After a couple of weeks with a lot of teaching and students; and after a lot of promises to continue editing the anthology, and studying for my Jung-Institut exams – about half of those promises broken, but I do try to keep going; and after somewhat warmer (though not actually warm) weather; and after a first meeting with Rumana, Norma, and Susan of something that may turn into an actual writing group –
today I did some e-mails and admin, plus a bit too much procrastination, as usual. Then yoga – which, over the past six weeks of trying to reconnect to something I haven't done for about fifteen years, keeps consistently transforming itself from a duty into a joy – and then a taxi to see a play about AIDS by a local writer (Steve Burbridge), performed in a pub, which I thought I should see...
The play was good – solid, a concrete experience of diagnosis. It reminded me that, for all my work with HIV training and counseling these days, I do tend to become – abstract about the experience, distant from my own stories, which gradually turn into memories that are dusty as old library books. And, of course, that so many of my later experiences are about isolation... and yes, I get by without the added pressures of other people. Or of relationship. How easy that all makes it. Or... not.
But at yoga the extraordinarily beautiful young man who worked in the health tent at last year's Pride – actually a beautiful puppy, but still very distracting – was for some reason in my class, though I know his abilities are years ahead of all of us.
Then after the play a very tall, handsome, almost exasperatingly charming bear of a man, with dark hair and a trimmed beard, stood at the door with a bucket to collect donations for local Pride festivities. (Yes, I spoke to him – and, as you might imagine, I was not entirely... coherent, throughout. But I suppose men like that are accustomed to people not completely making sense when they talk; they must assume that most people have some kind of mild neural damage. Probably located in their speech centers.)
Oh, and he runs the local Pride festival. So he's also intelligent, organized, take-charge... yeah yeah okay.
Then finally, since it was after 9 pm and I hadn't had dinner, I walked a block to a tapas restaurant I pass everyonce in a while. And yes, you guessed it: a disorientingly handsome, unexpectedly dark-blond, Spanish waiter – friendly, charming, personable... he told me his name (as did the handsome bear) but unfortunately I wasn't coherent enough to actually remember it. (Albañas? Something like that.) With that Spanish bearing – a clean, slightly soldierly intensity – a bit more sternly noble than my ancestral roots, with their more slapdash, self-indulgent Italian and Greek styles.
Are these men crossing my path just in order to confuse me?....
In spring, a (young?) man's thoughts turn to...........
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