Tuesday, April 24, 2007

The Disappearing Man

Tap, tap, tap. Is this thing still on? Good. Just checking.

In addition to taking a nice long break from blogging (and I’ve mentioned before that radio silence tends to be the direct result of great happiness), I have been MIA in a couple of other aspects of my life.

I haven’t seen Chip, my roommate, since April 1, nearly a month. You see, I’ve more or less been living with the New Viking full-time lately. I don’t think that I’ve slept in my own apartment at all this month. Oh, I’ve been stopping by a couple of times a week in the mornings, to pick up mail and catch up on everything I’ve TiVo’d. But Chip isn’t a morning person, so he’s fast asleep whenever I stop by. I pay my bills (more than my share, actually, since I pay half of the internet service, which I have never been connected to, and I pay half of the electrical bill, even though I use precious little of it myself), I clean up after myself, I’m utterly invisible (as far as he’s concerned) and I’ve given him eight months’ notice that I’ll be moving out. Does that make me the perfect roommate?

I get my newspapers and my Entertainment Weekly delivered to NV’s house. My computer is in his office, right next to his own. We’re on the same telephone plan. We shop for our groceries together and I cook dinner every night that we eat at home. I’ve begun to monopolize his TiVo. I have begun to reorder the contents of his kitchen cabinets to better suit the needs of a cook. We both belong to a Golds Gym near him, but we’re waiting for the new LA Fitness there to open up so that we can work out together. (The Golds is kind of ghetto during the week, but usually has several hot straight guys there to liven up the weekends. But it’s just so damn small and crowded.)

I have amassed a big enough quantity of clothes at the NV’s house that I don’t really have to drive over the hills in the morning to get dressed. And herein lies a problem. Making the trek over Laurel Canyon on a weekday morning is something that takes 20 minutes if I leave by 7am, but at least twice as long if I wait any later. I drive a stick-shift car, and sitting in uphill traffic in a stick-shift is torturous. So since I don’t have to get back to Weho-Adjacent (as I like to call my neighborhood) to get dressed, I tend to turn off the alarm clock, sleep in another hour, and go directly to work from the NV’s. (I start work at 9:30; not particularly early.)

This means that I haven’t been going to the gym in Weho-Adjacent in the morning at all. Or anywhere else for that matter; my busy work schedule during the last few weeks kept me away from my lunchtime gym too, and I just can’t face all the crowds that go there at nighttime. I’ve gotten a bit softer around the middle, but on a good day I can convince myself that I look nicely “beefy.” Other days, however, I just feel fat. I don’t really look all that different, but my jeans are definitely tighter these days.

What was my point? Who knows.

None of this is complaining whatsoever. I’m still kind of living between two worlds and feeling ever so slightly rootless, but I’m very excited about making these baby steps toward establishing the perfect life with the NV. He’s still my perfect man.

If only there weren’t those damn hills between his place and mine.

Weight: around 180