So the standard part of my evening adventure was pints with Laser at the local pub, amidst talk of politics, operations research, and faux communities of practice.

But after some delays I finally managed to meet up with Hat, a Taiwanese emigree on the closeted side of things, whose life is crazy enough that he is quasi-nocturnal, always running across the boroughs and impossible to pin down especially when his cellphone is dying and the 7 trains are all running local rather than express which made our attempts to meet on a train car not only twice-thwarted but very slow before we finally reached Flushing because the train skipped Corona and eventually eating with GBF.

That’s not the story, though, as much as the fact that I’ve been chatting up on MSN Donny, a decent, grounded masculine/bi guy whose renounced his family’s wealth and is trying to figure out balance in his life and how to be independent in the city while working for himself, and we’d made some sorts of plans to maybe hang out in Flushing, but it was very indefinite, and up in the air.

But as it turns out, the friend Hat was heading to see was none other than Donny, and so it was outside on the street that we ran into each other for the first time, unsure whether or not to actually acknowledge one another. In the end we didn’t…

Who knew the gaysian community was so damn small?

So the date was perfect. We were chatting for a while over the phone before we finally met.

He drove in from Staten Island. We have Scholar Garden plans in the future.

We started out in the West Village before we both realized that we don’t know any places, which meant we ended up at Pongsri.

Several stories were shared: of mine, these include “Are you Chinese?”, leaving-in-the-middle-of-the-night, the stairwell embarrassment, the pink iPod nano.

I heard all about the once and current lesbian wife, the military boyfriends, the hick bars, and multiple instances of extreme drunkenness.

We did round 2 at duplex, which was a bit much: I want me-serving bartenders not self-serving ones, but the knee contact was more than stimulating.

Somehow at the Stonewall Inn I was so enthralled I barely noticed we were the only colored people there, which meant that we could make all the honorary black women jokes we wanted.

It was and is still early, but somehow I think we felt the date had been so perfect we should end it on a high note.

I walked him back to his car and we stood by the door and we had a kiss (well, three) goodnight in the middle of Seventh Avenue near Perry.

We’d see each other again soon, but then again it is the national figure skating championships this weekend.

I just need to remind myself to take it slow.

So apparently Joephet and I are “dating exclusively” now. I guess I know what that means, unlike all of the past 2 months or so. So I guess my little black book is going back into retirement. And this after I had to rubber-cement the spine back into the cheap 1$ chinatown leathery cover. The most ghetto little black book in the history of faggery.

Meanwhile, I have a sore throat (no homo, please), and this is troubling me, as I still need to smoke, and it fucking hurts. I am such an idiot and should just quit, but this is hard to explain to nonsmokers. It’s like trying to describe how coffee smells, y’know. I will think about this some more and rhapsodize. But it’s worth giving up.

So today there was this proselytizer, shouting in the subway (at Lex), about the coming again of God and some such, and how punishment will be visited upon all those who are “practicing homosexuality, which is gay or lesbian acts…” I was sorely tempted (but lacked the balls, despite the cute, white, pecs-parading T-shirt I was wearing) to rebut, “I’m not practicing! It’s fer reals!”

Hrmm… So yeah, other than being sexy and eating yet more rice, I have little to report, other than the beginning of the weekend, and long overdue with my school friends: hard to imagine that that school is now swallowed by another, and that that little chapter has so fully tied itself up. I have, at least, been thinking more about cool new units for next year, and if I start setting things down now I might actually have a new teaching method for next year. I think that it is more fertile ground than last year, and it’s just a matter of getting started on the right foot and making the right sorts of nods to my kung-fu practicing Chinese ass: maybe I can wow them with some distorted vision of Chineseness, where duck sauce and PFR flow from every orifice, a neverending bounty of wisdom and MSG.

So the Post is still a goldmine. Today, re: the gay high school thing, a 35-year-old sheet-metal worker from Westchester is heard to remark, “There’s enough segregation in society as it is. What are they going to have next black and white school? It’s ridiculous.” I guess that’s all I need to say…

I’m skipping classes today. It’s not a big deal, though, as all my work is done, yet again. I really should find some fun project in Assembly to do in my spare time, except I don’t actually have an assembler at home and hafta schlep an hour and a half to assemble my code. So I should find something fun to do, though I’m tempted to just do some more math, strangely enough: looking up all manner of old work, and hankering to do some writing again.

I’d made great progress on this one short story And there is hope quite some time ago, but I have made little progress since and it’s not yet clear that my protagonist is a chinaboi. Hrmm….

