Feed the birds, tuppence a bag

HolyshitholyshitholySHIT.

I'm currently squatting on my living room floor wearing my (non-)running pants and three days worth of post-Nair chest stubble, in the midst of a mental breakdown and breaking out in hives as the world comes crashing in on me because I have suddenly realized that I am, in a word, poor.

I, Groom Zilla, privileged little white boy from suburban New England, who ordered his first Filet Mignon and shrimp cocktail from a highchair, who finished prep school and college without a single outstanding loan, who didn't know a car could smell like anything but brand-new because his parents' cars were always brand-new, am as poor as..........I don't even know what I am as poor as - - and really, where would I even get off pointing a comparing finger at someone or something else for being poor when I'm so very destitute? Poverty leaves no room for comparison or simile. I should be cashing in on my metaphors, not throwing them around like they grow on trees.

Seriously, I'm po'. (And also, seriously, breaking out in hives.) I have been treading water in the deep and murky waters of overdraft protection for several months now, drifting farther and farther away from any visible sign of financial viability, to the point where I am beginning to forget what it felt like to be on dry land. And all I have to show for it, other than an uncanny knack for metaphor which simply refuses to quit despite my own exhortations for conservation, is what? Do I hold anything concrete in my hands at the end of the month? My rent? My grad school loans? My half-used yoga membership? My tumor-inducing cell phone? My overpriced cable bill? Into what, exactly, am I feeding all of this money every month? The gaping, wet mouth of the capitalist cash cow? The razor sharp teeth of gluttony and sloth? Empty promises? Broken dreams? Unnecessary takeout meals?

O the money I've wasted! The early years in Manhattan spent going out to the bars four nights a week! The thousands of dollars I made from my freelance writing job which has since ceased to exist but which I have nothing to show for! The drinks and the dinners and, come to mention it, the overpriced cable bill!

I have no right to be living in this city, or even in this country, really. I should be sleeping in a refrigerator box in New Delhi and eating beans out of a can and selling my hair every month.

Honestly - - my whole body, by the way, is now itching, and it is doing so in places which cannot be blamed on post-Nair trauma, like my scalp and the backs of my knees - - honestly, I am more than a little freaked out. Where does one even begin to think about having a house and babies and dogs, when one cannot even afford to step outside one's apartment, for fear of the twenty-dollar-bill monster that lurks on every sidewalk in New York City?

I opened up a mutual fund account last year because I felt it was time to grow up and own stocks, except my father's stock guy said I didn't have enough money for that, so I had to start with a mutual fund. Anything having to do with stocks or mutual funds or anything of or related to these causes me great agita and discomfort, as it is an area in which I hold absolutely no expertise, or even basic knowledge (those watching over my shoulder will note that I just replaced "money market" with "mutual fund" after carefully checking the Smith Barney statement beside me to recall what, exactly, it is that I have). Because of this, I do everything humanly possible to avoid interacting with my father's stock guy, which results in me leaving him garbled messages at 11 o'clock at night telling him my latest idea for my mutual fund, or sending him emails which he never receives. My latest scheme involved leaving him a late night message suggesting that I'd like to start transferring $250 each month directly into my mutual fund from my bank account, in order to force myself to save something. And now, one month into this monthly transfer plan, I find myself $350 short in available bill-paying funds.

So what's the answer? Do I do what makes sense? Cut the cable bill, stop the mutul fund scheme, trade our bed in for a refrigerator box? Or do I look for a second income? Take on some extra work, write that novella I once heard myself talk about writing? Or do I stick with Plan C, where I just ignore it all and hope for the best and wait for pay day and roll with the occasional angsty punches every couple of months?

Perhaps Plan D, in which I dedicate 1000 words of publicly accessible internet real estate to my Failed Finances, thus alienating the few readers I had left, including my mother?

In other news, the Halloween bash was a success. Following are some photos which might understandably beg the question, But why doesn't he just start up a tranny goth hooker catering and housekeeping dance company? To which I might reply, Why not indeed?

