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    Weekend

    Whew. Fever-pitch week. Friend whose boyfriend dumped him a few weeks ago decided to break Rule #1. He–not making this up, guys–showed up at our hang-out looking for my friend. Found him. Proceeded to tell him, “You know our friendship is very important to me.”

    “It’s not that I don’t care about you–you know that, too, right?”

    “I miss having you around.”

    “You have no idea how hard it was for me to break up with you.”

    You can imagine the rest. I showed up about halfway through this particular scene and took a post on the opposite side of the bar until it became clear that it was Intervention Time. I put on my best clueless-American-being-heartily-friendly act and wandered over. “Evan! [blink-blink] Have you been here the whole time? I just got here ten minutes ago.” I gave him the chance to give me the look that says, “Now isn’t a good time” and got the look that says, “Help!” Luckily, he’s a strong-minded guy, so he just needed an hour or two of being listened to. I still entered the weekend kind of drained.

    Luckily, Atsushi was here, which always improves things. When we went out for dinner last night, we were, purely by chance, given a private room at the restaurant. That was not only nice but also useful, since when the waiter brought our lamb ribs, he deposited moist handtowels next to the plates and said, in that gravely expressionless waiter voice, “To enjoy it to the last morsel, you’ll have to pick up the bones and eat the meat off them.” So Atsushi and I got to sit on opposite sides of a table and watch each other hungrily sucking meat off bones. Put me in a very…you know…primal mood.

    Speaking of primal–or rather, atavistic–I also polished off While Europe Slept . Yet another reason to be glad Atsushi was nearby, since reading deeply disturbing stuff like that is always easier when your man is reassuringly at the other end of the sofa. And it was disturbing, though a lot of the reportorial details are familiar if you’ve been paying attention to the news over the last several years. Some passages also seem to be adapted from this essay of Bruce Bawer’s a while back (not that that’s a problem). In a way, the flat-out atrocities and terrorist acts weren’t as rattling as, say, this passage on p. 57, which made me snarf my Earl Grey:

    In many Western European countries, indeed, some laws are different for natives than for immigrants. For native Swedes, the minimum age for marriage is eighteen; for immigrants living in Sweden, there is no minimum. In Germany, an ethnic German who marries someone from outside the EU and wants to bring him to her to Germany must answer a long list of questions about the spouse’s birth date, daily routine, and so forth in order to prove that the marriage is legitimate and not pro forma; such interviews are not required for German residents with, say, Turkish or Pakistani backgrounds, for it is assumed that their marriages have been arranged and that the spouses will therefore know little or nothing about each other.

    I live in a country in which there are different rules for natives and foreigners, but here–quite justifiably, as far as I’m concerned–the laws favor, you know, the natives. (I try to hold out hope that the normally-exacting Bawer is misinterpreting something in the German legal code, but the phrasing he uses neither is ambiguous itself nor seems to refer to the kind of policy that could easily be misrepresented.) Sheesh. (See also this by the Grand Stander.)

    Added on 6 March: My parents and I kind of have an arrangement whereby they treat Atsushi like one of the family but we don’t discuss gay stuff head-on. I’m amused, though, by the way their Christmas present to him always manages to seem subliminally racy. Here’s this year’s:

    inajam.jpg

    Yes, yes, “Intercourse, PA” is a cheap schoolboy joke. But still, my parents live at the edge of Pennsylvania Dutch country. Every town significant enough to have a crossroads has some little collective of farms that makes jelly and relishes. There’s nothing easier than NOT choosing the ones made in, of all places, Intercourse.

    Of course, my thinking is probably affected by last year. This was what arrived for Atsushi for Christmas 2004:

    twinsticks.jpg

    As I said at the time, to the extent that I could form words while laughing, “I would call this a coded message of approval for our relationship, but I’m guessing there wasn’t quite that much subtext intended.”

    8 Responses to “Weekend”

    1. I’m waiting for the Berkeley library to get it. It only took them 50 emails to order Malkin.

      Alas, Bawer is the sort of thinker Sully might have been had he not imploded

    2. Sean Kinsell says:

      It’s worth it for Cintra’s description of Heath Ledger’s sideburns. “Like someone bookended his face with horsehair epaulets,” I believe.

      And I know it’s completely quixotic, but I still hold out hope that Sully will come back down to Earth at some point. That he’s kind of having his career mid-life crisis in public through real-time posts is embarrassing, but he certainly has the stuff to be able to right himself, eventually.

    3. Alan says:

      Yeah, Cintra was out of control! Her comment on Charlize Theron’s Bjork-themed frop was hilarious.

    4. Intercourse, Pennsylvania?

    5. Regarding Sully, there’s a malady afflicts public intellectuals, having gone out on a limb, they tend to saw it off behind them rather than face ignominous retreat

    6. Gaijin Biker says:

      At least it was PA jelly, not KY jelly.

    7. Sean Kinsell says:

      Gaijin Biker:

      Yeah, nothing worse than being born in the wrong commonwealth, huh? : )

      beautiful atrocities:

      Yeah, I know. You kind of have to be an arrogant bitch to begin with to do the kinds of things you need to do to become a public intellectual, and then when one of your pet beliefs collides with reality, the same arrogance makes it hard for you to back down. I still wish they wouldn’t pull that crap.

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