the diary of antoine roquentin

I feel like I never write in this thing anymore.

It just seems like one more thing to do. Anything really important or immediate I post on Twitter or Google plus. Anything else is just an afterthought. Still, when I put it that way it makes me think that so few people are actually making something that could be called a “work.” I would joke to my book and magazine editing teacher that the next great novel was going to just be one long printed Twitter stream.

I still feel like an anachronism most times, so I might as well be old-fashioned with the blogging. Speaking of being on the cutting edge, I downloaded Mac OS X Lion today. It’s pretty snazzy and didn’t break any of my applications (even Dragon works!).

Normally when I’m on vacation it’s time to post long, sweeping narratives, but this vacation I spent most of my computing time (when not working) on my iPad. As I long suspected, the iPad is the “computer” to use when you don’t want to be productive. It’s great for cruising blogs, Hacker News, and Reddit.

I also just updated WordPress to the latest version, which I really could have done without. 95% of the time, a “visual refresh” turns a great interface to crap, and this is no surprise. Also, the composition font is some Courier-like variant instead of the normal font. I’m really not sure if that’s Lion or WordPress 4? 5? I forget what version we’re at now.

Okay, enough with the banter and on to the photos! These are from when my mom and I took the Cape May ferry over to the teeny cute town of Lewes, Delaware.

My mom in a vestibule of the ship when we got on. Doesn’t it look like she’s gone 18th century?

The Cape May terminal.

Mom and I on the ship!

We checked out some cute shops, had lunch, and took a photo of ourselves in front of the oldest standing building in Delaware.

Ah, the open seas.

Cars exiting the Delaware as we left on the elevated passenger gangway, Cape May terminal.

The next day we went to Cousin Patty’s pool for a few hours.

A few days later we went out to the Cape May lighthouse, which was really fun. None of the olds wanted to go to the top of the lighthouse, so I went with the kids. We had a great time.

On our way up.

Diagrams!

View from the bottom.

View from the top.

View from the porthole. I love this shot; it’s currently my iPad home screen. I love how the houses are just barely out of focus and look like little dollhouses. It reminds me of those ubiquitous tilt-shift photos that make macro landscapes look micro.

The gang.

I think we had the best weather this year that we had any time we’ve gone. Every day was sunny and in the 90s. One day was too windy, but every other day was perfect. Perhaps because of that, we only went to the boardwalk twice: once for the water park and once to go on rides.

Ah, the beach life.

I spent a lot of time with Alexis and Nick, and I think they had a really great time. Despite the occasional, eh, “problems” that occurred (Gary remains capricious as ever), it was a much better trip than last year.

I’m dictating this on my iPad again. It just crashed, which doesn’t give me a whole lot of confidence that this thing is actually going to preserve the post until I’m actually finished, but what choice do I have?

Being on my actual laptop just make me feel like I’m going to be doing work, and that just makes me feel tired. I’ve been doing work for hours upon hours to make up for all of the work that I didn’t do earlier in the week when the kids were here, but it still seems like a rat race.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the future this week. I am not going to be able to afford to live in Manhattan. I can’t really even afford Brooklyn. And now that I found out that my mom has lost her job, everything just seems so different. I think that I’m going to have to be supporting her in the near term.

I also thought that with all of these full-time paychecks rolling in, I would have a lot more money. That turned out not to be the case. I mean, I guess I would be in a better financial state if it weren’t for indulgences like the device that I’m holding in my hands right now.

Still, money isn’t everything. It’s just that I was sitting here reading my Economist and sipping my tea and thought, “Is this going to be how I spend the next 10 years?” Even the school is out, I still feel like I have no time for anything. I am supposed to get up ridiculously early and go down to my aunt’s house for her birthday party even though I have a ticket to see Amanda Laporte tonight at Highline Ballroom.

If I don’t stay up all night, I will just sleep through the early train and wake up at 3 PM.

