. Affable; genial.

What the boy does, he does with flair. But moreso, Derek's a guy who brings a real enthusiasm to everything he does. He's creative, yes. He's imaginative, yes. He's got talent, yes. But it's really his enthusiasm that gets to me. He gets an idea in his head and an hour later he's written up a new two-thousand word rpg. Every conversation is a conversation with gusto! Every new book is a book with talking about!

That's why Bard is cool.

Here's why Erik's cool:

He's supportive

furnishing support or assistance.

Most recently it was the Fables. Before that it was any number of stories or comics or whatever still floating in my head. In college it was my failed attempt at a TV show and my SULive sketch ideas. Erik's never failed to give me his input and brainstorming and feedback on whatever I had in mind, as well as his encouragement that what I'm doing is cool and that I should go for it.

Also, he picked me up from jail.

That's why Erik's cool.

A few days ago I mentioned that my friend Derek has a lot of enthusiasm. I tell no lie. What he's done with that enthusiasm now is started scripting a comic book. And he's started posting that script to his blog as he writes it, three pages a day. He talks a bit about the concept here (where he mentions the Arabian Nights to my great delight and amusement).

I think he's got a solid idea. I think he writes a solid script. I think he could get this thing picked up by D.C. if he tried.

So here's what you do:

1. You go to his blog.

2. You read his script.

3. You help me convince him to send a proposal for the thing to D.C.

C'mon, he's only up to page twelve so far! It won't take long!

Derek, the Bard has Spring Break or some such this week and has therefore flown from Toronto to the Left Coast of Canadia to visit his mother and step-father in the suburbs of Vancouver. Seeing as Vancouver is only a little over a two hour drive away from me, this seemed a good opportunity to actually, you know, meet the Bard, which I'd technically never done before.

I hadn't made a long drive since July and hadn't made a long drive by myself in... well, honestly, I forget the last time. A while ago, anyway. I love long drives so much; the weight of the car as it grips around a turn, the hum of air outside the car, the minutes stretching out into miles...

The drive north reminded me of driving through upstate New York, only with fewer billboards. Honestly, I think I just automatically associate long drives through rural areas with upstate New York, given how much of the former have been through the later. Even drives that are very different geographically (say, when I drove through the midwest a few years back) I've thought of in juxtaposition with New York State.

An hour and a half north and I hit the border. The guard was very confused by the fact that my license plate and driver's license read New Jersey but that I claimed to live in Seattle. So confused was he that he sent me off to the customs office, whereupon I was asked a series of ridiculous questions, including the purpose of my visit to Canada, how I earned a living, how I knew Derek and so on. The sort of questions that airline check in people ask, that a person who wants to cause any sort of trouble will simply lie about. It was wonderful to have to explain that I know the Bard from when he worked for me as a volunteer for an internet chat. I have, all things considered, had gained quicker access to countries where the customs agents and I did not speak the same language. But they had a picture of Elizabeth II, Queen of Canada, on the wall, so that made up for it.

After I cleared customs I drove through a sort of sleepy suburban area; the sort that I, as a kid from North Jersey's sprawl, tend to think of as sub-suburban. There are shopping malls and condos and housing developments, sure, but also abundant farmland. Pleasantish. I made it to the Bard's house without further incident.

Derek's first words to me were that I didn't look like he expected me to from the pictures on my blog. So large was the discrepancy that the Bard felt the need to take a picture of me with his digital camera, to see if it more resembled the person standing in front of him. That picture is still forthcoming for the viewing public, but I don't believe that it does. Derek said I have a squarer jaw than my pictures suggest. That's cool. Also not a surprise. Leaving aside only one picture that I can think of, I don't photograph well. In my case, the camera lies. Not so for the Bard who, leaving aside the top hat and cane, looks very much like the pictures I've seen.

