I've been lately interrogating my anti-Auto-Tune stance because, I'm a little embarrassed to admit, I've watched a couple episodes of Glee and actually kind of enjoyed them or I should say found more in them to enjoy than I thought possible. I still find it too conservative for my taste, but it can be sneakily subversive. I'm finding it more interesting, and funnier, than I used to, and I don't know if it has changed or I have. Both, most likely. Anyway, because I was feeling a little warmer toward the show, I began to wonder if Auto-Tune as a tool to create a certain kind of shiny pop performance was possibly not so evil.
These vocal performances are processed to be sure, but with analog technology that can add to but can't fundamentally alter the voice in the way that Auto-Tune does. These are perfect pop vocal performances, flawless, shiny as glass. Yet they retain the essential emotional quality of human beings singing, a quality that is erased by the overuse of Auto-Tune. Barry and Frida actually sang like that into a microphone and they brought yearning and heartbreak to every perfect note.
Call me an old curmudgeon, but something important is lost when you create that perfect pop vocal in a computer instead of in the human heart and throat. Something you can actually hear and measure. Something good. It's like when people look at you with a forced, sad smile and tell you that Stouffer's frozen lasagna is "actually very tasty." Well, okay. Keep telling yourself that.
I think I just don't get Jane Austen. Whenever I encounter passages from her books quoted in other books or articles, or when writers I love write about her, I think, "Wow, that's so good I need to read some Jane Austen." But then I do and I always end up feeling somehow unsatisfied.
I read Pride and Prejudice, and I think Sense and Sensibility though I'm not sure, and I'm struggling through Persuasion right now. It's not a long book and I only have about 30 pages left but I am finding it such a chore, I don't even think I'll finish it. Seriously it's so boring I can hardly make myself sit down and finish it. The story is dull. None of the characters are sympathetic. They're either silly and vain (and we're supposed to not like them) or they're tedious and judgmental and just annoying.
All the things people say Jane Austin is so amazing at: the social observation, the critique of manners, etc., George Eliot does with as much bite and humor as Austin -- and, I would argue, more subtlety -- and her books have passion and warmth, sorrow and beauty. What is it I'm not getting?
On Sunday I performed for the first time in several years. I could be forgetting something -- I do that -- but I'm pretty sure the last time I sang and played in front of an audience was in 2004 when I was living in San Francisco finishing Life in a Box and a friend invited me to perform in a popular cabaret-type variety show hosted by a drag queen comic. I sang 2 songs, as I remember.
So. Sunday, I took part in a songwriters circle that my old friend Monica Passin hosts at Banjo Jim's in the East Village. It came about because J was going to be here visiting and we were going to sing together in sort of a reunion -- J and I did lots of shows with Monica when we were Y'all and we were all part of the New York alt-country scene in the 90s that was centered around Rodeo Bar. In fact, Monica was instrumental in the development of Y'all in those early years. I happened to take a guitar class at The New School around the time J and I met and started writing songs. Monica taught the class; she was my first teacher -- before that I was self-taught. After the class ended, I took private lessons with her. She was already performing a lot and had a following as Li'L Mo and the Monicats. Through her we discovered that scene and they us.
Anyway, J was coming to New York for a couple weeks and we were going to sing together in this show. Monica asked J and J asked me if I was into it. I've been trying to find ways to get in front of an audience again -- I'm started to write a solo theater piece, with my new songs and stories about my love and sex life since J and I separated -- so this was a perfect, low-pressure situation where I could get my feet wet. As the date got closer, I think J got a little scared. Monica emailed asking for a bio and photo which I think -- it did for me, for sure -- brought back a flood of anxious memories about our old performing career, and J told me he almost wanted to back out but he would be okay just singing harmony with me, not billing ourselves as a duo.
Two days before he was supposed to fly here, J passed out while he was peeing, tore open the back of his head, and spent 3 days in the hospital. He has a congenital heart defect which was causing his blood pressure to fluctuate wildly. He had to cancel his trip. So I was on my own.
I have a batch of what I call my new songs though some of them were written several years ago and the newest of them is 4 or 5 years old. I haven't performed them much if at all, so they feel fresh to me. They are not shaped, the performance of them is not shaped, by interaction with an audience. Not yet.
I'd never been so nervous about performing as I was on Sunday. To be honest, I was feeling a little out of control. I can count on one hand the number of times I've sung and played completely by myself. In the end, I like it best. I love the freedom, the control over everything, the simplicity of the relationship with the audience. But I was nervous as holy fuck all day. I broke out in a sweat before the show, kept telling myself to keep breathing. The venue is a little dive bar on 9th and C, and there were only a couple dozen people there at most. It was most definitely not a big deal.
After the first song I was calmer. The audience was quiet, attentive, and my voice felt strong. They liked the song, the applause was reassuring. The second song I did has a fast finger-picking part that sometimes trips me up, and I stumbled a few times but never fell apart. (It's the song in the video clip which is an excerpt from Life in a Box.) After that I was cool and confident.
I'm energized and inspired to get moving on this new solo work. I sort of have all the material already, I just have to wrangle it. I may write a new song or two, but maybe not. And the stories are not written down but they're in my head and in some cases they're here in this blog and only need to be reconfigured. I thought that I would work with an accompanist or co-writer to create piano arrangements of the songs so I wouldn't have to play. But after Sunday I'm sort of thinking maybe I can do it. My guitar playing is rudimentary, remedial, but it might be fine in this context. The simplicity is seductive, not just in terms of the performance but rehearsals, booking, sound, everything is easier if it's just me and my guitar. I'll give it some more thought.
My left arm was sore all last week. I assume it's from my job. A lot of my work is data entry that involves a lot of scrolling with the mouse, and I can feel the stiff soreness in my forearm after a few hours of it. Sunday it was really sore which pissed me off because I needed all the strength I could muster in that hand after not playing guitar for so many years. But I noticed Sunday night after the show that the soreness had completely disappeared, and it hasn't come back all week. I guess it was psychosomatic.
On Thursdays, T and I have dinner together. It’s so easy to fall out of touch with friends here, and I didn’t want that to happen when I moved out of T’s place, so we decided to have a standing weekly date.
