Entitlement.

A woman with whom I shared an apartment in New York in my early twenties, when we were both in art school, used to rail at me about my "sense of entitlement." This would be in the heat of an argument about washing the dishes or cleaning the bathroom, things she felt she always did and I never did. For the most part, this was true. I thought you cleaned things when they were dirty (sometimes really dirty), not just because it was Saturday.

I railed right back, against her characterization of me as a typical American male accustomed to having all the housework done by a female. I didn't see it that way. Compared to some of my male peers whose mothers had waited on them hand and foot, I didn't see myself as having been pampered. But now, looking back, I don't remember doing much housework. My mom cleaned the house top to bottom every weekend and did all the cooking and laundry. She didn't clean my bedroom -- maybe that's why I had the impression that I was a liberated male.

Anyway, my roommate and I were great friends for many years (though we've regretfully lost touch now). Her eternal feminist vigilance was tedious sometimes, but I knew she was usually essentially correct, and I learned a lot from her about how to root out those biases in simple everyday transactions. I miss her.

I think a lot about entitlement, my sense of entitlement, during these periods in my life when I'm particularly whiny about money and my livelihood and my frustration not being able to make a living at what I want to do. Because of course I know that, though I'm broke and anxious about it, my life is relatively luxurious. I'm comfortable, healthy, I eat as much delicious food as I need every day, often more. I complain that I don't want to get a job as a cook for $8/hour, knowing that there are many people who are grateful for jobs like that, or would be grateful if they could even get them. I'm surrounded by people whose struggles to make a living are much more dire than mine, not just on the other side of the world but right here in Austin.

Still, I complain.

I say -- and this feels true to me --that I am so strongly called to make art that if I'm not able to, I feel empty and useless. But is that true? Or is it my white American male sense of entitlement at the root of my opinion that I should be able to do whatever the hell I want to do and somebody should pay me to do it?

Plans or not.

A few years before the end of my career, my partner J. and I read a book, one of those "do this and everything will be fine" books about the music business. I won't mention it by name because of the negative impression I'm going to create. I think it's a fine book and it has been very helpful to a lot of people. In our case, it did a lot more damage than good.

The book sets out a method of structuring a career by making a 10-year plan, then working backwards to a 5-year plan, a 1-year plan, etc. I won't go into why I think this sort of planning is maybe wise for a restaurant or a computer business but not for an artist, except to say that it locked us into thinking about our work (or, to be more accurate, our lives, because there's no difference for an artist) as a series of goals -- goals which we were constantly not meeting, not because of a lack of hard, focused effort, but because of the nature of our work.

Anyway, thank god, it all came tumbling down soon enough. And out of the rubble of what I thought I wanted, I try to create a life as an artist without a business plan. I went from everything being way too planned to nothing being planned at all. This groundlessness is great for my Buddhist practice, but it's not so great for my emotional health.

When J. and I first started talking about what we would do "after," it was terrifying but wonderful that everything was suddenly so wide open, that anything was possible. Opportunities soon fell into place. Producers materialized with money, and I got the chance to create a documentary about our career and be paid for it.

When that was done, I felt pretty insecure as the money ran out and I didn't have other means, but then a random meeting in a bar led me to the owners of the restaurant in Utah where I would go to live and work in the most beautiful place I've ever been for two seasons. Through one of the other cooks there, I met the executive chef at Greens in San Francisco who hired me to work for her. But on a cook's wages, I couldn't afford to live in San Francisco., which is one of the reasons I'm in Austin now.

I grew to believe that when you're not nailed down too firmly, opportunities arise, a path opens. The trouble now is that, yes, a path has opened and I've been free to follow it, but I'm not sure it is the path I want to be on. I got a job cooking in a wonderful restaurant, which led me to another wonderful restaurant, and now I can apply for cooking jobs, but, wait, I thought I was an artist. Why would I want to spend 40 hours a week cooking? That would suck just as much as my old job as a legal secretary and cooks make about a third what legal secretaries make. I don't want to spend 40 hours a week doing anything, if it's just to make money. I gave up the legal secretary gig a long time ago, and not a moment too soon for my sanity.