Beyond that first surprise, we spent the day in a brief tour of the town, all important sites included. Which is to say the comic shop, the game store, the waterfront and the local shopping mall. I explained to Derek, as I have to many other people, that I'm very comfortable in malls, seeing as a good portion of my life thus far can be summed up by watching Mallrats. I bought some chocolate from what the Bard assured me was a wonderful chocolatier. We talked shop, which means we talked a lot about comics, both reading them and writing them. We threw some ideas at each other, gave suggestions and so on. Derek, in person, is as enthusiastic and energetic as he comes across on chat and the phone. It's slightly infectious.

I left the Bard's home a little before nine and made my way home. U.S. customs was pathetically easy to get past. I didn't have to answer any questions at all; just flashed the fakey-looking New Jersey driver's license and got waved right through. If anyone is considering illegal immigration to the U.S. for any reason, peaceful or otherwise, all you need to do is get a high school student to make you a fake I.D. and come through the Peace Arch customs station. Easy.

And that was the day. It was very cool to be able to see the Bard, finally. I've known him for so long it's crap that we hadn't been able to get together sooner. As I keep saying, we've put a lot of utility into the world, but nothing can top the wonderfully human touch of a voice unfiltered by electronics, of a strong handshake, of being able to make eye contact with the person you're talking to, of responding without delay. Even if it's just for a few hours, it can lend an interesting focus to a friendship.

Now I just have to work on that with Gus, Amanda and Gabe...

The internet is a wonderful reason to always behave with dignity, don't you think?

The Delightful Jeni Garber and I hung out tonight for dinner and a movie. I want to talk about each of them in turn:

Dinner

We had pizza. But not just any pizza. We had Extreme Pizza pizza.

How was it? At the risk of being cliche, it was extremely not bad. For horribly processed, artificial chain-restaurant pizza. God I miss pizza. Someone in New York: Mail me a pizza! Qucikly, dammit!

Boy was it extreme. There were surfers and snowboarders and skateboarders all over the fucking place. Or at least pictures of them on the walls. Extreme. Sweet Zombie Jesus! It's fucking PIZZA! There is no way to make it extreme and no purpose to be served by so doing!

Movie

We watched Ocean's Twelve. We'd both liked Ocean's Eleven, so why not the sequel, right?

Wrong.

As far as I'm concerned, there's exactly one clever part in this movie, and it's only mildly clever at best. It's about fifteen or twenty minutes in and all of the characters are standing around wondering why, collectively, they're called "Ocean's Eleven." It lasts for about thirty seconds.

Also, it was cool to suddenly see Eddie Izzard. He wasn't cool in the movie, it was just cool to suddenly see him. The excitement faded quickly.

The rest of the movie's overly intricate, impossible to follow, under-characterized, poorly planned...

The Delightful Jeni Garber has a less flattering opinion of the movie than I do.

And it's such a pity. Because the first one was so clever. It fell into such perfect place. It worked out so well. It was cool! I really, really wanted the sequel to be as good.

It wasn't.

Not even close.

Yesterday I got an email from Eugene, announcing his annual birthday barbecue. In North Jersey my friends and I have a barbecue season; every few weeks we get together for a barbecue. We've had as few as two to as many as six over the course of a season. It's a good time, sitting with good, old friends on a relaxing afternoon outside, enjoying good grilled food and some drinks... Maybe playing a little football, which might involve accidentally knocking Adi to the ground... I think of the start of the season as Eugene's birthday barbecue. Getting Eugene's email, I had one of those homesick moments that happen whenever I miss something important to me. It's what happens when you move far away from the friends you love.

Around the time I got the email, though, I also found the website Overheard in New York. It's impossible, in New York, not to touch on other people's lives. You ignore each other with blithe abandon as you walk down the street, but things are cramped enough that parts of people, snippets of their conversation, drift into your personal plane of reality and help make up your world. If New York is a microcosm for the world (and it just might be), then New York, and through New York this website, is a reminder that distant things might not be so far away. I read a lot of the site's archive yesterday, and I laughed a lot at what's up there, and when I stopped, I stopped with a sigh and thought "it's good to be home."

When is it that you actually use that fancy new internet connection of yours? Is it a time that those of us who are similarly equipped can intersect with you?

