amazing powers of deduction

The weather steadily improves, but there is nothing to be done. The city will either turn on our gas or they won't, the G.I.Q. will either disappear or he won't and I will either sleep or I won't.

Everything brightened for a moment last night with oysters and Sancerre in Grand Central, but the third evening of restive non-sleep has made me a bitter, reactive individual this morning, in spite of the Tuesday morning cafe au lait treat.

I'm pretty sure Peter peed in the bathroom sink last night. If he did not, I apologize for besmirching his good name, but the sink smells like a urinal and I sure as shit didn't do it.

temps nuageux, day four

Did not, in fact, dance last night. For better or for worse.

Em came over and between us we put away a take-out Italian dinner, a bottle of Malbec, Love Actually and a whole box of Oreos.

For all the blues that tango can cure, there are some of the terribly persistent variety that may require a stiffer remedy—in the form of dunking cookies into mugs of milk and pretending not to tear up at Colin Firth's proposal skills in português.

This weekend was a hard one. I was sad going into it and sad coming out of it—with intermittent bursts of irrational anger, loneliness and overall tedium. The mean reds plus panic and late onset insomnia. Aren't I a bowl of cherries?

My favorite moment: coming home to shave my legs on Saturday night (on the pathetic off-chance I might run into the G.I.Q. at the All-Night) only to find myself shivering in the shower with a clogged drain and no hot water.

the dregs before the ides

If tango has given me anything, it has given me the ability to take a suck-ass Saturday night and end it with dancing—just by showing up at a milonga. Tango is the perfect place to retreat, where in spite of the obligatory small talk one is allowed to shut ones eyes and say nothing for minutes at a time and let the hours go by.

And so concludes a horribly blue weekend: one spent ducking the gale force winds and getting rained on, suffering from a lack of communication with a man I fear isn't good for me and spending a lot of sad time by myself. I suppose everyone needs one of these humbling failures every once in a while, but it makes the return to the workweek almost unbearable.

"What did you do this weekend?"

"Wallow in self-pity."

See? Right there. No way to start a Monday.

Meanwhile, I am angry. Angry at my landlord for being incompetent, angry at Peter Pan for drinking, angry at myself for allowing a lack of attention from the gentlemen quarter plague me, and angry at the weather for adding insult to injury, for heaping miseries onto an otherwise miserable weekend and for making it very difficult to sleep.

It is gray outside—almost oppressively so. The wind has stilled and the rain is on hiatus, but I expect it all to come crashing back the minute I try to go outside. But go outside I will, because there is more dancing to be done. And even though (this weekend anyway) tango has become a solitary activity, I am counting on it to keep me going.

on the relative perils of infatuation

In a fit of independence (or was it self-indulgence?), I have taken my rainy Friday blues home to my empty, cold apartment (bumbling slumlord has cut the gas again) and taken refuge on my big blue couch. I've ordered dinner, I'm drinking Chianti right out of the bottle and I'm about to pop in the masterpiece that is the BBC Pride & Prejudice. May it soothe me in my self-induced (or was it the weather?) depression.

The G.I.Q. still looms on the periphery, though his attentions have been sporadic at best this week. I crave him irrationally and often, and while I can't quite shake the doomsday feeling that he will one day—perhaps sooner than I would like—wreck me, I cannot bring myself to stop.

hear me whimper

Will someone please explain to me the particular weakness of the female sex that immediately interprets two days without communication as the death knell of an affair?

jane austen on love

"She was humbled, she was grieved; she repented, though she hardly knew of what."

Elizabeth Bennet, Pride & Prejudice, 1813.

the moon bores of me and starts to wane

Back and underwhelmed with the present state of my reality. As soon as I suck up enough air and start sleeping enough to properly function, I'm sure I'll have plenty to say.

In the meantime, I've got those What The Fuck Am I Doing With My Life/Doesn't Anybody Love Me/Wanna Be Back On That Sailboat Blues.

Brief update for those who may have been paying attention:

• The G.I.Q. did not forget about me and, while things with him are perhaps as tentative as ever, I remain thrilled daily by the thought of him.

• My job was not hijacked as such, but I was informed that I am (personally!) to raise $150,000 by December. Or else.

• Had dinner with The Pilot last night during his 14 hour layover from JFK to LGA. How very strange the dice of the world if you only let them roll . . .

• I'm singing on stage again in April, hi-ho, hi-ho.
  

• And—finally—tonight is Em's belated birthday dinner, the thought of which is all that's keeping me slogging forward through the sleep-dep delirium of today.