I slept straight through to nine in the morning, the night after coming home, somewhat surprisingly. I'd expected to have terrible jetlag and lie awake half the night. And right away, I was confronted with the reality of coming home: urgent messages from work requiring me to spend all day compiling an important document (which would ordinarily take three days to write, and I had to get it done in just a few hours). Even worse, I was going to have to go to New York the following Monday, which meant I'd have to fly there from Los Angeles, since I was spending the weekend there with Ben. I'd come home hoping that my boss' promise that I'd be off the New York project would hold true. Yet here I was already, back in the same grind. I'd come back down to earth with a thud.

Despite knowing that I'd see Ben on Friday night, I felt rather low on Thursday and Friday. You know, I'd reached a stage of quiet contentment with my life, before meeting Ben. Yet now, my life seems bifurcated; I'm happy when I'm with Ben, and sorrowful when not. I don't know that this is terribly healthy, but I know Ben feels the same way. Which is why we've reached the decision to buy a house together sooner rather than later. If this was any of my own friends I'd have the same reaction you're probably thinking: that this is way too quick. But it's impossible to see into someone else's relationship. Ben and I are soul-mates. There's no possible doubt in either of our minds that we've a great future together. In the letter from Ben that was waiting for me when I arrived home from Paris on Wednesday night, he told me that he wanted to grow old with me. It was the first time either of us had explicitly said so, but it came as no surprise. Somebody asked me the other day how long is it since we fell in love, and I automatically answered, oh, it's four months or more. Then I stopped to think about it, and I realized it's just three short months. Yet we've packed so much experience into those three months, and have spent almost every weekend together: it feels like it's been such a long time.

Anyway, towards the end of October I'm going to drive down to Los Angeles to stay with Ben for two weeks, so we can start moving towards living together. Ben's house is already on the market; hopefully by then he'll have received an offer, and we can start house hunting in earnest. I also want us to find a couples' therapist; not because we have problems, but so that we can talk about our expectations, assumptions, and issues that might come up. Ben isn't fully behind this, but he's willing to go along. He's already battle-tested in that he lived with his ex boyfriend for nine years; my only experience with living with a boyfriend lasted less than a year, and was a disaster. So I'm a little gun shy (despite our seeming haste in moving together), and I want to do everything possible to make this a success.

Our weekend together in LA was fairly quiet, more so than we originally expected. Brett was supposed to come down with me and make his first visit to Los Angeles since his teen years. But he caught an inconvient cold, and then his favorite pet-chicken died. Although we felt sympathy for Brett, it was a little bit of a relief that he couldn't make it this time, since it allowed us to reunite after my time in Berlin and Prague without the limitation of having someone in the next-door bedroom hearing us having sex.

On Friday night, we went straight from the airport, after a quick dinner, to a birthday party for one of Ben's friends, David, at the Abbey. Most of the growing collection of Ben's friends I'm learning to count as friends of my own were there: Bill, Stefan, Albert, and Lam. I like, almost without exception, all of Ben's friends very much, and get on very well with them. It seems inevitable that when I move down to LA, I'll not be forced to develop my own network of friends. I'm not sure that's a good thing, but it certainly makes moving a lot easier. Also present at the party was Ben's ex, who, unexpectedly, kissed me in greeting.

Ben and I have never gone out clubbing on a Friday before, but LA is strangely lacking in an exciting gay club scene, and there was to be nothing interesting going on on Saturday, while there was a club event on Friday. So, although Ben felt he was wrongly dressed (in his pedal pushers), we went there with Lam, a short, hunky Asian friend of Ben's. The event never really got going, and the music was fairly deplorable, although we made an effort to have a good time. There are two inevitables about going clubbing with Ben: a) we'll take our shirts off, and b) we'll enjoy ourselves. So even though we left the club at the, for us, inconceivably early hour of two in the morning, we still didn't count it as a complete failure. Oh, there's a third inevitable of clubbing with Ben: that we'll have sex for at least ninety minutes after getting home. So it turned out to be another fairly late night. Sleep is never a major feature of our weekends together.

On Saturday morning, we got up too tired to go to the gym as usual, so we met up with Bill and Stefan for brunch at Hugos, in the Valley. The chief topic of conversation was that Bill and Stefan had broken up with their boyfriend. They were both pretty unhappy about it, but I can't say that it came as a huge surprise. The mechanics and ups-and-downs of a two person relationship are hard enough, let alone adding a third person.