Let me know.

Also let me know what your current email addy is.

Please.

Right Coast trip over and done with, now back in Seattle. I had a great time, but I'm glad to be back - I love all my Right Coast buddies, but the place where I have all of my stuff will always feel most like home to me, even if I rarely use or look at most of that stuff.

A short trip summary:

I hung with The Ogre, who I hadn't seen in more than a year, for the whole of the first week. We played video games, saw a movie (quite good), went Great Adventure, where we rode Kingda Ka (and no other rides - I love free passes) and went to Sleazeside. Oh, at GA we also drove through the safarri. Monkeys did not jump on my car, which made me sad, but I did determine that camels are the Gene Simmons' of the animal kingdom. I can't express how good it was to see The Ogre.

I also got to see Sarah Who Is Awesome (this is her new name) for a few days. Sarah is a friend of Ogre's from his days at William & Mary. I met her a few years ago and her awesomeness has only grown in that time. As a brief sample of her awesomeness I present to you the verb she created: snuffleupigate. How awesome is that?

I got to spend an afternoon with Maddy, who is every bit as cute in real life as her picture makes her out to be. Also, I got to see Brian and Sheira. Heh.

I went to Filthy to visit Dave & Bekah, who continue to frighten me (in a good way) and now live in Toronto.

I saw Kiki, who continues to be one of the coolest people on the planet and somehow, after all these years, still manages to take me by surprise.

I saw an ever-changing roster of my peeps at InterSlice (and my peeps formerly at InterSlice) on three non-consecutive occasions. I now have a book full of job leads, a few of which are nice and where I'd like to end up.

I went up to Connecticut (where I, surprisingly, did not almost die) to see Eric & Stefanie. Their house is great. The Irish restaurant they took me too is even better, because said restaurant has a stew that's stock is made from Guinness. What could be better?

I saw The Group, though not for as long as I wanted to. I also found out that I'll see them in November, which I wasn't expecting. Aaron & Jen have awesome timing.

And now I'm back and ready to veg out for a little while. A very little while; I've got lots of work to do.

Too all the folks I didn't get to see while I was in town: I'm sorry! I'll try harder next time!

And, of course, now that I'm back Seattle has a series of visits from some Very Special Guests:

September 9(?)-11: Erik, my erstwhile roommate, will cap off his driving tour of the Left Coast here in Seattle. I'm not quite sure when he'll get here and neither is he; Friday or Saturday, most likely. Seattleites! I say unto thee: be around to entertain my out of town friend, for verily he will appreciate your particular brand of madness.

October 3: Erin McKeown, who is tiny but sings with voice enough to topple Jericho, travels as some dude's opening act. All opening acts should be reffered to as "heralds," but that's besides the point. The point is that I'll go see her play anyway, because Erin is worth it alone, and the other guy might be good.

October 4: Neil Gaiman, a man who I don't have as much to say as I ought, will be here that evening to sign his new book. I will be there to have said new book signed. Possibly other books as well.

October 19: Dar Williams, who probably doesn't remember me, is going to hit Seattle a month after her new album does. I haven't seen Dar play in much, much, much too long. I don't always think about it, but when I do it makes me sad. Seeing Dar again will make me happy.

That is all.

I've let a few things fall by the wayside in the past few weeks, vis a vis blogging, at least. Let me see if I can sum it up quickly:

Dar Williams: I skipped the Dar show on Wednesday. Some of you will now undoubtedly be wondering if I'm feeling alright, and I assure you that I am. It's just that I had a test in Japanese on Thursday and decided that getting my master's degree was more important than seeing Dar. This one time, at least. Plus, by staying home, I got to talk on the phone with Sarah Who Is Awesome. The conversation, as you might expect, was awesome.

November: Speaking of awesome things, my invitation to Aaron and Jen's wedding came in the mail this week. Plus their wedding's just before Thanksgiving, which means I get to be home for that, too.

