cold fingers

Hello! Hanging out with old (in body and in durability) friends Amy and Raj tonight has inspired me to write in this neglected blog. But first, here's half a blog entry from December that I had not finished writing:

"It's only taken two weeks of living in Palo Alto with my parents and brother to make me feel like I'm fifteen years old again, freaking out about how I'm spending my life in a place that cannot contain my ambition. Except this time I am 27 and I have no more ambition. So now it's three a.m., which is the time for me to revisit all the emails I saved when I lost my college email account, and to learn all about how the gods have blessed me with their mercy and allowed me to evolve away from my craptastic youthful predeliction for gigantism and turn into the mellow, ruminant ungulate that I am today.

I turn, naturally, to the emails from the first hot throbbing love of my life, a green-eyed, bottom-weighted Pisces from Loma Verde Drive who was apparently terrible at spelling but decent at stringing together a pretty turn of phrase, which was all my nineteen year-old heart needed to be wrung like a dishrag. At that point in my life, I wanted to put my heart in the Popemobile and drive it through a crowd screaming to be looked at because I was certain that no one in the history of humankind had anguished and ached as I did. Our imaginations of ourselves don't change, but we learn to be more discreet in selling them so that we don't look like fools."

Too bad you'll never learn what happened to this teenage heartthrob and how this tale of tragic romance ends with two people in grad school serendipitously meeting on a garbage barge tethered to the west side of Manhattan six years later, with no desire at all to have lesbian sex with one another. (A true story!)

On to the present: the ai of wo de life is having a sleepover in frigid Saratoga Springs, New York, which is currently encrusted in the remains of last night's ice storm, with three homos and a redheaded "straight" Orientalist who have slept with each other in three different sexual pairings. Tonight they watched the "Pursuit of Happyness" and retired at an early, chaste hour, which tells you just how old all of us are getting.

Meanwhile, I spent the day with the best, cleverest, most amusing people I can think of, and felt for the first time this year that I was making good on my New Year's resolution to exploit New York for the last three months I have with it. Raj suggested we take buses around Brooklyn until we got bored, which was a fine idea, but I got distracted by the Internet (did you know you can watch free porn online???) and showed up at his place just before dark, and riding buses for the sake of tourism in the dark is pointless, so we walked from Clinton Hill to DUMBO instead, which worked just as well as riding the bus as a low-impact activity requiring no manual movement, which was a criteria for the day's activities because Raj, who had been degloved-by-windowpane earlier this week, could not use his right hand. We walked down Lafayette to Flatbush and then past the Watchtower complex to the waterfront, where we were almost immediately ejected from the park under the Brooklyn Bridge by a ranger with a paste-on mustache, which forced us to wander around the strange residential wasteland north of DUMBO while eating sixteen ounces of freezing yogurt with our freezing degloved hands. We discovered the estate of a mid-century vinegar baron, overlooking a vast vinegar distillery and guarded by curved-over steel fences and two kinds of barbed wire, and got scared of the desolation so fled by foot over the Manhattan Bridge to find Amy, whom we met at a safe space (Dojo's) and united with over our shared loves for not spending money and gluten-free, indeterminately Asian cuisine. The first two sips of my third of our $18 carafe of box wine left me stupefied, so I was only able to participate in the dinnertime conversation by being silently dizzy or irritatingly contrarian. Raj and Amy, forgive it for it knows not what it does. It puts the lotion in the basket.

Raj has a new job and apartment and Amy is ABD with a dissertation topic. The future looks good! So we celebrated in a nearby diner with wheatless rice pudding and chocolate ice cream, became sedated by the central heating, and then boarded three trains on our merry way home. I am at home now. I started and discarded two novels before settling on a third (Ha Jin's Waiting), taking the last with me into the bath and then accidentally submerging it in soapy water. I am a fucking idiot. I am going to ice my rotting left pinky and go to bed.