Oh, and it was 97 degrees here in Columbus today, but I didn't even notice. My comfort level was much more similar to an 80 degree day.

Just as I predicted, I'm enjoying this summer much more than I usually do. Self-fulfilling prophecy? or did I just correctly gauge my level of experience, and accurately judge what that would mean for me?

A Slip, Not A Relapse

I am very angry at myself right now. I was feeling rather horny earlier, having had extended small-talk with an attractive acquantance this afternoon, and was going to mastrabate. My room was too hot, however, and I needed to leave to do a variety of other things, so I said "I'll just find a restroom and mastrabate in between other activities." I figured that I would go to one of the restrooms that are slightly cruisy, and if anyone showed up, then I could look at them as though they were pornography, but not get touchy feely, or do anything unsafe.

Well, of course it took all of 15 minutes for me to get down on my knees, with someone's potentially disease-ridden cock in my mouth. It was someone that I knew, and he's not really the type to let anyone put anything into his mouth or his ass (he's too neurotic and controling for that), so the chances of him having some STD are less than alot of the other guys that do this type of thing, but that doesn't actually matter. Perhaps he's just controling and nuerotic when he's doing the restroom thing, and in other situations he's very open to the idea of being fucked or of sucking someone off. And certainly one can get a disease from being sucked; less likely, but still possible.

And I was trying to rationalize it by saying "I'm just going to watch, not touch. I won't do anything unsafe." Yeah right. I was doing pretty good, until he was like "suck it," and I felt like I just couldn't say no, 'cause that would have changed the vibe to be decidedly much less sexier, and it would have become much more difficult for both me and him to get off, and it would have become very awkward. As it was, it was very exciting, we both got off quick, and we both left satisfied. It was ideal.

I really enjoyed it. What I don't enjoy is the idea that I might have gotten a disease. I've been feeling unusually confident and social lately, so I don't think that I did this out of some sort of social insecurity; but the fact that I couldn't say no to him, even though I knew it was a bad idea, really does seem like a sign that there were some sort of neuorotic social insecurities behind this.

It's so easy to forget that I'm a sex addict sometimes, and that I need to be much more careful about my sexual behavior than other people do. Like, just wanting to watch someone can definitely be a part of a healthy, balanced life. For me, though, just wanting to watch someone almost always leads to something dangerous and neurotic, something that damages my self-esteem, and causes bigger problems too. I feel like an alcoholic, who sees everyone else drinking and enjoying themselves, and not having it ruin their lives the way it did his, and wondering "why? why can't I just be normal? why does this have to be such a big deal?"

The Talker

Yesterday I had The Talker (from two entries ago) over to my room. We cuddled during the rainstorm, listened to English folksongs from the 1700's and 1800's, and shared more affection than sex. It was pretty nice. Yet it was slightly off-kilter as well: it was clear that he had a very defined fantasy ideal of what it means to enjoy someone else's company in this way, and how I should be feeling and reacting to him. My realistic, down-to-earth perspective on what we were doing didn't sit with him so well: he didn't like to be reminded that our affection was based on knowing each other for two days, and thus did not actually reflect how we would feel about each other once we actually came to know each other well (not to say we wouldn't still have affection for one-another; it would just be different). He accused me of not letting go and having fun, which I found bewildering, seeing as I was really enjoying myself.

He slept over. I told him before hand that I would probably move to the floor at some point, because my bed is really small, and really is not sleepable with more than one person in it (or at least not for me; The Talker fell asleep within minutes). So I did so: when I wanted to get to sleep I moved to the floor.

At about 5 am he wakes up, and I'm sleeping lightly so I wake up too. He sits on the edge of the bed for about 10 minutes. So I'm like "what's up?" and he's like "I think I better go," but so cold, and almost accusatory. This both annoyed and worried me, 'cause it seemed really out-of-place and inappropriate, and I was worried that he was feeling distressed, but also annoyed that he was pushing his neurotic bullshit on to me. So I said "Well, it's really early, and you haven't gotten much sleep. If I were you I would stay. But, I guess you have your reasons." I didn't do any more than that, because for someone who was being rational, that statement would have been sufficient to let them know that I wanted them to stay. If he wasn't being rational, then I was just not in the mood to deal with him.

