Should I post or go to sleep?

Of course you know the answer to that question. How can I not post about my day? Today I got to hang out with Mr Splash and it was a long time coming! We'd been trying to get together from before passover and things just never seemed to work out (as you probably are aware of). We met for lunch in the city, got a nice table at the back so we could talk freely. I didn't tell him I blogged about staying at his place, but we did talk about my weekend, and some of the conclusions I had come to based on my perceptions of his life. I was way off on some of them, as some commentors thought too.

He didn't want to question me too much, and I tend to be more reserved and shy, especially when it comes to talking about my feelings. I open up more after a drink or two, lol. And he doesn't drink. But we did talk about issues I face. Coming out, doing the whole jewish and gay thing. He also told me again I should come see him on Fire Island and we'd hang out, which would be nice. Maybe sometime later this summer.

Afterwards we went to Soho to do some shopping. Well window shopping for me. But it was nice to hang out with him even if we were doing everyday mundane things. He's a really sweet guy, and i've mentioned that I think he's hot, lol.

Anyway I gotta run, going away for the weekend. To all you jews chag sameach, and to everyone else have a great weekend.

j

U-turn?

I had an amazing, crazy, good, funny, sad, eye-opening weekend. Ok let me explain. I got a call about a job over the weekend in manhattan. Well i needed a place to stay so of course i called Mr Splash who said no problem :) He was going away so I had his place all to myself. It was a quiet weekend with lots of time for contemplation. He gave me all the instructions I needed and also told me that any food I bring into his place should be kosher.

On friday afternoon I went walking the streets, it was a beautiful day out. I passed someone wearing a big apple dodgeball tshirt (i believe from the GYM bar team). It was kind of surreal. I mean i've been following their league a bit as well as a blog devoted to the dodgeballers (yeah i know it's kind of stalkerish, but this is the world wide web. Get used to it). But it just felt weird to see one of them in the flesh.

Anyway so at work there was this total hottie working, it was hard not stare at him all day :) . He was the epitome of a person that was tall, dark and handsome. Unfortunately he was totally straight, or closeted.

But getting back to my stay at Mr Splash's place. I started to think about that kosher comment. Of course I would only bring kosher into his place what did he think? But thinking about it he was right. I've eaten non kosher before, and i've blogged about it. And it didn't bother me. It was like i'd gone off the deep end and tried to ignore everything i'd been brought up with. Here was a guy that came from a religious background and was gay and seemed to be able to merge the 2 things together. He had a bookshelf with a selection of jewish books on it. Books on the torah and the mishna. He had a menorah (used to light candles on hannuka). On his refrigerator he had a jewish calendar with times for lighting sabbath candles, and on top of that he had a flyer for the Folsom St East Leather S&M and fetish party. I guess it just showed me that being Jewish and gay don't have to be mutually exclusive. Just because you don't keep some laws doesn't mean you have to throw it all away.

I brought some food with me and it was actually quite funny. Among the items I brought were chips and some soda. I opened up his fridge and besides for a few condiments and cooking ingredients, it basically consisted entirely of bottled water, some protein milkshakes, and a huge container of one of those whey protein powders. Yeah I know he goes to the gym often but this almost felt like I was desecrating a temple built to the human body by eating these things in his house, lol.

Yeah all that time alone with no entertainment except a book meant lots of thinking time. And the more I thought about it, the more envious I became of him. Here he was. Gay, jewish, proud, he had a job, a home, he put his own stamp on his life. A life with the perfect balance. And the better his life looked, the more screwed up mine looked. It just feels like i'm drifting aimlessly not quite sure which way to go. In other words, life kind of sucks and things feel pretty hopeless :(

All this means alot more to think about. I'm not saying suddenly i'm going to do a 180 and be the nice good jew that everyone expects of me. I'm staying the way I am for now, until I manage to find that balance. The search continues...

Jay

Oops I did it again...

Well I came out to someone last night. Well not exactly, i didn't actually know him before. I knew of him, he was a friend of a good friend of mine. And then I found out we had a gay friend in common. So I thought why not say hi? I mean he probably doesn't know who I am, and it's not as if he's going to tell my friends that I'm gay (in fact he even thought it would be wiser not to accept a friend request from my real account as we have quite a few mutual friends and they know he's gay - smart move boy). Anyway we spent much of last night and tonight chatting. He's a really nice guy, from a city not too far from where i'm from. And he's pretty cute too, lol. Oh who am I kidding, if he was single and I saw him in a bar i'd probably be chatting him up pretty damn quickly! No you won't be getting any more details right now, it's really late and I have to be up in like 4 hours. I just wanted to share the news :)

j

P.S. Stay tuned for a follow up post over the weekend involving one of our mutual friends. And before I forget, my blog hitcounter ticked over 20,000 hits sometime over the last few hours, so thanks all for reading!

