Diary of a Blood Ray

These questions were from Tommy:

1. What was the last meat product you ate? This was a while ago, probably six months or so? I was really hungover, and we were having a food day at work.  Someone had made dirty rice.  I knew there was sausage in it, but I thought perhaps the rice would be good for my stomach.  I tried to eat around the sausage as best I could, but apparently I didn't do it all that well, because I spent the remainder of the day sicker than I was when I got there.  On a side note, I was really craving meat last week (and that hasn't happened in quite a while), but I suspected maybe I wasn't getting enough iron.  I started taking a multi-vitamin, and the cravings went away.  Meat is murder, kids.  Cold blooded murder.  It does smell really tasty when it's cooked up right, though. 

 2. Who would you rather have sex with -- Danny Devito or Gene Wilder? My immediate instinct was Gene Wilder. 

3. If you were forced to remove one character from the entire run of the show "Friends," who would it be? (Try not to think about the logistics of that one.)   This one is really hard, and since I was informed it had to be one of the core six, I've been wringing my hands about it.  I guess it would have to be Ross.  He had the most wildly uneven character on the show and his character was directly tied to that goddamned monkey.

Shania's questions:

1.) You could play ANY role on stage or screen, who would it be?   Another really tough one.  I've thought about the male roles I love, the female roles I love; those on film, those on stage, and at this very moment, I'd probably have to lean towards Roxie Hart in Chicago.

2.) What is the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to you but that you can laugh about now?  When I lived in NYC, I got called back for a production of Oedipus! The Musical.  It was a long day, and at one point I was outside smoking when another guy from the audition came out and started talking to me.  We chatted for quite a while, and I thought that he might be flirting with me (to this day, I still have trouble figuring out if someone is flirting with me or not).  At one point, he kind of pointed at my ear and said that it looked like I had some shampoo or shaving cream in it.  I went to rub it and looked down.  It was clear to both of us that it was neither shampoo nor shaving cream.  It was, in fact, a nice blob of ear wax.  Mortified, I tried to laugh it off and said, "I guess I didn't do too well cleaning my ears today."  He looked at the mess and at me and replied, "It looks like you haven't done too good of a job cleaning them in a while."    I almost answered with the speed dating fiasco of this summer, but I'm still not laughing too hard about that.

3.) What number (between 1-10) am I thinking of right now? 6

Billy's questions:

1)Where can I get a 10lb box of "body of Christ" for the Saints and Sinners party. Sams was all out and Im not sure Cheeze-its will do the trick.   Have you tried that Catholic Supply store at Hampton and Chippewa?  They may not sell them to you, though.  Do they have to be official?

2)The chair or lethal injection?  Lethal injection.  The chair is just fucking creepy. 

3)Naked wrestling in jello or pork and beans?  This is a tough one, as both have animal-derived products in them.  The Jell-o would probably be better, but if you threw down a vat of vegetarian baked beans, I'd be okay with that, too.

Anyone else?

And now, the conclusion.

The first few months after the whole Reaper ordeal were the toughest.  I survived my first post-Reaper HIV test, and I threw myself into the production of Hair that I was cast in (side note – That’s the show in which I met Shania).  After a few more months had passed, The Reaper and I resumed contact (I’m not sure who contacted whom).  We got ourselves to a point of quasi-friendship, and this went on for about a year.  We’d talk here and there, send emails, write letters.  It felt like the damage was being repaired, and by the summer of 2001 we were close again (as close as we could be with two thousand miles between us).  We’d talk about how if only we were together, maybe things would work out, and when I did Hair again, he made plans to come visit me.

I don’t know what I expected in having him come visit. I was still here and he was still there, and at this point I had no idea if and when I’d ever move to San Francisco.  And he was still going to die, and I finally accepted that nothing was going to change that, no matter how much I loved him.

He arrived on a Friday.  I hadn’t seen him in over a year, but he was just as I had remembered him.  We went back to my apartment, where we hung out and screwed around (safely, I should add.  I’d learned my lesson).  He came to the show, met all my friends.  It was like having a boyfriend for a weekend.  I told him I loved him.  He told me he loved me, and (this is important) he said it more than once and not always in response to me. 