Regardless of how much I look forward to seeing T, I was feeling anxious last Thursday. I hadn’t slept much the night before. C and I had gone to a fundraiser called New York Loves Japan, a huge, crowded, hectic, loud sushi and sake event, and then for pizza afterwards with friends, all of which I enjoyed but it wore me the fuck out. I have always had to summon a special kind of energy to deal with crowds, and now that when I am in noisy rooms I only hear about 20 percent of what people are saying, even when they’re only a couple feet away, well, I know I complain about it relentlessly but whatever, it’s exhausting.
After a long cab ride in heavy traffic on FDR Drive, we got home near midnight, wound up, not ready to sleep. We watched American Idol and went to bed at about 1:30. I slept fitfully and got up at 6:30 for work. That afternoon, as I struggled to keep my eyes open, I nearly emailed T to cancel our date. But we had some Lizzie Borden business to discuss.
C decided to get Chinese takeout since he was alone for dinner, and the Chinese place is next to Nueva Espana, the Dominican restaurant where I was meeting T, so we left the house together. On our way out the door, C noticed the big plastic bag full of plastic bags that I had left in the hallway.
When I found that our neighborhood grocery store accepts plastic bags for recycling, I started saving them. I try to use reusable grocery bags, but it’s nearly impossible in New York not to end up with piles of plastic grocery bags. We keep our recyclables in the office which is small to begin with and it bums me out when my writing space looks like a utility room so I moved the bag of bags to the hallway where, because it’s one of those errands that never seem convenient when I’m thinking of it, it sat for 2 or 3 weeks. I should have known that it was trying C’s patience. But I didn’t.
On our way out, C suggested I take the bags to the store because it was only about half a block out of the way. I said, sharply, though I don’t remember this at all and C only mentioned it later when we were back home, “I’m not doing that now.” I was preoccupied, feeling anxious because so little of my evening was left for the ration of idleness I seem to need. T was already waiting for me at the restaurant, and I didn’t want to take the extra 3 minutes to drop the bags off. When we got out to the sidewalk, C stopped and said, “I’m going to get the bags,” and he went back inside while I waited. When he returned with the bags, I asked him if he was mad at me and he said, “I had a flash of anger, but it’s okay.”
In some ways we are such different people. I’m a recycling Nazi and I make fun of the size of his TV. He is less selfish than I and makes more time for his family and friends. He won’t call the landlord to fix a leaky kitchen sink, whereas I wouldn’t hesitate to demand it be repaired. I don’t feel any particular urgency about paying my credit card debts, whereas he considers it an ethical obligation. He looks forward all year to a summer house share on Fire Island, whereas I have trouble imagining why anyone would want to be on a beach in the mid-day sun, let alone with a bunch of fashion-obsessed gay men. I consider the Mary Tyler Moore Show to be the most important cultural touchstone of my life, whereas he says, “I think maybe I’ve seen a couple episodes, but I don’t really remember them.”
On the other hand, in some more essential, fundamental way I think we have known and seen and understood each other from the moment we met. I have trouble articulating exactly what I mean by this. Maybe it’s because it started with the raw, specific solicitation of a Craigslist ad, which made our sexual compatibility undeniable from the get-go. I will not underestimate how powerful a bond it is to be able to know that we turn each other on, and, more than that, to know that we give each other what we most want. The confidence of that is a tonic. It’s a moment -- and good god they are rare, aren’t they? -- of feeling like I have exactly what is needed.
But it must be more than that. I know my heart was flayed and raw from my breakup with M in Austin. I hadn’t had time to recover my defenses, so C could walk right in. And I know that he was looking for someone to commit to. I know he had a specific idea of what kind of commitment he wanted to make (lifelong, monogamous) but hadn’t yet found someone he was willing to make it with.
After dinner, at home, I told him how vulnerable his anger made me feel, how this new experience of anger in our relationship had made me fearful and insecure. I thought it was a natural response, considering that this was the first time anger had surfaced between us. He said it wasn’t the first time.
I haven’t had any flashes of anger yet. No flashes, no flickers nor slow burns. I haven’t been mad. I don’t think I’ve even been slightly irritated. I don’t say this to paint myself as more virtuous in some way, more tolerant, loving, more serene. If anything, I want to say that I’m less. Less self-aware, less emotionally open. But I think I’m just more afraid. C is straightforward. The idea of anger doesn’t, with him, spin out into a wild paranoid fantasy, a terrible apprehension that everything is rotten, corrupt, wrong, false, over. I avoid anger because it terrifies me. He seems to understand that it’s just something people feel from time to time.
He said that if we're going to save plastic bags he wants to keep them in the office, not the hallway. And he told me, “This is not fragile. My love for you is not fragile. You don’t have to worry about it. For this to work, you have to know that.”
The temperature has been in the 60s and 70s the last week and our neighborhood is thick and smelly with flowering trees. It is spring and this is the first change of seasons since C and I met in December. (How could it be true that we have only known each other 5 months?) We joke about the weather. I say it’s hot, he says it’s chilly. I dread the summer, C lives for it. He can’t wait till it’s 95 and sticky. I love winter and particularly enjoyed this past winter, and I feel sadness and regret to see it end, because I spent the last few years in San Francisco and Texas where there is no winter. We both worry a little that our incompatible weather affinities will be difficult to manage, one of us always relieved while the other is irritable. All winter C half-jokingly complained about how miserable and cold he was, and I fell in rapturous love with each new ridiculous snowfall. As the tables turn, I wonder if I will play the role of the miserable one with such charm and humor.
Friday at work, C texted me, “I love you. And I don’t get mad and stay mad. Stupid bags are stupid. You are beautiful.”
I texted back, “I love you, too. I love our life together. And stop making me cry at work.”
C, having been, before we met, a bachelor with a good income, has a guy come in once a week and clean the apartment, change the sheets, do a little laundry. Nothing serious -- for instance, I think he mops the bathroom floor, but he doesn't really get into the corners. Whatever. He cleans way more often than, if not as thoroughly as, I would, and I am deeply appreciative.
If we remember to run the dishwasher before he comes (and I won't even get into how little I understand the usefulness of the dishwasher, which, as far as I can tell is just a place to put dirty dishes to get them out of the way until you need something in there and have to pull it out and wash it and god forbid you put anything in there that hasn't been pretty much washed already -- it won't get clean) ANYway, if we remember to run the dishwasher, he'll empty it out and put stuff away. I wish he wouldn't. Over the course of the last couple months since I moved in, I've rearranged the kitchen to make it serviceable. C didn't cook much, so I have had free reign to make it over, to make it work for me. And I have accomplished that: I love cooking in my new kitchen. But our cleaning guy hasn't adjusted well to the changes. He puts stuff away where it used to go. Why would you put plastic bags in the towel drawer when it's obviously full of towels now and not plastic bags? And I want my good tongs hanging with the pots, not buried somewhere in the utensil drawer. Obviously I have some control issues.