Did I mention that Matt and me had a huge blowout? He was livid for my missing his birthday party, which I should not have done. I don’t even know what I should be doing. I know that I can’t really be there on the weekends and I can’t really be there on the weekdays. At one point in my life I was obsessed with escaping poverty, but now I realize that it is all but impossible. I’m not going to apply to graduate school. I’m going to live here as long as I can (read: as long as Grandma is alive), and that I’m going to have to move back to California where it’s cheap.

I think that my pulling back is sort of symptomatic of my whole approach to the city these days. I am poor. So what I’ve read Ginsberg, Proust, Camus, Beauvoir, Gibson, Vonnegut, Tennyson, Woolf, Dickinson. The starting salary for an assistant editor at Penguin publishing is $33,000. I might as well send in my application to Walmart.

Honestly, I’m kind of sick of being around all these posturing fools. I don’t think most of these “event people” give a shit about me. Perhaps it’s just my ever-increasing cynicism, but I’m a little sick of people like Jove, who talk a big game about being middle-class but somehow have the financial resources to attend Columbia on a waiter’s salary and live in Manhattan.

They finally called me with some apartment that they wanted to rent. It was in the Stuyvesant towers, on 14th St. The rent was $2700 for a two-bedroom. Fuck them and fuck Daddy’s money.

I’m literally so pressed for time today but I think I’m planning to do all of my sleeping for the day on trains and buses. I don’t know how it ends up like this. I have $1500 in credit card debt again, which somehow came out of nowhere.

I just don’t know what I’m doing. This whole being tethered to my house Monday through Friday is really strange to me. However, I can’t live this fantasy anymore. I’m going to be in Jersey for a very long time.

It’s really not the worst thing. I’m probably closer as the crow flies to Manhattan than my friends in Washington Heights, but it is a psychological thing. For as “hip” as Brooklyn is, rents are exactly the same in my neighborhood. I’ll take my less fashionable urban shithole to your urban shithole, thank you very much. Maybe it is inertia after all, I’m sick of making all of these endless treks out to Brooklyn. This is my home. I’m stuck here whether I like it or not.

I remember my creative writing professor who was so convinced that I would get into NYU. I feel like I let him down. I feel like I let myself down. But still, what could that possibly get me? What doors will that possibly open? I could have a PhD and I’m still going to start at a $33,000 salary for 80-hour weeks. I have no retirement savings. My health insurance expires when I turn 26 in November. I feel like for all the high-mindedness of higher education, it provides absolutely no tangible benefits.

I’m trying to keep my mind in shape by reading the Economist and keeping up with the New York Review. Still, I feel that my skills are atrophying. I feel like I am atrophying, turning into a comfortable creature of habit. One of those habits is my relationship, which I continue to see in an increasingly negative light. I am dating someone who does not read and loves Lady Gaga. For heavens’ sake, we can’t even go for a bike ride.

It’s not that I dislike him, but we have different schedules. Different lives. When I wake up at 2pm, I have to work until 10pm. This isn’t quite conducive to spending time together.

This relationship always worked because there was no drama, but now there’s drama. I feel trapped. Lost. Unsatisfied. Perhaps I am just unable to have a fulfilling long-term relationship. We have been seeing each other for a year and a half, after all.

He’s angry that I’ve been hanging out with Michael and Taylor so much, and it’s true that I do make more of an effort to leave the house to hang out with them. Just a few nights ago, I walked from the East Village to 42nd Street just talking about whether Vonnegut’s brand of humor-as-social commentary is easy to discard by non-intellectual readers.

I feel stifled in writing, in painting, in everything. I can’t write that I’m not happy with my relationship. I can’t say it. It’s like I’m at an event 24/7: say “hi” to these important people who you will probably never meet again and will never hang with solo. I was in the East Village a couple of days ago and saw Britt tweet that she was at Lit (a bar that was cool about 10 years ago), so I sauntered over to see if she was still there.

She wasn’t, but it still gave me pause. What would I have even said to her? I’m often stifled making friends because I think that people are too awesome to like me. Don’t take any of this too seriously, I’m just trying to break my writers’ block by saying anything that comes into my mind.

That’s what this blog is: a blotter to capture anything as I’m thinking about it, good and bad. I’m sorry about the overuse of colons. There’s a joke in there somewhere.