On his last night here, he came home with me after a party, and we danced to the Mamas and the Papas’ “Dedicated to the One I Love.”  He held my face in his hands and said that he loved me.

Our last day together was uneventful.  If I remember it correctly, we spent most of the day on the couch, watching VH1.  Eventually, I had to take him to the airport.  I waited with him at the gate (still pre-September 11) and we shared a final kiss and “I love you,” and he was off.  I’d never see him again.

I talked to him when he got home.  He said he’d had a nice time, of which I was glad.  I said that I hoped it wasn’t another year and a half before we saw each other again.

Then I wrote him the letter.  I don’t remember all that it said, but I told him how I felt about it, that I didn’t know where life would take us, but that I loved him deeply and that I was glad we were in each other’s lives.  There was more to it, and I’m sure it wasn’t all sappy and sentimental.  I sent it off without a thought, and went on with my life.

I don’t remember exactly when I noticed something was wrong.  I don’t know if I noticed the letters and calls were less frequent.  When one is blissfully unaware that something is wrong, you don’t notice the writing on the wall, even when it’s in letters that are ten feet tall.

He and I have birthdays six days apart, in September.  His is first, and when it was approaching (about a month after he’d been to visit), I ordered a couple of books from Amazon.com and sent them to him.  A few days after the order, I got a funny message from UPS.  The package I’d sent had been refused.  Perplexed but still naïve enough to take things at face value, I told them it must have been a mistake and to send it back.  I even double-checked the address.  Once again, the package was refused.

At this point, while still not grasping it completely, I knew something was wrong (Hey, I was only barely twenty-seven years old at the time. That’s apropos of nothing, but I just wanted to remind myself I was once in my late mid-twenties.).  I called him, instant messaged him, emailed him.  I knew it was gonna be bad, but I did feel that he owed me a little more than just vanishing completely.  And I was going to make sure I got my due.

I got my due in the form of an email.  I don’t know what finally got him to respond, but I finally got my response.  I don’t remember too many details, save for a crack about my “oh-so-eloquent” letter and how “a rose is a rose is a rose” because I’d said “I love you” too many times.  In a nutshell, we’d had a few laughs, but I was crazy to think it was anything more than that.  Indeed, I think the general point of his letter was that I was as crazy as a shithouse rat.  He made it clear that if should ever find myself in San Francisco, I was to make damn sure not to find him. 

So, yeah, after it happened I was all “Oh, he can say what he wants, but I was there, too, so you can put any kind of spin you want on it, but we both know the truth.”  To quote my beloved Rilo Kiley, “If you think I’m paranoid, that’s fine, cause I’ve got evidence on my side.”

And yet (and I didn’t realize it until I started closing this entry), these five years have brought a distance and a wisdom that allows me to see I probably was a little crazy.  I was a lonely kid who wanted to be loved so badly that I couldn’t see it from his perspective.  I’m not trying to absolve him for the way he treated me, because he really did treat me like a piece of shit.  He was also just a kid, too, a kid who was dealing with more than I could possibly imagine, let alone understand.  For as good my intentions were, I would never have been able to deal with the shit when the shit turned to shit.  Not with who I was then.  Maybe not even with who I am now. 

Maybe he really did love me.  Maybe pushed me away because he didn’t want me to waste my life on him.  Maybe, in classic, glorious Stella Dallas form, he caused me all that pain to spare me even greater pain.  And maybe the moon is cheese.

I’ll almost certainly never know how he really felt about me, so all I can do is acknowledge how I really felt about him.  I loved him.  I loved him harder than I’d ever loved anyone before. 

Five years ago, I gave my love to a goofy-looking, curly-haired boy in cool glasses. 

And that, my dear Tyler, is the way I choose to remember you.

This is a continuation of the previous post.

Before we go any further,” I said, nonchalantly, “I just want to make sure there isn’t anything going on here that I don’t know about. There are no secrets or diseases you haven’t mentioned, are there?”