Please send jobs, suggestions, cash, money orders or canned beans to the nearest 9th Avenue refrigerator box.

I'm a Halloweenie

Tonight was a nice, relaxing Friday evening at home.

I baked and decorated cupcakes and chocolate La Choy Chinese noodle spiders for our Halloween party tomorrow night, while M. caught up on a few things.

Then we rifled through our donated bag of Halloween decorations from RJ and made our apartment look festive.

Then we hugged goodnight, only to recoil quickly from one another due to a horrifying pain in both of our torso areas.

Because tonight, shortly before the cupcake decorating and not long after we'd resolved a brief but tense argument over which soda -- Mountain Dew or Mexican Lime-Ade -- would make our Halloween punch a more pleasing shade of green, M. and I also removed all of our upper body hair with Nair; I, in an effort to make a more convincing Vampiress as part of my ongoing annual Halloween-based excuse to dress like a woman -- an effort complicated this year, I will admit, by my misguided choice of a size 10 gown which refuses to zipper beyond my third rib -- and M., more or less, because his curiosity was peaked and he's the middle child.

And I must say that, in addition to the stubble which is apparently left behind in the process -- hence the painful embrace -- the sight of one's denuded chest and abdomen is jarring at best. I can't remember when I last saw myself looking quite so Baby's Bottomly, although it must have been around the same time that I began to compulsively shave the horrifying, solitary chest hairs growing around my nipples, a biological turn of events so unexpected and overwhelming that it should come as no surprise that I lost track of the pilatory processes elsewhere on my body.

And while it has been said that shaving and/or waxing and/or Nairing and/or otherwise depilatating one's chest leads to better visible muscle definition and tone, the only thing I have noticed thus far is that my nipples are even smaller than I'd thought (and redder, although I feel this must be due to chemical burns sustained in battle), and the skin around my torso has become slack and easily wrinkled, much like that of a seventy year old grandfather. Of course, anything will look smaller and/or wrinklier the longer one stares at it and/or contorts and crunches one's stomach in ways one hasn't previously attempted.

I suppose my point is that I am headed down a dangerous path. Because marriage, it would seem, inevitably leads to quiet nights spent at home in quiet places, which in turn lead to idle hands and minds which, when all is said and done, can only lead to me, night after night, completely hairless and zipped into a dress six sizes too small, high on eyelash adhesive and Mexican punch, feeding the cupcakes and frosting my children. But at least I'll have got the dress zipped.

Take your passion and make it happen

An open letter to Ms. Claudia Perez, permanent US resident from Chile:

I'm the young man who saw your wallet on the sidewalk outside the Times Square subway station earlier this evening (the one across from the Red Lobster) and, fearing it would end up in the wrong hands, hurried through the turnstile and picked it up and turned it in at the NYPD station on 44th Street.

But not before I stood outside in the cold rain for a quarter of an hour trying to get your credit card company on the phone - using, by the way, my pre-evening Verizon minutes - after a fruitless search for any other identifying information, and finally got through to a customer service representative who, I have a sinking suspicion, did not, in fact, relay my phone number to you.

And then, just so you know, after spending another ten minutes giving the cops my identifying information, I had to go back into the rain and then back into the subway.

And through the mind-numbingly circuitous underground labyrinth which eventually, ten minutes later, ends up at the A/C/E.

Where I waited another ten minutes for a train to come.

And when it finally did come, and I rode one stop to 50th Street, I looked up and saw that I was, in fact, at 34th Street. Because I'd gone in the wrong direction.

So then I took the underground walkway to the northbound train, and waited another five minutes for the train to come, and then finally got to 50th Street, at which point I once again had the opportunity to return to the now cold, wet and windy night.

The only thing that made this experience at all bearable was when the theme from Flashdance came onto my iPod. This, combined with my soaking wet pants and hair, made me feel as though I were actually in the movie, albeit a cold and windy and disgruntled version.