Matt seems desperate to make me happy. For instance, he bought us Joan Rivers tickets for next week. Still, on the phone he was admonishing me not to flake. And last week, when he was throwing this Northside show in Greenpoint, he sent me this “reminder” text when I was with Michael and Taylor telling me that I needed to take the L at 8. I mean, I understand that I have been flaky lately, but I was having more fun playing iPad Scrabble than being paraded around and introduced to event people.

Don’t get me wrong, I thought the event was great fun. Diamond Rings put on a great show, but, as with so many things in New York, the event seemed to boil down to social snobbery. I had to ditch my friends in order to dance at the show (when the only song I know is Show Me Your Stuff).

I just don’t know how to make everything good that used to be bad. To make our conversations interesting again. Perhaps I just get sick of everyone, which is not to say that I’m sick of Matt. We’re just in this bad rut that I can’t think of a way out of.

I thought that school was more of a timesink than a full-time job, and I was wrong. All of these complications could evaporate by way of Michael’s unemployment running out and his deportation out of civilization. Still, the excitement I used to have for cultural events has sort of waned. Michael and I had dinner at the East Village San Loco a few days ago and bonded with the cashier watching this super-sad movie (amusingly interspersed with adult sex line ads) at 1:30 a.m. We walked to Disco Down and said hi to our club friends. I’m realizing that New York has all sorts of non-friend categories. Still, Alexandra and Dana were super-nice and kept getting us free drinks all night. I even met someone that went to Kelly’s high school!

Still, after all these antics I felt ill riding the bus home at 5 a.m.

Is this it?

This is all life is.

Going to my weekly party on Tuesday. Staying in all week.

The pool opens next week, which I think will improve my mood. When I don’t work out, I get very depressed. Fuck my debt, I might as well just open my NYSC membership now. I’m not getting any less sedentary.

I just feel lost, with no creativity or passion to speak of.

To what degree this is related to my relationship is unknown. I mean, we get along great. We don’t fight, we don’t argue. But it feels airless and empty these days. Is it just that the flames of being “in love” have burned off?

My mom thinks I’m depressed and that I should be on medication. I categorically refuse to take any drug that alters my brain chemistry. If it takes pills to get from melancholy to apathy, I’ll stay at apathy thank you very much. I love that in our society depression isn’t seen as a sign of the inherent emptiness of our society, but as some sort of medical defect.

I don’t think I’m depressed. I’m certainly a cynic, but what thinking person isn’t?

I just wish things were simple, like when I was younger. When you’re young, you don’t think the world is as incredibly complex as it is. But now, at 26, relationships are almost incalculably complex. I mean, think about Kelly. We’ve had our ups and our downs (to say the least). And now we’re meeting occasionally for drinks in the city. I’m coming to the realization that we probably won’t ever talk about the issues that led us to stop talking, which would have been unthinkable to the 17-year-old me.

I’m even ambivalent about Taggart. I mean, I can think hard about him and remember crying, being morose, and hoping that he would come back. But now, he’s essentially just a n’erdowell who can barely hold down a job. Relationships, for him, seem to be less about love and more about finding someone to pay his rent. I mean, I can think of all the endearing things he did, but I can also think of all the times that we never felt exactly the same way about each other.

If we’re going for Tristan and Isolde, he’s as close as I can get.

What does love mean for me at 26?

I always start out relationships by telling the other person that I’m a big believer in polyamory, but that never really seems to pan out. I always end up with capital-”r” relationships. It’s like going into a car dealership, asking for a compact car, and coming out with an SUV.

I’m realizing more an more that being queer is going out of style. Especially with all this same-sex marraige rhetoric, we’re expected to be just like straight people. I find the idea of heteronormativity utterly repulsive. Sam and I have very similar views on this subject and what we want out of relationships. What I’ve got isn’t really cutting it.

I mean, I love Matt, but I feel like we’ve entered a terminal phase.

I’m not happy. He’s not happy.

I feel like I just get inured to love. WARNING: here come the classic film references.