He said nothing, and I knew.  The look on his face, the chill in the room, the pit in my stomach said it all.  “Well,” he said uneasily, “this is something I’ve been trying to find the right time to tell you … I’m positive.”

Immediately, I began to cry.  In retrospect, my reaction my have been a little extreme, but in my sheltered life, I’d never even met, let alone dated, someone who was positive.  My mind began to race, and I found it hard to breathe.  I asked him why he hadn’t told me before.  He said it was never the right time, and as things progressed he knew he had to tell me, but it was getting harder and harder.  I was angry, I was hurt, I was afraid, in shock.  Not knowing which reaction to have first, I continued with the tears, which were coming harder. 

I tried to regain some composure, to ask him what he was thinking in not telling me sooner, not before we had slept together in California.  He knew it was wrong, but we had been safe (relatively) and he was so happy to meet someone like me that he wanted to enjoy it with me before it inevitably got all fucked up.

The rest of that evening is a blur.  I remember standing up and going to the bathroom, where I collapsed on the floor, as though I were in a bad tv movie, sobbing hysterically into the soft burgundy carpet.  I wanted to get out of there, but being without transportation and two hundered miles from home, I had nowhere to go back to the bedroom, the tomb that the two of us were to share for the rest of the night.

I returned to the bed and slapped him as hard as I could.  He looked horrified, and I felt awful, but I did it again.  I dissolved into more tears, and told him that at this point I might as well tell him that I loved him.  To make the evening even more macabre, he told me he loved me, too.

I asked questions.  How long did he know?  Was he taking care of himself?  What the fuck was he thinking?  It was around this time that I realized that my own life my now in jeopardy.  We’d played it pretty safe in San Francisco, but not 100%.  He blamed himself for that, but I knew that some of the responsibility for that was mine.  He’d not told me, yes, but I didn’t ask any questions.

I don’t know if we spent minutes or hours talking about all this.  Time had stood still that night.  I told him that I felt selfish, because I kept thinking about how I’d been dreaming of my happy ending, and how that was effectively ruined.  “You can still have a happy ending,” he told me.

“Yes,” I replied, “but I wanted it to be with you.”

After more sobbing, we finally fell asleep.  We awoke in the middle of the night, and soon we were fiercely making out.  Not long in, I began to sob again.  This went on for the rest of the night.

The next day, his friends returned, and we tried to put on our game faces.  I think they knew something was wrong, but they couldn’t have known what.  The Reaper had also intended to use this weekend to tell his friends that his was positive.

As we drove to the airport, The Reaper held me in his arms.  I remember thinking, quite simply and without melodrama, that I wished I would die right then.  I knew there was no way this was ever going to be fixed, and even if it was – if I got tested and came up clean, and we still decided to make a go of it, etc – it was never going to be the way it was supposed to be.  At twenty-five, I began to imagine what it would be like to be with someone who most likely would predecease me by decades.  It was a far cry from the dreams I’d had before I left for Kansas City.

I cried the entire flight back.  My friends picked me up, and I imagined to keep it together until we got to the car.  I told them the whole story, and they were surprisingly without judgment, considering the stupidity of what I’d done in California.  I tried to map out my plan to get through this, not the least of which being the year of blood tests I had to look forward to. 

I talked to The Reaper the night of my return.  I told him that I still loved him, and that I still wanted to be with him.  He wanted to be with me, too, and I set my mind to making this work.  My intentions were good.  I can say that much.  But I did start to go a little crazy.

I became monolithic in my plans to get to California for good.  I started researching different treatments for him, gave advice, tried not to talk too much about the big A (or the fact that I still had no idea where my blood was going to fall in all this), and essentially lost my mind.  I suggested I move in with him when I got there, which he wisely thought was a rotten idea.  As I got more insane, he began to pull away.  And these were just the moments in which I was actually talking to him.

I spent my most of the first week back in fog.  My mother had known I was going to KC to meet a guy I’d met in California, but I didn’t fill her in on the details of my trip.  That, I maintain, was a wise decision, but it left me stranded when I was home.   I’d wander around the house until everyone had gone to bed, when I’d resume my sob-fest.   The first night back I remember having to actually hold on the walls to keep myself standing.  And it only got worse from there.

