Beautiful Summer's day - the Guggenheim

In Central Park last weekend

This week was bracketed by two late nights out dancing. Last Sunday, I met up with P, one of the guys I met when I was in New York over Memorial Day weekend, and we walked over to meet a couple of friends of his at a place called The Park. It was a large club with many different rooms, and passageways, but rather small dancefloors, and it was slowly filling with a younger, alternative crowd. The best thing was the music in the main dance floor - music with actual lyrics, mostly from the 80s. We had a great time dancing to stuff like "Pump Up the Jam" - songs I used to dance to during my first round of club-going, not long after I came out of the closet 16 years ago.

On Tuesday night, I went down to Tribeca to meet a photographer, who wanted me to model for him. Tribeca has become a hip neighborhood, and the street on which he had his huge apartment/studio looked like one of those unlikely places you see in movies like "Unfaithful", where striving, young New York artists somehow afford a large apartment with an old fashioned freight elevator. The photographer turned out to be fairly well known. He showed me some of his work, as he talked through his process, and put me at ease. Before long I was posing just in my jeans, and not long after that, naked. I have to confess that I enjoyed it, though, now, after having seen more of his work on his website, I'm not so sure that I'm going to like the end results. He doesn't seem to specialize in glamour shots - more like, here are naked people in unguarded moments. Still, this was all part of my New York adventure.

We've had some beautiful weather this week, and twice, I went out running in Central Park. It's such a beautiful place in which to run, and I feel privileged to live so close to it. Throughout my run I can smell blossom and hear birds calling. Some times you can barely hear the traffic and you imagine you're in the countryside.

I've started working with a trainer at Golds and she's been putting me through what she calls "Total Body Workouts", which are basically sort of aerobic weight-lifting circuits. Tuesday morning, I arrive at the gym at seven in the morning, still a little groggy from sleep, and the first thing I have to do is a set of push-ups; one pushup, then stand up, then back down again, two pushups, then stand up, then back down, three pushups --- and so on up until ten, then back down to one again. Completely out of breath, but no rest, immediately over to a bench where I have to step on and off with one leg, while holding weights in each hand, followed immediately by shoulder presses with the same weights. By the end of the workout, I'm sweating as much as I am after running in Central Park.

On Friday night, I had my first late night at work. And it wasn't even for my project. One of the other projects for the same customer had a Monday deadline, and their main programmer was out with a back strain, so I was drafted in to help out. I managed to get out by seven, but had to return by nine, on an evening of spectacular lightening, and work again until Midnight. As I walked through the fairly light rain, I noticed again the peculiar fad of wearing disposable plastic raincoats - well they're more like ponchos really - that I've seen everytime it rains here. So much for New York being a stylish city. Though, now I think about it, it was probably only the tourists who were conned into thinking that wearing plastic bags in the rain is a style statement.

I'm hardly one to disclaim about style, however, considering my fashion mistake last night. I'd arranged to meet C at Starbucks in Chelsea at 8.00, from where we were going to go for dinner and a movie. I was a little early, so I poked my head into a couple of shops. I was wearing fairly tight jeans and a tight t-shirt, and felt like I was glowing after all my exercise. I'd even received a couple of glances on the subway. Then I looked down at my feet and suddenly realized why the glances on the subway had been accompanied with a smirk. I was wearing odd shoes. How I came to do that, I have no idea. I couldn't fly home quickly enough to change.

Properly dressed now, I had dinner with C at Tea and Sympathy, my hole-in-the-wall English restaurant on Greenwhich Ave, and then we walked down 13th St to the Quad, a smart arts cinema in the Village. One of the greatest things about New York is that it's like living in a permanent film festival. You can almost always find some odd film that isn't playing anywhere else. This one was called "The Embalmer", and was an Italian movie about an extremely short, middle-aged taxidermist with a great personality, who falls for a painfully beautiful straight guy.

Afterwards, we went to the Roxy. I'd been there once before, over Memorial Day weekend, and had pretty much hated it. But since it's the biggest game in town when it comes to gay nightlife here, I thought I'd better give it another try. And I'm glad I did. The crowd and the music were much better than last time, and C and I stayed there until four - my latest night out in a long, long time. My friendship with C, a guy I met not long after arriving in New York, has been moving rather slowly along, largely because I've not been available much to hang out with him. He's a charming, smart, handsome, tall guy, originally from Trinidad. I liked him immediately when I met him, but, for some reason, wasn't physically drawn to him. Last night, though, as we danced together, I suddenly felt that I wanted to caress him. Of course, he was shirtless, and he looked good. Soon, we were kissing on the dancefloor, and things were going a little faster than either of us had expected. (We'd both had a few cocktails.) Not sure exactly where all this is going, but C revealed to me that he'd been interested all along in more than friendship. For myself, I'm not sure whether I'm genuinely attracted to him, or whether it was just feelings of friendly affection fueled by alcohol and the proximity of naked skin that prompted that moment. I hope I'm not playing with this man's feelings.