Well he started to get his clothes on. When he got his shoes on, I got up off the floor, so I could give him a hug and a kiss goodbye, then walk him down to the front door. I said to him "I'll walk you to the front door", and he was like "that won't be necessary" and then he left very quickly without saying goodbye.

I laid down in the bed to get some sleep. When I did, I dreamed that I was traveling, over and over again, back and forth from Minneapolis and Columbus. It was fun at first, but after awhile it started to get very tedious and stressful. I was traveling, like, every three days! And things were starting to go wrong: I had to ride all these conveyor belts to get on my last plane, and they were getting smaller and smaller, more rickety, with less safety measures. The openings to get from one area to another where ones I could barely get through. The mechanisms that were in place to grab me and put me on the plane were malfunctioning. Instead, I kept being put up on higher, more rickety platforms, with less places to grab on, and more potential for falling and dying. I ended up in the cock-pit somehow, but that seemed like the wrong place for me, so I went back out on the narrow, broken up platform.

I was so scared. I thought "I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to travel, I don't want to be up here. I JUST WANT MY FEET BACK ON THE GROUND."

And then I woke up.

I'm really enjoying being single right now. I'm really not interested in the drama that it takes to get involved with someone. I don't want to be all emotionally involved with someone, with everything I feel and say being under the microscope. It was fun in the past, and I bet it will be fun enough at some point in the future, but for right now I just want to live a stable life, with a few good friends, a few more acquantances, and very little obligation to anyone else. I'm just not in the mood for anymore bullshit.

By the way, I got my grades from last quarter:

Geology: A
East Asian History: B+
Science Fiction: A

I'm so proud of myself. Now I can say that my I'm valuable because of what I can do for people sexually AND because I can get good grades in my classes : )

Older Men

S'been awhile since I've blogged. I haven't been feeling too talkative lately, I guess. I'm less interested in being active right now and more interested in being passive. But today I feel talkative. Well, not so much right now, but earlier I was.

I met a nice guy today, who was hitting on me and such. I'll call him The Talker, 'cause he was certainly blessed with the gift of gab, and was not shy about using it. He reminded me of the kind of guys you see on infomercials, with their standard-accent speech patterns and snappy, hypnotic catch-phrases (which was much less annoying than it sounds, and though I didn't let on, he was actually really entertaining). I was very attracted to him, and I really enjoyed hanging out with him. The problem? He's almost 40 years old (and he lives on the other side of the country, but to me that's almost a plus). That's 13 years older than me. That doesn't work, not for building a real relationship; however, in this situation in particular it actually works just fine, and isn't going to cause any problems, because he's only in town for a week, and only comes into town around once a year, so he's not looking for anything beyond someone to hang out with and maybe mess around with a few times. The problem is really more of what it reminds me of: my inability to get along with people my own age. I've had this problem ever since I was a little kid, and it kind of sucks. Always hanging out with people older than me puts me into a position of constant inequality: regardless of the real relative experience and maturity of the two individuals, folks tend to see people younger than them as less experienced, less wise, and generally just slightly inferior to them (not in the sense of being worse than them, but just not exactly equal). This wouldn't be so bad if it were only a few of my friends who were older than me, but because they all are I get the overall sense that I'm just slightly inferior to everyone (all of my friends, except The Activist, back in Minneapolis, are age 30 or over. I'm only 26, which isn't so very far from 30, but still...). When I have any power at all in a friendship of this kind, it almost always feel to me as though the other person is allowing me to have power simply out of good-will, or because they're humouring me. In general, I feel like it's just assumed that the other person is the one with the power, and I can like it or leave it, but not change it.

I just wish that someone my own age would come up to me at a bar or a coffee house and start talking to me sometime. Because I'm always invariably being hit on by someone quite a bit older than me, and that people my own age never seem to be interested, I tend to get the feeling that the only thing that is attractive about me is my youth. My thought process is that if I were simply attractive in a general, abstract way, than people my own age would be attracted to me as well as older guys; I would be generaly held to be attractive by the population in general, with exceptions being due to personal idiosyncracy, not on how attractive I am. In reality only older guys are attracted to me (usually from their late 30's on). Because it is only a small, well-defined, subsect of the gay population that is attracted to me (older men) I assume that there is something very specific that they are attracted to, something beyond generic attractiveness (which I have already established I don't have). Assuming that that which is less attinable and more exotic is deemed more attractive, I ask myself "what do I have that would be considered less attainable and more exotic to a group of older men? What do they not have, that I do have?" The answer, I believe, is my youth (rapiding fading youth, but still youth nonetheless). This is very depressing to me, because I won't have my youth for much longer, and then what? What will I have going for me then?

