Tell Me Why, I Don't Like Mondays.

My biology test today was hard. HARD. And I really knew the material. I could have a conversation with you about it. (Let me know if you ever just want to chat about nucleotides or eukaryotic cells.) It was a multiple choice test -- those always throw me a little anyway -- and this professor is very clever and she posed a lot of questions in ways that force you to think on more than one level, so it didn't feel so much like an evaluation of my familiarity with the material and concepts as a test of my logic skills. (For instance, she often included answers like "1 and 2 are both correct," or "two of the above are correct.") I rushed through the last several questions because time was running out, and on half the questions I didn't feel at all sure of my answers. Shit.

Biology and Spanish are really testing me. I study both subjects for at least a couple hours a day, often more, and several hours on the weekends, and still my grip is tenuous. Both classes require so much memorization, and it's relentless. This is the fourth week of classes, and I already have a stack of 250 words in Spanish that I need to know, besides the grammar. There are slightly fewer words to memorize in Biology, but they don't for the most part match a word in English that means the same thing. Rather, each word corresponds to at least a paragraph of plain English. And they're long fucking words!

I'm going to bed.

Fall.

I survived my first week at the gym. I'm still sore, but much less so. Now it's only a general soreness all over. In just a week, my shoulders are noticeably (to me) different, bigger, and that's enough encouragement to keep at it.

My first Biology exam is on Monday, so I'll be studying all weekend. I think I'm in fairly good shape because I've studied all along, but there's a shitload of vocabulary to keep in my brain.

The weather seems to be hinting the last few days that maybe, just maybe, summer will be over soon. If I have ever done anything remotely resembling praying, I am doing it now for that.

The Unknown Life of a Great Movie.

Did anyone see The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys? It was made in 2002, but I don't remember it coming out in theaters. I read an article about Jodie Foster in the New York Times by Manohla Dargis last week in which she mentioned this movie that I had not heard of. (I'm so happy the Times finally got rid of their stupid TimesSelect thing where they hid the good articles behind a pay barrier.) All the article said about the movie was that Jodie Foster plays a one-legged nun, which was enough for me, so I greencine'd it and J and I watched it last night.

Jodie Foster produced it, and she's great as the nun, but the movie is about the boys. See it if you haven't. It's full of the best kind of surprises. Most people seem to already get the comic book thing, but I never did really, until I saw this movie.

Ow.

Today I worked out on my own for the first time, and I came home feeling defeated because I could only do about half of what I had done with the trainer. I wondered if it might be because he was not there encouraging me, but a better guess is that it's because I'm so fucking sore I can hardly move. Yesterday I woke up feeling like I got hit by a truck. This morning it felt like the truck put it in reverse and backed over me. Most of the pain is in my arms and shoulders and chest.

I almost didn't go to the gym today. Since I could hardly lift my backpack, I wondered if it would really be productive to try to lift weights. Finally I told myself to just go and do whatever I could do. I didn't want to skip a day so early in the program. (Besides, my backpack weighs about 3 times as much as any of the weights I'm lifting.) Most of the exercises that my trainer had me doing for 10 reps I could only do 6 or 8.

I found out that the gym is much less crowded at 1:30 than it is at 5, so I may start going early on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. On Tuesday and Thursday I have a couple big gaps between classes, but I can't imagine going to class after the gym. I can't imagine doing much of anything after the gym. Honestly, I could barely work the computer to check my email when I got home. (I'm trying hard not to exaggerate, because that would be complaining, which I don't do any more.)

After I regained the partial use of my hands, I wrote my first paper! It's only a one-page paper, but it was exciting for me because it's the first in my second college career. It's called "Is That a Pen in Your Pocket?" It's a reaction paper to the Sandra Gilbert essay, "The Queen's Looking Glass," which is a pretty important piece of writing if you're a feminist literary scholar. Check it out.

Good Lord, It's Early.

Last night at Hut's -- J and I go fairly regularly on Monday night 2-for-1 veggie burgers -- I could barely life my water glass to take a drink. The glasses at Hut's, like at so many places in Texas, hold about a half gallon of water, but I think I would have had trouble with a juice glass last night.