J. has a part-time job that he doesn't hate. It pays well enough that he can get by on it and still have time and energy for his writing. That would be okay with me.

I'll find out very soon if I have been accepted at U.T. If I'm a full-time student in the fall, everything will change. Even so, I still need to find a source of income that doesn't make me hate myself and my life. Not too much, anyway.

Toast and yogurt.

The study that I was screening for has been canceled. When I told J., he said, "So you wanna wake and bake?" Do I?! But I can't, because I need to keep trying to get into a study soon soon soon and that stuff takes three weeks to get out of your urine.

I went to the Chain Drive last night, had 2 or 3 beers, walked home distraught, wrote the blog entry below, didn't go to bed until 3 a.m. I was up and down with diarrhea until noon, feeling nauseous and chilly. When I got out of bed and checked my messages, that's when I found out about the study.

I've been eating nothing but toast and yogurt today. J. was a little stomach sick a couple days ago, so it's possible we caught a bug. But it's more likely psychosomatic. Emotional distress goes right to my colon.

Despair.

God I'm sick of this feeling. This encroaching despair as I run out of money. I have about 300 dollars in my bank account, not quite enough to pay the bills I need to pay. And I won't know until some time this week if I am going to be in this drug study that I'm counting on for my next infusion of cash.

You might say, well, if you're tired of being broke then get a job. But the reason I'm tired of being broke is that it's depressing, and having a job will only be more depressing.

I have lots of very nice moments, days that are great. Lately mostly having to do with working in the garden or writing or even blogging. But I want those moments to be my life, not just periodic relief from it.

I always feel like I have two choices. Ever since I was 20 years old, I have felt like I had these two choices:

Behind door number one: get a job. If I get a job, I either have to give up my creative life (despair) or try to hold on to my creative life but never have enough time or energy to give to it (despair). And even if I get a job, the jobs I am qualified for would not pay me enough to break even (despair).

Behind door number two: don't get a job. Keep doing what I'm doing. At least now I feel like I am living some semblance of an artist's life. I am writing. But I am constantly distracted by the need to again and again come up with money to pay the bills and I'm always just short of the bare minimum I need (despair, slightly less than with door number one, but, still, despair).

Nobody worry, I'm kidding about the noose. But I'm not kidding about being sick to death of these two choices. Sick to fucking death. Where's door number three? I need door number three. I am 46 years old and I am weary to my bones of not being able to provide for myself.

Black.

I did laundry tonight. A few of my t-shirts came out with big stains on them -- stains that weren't there before I washed them. The stains made me aware of how generally ratty and dingy all my clothes are, which made me want new clothes, which reminded me of how broke I am.

I think I'll go back to wearing nothing but black like I did in my twenties when I lived in New York. Wasn't everything easier when we were in our twenties living in New York and wearing black?

I'm just gonna lie down for a second...

I'm ready to take all these scenes and scraps of writing and put them into actual screenplay format. I don't mean to say that it's done, or that I'm even very close to a first draft, but I'm ready to start working in the format, which is a big step. It means, to me, that I can finally, however dimly, see this as a coherent work of art. I realized this as I was falling asleep last night, and I woke up early because I was excited to start.

Just as I was finishing my coffee and breakfast and reading The New York Times on the web this morning, J. knocked on my door to tell me he had a hankering for lunch at Hoover's. It was about noon. Noon to 1 p.m. is my scheduled time for showering and meditating. I had already showered, since I got up early.

Hoover's is a big, bright neighborhood restaurant, super-busy for lunch, serving a mix of Cajun, soul food, and just plain Southern cuisine. A tall, stout black man who must be Mr. Hoover in chef's jacket and check pants greeted us at the door and told us it would be about 15 minutes for a table. It was.

Our fast, efficient waiter warned us away from the tuna burger, complained about the TV in the corner playing the Food Network ("we can't eat till the end of our shift, but we have to watch it and serve it -- I'm starving!") and recommended the cobbler and coconut cream over the sweet potato pie ("it's just like pumpkin pie, but not as good").

