I'm sure many of you have heard of and read about the so-called MySpace Suicide Hoax scandal. There's a great article by Lauren Collins in this week's New Yorker about it.

There are some universal themes to this story: bitterness, peer pressure, questions of self-esteem, mistaken and false identities, teenage angst, revenge and retribution, parental instincts and protection. Despite Collins' attempts to provide an in-depth review of the proceedings and how they have been interpreted, despite her attempts to dignify the story, the whole thing strikes me as terribly nasty and tragic.

But here's something that surprised me as I was reading the article's accounts of Megan's postings and communications online: who the hell has taught these kids how to write online?! Not that I don't appreciate the artistry of a name spelled $h@ne (Shane) or an expression like "ya theres really hott guys at my school they are fine!!!" My friend Jimbo loves the expression "OMG" ("Oh my God," for those of you who actually don't know). But one of the things the now-departed Megan Meier wrote in her correspondence with the fake Josh Evans was "Ok how bout no tell me who they are and ya so w/e u know u ant to nice ur self!!!!!"

?

I'm not one to moan about aging since I never really liked being all that young to begin with — I was one of those kids who didn't have as many friends as Megan thought she was losing right before she committed suicide — but I also spent a lot of young adult years not realizing how separated I was growing from youth culture. I didn't care, really, but now that I'm reading these postings from teenagers involved in this story (well, actually, most of them are from only Megan), it seems so much clearer to me that I'm just not there, that youth culture seems almost like a foreign one to me.

That said, I also don't feel the way I used to interpret adults feeling when they were my age while I was a kid. I used to see them as settled, tired and old, always complaining about aches or bills or the stress of having children. Most of my memories of my grandfather involve discussions about how sick he was, how he couldn't walk on his own, about his cancer and his Parkinson's disease. Years after he died, I asked my grandmother if she'd consider dating again, and she turned to me, embarrassed looking, and said, "At my age?"

Even my parents seemed older acting to me at ages that I see friends of mine at now, and my friends just don't seem the same way. I remember, in 1978, when my dad turned 40 (I had just turned 5), and he talked about it like a milestone, as if he'd already exceeded his life expectancy. I remember the surprise birthday party my brother and I were part of for my mother's 50th in 1992 (we were part of the surprise — we were in Nashville and drove to her home in Burke, Va., when she didn't expect us). Something about reaching that age seemed to click with all the other similarly-aged people in the room, as if you were at a new level of old.

Not that the gay community is a good example, or so the popular criticism holds. As a market or "community," gay men are talked about as vain and looks-obsessed, thus youth-obsessed. Supposedly we value youth — some assholes in "heartland" America have the idiot notion that we all chase after youths, preying on them as if gay = child molester —  and emotionally and socially discard our elders like milk that's gone sour in the refrigerator.

Honey, most young people have prejudices about those who are older, whether in a GLBT community or not. I had them. My friends had them. We encouraged them in each other. Individually, we may have had long, personal, emotional conversations with teachers, coaches and other people's parents as if they were our counselors, but we always felt that invisible wall separating us from them. The truth is the GLBT communities are vast and varied, and they encompass groupings of people at all ages. Hell, I get more positive attention and get hit on more now in my 30s than I ever did in my 20s.

We always had a notion of our individuality, and many of us in college were made aware of this by the definition of generations:
• Baby Boomers, our parents, though both my parents precede the Baby Boom generation — this group includes the hippies and anti-war protesters of the '60s and the "thirtysomethings" of the '80s, and I'm pretty sure they're the ones who decided to endorse "classic rock" and Southern California country-rock in the '70s, though I can't vouch for who made disco famous;
• Generation X, my generation, though I'm toward the younger end of it; my almost-39-year-old partner John is more in the middle of this one — the post-Watergate, Reagan presidency youth who were fixated on consumerism and supposedly grew up with no real hope of promise or whatever, kind of rebellious but in a conforming sort of way;
• Generation Y, my little brother's generation, though he's at the absolutely oldest end of the spectrum — the first children of the internet, the ones who brought grunge and hip-hop into the mainstream, who figured out technology and new communications tools to the point of routing authority, who have been known to come into industries demanding high pay and big job titles that previous generations would've worked years to achieve;
• Generation Z, referred to by some as the "Neo-Disney Generation," beginning with Britney and continuing with Hannah Montana. You know: Mickey Mouse club, Nickelodeon shows like iCarly and Drake & Josh and that ever-present TV movie-musical series High School Musical, the music from which I hate to say is actually infectious.