I had my first workout with my trainer yesterday. This morning, my arms are so sore I'm wincing every time I move them. I don't know if that's why I woke up at 3:30 and couldn't get back to sleep.

The workout must have jogged something loose in my brain, because on the way home my idea for the short paper I have to write this week started taking shape seemingly all by itself. Seriously, it was like turning on the radio and listening to someone talk. Or maybe I'm schizophrenic.

The workout experience is hard to put into words. As I got more and more fatigued, I started to feel pretty emotional. I think I may back off a little on my tendency to intellectualize every new experience I have and just let this one sink in. All I'll say is that walking home I felt very, very good.

Jesus Was a Sissy and Christians are Hot.

I read a blog called Joe.My.God. every day. I started reading it because I can't stand the mainstream gay media -- which is too obsessed with shopping and hairless torsos -- but I still want to keep up with so-called gay culture and issues. Joe.My.God. is like a friend with a great sense of humor keeping you up to date.

Joe has a lot of readers, and every so often a subject will start a long free-wheeling thread of comments. Sometimes interesting, sometimes not. There are a few blowhards who are hard to take -- some might include me in that category and I'm okay with that -- but there are also a lot of smart, thoughtful commenters.

Things Joe's readers like to argue about are "old gay vs. new queer," "transexuals: yea or nay," and, lately, whether We (this community of people who can't agree on what we are or who is included or what to call ourselves but is broadly defined by some kind or other of sexual deviance) like or dislike being represented in the mainstream media by effeminate men (e.g., Carson what's-his-name on Queer Eye for the Blah-blah or more recently Chris Crocker, the so-called crazed Britney Spears fan who is actually a performance artist but people don't seem to be able to tell the difference between art and reality anymore): the "Sissy Question."

Aaaanyway, coincidentally, someone recently handed J, or he picked up somewhere, a religious tract called The Sissy, published by Chick Publications (named after the guy who writes the tracts). It's pretty funny, so I thought I'd share it with you. The drawing style reminds me of illustrated paperback porn novels that I used to buy at a great bookstore in the West Village. I can't remember the name of the store; it hasn't been there for years, but it was a neighborhood institution, very dusty and nondescript. Mostly, it had long racks of vintage 70s and earlier gay porn magazines. (I used to frequent the place in the early 80s, so I guess the magazines weren't really vintage then, just used. Ew.) And then smaller racks of pulp novels. A lot of them were truck driver stories. I loved them.

Libraries and Sexual Identity.

I've been wondering, since the Senator Craig scandal has shed so much light on the previously esoteric world of tearooms, has sex in public bathrooms decreased -- because there's a big spotlight on it now, making people more afraid of getting caught -- or decreased -- because, now that the arcane signals have been broadcast to the world, everyone can play?

I can't say I'm an aficionado, but it's definitely on my radar when I walk into a public restroom. The first anonymous sexual encounter I had was in a restroom in the college library where my mother worked. It was a year or two after I'd left for college but I was home for the summer. I was waiting for my mom to get off work, reading in a small lounge next to the card catalog. It was summer, so the place was deserted, but there was another man in this lounge, also reading. He kept looking at me. I was looking back. I'm not sure how I knew to do this, but when he got up and went to the bathroom (which was next to the lounge) I waited a minute and then got up and followed him. It's been many years, so I don't remember the sequence of events -- was there foot-tapping? I don't remember -- but it ended with me on my knees with my penis under the wall getting a blowjob. At that time, I had only had 2 or 3 sexual partners, and it had not occurred to me that I could have sex with someone I couldn't even see.

When I was in junior high and high school, I spent a lot of time at this library. I liked books, I liked hanging out with my mom, I liked that it was a college library -- I saw myself as much more intellectually advanced than the shit-kickers I went to school with. (If you think I'm a snob now...) I even worked there a couple days a week my junior and senior years in high school, and full-time during the summer between.