ROTFL

I've been a big fan of Ellen, for a long long time now. And not just because Ellen is sugar free. Ellen has a great taste, that really lasts. Thanks Liz.

Some of you will be wondering WTF?! And some of you just had an aha moment. Well I thought it was hilarious, so enjoy :)

j

Hot!

Nothing more needs to be said, lol. What I would like to do to him ;)

J

Stuff and then some

There are some things I really miss being single. Yeah of course there's the sex (which is great) and a friend you really love spending time with, but the thing I miss the most is kissing another guy. Yeah I really do. It's something that is just the most amazing feeling and you can do it just about anywhere, anytime. Well maybe not anywhere but you get my drift. Here's to more kissing in the future :)

The poll I made last week is over and we ended with a tie. You prefer guys clean shaven or with a short trimmed beard, both with 14 votes. Clearly the longer it gets the less you like it, lol. Well I'm putting another poll up. Lets say you were closeted. You had some friends that had their suspicions about you, but were completely oblivious to it all. Would
you rather know that they think you might be gay or would you rather not know?

I went out to a meal over the weekend with some friends, and the talk at the table turned to gays. I can tell you how wonderful it was to hear that some of my close friends/family think gays are sick. So much for expecting them to be able to handle my coming out in the [near?] future :( .

I just want to say thanks to those who comment. Even if you post as 'anonymous' and i'm curious to know who you really are, it's nice to have some feedback so I don't feel i'm all alone here.

J

A multitude of things

Wow this is gonna be some post. I know it's best when everything is fresh in your mind not a few days later, but it is what it is, and I hope it's as good a post as it would've been a couple days ago. As for everyone i'm going to be talking about i need to start coming up with more names for them :)

One person I wanted to write about was someone i've mentioned before. He's from the same place I'm from and figured out my identity yet won't reveal anything about himself. He keeps on chatting to me even though I've pretty much made it clear to him that unless he wanted to tell me something about himself, I wasn't interested. This week his excuse was that he needs to be able to meet me and get to know me better he'd be able to decide if i was trustworthy enough to know who he is (like that makes any sense), and then he mentioned that if I went home he'd be able to see me without knowing who he was. I told him that i'd had enough of it and I didn't care anymore who he was, and he just lost it! Apparently I was an arrogant prick, lol. Another one bites the dust.

Another guy i've been chatting with shall rename nameless, he's a guy i've had a total crush on for a while and he lives in Chelsea. We made plans to meet up at some point but not sure exactly when it's going to happen. He did flirt with the idea of a hookup months ago thanks to a facebook status of mine, not quite sure if he was serious or not, and he did say he doesn't like his moves blogged about, but we shall see. I can dream can't I? ;)

I have a friend I fooled around with earlier this year which I blogged about. We're pretty good friends and speak/chat fairly often. I was chatting to him last week and he asked if I ever thought about doing it again with him. How does one answer such a question? The truth is while I have thought about it, I think I'd prefer just to remain friends, rather than friends that fool around.

I also attended a birthday party of a friend last week in Chelsea, which was really cool. Like the purim party it was nice to meet my gay friends in a place that has a different atmosphere to the JQY meetings. I got the the front door and saw someone I knew so went in with him, we chatted a bit, and then I saw another person... the infamous Mr Splash. I didn't expect to see him there but it was nice to see him seeing we hadn't managed to sort something out in the meantime. He told me I should come to fire island one weekend. I'd love it :) lol. It's funny he's the second person to tell me to come to fire island. The other one was Mr Z who wanted me to come with him. But that's all in the past. Drinking, talking, dancing, the party was alot of fun. Some people mentioned that they've been keeping up with my blog. HELLO people you can comment you know ;) anonymously if you wish too! There was one guy hitting on me the whole time. "You're very handsome", "uh thanks". "No you're REALLY handsome", "thanks so are you". Eventually we got to the point where I was "fantastically gorgeous" but I wasn't interested. He showed me pics of his kids and he told me he'll email me. I don't know why I gave him my email address, maybe he forgot it because I didn't get anything yet. And then when it was time to leave, the weather was perfect so I walked one of the guys home. Yes I stopped at his front door ;) Oh and how could I forget, there were these 2 guys making out most of the time I was there on the couch right next to the DJ. One of them was a cute guy i recognized, but I didn't get a look at the other one because all I saw was the back of his head! And lastly I was told I should come to a GLBT shabbat dinner that's happening in a few weeks, but I don't know if I will. I'm not sure why I prefer to avoid attending things like this but that's the way it is. I'd have to find a place to stay in the UWS - Mr Splash has offered to let me stay at his place if I ever wanted. And even though I'm unemployed it's not prohibitively expensive. I guess I just hate the feeling that I would stick out like a sore thumb if I were to go. You know on second thoughts I probably should go.