I really identify with the way love is explained in Jules et Jim. It’s a fickle thing that grows and dies without any logical reasons. I very much identify with Catherine, who must be loved and love however she feels, despite the consequences. She knows she’s out of love with Jules and begs Jim to move in with them, even though she has a daughter. And for a while, everything is happy.

Another scene I’m drawn to is the one in La Dolce Vita where Maddalena speaks to Marcello about wanting to get married, to be faithful, to be everything she’s not. While she’s speaking, another man is already kissing her and trying to seduce her.

I identify with La Dolce Vita so much because there are so many characters who just want to be happy and free, but just can’t think of a way to escape their decisions and fates.

I’m afraid of changing anything in my life for fear of making it worse, but that ties my hands about making improvements.

I don’t even know why I’m going to Gail’s. I didn’t buy her a card, and I have no present. There’s not going to be anything open at 7 a.m.

I’m completely alone in the house.

And it’s 4:23 a.m.

I’m sipping the roobios tea I made hours ago, which is pleasantly room-temperature.

I was reading about Greece’s financial woes to make myself feel like America’s politics wasn’t as bad by comparison. It’s also great to read about a far-away tragedy to distance one from real problems.

I’m sick of being unhappy. Time to do something about it. I just don’t know what.

Screw it, I’m going to sleep. Fuck family functions. I don’t drive, and I’m not wasting four hours of tomorrow commuting to bumfuck Jersey. Even if I drove, I’d only save maybe a half-hour.

4:40 a.m. is not the time to be making life decisions.

This is the way it always goes, I overcommit and then I can’t follow through. I said I’d be there, and now I obviously can’t. I hate myself sometimes. It’s all the lies to myself: “oh, you’ll totally be able to get up in the morning tomorrow.”

I mean, I’ve actually been doing all right in that department. I haven’t been sleeping in until 5pm, just 2pm. It’s a difference that makes quite an impact on my psychological health. If you wake up at 5pm, you see very little daylight. On the bright side, I think it is literally impossible for me to ever develop skin cancer, as I only experience four hours of daylight per day, tops.

I would wake up earlier, but that means no nightlife.

Is it really a big deal if I miss her birthday? I don’t know. I’m sick of all this waffling. I’m sick of so many things.

I am going to sleep.

It took me so long to upload my photos to Flickr, but here are some highlights from our trip to the Cloisters a few weeks back.

Fort Tryon Park

The Hudson looking towards Jersey

Mom in front of a fountain

This piece was executed in limestone.

Oh! There’s where I left my Incredibly Gaudy Golden Lectern!

This was one of my mom’s favorite pieces. It’s incredibly detailed, and the statues have these looks of abject despair.

Priceless ancient tapestries abounded

We had lunch in this adorable little courtyard

And took some pictures on the way back

Also, here’s a blurry photo of Morena Baccarin (the Companion from Firefly) at the mini-con we went to.

someone runs into the middle of a street in SoHo and places an ironing board there.

Tuesday nights, man. Tuesday nights.

This is the third week in a row that I went to Disco Down at Happy Ending. We met up with this other guy, the one who was also from Sacramento, named Michael (another one).

So the deal with the night at Happy Ending is that you can’t get there early because they have to play Ke$ha to the sluts. So we have gotten into the habit of going to Cazwell and Amanda Lepore’s party called BoyBox. It’s certainly unwholesome— like a bag of potato chips that you swear you’re going to put down after the next handful of chips— but the event attracted a very mixed crowd, which I appreciate. It’s certainly all gay (with the occasional hag), but it’s not just one subgenre. There’s nothing worse than walking into a room of Aryan twentysomething twinks, so it’s refreshing to see anything from trannies (sp?) to off work business types to people who you know took the train from God knows where in Jersey or the Island just to come.

We watched the dancers casually, wearing out the adage about bouncing quarters off of body parts in short order. Cazwell was DJing, but Amanda didn’t make her appearance until around 11:30, sashaying subtly into the room. She approached the DJ booth and made her introduction, “Caz! I’m so horny! There’s so many beautiful men here tonight! I’m so drunk, Caz! You have to catch up with me!” Carrying her big wireless mic, she took a seat in a corner and let her circle surround her. Like easily frightened birds eager to snatch up a hunk of bread, soon there was not a seat to be found near her.