I guess the fact that I know some of this information is enough to claim that I'm not completely ambivalent or at least not oblivious. I don't watch Nickelodeon or Disney, so I've never seen an episode of Hannah Montana or Drake & Josh. And I'm sure, as relevant and influential as these pieces of entertainment are, they don't speak to, or on behalf of, the entirety of their intended market. Shia LaBeouf is 21 years old, not high-school aged but not far removed from those years and still considered young, so he can play teenagers in movies like Transformers. Zac Efron is 20 and played a teenager in the two High School Musicals and in Hairspray. Really, MySpace is far more in tuned with an ordinary youngster, or at least one who's online.

One way or another, though, I think it's wrong to allow nostalgia to become painful or a source of regret. Not being young(er) is no reason to fret or feel unworthy. Even these successful, wealthy and sought-out young people like Vanessa Anne Hudgens and Ashley Tisdale (both also of High School Musical fame) have growing up to do and very likely may reach the same conclusion that many a middle-aged or elderly person has come to: youth is wasted on the young. The saying is a cliché for sure, but a lot of clichés come from truthful and long-standing observation. They wouldn't be clichés if they hadn't been used repeatedly to the point of being believed without question.

Of course many may not agree with that assessment, that youth is wasted on the young. They may believe that you're not supposed to know better when you're young, no matter what your circumstances are, and that the result is there is no such thing as a wasted experience. I do believe that your experiences make you a fuller human being over time, and perhaps except for the most dramatic of circumstances (certainly Megan Meier's suicide), you serve yourself better by not regretting anything. But there's something to be said for wanting that taught, younger, more nimble body, that sense of the unknown being exciting rather than suspect, and that lack of social responsibility that comes with youth, whether it's in childhood or adolescence. I know a lot of us think to ourselves that if we could just go back to those younger times, knowing what we know now about ourselves, we'd do things differently to take advantage of what we had that we didn't realize to its fullest extent. There's a beauty to being able to think that and to the fact that you cannot go back. It's better to appreciate something at some point in your life, even if the timing is considered late, than to never do so, don't you think? That said, I don't think even now I'm going to catch an episode of iCarly.

Nonetheless, what happened to Megan Meier was a terrible tragedy, and what was done to her on MySpace, if even one of the many accusations is true, was unconscionable. That truly is a case of youth being wasted on the young.

There's really nothing that I care to say specifically right now except to wish my friends and family a happy holiday season. I know it's almost over, but it's nonetheless still upon us.

This blog has not worked out for me, not in the way I envisioned when I began this back in June. A post every few months doesn't tell much of a story, and I've run out of attention for telling stories here.

It has nothing to do with readership, if there is any of which to speak. It has more to do with what I value and, as a result, the ends by which I am willing to commit certain means.

If I do not feel like taking even five minutes, let alone the hours I was committing several months ago, to post on to a blog site, if I do not read other people's blogs regularly or participate in their subsequent online discussions, if I do not know much about the general state of the blogosphere or even about the specific environments on which friends of mine who blog concentrate their attentions, why advertise or maintain at all my own blog site?

I suppose I'll write on here again. I have certainly benefited from joining MySpace, reconnecting, if only briefly, with people I haven't talked to in years and keeping up with people I know and maintain regular contact with now. I certainly do not intend to stop participating in at least the upkeep of my own profile here. I just doubt you'll see many changes very often in my profile or here in the blog section.

