friday night recap

From what I can recall:

7:30: Dinner with Sarina, Yoav and Randy. Sarina cooked, I pitched in as potato-masher and wine bottle-opener. Excellent.

9:30: Over to Bemelmans at the Carlyle to meet Shibani (in from Cleveland), her boyfriend Darren, and his mom (in from Australia). Jazz courtesy of Loston Harris, former piano player of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra.

11:00: Meet back up with Yoav and Sarina at Amelia’s birthday party at Noche in Times Square. Bachelorette party is simultaneously taking place at bar and bachelorette has t-shirt emblazoned with checklist of things she needs to get random guys at the bar to do; Yoav has apparently already given her his boxers (replete with Seven Dwarfs pattern). I escape having only to buy her a round of vodka shots and kiss her on camera.

1:00: Side trip with Sarina, Amelia and Chandre for drunken hamburger eating at McDonalds down the block.

1:15: Back to Noche to assist Yoav in rescuing two early-twenties girls unhappily surrounded by balding men in their early fourties.

1:30: Escort girls to Single Room Occupancy a few blocks away; gain instant street cred by knowing location of the bar, as one of the two had heard that SRO existed, but had never been able to find out exactly where.

2:00: Apparently, second (cuter) girl is in for the weekend from Syracuse, where she’s working on her masters. Yoav and I exchange glances on this fact, as girl seems to have brains of toothpaste.

2:30: Ah, masters is in fitness education. Right.

3:00: Wait, how much have I had to drink by now?

4:00: In moment of clarity, realize would regret immensely actually going home with either girl. Say my goodbyes, stagger back to apartment and, after some difficulty negotiating the stairs, collapse on bed still partially dressed.

11:00: Solemnly vow to never, ever drink again so long as I live. Or at least not until later this evening.

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interlude – q and a

Q. Haven’t you blogged about your love life in the past? Didn’t you stop because it made a horrible mess?
A. Yes. But I’m a glutton for punishment.

Q. What will your mother say when she discovers you’re back to your old hijinks?
A. She will not be pleased. She will not be pleased at all.

Q. Wait. Just a few days ago, you were writing about having a crush on Sarah Brown. Now you’re off chasing other women. What gives?
A. While the crush is still officially on, Que Sera Sera World Headquarters is located in Tulsa, Oklahoma, some fifteen hundred miles away. To paraphrase Ritchie Tenenbaum, “I guess I’ll just have to be secretly in love with her and leave it at that.”

Q. Also, weren’t you pulling together a blog-based dating site? Does this Friendster mission mark the end of that project?
A. No, the blog-based dating site is still very much alive and well. I’ve been making some good progress, though as I have a number of other, more pressing, projects going simultaneously, it may be a couple of months before blogbooty.com (or whatever it will be called; actually, I just made that name up and I kind of like it) hits the web.

Q. You say you’re doing this to prove that straight guys can keep interesting blogs, but ________ is straight and his blog is great.
A. Possible answers include:

  1. ________ has simply yet to come to grips with his latent homosexuality.
  2. You’re a moron; ________’s site sucks.
  3. Good point.

Q. Wait, isn’t self-aggrandizement itself a straight guy’s blog that has existed for years and now draws a fair number of regular readers?
A. Well, actually, yes. On average, about five thousand different people (counted by unique IPs) visit the site each week. Still, over the past year, the amount of drunken mischief chronicled herein has fallen off dramatically, largely due to 1.) being wildly busy with getting Cyan off the ground, and 2.) following that, being in a relationship too good to screw up with stupid blog melodrama. Now that I’m back to bachelorhood, however, I’m hoping these escapades will serve as the kick in the ass I need to lift the site (and my love life) back to its former exploitative glory.

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prologue

Earlier today, in an effort to cut down the time I spend cycling through various weblogs daily, I created an account at blo.gs, a site that allows users to track when all of their favorite blogs were last updated from a single page. In the process, I was a bit dismayed to discover that just one of my long list of favorites belonged to a straight guy, and I spent some time thinking about why that might be the case.

I realized that most of the web’s best blogs fell into one of three categories: political news, technical news, or personal revelation. The first two types, maintained mainly by dorky journalists and journalistic dorks, respectively, bore me to tears. The third type, largely maintained by writers and designers, were what populated my blo.gs list. HBO to the other types’ CNN and TechTV, those personal blogs never failed to draw me in.

The gender gap, I realized, stemmed from the vast majority of straight guy blogs falling into the first two categories, from the vast majority of straight guy bloggers being either policy wonks or tech dorks. Groups, I realized, that were not just too straight-laced to dish details, but actually lived lives so painfully dull that they simply and entirely lacked details to dish. I didn’t dislike guy’s blogs – I disliked lame people’s blogs, and guys just happened to rather frequently be lame. (So that’s what women are always bitching about!)

Still, I wondered, what happened to interesting straight guys? Weren’t there any straight guy writers and artists? Weren’t there at least some guys who went on dates – with girls – and were willing to spill the details? Actually, didn’t I go on dates with girls? Wasn’t I an attention whore with a blurred sense of the public/private barrier? Perhaps, I realized, it all fell to me. Perhaps it was my job, my calling, to do something stupid and ballsy, something providing ample opportunity to look like a complete and total jackass, something that could prove, once and for all, that straight guys could maintain intriguing, captivating personal blogs.

No sooner had I sat down to puzzle that question, to weigh the enormity of such a task, when the answer popped up in my email box. “Friendster: M is now your friend!” the answer said. Friendster! Brilliant! In that site lay all the intrigue I needed to hold up the torch for heterosexual male bloggers everywhere. My mind was made up. The exploits had begun.

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an open letter

Dear vast number of guys who always seem to have razor burn on their necks-

As you surely have already noted, shaving with the grain prevents razor burn – hence shaving down rather than up while shaving your face. But run your finger along your neck and you’ll notice the direction of hair growth changes part way down. That’s right, it changes direction. Your beard hair grows pointing down only above the top of your Adam’s apple; below that, the hair grows upward. Which is why you always have razor burn at that point or lower – all these years, you’ve been shaving your neck against the grain.

So, basically, stop doing that, because those little red bumps make you look like a jackass.

Yours in the Internet,

joshua

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where’s my camaro?

Confirming my fear that Kraft Velveeta Shells & Cheese (which I secretly enjoy immensely) is the white-trashiest of macaroni and cheeses, the back of the box I just prepared is emblazoned with: Velveeta. Ain’t No Substitute.

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