Saturday.

It’s a cliché but true that keeping busy helps. Today I met with the programming group of aGLIFF (the Austin Gay & Lesbian Int’l Film Festival) to put together a rough draft of a schedule for the festival, which is in mid-September. Several hundred films were submitted. Each is screened by at least 5 people, and about 35 films I think are programmed in the festival.

There were about 20 of us there from 10 to 6 today, discussing which films we liked, which we didn’t like. It’s my first year being involved, so I’m trying to lay back a bit and give it a chance, but I have some serious reservations about the method used to program the festival. There’s no strong curatorial voice -- the program is really dependent upon the tastes of a random group of volunteers. They consider that to be a virtue. A festival programmed by the community. I’m not convinced. I think there’s a skill to curating art and that it helps to have some specialized knowledge. The reason I got involved is that I’ve thought the festival in past years was kind of lame for such a hip film and media town as Austin. So I’m laying back sometimes, asserting my opinions strongly at other times. The program has to appeal to a broad, mainstream audience, so I accept that there are a lot of films people will love that I think are crap. And a lot of films that I adore which most people wouldn’t sit still through.

When I got home from the meeting, J asked I wanted to go to P Terry’s with him and his summer love, A, and afterwards to see the Joan Rivers documentary, A Piece of Work. So I did that. The movie is great, go see it. Inspiring, and kind of riveting.

Before the show there was a trailer for a new doc which seemed to consist of interviews with important filmmakers, and watching it I had a moment of feeling quite strong, pondering how life is full of heartbreak but if it weren’t I wouldn’t have any subject matter. As bad as I feel right now, I know the experience will make my work more empathetic. I don’t think that thought makes me any less sad, but it makes me less hopeless.

Everything reminds me of him. Everything. I pour myself a beer and it makes me think of Liberty Bar, where we would order a couple pints and take them to the patio where we’d get food from East Side King. I read some random food blog, it mentions a farmer’s market, and my eyes tear up. Jesus Christ, we only went to the farmer’s market together twice, but immediately I’m back there with him picking out tomatoes.

I play Angry Birds on my iPhone and think of him because he turned me on to it. I updated and got new levels a couple days ago, which I’ve been waiting for for weeks, and I was so excited I wanted to text him to tell him, “Angry Birds! new levels! :-).” I didn’t. I avoid most things that I know will evoke his memory, but I defiantly hold onto Angry Birds. He can take my belief in love, my self-esteem, my hope for the future, and everything else in life that brings me joy, but he can’t have my motherfucking Angry Birds.

I feel the absence of him on the inside of my arms, on my chest and stomach. I long for him. I told him, the last night we slept together and he didn’t want to have sex, that just being near him made me hard and that I understood we wouldn’t both always want to have sex at the same time and I was afraid my arousal would be creepy to him when he wasn’t in the mood -- I was apologizing for being turned on by him really is what I was doing -- and he said something like, “You shouldn’t feel like a totally natural desire is creepy.”

Can you get dehydrated from crying? How much water are you actually losing when you cry nonstop for say like an hour? It’s like a PSA about water conservation when they tell you stuff like, “When you have a dripping faucet, you’re wasting 4 gallons of water an hour,” or whatever. I’ve sprung a leak.