And why the hell is it so important to me to be attractive anyway?

And just because I wrote just a few entires ago that I was being hit on by a younger guy, don't take that as a sign that I'm blowing this whole "older guy" thing out of porportion or anything. That guy just wanted to jerk off in a public restroom with me, and, in general, once a guy has gotten to the desperate point of having sex in public restrooms they're not too picky about attractiveness and such; it was problaby a choice between me and someone who was drooling, and a hunchback, and smelled like nasty gourmet cheeses.

My Brother/Going Home.

I don't know what it is about my brother, but no one can make me laugh like he can. And I mean, like, manic, uncontrolable laughter, the kind of laughter you get when you're a teenager, getting high for the first time. Usually I don't even understand what we're laughing at; something will just strike me as deliciously absurd, or unbearably exciting, and I'll be forced to laugh. And of course if he's laughing too that just feeds my laughter, which just feeds his laughter, and , well, we all know how this goes. For me it usually ends with a slight feeling of nervousness and dissatisfaction with life, which is annoying, but not heavy enough to outweigh the pleasure of the overall experience, so it's still worth it.

Yeah, I guess I'm a little sad that I have to leave him, and go back to Columbus. I'm not as sad that I have to leave my Mom. I do love her, but I don't exactly get along very well with her or anything. Sometimes we have nice conversations, but she has that weird Minnesotan passive-agressiveness that drives me nuts. I mean, having someone make themselves a martyr for you is really not a lot of fun. I guess this is something that all Moms do. The fact that she's from Minnesota just makes it twice as bad.

Well, I'm leaving tomarrow. I've been wanting to leave for the past three days. I'm not wanting to leave so much today, but I'm not really wanting to stay either. I certainly am looking forward to getting back to my little room, bland and strange though it may be, and all the people and places that make up my day-to-day life. You know, this is exactly what I had hoped would happen: my distance from Columbus has made me look at it with more fondness, and living there will be a much more plesureable experience than it has been for the past couple of months.

Must resist urge to type forever...must stick to the point...must not go on random tangent...resist! resist!

Well, Okay, Minnesota DOES Suck, Just a Little Bit

All week long, I've been feeling like I'm on the edge of not being happy, or of not being good-natured. At times I've felt downright mean, and angry at people, in a way I haven't felt in a long time. I think part of this is due to me being back in Minneapolis, 'cause I have a lot of unresolved issues with this place. It actually makes me feel a little sad, the people who live in this mid-sized city, though I couldn't exactly tell you why. They all just seem so flakey and ridiculous, and also kind of pretentious. Minnesotans don't seem to have a lot of emotional control, or a lot of control over themselves in general; and they're always over-compensating by trying, unsucessfully, to keep as much control as possible. Columbusites, on the other hand, seem to be rather gifted at the art of graceful, easy control over themselves. I may think that individual Columbusites are controling themselves in unhealthy directions, but at least they know how to do it.

My description of Minnesotans may surprise some people, given it's Garrison Keiller inspired reputation of dowdy, passive agressive humility; but it's exactly that humility that turns Minnesotans into complete flakes. You see, folks in Minnesota are so friggin' worried about doing the "right" thing, about not offending anyone, about being "perfect." Like, so many Minnesotans, especially the young urban ones, drive themselves insane in their pursuit of doing what they think the people around them want them to be. They second guess everything they do, and worry themselves into a paranoid frenzy. Then, to top it off, they get fanatically idealistic. If you want to disagree with a Minnesotan, you best be ready to be treated like satan himself, because you're not just disagreeing with someone's opinions, you're disagreeing with their ESSENCE, their SOUL. Their whole way of life is being threatened by everything you do that doesn't fit into it.

