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.

Spoke Too Soon.

I read for a bit, meditated for 10 minutes, and then cried for an hour.

It’s Friday, I don’t have plans. I don’t want to go out. I don’t want to meet anyone. Before I met M, I used to go often on Fridays to the Chain Drive alone, get stoned and listen to loud music because I liked the Friday deejay. Maybe there’d be people there I knew, maybe not. Maybe I’d make out with somebody. It was all very mindless and fun and low key. I don’t want to go there tonight -- that’s where I met M. I don’t want to sit in the corner of a gay bar and cry. Jesus.

I’m halfway through When Things Fall Apart, and somehow it’s not as convincing as it was when I read it last time. It’s all very wise and true, but it hasn’t struck me as the lesson I need to learn now.

How did the story of this heartbreak become all about my unreasonable expectations? My inability to relax with impermanence? I think I’m pretty good with impermanence, thank you, and I believe my expectations were extremely temperate and flexible. M worried that I was hanging everything on my relationship with him, and he said that scared him and made him lose interest.

Yes, I loved the comfort and safety of his company. I loved knowing that he wanted to be with me. I loved getting his texts that started “hey sweetie,” and I loved returning his affection. I loved sleeping with my arms around him. How is that wrong? What is love supposed to be, if not that tender feeling? And it hurts like hell to have it one moment and then have it snatched away. Maybe it hurts for a long time.

How about this story: I’m despondent because I fell deeply in love with a man, thought with good reason -- he told me he did -- that he felt similarly about me, thought with good reason -- we expressed the desire to each other -- that we both wanted to be together for a long time, and then, out of the blue, he told me that he didn’t want to be together any more. That seems like a damn good reason to be freaked out and very, very sad.

So Far, So Good.

Well, a little random weeping here and there today, but no major sobbing fits. It’s only 7, but still I think that’s progress.

I composed letters to several of my New York friends, testing the waters for a move.

Human Centipede.

J and M and I went to see The Human Centipede last night. If you like scary movies, go see it because it’s absolutely terrifying, but also fucked up and hilarious. I loved it. The Dobie had some projection problems about halfway through, the DVD froze so they had to start it over and fast forward. They started the movie a few minutes before the spot where it stopped, so we watched a couple scenes twice. I was grateful for the break -- though several times it made me laugh out loud, it’s a seriously scary and upsetting movie and it was starting to make me more anxious than I like to be at a horror movie.

Afterwards, on the way to the car, I started crying again because the movie was on campus and we walked near the building where M works, and it set me off. There’s not much in this town that doesn’t remind me of him.

When will I stop thinking about him all the time? When will I stop missing him? I must still somehow believe that he’ll come back and say he wants me after all because why would anyone let someone he loves suffer so much if he could end it? I know, it’s insane. Yet at the same time logical.

I guess my task is to find a way to relax with not being able to reconcile what’s happening between us now with what was happening just a matter of days ago. Maybe I’ll get there. Right now, it’s still driving me mad. I still can’t accept it.

*

I lost confidence with the high school diary project. I just don’t know if the text, even heavily edited, has in it what I feel when I read it. I’m not sure it supports what I want to do. It’s possible that I’m just getting cold feet now that it’s starting to become labor, but it feels more like a real art problem. I’ll mull it over for a while. Meanwhile, I have 3 short stories, which I dug out recently and made notes for revisions, some of them very simple. I’ll do that first. One of them I want to turn into a screenplay, so that’s a little more work, but I think I have a pretty good outline, so the fun part is left: writing dialogue and description.

I cooked some stuff yesterday for salads. I marinated 3 chicken breasts in lemon, orange, garlic, and black pepper, then sautéed them, sliced and froze 2 of them. They were beautiful, delicious, and juicy. And I fried some tempeh for J. The salad I made us for dinner had red bib lettuce, some Romaine, a little cabbage, sliced radishes and red onion, with my regular vinaigrette (lemon, red wine vinegar, Dijon, and olive oil -- I left out the garlic or onion I usually put in it because there were onions in the salad), and I put sliced chicken on mine and tempeh on Jay’s, and half an avocado on each. Yum! I also bought feta and some Gaeta olives, red peppers and asparagus, to vary it a bit since I plan to make salads every day for a while.

I’m cutting back the amount of food I eat and trying to limit fat and carbohydrates for a while to lose some weight. I’m about 15 pounds heavier than I like to be. I also like eating lighter and using the stove less now that it's close to 100 every day and will be for the next 4 months.

More On That Subject.

