The British use the word 'tetchy' instead of 'touchy'.
Now you know.
31 May 2005
26 May 2005
Back like a rash
I could have sworn I've posted since March, but maybe not. Ok, so here's the lowdown:
Moved.
To a tiny pied a terre in a swanky new development in Paddington Basin. Still getting used to not living in South Kensington, but oh my I'm loving having Sky satellite television, a dishwasher and air conditioning (especially as they're predicting a scorching summer.)
Devastated.
My best mate Kirsten's packed up her family and are immigrating to Perth, Australia on Sunday. Our big 'sex and the city' night out was pre-empted by her husband's clashing plans and we had to make due with a takeaway and a bottle (or three) of wine 'round hers. It's beyond sad. They're like family - we spend holidays together. Now, I'm devastated I won't get to see her children grow up, won't have K to drag to nice bars and restaurants, won't have someone in London I always knew I could call if I needed someone. I'm going to miss her tremendously.
Prepared.
Robert's coming to London on Sunday. I'm preparing my liver for the onslaught now. It's bank holiday weekend here and the clubs are open all hours and I've no doubt we'll be embarrassing ourselves somewhere.
Intrigued.
The Economist has launched a lifestyle magazine, Intelligent Life. Anyone read it yet?
Sad.
Ismail Merchant died yesterday.
Annoyed.
Big Brother 6 starts. But happily I have Sky and hope to avoid it.
Moved.
To a tiny pied a terre in a swanky new development in Paddington Basin. Still getting used to not living in South Kensington, but oh my I'm loving having Sky satellite television, a dishwasher and air conditioning (especially as they're predicting a scorching summer.)
Devastated.
My best mate Kirsten's packed up her family and are immigrating to Perth, Australia on Sunday. Our big 'sex and the city' night out was pre-empted by her husband's clashing plans and we had to make due with a takeaway and a bottle (or three) of wine 'round hers. It's beyond sad. They're like family - we spend holidays together. Now, I'm devastated I won't get to see her children grow up, won't have K to drag to nice bars and restaurants, won't have someone in London I always knew I could call if I needed someone. I'm going to miss her tremendously.
Prepared.
Robert's coming to London on Sunday. I'm preparing my liver for the onslaught now. It's bank holiday weekend here and the clubs are open all hours and I've no doubt we'll be embarrassing ourselves somewhere.
Intrigued.
The Economist has launched a lifestyle magazine, Intelligent Life. Anyone read it yet?
Sad.
Ismail Merchant died yesterday.
Annoyed.
Big Brother 6 starts. But happily I have Sky and hope to avoid it.
14 Mar 2005
In another world ...
Wondertoonel, the paintings of Mark Ryden. only just less bizarre than Henry Darger.
Moving on
Last week, annoyed that my landlord had ripped out the tiles in the shower without notice, because of a leak, and rendering it useless (it still isn't fixed) I gave notice on my flat. So after four years in South Kensington, I'm moving on. Now, I've got to find a place to live. I've never lived any further east than South Kensington (which isn't east at all) so I'm thinking Clerkenwell, or the newly fashionable Borough, home of the glorious weekend food market. Something more urban, something bigger, something new.
A month ago, exactly, I decided I needed to face up to some delusions, scatter some fantasies and find a way forward that wasn't mired in 'what ifs' and 'maybes' and 'if onlys'. So I confronted T. about my feelings for him and in the process broke my own heart. I knew the probable outcome. Despite the many (and non-imaginary) signs that we were developing an intimacy, I had to face up to the fact that even I couldn't imagine us actually being together. So ends a two-year torch-bearing marathon. I've sung the sad songs, and cried into my beer and railed against the fates, but in truth I'm proud of myself for moving on and giving myself some room to be real.
T. handled it graciously (which is in turn annoying and gratifying) and once I'm over the resentment of finally having met someone handsome, smart and so bloody seemingly compatible but for naught, we'll continue to be great friends. In the meantime, I'm free and single boys so, bring it on. Or not. For the good news is I've decided to stop being selfish and let someone else break my heart next time.
A month ago, exactly, I decided I needed to face up to some delusions, scatter some fantasies and find a way forward that wasn't mired in 'what ifs' and 'maybes' and 'if onlys'. So I confronted T. about my feelings for him and in the process broke my own heart. I knew the probable outcome. Despite the many (and non-imaginary) signs that we were developing an intimacy, I had to face up to the fact that even I couldn't imagine us actually being together. So ends a two-year torch-bearing marathon. I've sung the sad songs, and cried into my beer and railed against the fates, but in truth I'm proud of myself for moving on and giving myself some room to be real.
T. handled it graciously (which is in turn annoying and gratifying) and once I'm over the resentment of finally having met someone handsome, smart and so bloody seemingly compatible but for naught, we'll continue to be great friends. In the meantime, I'm free and single boys so, bring it on. Or not. For the good news is I've decided to stop being selfish and let someone else break my heart next time.