For years I've contemplated whether or not I feel like or want to be treated as a public persona. Whether in fantasies about being an entertainer or in the real-world experiences I've had as a professional writer and in my current work, interacting with some of the foremost practitioners of hematological and oncologic medicine in the world, I always instinctively retreat from any prominence once the work I've set before myself is completed.

I used to be labeled by Myers-Briggs as an INFJ, my emphasis here on the I, introverted. Since then I've played with a more extroverted characteristic, from journalism to critical review to organizing to exhibitionism. I've enjoyed the benefits of those times and am not saying here that I will not continue to expose extroverted tendencies. However, it's hard to simply avoid or force a change from what probably is a fundamental characteristic of mine: I am an introvert.

So call it a failed experiment. Or, to put a more positive spin on it, call it a worthwhile endeavor regardless as to its outcome. Better still, call it a continuing experiment, one that has not reached its end just because I write all this to you today.

A new year will come soon, in effect just another day in a string of days that turn into months and, ultimately, into years. I will turn 35 in 2008. My father will turn 70. Is there meaning in those ages?

Shirley Q. Liquor talks repeatedly about having 19 children whose ages never seem to change even though she's apparently had them sometime between 1958 and 2001. She's fictional. The Simpsons is fictional, so Bart can remain 10 or 12 or whatever age he is as long as the show is kept running on TV.

My and my father's aging is not fictional. Are the milestones such as 70 there only to keep us mindful of changes even though they're actually fluid, or do the milestones mean something deeper, as if the age of 35 or 70 truly marks something specific and causes a change that everyone can see? I don't think that my father will look discernibly older come June 15, nor will I look suddenly older as soon as June 12 comes.

Still, I too like milestones, rituals and such, and I appreciate being able to live into a new year. Benzir Bhutto will not, even though Muslims don't faithfully follow the Gregorian calendar and, thus, don't see Jan. 1 as the dawn of a new year (sometime in 2008, the Islamic calendar will mark the year 1429).

And I speak too soon, I guess. It's Dec. 28. I may die right before Jan. 1. I don't believe in bad luck, really, so I'm not worried about throwing that out there. If you are worried as you read, throw some salt over your shoulder or say a novena or a protection chant in my name (Andrew Joseph Harmon III — be specific).

As for resolutions, I look at them now the way John looks at Christmas: why designate a specific time for the positiveness of it all when you should harness such good will all year long? If I resolve something, I can start today, before the new year comes, or two days after it arrives.

I'd like to lose weight. In fact, I need to because I'm getting too fat for my own good. Will I do it? I don't know. Am I resolved? I always am resolved, at least for a few minutes at a time. I did well three years ago, when I started taking phentermine and, as a result, stopped eating all together. I lost weight, that is. Actually, I didn't do well on it and quit once I realized that I could get hooked on the stuff.

I'd like to be nicer to John, to my friends and to my family; to call my father more often and visit him in Middle Tennessee every now and then; to reconnect with friends even here in D.C. with whom I've casually lost touch over the years and who I think actually would like to see me again; to appreciate my 18-month-old nephew Adam more and to do more for his parents, who I think suffer from the strain of both working while trying to raise a child (and who, it turns out, are going to try soon to have another); to find a more positive angle when thinking about and focusing my attention on the chorus, instead of always looking for the scandal, the conflict and/or the general malaise to talk about since it's just too easy to do so and so easy to get others to do so as well; to develop a stronger, more consistent work ethic that takes into account an actual enthusiasm for the industry in which I work, not just any potential advancement on my part, which would also mean to start looking at my work as an investment and not just a routine that keeps me paid; to get a better grip on my consumer debt so that I'm not simply maintaining a balance by paying just the monthly minimums but actually working to reduce the principle; to be a better read, more literary person because I enjoy reading but do it only as a way to pass required time, not for time I designate for it alone; to see to it that when John turns 40 in 2009, there's a big party and an extravagant gift for him, something to make that milestone, as artificial as it may be underneath the surface, special for him; to remember more often what John taught me to begin with: life is for now because it's all you have when you bother to notice it. The past is gone. You learn from it, but you can apply it only to the present. You can plan for the future, and you should, but we never actually experience the future. Whenever we've stepped into what we once called the future, it becomes the present. Do you want to spend all your present moments constantly harping on a past injustice or hurt or constantly planning for a future you have no guarantee will be there for you? I put together this blog and this MySpace profile all together out of a sense of the now. I tell you out of a sense of the now right now, on this Friday Dec. 28, that I'm not in the mood to keep it up to date. That may change. I may become a better, more consistent blogger. I may become a more active MySpace participant, with hundreds of friends, not just 61. I may not. I don't know. It won't happen 'til it happens, and then it will become now.

