Earlier this week Pulp announced a show at Radio City Music Hall, and tickets went on sale at 10am, and when I checked at 9:59 tickets hadn’t gone on sale yet and when I tried to but two tickets at 10am they were sold out already and when I tried to get one ticket at 10:01am that was also sold out and then when I tried again at about 10:04 I got stuck in this endless loop of Ticketmaster wait time.

Argggggggggggh.

I haven’t been to a show, or tried to go to a show, in New York since MIA in 2007.  I am overdue!

The last time I had a chance to see Pulp, when they played Providence touring for Different Class, I was fifteen and trapped at a problem solving conference for nerds.  This was my chance!

Anyway.

Over on One Week One Band this week people are guest-posting about their favorite album closers…  The posts on Blur’s “Yuko and Hiro,” Fiona Apple’s “I Know,” and the Magnetic Fields’ “Take Ecstasy With Me” are all excellent.  I wrote something, too.  I was one of the few (the only?) person to choose an album-ending single and it’s one you’ve probably known forever, even if I didn’t know it myself until I was in my mid-twenties.

Actually, with the move I’ve got all my vinyl with me but none of my CDs, which is part of the reason why I didn’t end up writing about “Bar Italia” or “The Dancer” or “O Girlfriend” or “Constant Craving” or “Glory Box” or “Just Call Me Joe.”  Also, I considered “Jealousy,” but I’ve already written about the Pet Shop Boys there…

Last year, in lieu of making one New Year’s resolution, I decided to resolve lots of things.  Rather than One Big Change, I thought what I really needed was A Bunch Of Little Changes That Might Add Up To Something Significant.  There were 38 items on the list I came up with, ranging from the very specific (eat more vegetables) to the very general (rely less on others.)  Some would be very easy, like look at more art and get glasses, and some would require major work, like getting published more and being more fiscally responsible.

In general, I failed almost completely at just about every action item.

A lot of that had to do with my continued un/under-employment.  I didn’t get glasses because the glasses I want to get are kind of pricy.  I didn’t brush up on French because, even though an organization called L’alliance francaise opened up just two blocks from my home, I couldn’t afford to take any of the classes there.  Being a snappier dresser was also a challenge, although I did do myself a favor by donating most of the older clothes I wore whenever I didn’t feel like doing laundry.

Not to be a total downer.  I actually did a lot of things in 2011 that I’m proud of:  I was profiled in the local alt-weekly (twice), organized a couple of successful readings, wrote (and later spoke) about libraries as safe spaces for queer youth, promoted the debut issue of a magazine and then put out a second issue.  My photography’s gotten better, I actually look in the mirror before I leave the house these days, and in general I’m not in an awful mood.

But none of that pays the bills, and unfortunately that’s really annoying.  I genuinely want a real job–very much so, in fact–and it keeps not happening.   I don’t own a car, don’t pay for cable, don’t have a family to feed, I’m on a cell phone family plan with my boyfriend, and I still can’t manage to scrape together enough money to not be completely stressed out all the time.

This year, my goals are the same:  to read more, to write more, to drink less, to look better, to manage my time better, to be on the internet less and in the real world more (even if that just means music venues and movie theaters.)  I also really want to spend more time with people that I like, because I am spectacularly awful at that.

Really, I’m not.

This month was just a little much…  I’m moving out of my apartment after seven and a half years, and that’s been taking up tons of my time.  That, and the magazine, and my month-long photo project, and job hunting, and family stuff, and events, and stuff and things and crap and so forth.

Honestly I’m really in need of a shake-up, and I’m hoping this move might jumpstart me, even though I’m only going about two miles away.  The constant fretting about money has been getting me down, my diet has been completely atrocious, this moving has just reinforced how completely out of shape I am, and I’ve had very, very little creative energy.  On top of that I’ve been drinking a ton, partly out of boredom and partly because I don’t have heat and partly because I’m not necessarily the smartest about life choices.

Sorry to be a downer… I’ll be back soon, I hope.

On the bright side, the photo project’s going pretty well.  I didn’t get the guy-a-day I hoped for but I’m over 50% and some of the shoots have been really good.  I’ve been filling in the off days with self-portraits, including the one of me pictured above.  I have no idea what the series will amount to, if anything, but it’s been fun to actually be shooting real humans again.

The folks at Ironing Board Collective were nice enough to let me blog for them for the next eight Wednesdays, starting today.  My first subject: Bridget Kelly and Siobhan Martin, the good-and-evil identical twins played by Sarah Michelle Gellar on Ringer.  Which is SO GOOD, oh my God.

It’s official… After seven years (and four roommates) in the same apartment, I’m moving at the end of November. Not far, just under two miles, but far enough that I’ll be spending a lot of time in the coming weeks cleaning out my attic. And my basement. And my garage. And my bedroom. And so forth.  (I’m not a hoarder, exactly, but seven years is a long time for books and papers to accumulate.)

That said, I’m doing one last major thing before I go: You know how periodically I advertise that I’m looking for models for dirty-ish photo projects? Yeah, so I’m going to do one more run of those before I go, as a way of saying goodbye to the place and also as a way to keep my sanity and not stress over what I’m going to do with all of my belongings now that I’m not going to have an attic and basement and garage…

So, if you’re in the Providence area and feel like taking your pants off for me, drop me an e-mail (mixtapesforhookers@gmail.com) and we can talk.