It's where I learned about homosexuality, by reading the Kinsey books, and started to come to terms with my own deviant feelings. I worked in the reference department for a librarian who, I see in retrospect, knew I was a gay kid and made a great effort to let me know it was okay. She talked about her gay friends (she was a former Catholic nun married to a former priest, so she had a few homosexual friends), and she introduced me to lesbian feminist writers.

I was going to say I wonder how she knew, but I was going through my first wave of Judy Garland obsession when I was 16, so, duh. She consoled me when -- after I'd gotten tickets to a Liza Minnelli concert in Indianapolis 6 months in advance and looked forward to it more than anything ever before, but, a week before the date, Liza canceled "due to exhaustion" -- I was practically suicidal.

I still like libraries a lot. I feel at home in a library.

Reclamation.

I had my first meeting with my personal trainer, a very fit young man who said, "yes, sir" and "no, sir" to everything I asked him. We met briefly to discuss my "fitness objectives." I felt like a shy high school girl crossed with someone's totally uncool dad. I know, scary. The trainers at the U.T. gym are studying to become certified. They're inexperienced, but inexpensive.

I have one fitness objective, which is basically, "yes." We scheduled two sessions next week. I can't wait to start. He told me I should see and feel different in as little as six weeks, since I'm starting pretty much at zero. He looked me over and said that he thought I was starting with a "good foundation." No one has ever told me that before. (I think he meant, "At least it's not like you're 350 pounds and asthmatic.")

Since I first mentioned that I was going to start working out at the gym and that I'm a little frightened of it, many of my gay men friends -- as well as readers of this blog, guys I don't even know -- have expressed sympathy and support. It's funny, and I've been very moved by it; I never thought of this step in the terms I'm starting to see it in now, as a reclaiming of territory that was denied me as a kid. Denied to me partly by other boys because they were cruel, were bullies, but I think mostly self-denied because of my confusion and discomfort with an environment where there was obligatory intimacy with other boys in the form of physical contact and nudity.

The sad thing is that an environment of natural intimacy among men would have been such a healthy thing for a little gay boy. I feel a great sadness and regret sometimes that I missed all that. For me, the first -- and only for many years -- situation in which it was appropriate or even possible to touch or be touched by boys or men was when having sex.

That idea of reclaiming male space is obvious now, because I'm staking a claim in this particular gym which is full of boys just barely out of high school who are masculine and athletic and, at least apparently, sexually confident, just like the boys I was afraid of 30 years ago. But now, because I'm as old as their parents, to these boys I'm either invisible or I'm an authority figure.

Patti Smith Makes It All Better.

I had a vivid and rambling dream about Patti Smith last night. Through most of it, we were just talking quietly in a bright, white-painted New York loft. We were sitting very close, and I had to lean in to hear her. I don't remember what we talked about, but she smiled a lot and her eyes were so bright. When I got up to leave, we lingered at the door for a long time, and she hugged me over and over.

I had gone to bed feeling anxious because there wasn't enough time last night to study my Spanish as much as I wanted to, and I woke up reassured.

God's Gonna Send the Water From Zion.

It's raining, and I opened my windows for the first time in four days. J said a storm was coming -- his sinuses tell him these things. The weather has been absolutely, relentlessly stultifying for the last week, day and night, but now it's cool and breezy.

I took a break from studying so we could watch the two remaining episodes of Peep Show on DVD (we started watching it last night -- it's really really funny) and then we went to Hut's for 2 for 1 veggie burgers. Now back to Microbiology. We're still on the chemistry chapter, which is like a fascinating nightmare. I'm simultaneously enthralled and terrified. Is all that stuff really happening inside me? and how can anyone possibly keep it all straight?

Monday is a bear. I have Spanish lab at 8 a.m., biology lecture at 9, Spanish class at 10, and biology "discussion section" (which is a small-group review session with a grad student) at noon.

I have to study now.

Kane Welch Kaplin.