C and I sometimes watch The Fabulous Beekman Boys, a documentary series on Planet Green about a gay couple who move from New York City to a farm somewhere upstate to raise goats and chickens and sell soap, etc. One of them is, at least as portrayed on the show, a total control freak micro-manager who drives his boyfriend and everyone else crazy, and as we were watching it the other night, C asked me (because our relationship was somewhat analogous in that we were domestic partners who also created and ran a business together) if J and I had a similar dynamic when we were together. I guess were were similar in some ways, but I think J and I were both control freaks, just in very different ways. He wore his freak on the outside, and I was the passive-aggressive one.
If you've seen Life in a Box, remember the argument in the trailer during a rehearsal? I was so glad to find that footage because it showed something essential about J and me and Y'all and that time in our lives, and because it showed how obstinate and controlling I could be, which is an aspect of my personality I don't think most people saw because I was the shy one, the yielding one, in the face of J's outsize personality, in the act and in our life together. If making that documentary was, among other things, an exercise in self-mortification, that scene is the one I find most difficult to watch -- because it shows an ugly side of me. The storyteller (and the narcissist) in me knows that that is what makes it good for the film.
The reason I'm so exercised about Raja winning this season of RuPaul's Drag Race (besides the fact that she came off like a shallow bitch with the totally repulsive Heathers vs. Boogers thing because, let's be clear, drag queens make catty comments about each other, it's part of the job, and it's not hard in the editing room to exaggerate or even create little backstage rivalries and to make anyone look evil or sweet depending on what's required to put drama on the screen) what makes me really sad and disappointed, not just about the show or about RuPaul but about the state of drag and by extension gay culture (and doubly, triply, disappointed because Drag Race was my bulwark, my beacon, my raft in the storm of conservatism that threatens lately to obliterate all that is campy and sick and delightfully wrong about being queer and loving a little entertainment and comfort at 2 a.m.) what has me, again, again, despairing that much of what I came of age loving and feeling welcomed and nurtured and inspired by, is that Raja is, in the end, just dull. Dull. This is what RuPaul thinks represents the future of this venerable art form? I watch Raja and yes her clothes are creative sometimes even brilliant and she can walk with her hips like nobody's business -- but there's no love, no generosity, no light, no sex appeal, no fun. And she has the comic timing of a turtle.
I downloaded the new Teddy Thompson record this morning (it's really, really good) and I'm listening and feeling a little rapturous about love and art and music. I couldn't find a good youtube clip from the new record, so I offer this great live clip of two of my favorite T.T. songs. In this pared-down version you really get the heartbreak of "I Wish It Was Over." The shiny production on the CD version buries the irony, making it a more complex, disorienting experience. Which I love. But seeing him sing it with the sadness right on the surface is nice, too. Anyway, I just think he's luminous.
Terrible sound on this concert clip with Dad, but I still love it.
If anyone has wondered where I disappeared to -- I’m nesting. I moved in with C two weeks ago. We did a little painting, I bought a bunch of stuff for the kitchen (he didn’t, doesn’t, really cook, and I really do). We hung some art, made a little room in his dressers and closets for my clothes, cleaned out his office to make room for me to work.
I’ve neglected my blogs. I can’t blame it on my new love. That’s part of it, but the real culprit is my job. I hadn’t had a real job in years, and now I’m working on average 4 days a week at the prop house in Brooklyn. It’s a good job, pays well, nice people, flexible, and a guy has to make a living, etc. But it’s a lot of hours to be out of commission. I get up at 6 a.m. to punch in by 9, and when I get home at 6:30, I just want to cuddle on the couch with my honey, smoke some pot, and watch mindless TV. Is that really so bad?
I’ve never been one of those people who can work a full time job and come home and write a novel all night. I’m just not. I am a diligent, disciplined, and prolific artist, but it only happens when I don’t have to work for someone else to pay the rent.
So I’ve neglected my blogs. Here’s a list of things that have passed through my thoughts in the last few weeks, or that I’ve written down on post-its and stuck in my pockets, that I thought I might blog about, that I thought I might have something interesting to say about:
Jacob Lusk, one of the finalists on American Idol. One part sweet, gregarious teenager, one part big black drag queen. He sings like Aretha Franklin crossed with Teddy Pendergrass. I have no idea if he identifies himself as gay, but he is so queer. He amazes and moves me to tears every week.
CMA Awards. Maybe not the worst TV ever, but close. A not-awful performance by Brad Paisley, then a numbingly stupid fag joke by Reba’s unmemorable (except for the fag joke) co-host followed by a sickening (in the good way) Steven Tyler/Carrie Underwood duet on “Walk This Way.” The homophobic joke was maddening. I keep hearing how homosexuality is not a big deal any more, so why is it that a fag joke, no matter how idiotic, is still the easiest way to get a big laugh on national TV?
But speaking of Steven Tyler and American Idol: A 60ish man leering at teenage girls has never been so fucking sexy. My high school Aerosmith crush is back with a vengeance.
All of the above are about TV. Hm. I haven’t had a TV for over 10 years until I moved in with C. Now I live with a TV that’s half as big as the living room and I watch American Idol. And look forward to it.
I should say, to be clear, it’s not as if I haven’t watched any TV in the last 10 years. J and I rented plenty of DVDs and watched movies and TV series on Netflix streaming on our computers. And last year in Austin, a group of us gathered every week at a friend’s house to watch RuPaul’s Drag Race.
Drag Race is now my favorite thing on TV, by a long shot. This season is even better than the last. Full of surprises, fucks with your assumptions about gender and sex, gay culture, homophobia. It’s deep, seriously. It manages to be totally sweet and disarming and at the same time subversive and very, very dirty. Love it. Bam!
And I've been mulling over an essay about exes, how those relationships change and, especially, what they mean. I have a couple (exes, that is) and they are all very very different in the way that they figure in my life. This subject deserves a long essay. I have had so many thoughts, been so sure of my opinions, on the subject of ex-lovers, ex-partners. This is really mostly an effort to understand my relationship with J, who is so important to me, so dear to me, but it's been confusing and sometimes painful in the last few years to negotiate this phase of our alliance. So, look for that in the future...