I was temping then, and though I’d been at this assignment for a while, I had no real friends at the job, and certainly not the kind I could tell something like this to.  I’d sit at my desk and calmly do my work, but I’d be dying inside, and every hour or so, I’d calmly leave my desk, walk to the bathroom, and lock myself in a stall and cry. 

At home, I’d keep it together in front of my family, and lock myself in my room to weep when I had to die.  Not only was I dealing with this, but I was also dealing with the fact that I’d gone from constant daily contact with The Reaper to none at all.  I’d lay in my bed at night, and consider just running out the door, in the middle of winter, with no clothes on and just run and run and run until I dropped.

I considered taking my own life.  I don’t think anyone who actually knew what was going on with me at the time knew how close I came to packing it all in.  I don’t know what stopped me from doing it.  I had no epiphanies, no moments of clarity in which I screamed, “I want to live!”  I just kept going.

The Reaper finally resumed contact with me, essentially to tell me that I was crazy and that it was best to end things with us completely.  I’d given up by this point.  I bid him farewell.

 All right.  Hopefully the next installment will be the final chapter.

I’ve been feeling a queasy discontent for a while now. I feel as though I have been worrying incessantly, yet if you asked me to name one thing I was worried about, I’d scratch my head. Money’s always a concern, but no more now than usual. It’s not that I’m desperate for a boyfriend; that mania has blissfully gone into remission.

It’s funny the way we choose to remember things, and how those memories decide to remind us of their presence. In a few days it will be exactly five years since The Reaper met me in Kansas City, and all these years later, I’m still not completely over it. I’ve gotten through it, sure, but I don’t know if this is the sort of thing one actually ever gets over.

 In February of 2000, I flew to San Francisco to celebrate Devon’s 25th birthday. It was my second visit there, my first since leaving New York. At that time, I’d been back in St Louis just under a year, and I was planning on moving to San Francisco in a few months. The trip started off wonderfully (indeed, I’ve never had a bad time in San Francisco. It could be due to the fact that I am generally fucked up from the moment I get off the shuttle till the moment I get on the plane to return home). As usual, I had a great time with Devon’s friends, and I resumed my love affair with that city. On my third day there, I attended Devon’s birthday party. The drugs flowed freely, and everyone was in great spirits. I hadn’t had that much fun in a long time (my adjustment back to the Midwest after my years in NYC had not been smooth) and I was happy for the first time in months. I couldn’t imagine things getting any better. And then I saw him. The Reaper.

Tall, with curly brown hair and the kind of nerdy Clark Kent-y glasses that used to be the rage, he wasn’t conventionally beautiful, but when I saw him my heart stood still. Without getting into the debate over whether or not love at first sight actually exists, I can assure you I felt something for him the moment I saw him and I could tell from the way he looked at me that he was feeling something for me, too.

After I composed myself, I began interrogating Devon. What was this guy? What was his story, etc. Devon knew him from work; he was the roommate of a friend of his. He didn’t know him all that well, but thought he was a decent guy. As the evening progressed, we were introduced and before long he and I were joined at the hip. As the party drew to close, he asked me what I was doing next. I told him that I hoped I’d be spending the evening with him. That was the response he was hoping to hear, and we left to go to his apartment. He showed me around his place, showed me the work he was doing to jazz it up, and then took me to his bedroom. He held me in arms and kissed me, and before long we were making love. I can still remember what his arms felt like around me, and how his hair felt between my fingers.

When we awoke, he took me for a walk through The Mission, holding my hand the whole time. I returned to Devon’s later that morning, exhausted and ecstatic. My trip was coming to an end, but I saw The Reaper later that day. Devon teased us about how cute we looked together, and he held me in his arms all afternoon. We promised to keep in touch after I left, and when I said good-bye to him, I fought the urge to cry. I was astonished at how quickly I’d fallen for him, and how I felt like I was leaving a part of myself in California.