Our old friend Fats Kaplin was in town on Friday, playing with Kevin Welch and Keiran Kane at the Cactus Cafe. They go by the name Kane Welch Kaplin -- it's the three of them along with Keiran Kane's son Lucas Kane on drums. It's been a while since I heard such beautiful songs and beautiful playing. J and I were friends and neighbors of Fats and his wife Kristi Rose when we lived in Nashville, Fats produced and played on the record we made there (The Hey Y'all Soundtrack), and we met Kevin and Keiran at the Kaplin's house, probably more than once, but somehow I never paid attention to their music.

The Cactus Cafe is a funny place. It's a small listening room-type venue. The shows there are usually in the folk/Americana/Texas singer-songwriter camp which is revered here in Austin. It's on the U.T. campus, in the student union building, but I'm sure most of the students have no idea it exists. The audience is older, the grey ponytail and Hawaiian shirt crowd. It's the crowd that J and I spent so much time and energy wooing when we were doing Y'all. A faction of that audience loved Y'all, but we were never an ideal fit because we wanted to do more than sit and play. (The fact that the "more" that I wanted to do became, over time, different from the "more" that J wanted to do is what pulled us apart eventually.)

Kevin and Fats and Keiran sit and play. The stillness is what makes it soar. There's no detectable showmanship -- though they're charming and engaged -- but the trick is to make the audience feel like they're sitting in your living room, and these guys are good at it. I guess at some point, in the life of a touring folk musician who spends as much time on the road as at home, these little acoustic venues become their living room.

I fancied myself that kind of songwriter, because I love that stuff so much, but I wasn't interested in developing the musicianship that this genre requires. The simplicity of the presentation is what makes it so affecting, and it is also what makes it crucial that you be a very good player, because it's only you and your song, your voice and your guitar. I was aware of my musical shortcomings all along, but Friday night it was really clear to me.

I came home and downloaded from iTunes one particularly gorgeous song they played called "I Can't Wait." If you're a fan of songwriting, you might want to check these guys out.

Disingenuous.

My new language pet peeve is the overuse of the word "disingenuous." I remember many years ago having to look it up when I encountered it somewhere and thinking what a good word it was. Now, suddenly it's everywhere, mostly used interchangeably with "insincere." I hope it doesn't end up one of those words that loses its particular shade of meaning because people use it indiscriminately -- it really is one of my favorite words.

I don't have any examples -- it's 7 a.m. and I'm getting ready for Biology class -- but I'll try to find a couple.

A Judy Diversion.

I was prepared for my days to be suddenly very different, I was prepared to work hard, but it's still a shock. I'm either in class, reading, or studying almost every moment now (except when I'm hauling 40 pounds of books around town on my back). I was sitting in the student union building today (they call it the "Texas Union" because everything is Texas something here) -- there's a nice quiet study lounge where I spend quite a bit of time between classes -- reading, and I felt a sudden shiver of joy realizing that this is what I do now: sit around and learn stuff. And I'll be doing it for quite a while, years even.

Yesterday when I got home I really needed a break. It's been very humid this week, and of course it's always hot (Texas hot), so when I get home I just want to get dry. So I turned on my a.c. and watched a Judy Garland musical which had arrived several days before from greencine.com but I hadn't had a chance to watch it: Presenting Lily Mars. Whoever wrote the blurb on the sleeve called it "so-so" but judging from this writer's summary of the plot, he or she didn't even watch it, so... I know a lot of the MGM musicals are trash -- J won't even watch them with me anymore -- but I'll watch Judy Garland do pretty much anything.

The movie was full of cliches and over-the-top sentimental (of course) but I enjoyed it. Great musical numbers. And there's one scene that broke my heart, between Judy as Lily Mars, who moves to New York from Indiana with nothing but a suitcase and wants desperately to be a Broadway actress, and the charwoman (played by Connie Gilchrist, who has had a long prolific career, but I know her from Auntie Mame, in which she plays Mame's maid). Lily camps out in the theater, and the charwoman, mopping the stage, discovers her asleep in the orchestra pit. Well, it turns out Connie, when she was a young thing, also had Broadway dreams. Her dreams didn't quite pan out, but she loves the theater so much she'd rather be mopping the floor of one than be anywhere else. She sings a song called Every Little Movement, Judy joins in on the second verse and they sing in harmony and do a soft little shuffle across the theater floor in the dark. It got me.