Since we plan to move in together, C, being more traditional than I am about these things, took me home to meet his family. Besides his mom and dad, his brother, his sister and her husband and baby were there. And his aunt and her two adult children with their spouses and, between them, four teenagers. For a Super Bowl party. C’s father is a retired Air Force pilot, taciturn but obviously thrilled that his whole family had come to watch his beloved Green Bay Packers win.
To recap, I went to North Carolina for the weekend for a Super Bowl party with a military family who are for all practical purposes now my in-laws. Can we count the words in that last sentence that blow my mind?
I don’t know how it came up, but Saturday night someone mentioned C’s dad’s “Kringle,” which is a pastry he’s famous for, made, I believe, from his mother’s recipe. I took an interest, so he decided to make it for Sunday breakfast. It’s basically a rustic tart filled with canned pie filling. That night, he mixed up dough for two crusts and put it in the fridge to rest overnight. When I got up the next morning, he had rolled out one crust but was waiting for me to get out of bed so he could roll out the second one and fill them while I watched. He reminded me of my own father, the way he warms up when he has something to show you.
(He sent us home with 4 quarts of home-canned tomatoes from his back yard garden. Today, the apartment smells like fennel and sweet tomatoes. I have a cold so I stayed home from work, but I walked down to the Italian butcher, bought sausage, came home and made a big pot of tomato sauce. Feed a cold.)
The week before our trip, C texted me at work to say that the trip was off, he’d just had a fight with his mom over sleeping arrangements. The married siblings and cousins would be sharing beds in various rooms, but C and I, along with C’s single brother, would be sleeping on air mattresses on the basement floor.
He asked his mom why his sister and her husband would be sharing a bed and not us. She said, “They’re married.” Yes, she understood that her argument was weak because we don’t have the option of being married, but “you’ve only known each other for two months. You’re just dating.” “So when can we share a bed?” “A year?”
I told C I didn’t think we should make a big deal of it. I didn’t want my first encounter with his family to be a showdown. (And C had taken one of my CDs with him for a Christmas visit and his mom told him that I sounded like James Taylor “but better,” so I was inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt.) Maybe this was not homophobia. It looked to me more like the old “not under my roof” argument that must have appeared at least once a month in Dear Abby in the late sixties/early seventies when “shacking up” was the frontline of the culture war.
The weekend was chaotic, wonderful, exhausting. I think I made a good impression. I think they trust me with C’s heart. I hope they believe that I will try my best to make him happy. We arrived at 3 a.m. on Friday, got to sleep at 4:30 and were awoken at 9 when the second batch of cousins arrived. I am not a morning person. Meeting new people, any new people, is for me stressful and draining, but all those parents and siblings and cousins and kids and everyone sizing me up because they adore C and he’s never brought anyone home before, at times it felt like an initiation ordeal, a rite of passage.
Shortly before the game started, a friend of C’s mother arrived with her husband and C’s mother was introducing her to the crowd packed into the basement den (where C’s brother had hooked up two very big TVs over a table crowded with snacks and a big pot of chili): “…and you remember C, and this is his boyfriend Steven.” “So nice to meet you, Steven…”
At that moment, I suddenly realized how unequipped I was to understand this world. Like most military families, C’s parents are Republicans. “This is C’s boyfriend, Steven.” No special emphasis, no slight lowering of volume like when my grandmother used to say “colored.” Just boyfriend, like it’s just what you’d expect. Whereas I practically choked. I must carry such a deep, rarely-conscious shame about my sexuality, such a wincing fear that a world where C and I would be folded naturally into this family doesn’t compute.
I have railed here and elsewhere about the danger of assimilation. And, yes, I believe that saying “we are all the same, we are only asking to be treated equally” ignores, thwarts, distorts what is essentially different about our queer lives and creates just another kind of closet, with all the pain and danger of the old closet. Yet, there I was watching the Super Bowl in North Carolina with Republicans and on the verge of tears just to be welcome.
I am proudly and adamantly queer, radical, and, most importantly, critical of a status quo that creates so much unfairness and injustice, a status quo that privileges certain people and leaves certain people out. And my unwillingness to conform, to compromise, is based on core principles. Like freedom (no one should have the right or the power to dictate how I express my sexuality) and fairness (access to housing and employment and healthcare should not depend on one’s wealth, class, race, sexual orientation, or gender identity), etc. But can we acknowledge that, to some extent, the passion with which we fight assimilation is also about our own pain? That we are wounded creatures lashing out? That we want no part of the status quo because it has abused and rejected us? And, knowing that, knowing that not just our emotional lives but our political convictions have been shaped in response to that abuse and rejection, what do we do now, when the world that has hurt us begins slowly, fitfully, to extend a remorseful hand?
I wonder if we, as a community, are capable of such profound forgiveness. I wonder if I’m capable of it myself, personally.
C and I this morning took the A train down to City Hall and registered our domestic partnership. This status will give us access to a few benefits from New York City as well as some benefits offered by the firm he works for. After we had shown our IDs to the guard and been given a number, we walked by a newsstand on the way to the clerk’s window and C bought me a bouquet of 6 yellow roses.
Almost every time I criticize the gay marriage campaign, someone responds with, “If you don’t want to get married, don’t get married, but some of us want to, so leave us alone.” The most frustrating thing, the saddest thing, about that response is that it sets me up as someone who is against love, against the possibility of a deep, permanent commitment based on love.
I have had deep, lasting relationships with men as lovers, partners, friends. Two, in particular, lasted several years each -- both were men I thought I’d grow old with -- but eventually ended when, in different ways and for different reasons, the partnership was no longer fulfilling. Neither relationship carried a promise of sexual exclusivity.
I wonder if all the qualifying language -- “we’re emotionally monogamous, but not sexually monogamous,” etc. -- is just an attempt to preclude disappointment. If fidelity is not what he promised, then maybe I won’t be devastated when he’s unfaithful. But is it the looseness of the commitment which lets it unravel?
Until this relationship, I did not think that self-actualization could be possible in a monogamous relationship. Monogamy was all about limitations, about narrowing possibilities, about shutting down desire. But now I see that not only is it possible but that an exclusive relationship might even be the cause of becoming my best, fullest self. Rather than expressing over and over with many men a tiny part, a small aspect, a glimpse of who I am, I feel myself unfolding with this man. Letting him completely in. Letting him see more and more of me every day and, in so doing, discovering those aspects of myself.