Smallville: Same problem with Aquaman here as in Super Friends: they had to invent a water-based problem for him to have a reason to be around. Also, sufer style was never cool. Not even in the 80's, when people thought it was. Also also, while I'm not a huge fan of Tom Welling's pecs, it probably wasn't the smartest move on the producers' part to film the episode where he goes topless after he'd stopped working out.

Kamikaze Girls: A Japanese biker girl head-butting a Japanese Loli is a universally funny image. When it shows up repeatedly in a movie that's cute, funny, bizarre and, at turns, heart-warming, you're pretty much set. See this if you can.

Arkham Asylum: One of the classic Batman stories, re-released in a normal-sized trade, includes a copy of the script. It has one of the best lines from Batman ever. The rogues have Batman trapped and at their mercy. They're debating what to do with him. "We should take his mask off and get a look at his face," says one. "Don't be obvious," says the Joker as he looks at Batman's grim mask. "That is his face."

Mirrormask: Lukas accurately quotes me as saying that "I have never seen a movie that so fully reflected the tastes of its director." Neil Gaiman, Dave McKean and the Jim Henson's company were locked in a room. This is the movie they made. It's of the "unhappy girl gets sucked into wonderous yet crappy other world" genre. Some reviewers regard this as a bad thing. They are stupid, for this movie is excellent.

I think that pretty much covers the highlights. I need to get better about keeping a schedule, I think. But, then, that's usually the case these days. Pardon, I'm off to give being productive a whirl. Or possibly to watch the Princess Bride. I haven't decided.

This past week's kept pretty nicely in theme with the rest of the month of November and been mostly about relationships. Not mine (and, given my mid-month problems in that department, that's probably a good thing). No, this was a week about other people's relationships. That said, my friend's relationships are mostly not something that it's my place to discuss on my blog, so this is just a place-holder, a bit of digital string tied around a virtual finger to remind my future self, when I read back on this entry later, that this past week So-And-So started dating, Someone's new guy may be crazy and Another Person got turned down in a most uncool way.

That said, there is one relationship I'm cool talking about, at least a little: Aaron and Jen's. Why am I cool talking about it? Because they got married a week ago today, and that's all public and whatnot to begin with. Plus it's just awesome, and I was thrilled that I got to be there for it.

Best part of the wedding? Well, no offense to Aaron and Jen, but I think it was the shrimp wrapped in bacon served during the cocktail hour. Serving something like that just takes a very special kind of class.

Also, because I had to hit the Right Coast for said wedding, I got to be with my family on Thanksgiving. There are some things in life that, years gone by, are colored by the weight of nostalgia. They're things that, if you ever get back to them, are better in memory than in reality. I'm happy to report that Thanksgiving dinner with my family isn't like that. It was every bit as great as I remember it being, and I would only complain that it was just too short. I really do love Thanksgiving.

Back on the Left Coast, now, and spent today getting reaquainted with my bed, my bookshelves, my tv and my local grocery store. Tomorrow I'm back to something resembling normal.

I travel a lot less now than I used to, but in English that still translates to a fair bit of time on the road. The more complex travelling gets - especially in the holiday season, when travelling means checking in five minutes after your flight was due to leave, rushing through security and then dashing breathless down the concourse to reach the gate in time - the more I think that love is simple. I think love is as simple as someone waiting for you at the airport when your flight lands.

I had to take a shuttle bus home.

It was a good trip, all in all, though I couldn't help but feel... small... while I was away. School is part of that; the more time that goes on with me in school and unemployed, the more my relationships to people - my parents in particular, but most other people, too - shift back into the college frame of reference I thought I'd given up a few years ago. It's probably because I have the same lack of control over my ultimate fate now as I did then; I'm living in a microcosm of reality, cut off from what I view as the real world. It's not something that makes me happy.

To put it succinctly: The parents of a 27 year old guy should not reasonably expect that he'll call them to let him know his plane landed safely, nor should they reasonably expect that he'll go away on vacation with them. The guy should have his own money and schedule with which to go on vacation. He should have his own people to vacation with and should have other people to see that he landed safely