Both of us ordered the "4-veggie plate." (Me: jalapeno creamed spinach, macaroni and cheese, garlic new potatoes, and green beans cooked with bacon; J.: butter beans, mac and cheese, the same new potatoes, and ? I can't remember his fourth one). Each portion was served in an individual bowl and would have been lunch in itself. Good lord, good food!

Now it's 4:45 and I haven't meditated or started writing. I'm not going to say it's J.'s fault. Hoover's is one of those things that, once you've said the word, it has ultimate power over you and you won't be satisfied until you're so full you're sick. It's been a long time since I was already stuffed but forced down dessert anyway.

Now I just want to take a nap.

Dust.

J. got a wild hair yesterday, borrowed our landlady's vacuum cleaner, and vacuumed the whole house. Except my room, which I did. I hadn't noticed that it needed vacuuming until one evening when J. and I were watching a movie. There was only one lamp on, which for some reason illuminated the area under my desk.

I'm not much of a duster. The dust is not as bad here in Austin as it was in Jersey City when my windows were only a couple yards from a very busy street. Or southern Utah, which is pretty much made of dust.

Dust reminds me of Quentin Crisp. Quentin Crisp lived on E. 4th St. during the years I lived in the East Village. It wasn't really a boarding house he lived in, but it was a four story walk-up, all tiny, single rooms, each with a sink, and a shared bathroom on each floor. Two or three times over the course of many years living in the neighborhood, I went home to this building with a boyish man with white, white teeth and long eyelashes whom I met in Stuyvesant Park. (The two of us had remarkably compatible sexual tastes.) Quentin Crisp had violet hair. I passed him in the stairwell a couple times; he was coming up and I was going down. Quentin Crisp didn't believe in dusting; he said that after the first three years it doesn't get any worse.

That reminds me of Annie Dillard's amazing book For the Time Being, which is all about dust. Well, it's about other things too, but mostly it's about dust. (It's a shame about the word "amazing," another in a long list of ruined words, like "awesome," and "gay.")

Having caught the spring cleaning bug from J., I went on to scrub the mold off the bathtub, shower walls, and toilet. Let's just say the garden was not the only thing growing around here. I can tolerate a dirty bathroom for a pretty long time -- it's just a bathroom. But it sure is lovely when it's clean.

Drop it.

I was thinking while I was meditating just now that working with my mind is like walking a dog that keeps stopping to pick stuff up. I'm strolling along, suddenly I feel the leash pull, I look and the dog is holding something in its teeth, a piece of fast food trash, a dead mouse, whatever. I say, "Drop it!" He does. Back to strolling, half a block later the leash pulls again, and on and on.

And if you keep walking the same path, it's often the same damn thing the dog picks up every day. Meditating is just practicing dropping it. Every time. Over and over.

Something I picked up today on my walk was my view of myself as lazy. I guess writing about my schedule put me in mind of it. I've dropped this one a million times, and I keep practicing. When I was a kid, my dad used to tell me I was lazy. "Pick up your feet when you walk!" "Get out of bed!" etc.

I still drag my feet when I walk, and I still sleep in sometimes, but I've come to see these things as aspects of my personality, not moral defects. I'm slow, deliberate, and generally sort of still. Not lazy. But that piece of trash on the sidewalk is still there and still tempts me every time I walk by it.

Starting today.

Pema Chodron says, "Start where you are." What I would add is, "Okay, now again. And again. And one more time."

I realized when I was in the long slog of logging and editing my film Life in a Box -- the first and only time in my adult life during which I was completely free of outside work -- that I did well with a strict schedule. I had the day, and the week, scheduled down to the hour. Two hours for coffee and the New York Times, one hour journaling, one hour for showering and meditation, six hours of logging, and so on. It worked.

I had always thought, before then, that I was a little lazy and certainly not a morning person. But suddenly, with no extraordinary effort, I was getting up at 7 a.m. (with no alarm clock!), working at one thing or another all day, and going to sleep at 11. It turns out I was not lazy, I just didn't want to do a bunch of shit other people wanted me to do. I stuck to that schedule, more or less, for two years, until the money ran out and the film was done.

