Photo by Camilo, taken Dec 30, 2003

I've been trying to nap for the last hour, but I never was very good at napping. No matter how tired I am, and no matter how urgently my body is crying out for a break, if it's not bedtime my mind doesn't want to switch off. The afternoon was an exhausting one. First, I met Phoenix in Chelsea to go to the gym. Before working out, I imagined I wouldn't have much energy. I'd even been falling asleep on the subway downtown. But working out with someone else seemed to push me into feeling more vigorous. Perhaps it was the drive to not let Phoenix lift more weight than I could. We did, in fact, push round about the same amount of metal around, although Phoenix has a more immediately impressive chest than I do. Despite years of hard training, my pecs remain a little dissappointing. I always say that it's biomechanics working against me. Take the bench press for example. Since my arms are so long, it means I have to push the bar at least a third further than most people, in order to get the full extension; all that potential energy wasted (remember your high school physics).

Afterwards, I grabbed brunch while Phoenix got his hair cut, and then we walked over to Best Buy on 6th Avenue where Phoenix required my moral support while he picked up his new television set. Phoenix is a worrier; he could easily have accomplished the task on his own. But he worries that he won't be able to get the television into a taxi by himself, and so on. By this time of the afternoon, the earlier mild temperatures had dissappeared, and a cold rain had begun. Sixth Avenue was crowded, both on the street and on the sidewalks; taxis honked, street vendors played boom boxes, and it was in general a huge, noisy reminder of why I prefer the relative peace and quiet of San Francisco.

Still, I reflected that it's really nice to have two good friends here in New York. Phoenix has his flaws; he's terribly unpunctual, he worries too much, and I don't always follow his train of logic; but he's great company. I'm going to the Roxie tonight with both him and Chris, my other New York friend.

Last night, I took the subway down to the East Village to meet M, a latin-American guy who's a producer for one of the 24 hour television news networks. We've been talking for ever on the Internet, but our schedules hadn't coincided until now. We met in a huge, funky, subterranean, Morroccan bar-restaurant on 1st Street, where a lithe, dark-eyed beauty would come around dancing either with candles on her head or waving a huge golden cape every twenty minutes or so. M proved to be, at first, a little different than I'd expected, which showed me how poor an assessment we do of somebody when all we have to go on are photographs, and their own writing. He was certainly sharp and interesting, but he seemed, at first, to be somewhat vain, and a little self-mythologizing in a very New York way. After we'd each had a couple of cocktails however, and our conversation had warmed up into a fiery, exciting interchange on a huge range of topics, I realized that he was quite a sweetheart, with a lot of heart. We talked and talked until it was half an hour past midnight. He had to be up at 5.30 to produce segments for a morning show, so I took the subway home, wishing I hadn't had that third cocktail.