i was just talking to a friend of mine while doing laundry -- he had a mini-breakdown last nite, one of those demoralizing someone-i-like-just-wants-to-be-buddies experiences. i know those all too well, or at least i used to. i lived for four months in israel w/ my graduating class and started hanging out a lot w/ a guy i'd never spoken to before. we got along great, connected, all that crap; he was cute and we both were lonely; and every once in a while, he'd comment on how hot some girl was. crushing. i endured it, only telling him how i felt much later, once i was hundreds of miles away from up-close rejection. in the meanwhile i felt rather awful about myself and wrote reams of poetry on the subject.

in short, i know how my friend here (college friend, now, not the high skool guy) feels. i told him that, altho i didn't expect it to help. it's universal human drama. up until the last couple hundred years, everyone realized that happy endings were mostly only for the folks who could afford them; that love and tragedy were inseparable dance partners that made for great, if tear-jerking, art. now people expect love to come trailing happy endings like a boy with a wooden duck on a string. hence the hollywood fluff machine.

now i'm in ben's room. he's behind me, eating cheese-flavored popcorn and reading pynchon. he's even finding ways to relate the two. this evening, after my first meeting w/ the For Colored Girls ... cast, i'm taking him into the city to meet the other ben. boyfriend meet oldest friend. i'm apprehensive. no matter of nerves or flip cyncism can make me forget how lucky i am, tho.