And no, I'm not just projecting. And it's not just my family either: in fact, my mom and my brother are comparatively low-key compared to a lot of other people I meet. These are the things that I moved away from Minnesota so I wouldn't have to deal with anymore. I wanted to be able to make small talk with a stranger without the risk of sending them into a neurotic whirlwind of self-doubt, full of fear of saying the wrong thing, and, god forbid, not being able to talk constantly so as to fill up all those horrid, painful SILENCES. I wanted to be able to have a debate with someone that didn't lead to an emotional outburst, starting out as an attempt to guilt me into agreeing with them, and ending with them out-and-out denouncing me. I feel like everyone is always trying to goad me into a competition of "who's got the moral highground?" My answer to that question is usually "who cares?"

I mean...Minnesotans take themselves WAY too seriously, and when I get back here I usually start to do the same thing. For example, as someone who has done a lot of bicycle riding in the street, alongside the cars, not for fun but for transportation, I get really pissed off when I see other bikers doing dumb things while in the street: they don't follow the rules of the road, they're not considerate of other drivers...they make everything more annoying, and they give polite, orderly bikers like me a bad name. The eratic and dangerous behaviour of many cyclists 'causes some drivers to get really nervous, and so when they see me on the road they get all sketchy, and start doing things that make no sense, 'cause they're so certain that I'm gonna dart out in front of them or something. This is very confusing to me: I base my behaviour on what I can reasonably expect cars to do in most situations, i.e. I expect cars to drive like normal and not do anything weird. Yet, because of the actions of many other cyclists, cars very frequently do very weird and sudden things when they see me, in the expectation that I myself am about to do something very weird and sudden. This pisses me off, and puts me on edge.

Ok, so when I see some dumb ass cyclist doing some dumb ass shit on the road, like weaving all over the place, darting in front of people without warning, or, horrors upon horrors, DRIVING ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE ROAD, I commonly think something like "thank you, dumb ass, for making everything worse for me." Now if this happens in Columbus, the thought passes through, I feel a quick sensation of sarcastic derision, and they I move on to other things. In Minneapolis, on the other hand, it allways turns into an obsession, in which I start to feel real moral outrage; and the sarcastic bitterness isn't a quick sensation, but a cold knife, ripping into my heart and twisting around for, well, a long time. Like ten minutes. Which I don't enjoy. I don't want to be full of hate. I'm full enough of hate as it is. I don't need to be emersed in this self-righteous, hateful culture; it's everything that I'm trying to move away from, and I slip back into it way too easily. Columbus has been good to me. I'm not going to stay in Columbus for the rest of my life, but one thing I can promise is that when I do move, it ain't gonna be back to Minneapolis.

On the upside, I had a really fun time in Chicago, and I intend to go back frequently. I think that that's probably where I'll move next....

I'm about to leave for Chicago. In just a few hours I'll be on a bus, heading to Cleveland to catch my train.

I'm so excited that I feel as though I may pass out. The fact that I'm over caffenated and sleep-deprived may have something to do with that too.

By the way, I did surprisingly well on my finals.

Heat Anxiety/Global Warming

I think that this summer I'll be able to deal with the heat a lot better than summers in the past, because I have figured out a good method of keeping myself cool: do everything I can to keep my heart rate down. To do this I'm going to do things that seem obvious to me, like dress in light fabrics, and not exert myself too much physically when I'm not in an air-conditioned environment; but I'm also going to do things that seem less obvious to me, such as not let myself get tensed and stressed out, making sure I'm relaxed, confident and happy, so I don't start worrying myself into a heart-racing frenzy. When I'm walking around I'm going to focus on deep, slow breathing, instead of fast, shallow breathing.

Today it was 90-92 degrees here in Columbus (or so I heard), and I felt pretty good. I told myself that I would enjoy the heat, and I did all the things that I described above, and as a result I really did enjoy it.

You know, I didn't always hate the heat (though I do remember many a sleepless summer night when I was a kid), but when realized that the summers were getting hotter because of global warming, I started to get very anxious and angry when it began to get hot out: hot days would fill me with nervous apprehension, while cooler days would reassure me, and make me think that maybe everything was alright. I began to watch the weather for signs of cooling and heating, my anxiety level adjusting itself accordingly. Now I feel just the opposite: because global warming is inevitable, and things are just gonna get hotter from here on out, I might as well get used to it, and figure out ways to be happy and functional in the heat. I'm not helping anyone by being freaked-out and ineffectual for 3-5 months every year, neither myself, my fellow humans, or the earth itself.