C and I have talked about marriage. He appreciates my oppositional view, but he’s more conservative than I am. He supports the campaign for same-sex marriage, seeing it as a crucial move toward the legitimizing of same-sex relationships and the equality of gay people. But he’s not sure he wants to get married until, and unless, same-sex marriage is widely accepted and equal to opposite-sex marriage. He doesn’t want his wedding to be a political performance.
I’ve always had a distaste for weddings which now I’m compelled to try to make sense of. As a feminist, I’m suspicious of marriage because it has, historically, not been great for women. But that objection doesn’t hold up to the many ways in which marriage has been reformed in the last 40 years to make it more equitable. As an environmentalist, I’m put off by the extravagance of weddings, the orgy of consumption, the money spent on clothes and jewelry and flowers, but certainly one doesn’t have to have that kind of wedding, any more than one has to have a certain kind of house or car. And the cynic in me distrusts the whole naive fairy tale which, let’s face it, usually ends badly.
So. Maybe I’ll get married. Maybe I won’t. I know if I do I’ll take some flack for it -- “Yeah, you’re all counter-culture anti-marriage until you fall in love, then everything changes…” -- but my own marital status will have no effect on my criticism of the role of marriage in our society and the priority of the marriage campaign in the gay rights movement, except possibly to strengthen my critique.
Eight months ago, I was living in Austin, Texas. I had been looking for work for months but couldn’t find a job. A brief, intense relationship had ended and I was heartbroken. An old friend invited me to come back to New York and stay with him until I got on my feet. Two months later, I met a man in the neighborhood who happened to need a roommate. A week after I moved in, I placed an ad for sex on craigslist, something I’ve only done maybe 5 or 6 times. My roommate’s friend who lives in the same building happened to answer the ad. I was hesitant, not wanting to create drama in my new home, but horniness prevailed and I went across the hall to meet C. We immediately found a sexual compatibility, then a musical affinity, and a similar sense of humor. As we’ve gotten to know each other over the last 3 months, we’ve discovered similarities in our ethics, our taste, and our attitude toward life and friends and family. He lets me cry about silly things and then reassures but does not coddle me. He laughs at my neuroses in a way that doesn’t hurt but lets me laugh about them too. He loves my cooking. He is unwaveringly considerate, direct, honest, clear. He perfects me. I have not had a moment of uncertainty of him.
The breathtaking unlikeliness of this ever having happened renews my conviction that essential benefits like access to affordable health care should not be dependent on something as miraculous and rare as finding someone you want to, and are able to, spend the rest of your life with in an intimate and domestic relationship and that, because it is something available to such a small percentage of us, we should put our energy and money into reforms that affect more of the community, like ending employment and housing discrimination.
This article about the juvenilizing of American speech has been making the rounds on Facebook, mostly among people around my age, of course.
Why are Americans unable to grow up? We no longer change the way we dress when we become adults. What's weird about that, though, is that American men and boys wear the same styles because men dress like little boys (oversize t-shirts, sideways baseball caps, basketball shorts) but American women and girls wear the same styles because girls dress like mature women (sexy dresses, makeup, fancy shoes).
The same is true of the way people eat. Taste in food doesn't mature. Grown people eat pop-tarts and Cap'n Crunch and prefer everything sugary and insipid.
I know I've made some massive generalizations here, but isn't there something true in it? I also know that I'm dangerously close to making some kind of class judgment (arugula vs. iceberg, etc.). And I don't mean to grumble, too much. I like that I can wear jeans and sneakers pretty much everywhere and don't ever have to put on a coat and tie.
I'm curious if all these trends are related or share a common source.
Dammit, I broke my first rule of blogging. I said when I started doing this that if there were gaps -- because I was away from my computer for a few days or super busy or things had happened that I didn't quite know how to write about, whatever the reason -- I would not be required to fill them in, that I would just keep going. That was what had always derailed me when I kept a journal. I'd stop writing for a while and then feel like it was impossible to go back and catch up. I wanted to avoid that pitfall, and I did until recently. Not sure why.
So ... I've been busy, I've been away from my computer a lot, and things have happened that I don't quite know how to write about yet, but I am going to plug ahead. Just so that I am not continually referring to things that you don't know anything about, here's a quick time line of the last couple months (some of which I've chronicled here, some of which not) with minimal commentary and analysis, and then we'll just forge ahead:
1. Early December, I moved out of T's place into an apartment farther up in Inwood with a new acquaintance. A few days after I moved in, I met my roommate's good friend who lives next door and fell in love. 2. Gradually over the last 2 1/2 months, I've begun to spend more and more time at his place and less and less time at mine. 3. He's a former actor turned attorney, loves theater as much as I do and makes more money, so he can afford to actually see it. We go to lots of plays. 3. He's got me watching American Idol and loving it. I tried Survivor but couldn't work up any interest. I turned him on to RuPaul's Drag Race, which he loves. Of course. 4. We drove to North Carolina to meet his family on Super Bowl weekend. 4. He took me to a very expensive restaurant for Valentine's Day. I gave him a dozen red tulips, and he gave me a heart-shaped box of chocolates. There was very little irony involved. I think. 5. At the beginning of April, I will move next door completely. 5. Mostly for practical reasons, we decided to register as domestic partners in New York City. I was surprisingly moved. He was, maybe not surprisingly, less moved. (He's a little more conservative than I am. For him, domestic partnership, though it will provide us with a few benefits, just points out the fact that homosexuals are second-class citizens. For me, it reified my commitment to him, which is a more stringent promise than I've ever made to anyone in my life.)
I am still working on that longer post about my new relationship in relation to my political philosophy. I think it's pretty close, but things keep happening -- in the larger world, such as Obama's shift regarding DOMA or Facebook's new relationship status options -- that I want to include.
No, I haven't given up blogging! I am blogging almost every day lately, just never finishing anything. What started out as a post about Super Bowl weekend with C's family in North Carolina (I know!) is turning into an essay about discovering that political convictions are shaped by circumstances and history just as much as by values and principles, maybe even more so. About how love changes everything. It's tricky, and I want to get it right before I share.
C and I went down to City Hall this morning and registered our domestic partnership. Stay tuned.
I’ve been reluctant to write much about this new relationship I think partly out of some vague, superstitious fear of jinxing it but, I think, too, because I want to hold it close, keep it to myself, protect it. It feels fragile -- though less so every day -- and sacred. So forgive me for ratcheting back the level of disclosure of my intimate life, those of you who are used to that from me and enjoy it. (Don’t worry, there has been no lessening of the pleasure I find in talking about myself.)