The finale is pretty dazzling. It jumps forward to when Lily is a big star in her own big Broadway show. The number is about 10 minutes long, a big flashy dance medley. Wow. Judy delivers. Other highlights are Bob Crosby and Tommy Dorsey and their big bands.

One Down.

Today is the first anniversary of the day I moved to Austin. J and I went to see Cleopatra at the Paramount Theater downtown. It was the original 243-minute, 70 mm version of the film, which hasn't been seen in theaters since it was released in 1963. The first half is better than the second half, which gets a little tedious, but wow what a feast. Afterwards (speaking of feast) we went to Hoover's and had catfish po-boys and mashed potatoes.

Heart.

I loved Heart when I was in high school. I was obsessed with Ann and Nancy Wilson. There was a group of girls in my high school who were a few years older than me, the older sisters of my group of friends, sort of pothead bad girls but beautiful and, I thought, glamorous in their frayed jeans and gauzy tops. I idolized them. I still swoon a little when I smell patchouli because Carly, who I thought was the most beautiful of those girls, wore patchouli. Ann and Nancy Wilson were the apotheosis of that type of girl. I thought they were the most desirable people on earth. I sat in my bedroom and stared at the Little Queen album cover and longed to join their caravan of rock and roll gypsies, imagined what it would be like to be married to Ann and Nancy would be my sister. I drew pictures of them, I listened to Little Queen and later Dog and Butterfly over and over, I knew every word, every inflection, every guitar riff. Ann Wilson is the only woman I was ever sexually attracted to.

Around 1977 or 1978, I saw Heart play at the Indiana State Fair. I can't think of any show I've seen since that surpassed the thrill I got from that concert. I don't even remember who I went with -- maybe my brother? -- I was so single-minded through the whole thing. I devoured it.

The concert started with Nancy in a tight spotlight, playing the acoustic introduction to Crazy on You, her hair blowing like a flag. (It's not short, that intro. Nancy Wilson is a great guitar player and this is her moment, at the very top of the show, to show off, because once Ann is out there she's going to get all the attention.) Nancy hits those harmonics at the end of the intro. She pauses, and you can see her wind up for the opening riff. The beauty and suspense of that moment. The band kicks in, the whole stage is flooded with light, and Ann strolls up to the microphone. I probably cried.



When I moved to New York and became a cynical, detached young art student, I found I could keep my Heart obsession if I turned it into camp. If you're going to say you're a Heart fan, it's better if you're wearing black and chain-smoking in an East Village cafe than if you're wearing a Doobie Brothers t-shirt and a mullet. Or so I told myself. I was such a smart-ass. I probably used to say that Ann was like a drag queen. It helped that she gained weight and turned from a sexy rock and roll woman-child with a huge voice to a big, flamboyant rock star with a huge body to match her huge voice. But what never fit into that reductive view of Heart is that they were a great band, and that Ann was and is a great rock and roll singer, the best. Who is better? Okay, Janis Joplin. But who else? Etta James? Anyway, Ann is up there with very few peers.

One thing I love about the youtube age is that you can easily find clips that confirm or refute your memories of public events. The clip above must be from around the same time as the concert I saw, maybe even from the same tour. It's exactly as I remember it. The clip below is from some sort of tribute concert a few years ago. Ann doesn't look like a drag queen -- Wynonna, who appears in another clip from the same show, looks like a drag queen, bless her heart -- Ann looks like the motherfuckin' queen of rock and roll. And Nancy is still kickin' it.

Gym.

I had time between classes today, so I decided to check out the gym. It sounds so casual to just say it like that, but it was a big deal for me. Next week, I plan to start working out for an hour 5 days a week. I haven't been in a gym since I was 16, back when I would cry myself to sleep on nights before P.E. class.