Even though, for the past couple of years, I've had to do various jobs to pay the bills, I'm trying to live by a schedule when my time is my own. Sometimes it works better than others. I have trouble recovering from any disruption. I plug along on my schedule for a couple of weeks, but then I do one of these drug trials and get all out of whack.

The drug trials are better than having a job as far as giving me time and psychic space to write. I have blocks of free time while I'm in the trial, and there's not much to do in the facility but read and write. I just have to nudge myself to do less reading and more writing. But it's been two weeks since I ended the last trial, and I haven't been able yet to get back on a schedule. Today, I'm starting again. At noon, I shower.

Fasting.

I was thinking I would get to bed early, so I can get up at 6 and have breakfast. I have a 1 p.m. screening appointment for a drug trial, and I have to have been fasting for 8 hours before they take blood. The first thing they do at these things is read a long consent form which we have to sign, along with all sorts of other paperwork, so it'll be at least 2 before they take blood. If I don't get up early enough to eat something at 6, I'll for sure have a nasty headache by 3 or so when I get out of there.

But J. and I just got back from Quack's, where we each had a cherry Danish (half price on all pastries if you go late), and two cups of decaf, which I'm skeptical of the decaffeinatedness of, since I feel a little wired. Well, okay, maybe it's the cherry Danish. So I probably won't be going to sleep any too early.

Tonight for dinner, I made a big pot of beans & greens (from Nick and Michael's recipe: white beans, greens -- I used the chard, beet greens, and kohlrabi greens from the farm -- lots of garlic and pepper flakes, cooked until it's soupy, salt to taste). I also made foccacia from a really easy recipe my mom sent me. It only took an hour from pulling out the mixer to putting the bread on the table. I topped it with fresh rosemary that I clipped from the huge bush in our front yard. And J. made jasmine rice. Perfect.

Between dinner and dessert, we watched a little French & Saunders. Dawn French is the funniest woman alive. Period.

Stormy Weather.

I'm listening to iTunes on shuffle, which is how I usually listen to music. I have the Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall recording (remastered a few years ago for a new CD release) which, on vinyl, was one of my favorite records when I was a teenager. I listened to it over and over and over. I'm still fascinated and mystified by that fact. I had no exposure to gay culture back then, didn't even really know I was homosexual, yet from about 14 I was obsessed with Judy Garland. I scoured the Reader's Guide in the library and photocopied every article I could find about her. Bought every record I could find. Poured over the TV Guide every week to make sure I caught her movies on the late show that week.

Anyway, it's still pouring outside, and Judy comes on singing Stormy Weather. Her arrangement is over-the-top huge, of course, building up to a big, sobbing bridge, and you can just picture her on the floor, pounding the boards with her fists: "Rain pourin' down, over every hope I had, this pitterin' patterin' beatin' and splatterin' drives me mad! Plop! Plop! Plop! Plop!" Then she slows down and gets all quiet and pleading: "This misery is just too much for me." And she kicks back in again, transposing up a step: "Can't go on!" -- and a huge thunderbolt cracks outside, buckets of rain are falling -- "Everything I had is gone! Stormy weather..."

Oh, my!

Didn't it rain, little children?

It's been raining on and off all day, but now it's absolutely gushing. Big storm, dark sky, I love it.

From my desk, through the screen door, I can see from the back of the house, where my room is, along the side of the house to the street. J. moved here a couple months before I did, and I guess the side yard was kind of a mess. The wooden stoop at my door was rotted and collapsing because the kitchen sink drained right out to the side of the house under it. Nice, huh?

J. paved a narrow path with bricks along the side of the house from the front porch to my door, and he asked a friend to build a new set of steps. When I got here, we bought some plastic tubing and diverted the grey water past my stoop and farther out into the yard. (It's probably illegal for gray water to drain into the yard, but we don't want our rent to go up if we ask the landlord to fix the plumbing.)

There are no gutters on the house, so when it rains water pours over the edge of the roof into the side yard. J. and I have talked about rigging something up to catch rainwater for the garden, but there's only so much you want to put into a rental house.