Another reason that occurs to me, for not writing much about C. and me, is that I don’t feel at all up to the task of describing just how good it is: I could never get it right or convey how happy I am or how wonderful this man is. Even going back and reading that last sentence disappoints me, how thin it sounds compared to what these days are like.
I will share this, though. I -- the original love skeptic, the anti-marriage crusader, the free love tutor, Mr. Monogamy-Shmonogamy – have, for the first time in my life, made a vow to be sexually exclusive.
The notion that this would be something I might want, or want to try, didn’t strictly arise out of my feelings for C. I made a lame stab at it with M. in Austin. But that promise was more like, “Let’s be monogamous until we don’t want to anymore and at that point let’s be honest as we renegotiate.” The fact that M. betrayed that promise (not the promise to be exclusive, which of course we hadn’t made in any meaningful sense, but the promise to be honest) is what makes me both scared to try again but also eager to give it another shot because it wasn’t me who fucked up.
So I was ready. But I wasn’t sure how to implement such an arrangement. The problem I have with this type of vow is that it places expectations on another person. It seems to place conditions on affection. This is about me. I want to try this. I want to make this promise. But the promise loses it power if it is not mutual, so how do you start? I decided that I would just keep these thoughts to myself for a while, that I would make this vow for myself but not ask it of C. yet. It seemed like unnecessary pressure so early in the relationship. C. and I had only known each other for a month or so.
But then he said to me one evening, “I rejected someone for you today.” He told me that he had hailed a cab after work, and, as he was getting in, the driver asked where he was going. A man standing at the curb heard C. say, “Inwood,” and said, “I’m going to Inwood, too. Do you want to share the cab?” Since Inwood is an expensive ride, C. said sure, and they rode up together. Some time in the course of the ride, the man asked C. if he could call him and C. gave him his number. The man called as soon as C. got home, but C., I guess having given it more thought in the meantime, said, “This isn’t a good time. I’m seeing someone.”
That night in bed, I said, “I’m glad you rejected that guy for me.” It seemed unnecessary to keep my recent thoughts to myself after C.'s story indicating that he felt similarly, so I told C. that I wanted to be exclusive but was hesitant to make demands of him. He said, “Let’s do it,” and I said, “Okay.”
My argument against monogamy, a big part of it anyway, always had to do with what I felt was an unnecessary loss of freedom. Why put restrictions on a natural, healthy desire? It’s repressive.
But with that sacrifice, which at least so far does not feel at all like a deprivation, I’m experiencing a kind of freedom I never expected, never considered. As soon as we had that conversation, as soon as we made that promise to each other, I felt unburdened. I felt energized and open and free. I wasn’t sure what this feeling was about, but after mulling it over for a few days, this is what I think:
One, I feel free to be myself, to share the aspects of myself that I worry may be unattractive. I don’t feel constant pressure to be impressive, worrying that if I show C. a side of me that repels him he’ll leave me. The promise is not provisional. It can bridge those moments when we don’t connect. I am free to be unattractive because the option to look for someone else to fill those moments is removed. Yeah, yeah, nothing is certain, nothing is permanent, I know, whatever. But it’s certain enough. It’s permanent enough.
And, two -- and this may be more the cause of this feeling of relief, this feeling that I am breathing deeper and easier than I have since I was about 12 years old -- I am free of the relentless, grinding search for sex. I’m not going to have sex with the cute guy in line at the grocery store, or sitting across from me on the subway. It isn’t going to happen, so I don’t have to yearn for that encounter to be any more than it is: just noticing someone attractive. I can’t describe how much lighter I feel having released myself from that. There is someone at home who wants me. Someone who knows me, and wants me. (Even porn is boring. My boyfriend is sexier. My sex life is hotter.) I never imagined that it would feel so good to have fewer options. To know. I never imagined that it would feel so good.
Today I set about recreating my identity from scratch. Or, I should say (knowing full well there’s no such thing as any sort of fixed identity), my official identity.
Somewhere, somehow, in my move from Austin to New York last fall, I lost a small file case containing every one of my “important papers”: birth certificate, passport, Social Security card, and the title to my car, among others.
I should say, hoping not to sound too defensive, that, in spite of the instability that has characterized my adult life (or maybe because of it), I am not one to lose these sorts of things. I can’t remember ever losing my wallet, or keys, or credit cards, or plane tickets (back when there were plane tickets). I haven’t kept much stuff over the years, but the important stuff I don’t lose. And by “important” I don’t mean significant in any real sense. I just mean those things that are a pain in the ass to replace. So I’m baffled. I had the file case when I was packing in Austin, and I don’t have it now.
I left a few boxes in Austin, boxes of unsold Y’all and Life in a Box Soundtrack CDs. (Don’t ask me why I didn’t just throw them in a dumpster on the way out of town, except that they cost a lot of money to have made, a fact which, unfortunately, doesn’t make them valuable. It just makes me laughably optimistic.) But J looked in M & J’s house for the file case. It’s not there.
I left a few boxes with my parents in Indiana, to be shipped to me when I got settled, which is, more or less, now. Mom looked through those boxes. No file case.
I left the “Y’all Archive” with a friend in Austin to store. He was a Y’all fan before he was a friend. He’s also an American Studies scholar, and I think a bit of an amateur archivist. When I told him how for years I’ve dragged around all this Y’all memorabilia (posters, letters, master tapes of our recordings, videotapes, etc.) in and out of less than optimal conditions for preservation, he was visibly worried. When I couldn’t fit everything in my car in September, I called him, frantic, and he offered to take care of the boxes. He’s in Cambridge for the year on a fellowship, but he had a friend go to his house in Austin and look through those boxes. Not there, either.
So, having turned over every rock I can think of, this morning I submitted an application to the Lake County, Illinois clerk’s office for a certified copy of my birth certificate, which I will need to start the process of obtaining a Social Security card, which I will need to apply for a passport. Next I need to contact the Texas DMV to get a duplicate title for my car. So I can sell it.