So upon reading Harper’s for the first time in some time, I confess I find it horribly horribly pretentious. It has the post-visceral taint of well-fed white liberalism, if that makes sense. The extended essay on dissent is more rambling than a drunken me. Maybe I am allergic to higher-quality paper, or the pooh-poohness of it all: this is simply not muscular prose, it is too upholstered in a florid print. I guess it’s also already long-obvious the things pointed out: the similarities between the present American imperialism and that of a century ago. So maybe I’m jaded: I guess I’m curious as to what the demographic for this magazine is, as well as what the further-left reception is (not great, I’d imagine). To think that I’d once wanted to work for these guys…

Ah, yes: the Post, which I read as my daily dose of right-wing nonsense, and also for signs of cracks in the Bush edifice, which is actually happening blessedly more and more often, today has a second headline of “Gay High,” which is apparently just good ol’ Harvey Milk given a head. Hrmm… I guess it would be nice to be able to bring Joephet to school, but at the same time, I feel as if I am ill-equipped to deal with quite so much high school bujiiness. Still, one must give some thought to the Conservative Party Chairman Mike Long’s query, “Is there a different way to teach homosexuals? Is there gay math?”

Well, I can say from personal experience that in gay math, combinatorics (how many outfits?) is much more important. And your word problems tend to be set at Sephora. But that is an inside joke. And I am a terribly dressed gay math teacher, hehe, so I was famous for the (illustrative) question, “Mr. Hu has five dress shirts and one pair of pants. How many outfits does he have?” It’s great to be able to deflect your students’ accusations of buggery with a simple, “Not with these shoes…”

So I lost the previous version of this post, which I was writing when I had just gotten back from Bessie’s in Connecticut–Glorious (which is what I said before too, cuz it’s true), laid back, no rush, no schedule, outdoorsy, historical and quaint, but just perfect weather and a river that is much more pleasant where there is no danger of actually drowning, even if the twelve-year-old who saved your life last time too is still around to throw you a rope again if necessary. So floating in the river on an inflatable (inner tube), happily browning (like Elizabeth Barrett, only more so), and occasionally stretched out Christ-figure-like like Gatsby at three in the afternoon. Bessie is the ideal hostess, and I have a newfound appreciation for perfect gins-and-tonics (I love the idea of that pluralization, especially given how it should be “standersby” or “passersby”), though inebriation is dangerous (Someone: “Yeah, half of Yale is gay.” me, unintentionally, talking literally about bodies, not other dichotomies: “Is that the top half or the bottom half?”) when you are in a crowd of similarly educated fofolks where it’s possible to end up in extended disputes over whether a marsupial pouch is actually an orifice (of course it’s not: it’s not internal).

So charades was great, even if classed. Abstract nouns/ideas (“integrity”, “continuity”) and crude sexual slang are very effective, as are sundry organelles. We actually devised a sign for “abstract noun/idea” which is wiggling your fingers on both hands above your head. It’s also extremely frustrating to get as close to “Trinidad & Tobago” as “Trinity & Toboggan” and then run out of time. Ya can’t win ‘em all. And pancakes are delightfully acceptable carbs.

Ah, Bessie. Maybe I’m a little tipsy on slightly watered-down Maker’s Mark, but she really is the “best girl in the world.”

Oh, yes: I got a letter (which is pretty morbidifying in its own way) from the organ bank recently. So it turns out that if the teaching and leftism don’t work out I can always be an eye-banker….

So I’ve been a marvelous juggler. Today since hitting the college library again I’ve been bouncing all around yet more modal logic, some philosophy of math a la Hartry Field, and William James and Pragmatism. And I can hold each in my head, separately. But this of course does not compare to what I was doing last night, which I can now shamefacedly confess–I was half-consoling my friend Boston, chatting with Joephet on the phone about my tendency to be mean to him (for all the obvious reasons), and performing a running commentary over IM about this really bad gaysian porn I was watching with Kean. Yeah. All this at the same time, somehow. I had considered writing at length on that particular porn, but that would be very Albert freshman year. I just don’t know that it would quite change anything.

Beyond that, a wonderful moment at Borough Hall in Brooklyn on the 4 train when a family walks in, and the matriarch (grandmother) mutters about one of her grandkids, “I really hafta get rid of one of them,” to which I promptly reply, “I’ll take him!” Something about 3-year-olds which is so vulnerable and beautiful and full of hope.

Crabs are good for your dick.

