About Food

This was my dinner on Monday night. I like dinosaur-shaped meats. All meats should be dinosaur-shaped. In other thoughts, are McCain Smiles kind of black-face racist or do I just overcook them?

I'm sitting here eating Edy's Double Chocolate Brownie ice cream and remembering how I used to pay a small fortune for a midget-sized quart import container of this stuff at the Carrefour in Taiwan. Taiwanese ice cream sucks, and I would have absolutely died a miserable white man's Asian death without this crack. Even now, the taste takes me back to laptop movie nights under the mosquito net on the world's hardest bed.

Everyone that I know loves food. Except me. I've been running with a gang for a few weeks now that can easily spend an hour in Whole Foods' produce section picking vegetables for a cookout. This is great, excruciating madness. I see the enjoyment that eating out at new restaurants brings people, the excitement of trying a new type of cuisine, the fun that some find in cooking from scratch, from finding a new recipe.

I love ice cream, doughnuts, and Pringles, am passionate now about certain, very specific Asian dishes, and pretty much just eat to survive otherwise. I actually enjoy smelling food more than eating it most of the time. I work right by the break room at my bank, so I get the olfactory experience of biryani, Greek kabobs, and Vietnamese rice dishes on a regular basis. And then there was the day when someone brought sardines, extolling their Omega 3 content, and was savagely rebuked by all others in attendance.

Anyway, I don't love food. I guess some people have a hard time understanding this.

Just Watched:
Grey Gardens on DVD
"If you can't get a man to propose to you, you might as well be dead."

Pride comes easy with 450,000 of your peers and peeps around. The Monday after it generally isn't quite so easy.

Blogs are great. You can come and go, people care and they don't. So casual, like gym memberships for people who join just because they want to tell their friends and not feel so lazy. The best blogs, of course, have multiple authors with interconnected conversations and conflicting ideas and dynamic comments and heated discussion. My blog is a soliloquy, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Looking for meaning in the dustbin of my life. I probably won't find it in Savannah, so I might as well keep looking here. I learned a couple of weeks ago that the school to which I have applied doesn't make the all-important out of state tuition waver decision (my $10,000 question) until 2 weeks before school starts in August. This hardly allows me enough time to pack my apartment, much less quit my job, give my landlord any sort of notice, get a moving truck, move 1,000 miles, find a new place to live, change my mailing address with the postal authorities, start classes, get a job, and grow a new life to replace the one from Chicago that I shredded and recycled.

Young (very, very young) artist's work on display in the corridor outside the classroom portion of the new modern wing of the Art Institute of Chicago. The gril is sad indeed.

I am not. I've really been enjoying this summer so far. I'm at the beach almost every day that I have off of work. I've been to several interesting concerts in Millennium Park, several fun neighborhood festivals, and experienced a different side to life in Chicago than I have during previous summers. It has been good. A lot of this has to do with the fact that...

I am still seeing this boy named Scott. He is very NICE. This may be my highest compliment of all, and altogether too rare for the gay boys. Which is not to mention other facts such as: he is also nice looking and nice smelling and intelligent and accomplished and stylish in a slightly-askew sort of way and somehow, miraculously, enjoys my company, too. He has cool friends, and I am working hard to get over his veganism. He turns out to be Jewish, which is a delicious irony if you know anything at all about my father. He is also moving to Madrid in August for a year of school, so I am totally, positively not falling in love with him.

I am mapping some things in my head now, though, as far as relationships go. And ebb and flow. I'm learning. There are interesting convergences and divergences, people patterns. There's probably more in common with evolutionary theory than just terminology, also. Punctuated equilibrium and missing links and extinction.

Currently Listening to:
Marry Me by St. Vincent

Tomorrow I have a first date.

Fiction-worthy irony: tomorrow would be the fourth anniversary of the beginning of my relationship with Kevin.

