Things that are not the poem of the day

Yesterday (Jan. 2) was an anniversary of sorts, being one year to the day when I first went out with The Poet. We met for a drink at the KGB Bar and accidentally found ourselves at a poetry reading that seemed to be dominated exclusively by awkward, skinny dudes in their early 20s reading mediocre poems about Nebraska and Times Square. And at one point, The Poet leaned over to me and said, "It's awful to be a young man. If one has to be young, one should be a woman." I still think this is kind of awesome and hilarious.

I was not, I should say, treating this as a date at the time. I was just coming off the several months of drama that had been my online dating experience, I'd done enough digging to know more or less how old he was and feel like that was possibly too old, and I was still very committed to not sleeping with anyone in my department (having previously reneged on my resolution not to sleep with anyone who went to my school at all). The vicious cold that I'd brought back from MLA with me was just insurance. We went to dinner after the poetry reading at a restaurant that we've been to many times since, though it was located for me in what was, at the time, something of a Bermuda Triangle of trauma. (My route from the subway to the bar had taken me, unexpectedly, past the hotel bar where E. broke up with me--a bar which later came into tabloid headlines as a major hangout for Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson. I can, fortunately, joke about that now, too.) I remember not being able to taste the lasagna because I was so congested. And I was kind of surprised when he emailed me later in January. I hadn't been sparkling, nor had I wanted to be, necessarily.

Of course, now it's a year later, and he's one of the best things that happened to me on a personal level in 2008.

I spent January 2, 2009, tearing up Chinatown with one of my favorite people ever who is also an avid reader of this blog so I don't really need to go into details except to reiterate that *she's* the one who should be writing a novel, not me.

I'm still getting stuck in these really slow and unproductive mornings. I guess it's kind of forgivable since it was Saturday and I was skipping the Greenmarket in order to attend to the food I already had in my freezer. But I'm still letting all this time slip away. It was telling that when I got home from the bank with the half of my rent that I pay in cash, the first thing I did before even taking off my coat was sit down at the laptop and see what was going on on Facebook. These are the kinds of things I need to be more aware of. This didn't, of course, stop me from watching four episodes of Arrested Development (all of which I have seen before) during a two-hour "lunch." Augh. Am trying to slowly cross some things off the old to-do list this evening.