What else has been happening... I got in touch with an old friend. Well not an old friend, but one of the earlier guys I came out to. We had a nice long chat and I updated him on what has been happening in my life, including bringing him up to speed on Mr Z. Meanwhile I removed another friend from my real facebook friends list. The one who outed me to his partner (that I blogged about fairly recently) which he took me to task on for not consulting him beforehand. Really the only reason I did it was because his partner (well ex-partner now) was a real bastard and knew my identity and I didn't want him to be able to track me down at all. I just don't see how in his mind the deleting of a fb friend is more of an issue than outing someone. WTF?!

Things aren't going so well other aspects of my life, e.g. work search. I don't want to go into too much detail in a public place about this, suffice to say it sucks not being a US citizen or at the very least having a green card.

Lastly, there are twenty something hours left in my posted poll and we currently have a 3 way tie. Damn I shouldn't have allowed people to vote for more than one option, so let's see if we can break the stalemate! As soon as that's over I have another poll to post based on some things that happened today. Tomorrow will be a busy day but hopefully you'll hear from me tomorrow night :)

Jay

Another rant

That's right, time for another rant. You may call me a whiny bitch, and tell me to grow up, but I don't give a fuck. Right now i'm coasting along. Things aren't great, but they're not bad. I keep myself occupied and am becoming more aware of my life changing in small ways. I hang out with my friends, straight friends that is. My gay friends, not so much. I'm not even sure I would say I have that many gay friends. Acquaintances, yes, but friends, no. There's a bunch of people I know from JQY, similar in age to me, somewhat similar backgrounds, but I feel like I have nothing to do with them.

There are some other guys i know. Also gay and jewish, but slightly older than me, and they seem more disposed to hanging out. This is the story of those friends. Before passover, the guy i called HJ (hot jew) previously (who incidentally has asked me to stop calling him hot jew) so i'll just call him oh i dunno... Mr splash. Because the first time i went to splash was with him. So we'd hung out before, we went out to eat. Anyway, so before passover he messaged me if i want to go see a movie. Unfortunately I was leaving early the following morning to go away and then he was going away as well, but we promised to get in touch when he gets back. Fast forward a couple weeks and I got a call from him. We made plans to meet up the following week. Yes it was 6 days away but I was really looking forward to it. Counting down the days until the morning arrived and I messaged him what the plans were. Unfortunately something had come up with work so he couldn't meet me. Strike 1. Yes I know that it's not his fault, but it was something I was really looking forward to all week, and unfortunately things like that don't come around so often. Over the next week I texted him a few times and all i got was silence. No reply at all. I called and he didn't answer. I didn't know what i'd done but I was almost considering giving up on ever seeing him again.

Then something else came up. I was chatting with David online and he mentioned he was free sometime the following weekend, so we made tentative plans. Something else to look forward to. And then things again went downhill. Whatever he was doing before meeting me was going to take longer so it wasn't going to work out. So i made other plans, only for him to later ask if i was free later that evening, but now i wasn't. Strike 2.

I decided to give Mr Splash a call just to say hi, to try one last time before I decide he was a waste of time, and he actually answered. We had a nice chat and he apologized about everything and said he was very busy but when he gets a chance we'll sort something out. And i'm sure David and I will figure something out too.

But there's one thing i just don't get. Why don't i click more with the gay guys more my own age. Is it because i'm living in Brooklyn and they're in Manahattan and we're practically a million miles away? Is it because on one hand i'm supposedly religious, yet on the other hand I probably do a lot of things that they (at least the religous ones) would probably never do. Dating a non jewish guy, eating non kosher, not keeping the sabbath. I really don't know. Maybe i just don't try hard enough. Even those who say we have to hang out sometime, or i want to go with you to G or Vlada or wherever, just have better things to do.