I returned to St Louis a joyful man. My contact with The Reaper was immediately daily and constant. We’d email all day during work hours, we’d instant message in the afternoons, and we’d talk on the phone at night, three hours or more at a time. We told each other everything about ourselves, the right and the wrong, the good and the bad. Nothing I said scared him away. In fact, he told me he adored everything about me. At this time, I was living in my mother’s house, having a rotten time adjusting to her and to my life in St Louis. Having The Reaper in my life gave me a reason to keep going. I figured I’d be living in California by the summer, and my one wish was that he’d be there waiting for me, and we’d begin our happily ever after. The Reaper’s best friend lived in Kansas City, and he’d had a visit planned before he’d met me. A week or so after I’d returned home, he asked me if I’d meet him there. I didn’t have to think about my answer. There was no way I’d miss seeing him when he was so close.

We spent the next six weeks talking, laughing, watching Friends "together,"planning this big reunion. He told me how a friend of his was teasing him about his crush in St. Louis, and how he’d told her “this was so much more than a crush.” At the end of one especially enjoyable call, I realized that I loved him. After seven years of dating hell, I’d finally found the guy who made it all worth it. I couldn’t wait to see him in KC, and knew that it would be a matter of time before we were together for good.

The days before the trip were a heady time, full of nerves and excitement, and if I can resort to cliché here for a second, those days were really the last days of my innocence. I had no way of knowing how things would so drastically change, and the lasting impact they would have on my life.

On eighteenth of March in the year two thousand, I boarded a plane for Kansas City. I remember catching my breath when I saw him, as he was more beautiful than I remembered. He took me in his arms and held me, and I breathed in every inch of him.

The ride to his friend’s home was surreal, hearing this voice I’d heard disembodied for six weeks coming out of the man sitting next to me. All I knew was that it felt so right to be with him, and if there was any justice in the universe, I’d be next to him for the rest of my life. His friends dropped us off and let his have some time alone. We made out, screwed around, and talked about where things were with us. I talked about my impending move, and we talked about what that meant for us. To my delight, he told me that he hoped that when I was in California for good that we’d be together.

We joined his friends for dinner. They were both really smart, fun people, and they took an instant liking to me as well. It was my first double-date, and I passed with flying colors. That evening The Reaper and I returned to his friends’ apartment, which, through a stroke of luck (doom?), we had to ourselves. We returned to the making out and screwing around and soon took our act to the bedroom. We lay in the bed, and The Reaper climbed on top of me to kiss me. I looked up at him. “Before we go any further,” I said, nonchalantly, “I just want to make sure there isn’t anything going on here that I don’t know about. There are no secrets or diseases you haven’t mentioned, are there?” Those were the last words I spoke before the bottom dropped out.

This is getting horrifically long. I’m going to have to conclude this in a second entry.

Once, in college, I was stage-managing a production of The Fantasticks.  In the cast was a girl named Mary.  Mary was one of those annoying types of folks who were all about Jesus, but could conveniently ignore the parts of the good book she felt didn’t apply to her.  In this case, I’d say all references to pre-martial sex.  I ain’t saying she got around, simply that I have very little tolerance for Christian piety as it is, and the hypocritical sort (he sighs, is there any other kind?) just makes me nuts.  This fact of about her is fairly irrelevant to the story, as was her shiny, greasy skin.  I hear she’s got a decent gig doing regional theatre somewhere, so don’t feel too bad for her.

Mary was more a music department person and there was often bad blood between her department and mine, the theatre department (or maybe there was just bad blood between me and the music department.  All those fornicators for Christ would really get to me after a while.)  Add to that I’d fucked around with someone in her clique (doing my small part to fornicate for Christ), a situation that turned really really ugly and didn’t really make me look too great, and you can imagine how we weren’t exactly all that tight.  We got along, were friendly, etc.  We had mutual friends and we were both students at a small university, so we saw each other a lot. 

By the time I stage managed her show, things were pretty cool between us.  I was even in her presence the first time she got high (tokers for Christ!)  and, contrary to what might be your initial reaction, it wasn’t even at my suggestion. 