So, for a milestone that has yet to pass us but very likely will seem to have whirled through us at breakneck speed once it does, as well as for a milestone that we humans created, that is not all-natural, and that may not be accurate by nature's count and that won't lead to any dramatic change for the majority of us when the hour strikes (another thing to ponder: our new year's clock strike in D.C. will be the stroke of 4 p.m. in Sydney, 16 hours after they celebrated their New Year's), I wish you a wonderful new year.

I guess I did have a lot to say. As always, darling. LOL!

For this year's GMCW retreat, which features a big "No Talent Show" pageant hosted by last year's winner, I was asked by the reigning queen to create a video. It had to tie together her theme for the year (Hollywood turned into "Trannywood"), the eight films she chose to model cabins by, and previous years' No Talent Show footage, including prominent players and their (often sullied) reputations.

There are more than eight films referenced here, but the eight in question are
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
Brokeback Mountain
Cabaret
Dreamgirls
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Mommie Dearest
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Valley of the Dolls

The entire weekend experience is meant to allow us to bond, rehearse intensely for our upcoming holiday concert in December, and to have a raucous time, all culiminating in this climactic Saturday night show that, it turns out, is almost as expensive and laborious to set up as one of our regular concerts. We build a new stage each year, and the queen and her consort come up with a running theme underlying the show as each contestant comes out to show us just how much no-talent he has.

Of course this is all a big inside joke, so I don't expect that you'll truly understand the gist of everything. But you can make up for that, having fun counting all the instances of copyright infringement. Bet you won't catch every one.

Enjoy.

Needless to say, John and I had a wonderful time overseas. The U.K. has its flaws — the weather this time of year being one of them along with the horrible cost of living and of vacationing there — but I enjoyed its sense of itself, the overwhelmingly local flavor of Portsmouth and Southsea, learning how to get used to drive from the right side of the car on the left side of the road, and the ongoing, almost blasé regard for its long, tortured, distinguished history. Our friends had a good time, and we ended our stay in their hamlet by treating them to a very good Argentine steakhouse dinner.

Word of caution: Stonehenge is a massive rip-off. More than 6£ ($12 and then some) just to walk a wide perimeter around the goddamn thing when, a short fence line away along a quiet autoway, you can see it all without paying anything. I suppose I should look at it as contributing to the maintenance of an ancient, beloved site, but I can't. Everything in the U.K. was so fucking expensive that this just capped it in a nice, tight way.

Spain, of course, was amazing: just as old, just as dignified, perhaps a little more stylized, thankfully less expensive, though not dramatically so. Driving was both easier than in the U.K. (they do drive on the right side of the road) and tougher (pedestrians in Madrid have pretty much no right-of-way and, as a result, dart around like insects, and the side streets are painfully dark and narrow). John's and my one failing in Madrid was that we never kept up with the locals' partying schedule. There it's usual to begin a bar crawl or a night of drinking at 1:30 a.m., which is normally already too late for us. We kept going into bars and eating at restaurants that were not even half-full and wondering where all this storied, crazy nightlife was. We considered staying up 'til 5 a.m., but neither of us had the stamina for it, and we really liked the daytime sightseeing. We did make it to Segovia and Toledo and marveled at such old buildings, some of them dating back to the Moors. The food was awesome too (though I had tapas only one night — we actually found a Chinese restaurant that we really liked and ate there more than once).

