Andymatic

And it is Wednesday. Our money discussion went well last night. I’d created a budget for us that outlined how much we both contribute to the joint account, how much we each have in our separate accounts and how much we have left after we pay rent and utilities and all the other things that have a fixed monthly price that isn’t going to change.

RON: What about shoes?

ANDY:What *about* shoes?

RON: What if we want shoes?

ANDY: We can buy shoes. How many pairs do you want to buy a month?

RON: I don’t now. One each? Or underwears?

ANDY: Are these like $130 Nordstrom shoes or $50 gym shoes or BOGO..?

RON: I don’t know. We just have to have a place for shoes and clothing.

ANDY: Yes, that is under entertainment.

The great joy came when Ron found an error in my spreadsheet where I’d been calculating by pay period instead of month - meaning we actually had twice the amount available. This was after he’d started talking louder and louder and eventually forced me to come to the dining room table and write all this out by hand and go over it line by line. As he punched it into the iPhone.

RON: Do you see what you did now? You’re just confusing yourself with that thing. (the spreadsheet)

I’m not going to give it to him this easily.

ANDY: I understand where the error happened. I’m glad we found it together.

RON: You would have turned this in like this if this was a math test.

ANDY: That is why I wanted to walk through it with you.

RON: Do you see what you did wrong?

(a long pause - I make Ron beg for it)

ANDY: Yes, honey. I was wrong.

(he tries not to smile)

ANDY: Stop smiling! I’m wrong! Just add it to the list of things I’ve been wrong about. Then hold on to it tight until you’re ready to lash out at me.

I can never remember the list of things Ron’s been wrong about. Nearly all of this is in jest.

I imagine our kids’s math homework:

RON (on the phone to one of our kids): Okay honey. Yeah go ahead and send your math homework. I’ll look at it when I get into the hotel. Just fax it to the front desk. I’ll make corrections and send it back.

The good news is rent it the biggest chunk of money and we’re hoping to reduce that by a quarter if possible by the end of the year. And Ron’s union contracts get re-negotiated this year so by 2010 he should be making what he would have been making before 9/11.

It is Sunday. Ron is lightly snoring. Woke up to Astro sleeping on top of me purring. Downy is usually at our feet.

Downy has a strange attraction to cords and cables. One his favorite nooks is between the TV stand and our big box o’ cords that we haven’t packed away from moving (you know: every telephone cord, charger and ethernet cable you’ve ever owned). Yesterday he was camped out by the router and cable modem box. I don’t know if those emit warmth or if he just likes being a sentry for something. But a few times a day I’ll check in with him to verify: “Are the ethernet cables okay Downy? Is there anything else you need?”

Usually what he wants is soft food. He’ll stare at you mournfully with big doe eyes like we never feed him. We probably give them some soft food every two days or so. I’ve found any fish-based soft food makes Astro wretch and any kind of soft food makes the litter box unliveable.

Ron and I had a minor tiff yesterday resulting from trying to have a rational discussion while we were both hungry. My explanation that I thought that shopping was a waste of my time got extrapolated and ended up with several hours of silent death march through The Embarcadero. The one highlight was we sat silently on Pier One (the actual pier, not the store) and watched sailboats go by. A quiet walk home and immediate napping helped to remedy our icy schism and things are fine now.

Ron and I got joint-checking on Friday. Bankers are always so tailored. I think I’d like to be a banker because you get to wear a suit and be all debonair all the time (of course, I’m forgetting the masses of bad customers I’d have to deal with on a daily basis). Our guy at Citibank was named Abdul and had long eyelashes and a nice pinstripe suit with an icy pink tie tied in a knot that seemed too big. A joint-checking account will help us track our shared finances together - we aren’t sharing everything yet - but following a monthly budget will be easier if our shared expenses are from one account.

Work was fine this week. I did a fantastic bit of QA that I can’t really talk about but I got kudos from some of the programmers.

I feel like my writing has really gone into the shitter lately. My blogging too. I feel generally bored with most things around me. I think the nihilism surrounding current events was energizing at first but prolonged hopelessness can be draining. It makes me pull in my circle of concern to be less global and more selfish.

I’m going to go back on Zoloft. I’d gone off before I moved here thinking that having more sunlight would help things. But I’ve started having frequent panic attacks and am feeling that slight ‘entropy’ of depression - that slight slowing down. Hitting the gym daily isn’t really repairing that either. I don’t see depression as this crippling force - I don’t want mom and dad to worry about it. Right now I see depression as a tendency - a neurochemical tendency to be less than pleased. Need to get a refill this week.

Got measured at the gym. The good news is though my body weight has stayed the same (about 192# - what the fuck!) I’ve lost about 3% body fat. My chest is getting bigger which is good news. It is odd: Ron’s chest seems to grow deeper and bulgier - my grows wider. Lots of fat loss in my legs. I figure I’ll lose fat in my face next, then back and finally stomach. Maybe I shouldn’t be so self-obsessed with how I look. Maybe it is because I’m gay, or I’m a modern man newly socialized to be ultra-vain, maybe it is a reaction to the out-of-control world around me. Maybe it is the desire to have peak performance in all areas of my life.