[photo: Guy In My Bedroom, 2008 (?)]

This morning I woke up at 6am to audition for Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, because I saw a blurb in the newspaper yesterday about the show’s producers coming to Providence and, you know, why not.  Also, my financial situation is incredibly dire right now, and I know a bunch of useless trivia, so I thought this might solve some problems.

A coffee stop on the way made me a few minutes late for the first seating, but I hung out towards the front of a line for a long time while reporters and photographers from local media buzzed around.  The line swelled, largely with men in their fifties and sixties, by the time we were called in to take the 30-question written test.  (I don’t know why, but I assumed the crowd would be mostly female.)

We were given Scantron sheets and tests in envelopes.  There were about fifty of us there, although there was seating provided for almost ten times that.  We had ten minutes to answer thirty questions.  I think I got most of them right… (Picasso is the artist whose daughter designs for Tiffany.  “Tequila!” is the 1958 song featured in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.)  I got at least a couple wrong, though…  Though I periodically pretend that I watch football, I thought a torn ACL was a shoulder injury and not a knee one.  I have no idea what popular exclamation was first coined in Kung Fu Panda.  But worst of all, I got a music chart question wrong:  When Jay-Z broke the record for most #1 albums on the Billboard chart, I thought he took the record from Mariah Carey, not Elvis.  That one kinda stung.  (I was thinking Elvis was a singles artist, not an album one, and also I thought the whole point of Mariah Carey was that she broke pretty much every Billboard record there was.)

Even if I had met the producers, I’m sure my surly demeanor and complete inability to outwardly express enthusiasm would have kept me from making it onto the show.  Still, the money would have been nice.

[In honor of National Coming Out Day, an event I have extremely mixed feelings about, one of my stories.]

I came out to my best friend when I was seventeen, via AOL Instant Messenger.  Just moments previously, in the same instant messenger chat window, my best friend had told me he was gay.  He didn’t really believe me and I didn’t really believe him and then one of us called the other one and I think maybe we cried a lot, mostly because we were happy.  And gay.

He was a year younger than me and we had met doing some insanely nerdy thing at school—Math Team? (I don’t know, there were so many nerdy activities.)  Over the next few months we hung out like we always had, but we talked about sex more and more.  We watched Emmannuelle movies on Cinemax and we saw Boogie Nights and talked for hours about how much we wanted to do it with Mark Wahlberg.  A couple of months later, on Valentine’s Day, we started doing it with each other instead.

Valentine’s Day was chosen weeks in advance not because we were romantic, but because it was my mom’s birthday and my parents were going away and I knew we’d have the house to ourselves.  Embarrassingly I talked about my excitement on a variety of internet forums, including completely inappropriate venues like the Suzanne Vega fan forum.

On the big day we walked to opposite corners of my bedroom, like boxers would, and removed our clothing.  Then we went near my bed and had a lot of sex for most of the afternoon.  It was awkward and weird and we discovered that there were things that we liked (ears) and things we weren’t so into (feet).  We used the bed and the floor but we never left the bedroom.  Sex was great, once you were having it.

A week later we went on our first date, as a couple, to see Velvet Goldmine, which in retrospect is a really great movie to have be your first date.  Plus, you know, naked Ewan McGregor.

We remained a couple for several years, although not as long as I remembered, until college and awkwardness split us apart as a couple and, years later, as friends.

In the meantime I came out slowly, to my small circle of friends, one by one, my boyfriend and I semi-seriously having a contest with each other over who would tell more people first.  By the end of the school year (my senior year) pretty much everyone I cared about knew and pretty much everyone I didn’t care about didn’t know.  I liked it that way and, if you feel like coming out, I think that’s a pretty good way to do it.  I only remember freaking out once, when I found out that a good friend had told her parents, but that was fine in the end, too.  (I was just paranoid, really.  It’s not like her parents were friends with my parents or anything.)

My parents were the last people to find out, although that’s because my mother is very dramatic and my father and I don’t really talk.  I told my mom during my senior year of college, around the time a video of mine got accepted to a queer video festival in Olympia, Washington, and she cried a lot and was fine the next day.  I have yet to have a single conversation with my father about this subject.

[image: Ewan McGregor in Velvet Goldmine, kind of the ultimate date movie.]

Coming out of my blogging coma to let you know that we’ll be in New York later this month to launch the second issue of Headmaster.  The party’s at Julius, a West Village institution that I’ve been fond of for a while now.  The first time I went there I had taken maybe two steps in the door before someone offered to buy me a drink.  Not even five minutes later, 7/8 of a Guinness still in hand, someone else offered to buy me a drink.

Perhaps you will also be lucky, if you come to the party.

11 posts on the Pet Shop Boys since Monday and the big party tomorrow.  (Hopefully you are coming!)  The plan for Friday is to crash all day and/or catch up on Torchwood, which I’m already three episodes behind on.  (Although honestly I spent most of the first couple of episodes just wishing the Mekhi Phifer would go away, possibly to an acting school somewhere.)

In any event, posting will resume soon.