That brick path still breaks my heart, reminding me that J. put so much effort into making a nice home for me to come to. We'd been apart for several years when we decided to live together again.

Um ... ?

Z. called me "sweetheart."

At Whole Foods yesterday, when we were buying food to take up to the roof for a picnic brunch, he said something like, "the half and half is right over there, sweetheart," or "I'm gonna pick up some yogurt, sweetheart," I don't remember the exact sentence. But it hit me like a tap on the shoulder. Or a poke in the ribs. I felt an urge to make a dry comment about it, but thankfully my wit failed me at the moment. We don't know each other well enough, I don't think, for dry comments about the progress of our relationship. (I use the word relationship in its less fraught sense.)

The word "sweetheart" makes me think of my friend Larry, who I used to proofread with on the graveyard shift at Weil Gotshal & Manges in the eighties in New York. There was a group of us who were temps working through an agency, but we were permanently assigned to this one firm and this one shift. This was in the heyday of big corporate mergers and junk bonds and all that stuff (remember?), when law firms were cleaning up big time, and they hired boatloads of temps who did a few hours of work a week and spent the rest of their time on the clock smoking cigarettes and reading magazines.

Larry was this sort of regular straight guy from Brooklyn. For some reason we became buddies. He used to call the women we worked with sweetheart, and a couple of them really bristled at that. They felt it was demeaning. It seemed affectionate to me, and charming. He never called me, or any man, sweetheart.

But neither am I in the habit of calling a man sweetheart, unless he is "my" sweetheart. Not even my dear friends. Is this deeply ingrained sexism? Or just a natural gender differentiation? My friendship with Larry was the beginning of my consciousness that all these issues of bias and discrimination are more complex than I had imagined. This was around the peak of my ACT UP and Queer Nation days, and probably the beginning of my disillusionment with those circles.

Larry pushed more than one button there. Near the end of my proofreading career, Larry and I hatched a scheme whereby the two of us would jump to a different agency, take our regular gig, and ask for a huge raise in our hourly rate in return for delivering several of our co-workers to the new agency. It worked, but a few weeks later, the economy tanked and all the big New York law firms cut way back on temps.

The scheme didn't seem unethical, just a little cutthroat, but still several people we worked with took a dim view of it. I still believe that those people judged the situation negatively because Larry was Jewish and he was driving a hard bargain.

Anyway. Z. called me sweetheart.

Damn.

I went to my screening appointment for the drug study, but found out when I got there that it's too soon after the last study for me to be eligible for this one. The waiting period is different for every study. I thought I had given it enough time, and I thought that the recruiter who signed me up would have told me if it was too soon, but I guess she missed it.

So ... damn. That $7000 was going to make life a lot easier for the next few months. Let's hope they post another big-money study soon.

The upside is that today will not be so frantic. I won't have to do laundry, prep and freeze vegetables, mail a package, pack, and go to the library to get books for a week-long stay in the study clinic which would have started tomorrow morning. Well, I need to do some of those things, but not all of them. And I can have coffee.

Farm produce.

Our box from the CSA farm this week contained collards, chard, kohlrabi, cabbage, a bunch of parsley, beets, broccoli, lettuce, and asparagus.

Z. is going out of town for a week, so we had breakfast together this morning. We wanted to eat at Kerbey Lane, but there was an hour wait for a table, so we went to Whole Foods and got a muffin and scone and ate on the roof.

Since we were there, I picked up some lemons and bulgur, and, when I got home, I made tabbouli. I also braised the collards with garlic and chipotle peppers (spicy and smoky like the traditional way, but meatless). And finally cooked a couple of those sweet potatoes that we had bought to root and plant in the garden. They never did root. My new favorite way to prepare any sort of root vegetable is to cube them, toss them in olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper, and roast them on a sheet pan in a very hot oven. The roasting brings out the sweet in sweet potatoes which contrasts nicely with the garlic.