Afterwards, Ben and I did a little shopping. I bought the most outrageous pair of pants yet, exceeding even the Berlin pants in terms of "when the heck can I wear these?" I believe Ben will only let me wear them on next year's cruise, which gives me an incentive to stay in shape (since the pants are skin tight). Ben was running low on energy by now, but we thought we could last through a movie, so we tried watching "Sky Captain..." at one of the Mann's theaters in Hollywood. I confess I hadn't read a single review, and had been wooed only by the visuals I'd seen in a preview. Maybe it was because we were both tired, but we walked out after twenty-five minutes, feeling unable to connect with the story or care about the characters. If I'd been less tired, I'd have wanted to stay to watch the mesmerizing cinematography, and truly imaginative visual ideas. But you need more than a bag of tricks to make a movie interesting (George Lucas please take note).

We retired to Ben's home in the Valley for a long afternoon nap, and I surprised myself by actually falling asleep for an hour (I'm usually an execrable napper). We went for an early, delicious dinner at the nearby P.F. Changs (I think that was the name), part of an upscale chain of Chinese restaurants, then got ourselves dressed up again for going out. We would have done better to stay at home and have a quiet evening. The only clubs open were Mickeys and Rage, both of which attract a fairly "twinky" crowd, and, although we spread our bets by oscillating back and forth between the two places, it turned out to be another club night saved from being forgettable only by our mutual enjoyment of each other.

Sunday was one of those quiet, hanging-out days that are one of the best things about having a boyfriend. We drifted easily from a dim-sum brunch at Chin-Chin's (I think that was the name) on Sunset, to going to a tiny nearby architecture/design museum we happened upon, to driving down to Will Rogers, the gay beach, and sunning under a surprisingly fog-bound sun for a while, before driving up the highway to Venice Beach and walking slowly along the amusing, colorful, famous boardwalk, packed with muscleheads, dope fiends, hawkers of beads or henna tattoos, and a gawking cross-section of suburbanites. Apparently Ben and his ex used to come here regularly, and Ben found himself feeling wistful. I asked him if he missed his ex (since they parted amicably last year after nine years together), and he admitted that while he didn't necessarily miss him, he couldn't help but remember the good times with fondness. I asserted that his ex must miss Ben tremendously (Ben had instigated the break up, and I think his ex is still in love with Ben), and I found myself feeling a sudden, strong empathy for the guy. I could imagine how I'd feel if Ben wasn't in my life anymore.

By late afternoon, it was time to head home, shower off the sand and sunblock, and change into nicer clothes to meet the usual suspects at the Abbey, which is particularly popular early evening on Sundays. For both of us, Sunday evenings always mark the beginning of separation-melancholy: the realization that the companionship of the weekend is drawing to a close, and the morning will see one of us driving the other to the airport. It's always a bittersweet feeling. Meeting our friends at the Abbey, getting quite drunk on their powerful martinis, and bumping around to the great music they were playing: all this took our minds of the looming separation, but it, of course, returned when we got home and ended our long day by watching a couple of old episodes of Sex in the City I'd never seen.

So just a few hours ago, not long after noon, we parted company at LAX. I feel bad about wallowing in the mud of sentimentality so much in this (and other) journal entries, but that's how I feel right now. Both of us seem to be getting precious little work done these days. I feel guilty about that too. I should have put in some work on Monday morning, rather than spending half the morning in bed with Ben, then going to Starbucks and finally Mel's Diner. I should have loaded my laptop with the unread correspondence and documentation for the upcoming project I'll be leading (as soon as the New York project let me loose). Instead, I'm sitting here in my comfortable First Class seat, on the first of my connecting flights to New York, absorbed in self pity for a separation that will last all of four days (Ben's driving to San Francisco on Friday with his dogs). And Ben too isn't working as hard as he's used to. He has so many responsibilities at work. I guess both of us will be able to return some focus to our careers once we live together and don't have all this travel back and forth up the coast. We'll start a new phase of our relationship; doing the much harder work of building an intimate life together without the guilty enjoyable emotional dramas of separation and reunion. Lord, how I'm scared of becoming a boring, domestic couple. But that's a subject for a whole new journal entry.

Below is the last round of photos from the cruise: these were all taken by the official cruise photographers. We bought prints on the ship, and I just finished scanning them in.

A great shot, by the official photographers of me, Ben, Bill and Stefan as we sailed out of Venice at sunset. It's the kind of photograph I'll look back at in a few years with a huge amount of pleasure and nostalgia - we all look so happy arefree, and Ben and I look so much in love. All true, of course.

At the White Party on the cruise ship, with an off-duty crew member. His girlfriend asked him to pose with us for the photo.

A hokey pose forced on us by the official cruise photographers

Another artificial pose, this time for the Venice Carnival party

Later on in the same party, after I'd switched to the beautiful mask Ben was going to use for the White Party, in order to avoid poking his eye out each time I tried to kiss him.