I guess my point here is that I really hope you get your wallet back, unhelpful customer service representative notwithstanding. But only as long as you're not a rude or evil or ruthless or nasty or generally unpleasant person, or one with a plan to exact any sort of mayhem or misery on a micro- or macrolevel, or a hater of gays. You would probably be better off without that last one as well, as your personal effects are now teeming with my invisible homosexual fingerprints.

Call me!

Sincerely,

Groomzilla



And to think, I was going to spend this entry talking about the old homeless woman who peed on my subway this afternoon.


NOTE TO SELF: put phone number in wallet.

It Burns, It Burns

Clearly, I cannot be expected to utilize my Sunday in a productive manner - - including, but not limited to, the ongoing-yet-still-forestalled development of my novella, or the online perusal of dj's and photographers, or the creation of an appropriate Save-the-Date - - with this going on outside my window:



If I could add a link to the song they're playing - - a song which, after suffering through it on an annual basis for the past 4 years, will be forever seared in my memory and will surely be playing on the loudspeakers as I ride the escalator down to Hell - - I would. I would also add an olfactory link to the incense which has now overtaken my apartment, robbing me of my faculties and leaving me with no choice but to lay prone on the couch watching Nip/Tuck on Netflixx all day.

Then again, after channeling Cleopatra all night long at RJ and Lance's murder mystery party last night, I could certainly use the rest.

Vocab test

gross: (grōs), adj.

1. The feeling an individual feels when he moves to Manhattan at the tender age of 23, eager to explore his burgeoning same-sex sexuality, only to come down with a dual case of crabs and chlamydia two months later, both of which were likely provided by a strange middle-aged man on a subway who appeared to live with his mother in Queens, judging by the powder blue shag carpeting and china figurines in the living room. This feeling may be further complicated by feelings of doubt and embarassment six years later when said individual questions whether he ought not to include such a personal life detail merely as a means of setting up a blog entry.

2. The feeling an individual feels when his boyfriend M. discovers that their bathtub is not, in fact, fashionably gray, or irreparably dingy, but simply dirty, a fact M. discovered simply by spraying shower cleaner on the tub and scrubbing same with a sponge. This feeling is amplified when the individual and his boyfriend realize they have lived, unquestioningly, with their erroneous assumptions since they moved in 3.25 years ago. It is further complicated by feelings of guilt and shame for having allowed innocent outside acquaintances to use said shower as recently as last weekend.



All of which goes to show that being the perfect bride does not necessarily go hand-in-hand with being the perfect judge of character, or the perfect housewife, or the perfect friend.

Sorry, genitals. Sorry, M.. Sorry, mammy hush child and oprahinwaiting.

This entry brought to you by the good people at Tilex(TM), where having a clean tub is as easy as getting off your lazy ass and cleaning it.

An Unpaid Advertisement, Part II, and an open plea for magnetic printing supplies

Work this week has been, in a word, chaotic, leaving me with little mental and/or emotional energy to devote to and/or obsess about nuptial details - - except, if anyone knows where one might find magnetic printer-paper in Manhattan, I'd appreciate the referral - - but I do feel compelled to share my latest non-wedding-related obsession. Kind of a little torn when it comes to the issue of outing, but maybe not so much when it comes to the self-haters.

Come to think of it, there is one teensy bit of wedding minutiae, which is that I just got off the phone with my mother - - who is now with my father in mid-Atlantic Florida, which will seemingly be spared of anything too horrific, but this fact does little to assuage my penchant for mental grimacing - - and she has sent me a list of potential wedding invitees. In the regular mail, as opposed to email, which I am quite certain was part of her ongoing efforts at Avoiding the Gay Wedding Elephant in the Room where my dad is concerned.

Anyways, she tells me she's divided the list into A-, B- and C-listers, which gives me simultaneous pause for delight at the clear genetic origins of my knack for creative organization, pause for concern that she has been watching too much My SuperSweet 16, and pause for terror at how we're going to fit fifty of her friends at a table for ten.