I realized this fun fact while getting all googley-eyed at work this afternoon thinking about my exciting and terrifying first date to come. I was very happy about this irony; it seems like a great way to NOT mark the day, to forget it and begin to attempt to bury it. We celebrated May 27 for the last few years because it was the last day of my school year in 2005; thus, it was the first day that we could date after I finished working at Grace.

His name is Scott. Funny but true. While I've never dated a Scott before, I have also never met a Scott that I didn't want more of in my life. Scotts are good people. Let's hope that continues to be true after tomorrow.

I asked him out over IMs. That's awfully 21st century for an old guy like me, and feels a little too easy, actually. A bit of a cheat. But, of course, I can't ask him out face-to-face as we have never met. We have chatted online several times now, and it turns out that he lives very nearby.

I asked if I could take him out to dinner. He tried to bargain me down to drinks or coffee. Said that dinner makes him too nervous. I find this to be a most winning answer. Eating in front of someone you don't know is intimidating, isn't it? I would never bid on lunch with a favorite celebrity at a charity auction; I'd be too freaked out about eating in front of them. So we are going for tea, and then a movie. The fine art of bartering: something less than dinner, more than drinks.

So I offered Wednesday, Thursday, or Saturday, thinking these are the best days for me, work schedule-wise. He went for Wednesday, and the rest is a beautiful twist straight from O. Henry's celebrated short fiction.

But, a date! I'm so excited.

Currently Listening to:
"I Do Not Hook Up" by Kelly Clarkson

I Like

I like how the girls in my life take care of me. Sending me home from work with food, saying "Awww" a lot, asking me questions and giving me unsolicited advice. Sometimes I take girls for granted, but sometimes the little things they do can melt my heart.

I like how my RSS reader captures your blog posts, even the ones that you have second thoughts about later and remove. I'm glad I got to read that, it made me hurt for you, but now I'm not sure what to do with the information that I have. I want to help. How can I help?

I like the ramen noodle soup and general vibe at this pan-Asian restaurant near my bank - a truly unlikely location. Sofia and I went there yesterday afternoon after work, and it was the best thing I've tasted in a long time. Not exactly the way I remember it, but familiar enough and fantastic in its own unique way.

我喜歡說中文,可是我的中文不好. (I like speaking Chinese, but my Chinese is bad.)

I like Pillsbury Cinnamon Rolls from the can that explodes on Sunday mornings.

I like The Wire, and chatting late into the night with some cool guy that I just met, and people with different cultural backgrounds that want to share with me what that culture is like, and Dave Eggers, and old friends, and walking and walking and walking, and exotic but easily pronounceable names, and making plans but not following through on those plans, and going places in the backseat of a car though not while tied up.

I like French movies lately. When was the last time you saw a bad French movie? Never, that's when. I'm halfway through Paris, Je T'aime right now. What a cool, cool, fascinating, funny little movie. Recently I watched Tell No One, Persepolis, and Ma Vie En Rose, too. And what about Ratatouille? One of the best French movies ever.

Currently Liking:
"Heartless" by Kris Allen

Dispatches from the Dead Twitter/Letter Room

What the what? I have no idea.

Today is one of those days when I say that little rhetorical, pointlessly ego-reflexive prayer aloud: "Dear God, it is perfect here. Why would I ever want to leave?"

Ladies who fall off of their ridiculously tall shoes and injure themselves: who do you have to blame?

Saw two be-hoodied individuals making out in the park as I walked home this afternoon. That is so mysterious and hot. Girls in love? Guys? One of each? The androgyny is intriguing.

Tomorrow morning I'm heading to New York City for a couple of days to hang out with a few friends. It promises to be a weekend unlike any other I've ever had.

I'm staying at a hotel in Rockefeller Center. If I don't see Tina Fey, I will be severely disappointed. I know it is fiction, but still.

"Gone, gone to New York City, where you gonna go with a head that empty? Gone, gone to New York City, where you gonna go with a heart that gone?" Lyrics by Conor Oberst, kind of.

Currently Listening to:
Vampire Weekend by Vampire Weekend