I got a call from Jove, who almost never calls me, about the apartment that he wanted to rent on 23rd St. at that giant complex Stuyvesant Houses (Towers?) or whatever. My rent would’ve almost been $950 a month and I would probably be sharing a bedroom with someone. It’s not that I don’t love them, but I don’t have $2000 lying around for first last and deposit. I was reluctant to text him today, but I will tomorrow morning. I need a couple of months to save up.

Michael 2.0 showed up about a half hour after we arrived, and we sipped drinks as we watched Amanda Lepore introduce a parade of ever-more-slutty dancers. It was an enjoyable spectacle, don’t get me wrong, but in any spectacle of that sort there is always an unwholesome, desperate undertone (especially as one skeletal beauty was extravagantly fake-humping the floor). The more amusing dance was one where he pretended (quite convincingly, at first) to sweep the floor while gyrating his nether regions in the faces of some people (who we came to realize were his friends).

Unfortunately, I must sign off right now. Here’s the abridged version:

Left BoyBox
Walked to Happy Ending
On the way, ran into Kelly (that guy that we know) working the door at a Bowery bar
Went to Happy Ending, schmoozed with the crew
Random French guy kept high-fiving and fistbumping us
Too much alcohol
Pissing on garbage
Ironing boards in roads
Breakfast at French Roast
Up to Washington Heights
Drinking at 8am and watching Ferrets with Hats and Chloé
Subway, Bus, disco nap, work.

I know I haven’t been writing.

I think it was just that I wrote so many papers in the span of maybe a week that my writing neurons were just done. I needed some time to collect myself and be creative again. I haven’t painted in a very long time, and my contributions to this enterprise have been few and far between.

With my diploma in hand (hopefully it’s in the mail), I can devote way more time to personal creative projects. I’ve been working full-time at the magazine as we launch all sorts of new web projects. I’m not really sure what I’m going to do while my editor is in Africa for the next two weeks, but I suppose there have been delays before. I’ll find out on Monday what’s going on.

I did a whole bunch of spring cleaning today. I think that my part of the house is as clean as possible. A lot of the cleaning involved going through all my old school papers and getting rid of the unimportant ones, which was rather cathartic. I really wish I had some kind of story writing group or something that would actually compel me to write things, because I have a lot of ideas bouncing around in my head that just never seem to end up on the page. I unearthed my portfolio from last semester’s creative writing class, which I was immensely proud of.

Next summer I’m going to try to save up and do this intense writing workshop thing at the New School, but realistically it might be better just to find some kind of group here. I mean, where else are you going to find aspiring writers in such high concentrations? I just need a deadline. I need to have some kind of tangible reason to write my terrible first draft, and right now I don’t really have that. I’m trying to organize my life in a way that is sustainable. On my next paycheck, I’m joining New York Sports Clubs. All of this sedentary work is taking a toll on my fitness, and I refuse to put on weight. I mean, I do walk all the time (I even ran from the East Village to the West Village a few nights ago because I was going to be late for a midnight screening of Taxi Driver), but walking and climbing subway stairs alone isn’t going to keep me in the kind of shape I want to be in.

Last week I had dinner with Jove and his boyfriend, which was really fun. The last time that we hung out, we went ice skating at Wollman Rink at the very tail end of winter. It was a really great time. I don’t know why, but we always get along so well. This was no exception. He told me that him and his roommate Adrienne were looking to move out of Washington Heights and were looking for roommate. I was thrilled! To live with non-crazy people in bona fide Manhattan is a dream.

My finances, unfortunately, haven’t fared very well. Instead of using my graduation money to pay off my credit cards, like a sensible person would do, I used most of it to buy an iPad. I do adore my iPad, I have to say. Still, I can think of a lot of things that would’ve been better to use that money on. The downstairs is cluttered with all of these things but I spent a lot of money on that I don’t use anymore, like my old 24 inch display, my 1 TB hard drive. These are all first world problems. Still, I’m going to try to make this summer the best summer I can after suffering through the Winter of Hell.