To continue and elaborate on that earlier line of thought, it is important to me to note that that was the first time I had been in that situation -- where I was so aroused by someone who 1) didn’t physically match any idea of mine of what a sexy man is, and 2) was, as far as I could tell, less into my body than I was into his. M was sweet, affectionate, and responsive to my touch, but it was usually I who initiated any kind of contact. I didn’t feel insecure about that. I was okay with it and in fact enjoyed it. I enjoyed being the pursuer.

That was a huge change for me, a huge positive change, because the usual scenario for me -- going all the way back to the middle-aged men who I knew were turned on by me when I was a teenager, and the fact that I turned them on, turned me on, even though I found them physically repulsive -- the usual dynamic was that my arousal depended on someone being turned on by me. I loved this change, this new way of feeling sexy. I thought it was more honest and real and healthy. I felt like I was dealing with getting older, finding a way of being an older man in a relationship.

Last Night.

Last night, for the first time in a week and a half, I didn’t take 2 Tylenol PM before I went to bed. Too soon. I managed to slow my mind down enough to fall asleep after about an hour, but I was wide awake again at 3 a.m., trying to reconstruct the sequence of the last few times I saw M, what we did, what was said. I was worried I would forget, so I got up and wrote down what I was able to remember. It’s like a riddle, a mystery; I think if I recall the right bit of conversation, if I look at it from the right angle, it’ll come together, it’ll make sense.

I fell asleep again quickly after writing, but awoke again at 5. I stayed in bed till almost 10, drifting in and out of sleep, dreaming vividly about watching a Stephen Sondheim musical on TV in a dirty, cluttered house with some people whose company I was enjoying. There was a bunch of other weird shit going on in the dream, but I don’t remember any of it now.

*

I know, I totally know, that 90% of this pain I feel is the sting of sexual rejection. I’m not proud of it, but I have to admit it. If there is any good to come out of this, maybe it’ll be some kind of watershed in my letting go of my vanity.

Sex for me had always been about trying to discover what it was that another person found sexy about me and then maneuvering to show that off and camouflage the rest, whether that meant literally being conscious of in what light and from what angle I was being seen or modulating my attitude, stance, mannerisms. But I let M see me from every angle. I don’t know why I felt safe doing that, but I did. Maybe it was because I didn’t think he was sexier than me, objectively speaking. He has a big belly and hair on his back and bad teeth and didn’t make any effort to conceal the fact that he sometimes wore the same pair of underwear for 4 or 5 days if he didn’t have time to do laundry. He’s fussy and a bit of a snob. I was turned on by him in spite of all that, or because of all that – I was turned on by him, not by an idea of how his body reflected a fantasy I have of a sexy man. I think I assumed the feeling was mutual. I let him see me in unflattering light. I felt like he was attracted to me, turned on by me, not by an image of myself that I was carefully managing for him, displaying for him.

To be rejected at that level of vulnerability is a true rejection. He saw me, and he rejected me. That fact, that he is not sexually attracted to me now, that fact is what stops in its tracks any scheme I devise for reconciliation. I want him. He doesn’t want me.

*

I’m old. I’m old. I’m not a senior citizen, but I am older than most of the people I encounter in my life. I am older than anyone I know who is still floundering, still cobbling together an artist’s living with no security and no real prospects of it ever changing.

I’m still thinking about moving back to New York.

Bought Groceries Today.

I think the world has always been for me a scary and difficult place, and I’ve always looked for someone who could help me negotiate it. Despite how headstrong and confident I can be, I’m really scared shitless most of the time. It’s true.

*

I accomplished one thing on my list today. So far. I might still get to editing that script -- it’s only 7. If not, there’s tomorrow.

I went grocery shopping at Whole Foods because I wanted to get some meat. Chicken breasts were on sale and pork chops, so I got a few of both. I put the pork in the freezer. I think I’ll marinate and saute the chicken and then freeze some of it cooked. I don’t plan to prepare much but salads for a while, and I’ll put some cold chicken on mine for protein. For J, I’ll cook some beans, and there’s tempeh in the fridge.

I had a little mental breakthrough last night as I was lying in bed waiting for sleep: no major revelation, just a moment of seeing clearly how my being so agitated isn’t helping anything and will never change what happened. I need to read the Pema Chodron and start meditating again if I want to get sane. I know it works. Marijuana helps also, to loosen up my mind, get some air in there.

I was thinking about when I met M. It was at the Chain Drive, he was there with a friend of mine. They had just met at a party through an acquaintance, and M was interested in my friend. I thought M was handsome, and I was drawn to him because he was smart and funny and he knew who DeAundra Peek was. But he was interested in my friend, and I just thought of him as an interesting guy to have met, someone I enjoyed talking to.