I found a great new way to make cole slaw too, in The Best Recipe, my favorite new cookbook. You shred the cabbage and salt it, put it in a colander over a big bowl, and let the salt pull out the moisture for several hours before you dress it. The cabbage wilts but it's still very crisp. It's easier to eat, absorbs more of the flavor of the dressing, and you don't end up with a pool of water at the bottom of the bowl.

Obsessed.

Reviews of Reign Over Me appeared in the Statesman and the Times this morning. The Statesman didn't hate it, which made me angry. The Times gave it a pretty bad review, which was only slightly satisfying.

I'm worried about how obsessed I am with this movie. It's out of proportion. Just thinking about it makes my heart race.

Yes, it was homophobic and misogynistic, but no more so than the average overheard conversation among straight men who don't think any women or homosexuals are listening. Maybe it's the fact that the hatefulness is wrapped up in what is supposed to pass for sensitivity. It's supposed to be a meditation on how difficult male friendships can be. Difficult because men are shallow assholes, is what the film says, I doubt intentionally.

The other issue, besides the politics, is the fact that the film is just bad. Bad writing, bad idea, bad, bad. Nothing in it rings true. This is where I get most frustrated. It's the same feeling I get about Clint Eastwood movies. Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby are two of the most get-in-your-face-and-make-you-want-to-throw-things bad movies I've ever seen. They are maudlin, heavy-handed, simple-minded, and just plain ridiculous. Not only is Clint Eastwood an awful director, he's the worst actor ever. And yet, people rave about his movies.

If these are not bad movies, then I'm an idiot. So all the talk about how great he is and how great these films are, makes me feel like I'm either insane, stupid and out of touch, or living in a nightmare upside-down universe.

Bad dreams.

A couple days ago, J. and I watched Stay, an intensely disturbing movie. Since ruining movies is on my short list of Deadly Sins, I won't write much about it, except to say that it's really, really good. I'm sure it accounted for my creepy dreams that night. But I can't blame it for the awful dreams I had this morning. Awful in the sense of upsetting, but also awful in the sense of "can't you do better than that?"

In one, I was moving out of a big, dark house. My parents were there; in the dream this was their house, but it wasn't their actual house. I and a group of friends were carrying boxes out to a car, which was parked on the other side of a strange, uneven landscape of lawn and pavement, trash and shrubs. As I was making my final trip to the car, ready to jump in with my friends and drive away, I saw that whoever had carried out a tray of seedlings for the garden had, instead of loading them into the car, planted them in a crack in the asphalt. I shouted to my friends in the car that they would have to wait until I dug up the plants and re-potted the.

Can you say heavy-handed?

In another -- this one woke me up -- I was in a big, dark house (many of my dreams take place in this big, dark house), doing something sedate and domestic like watching TV. J. was there. It was dusk (many of my dreams take place at dusk in a big, dark house), and someone knocked at the door. Through the screen door, I could see that it was some people we didn't want to deal with, so I discreetly pushed the latch closed -- in the dream, I thought I was being discreet, but, now that I think about it, these people were standing right there watching me do it -- and walked away. I looked out a window on the side of the house and saw that these people were rigging up a floodlight and two huge speakers aimed at the house. They looked like bikers, men and women in black jeans and cutoff t-shirts.

I'm struggling so hard with this screenplay lately, trying to tell a complex story with some subtlety. And I'm not getting it; it feels either completely obscure or, on the other hand, clunky and maudlin. So it's disheartening that not even my dreams are subtle or complex.

Steamed.

I read the Austin daily, The Austin American-Statesman every morning. It's not a bad paper. Their editorial page leans ever so slightly leftward (in the current sense of "left," meaning any acknowledgment, however tepid, that there may be a point of view other than Tony Snow's). I miss the New York Times, but it's important to me to know about local issues. One thing I like is that I can read it in half the time I used to spend on the Times. (I scan nytimes.com and slate.com to fill in the gaps on national and international news, so maybe I'm not saving any time at all. Whatever.)

