Hot City Blues:

My sister is as into getting pictures taken of herself as I am into NOT getting pictures taken of myself. It's a symbiotic ying and yang, as I have discovered.

This set, as well as the next, were taken in Central Park, when she visited me before leaving for college.

The subway car stops, grinds to a halt.

All that can be heard is the occasional drop of water against the metal of the train. Not a breath. Not a whisper. I muffle the ear pieces of my iPod with my hand so I can hear all of this and not disturb it.

"There's water on the tracks, please continue to be patient. We will be moving shortly." The conductor intones. The MTA are ridiculous about repeating the same message over and over until something gets fixed.

It's still silent. The only exception is the occasional whine of stubbon train equipment, as the driver attempts to get the train moving. It's a very small, very weak noise of protest.

Turning my journal pages to write this makes them rustle conspicuously. It's that quiet.

The second of the three people in the car (third being me) shifts in his seat. Nothing. Whine. Water drop. Nothing. Breath. Whine. Nothing. Water.

The silence is uncharacteristic. We're deep in the world, far from the noise of the city. Far from the noise of other trains. It's oddly soothing.

Suddenly, a loud "SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSH" of steamy noise comes though and is silent. The whir of compliant machines.

"We are returning to Lawrence Street. Water on tracks has created an unsafe condition."

The train churns back into action, and we slink backwards. The silence is gone.

What do you usually do on Sunday?

Recouperate and catch up. Sunday, now with my new job, is usually the day where I relax and catch up on sleep and whatnot. I fool around in my jammies, sometimes get cleaning done.

Right now I am contemplating playing World of Warcraft, sleep off a lot of drug-related exhaustion, and maybe get some cleaning done. Sundays are rightfully welcomed as a very boring day.

If Danny was the one person who gets the most photographed, Rick would be the person who tolerates it the best.

Sources say that he's famous on the Internet, but I just think he's a pretty nice guy who has good taste in music. He plays video games a lot.

You've met Danny. This is Chris. Chris is one of my best friends online, and I recently got to meet him in person and spend the weekend with him. He's a film student who is moving out to LA right now to attend film school. I suggested that he use these for his impending IMDB profile. He still laughs at me.

I wish everyone had a friend like him, because I consider myself horribly lucky.

I'd date him if I could.

If you had a band, what would you call yourselves?
Question submitted by Zoot.

This is really hard, because honestly, this all breaks down on a genre-aic level. That's not even a word. I know. Shut up.

Alt Rock/Indie: Sun Cato
Those words drifted into my head on a very hot day in Brooklyn.

Girl Pop: The Glitterettes
My old coworkers and I thought this up - Kristina, Victoria and I used glittery sale paper to make name tags. Kristina was silver, Victoria was blue, and I was pink. Kristina was the smart one, Victoria was the pretty one, and I was the ho. Margaret Cho, eat your heart out.

Nu/Metal: Mnemonic
I'm sure someone else has this name. I used this made-up name back in 8th grade to spoof people into saying they liked a band that didn't exist. I used to have fun catching people in lies. I was a messed up kid in middle school, needless to say.

Hip-hop/Dance/House: MC Stopdots
This is a shout-out to my fucking nerd hard-on for World of Warcraft. Anyone know of that one sound file of the overzealous guild leader telling people how to run a raid? "OKAY NOW STOP DOTS!" I decided to use that as my MC name. I even made up part of a rhyme for all my Gnomeregan fallen:

This is how we roll on BoPs
level 20 drops
BoEs outside of World Trees
easy freeze when I'm macking with my frost mage Gs
If y'all from Gnomer throw your green arms in the air
If y'all from Gnomer wave 'em all around like ya just don't care

Yeah, that's about it for now. If I think up anything else that rivals this answer in profundity, I will gladly edit it in.

I think I might do this every Wednesday, remind me.

http://www.chemsetcomics.com/ - This is one of the newest blog/comick groups to start up (so I take it) from a lot of gifted creators/writers/artists. The comic on the front page, 1 Way Ticket, is done by chrisarrant (who is a personable motherfucker and a good writer), and cocopiazo (another Daniel! But he's also supportive and mysterious), who happens to write/art Cocopiazo, one of my favorite SLG comics. Both of them are talented and I look forward to reading more of this rock-and-roll comic. Incidentally, both of these blokes are responsible for kind of kicking my ass on the artistic front and for getting my Vox blog up and going. (Thank you, Chris.)

http://normallife.livejournal.com/81110.html - This was linked on Warren Ellis' blog, and I read this and cried. It's just really sweet and heartbreaking. The art is amazing, by the way. I envy those with such a distinct style.

It's very recently that I've become single, and even more recently that I've decided to toss myself into the realm of Singlehood - that state where you emerge from the ashes of the breakup and become the half-feathered phoenix-chicken of Dating.

This is always a state of confusion for me than anything, considering that my dating MO has consisted of long-distance relationships, primarily started with internet-based friendships.

You'd think that now, because I live in a city that's chock full of people (and hopefully cute, geeky, single ones), that it would be easy to just pull myself up by the bootstraps and walk out the front door to my new life in the dating scene. But it's not. How do you change someone who's used to dealing with people over a text-based medium? Voice chatting? E-mails?