A few days later, I saw him there again. I had just been stood up by a guy I’d gone out with a few times, I was miffed, and I decided to go out carousing by myself. Some time between the night I met M and this night, my friend (the one M was interested in) told me that he wasn’t interested in M.

M was out on the front patio with his roommate. He lit up when he saw me, and he called me over. He and I and his roommate talked for a long time, had a friendly, boisterous, increasingly drunken argument about race in America, which was so stimulating I was giddy; I so seldom had those kinds of conversations, and I was eating it up, how smart these guys were and how much fun. It’s the kind of situation where I feel like I blossom, I become my best self, my most impressive, or something. I don’t know how to describe it, I just felt alive. I felt like who I am, or who I like to think I am, anyway. Some time after midnight, M’s roommate wanted to go. M had come in his roommate’s car, but I told him I would drive him home if he wanted to stay. He did.

We talked non-stop for another hour at least. M was pretty tipsy. I was a little less drunk, but we’d smoked some pot. We sat on a bench, and M leaned in toward me, and we talked about art and sex, gay culture, the South, and I don’t know what all, and I have such a strong memory of how that hour or so felt. Maybe we were a little flirtatious, I don’t know how to gauge. It was a loud bar, so we had to be pretty close to each other to be heard. It wasn’t at all like a pickup, I didn't at all have the feeling that we were going to go home and have sex, but I was really smitten with him.

Eventually, I drove him home, and, when I pulled up in front of his house, I asked if I could kiss him good night because, I said, “I have a bit of a crush on you.” He made a sound like “aww,” and he let me kiss him. We made out a little. I felt awfully good driving home.

A day or two later, he invited a group of friends to a talk by Heather Love at a conference at U.T. In the email invite, he said that he didn't know what Ms. Love was talking about but that everything of hers he'd read had been "gorgeous." My crush was deepening. It ended up that I was the only one to join him. We both enjoyed the lecture, but he had to rush somewhere immediately afterwards, so we made a date for coffee a day or two after. We met at Caffe Medici across from campus. I think of that as our first date, but at that point it was still unclear to me whether the smooching in the car was just a drunken impulse or if we’d try it again.

My next memory -- and I can’t place it exactly, but it was in the first week or two of our acquaintance, it was probably the next time we saw each other after the coffee date -- we’d been somewhere together, I think, but we were back at his place, sitting on the couch. Which is interesting because it’s seldom that anyone sits on the couch in his house. But we were there, and by that time we’d started to kiss a little, but it still felt tentative. I was telling him how, at the Heather Love talk and our coffee date, I hadn’t been sure of his interest in me. And he said, “I was interested in you.” And he said, “I think you’re actually kind of amazing.” Inside, I was swooning.

That’s how it started. I wonder now how things would have played out if I hadn’t asked him for a kiss that night when I drove him home. Would we have become just great friends, instead of lovers?

My interest in him at the very beginning was not sexual. That came later. So it’s easy for me to imagine that we could have had a very different kind of friendship if we hadn’t become lovers. I miss him so much. I’ve lost the first person with whom I felt like I brought my whole self, without fear, into the relationship. The hardest thing about this breakup is that, because he lost interest in me sexually, everything is lost. There was so much more to our partnership than sex: he turned me on emotionally, sexually, intellectually, artistically, politically. But somehow the sexual aspect is the keystone and none of it holds without that.

*

I’m conscious of the artfulness of what I’m doing here, but still I’m trying not to exaggerate anything for the sake of a better story. If anything, I would say I’m downplaying the maudlin aspect, all the crying and moaning. It is emotionally harrowing. I’m half-expecting to wake up one morning and find that my hair has gone completely gray.

A Week.

It was a week ago, almost to the minute, when M told me -- reluctantly, but unequivocally -- that he didn't want to be together any more, "like we were."

I’m avoiding people (except for a few very close friends I feel comfortable crying in front of). I don’t feel at all stable, and I don’t want to do some cliché breakup ritual where my friends take me out to get drunk and badmouth M. I don’t want anyone to be angry with him on my account. I still love him. I still think he’s amazing. How could I not still love him? He was so sweet and loving and generous to me. I’m not angry. I can’t let go of this irrational notion that we just had a misunderstanding that we can clear up. None of this is rational, so why not? Okay, so maybe that’s not likely, but at the very least I hold out hope that we’ll be close again in some way. I don’t think I’ve ever fallen out of love.