Most of all, I have to marvel at the liberalism in a place like Madrid, in a country so long dominated by the Roman Catholic Church. I guess Pedro Almodovar and the movida movement that followed Francisco Franco's death in 1975 really did mean something. It's not just the matter of gay marriage being legal there. Though it's not Amsterdam, you could buy drugs in Madrid and see prostitutes openly walking the streets at night. I don't know if I'd call all of that necessarily good, but the idea that people can make decisions for themselves without having the government and "society" do it for them really made me feel comforted. I suppose like a lot of Americans who (at least sometimes, if not often) travel aboard, I've returned home appreciating some things about life here in America (it's certainly cheaper in many ways) and longing for other things (maybe someday to actually sign a marriage certificate with John, you know that heartfelt crap).

After four years, John and I are returning to Europe.

At the onset of the dreadful heat wave of 2003, we visited Malta, Paris and Amsterdam. I can still remember the BBC and French news stories on TV about the heat wave as it was beginning. Nonetheless, we had an incredible time. It's a pity that it's taken this long for us to return.

This time around, we're traveling to Southsea, U.K., a seaside resort village southwest of London and just outside of Portsmouth. John has an old friend who lives there with his very cute, younger Irish partner. While there, we'll visit London, of course, as well as Bath and Brighton.

Six days after arriving, we'll fly south to Madrid for a five-night stay in the center of town near the Puerta del Sol. Hide your osos and tipos! Better still, don't hide them. Some of the nicest-looking men I've chatted with online have come from Spain. It'd be a shame to miss them entirely while visiting.

While in Spain, John and I want to take day trips since we'll have a car on hand. We're thinking Segovia and Toledo, historic, picturesque and no-doubt tourist-trap cities that beg for you to take photos.

Not that I've been blogging lately. So what's another 12 days or so?

Just checking in to say hi. There are entire days now when I do not log on to MySpace. Two months ago, I was logging in several times a day.

Life's pace has taken a decisively hectic turn for me lately. I'll provide more info later, when I have a little more time to write.

The majority of my entries turn out to be writing or photo projects that take me a while to complete because I have to upload the photos, write the text, and code everything properly for display. When I don't do that, most of the time I'm not providing any entries at all. I guess I'm more an essayist than a blogger. But it was the first thing I said when I start this back in June: I'm not a blogger.

It's Friday before Labor Day, and no one in my office is working, or so it seems. I feel like leaving early, but I'll be good and stay.

My friend Nick has abandoned his own blog, which makes me a little sad. I don't read other people's blogs because I don't consider myself to have the time. But Nick and Jimbo were two people whose blogs I would read, mainly out of personal concern for them, though I do like what they contribute. Now there's only one left. I'm not about to go to Daily KOS or anyone like that.

I don't know if I'll ever get a "blog personality" down. This phenomenon has existed for years, and those who rode during its launch or shortly thereafter and stuck with it 'til now have learned how to gauge their readers' interest while maintaining their personalities and control over their content.

More so than that, they have a way about them, something that's hard to describe despite the fact that this is a text-centric medium. I don't know. I can feel — or at least read — their personalities in their postings. I know I'm putting out something, but I can't say it's definitive enough to get you to know me as a person.

I've been a professional writer, but I was never all that good at it. The day I left my job as a newspaper reporter in Franklin, Tenn., to attend graduate school in New York, my editor told me that I was a bright young man with a great future ahead of him — I just needed to learn how to write.