I rant a bit from time to time about the soul-destroying culture of body perfectionism that either springs from or at least feeds the fitness industry. Not that I don't still believe that, but all that bluster also functions as a great excuse not to be in better physical shape. And I've come to see that a big part of my aversion to gyms is simply fear. I'm surprised -- I shouldn't be -- to realize how traumatized I still am by the experience of being forced during puberty to parade naked in front of, and compete in athletic contests with, boys whom I was just discovering a (horrifying and deeply shameful, but powerfully stimulating) sexual attraction to.

So I just walked right in that gym today, puffed up my chest a bit, and sniffed around. It's gargantuan. Lots of big rooms full of big machines. And a cafe.

My friend the Gardener, who knows all about physical fitness (did I mention he was a helicopter rescuer?), offered to come with me to the gym a couple times and show me what to do, and that's exactly what I need. I'm a little reluctant to put myself in such an uncomfortable and vulnerable position with a very new friend. But I'm gonna do it.

So Far, So Good.

All but one of my classes has met at least once now, Spanish twice. My American Government class won't meet until next week, but I've received a couple emails from the instructor and she seems enthusiastic and engaged. I like my American Lit. professor quite a bit. He obviously loves teaching. The reading and writing for his class is going to be a bear, several novels in addition to a stack of shorter readings each week, a critical journal, and two more formal papers. But that's what I'm here for.

I dropped Environmental History, reluctantly. It looks like a great course, but I'll take it later. When I looked at the syllabuses of all my classes together, I realized I would be reading a book a week for Lit. and a book a week for History. I'm used to reading a lot, and I could probably get through two books a week if I weren't doing anything else. But I'll have a lot of reading for Biology and Government, and Spanish homework, too. Without the history class, I still have 14 hours, so it's still a full load.

Day One.

I love my biology teacher. The class is called Biology of AIDS, so it dips into many areas: molecular and cell biology, genetics, immunology, epidemiology. Today she gave a very condensed history of the early years of the epidemic, talking about the Reagan 80s like someone who remembers what it was really like. I was the only person in the room besides the professor who was alive in 1981.

My Spanish teacher is a small, shy young Asian woman who speaks halting English. I'm sure she speaks Spanish beautifully. (But she did a very weird thing this morning. I'm still trying to figure it out. She was sitting at a desk in the front row as the students came in and took seats, so she looked like just another student. At 10 o'clock, she turned around and said loudly enough for everyone nearby to hear, "Is this Spanish 506? Did you know the instructor for this class has been changed? Who is this Sheena Lee? Oh! I'm her! Ha ha ha!" and she got up and started the class. It was a bit surreal.)

My only other class today was the discussion section for my American Lit. class. Here at U.T., the big lecture classes are broken into small groups that meet once a week to discuss the material with a graduate student. The instructor didn't show, I guess because, since we haven't had a lecture yet, there's nothing to discuss. Still, it would have been nice if someone had let us know. We all just sat there for 10 minutes and then one by one got up and left.

I spent $350 on books today. That's just for two classes. My Spanish book cost over $200. I have one more textbook to buy, for my government class. The books for my other classes are regular trade paperbacks which I hope I'll be able to get cheap used or maybe even check out at the public library. There are about 10 books on the list for my lit. class and just as many for my history class.

On another note, my jaw hurts. I have TMJ. Usually it doesn't bother me much, but last week I strained my left jaw muscle while I was chewing. I could barely eat for two days. Now it's just a dull ache. When I told J that I had strained my jaw, he said, "That's not very good for dating, is it?" And when I told Z, he said, "How'd you do that?" and he smirked. One bad thing (or good, depending on your sense of humor, I guess) about being a gay man is that there are times when your life feels like one long blowjob joke.

Off the Hook.

I heard from Z. He'd been trying to call, but he's climbing a mountain somewhere (South Dakota? I can never remember, he's always climbing a mountain somewhere) and couldn't get through. He told me I wasn't as much of a freak as I thought I had been, and that his new boyfriend thought I was very nice. Much relieved, it occurred to me that maybe it's good the marijuana threw me so far off balance Friday night, because if all I'd had was a couple beers I probably would have done something like pull his boyfriend aside and say, "You better be good to him, 'cause if you break his heart I'll kill you." (Not really. I wouldn't do that.)