And the she and I shared a quintessential Blood Ray moment.  I was talking to her one night, and for some reason, out of the blue I teasingly commented to her that genital warts, while not fatal, were incurable.  I don’t remember there being much of a reaction from her, and I forgot all about it after it happened.

The next day, Mary (flanked by two music department flunkies) came flying at me and started screaming at me for what I said.  At first, I didn’t even know what the hell she was talking about, as I say a lot of things all day long.

For several days, random people would come up to me and attack me for what I said to her.  I’d gone from apologizing to Mary to apologizing to half the campus.   Jesus, I knew that joking about genital warts probably wasn’t all that funny, but did it really need to inspire such vitriol?

Several months later, after Mary had graduated, I was hanging out with a mutual friend of ours and the subject our last scuttle came up.  He said, “She was ready to kill me.   She told me that in confidence and was furious at me.”

“Why?”

“Because she thought I told you.”

“Told me what?”

“How did you find out, anyway?”
By this point, I am totally lost.  “Find out what?”

“That Mary had genital warts.”

“I didn’t.  I – wait, what?  She really had genital warts?”

“She – you didn’t know?”
”No, I was just making a random joke.”

Turns out that my throwaway comment about genital warts hit a little too close to home.  Heh.

I would like to take this moment to apologize to Mary.  And her warts.

Tonight we have a guest blogger.  This is Tommy.  "You say that i choose sadness, that it never once has chosen me."

That's a Rilo Kiley line.  And I'm glad to say that Bradley is now a Rilo Kiley fan.  There can never be enough Rilo Kiley fans in this world, okay? 

"It's all of the good that won't come out of them and all the stupid lines they hide behind it's such a big mistake standing here on this frozen lake."  "And then you took off your energy mask and you were cameron diaz!"

That's just for us.  And anyway.  I'm coming off of what is probably my worst day ever.  And it's not even over.  And tomorrow stands to be even worse, seeing as how it's past midnight and i have a nine hour day ahead of me.  Two dollar margaritas?  Yeah, they're cool.  And free beers from the bartender at AMP?  Sure, give 'em to me. 

"This is your last line of defense.  You could sell your baseball cards just to pay your rent."

This is all pretty surreal.  I'm gonna turn it over to Blood Ray now.

Thank you, Tommy.  This is Blood Ray now.  Tommy's on the phone with Billy now, and I'm sitting here trying to figure out where to go with this blog.  I'm glad he started off for me, though, as all I had was a title until he got here.

My cholesterol is low.  My blood is clean.  My mind, though, is a mess.  There's too much in here for me to sort out in this lifetime, and I often panic because there are only a finite amount of shopping days left before Christmas.  I'm sitting here listening to Tommy describe his underwear to Billy and wondering exactly how this life became my life. 

"There's blood in my mouth 'cause I've been biting my tongue all week".   There's my Rilo Kiley line.  Also, that's "it's bad news.  Baby, I'm bad news.  I'm just bad news, bad news.  Bad news."

"I know I'm alone if I'm with or without you.  But just being around you offers me another form of relief."

Wow, you let someone hijack your blog and you turn into someone incapable of doing anything but quoting others.  But, when someone else says perfectly what you are trying to articulate, why even try to fight it?

"And you're bad news.  I don't care, I like you.  I like you."

Who should be named the winner of the Blood Ray Trivia contest?

So remember that contest I announced a few weeks ago?  It wasn't quite the crowd-pleaser I thought it would be, as I got only three entries and all are subject due to disqualification. 

Billy entered the contest first, but he posted all his answers as a comment.  They were all pretty much wrong, though he did inadvertently almost get one right.  One of the biblical names I toyed with was Moses, and Billy did guess "Moe" as one of the answers.  Out of a possible twelve points, Billy received 1/3 of a point.

Tommy, after hearing me bitch that Billy was the only person who entered, answered next.  He got eight correct answers, but he posted his answers as a comment on the blog, when the instructions clearly stated to send them via email.

Finally, Shania entered the contest.  She emailed her answers, as instructed, but she sent them the day after the contest closed.  Her score was ten out of twelve.