The legwork is annoying, but not difficult. Just lots of phone calls, web sites, lines to wait in. The only possible hitch I anticipate is the issue of my last name. In my twenties, I started using my father and mother’s names hyphenated, at first only professionally but then I decided I wanted to use that name for everything. I didn’t change it by court order -- a lawyer friend told me that New York is what they call a “common law state,” which means that one can change one’s name simply by stating that one has changed one’s name. So, he prepared an affidavit stating my new name, which I took to the Social Security office and got a new card with the name “Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer” instead of “Steven Jack Cheslik.” With the new Social Security card, it was easy to get other documents in that name: passport, driver’s license, etc. But my birth certificate will still have the old name -- that is, provided they don’t give me a hard time about even getting a new birth certificate, since they require proof of identity in the form of a driver’s license, which has my new name on it. Because of course I need proof of identity to obtain proof of identity. I will postpone worrying about this little Kafka scenario until it actually happens.
So, who the fuck knows who I even am anymore? or who I will be once I have gone through this very surreal process? I sure as hell don’t. Essentially what this is all about is proving that I am still the same person that I was when I was born, that I was when I was 14 and got my first Social Security card, that I was when I got my first passport at 25. A lot of effort to prove something that I know is not true.
It’s really too soon to be sentimental about Austin. I’m very absorbed in loving my new life here. But there are things I miss. Like my friends. And breakfast tacos. You can get decent tacos here, but they’re not ubiquitous like they are in Austin. And I haven’t come across breakfast tacos at all.
I’m not working today, but I got up at 6 with C. We went to bed early last night, and I slept well because I hadn’t slept well the previous two nights. The feeling of being close to him is more compelling than sleep -- I find myself sometimes not wanting to drift off.
I spent the morning reading. I finished Myra Breckinridge.
My roommate M. got up at about 10 and made more coffee. By then I was hungry, so I went downstairs planning to warm up a couple tortillas with some cheese for a late breakfast. The onions in a bowl by the stove caught my eye, so I cut one up, thinking I’d make a quesadilla with fried onion and hot sauce. But, since I had the pan out, it seemed silly not to scramble a couple eggs, too. Then I saw one red potato sitting there and suddenly I was slicing it thin and throwing it in the pan with the onion and some butter.
I put the rest of the onion in a plastic bag and was putting it in the fridge when I saw the bacon and the whole game changed. I had bought it for the bean soup I made a couple weeks ago, and there were a few strips left which I had sort of forgotten about. I threw them in the pan. (Normally, I would start with the bacon and drain off most of the fat before I cooked the potato and egg, but, since I didn’t find the bacon till I had the other stuff cooking, I fried bacon in butter. I fried bacon in butter. Which is illegal in San Francisco.)
When everything was brown and crispy on the edges, I turned down the heat and threw in the eggs. I warmed the tortillas, put a couple slices of sharp cheddar on each and then piled on the eggs/potato/bacon/onion. A little hot sauce. I would’ve posted a photo but they disappeared too fast. Nostalgia is fucking delicious.
The Saturday before Christmas I attended my friend Kristin's tree-trimming party. She has this gathering every year -- the first time I attended was in 1987, I think. She lives with her husband and child in Peter Cooper Village in the apartment she grew up in. Over 20 years ago, her fledgling theater company invited me to write music for two shows in their first season, and that began my career in New York theater. I even lived in her apartment for a few months in 1989 when we had both broken up with boyfriends around the same time. I had left mine and hers moved out, so it worked well.
At the party I saw friends I haven't seen in years and friends I still see frequently. I was struck with that sense of destiny-in-hindsight that reunions conjure up. A great deal of what has been important to me in the last 25 years of my life -- relationships, my work -- I can trace to my friendship with Kristin and the opportunities she gave me to create music for theatre, something I had never done before.
Tim, my friend and collaborator on Lizzie Borden, was also one of the founders and directors of Tiny Mythic Theater Company, which did most of its early shows in the recently-shuttered Ohio Theater on Wooster Street. I spent a good chunk of my late 20s and early 30s in that theater, and now that the physical space is gone, I feel an urgency to protect the friendships that have endured from that time, like the source of a spring. That is only one among many reasons why I cherish my long friendship and collaboration with Tim: it anchors me in a history that I had a hand in creating. It helps me to feel like there's a meaningful arc to my life rather than (what it more often feels like) just a lot of random reactions to whatever circumstances present themselves.
I don't mean destiny in the sense of a deterministic view of the world, according to which everything is the result of chemical reactions that can only go one way so that's the way they go. Maybe it makes some kind of poetic sense when describing the sense of inevitability of a certain biography, but to say that a chain of organic events led to, say, a love affair, gives a lot of weight to the idea of a discrete self, a notion which a deterministic view eventually makes hash of.
At the beginning of December, I moved out of Tim's place to an apartment a few blocks away. I didn't know my roommate well before I moved in, but we have a couple of mutual friends, he's a writer, and his apartment is one of those magical New York apartments you always wonder who lives in when you walk by. His roommate moved out I think in October and he asked me if I wanted to move in. I said no -- I didn't want to stay in Inwood, thought it was too remote at the northernmost tip of Manhattan, and the rent seemed high. But he still needed a roommate in November, asked me again, and by that time I had grown to love Inwood, and, after being back in the city for a while, the rent looked reasonable.
It's a sweet house with 4 apartments nestled among the type of huge pre-war brick apartment buildings that characterize most of Inwood. My roommate knows the other tenants in the building, a fact which I found reassuring, and in fact his best friend of many years lives across the hall.
A few days after I moved in, I got a wild hair and took out an ad on craigslist. I read the MFM ads from time to time, but more for entertainment than with the intention of responding to any of them or meeting anyone. The anonymity of them is what makes them sexy to read but it's also what makes me apprehensive to meet someone. Anonymous sex is one thing with someone you meet in a bar or club, but to invite someone to your house or go to a stranger's house without even meeting beforehand, well, I can be pretty fearless but that scares me.
My ad was basically a sex ad. I was specific about where I was and what I wanted. I got a handful of responses; one seemed promising. He was in the neighborhood, and he was as direct in his response as I was in my ad. We emailed back and forth a couple times. He sent a photo. He looked familiar, but I couldn't place him. I asked where he lived. Same corner as me.
Then I looked at his return email address. It was my roommate's best friend across the hall.
I emailed and told him who I was and that I knew who he was. We were both a little embarrassed, but by that time I think we both had a strong hunch we could have some fun together. He invited me over (I didn't even put shoes on) and we did.