6 Mar 2005
To R. on his birthday
You've been drinking vodka, no? And in your 37th year discovering you're actually a poet ...
7 is my lucky number. So as a present, I'm sharing that luck with you. So 37's going to be big for you in some way. You'll discover a course, an inner resource, a passion you never knew.
And it will shake things, and it will be scary, and it will be exciting. But it won't include time to sit and be sad for a past that can't be re-lived or for a future that seems impossible. Wild things will be possible.
Because now, you've got 37 on loan. For a whole year. It even points forward, 37 does. See it? ...
Wake up groggy head. Your year is starting ....
And if you're wondering what to do:
Penguin has a new series of books, Great Ideas. Little beautiful, designed reprints of thoughts and essays by the world's greatest thinkers Seneca, de Montaigne, Schopenauer, Woolf. They're cheap and portable and insightful. Maybe it will waken a hunger for things bigger than your imagination and more beautifully worded than your fears.
Jem's new cd, Finally Woken, is gorgeous and other worldly and hip-swivellingly good. It's as if Dido was talented or the streets of Italy were made melody. They make one feel sexy. They make one want to flirt and lick someone's neck.
And you're 37. 7. It looks like tented trousers. So it must be the year of good sex too. Bonus.
And we shed baggage. Things that inhibit 20 year olds and friends that proved to have no endurance and the blinders that made us think we had to find one path when the fields were open for running.
And we take things on. Years of experience. Things people told us. Better understanding of the world. Distance. The dust of travels and sights and Paris and Prague and London and Eureka on your ankles. We share the sky and the universal language of a smile even if every 12 hours or so we have to send the sun back the other way.
Seneca says that a life well lived isn't short. It's rich. So remember that next time you're tempted to lay in bed and think too much. You could be out dirtying your feet and finding new experiences. The Flaneur knows that the walk unplanned can show as much about a place as one that's planned and will show something new and unexplored. Secret passages lie around the corner. Some of them take you places and some of them take you back where you were, but very few go nowhere at all.
You're 37. Your year is started. Go.
7 is my lucky number. So as a present, I'm sharing that luck with you. So 37's going to be big for you in some way. You'll discover a course, an inner resource, a passion you never knew.
And it will shake things, and it will be scary, and it will be exciting. But it won't include time to sit and be sad for a past that can't be re-lived or for a future that seems impossible. Wild things will be possible.
Because now, you've got 37 on loan. For a whole year. It even points forward, 37 does. See it? ...
Wake up groggy head. Your year is starting ....
And if you're wondering what to do:
Penguin has a new series of books, Great Ideas. Little beautiful, designed reprints of thoughts and essays by the world's greatest thinkers Seneca, de Montaigne, Schopenauer, Woolf. They're cheap and portable and insightful. Maybe it will waken a hunger for things bigger than your imagination and more beautifully worded than your fears.
Jem's new cd, Finally Woken, is gorgeous and other worldly and hip-swivellingly good. It's as if Dido was talented or the streets of Italy were made melody. They make one feel sexy. They make one want to flirt and lick someone's neck.
And you're 37. 7. It looks like tented trousers. So it must be the year of good sex too. Bonus.
And we shed baggage. Things that inhibit 20 year olds and friends that proved to have no endurance and the blinders that made us think we had to find one path when the fields were open for running.
And we take things on. Years of experience. Things people told us. Better understanding of the world. Distance. The dust of travels and sights and Paris and Prague and London and Eureka on your ankles. We share the sky and the universal language of a smile even if every 12 hours or so we have to send the sun back the other way.
Seneca says that a life well lived isn't short. It's rich. So remember that next time you're tempted to lay in bed and think too much. You could be out dirtying your feet and finding new experiences. The Flaneur knows that the walk unplanned can show as much about a place as one that's planned and will show something new and unexplored. Secret passages lie around the corner. Some of them take you places and some of them take you back where you were, but very few go nowhere at all.
You're 37. Your year is started. Go.
11 Feb 2005
9 Feb 2005
Being negative
Things are going mightily well. I'm almost frightened. Pitches and speeches going ok. I'm finally over that illness I brought back from California. I got my tax refund check in the mail. The chicken little inside of me is wondering when the sky's going to come falling down.
In truth, I was terribly worried something was wrong. I had for a while not been feeling well, then I got some sort of strange infection. I went to the doctors who insisted I have blood tests done, syphilis, chlamydia, Hepatitis, and the first HIV test I've had in four years! I sort of knew it would be ok - my sex life is hardly prolific and seldom seedy. Mostly vanilla, although I'm happy to note that in at least one case it was French vanilla. But waiting for HIV results are perhaps some of the strangest times one will ever spend. I was alternately surprised how easy it was to forget about it, and how easily it crept up behind me to shake and rattle my nerves.