These days, writing is more like impulse and less like a craft, even though I do agonize over words and punctuation at times, not to mention style, spelling and syntax. I've never really been able to master the art of organizing one's writing first, then letting it come out. I can reorganize what I write, which sometimes results in something worthwhile. Still, that's only sometimes, and it's a subjective claim, not one that I can prove scientifically. You may think everything I've ever written sucks, and why wouldn't you?

For the holiday weekend, John and I will probably take our new convertible out for a drive. I still need to get used to handling a stick shift, especially on an incline with vehicles behind me. Stay still on an incline, then try to catch the gas pedal after letting go of the brake while your other foot tackles the clutch, and you're playing a game against the clock that ticks as the car slowly scoots backward, your only hope of stemming the tide to hit the gas and hope the engine and the forward-turning tires can reverse your direction. I can do all this but not really.

I tried this last Tuesday night while grabbing a parking ticket at a garage with an inclined entrance. A car was so close behind me that I became deathly afraid of letting go of the brake at all. I didn't want to just avoid hurting the other car. I also wanted to avoid scratching my own new car's nice dark-silver finish. The result of my neurotic obsession was to screech my tires dramatically for nearly a minute, going nowhere but sounding as if I were about to tear forward, up the ramp. Eventually I was able to move and avoid hitting anyone, but the damage was done to my psyche. So now we'll spend part of the weekend teaching me how to drive more smoothly and handle otherwise treacherous situations.

I say this, but nothing's set in stone. We may just veg in front of the TV all weekend.

Or not. My sister-in-law is having a birthday on Sunday, and a bunch of us will get together to celebrate with her. Monday some friends of ours have invited John and me to a barbecue, and we'll go and overeat like we always do.

Is it cheesy to announce your weekend plans on a blog, as if everyone else wants to know? Anyone else?

Well, TTFN...

(Actually, I'm in a good mood, but I rarely look happy in a pic)

Call it low will power. Call it lack of fiscal discipline. Call it the insatiable hunger that gnaws into your soul once you have tasted the blood.

Call it one week.

One week. That's how long John and I made it after giving up his sister Jeanne's Mercedes convertible. One week of John commuting from D.C. to Centreville, Va., in his 1998 Honda Civic. One week of working, not really talking about it, tending to business.

Then Saturday. Free time. Sunshine. No chores to do.

We talked. John went online.

By noon, we drove off the lot of Brown's Honda in Arlington, Va., with a dark silver 2003 Honda S-2000 convertible, just in and marked down. Four years old and only 27,000 miles on it.

We traded in our 2002 Honda Accord LX, the first car I had ever financed on my own. At the time we got it in November 2004, I considered it a big deal because I had never tried to buy a car before.

Nearly four years earlier, I had inherited my grandmother's 1988 Aries K, a car I remember her buying. As excited as I was to have my own car for the first time, my dad could see the fallen expression on my face when I came face-to-face with it. "Not sexy, is it?" He asked. No, not. I admit that for a minute or two there I was even afraid to show the car to anyone I knew in D.C., but I got over that when I realized that it would take me from A to B well enough. What more could I expect? I had no money.

Tim's add says it all:

Mine was blue.

Over the two and a half years that followed, I put much more money into maintaining that car and all its incidental break-downs than it was worth. Putting even $20 worth of gas into it was investing too much. I diss the car, but really I loved it. In a way, it was like having my grandmother with me in spirit.

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We wasted no time after driving the Honda S-2000 off the lot and took the car east toward and across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge on to Maryland's Eastern Shore. Our original intention was to make it to the beach and see Ocean City. But the 100°F heat index eventually wore us out. We drove home in the sunset with the top up and a very powerful air conditioner keeping us cool.

Oh, this Honda convertible's ride is smooth, the gear shift and clutch more sensitive than the Mercedes, the acceleration inspiring. If I had first learned to drive a stick-shift in a car like this, I'd have been a player by now.