It’s strange, though. I’ve been going out a lot, mostly on Tuesday nights to this event called Disco Down. We befriended a few regulars, one of whom also moonlights as a dancer at Trash, this party at Webster Hall on Friday nights. Last week, before Disco Down, we met Kelly in Williamsburg for a couple drinks before taking a cab (the L was being insane) to BoyBox, Cazwell and Amanda Lepore’s party in Chelsea. It’s at an unassuming bar called G Lounge, on a street with very few storefronts (it’s around 19th, I want to say). We walked in. Amanda Lepore was holding court at one of the tables to the left, with a dizzying assortment of scene queens desperately (but with a modicum of subtlety) vying for her attention. We walked towards the oval-shaped bar at the back of the place and ordered some drinks, observing Cazwell DJ the gayest mix I think I’ve ever heard (he did include a Garbage song in addition to the parade of 80s Madonna, which I give him points for). As Kelly waited for the attention of the bartender, we were transfixed by the dancers up on the bar. Now this wasn’t a strip joint, but at any event Cazwell is involved in expect 2 to 5 immaculately muscled men, at least two of whom will be Dominican or Hispanic.

We watched the embarrassing spectacle of the overweight, less-than-attractive guy putting money in the dancer’s jock strap. An essay on power dialectic in queer culture is forthcoming, although Foucault probably already wrote it. Kelly by this time had struck up a conversation with a couple of guys sitting near us at the bar when Cazwell announced over the PA that Peaches had arrived.

Immediately all eyes were at the door, then on Amanda’s inner circle, where Miss Nisker (Peaches, to the uninitiated) was kissing Miss Lepore on the cheeks and saying her hellos. If this had happened three or four years ago, I think I would have been more excited. However, the strange thing about New York is that celebrities are ubiquitous. After you say “wow, that’s Peaches” a few times, what else is there to say? There’s always this distance between celebrities and real people. It’s not like you could walk up and say “hi,” which is what makes seeing celebrities almost anticlimactic. They are close, but they are still so far.

We finished our drinks, got a cab for Kelly so she wouldn’t miss her bus back to Philly, walked to Chinatown for Disco Down, and danced until 4 a.m.

I’m not sure if I mentioned that I’ve been going out a lot. Catching the 6 AM bus home has become almost par for the course when bars close at 4 AM. A couple of nights ago I went to the midnight showing of Taxi Driver and then we all walked over to Eastern Bloc for a nightcap or three. We went with this friend of a friend who was also from Sacramento, weirdly enough, and was a very jovial companion. When we were all outside for a smoke, this very strange guy came up to us and for some reason started this whole conversation about dogs versus cats. At some point in the conversation he was telling us this possibly apocryphal anecdote about Zac Efron asking the manager of some bistro whether his waiter was single. After that, the conversation became all about cats versus dogs, and in his incredibly drunken state he began imitating dog and cat behavior. I’m not sure if I can convey the horror of this, but he was literally trying to nuzzle us (not me, thank the fates) and bark like a dog. I’m not sure if this was some kind of conversational screening tool designed to identify people who were into dog play, but we hightailed it back inside.

The bouncer, oddly enough, is from SoCal. He takes absolutely zero crap from drunk sluts (of the male or female variety), and I respect him immensely for that. I think that it’s my personal fantasy to destroy the fragile egos of drunk sluts. He was calmly explaining to this incredibly drunk girl who “didn’t have her ID” that he wasn’t going to talk to her about it. “Oh my god but my friend is in there and it’s his birthday!”

“No. I’m not talking to you about this.”

Somebody that knows her popped her head out as I tried to squeeze by her into the bar.

“But yeah, that’s a friend of mine and like, you know, she just totally forgot it. Can she get—”

“I am not talking to you about this. Leave.”

Love it.

After we were a little buzzed (okay, buzzed enough to be unable to resist the siren song of San Loco), we went into the San Loco on Avenue A and had burritos and nachos galore. It has the best bathroom graffiti.