You're Not One of Fags Whose Head is in the Clouds with Unrealistic Dreams...

...but as you lay in bed you can't help yourself imagining how nice it would be to be snuggling up against Blonde Beard right about now. You imagine your face rubbing up against his softer than expected beard, and kissing his welcoming lips, as you get lost in the feeling that made you fall in love with him in the first place. Only instead of your unrealistic dreams coming true, you wind up with a text message that beeps you back to reality and makes your heart skip a beat. The only boy who would be bothering you during your silly fantasy is Blonde Beard, right? Wrong. You pull your hand away from your nether-regions in order to check the phone and, not necessarily unfortunately, your message is from Mr. Write. "that was great fun...meeting you. i told my director all about you and he thinks you sound 'dreamy.' and he is the straightest boy i know." Although you are obviously touched, your heart is still busy imagining the bearded boy who you hoped to be receiving this dreamy message from, and you take a moment to decide how best to respond. You know you're not in the best mental space, but you also know that you met someone special tonight and you don't want your bad mood to sabotage the obvious potential. So you take a moment and edit your crankiness, and wind up responding with something deprecating, and are quickly rewarded with yet another compliment, "dude you ARE dreamy. surely you know." And you decide to end the conversation because you like the idea of Mr. Write falling to sleep and dreaming of your alleged dreaminess, even though you'd prefer to imagine Blonde Beard tossing and turning to his obvious nightmares of leaving you crying on a subway platform.

The next morning you awake to a full schedule of crap coupled with an overwhelming case of woe-is-you, and you have serious trouble pulling your head from your pillow even though it is (surprisingly) not hungover. You never feel like shit after a night of relative soberness, however, when you reach over from your pillow to check your cell you are distracted from your Blonde Beard sorrow long enough to see that Mr. Write has obviously jumped out of his bed and texted you with a simple, yet substantial, "Hi."

You have so much to do today before schlepping out to JFK and flying to Florida to visit your aging Snowbird parents, but your first order of business is to finish that damn Shutterfly Photo Book and send it off to Blonde Beard. You want to be done with that humiliating task so you make sure it is at the top of your daily To-Do list. You feel kind of silly putting it together, yet for some unknown reason, you want it to be as spectacularly special as you initially imagined it would be. So you run out to a card store to buy some self-adhesive photo-corners in order to paste all of the restaurant business cards that you collected onto each page of the ridiculously inappropriate book. It saddens you as you flip through the book, pasting each card onto each page, while wistfully remembering each conversation at each restaurant, and yet somehow you are compelled to finish. You need to be done with this and drop it in a mailbox. Only you can't. After you finish you end up dragging the humiliatingly sentimental Photo Book into work so you can show someone how fucking fantastic it is. And she literally tells you that, "It's absolutely wonderful. I would cry if I ever received something like this." And that makes you happy enough to finally drop the fucking thing in a mailbox and be done with it. Then you race over to The Mercury Lounge in order to buy tickets to Yaz this summer because you know that, although Blonde Beard bought tickets for both of you, that you are no longer going to see that concert with him. You fret over which night to purchase tickets, but you ultimately decide that if running into Blonde Beard would ruin the entire experience of seeing one of your favorite bands, then you should definitely buy tickets for the alternate night's show.

That evening you have plans to go have drinks with the Portuguese Brazilian From London, only you aren't really feeling all that social, so when he IM's you in the middle of the day to ask if you'd rather go help him buy a suit, you are completely non-plussed. You had tentative plans to have a drink with him tonight, even though you're in no mood, so you're kind of happy that he's altering the plans and giving you an easy out. You want to ask the Portuguese Brazilian From London if, perhaps, he'd rather come watch you write for the rest of the afternoon, but you are friendly enough because you realize that it is indeed best that you skip this undeniably doomed date. So you lie and tell the Portuguese Brazilian From London that you are very busy working even though you are merely procrastinwriting, and you happily put an end to the possibility of spending your aftersnooze at Brooks Brothers.

Later on you get a really nice Text from Mr. Write that says he really wants to see you before you leave for Florida to visit your parents. You are touched and tell him your crazy schedule, to which he responds, "can we at least have coffee? i want to lay eyes on u b4 u go. 4 or 5 ish." And how can you really say no to that? So you meet him at 5pm after a full day of procrastinwriting and then you have a nice coffee at a NewsBar on University Place even though you carry in a Diet Pepsi because you don't drink coffee. You wind up talking about past relationships and even though you consciously choose to be vague about Blonde Beard, Mr. Write is definitely even more vague about his recent romantic shenanigans. So, of course, you press him. He hems and haws but basically tells you that he has recently ended a four year (open) relationship because he wound up falling in love with a boy (which is exactly why you would never allow yourself to be in an open relationship...) and that they broke up a few months ago. When you ask for specific dates you are given nothing. Actually you are ignored. So, of course, you ask again. And then Mr. Write says, January. Or February. As if he has actually forgotten which month his heart was broken.

This is when you begin to look at Mr. Write long and hard. And something seems off. His enthusiasm for you no longer seems appropriate. Suddenly, his overly confident assurances that he is, indeed, truly single, and that he is ready to be dating make you begin to wonder exactly who he's trying to convince? You smile, even though you thinks that the Lady doth protest too much. But you have a plane to catch, so you kiss Mr. Write goodbye and race home so you can pack your largest Gay Fat bathing suit and head out to JFK so you can fly JetBlue through the white puffy clouds to warmer weather for a dreamy weekend in the sun with the Straight Senior Set. Anyway...