Look, don't get me wrong: I'm not in any way pumping up a Honda convertible over a Mercedes. Far be it for me to be so oblivious about cars and the hierarchy of their brand names that I fail to recognize that, compared to bragging about a Mercedes anything, you can't do the same with what we got: "Dude, I just got a slick, tricked-out convertible. It's a Honda."

Seriously.

But this car is nice no matter how you toss it. Nice looking, well performing, clean. The lady who owned it previously leased it as brand-new (with 24 miles on it!) from the same dealership and didn't use it for anything. Twenty-seven thousand miles in four years?! John drives more than 15,000 a year just to get to and from his office.

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The next day, however, we set out at 5 a.m. and made our way up I-95 and the Jersey Turnpike, passing under the Lincoln Tunnel into Manhattan for the day.

Most of you probably already know this, but if you are doing something as nutty as going five hours north for a weekend day in the city, get there as early as you can. Even though on Sunday nothing opens 'til about noon, it's worth it to have your pick of parking spots in places like SoHo.

Although the top-down drive was part of the goal — as one car ad used to say, driving is fun again — we didn't mind leaving the car parked while we walked around the city.

We parked on Greene Street between Spring and Prince...

...and walked around a very sleepy neighborhood, making our way northward to Washington Square Park to walk around my old haunt, NYU.

I still remember being in tears about an hour or so into the long drive my father and I went on in August 1991 from Nashville to New York. He was dropping me off there to go to college. I'd visited the city earlier in the summer for orientation and was scared shitless. I was even more afraid now that I knew I'd be left on my own.

Who was I to know, being 18 years old? If I'd thought more clearly about it or had some older, wiser person who'd already been through the experience talk to me, I may have seen that I was never going to suffer some indignity or a fate worse than death just because I was left alone in America's biggest city. I mean it is college. Depending on whether or not you're funding your own way — I was not — it really can be only a taste of freedom. I think all I could've stomached at the time was the taste that I got.

All these years later, part of me still yearns to live there. It's not as big a part as it used to be, though. I talked recently with a friend who lives there, and he helped me understand something that gets lost, I think, for a lot of people who think a lot or talk about New York, whether or not they live there: after all is said and done about how big and powerful it is, it's still mainly just a city.

Of course it's unique. My dad has admonished both my brother and me for trying to compare it to anything else in size and coolness. I read an article in the Washington City Paper once that compared the two cities, figuring out which one was cooler. But the article began with a waiver saying that there really is no contest because New York by default is cooler, that what you were about to read was more academic than realistic.

Nonetheless, eventually the furor over the size and scale of everything in New York is put into its rightful place, and you see the human level that characterizes every city, town and village. You realize that you still have to learn where the most convenient and reliable stores for buying groceries and hardware are, the restrictions for parking on the street, how and when to register your vehicle, the best commute route or train line, the bars that suit your interests, how to budget for fun, where and how to meet people for friendship and dating, where to look to get a job, the safest but also most affordable neighborhoods where you can look at condos or apartments, and, just as important as everything else, how to get out when you want or need to. I went through those things in D.C. when I moved here in 1996. If I move anywhere else, I'll go through it again.

That's not to say that it wouldn't be awesome to live in New York. More appropriately, it would be awesome to be able to afford to live in New York. Better still, it'd be awesome to be able to afford to live well in New York.

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Besides, there are parts of Manhattan that I never saw when I was in college and graduate school there. John took me to one: Beekman Place. The tiniest of urban enclaves, this extraordinarily ritzy neighborhood sits on an embankment just north of the United Nations, between 1^st Avenue and FDR Drive on the east side.

Back when they had a ceramic art business together, John and his ex had clients and friends in New York and often would visit them on Beekman Place. They attended a wedding reception at the Top of the Tower, a panorama restaurant atop the 28-story Beekman Tower on the little neighborhood's southern border, not far from the 72-story Trump World Tower.