After two weeks of not being able to get out of work to follow up with the doctors, I decided to ring and see what the test results were. I stood in the stairwell of the office, my voice audibly shaking, to find out if the sometimes seemingly impending storm was going to engulf me. It was a brave / stupid moment. Was I really going to have to break down in the stairwell of the office if something really was wrong?
Luckily, it wasn't. Not perhaps just luckily, but maybe reassuringly, yet probably more realistically lucky. Everything was negative.
Negative.
I was surprised at how surprising the words and the feeling of surprise were.
Had I somehow been resigned to the possibility of becoming HIV positive -- though, not likely given my sex life of pillow hugging and daydreaming -- even though I hadn't had unsafe sex, or shared needles or had a blood transfusion? Would it have been less scary a verdict than in the early years of my so-called gay life in San Francisco when AIDS was still cutting a wide swathe through the gay community and the papers were filled with pictures of those who fell victim to it? I remember the chillling habit of skipping the second-half of the Bay Area Times for fear of what? Knowing there was a human face to the epidemic? Wondering if one of them was a former lover? It's most likely that someone in my sexual past is and was HIV positive.
That should be chilling. But now that people I know live with the virus was it somehow less ominous than it was? Was some irrational inner self surprised that one could be gay and 36 and HIV-negative?
And is it that irrational inner self that sets one on the road to complacency? That's more scary sometimes than the eventuality itself. Why resign oneself to the surrender when simple acts of vigilance can pre-empt the battle?
So I'm going to be relieved and celebrate for a moment. Then I'm going to realise that whilst I've been lucky, others haven't been. It's still an epidemic of shocking violence and strength, and we let it fester and rage in quiet corners of our social consciousness. Has AIDS become the quiet secret, or the troubles of a continent 'over there'? Do we still know that it has a very human face? Had I succumbed to the American habit of belittling disease and disdaining the weakness it brought? When did I actually start to think the storm was retreating? Because people stopped dying or just because there weren't pictures in the back of the gay papers filled with the dead?
So now, and hopefully for a time, I live. And I'm going to be positively grateful for being negative but I'm going to try to remember not to forget the power of being negative.
In truth, I was terribly worried something was wrong. I had for a while not been feeling well, then I got some sort of strange infection. I went to the doctors who insisted I have blood tests done, syphilis, chlamydia, Hepatitis, and the first HIV test I've had in four years! I sort of knew it would be ok - my sex life is hardly prolific and seldom seedy. Mostly vanilla, although I'm happy to note that in at least one case it was French vanilla. But waiting for HIV results are perhaps some of the strangest times one will ever spend. I was alternately surprised how easy it was to forget about it, and how easily it crept up behind me to shake and rattle my nerves.
After two weeks of not being able to get out of work to follow up with the doctors, I decided to ring and see what the test results were. I stood in the stairwell of the office, my voice audibly shaking, to find out if the sometimes seemingly impending storm was going to engulf me. It was a brave / stupid moment. Was I really going to have to break down in the stairwell of the office if something really was wrong?
Luckily, it wasn't. Not perhaps just luckily, but maybe reassuringly, yet probably more realistically lucky. Everything was negative.
Negative.
I was surprised at how surprising the words and the feeling of surprise were.
Had I somehow been resigned to the possibility of becoming HIV positive -- though, not likely given my sex life of pillow hugging and daydreaming -- even though I hadn't had unsafe sex, or shared needles or had a blood transfusion? Would it have been less scary a verdict than in the early years of my so-called gay life in San Francisco when AIDS was still cutting a wide swathe through the gay community and the papers were filled with pictures of those who fell victim to it? I remember the chillling habit of skipping the second-half of the Bay Area Times for fear of what? Knowing there was a human face to the epidemic? Wondering if one of them was a former lover? It's most likely that someone in my sexual past is and was HIV positive.
That should be chilling. But now that people I know live with the virus was it somehow less ominous than it was? Was some irrational inner self surprised that one could be gay and 36 and HIV-negative?
And is it that irrational inner self that sets one on the road to complacency? That's more scary sometimes than the eventuality itself. Why resign oneself to the surrender when simple acts of vigilance can pre-empt the battle?
So I'm going to be relieved and celebrate for a moment. Then I'm going to realise that whilst I've been lucky, others haven't been. It's still an epidemic of shocking violence and strength, and we let it fester and rage in quiet corners of our social consciousness. Has AIDS become the quiet secret, or the troubles of a continent 'over there'? Do we still know that it has a very human face? Had I succumbed to the American habit of belittling disease and disdaining the weakness it brought? When did I actually start to think the storm was retreating? Because people stopped dying or just because there weren't pictures in the back of the gay papers filled with the dead?
So now, and hopefully for a time, I live. And I'm going to be positively grateful for being negative but I'm going to try to remember not to forget the power of being negative.
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