Finally, the best part about a publicly-accessible blog is that I can write about things like the impending wedding guest list/novella we're due to receive from my mother in the mail, rather than tell M. about it in person, and if he arrives home to find aforementioned list blocking the front entryway and half of the kitchen....well, it's not like it wasn't written right there in my publicly-accessible blog.

A Filthy and Unprepared Hypocrite

The bad news is that I forgot to include the invitations -- and the save-the-dates! -- in my ginormous list of incomplete weddings tasks, thus sending my internal matrimonial obligation switchboard into nuclear meltdown and ensuring that our guests will not only be sitting on cardboard and eating Ho-Ho's, but they will be doing so in August or September of '08.

The worse news is that I've now become addicted to seeing what the other brides are doing with their invitations over at indiebride.com.

It was only a matter of time, really.

Om Shanti; or, An Unpaid Advertisement

The thing I love best about living in my neighborhood in midtown Manhattan is that, even when I come out of my Saturday morning yoga class - chakras aligned, core strengthened, toxins purged, tensions relieved - and haven't walked two blocks before some shlub slithers past me and mutters, "Learn to walk like a man, homo," and then another two blocks before a Jersey Mom in an SUV first waits for me to get through the cross-walk and then blares her horn at me before speeeding off to the red light ten yards away, I can always rest assured that it will only be another two blocks before I have my hands on a C-Ya with blueberries(TM) and all will be right in the world again.

The list

My life is much simpler when I stick to descriptions of hotel rooms and the meals consumed within them. Or even minute wedding registry details. But from there, it's a slippery slope, and before I know it I've made an insurmountable mental list of Things Still Left Undone, and it is then that I realize that there is simply not enough time to plan this wedding, and our guests will be sitting on scattered pieces of cardboard box eating Ho-Ho's and listening to their iPods while I pay someone to go around snapping pictures with their cell phone.

If it must be known, here is the insurmountable mental list of incompletions:

Flowers
DJ
Photographer*
Justice of the Peace
Priest
Rings
Ceremony Details including format, content, music, vows
Tuile Jordan almond sachets
Final guest list
Seating arrangements
White doves

And that's just what I can think of off the top of my head as I am simultaneously distracted by M. watching Jimmy Kimmel Live in the next room. If I really wanted to, and wasn't exceedingly lazy, I could turn around and pull my Gay Weddings book down from the bookshelf - or shoot Jimmy Kimmel's electronic image between the eyes - to make sure I wasn't missing anything.



*spoke to Mom this evening, who avers that really there is no need for photographers in the age of Guests Carrying Digital Cameras, so this is an expense that we might consider skipping. Between this potential relief-inducing piece of advice and the fact that she is now mailing me newspaper clippings about Massachusetts gay marriage minutiae, I may have to set her up in the front of the wedding tent on a large altar with a bowl for fruit- and small animal-sacrifices. Me luv her.

Well would you look at that.

Note to self:

When stranded in a lonely hotel room in an isolated section of an unfamiliar town, perusing and updating one's online gift registries can provide a particularly cheap and effective way to pass the time.

Yep...

Just when I was coming to terms with my day - a day which consisted of making no Best Friend Conference Pals with whom to eat dinner at that cute hypothetical cafe in Northampton Center; and then gathering up the nerves to say something during my afternoon workshop but coming off sounding like a nervous laryngitic on the verge of tears; and then tucking into my lonely and dark and cold hotel room at 6:15pm with a tandoori chicken burrito, a bag of Doritos and a liter of Diet Coke - just when I was finally coming to terms with Life As I Knew It Today, who should come across my TV set but Halle Flippin' Berry and her Godforsaken Flippin' FabuLash(TM) commercial.

Lucky for her, I was only halfway through Surface and still had two of the four giant chocolate pretzels I bought at the giant chocolate pretzel store.