Another advantage to a smaller paper in a smaller city is that when I don't agree with their editorial decisions I can write a letter and stand some chance of it being printed. My most recent letter, though, they did not print, and I'm mad about it. My letter was about the way they covered the Ann Coulter "faggot" remark. There was no coverage of the actual incident, but they printed a small story a week later about Edwards' response to it.

Here's my letter:

Dear editor:

I am offended by your article on Senator Edwards' response to Ann Coulter's calling him a faggot.

First, Coulter made this remark a week ago. This was a well-known political commentator using an extremely offensive slur in front of an audience of applauding Republican presidential candidates. If she'd called Barak Obama a nigger or Hillary Clinton a bitch, would you have taken a week to report it?

Second, you won't print the word "nigger" (or "bitch") in the Statesman, but you will print "faggot," which is just as degrading to a whole class of people. Why the inconsistency?

Third, and worst, is the paragraph about Edwards' wife and children, as if to reassure us that Edwards is not a faggot. Do I really have to point out to you that the point of the story is not that Coulter was mistaken?!


Two weeks later, I wrote and said that, if they were not going to print the letter, I would at least appreciate a response to my question about the inconsistency regarding which slurs they print in their pages. An editor emailed me to say, "In a highly publicized remark about a presidential candidate or potential candidate, we would use those words you held out as an example. In fact, we have used those words when news judgment dictated that it best serves the reader to do so."

A search of the Statesman's web site returned no hits for "nigger" and one hit for "bitch."

I'm still mad that they get away with trotting out the wife and kids to verify Edwards' heterosexuality. It just feels so sadly backward. It reminds of my freshman year at Miami University (1979!), when I wrote a paper about the play, Tea and Sympathy, objecting to what seemed to me to be the message that the taunting of the boy -- I don't remember what names the other boys called him, but the essence of the teasing was to question his heterosexuality -- was reprehensible only because the boy was not gay, which was revealed by his having some kind of sexual encounter with the female teacher.

My professor told me I was overreacting. Twenty-five years later, I'm still overreacting.

Another year older and deeper in debt.

Today, I signed up to screen for another drug trial. This one is bigger, longer, and pays $7000. It'll tie me up on and off until the end of May, but $7000 should be enough for me to make a big payment on my credit cards to offset what I'll have to borrow for May rent and bills and have enough left to get me through the summer.

Today is my 46th birthday. J. made heart-shaped pancakes with strawberries for breakfast.

Spring blah.

I haven't felt like doing much of anything this week. Maybe I'm still wiped out from the film festival. I haven't worked on my screenplay, haven't even done much reading. I'm about 100 pages into Moby Dick. Great book. (Duh, you say. But for some reason I never read it before.)

I haven't been sleeping well. I toss and turn and by 6 o'clock, I'm wide awake. Sometimes I'll fall asleep again at 8 or so, but I've been making myself get up because I don't want to sleep all day. I've actually been getting bored sometimes during the day, which is rare for me. Usually I feel like there's too much to do. But, since I haven't been able to make myself write much and don't feel interested in reading, there's a lot of time to fill. The last few days, I've been filling it with either reading blogs or browsing the gay hookup posts on craigslist. I haven't been interested in meeting anyone, I just get mesmerized by the often very strange pictures.

Oh, and gardening. I've been doing that. And that's satisfying.

I got out of the routine of meditating during the film festival, and when I'm not doing that, everything becomes more difficult.

Yesterday I had an appointment at the STD clinic to get screened for everything. They have test results for HIV and syphilis is about 20 minutes, which was nice. HIV tests have previously caused me so much anxiety that I've avoided them, or even a couple times, when I've gone to have blood drawn, I haven't been able to bring myself to call for results. Anyway, my tests were all negative.

Overall, the clinic experience was top-notch here in Austin. Since I've been without insurance most of my life, I've relied on free and low-cost clinics for most of my health care. And I've been to some extremely unpleasant clinics. But yesterday, I was in and out in an hour, the place was clean and cheery, and the phlebotomist and nurse were both pleasant and efficient.

In the evening, Z. and I went for a walk around Town Lake then had dinner at Marakesh. (Finally a Middle Eastern restaurant that stands up to the high standard of my old Jersey City haunts.)