Why am i writing all this? It's just been a bad week. Well a bad few weeks. Things that I was really looking forward to just didn't work out, and the past few days I just got really down. How much longer can I keep on doing this? The whole facade, dating girls, it's gone on too long, yet I can't bring myself to do anything about it just yet. Yesterday especially was a bad day, saturday night came along, and I just needed to get out and get away from all my straight friends. I don't have a wingman anymore but I went into the city anyway. It was late, but i got out in Greenwich Village and just walked. Through the village, chelsea, midtown, just walking trying to clear my head. I was there for a good couple of hours, walking past places I have been... the G lounge, the Gym bar and others.

Of course now i'm continuing this post and things have changed. I went to a surprise birthday party my siblings arranged for me. One that I almost did not attend because I had planned on meeting David. There will be other times to meet him, but I only have one birthday. And while I was there Mr Splash also texted me if I wanted to have dinner with him. So things don't always turn out badly.

There's another JQY meeting this week, so let's see how it goes. Good night all.
J

P.S. In the top right corner of my blog you'll notice a poll. It should give you an idea of what i'm thinking of doing.

I like this :)

and in other news Mr Z commented on my blog, i think for the first time. Check out the post about the fat lady has sung. And Mr. Z feel free to comment as you wish in future :)

j

The other side of the coin

Again it's been a crazy few days, but this time not so great. A friend I'd planned on getting together with cancelled on me on Wednesday. We'd been hoping to do something for weeks but passover got in the way. We'd finally planned something the week before, only for plans to change. Who knows when we'll actually meet up next. On Thursday I met up with someone and after a relatively quick chat I got really nervous and decided to go home. I'm not going to elaborate on who it was or the reasons why, but suffice to say I was told never to contact him again. Fine with me.

Then another thing happened. I have a friend who recently moved to LA. We've been friends for a long time. He knows my real identity. He met a guy and after knowing him a few months his new man proposed to him and he accepted. I'm not really going to talk about their relationship but i do have one problem. My friend told his beau about me. Not just that my name isn't Jay, but my background, my real name, and of course with that info he managed to track down my real profile. At first I didn't know anything had been revealed. Until I get a message from the fiance referring to 'Jay'. Well what does that mean? He tells me he knows about me. I assumed he knew it was a fake name, and didn't really make a big deal about it. Then he messages me making reference to the pic on my real fb profile, then he says something to me that I could only understand to be a veiled threat to out me. And that was when I'd had enough. I don't know this guy, my friend barely knows this guy, what right does he have to reveal my secrets to other people because he decides they were trustworthy?! I got mad at my 'friend' as we were chatting online at the time. Obviously I'd have to face the facts at some point but who was he to decide when that time would be?

He acted like I was hanging him out to dry and protested that he'd been nothing but a good friend to me. Up until this point we'd been chatting often about a lot of things, and it had been daily or even more often. But i just can't do that right now, i'm too mad at him and worried about the things that could possibly happen. I went into damage prevention mode and changed all my facebook privacy settings to the highest. Now even if you search for my name you won't find me. Does that accomplish anything? I don't know. He still has enough on me to do damage if he wanted to. Does he want to? I have no idea either. I decided to have a bit of a break from this 'friend' for a while.

That night i needed to get out. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but i needed to get out. I thought of heading to the G lounge with the friend I had gone with the previous week, but after last week's encounter with other JQY guys he wasn't so keen on going to anything gay and popular. I guess that means nothing gay, because I don't know of any places that are unpopular, lol. So I went to his place, and yes it was a shlep by subway. Only to get there and think WTF am i doing here. He doesn't want to go out, I stayed a bit but i just decided I had to leave, with him or without him. So I went back to the G Lounge. Alone. Drinking alone just isn't that fun, and you end up drinking way more than you should. Well I wasn't alone the whole time there, but too much of it. So going out and having a few drinks turned into drink a bit too much to forget what happened that day. One thing I learn was that I need to make some new gay friends that actually like going out to gay bars and clubs.

At least the weekend ended on a good note, I'd been in contact with a guy online for a while, but never managed to actually meet up, so on Sunday we finally did. We talked alot just walking the streets of Manhattan and then we saw a movie. It was a really fun sunday :) And on that note i'm gonna end this post.

j