you don’t learn this in school
i’ve spent the past 3 days pretty much bedridden, cranky with the flu, achy and sneezy and coughy and headachey. i don’t get it—i take a break from boozing/clubbing/sexing for just a few days, and all of a sudden my body decides to shut down.
thank god i smuggled some dayquil back from the states… i can’t imagine how you brits survive colds and flus without proper [speed-containing] cold medicine. i mean, are we living in the dark ages? should i whip out some leeches? ;)
i’m exaggerating a little bit, as i have escaped my flat a few times over the past few days. there were two very significant encounters:
encounter one
over the summer, i was dating a very sexy, very sweet irish lad by the name of brian. brian and i got along swimmingly, and we had plenty of fun nights out and hot nights in… he even helped me move from finsbury park to vauxhall.
brian was 24 or so, was ginger/brown, very dashing, swimmers build, loving personality, and as sweet as pumpkin pie. during my move to vauxhall, though, a few things happened simultaneously:
- we had a pretty bad date
- i purposefully dis-invited him to my flatwarming party
- i lost my mobile phone which contained his phone number
this combination of events resulted in our relationship ending… he never called me, i had no way of calling him, and that was that. in all honesty, he still lingers heavily in my thoughts, as we never properly resolved our relationship… he was a very sweet and gentle creature, and i felt awful for having him think i’m an asshole who just stops calling people.
the last evijhserf entry mentioning brian is from july 27, 2004. since that date, i haven’t crossed paths with him a single time… and believe you me, i have amazing radar for spotting landmines [exes & enemies] when out clubbing.
anyway, last monday, the boys and i decided to leave our comfortable post-boxing day love-in at my place, to head into town for some dancing at .ghetto. ran into several smiling faces, including my long-lost ex stuart who was in good spirits, looking mighty fine, and was nice to me [usually he kicks my ass around the club a bit before throwing a drink in my face].
around 1am or so, salt-n-pepa comes booming across the .ghetto soundsystem, and the dancefloor clears so that .marcos and atif can do their choreographed routine. i’m off to the side, cheering them on, when i spot brian across the dancefloor. dread overwhelms me for a few seconds, but then i muster up the courage to go over and say hi.
he spots me as i cross the dance floor, and a false pleasant smile crops across his face. he has absolutely every right to be angry with me. we chat, i attempt to explain what happened some 5 months ago, and in the end we decide to just let it go. his friends are off to the side shooting me evils, and as brian begins to tell me about his amazing new boyfriend of 4 months, i move in for a kiss.
as we kiss, it all comes flooding back… the mojitos during the summer in covent garden, the mornings in bed sipping coffee and watching teevee… we both look down in guilt/shame/regret, and then he deadpans in a thick irish brogue, this is bahd. this is very bahd, you know? these half-hearted wails of regret continued in the minicab ride home, the next morning, and on our walk to the tube station.
part of me would love to rekindle this romance, but only a small part of me. most of me knows that he has a much better boyfriend than me, and if i really cared for brian i’d keep away—far far away. we’ve spoken on the phone since, and i think the best thing to do is to have a very public, very asexual cup of wholesome coffee in a café surrounded by eyewitnesses.
encounter two
if i had things my way, i would’ve spent the past few days in bed with some chicken soup, watching the 130 episodes of will & grace i have saved on my computer. but, i had a very special friend visiting the uk—one of my best pals from high school, cathy.
cathy and i were the ~`good kids’~ in high school. i was valedictorian, she was salutorian. we were in all the same honors courses together. we were the kids that everyone’s parents liked, that all the teachers liked… we were the golden children that could do no wrong.
left: best singers (jen, my only girlfriend and marty)
center: most gullible (natalie, who dated my cousin, me in the middle presenting the award, matt, my friend from kindergarden through high school)
right: teachers pets (cathy and me, egads)
in retrospect, we were very vanilla… eric only went to a few parties in high school, eric had perfect attendance, eric only sipped alcohol once, eric didn’t date [well... erm...] but, the flipside is that cathy and i were very evil within the walls of our school.
we would tormet substitute teachers, playing games on them [like the one where you take turns humming so that the teacher can't figure out who's doing it], lying to them about what chapter we were on… it got to the point where we were ordering pizzas in class, taking naps on the floor between desks.
the worst thing we did though, and this is something cathy and i spoke about while chilling out at my place this afternoon, was the pear paper.
one of my biggest regrets about high school, was the way that we treated two of our good friends… aaron and scott. i had a big clique of friends in high school, but this clique was very amorphous… each week the dynamics changed, and in a very immature way. one week you could be in, the next week you could be out. when i came back from my exchange student trip to germany, had discovered that i was gay, and decided to break up with my girlfriend jen, i horribly pissed off the clique and none of my friends spoke to me for nearly a month.
aaron was a childhood friend, with whom i had slumber parties and traded baseball cards and rode bikes with. scott was a drama friend, who had a very sarcastic wit and who was lots of fun to be around. for some reason, the almighty clique decided to start inferring that aaron and scott were gay, were boyfriends.
we started rumours, we started tormenting them, and they disconnected from our circle of friends very rapidly. the fire was fanned, however, when my rather obese friend jolene made the joke that scott [who was just a little chubby at the time] was shaped like a pear. everyone started referring to scott as ~`the pear’~, even to his face. scott had the misfortune of living on pearl street, and within days all of the street signs were appropriately altered.
in retrospect, i think that scott was probably gay, that aaron probably wasn’t, and either way it shouldn’t have been any of my business. it doesn’t take freudian analysis to figure out what was going on here… i was hiding my own secret of being gay, my own internal shame, by making fun of scott.
eventually we created an underground newspaper called the daily pear, which was horrendously cruel. my best buddy salem worked in the school office, and was able to make photocopies and distribute them around school. the paper featured drawings and poems and articles, all immaturely making fun of aaron and scott, two boys who had done nothing wrong and, just weeks earlier, had been friends that we had hung out with, had lunch with, talked during class with.
eventually things escalated, with scott getting royally pissed off and threatening us, and in the end we [cathy, jennifer [my ex girlfriend], salem [my best bud] and everyone else] turned ourselves in to the principal. she threatened to withhold our diplomas, prevent us from graduating, but in the end we pleabargained to come in during spring break and help the janitors clean the school.
i came to terms with my sexuality over the next year or so as i settled into college life in california… as i settled into my new life, i started to look back on my high school life with a great deal of shame, and i look forward to the time when i can properly apologize to aaron and scott.
i spent today hopped up on flu medicine, dragging my old highschool chum cathy around central london, buying souvinirs, navigating oxford street and catching up on old times. she helped me fill in some of the blanks about the awful things we did as kids, and i look forward to [somehow] making amends, probably next summer at my 10-year [gasp!] reunion.