All I wanted that night, frankly, was a blowjob, but he's handsome and he smiles with his eyes, he makes me laugh, and he's the perfect height to fit in the crook of my body. And now I'm falling, falling, falling. Jesus fuck me, why is this shit happening? After that first night, when we had ferociously intense, deeply connected sex and then spent a couple hours in each other's arms talking, we saw each other nearly every day for two weeks until we both left for Christmas. We've curled up on the couch and watched movies, shared with each other music we love, talked freely about our lives, our desires, our disappointments and loves.
I am not ready. It is not my turn. I did not want this. I did not look for this or pursue it in any way. I am not ready.
I've had several conversations with Tim. He's the one who listened to me crying on the phone from Austin when M and I broke up this summer, so he knows how badly timed this is and how afraid I am. He knows what I'm afraid of, a thing which is so recent and vivid and raw. Tim's advice is to enjoy this without fantasizing about what it might mean, what it could be, how it could end. Let go of the storyline, as Pema Chodron says.
It's good advice, but how to follow it? Isn't half the thrill of this moment the anticipation, isn't half of what gives this moment its charge, the recognition of a seed of a possibility of something deeper and more enduring? Isn't it all about the storyline? The sex is great, the physical contact, the ecstasy and comfort of being with someone who knows what I want and wants to give it to me. But there is also tangled up in it something more intimate, domestic, an affinity. How do I enjoy this moment without wanting what it portends? How do I not spin out the fantasy? He sees me. I feel like myself when I'm with him. I feel safe. Am I?
Is falling in love something that I just, for some reason, do? The timing could not be much worse. And I second-guess myself. Am I so susceptible to this new man because I still hurt, because I still feel the lack of M? Has M hollowed out a place where C fits nicely? Even if that is true, is there something wrong with that? It seems like an awfully punitive attitude to take, saying I should not be allowed to feel love because I am unusually open to it right now. Does it really matter where and when? Shouldn't love always be welcome and appropriate?
C is smart and soulful. He has great taste in music. He's funny. He likes my cooking. He's very, very sexy, and he wants to be with me. I just don't think you say no to that. I don't feel as though I deserve it -- how many chances do I get? -- but in what universe do you say no to that? He read my blog. He knows the worst of me. He knows stuff about me that not even I remember. And he still seems to want me.
I keep trying to bring what I may have learned from those months with M and how blind I was into this new beginning. What did I do wrong that I can do right this time? What did I say, how did I behave, what did I miss? But it doesn't work. C is not M. What M may have wanted from me won't be what C wants from me. All I can do is be myself. M didn't want that, and, though it's awfully early to tell, I think C does. The lesson is that there are no lessons. Every time you're flying blind.
Or the lesson might be: you are never ready for anything. Which is to say, you are always ready for everything.
In spite of whatever I might think about the timing, I find myself so willing, still wide open, yet in my head repeating, Don't hurt me, don't hurt me, please just don't hurt me.
There's an interesting essay on my new favorite blog, The Awl, about the gutting of Leonard Cohen's transcendent "Hallelujah," in order to make it vague and Christiany enough for Christmas.
Which follows in the long, noble tradition -- well, there's only one other that I can think of off the top of my head, but there must be others, right? -- of eviscerating songs to make them palatable for bland holiday records by the likes of Kermit the Frog (for real).
My favorite Christmas song, in fact my favorite Christmas thing period, is this song, which isn't really about Christmas as much as it is about despair. But replace, "until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow," with, "hang a shining star upon the highest bow," and it's still a bit sad, but not sad enough to do anything drastic like put you off shopping.
I guess, like most, I get sentimental this time of year. I am not Christian, but I love the story of a gift of hope and redemption in dark times. I like to mark this time of year by acknowledging in my heart the miracle of another year, another orbit, another chance.
This blog post (which Andrew Sullivan linked to this morning) says succinctly what I've been thinking, what I've been trying to put in words, regarding the billboard that some atheist group put up near the Lincoln Tunnel (“You Know It’s a Myth. This Season Celebrate Reason.") and the counter-billboard put up by some Catholics: "You Know it's Real. This Season Celebrate Jesus."
“Myth” is not the same as “falsehood.” Myth is a narrative structure used to convey some of the deepest truths we humans can glean. Myths are not believed in but unpacked and lived.
I am irritated to no end by the asinine "Jesus is the reason for the season" garbage we have to listen to this time of year. But I am just as irritated by a lot of the public atheists' responses, which are every bit as asinine. Though this organized atheist effort to rid the public sphere of Christian propaganda is inspired by writers like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, I don't like how Dawkins' and Hitchens' more distilled, acerbic statements along the lines of "Christians are stupid" get pulled out to support the exasperated atheists -- because both writers obviously are much subtler thinkers and have a lot more than that to say.
Which is to say that I find it unfortunate that the atheist statements in response to the literalist Christmas stupidity are often just as thick-headed. It's ridiculous to justify your Christian faith by insisting that all those stories relate events that really happened. It's just as thick-headed, in this context, to use the word "myth" to mean "lie."
The heart of my objection to this argument is that it cheapens, it disregards, it erases the value of what, as an artist, I do. Artists are myth-makers. Artists are storytellers. The work of an artist lives in that realm where a standard of literal truth or falsehood makes no sense, does not apply. Where the whole point is to be truthful, to say what is real, yet where stories are constantly told which are not objectively verifiably true. The story of Jesus's birth is no more actual than the story of Dorothea and Casaubon's marriage or the story of Mary Richards' job interview, but they all have the power to transform at the molecular level one's very being in this world.
It just occurred to me that I am living in an apartment that is very similar to M’s apartment in Austin: open living and dining room/kitchen and half bath downstairs, two bedrooms and full bath upstairs. My house is much older (his is new, very East Austin contemporary green building, mine I’m guessing was probably built in the 20s) but they both have simple clean design, lots of light, white walls and black granite kitchen islands.
Today on facebook, M posted a photo of himself with a man. The man is leaning to rest his forehead against M's, and they're both smiling sweetly. No caption. Several of M's friends have "liked" the photo. I'm not a rocket scientist, just an ex-boyfriend, but it's pretty clear. The guy is handsome. They look happy.
My house sits at the top of a long stairway up to my neighborhood from Broadway. There are two wide sets of concrete steps with a little green space in between, 10 flights. Anytime I want to go anywhere I go down these stairs and up again on the way home. (I could take a longer way around, through the neighborhood, but the stairs are more direct and I like that my legs get a little workout since I don’t have time or money for a gym right now.)
My bedroom window looks out over the top of these stairs, so, if I want to (and I do) I can watch people go up and down all day.