I’m torn about this.  I feel I should name a winner but, as I said, all the entries should technically be disqualified.  It is because of this that I am putting this into the hands of my gentle readers.  Please take a moment to cast your vote above.  I will announce the “winner” in a few days.

Last night, Tommy and I were invited to attend a "soup party," showcasing the art of Fern Taylor.  If I was going to buy art from anyone, it would be her, as I believe in supporting other local artists.  Alas, I don't have the money for paintings, but if any of you do are looking for some unusual pieces to grace your walls, please check out her stuff.  I hope she liked the hostess gift I brought her. 

The party was fun.  There were a lot of people there, and I knew quite a few of them.  Besides Tommy and me, Billy was there, Phoebe and her girlfriend Gypsy, That Guy, and several others I have met in passing over the past few months.  I saw a guy I had dated a few years ago who just stopped calling me (we didn't speak, though) and I also Anti-Abortion Republican Boy (AARB, I guess), whom I made out with at Freddie's several months ago.  We were going to go on a date, but after several evenings on the phone with him, being lectured about the waste I was making of my life (culminating with him practically yelling at me for being like "all those other fags who contribute to the cycle of poverty" when I told him I'd have no qualms getting out of the corporate world and just waiting tables), it never went anywhere.  He didn't recognize me when we met.  Tommy says that it's the hair.  It was amusing, though, because when AARB introduced himself to me, I said, "oh, we've met."  His face went blank as he struggled to place me.  I said, "Eh, it was a while ago, at Freddie's.  I was wearing a hat."  Tommy jumped in by telling him that it must have been at least six months or so since he had met me, but AARB still seemed to have no idea who I was.  No worries, there.

That Guy and I continue to do our dance of futility ("Did I not see you sitting on his lap at one point?" Tommy asked me.  Guilty.).  All the signs point to massive incompatibility between the two of us, yet we still play our "boyfriend for a night" game when we see each other.  We have plans to spend St. Patrick's Day together and I'm sure we'll have a good time, provided we don't discuss the fact that we'll never be able to make it work in or out of the bedroom.

After the soup party, we went to AMP, to celebrate Celene's twenty-eighth birthday.  It was great to see her, as I haven't in a while.  She looked fabulous, which was no surprise.  This is the girl who used her magic to turn me into a grotesquely beautiful East German transsexual songstress. 

It was good to see Rob there (as I haven't seen him in ages) and This Guy (also known as Ryan and not be confused with That Guy).  Both of these gentlemen write blogs that are part of my daily blog-reading routine.  While I always enjoy what I read from them (theirs are two of the best blogs I've encountered) it was nice to get some face to face time with them. Ryan has posted some pictures of last night, including one of me looking incredibly wasted and shiny.

I also got to meet (and be photographed with) Angry Black Bitch!  The blog she pens has quickly jumped to my list of daily must-reads.  It was nice to put a face to the web-voice.  She and her sister (who was also there) are two really fun ladies, and I hope I get the chance to see them socially again.  At any rate, please visit her blog.  Her distaste for Katie Couric alone is worth the price of admission.

All in all, it's been a nice weekend.  For those of you with statistical minds (or those of you who come here to hear about whom I'm screwing, here are some numbers I've been crunching about last evening:

Number of men at the party that I kissed (not that I kissed them at the party, but at some point in my life):  5

Number of men at AMP that I kissed (again, sum total):  4

Number of men I've kissed who are at the party and at AMP:  2

Number of these men I imagine I'll kiss again:  1 (maybe 2?)

Number of men at that party that I've seen naked:  2

Number of bowls of soup I had the soup party:  0

Number of vodka drinks I drank at the soup party:  3 (or was it four)

Number of times That Guy and I were asked how long we've been a couple (in jest): 1 (by Tommy)

Number of times we were asked that question seriously: 1 (by a sex therapist who commended us for "taking it slow")

Glasses of champagne I had at AMP:  2

Number of Friends episodes Tommy and I watched last night at our post-party slumber party:  3?

New favorite song:  "Portions for Foxes" by Rilo Kiley