Got an awful haircut at a place down the street. $60 later it doesn’t look like they cut anything at all. And I’m sitting in the chair staring out across the street on Embarcadero and there is a goddamn Supercuts across from there. I’m never going to go to this salon again. The haircutter was a nice guy but just didn’t do what I asked. And he implied I should start coloring at my grey hair. I liked the guy in Castro much more that was some kind of retired military guy in a mechanic’s jumpsuit - he had his trimmers attached to a vacuum attachment. Nice tight buzz-cut: ready for the military service or prison term or maybe even a term of service in a military prison. I’ll go back to him. Or to Joe’s barber shop which is also in that neighborhood and manages to be a barbershop booked four weeks in advance.

It is 9:01.

I have too many ideas. I had a fantastic idea for a blog yesterday but I don’t have the time to put it all together.

Astro is running around playing soccer with a fake mouse. We got a big blue rug from Overstock.com and so he can now do his hunter routine of tucking a toy under the rug and then acting like he forgets it is there and then discovering it and attacking it. Downy is sitting on the bed now, sitting on Ron, gazing out at the Bay Bridge.

I find that at work I sometimes get frustrated. I think that I have clear opinions about things - hell don’t we all? - and I think after spending so much time working solo that I just get ate up that things can’t just move faster. Why do we have to do all this talking? Why do we collect input from people whose input shouldn’t even matter? Do I have to pretend that it matters and go and do things our way regardless?

My current literary agent officially said no to a rather rambunctious book idea. It is an idea that anytime I mention to anyone they say ‘Oh my God you HAVE to do that!’ Trying a second agent based off of a recomendation - after that I’ll probably just make it a manifesto or something.

Working on the French and Spanish rights for Blogwild. The publisher hasn’t sold them yet and I figure I should snap them up myself and distribute the books myself.

Had great results at the dentist on Friday. This is a guy we met through a fellow flight attendant and is a Filipino dentist with an all Filipino staff so you know he has to be good. Actually, Dr. Alan Pineda was a very good dentist. Very considerate - always checking in. And h has very soft hands. People always tell me I have soft hands (from piano days but lately I have weight-lifting callouses). But he had soft warm hands like soft warm sourdough bread. I have one small cavity developing in the back that needs to be attacked and then we’ll do some whitening. All this compulsive tea drinking has stained my teeth. But he did say several times that I have perfect teeth and kept asking if I had to have braces. Nope, my poor sister is the one that had to survive a headgear and braces in middle school.

That was a funny line from Will/Grace a few nights ago when Grace talks about how she was popular in school except for the year when she had a headgear - attached to her scoliosis brace. I remember when they checked us all for scoliosis - it was one of the times they separated the girls from the boys - the other time is the big ‘Girl You’ll Be a Woman Soon’ movie where they indoctrinated the girls about their menstrual cycle while I think we watched Empire Strikes Back on video tape.

The new Indiana Jones movie is okay. I really don’t think it could ever live up to the hype foisted upon it but it is fun to see familiar faces back at it. Shia LeBouef is no tough guy and can’t pull off being a sincere greaser unless that was kinda the joke of his character. He’s a schlemiel - that is why he was good in Transformers - he was more of a wuss than Peter Parker in Spider-Man (which we watched on TV last night - God he’s such a WIMP!). But here he is trying to pull up off a greased up do that looks more like a fro than anything else. I was happy to see Karen Allen though they styled her a bit frumpy - she has so much charisma though and I thought it was an apt choice to put her next to Harrison as a love interest instead of a pretty young thing. Cate Blanchett is absolutely wonderful of course with a thick Red-Scare accent. The movie starts out with class Spielberg Americana themes and manages to hit notes of the cold war, the nuclear age, post-war bravado and Happy Days retro all at one time. It was fun to see the movie at the Castro Theatre movie palace complete with NO previews (!) and pre-show organ music and clapping among a primary homosexualist audience that squealed at Harrison’s first entrance and you could hear lesbian hearts a-flutter when Karen Allen finally graced the screen.

I wonder if we’ll always idolize the 1950s? Nostalgia for a past that never happened. TV dinners and Googie architecture pushing down sexism, racism and xeonphobia.

I’ll always love Temple of Doom the most because it is so relentlessly dark, includes Anything Goes in Mandarin and has the best evil temple chant EVAR.

Last night Ron and I kinda admitted to eachother how isolated we feel. I think it is our lack of neighborhood. No, this is not a surprise at all. We live south of the financial district with no color and no culture - just tall concrete buildings. Maybe we can find some place close to the airport-bound train and near a bus that goes to work for me. Our lease is until November - we’ll be fine I know. It is just odd to feel so disconnected. Like I told Ron, ‘There’s nobody that’s glad to see us.’