True or false: Hotel livin' leads to borin' bloggin'.




Are you still there, Mom?

The Loneliest Number

And now here I am, safe and sound, in my scary and lonely Clarion Hotel room, which lies at the end of a very long and dark and twisted maze of corridors.

My visions of an early autumn evening spent enjoying the brightly turning foliage and cute New England College Town cafes as a Free-Spirited and Independent Young Man Who Loves to Love Life have been quickly choked by the dark, the rain, the cold, the looming emptiness of the Montana's Steakhouse in the hotel lobby, and the enormously endlessly King-sized expanse of my hotel room.

(Oh look, and there's even a creepy thunderstorm on the TV.)

I don't think I would do very well in jail. Or a monastary. Or any sort of traveling profession. Unless I was part of a duo.

(And now a commercial with people screaming about a FIRE!)

Who ever said it was any fun traveling alone?

Or do anything alone, for that matter?

Great! Now I'm scared, lonely, bored and co-dependent.

Ungh, it's time to dance.

Three hours ago, I was sitting in my Fuck-Me-With-a-Candy-Apple-While-I-Drive-My-Fire-Engine Red (this red doesn't even come close) rental car, just setting out on my journey northward for my very first Professional Adult Conference, when it began to rain. And get dark. And then Samantha Fox came on the tricky iPod radio-connector thingy, singing "Naughty Girls (Need Love Too)", and I glanced Heavenward and prayed, Please God, don't let me get in an accident in the rain and have them pry me out of this inexcusably red Hyundai and find this song playing on my iPod.

As Samantha faded out and Vanity 6 came on with the inarguably more crash-acceptable "Nasty Girl", I knew, without a doubt, that God listens.

There and Back Again, Illustrated

It certainly doesn't take long to get reacclimated to the hustle and bustle and sturm and drang and heightened security alerts of life in New York City, does it?

Had I written this entry thirty-six hours ago, whilst we were still nestled safely within the cool confines of our Designer Imposters hotel, I might have gone on and on about how all the bitching and moaning I've done about Los Angeles during my discussions about it with M. - usually something along the lines of, "Sure, move back to L.A., have fun, let me know how it is" - came to naught, as I found myself actually enjoying myself there.

The temperature, the cute houses, the relatively large expanses of sky, the slightly lower cost of living....I've still got my clawed feet planted firmly on the edge of reason, aided in equal parts by the distance, the smog and the attitude, but I did feel my grip loosening at least a few times.

Let's make it an even ten:

1. During our first full day, we took a drive to El Matador beach, and whom should I spy within two minutes of hitting the sand but Joely Richardson and John Hensley, making out...! This will only interest those who know who Joely Richardson and John Hensley are, and that they star on Nip/Tuck...as mother and son. This caused me great excitement as I have just recently started Netflixxing their show. And because I saw them first, because M.'s usually-uncanny celebrity sensor was compromised by our transcontinental flight. And, 'cuz we're creepy, we captured it on digital.

2. This sighting was followed, over the course of the following five days, and in no particular order, by Sinead O'Connor (staying at our crappy hotel with her Reggae band, looking a bit pasty in a pink kerchief, leading M. to query, "I guess she's still a nun?"), Kato Kaelin (orange, yet flawless, skin), Jay (of Jay and Silent Bob, looking girly), Scott Speedman (looked hot, bad hair, also looked high and/or drunk and/or schizophrenic), Jay Alexander (as in "Miss", as in America's Next Top Model, as in nappy head o' hair), James Denton (Desperate Housewives; we were soon redistracted by our delicious Margaritas), and Balthazar Getty (didn't actually see him, M. did, wouldn't have even mentioned him except that now I've come to find out he's now starring on Alias, which in retrospect makes him a bigger sighting than I thought). Mainly C- and D-listers, but enough to make me feel as though I were inside the pages of In Touch Weekly, or at the very least Life & Style. Maybe Star. Oh, and also, we were THISCLOSE to seeing Lindsay Lohan crash her car in front of the Ivy. Like, one hour too early. That could have been us in the pages of In Touch Weekly, being carted onto the ambulance. I'll bet that poor Mexican man didn't even know what a coup he'd pulled off.