A few friends, either because J has talked to them or because they’ve read my blog, have sent me notes of sympathy and support. I keep repeating the refrain, “I have nothing, I have nothing,” but what I do have is very sweet friends.

What I hate most is that I regret the last 7 months. I wish it had never happened. I wish I had never met M. I wish I could erase it. Nothing is worth feeling as awful as I feel right now. But what that means is going back to a time when I sincerely believed I would never fall in love again. And that makes me crazy with grief.

*

What it comes down to, and M even said so though not in so many words, is that he lost interest in me because I’m basically a loser whose life has ground to a halt at 49. Okay, that's not fair, he didn't say that; he said that it made him panic to see that I didn't have anything else in my life but him. I had nothing to offer him. I grabbed onto him like a life jacket because he’s young and ambitious, talented, successful, etc. He has lots of friends and interests and confidence and promise. What would he need with me? What would he need with a washed-up artist who fell short of every dream he had, whose every frame of reference is in the past, who can no longer envision his own future? You’d run too.

*

Tonight I took out a piece of scrap paper and wrote “Wednesday” across the top, then “1. buy groceries,” and “2. edit HSD script.” HDS refers to the video I’m making based on my high school diary, which I've barely touched in the last week. And I haven’t wanted to do any cooking to speak of, so there’s nothing fresh in the house. I can’t keep eating chips and beer and takeout. I have $300 left on my food stamps card. I’ll buy a bunch of stuff to make salads -- M didn’t care much for salads, so making them and eating them won’t remind me too much of him, and it’s so hot now already that even turning the stove on makes the house uncomfortably warm.

If I can accomplish these two small tasks tomorrow, it’ll be some small step forward.

After I made the list, I cried harder than I’ve cried in the last week, realizing that it’s inevitable that I must leave my life with M behind. That I can't be with the man who brought me such joy, that all the wonderful things I looked forward to, the life that I was so sure was about to happen, will never happen.

Did I Fucking Dream This?

I keep thinking that if I misunderstood M’s intentions or his feelings about our relationship in such a fundamental way, I must have missed many clues all along, and that somehow it was fucked up from the beginning, that I must have been missing something or misinterpreting what was happening all along. All that time I thought I had my eyes wide open I was blind.

My memory of our trip to Mexico City turns from a sweet, wonderful reminiscence into a kind of Gaslight nightmare when I think about it. It was in Mexico that M started to talk about the future. And he encouraged me to think of us being together for at least a couple years when he discussed possibilities that could allow him to work there but not until at least the fall of 2011. It was all very tentative and contingent, but I didn’t ever think of it as contingent on anything that was happening between us, only contingent on the availability of opportunities to make a living there. I don’t think it was just the romance of being in a beautiful, exotic place on vacation because we continued to talk about it for weeks afterwards. He would bring it up. I wasn’t pushing the idea, I swear to fucking god I wasn’t. As recently as a couple weeks ago, he mentioned wanting to take another trip to Mexico City together this summer.

I’m going insane trying to figure out what happened, and being well aware that I might never know makes me even crazier. If I was so wrong about this, how can I trust my perception of anything.

*

It's a big perfect storm,this breakup, exacerbating all my fears about money and success and aging and home and love and family, blah blah blah, and I can see it and know what's happening but that doesn't make it any easier. God damn, it hurts!

Once again, I have to create some kind of life for myself from scratch. I'm tired. I'm tired of going back to nothing and starting over.

When Things Fall Apart.

I went to Bookpeople tonight and bought a new copy of When Things Fall Apart, by Pema Chodron. This is the book that I read -- or I should say that R read to J and me -- when things got so tough for us on the road, and the ideas in it -- which come from Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, through Pema Chodron, who was his student – got me through that difficult time and profoundly changed the way I live my life. Though my meditation practice has lapsed the last couple years, I still refer to those teachings and ideas daily.

I looked for this book on my shelf last week -- I must have given it to someone, because it wasn’t there. But the more I thought about it, the more hesitant I was to read it again. I have begun to worry that this notion of detachment from desired outcomes -- a central idea in these teachings and one I’ve strongly believed (I have “Abandon any hope of fruition” tattooed on my arm) -- is somehow behind all this chaos in my life the last 5 years. Is my success at letting go of any expectation of getting anywhere the reason that I can’t seem to get anywhere? It seems to me that what I need right now is to get my shit together, not to be cultivating contentment with the fact that I can’t get my shit together. I don’t want to be content with living in a homeless shelter and panhandling on the access road.