I don't feel so good right now: I was just sexually propositioned by a very young, very attractive man, and I turned him down. I did this because I was feeling like I didn't have a choice in the matter, that my compulsive behavior patterns were taking over. I did this because I'm pretty sure I have an STD right now, and I knew that once I got started I wouldn't know when to say when, when to draw the line. I did this because he is a stranger, and for all I know has extra-special STD's himself. I did this because I would have felt like shit afterwords, because he's so young and beautiful, and I'm so not young and not beautiful, and being with him would have just made me feel even more distant from other young and beautiful people, and people in general, by putting up a wall of sexualization between me and them (for I use sexual interactions as a replacement for actually social conncection). I did this because it would just have fed my self-image as a person whose only value is what he can do sexually for others.

But I feel, in a strong way, like I made a mistake; like somehow I'm missing (for I could still take him up on his offer) something really great, which I may never have a chance to do again. I may never have the opportunity to have sex with someone that beautiful again, is what I'm telling myself, and having sex is one of the most important things, for me and for everyone. That's just the way the world works: sex is more important than anything else, and the best person is the person who has, not only the most sex, but sex with the most desireable people. If I could tell people "I had sex with so-and-so," and so-and-so is seen as very sexually desirable , then my status goes up; and I have so little status, and so little worth as it is; the least I could do is make sure I have sexual status. Everyone would envy me, I tell myself. If I don't do it, then people will think I'm stupid, and I'll be derided, or seen as neruotic. In fact, to prove to people that I'm NOT sexually neurotic, that I AM comfortable and knowledgable about sex, then I'd better go have sex with this guy, so everyone will know how sexually healthy I am.

Me and my doctorish friend are very different. In fact, lately I've been feeling as though I don't relate to him at all. It's not that I dislike him or anything; there just seems to be a very wide gulf between us, one which neither of us is very interested in crossing. I don't want to cross this gulf because the place I'm trying to get to is on my side. I assume that he has similar reasons: he likes his side, and wants more of it. The end result of this is that I always feel very distant from him, and I never feel like I get beyond the level of close acquantanceship.

So why, for the fifth time now, have I dreamed that we we're married, or engaged to be married? The first couple of times this happened, I felt as though this was some sort of superstitious sign, and that we were going to get involved. Review of the facts, of my personality and what I know of him, quickly convinced me that this could not be true, and that my subconscious was jumping the gun. Yet the dreams have continued. I can only assume that this is somehow symbolic, that my doctorish friend must represent something that I feel I should have in my life, which I want to incorporate into my personality and "marry" to myself.

Let's see...in this dream we went to Chicago to visit his family and announce that we were engaged. Chicago, to me, represents, among other things, the larger social world, a bigger perspective on life than I have. Well, my doctorish friend has traveled quite a bit, lived in serveral different countries, and speaks several different languages well enough to make small talk. He belongs to several different organizations, and does a fair bit of public speaking. He does seem to have much more of a handle on how to deal with society than I do. This is almost the opposite of me: my life is almost totally focused on ME, with very little understanding of how other people operate, and how to interact with them. On one, very prominent, level I'm proud of this, and am quite happy with this part of myself. I believe that my focus on the personal self makes me superior to alot of other people, who never seem to really get what they're about, or why they do what they do. However, I realize that I take this to an extreme, and that my inability to relate to others, and to navigate my way through the social world holds me back from doing a lot of things that I would like to do. And while I am really good company, just hanging out with myself all the time can get a little boring and repetitive.

So maybe this is it: I envy his ability to navigate the social world, and I wish to make that understanding a part of myself. Though I'm sure there is more to it than just that, perhaps this will bring my desires in this area up to a more conscious level, and they won't need to come out in dreams in order to make themselves acknowledged; 'cause these dreams were pleasant at first, and then thought-provoking, but now they're just annoying, for reasons I can't put my fingers on. Well, we'll see what happens.