Groomzilla, trapped, high tide.


The photos that could have netted me at least $25.00.


The Ivy Drive-by: Lost Opportunities.

3. After five days of begging and reminding, M. took me to House of Pies on our last night in town. Regular readers of ITW will recognize this as the place oft-sited as responsible for Kirstie Alley's incredible weight gain. I had lemon meringue pie, which I am fairly certian is not what Kirstie was eating, but I needed something fruity to wash down the In 'n Out burger I'd consumed two minutes earlier.


At last.


What Would Kirstie Eat?



4. The gay bars in L.A., while overall leaning slightly to the left of cheese, have cool things like 10:30pm happy hours and strippers that stand around naked in bathtubs.

5. One of L.A.'s main food groups would appear to be fast food, except they somehow manage to package it in the guise of healthy-food-on-the-go. We went to In 'n Out Burger (twice) (they slice their potatoes fresh...before they deep fry them), Baja Fresh (grilled fish tacos...with double-deep-fried chips) and Coo Coo Roo (BBQ chicken sandwich...with a side of butternut squash).

6. When M. had a work meeting on our second-to-last day, he dropped me off at Crate & Barrel to play the fun scanner-gun wedding registry game. Not as much fun as I'd imagined doing it alone, but I simply adopted the stoic face of a high-class registry widow, avoided the quizzical and/or reproachful stares, and let my fingers do the scanning. Other than an over-abundance of Melamine, a few too many high-ball glasses and two toasters, I was creative yet restrained. (Point of interest: we have decided to cancel our Williams Sonoma registry in favor of Crate&Barrel and Bed,Bath&Beyond, which will deprive us of gold-plated muffin tins but should provide adequate consumer savings to nab us bonus points with our generous guests).

7. Did I mention In 'n Out Burger?



8. At the suggestion of a friend of a friend who said we Simply Had To Do It, M. and I donned our cute clothes and headed over the Roosevelt Hotel on Monday night to hang out with Paris and Nicole and Lindsay. And got to the velvet (black leather, actually) rope. And were summarily dismissed. And (me, anyways) felt like we were back in fifth grade, not getting picked for dodgeball. Or being picked off by a dodgeball. At least the bouncer was nice enough to lie and tell us it was a private party. This one belongs in the bottom ten, but I need to include it as part of my personal psychotherapeutic journey towards getting over the fifth grade. I feel better. In a still-crying sort of way.

9. T-shirts during the day, long sleeves at night. Less than ten really tall buildings. Relative silence. I could clearly hear my own thoughts for the first time in a long, long time, and realized they weren't screaming in delusional pain and agony so much as screaming to get a little attention. And also to tell me how unruly my unibrow had grown. This silence was aided by our lack of readily accessible cable and internet. Is it a bad sign when Los Angeles, CA, starts to feel like Lancaster, PA?

10. I could say something sappy about finally having some quality time with M., and how nice it was to finally be able to just lay in bed and talk with him without hearing sirens and screams and horns outside, or how it was really nicely rejuvenating to just hang out with him and his nice friends and his old haunts and not be distracted by computer porn or the growing list of unwatched shows on our DVR or the fact that we are living beyond in our means in a city built for the exceedingly wealthy, or how I maybe re-remembered why I am marrying him in the first place.

I could say those things. Or I could say that the first person to buy us the 6-Piece Melamine Bowl Set and the Kitchen-Aid Mixer in Pistachio gets first dibs on our enormous House of Pies(TM) banana cream wedding pie. On your marks....


The art of the self portrait, continued.


OK, enough, someone please shoot us.


No, with a camera, silly!


Seriously, though, how's my hair? I think M.'s in my light.