On the other hand, the source of this pain I feel now is my inability to let go of the future I had envisioned with M. I’m scared to let go of that vision because it feels like letting go of the very possibility of an enduring bond, a lasting partnership based on love and affection. I didn’t believe that it was possible, not for me, before I met M, but I let myself believe in it with him because I thought I was witnessing it happen. It felt miraculous. And, like most miracles, it was just a lie somebody wanted badly to believe. How will I ever let myself be that vulnerable again?

Monday.

I realize now, because it's all rushing back, that being with M alleviated a lot of my fear of aging. That I was interesting to a man 15 years younger than me was very, very reassuring. So, him losing interest had an extra punch.

I'm sort of wondering now how long it's normal to be so intensely sad. I'm still -- it's been what, like, well over a week? -- crying uncontrollably several times every day and avoiding the company of anyone but J because anything can set me off. I'm basically sitting in my room most of the day watching movies and maybe reading a bit. I don't want to pathologize what might be just a run-of-the-mill broken heart. On the other hand, I feel like I might need help.

I've thought about suicide a lot the last few days. I can't say I've contemplated killing myself, but I've ... pondered it. I've found some relief in googling “clean painless suicide” and reading all about the pros and cons of hanging and decapitation by train and various poisons. I don’t have the guts to kill myself, but it’s a way of imagining an end to this pain. I can’t imagine how else it will stop. The idea of living without love is too bleak to imagine, but the idea of ever being open to it again is terrifying.

I've been thinking about moving back to New York. The argument against it was always that I didn't know how I would make a living there, but lately I can't make a living anywhere, so New York isn't any more intimidating than any place else. There is no place that feels more like home to me than New York, and it's been so long since I've felt like I was home.

Why Not?

It must seem weird and maybe a bit icky to some, the fact that I’m writing about this intense shit while it’s happening. I was apprehensive at first, but I couldn’t think of any good reason not to. I think my hesitation was just a vestige of Midwestern reticence about anything emotional. It’s distasteful to show strong emotion, even to your family.

Most of my work has been, in some way, autobiographical. The real-time aspect of blogging heightens the effect, but I can’t see how it’s any different sharing this experience now as it’s happening or sharing it 2 years from now in a book or something.

And, anyway, while I’m sitting here composing sentences and paragraphs I feel sane and focused, and I will do just about anything right now that will make me feel that way. Because I’m going a little crazy.

Expectations.

I, we, talked so much about my expectations. I expected too much. I depended for my well-being on a certain outcome. As if there’s something wrong with the expectation that our connection would endure and deepen, when we both explicitly expressed that desire. But it's you who became apprehensive. It seems to me that this moment is about how the relationship didn’t meet your expectations. What did you think I was that I turned out not to be?

Another Day.

I picked up my friend P at the airport today -- she’d been to Indiana for a family wedding -- and she treated me to brunch at Blue Star Cafeteria. It was crowded and we ate at the counter. I cried, she listened and cried and gave me good advice. P is a social worker, she works with the families of people who are dying, and I don’t know if she ended up doing that work because of a natural talent for maintaining equanimity in the presence of other people’s pain, or if she cultivated that talent by doing that work. But she’s good and very wise, and I felt and still feel a little better after spending time with her.

When I got home, I had a lovely, heartfelt email from someone I met briefly last year through some old friends who came to see Lizzie Borden in New York. She’s been reading this chronicle and felt compelled to send words of encouragement and support, for which I’m grateful. It helps.

I watched Palindromes last night on Netflix streaming. It’s beautiful and brilliant and a few times while watching I felt a little brightness, a little optimism about art and being an artist. I also felt sad because it’s the kind of film that M and I would have enjoyed together. I think Todd Solondz’s sensibility is one of the places where our tastes coincide: that mix of deep emotion and fucked-up weirdness. Hilarious, freaky, painful, and deeply true all at the same time. But maybe not. Maybe we both like that kind of thing but see it in completely different ways.

By the time the film was over, I was pretty drunk, but I started watching The Puffy Chair. I enjoyed it for a while, but when I saw that it was going to be all about the couple -- at some point, they were in bed and the woman said to the man that they needed to talk about the relationship -- I turned it off and went to bed. I couldn't do it.

I’m neglecting my other blogs: The Austin Chronicle and Bilerico. I don’t know what to write about. Nothing is very interesting to me right now but my own suffering. I read a little bit. I spend hours doing nothing in front of my computer: checking the hits on this blog, wondering if M is reading it, scrolling through tumblr blogs of pictures of sexy men, avoiding photos of redheads, waiting for another day to be over.