I don't do bars and coffee shops. I live in Staten Island. It's really just not as feasible of a possibility as one might think. Plus, I am sure I have the stink of "socially inept" nerd on me as I shield myself from the sun and play yet another hour of World of Warcraft.

So what does someone like me do?

Hit up social networking sites so as to meet city people who are also online. That way I know that they are at home rather than trying to find them outside. Seems pretty smart to me, if I do say so myself. Too bad that most of the people also using these sites are nerdy but crazy. (which is probably true for myself.)

I had a meet-up last week with an unfortunate person from OKCupid, and as I reported on my LJ, it left a bad taste in my mouth:

He talks about HIS past relationships, which number two, and are only this year. A late bloomer, no biggie. Um, except that he explains that he was a shut-in and "decided to research in order to jump in with dating girls." I believe that the words "female anatomy books" "vulva" and "sexual techniques" were used. WHOA. Hello here, are you being antisocially pragmatic or are you trying to scare me off here? Did you ever read about how to talk to women?

Anyways, I pass it off, laugh it up, and he goes on to tell me about his exploits (all 2 or 3), which just seemingly come out as awkward and weird and one of his stories ends up being "...and it went pretty well and I ended up fingering her." Now at this point, between him explaining about gaining a foot fetish and comments about "not needing a serious relationship", I just lost it, thinking back to [a fairly infamous forum poster who spoke of something similar]. Of course, our little Don Juan here needs explanation to why I am almost heaving for breath against the side of a brownstone so I explain it to him. He laughs as well, ironically, not realizing that he's just as pathetic sounding.

Yeah.

And finally, to wrap up this delicious evening, this happened:

We get up to his apartment (oh wait, NO, his PARENTS, but hey they are on vacation blah blah where have I heard this before) and he does indeed have a really cute pug named Spanky. I am a sucker for dogs. He offers me water and we sit in the dark, which is okay becaus he has AC, it's cold water and it's a hundredfuckingdegrees outside. As soon as I set that glass down for a prolonged pause, and go to look at him to talk, he's pretty much trying to kiss me.

UGH. UGH. UGH. No tongue, but still, KISSING ME. I pull back and go, "Um, no, no no..." and he kisses me again, and I'm REALLY pulling back, going "Um, no. SORRY. Not attracted to you." And he gets this really confused look on his face. "You mean, like, don't want to do this?" "yes." YES DUMBFUCK. >(

He gets this really hurt look and sits back, looking pouty. I go through the song and dance of saying how there's no chemistry, that whole "don't go into something with expectations" and he's hiding being pouty and angry. "This always happens to nice guys like me."

What?!

Yeah. I pretty much tried to be as sweet and gentle as pie because I wanted to get out of there. "Just want to be friends." "Don't feel that chemistry." So we stop the whole talking thing and he takes me downstairs to say goodbye. I still feel kind of bad, he seems like a nice if not pretty inexperienced KID, and I go for a hug. Hey, bygones by bygones right? I know I told him I know how it feels to be rebuffed into the "just be friends" zone. And he pulls back a bit.

"Hugs are kind of a tease, aren't they?"

I hug him forcefully and ask for directions to the 1 train and fucking turn my Ipod on.

Sure, it was no "How Not to Act on A J-Date" but it definitely freaked me out from dating from people online.

I mean, is this the standard? Are the people you meet online, even in your own city, going to be crazy people? I've had luck before but not on OKCupid, only places where I could actually get to know the person in a non-"wanting a date" scenario. So that kind of cancels out any dating or social site because everyone on there is pretty much vying for the same thing unless they are already dating someone.

The thing that gets me is how inept some of these people are. It's not just like, you go onto these sites and are a little bit lonely - that's me in a nutshell. It's like the people signing up for these services do it because that, to them, seems like the perfect place to unleash their campaign of poorly written private messages or instant messages on women who they think "r cute" and "wuld want have sex." What's worse is they think it will work. I think dating sites potentially breed the delusional, and because they are online, the ridiculously socially backwards. How could anyone with two brain cells to rub together think that assaulting a woman about how pretty her mouth is and in poorly-written English how they should get together with her think that she's going to roll over and have sex with them? Seriously now. All she's going to think is that she's annoyed or alternately (and this has crossed my mind), be kidnapped to some bondage lair to be gibbered at in broken Internet English ("lol") and turned into a lampshade.

So, my thoughts are this: If you are a geek or even a normal person in a city, it's like being a very sad lion. You are one great awkward beast in a sea of hyper-smart, super-fast zebras. Sure, the numbers are there, but you are never going to catch one, and the ones you do are the ones that the herd are trying to cull for genetic purposes.

So all the sad lions go home and continue checking message boards, alone, and playing World of Warcraft.


Someone needs to invent a filter for the crazy online. All I want is a single, attractive, intelligent person to hang out with and have fun with who lives nearby, if possible. I know there's some other saddish lion out there. Too bad we're all too scared to venture back outside, for fear of some retarded zebra breaking into our house to assault us and drool.

Danny, who I mentioned before, is one of my best IRL friends. I take more pictures of him than anyone else, so if you are somehow uncomfortable with seeing lots of pictures of guys (him in particular), you might want to look elsewhere.

These two pictures obviously involve Claudius but I have a lot more pics of Danny because he's the most willing portrait subject I have.

And where does it come from?