Pop Goes the Pie

Pink TV

It is 5:43 and I am wide awake at a Super 8 motel (free wireless internet!) some 85 miles from my new apartment in Brooklyn and 3,650 from Paris. I turned off the air conditioner an hour ago and am about to turn it back on. I am watching an infomercial for Girls Gone Wild videos and can't bring myself to change the channel. I've been away from the computer for a while. Much of my precious "downtime" in the past few weeks has been spent on the living room carpet at my mother's house sucking on orange popsicles and working the remote control, bathing in the glow of Six Feet Under, Queer as Folk, Style Court, Erasure Live at the Fillmore, Brat Camp, I Wanna Be a Hilton, I Wanna Be a Soap Star, Bridezillas, Lost. It's like I'm a visitor to Planet Digital Cable and it's my mission is to study this strange new world. And what queer creatures in it! Literally. I love LOGO, the new gay and lesbian network, but what shocks me is that it's only, like, 10% more gay than the rest of American television. I'm not just talking about the Fab Five and that guy from What Not to Wear, either. It's the baby dyke trying so hard to trade her b-ball shorts in for a prom dress on Made, the gay dads on TLC's A Baby Story and the Showtime Original Movie Jack, David and Keith on 6FU, plus same-sex wedding documentaries on every other channel, the husband who cheated with his gym buddy on Divorce Court, those Lifetime reruns of The Truth About Jane and that horrible one where Cherry Jones dies of lupus and Brooke Shields fights for custody of their daughter, not to mention the inimitable Tucker Carlson. No wonder the red state Christians hate us; they're just bitter because the only true representation of heterosexuals on TV these days is in Girls Gone Wild infomercials, and even those girls seem to be doing much more than just dirty dancing with each other. Which might explain my inability to turn it off.

Baby Got Back

So things are going well so far. The apartment is full of unpacked boxes and I'm still waiting to hear about that library job, but being in limbo is okay when one has good people around to grill meat for you and bring you chocolates while you paint and meet you at the Liberty game and buy you slushies at the pizza place and drink beers with you on Chelsea Piers. Thank you. Limbo is also bearable when you're in it with someone you love, especially when that someone is calm when you need her to be, holds your heaving shoulders when you slam your finger in the folding bookshelf, lets you paint the bedroom green, and trusts you take control from time to time. Yesterday, while caught in bumper to bumper traffic in a bus and faced with missing an important family event, I complained of being particularly down on my luck these days. What on Earth was I thinking?