I hope that reading my writing makes you feel like I've just given you a hug. If it doesn't, e-mail me, and I'll have to give you one in person.

1. “Your girl is lovely, Hubble.”
   They put this on Netflix Watch Instantly to torture the sad gay man inside of me.
2. Philosophy vs. Masochism
   The downside of dating a philosopher is that he prizes personal truth seeking over meaningful relationships. The downside of dating a masochist is that your genuineness, a supposedly valuable quality, suddenly becomes a flaw. The downside of dating both is inevitably writing sentences like those two.
3. Here Comes Everybody
   The universality of breakups is simultaneously comforting and upsetting. The cycle of recovery might slightly differ on a case-by-case basis, but underneath it all the pain is the same in its relentlessness, its gnawing.It’s “Relax, everyone goes through this” vs. “Shut up you pathetic cliche.”
4. Hallucinations of women in the nail salon dancing around to “I Will Survive” and feeling empowered.
   I’ve apparently been watching too much Glee.
5. Revisionist history
   There’s a tendency when it comes to break ups, I think, to seize on your depression and use it as a vehicle for “seeing things differently.” This is the broken-hearted’s version of removing the rose-colored glasses, I guess. Combing through the past few weeks in my mind, I search for clues and signs that–had I not missed–could have at least given me some semblance of forethought. (The night I got back from San Francisco and broke out into hives had nothing at all to do with my cat;  When he first said “I love you” I started to cry–out of what I thought was relief but I now see was fear. A Labrador ran up and started licking my ankles. “He wants to play,” his owner said. I replied with what at the time was a sarcastic joke but now seems so much more meaningful: “Trust me, he doesn’t want to play what we’re playing.”)

   When I can’t find any red herrings, I make them up. I convince myself that he was lying, or that I was lying, or maybe even that we both were. In the present, events unfold in one honest way; in my memory, I bend them at the spine, urge them to unfold differently, retroactively applying meanings that allow this present, this awful, messy present, to feel somehow more logical.

6. Death to sentimentality
   How do you make gestures, events, people mean less? I’m not good at that. If I wasn’t so earnest or sentimental I wouldn’t feel things so deeply and it would be easy to float away, unharmed. How do you disengage from compassion? How do you teach yourself that every action that you take, or that others take, isn’t imbued with some greater meaning? Intellectually I’m aware that the subway turnstyle from which I choose to exit will have no literal or figurative bearing on the day’s events, but for some reason I can’t convince my emotional self otherwise. If I take the one all the way to the left, god help us all. This is what we call:
7. OCD
   Or maybe just being a crazy person.

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