We walked across a bridge over nearby Peter Detmold Park, passing over FDR, and looked out on the East River toward Queens:

For a very short time during the summer of 1994, after graduating college, I lived in Sunnyside, which isn't that far northeast from the Queensboro Bridge behind John in the pic. Despite being depressed because I couldn't find a job and was going broke little by little, I really liked where I lived.

I was a block removed from Steinway Street, and there were all kinds of shops within a minute or two of my door, including a Mattress Discounters where I bought my first bed, and a Coconuts Record Store where I bought cassette singles. Other than one time while in graduate school a year or so later, I haven't been back to that neighborhood and wonder if it's changed.

After Beekman and Detmold, we made our way south, passing the U.N. and climbing the stairs at Ralph Bunch Park, settling in for a few minutes at another place I didn't even know existed: Tudor City:

I thought I had seen pretty parks in Manhattan, but the Greens at Tudor City really gave me pause. On the scale of typically modest-sized city parks, this place was modest in size but not in landscaping.

I was complaining to my friend in New York that it used to seem to me that people would hang out in places like Central Park as if they were escaping something, the park acting as a surrogate for the nature that they at least occasionally craved, a respite from the constant movement of urban life. But Tudor City struck me as more integrated with the density surrounding it. I could almost see it as if it had been in the same use some 100 years ago, set very naturally among the tall apartment buildings and tasteful houses.

Just when I'm sure that New York has too much set-in pollution stain to make it seem actually aesthetic, as opposed to just post-industrial, I discover a place like this and understand all the more why it is so unlike other places. I mean you just have to see it to understand because it's hard to compare.

Didn't I just say something about New York being just a city?

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The only snag we ran into was being caught photographing the entrance to the Holland Tunnel on our way out of town. The top down can help or hurt, it seems.

Some suspicious Port Authority officer halted us from entering and asked us a bunch of questions, all the same: "What are you going to do with those photos?" No matter what we told him, he asked again. It was if what we said didn't sink in. Forgive me for wanting to photograph the steps I take when I'm on a vacation.

The officer then gave us a convoluted lecture about our needing approval from the Port Authority to take photos. John deleted our pics of the entrance, and the officer let us drive off. We were never nervous. We never expressed anger at the man. We were nothing but polite. But that was just for show. You know, pragmatic thinking.

I don't buy that the cop was just doing his job, but what are you going to do? No one stopped us from taking shots — oh, and video — of the Lincoln Tunnel when we made our way in. Isn't that even more of a soft spot for the city? If anything, how pissed off I felt as we made our way across I-78 toward the southbound Jersey Turnpike brought the perspective into greater focus: it probably was the best thing I could do for myself 11 years ago to leave that town.

I might have stewed in resentment for longer had I not been driving this next-to-new convertible and feeling it sink in that it was mine.

The drive home went smoothly, especially compared to the near-constant back-ups on the opposite, northbound side. It wasn’t just the Turnpike, which crawled all the way from the Delaware Memorial Bridge northward to long past the dividing lanes. I-95 in Delaware and throughout Maryland had back-ups on the northbound side, either caused by accidents or just density. I couldn't imagine visiting D.C. or Philadelphia from New York for the weekend and driving through that on a Sunday night, probably unsure exactly when I'd get home or how much sleep I'd get for the next day.

But I didn't give a fuck. I own a convertible.

Um yeah, a Honda convertible. Whatever. I'll get a life when you get one too.

He's so handsome.

Even though I know this, somehow it gets reinforced when I least expect it.

It took me over a week to finish this, mainly because I didn't have any single long stretch of time to work on it. This is a video detailing John's and my joyride up north in Jeanne's 1999 Mercedes-Benz SLK 230 Kompressor convertible. Enjoy...

Incidentally, I've had nothing but trouble uploading this to MySpace, so I'm trying my hand at YouTube, which I've never done before. I hope this works, and I can't tell you what's up with that MySpace video uploader.