Some philosophical asides: Life is great as far as logic goes, I’m waking up more than I have, and I think I can make all sorts of new use-mention jokes because I have been reminded of pointers. This business–the machine-language, assembly, higher-order language business–has also made me think more in terms of linguistics, especially those aspects which line up of course with the philosophy I’ve been interested in, some watered down version of Wittgenstein. But I am also realizing that the sorts of in-jokes, half-asides and flexing (as the old term used to go for showing off in class, back in college) that this instructor for the Discrete course engages in is no doubt how I do teach my high schoolers and how I would teach at the college level, if that ever again presented itself. And it’s fucking annoying. Mostly because you can’t make technically precise jokes to an intro-level class….

I am growing out my facial hair in recognition of my current non-dating status. The same for my hair, which has grown rather unmanageably long in the back. I figure it’s worth a shot, and might help me look more hard-core. For whom, I don’t know.

Beyond that, today was a lazy time, with eventually a brief walk with Jet up and down Broadway–yes, I have a Chinese buddy named “Jet,” withthe exuberance that only comes of jabbering in Chinese–my intonations are all different, somehow, and indeed my personality. Dealing with bilinguals is like dealing with two people, really.

Today was also the first day in quite some time that I’ve worn my old Florida YSP shirt, which has on the back many names, including that of one Michael Hunt (that’s not a circumlocution–that’s usefully-mentionally correct!). But in any case, I’m at the pizza place (pizza has again become a staple in my commuting to classes) wearing this shirt, which in standard math/science camp fashion has an odd agglomeration of things: Gauss’ Law, a DNA helix, a Spanish fort, a Pascal syntax bit, a crab. Well, the Mexican pizza guy recognizes the crab, at least. He starts saying, “congrefos” which is evidently Spanish for crabs. In any case, after going on for a bit about how los chinos like their crabs, he starts talking about “pito”. Then he starts flexing his arm and saying that crab is good for your ‘pito.’ Or so it appeared. Hrmm… So yes… thankfully, with the help of the Slavic counterman, I was able to figure out that crabs are good for your dick. Lobster too.

Home now from dinner, stroll, sit, and about 20 cigarettes along the way with Kenneth. Good and bracing, that–an opportunity for more honesty and useful discussion than with hets who are speaking the wrong language or fags with whom there is undue sexual/romantic tension. So it’s nice just to talk without consequence, as it were, where one’s travails might actually be instructive–I certainly haven’t learnt anything from them. Frightening, though, the personal psychosexual geography of Union Square (and this does not mean psycho and sexual, it just means psychologically-sexual, hrmm.. which loses something in the necessary qualification) and those Village-ward bits: again this notion of secret history, of reminders, of slow accretion.

But no, at the risk of condescension (which is with every utterance with me, after a fashion), it’s good to see a sharp kid who reminds me in the good ways of myself at that (st)age. And since I’ve already made all those mistakes…. hrmmm… youthful indiscretion by proxy, neh?

And imagine: a fag who’s on time. I guess he’s new… Well, cheers. There is hope. Just a matter of whether there’s some for me too…

It’s amusing thing to do archaeology-by-way-of-receipt. What then, is to be made of the following (“fer-reals”) order I placed today at AllDirect.com? As the old motto at math camp went, “This will not end well”:

1 Assembly Language Programming for the IBM PC Family

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1 LSAT

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1 Sex And The City 3 – The Complete Third Season

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1 Orientalism

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1 Gunga Din Highway

But beyond this petty commerce, today has been thoroughly lazy, aside from the obligatory lifting. Classes begin tomorrow, and so I go back to a minor grind. Amazing how fast this summer has already moved, but I suppose I have let myself lose myself. But it’s not hopeless.

Oh, yes: I’ve realized that gay New York is basically like a generic-brand raisin-bran cereal: some tasty fruits (somewhat dessicated), but mostly just flakes. Not that this realization is new–the conceit, though, is.

So back again from a night at the Beer Garden, this time with Joephet and his fam and birthday boy Dannis. Not to mention Betsy. Or at least I try not to. A good set to have fallen in with. No subequatorial stirrings of note despite the proximity to Joephet, which is indeed well-due progress, I must say. So it’s going to be OK, and already is. Difficult to imagine a week ago, which was so marooned and desolate and without hope. Now there is sort of passing acrimony matched with nurturing friendship, which was probably the way to go anyway. New joke, “This is the monoGAMest I’ve ever been.” Must be the buzz talking. It’s a joke because of the acronym GAM. If this needs further explanation, maybe you should read the handbook. Am I hardcore, or do I just pretend? I guess a whiskey, a Lucky, and a Zippo are all that I need. But no, drunkenness is ineffable, even from the inside–and of course a roving eye is always good, though the lighting is not Web-quality: the red lights at the Web make everyone look white. But not quite right.

White makes right.

The 60s managed to win equal whites.

So it goes.