Saw “Mysteries of Pittsburgh” last night--- a kind of tentative recommendation from Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo. I’d seen the novel around, but it’s not something I’d ever read. The film wasn’t bad at all--- very good performance from Sienna Miller, who’s a crush of both mine and Miss Ginny’s. Not a bad film for a weeknight alone--- huge and icy gin-and-tonic, pita chips and hummus, the lovely and lithe Sienna Miller.

My father was from Pittsburgh. He and my mother lived there for a year or so just after they were married. I’m told that my first flight was at age two or three, flying up with my family to visit relatives.

I remember Pittsburgh last in early spring. I was moving back from New Haven, and I spent a week with Constanza at her dorm at Carnegie-Mellon. Snow and wind the night she met me at the Amtrak station--- the cab back to CMU skidded through a stop sign and just missed another car. Drank lots of Iron City and Rolling Rock beer, danced at a couple of long-vanished punk venues. Grey and cold and rainy--- I remember that. Chinese restaurant on a hillside in the rain, seeing a showing of “Where the Buffalo Roam” at some student film society, midnight pizza and smoking a joint in some park by one of the rivers. Sang songs from “Evita” to one another in her dorm room. The Warhol Museum wasn’t opened yet, but we did do the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Natural History Museum.

That would’ve been…what? Just before when “Mysteries of Pittsburgh” was set. The summer when the film is supposed to have taken place I was living in Vienna--- Muellnergasse 15/7, Vienna IX. Across Liechtensteinstrasse from the Café Landsknecht. I caught the date in the voice-over for the film and had to laugh.

Somewhere in her 43 Things entries, Miss VarietySnow / DanceItsTorture notes that she met someone when he poked her at Facebook. Good taste in music, she wrote--- and he was “just batty enough to be tolerable”. I miss her--- she’s the Vanished girl I really do miss painfully. I’ll never know why she--- Miss Lissy at emigree ---so abruptly Vanished. I can only wish I’d been “just batty enough to be tolerable”.

I still can’t jump rope. Haven’t the coordination to jump rope at all, let alone the aerobic capacity. I’d never be able to train at boxing. My core remains…useless. Can’t jump rope or box or run. Can’t tie knots, either.

My obsessions and compulsions and fears shift and pulse. I’ll be obsessing over my inability to jump rope all through the Year Nine. I will envy a certain Vanished girl her boxing and running skills, and envy her her ambition and drive and future as well.

There are obsessions I can’t explain at all. Why do I obsess over being a Facebook Relationship Name? I’ve always needed the forms of romance, needed to have designations and forms. It can’t be that I envy the co-eds who laughingly become Facebook Married with their roommates. It’s probably about my value fears, my fears that I’ll never have the value to be given public acknowledgment of value, of being part of someone’s life. Or is it as simple as wanting to know that I’ve been found better or more valuable than Others, as wanting to know that I’m the one who was chosen?

I’ll be obsessing all week about going to Orange Beach to see the lovely Laura-Ashlee. A four-hour drive--- once upon a time that was nothing. I suppose I’m afraid of something mechanical going wrong, of car trouble and being left stranded by the roadside. I did take the Small Black Saturn into the garage this morning. I’m going to work myself into a fit over this. And I can’t. I have all the more usual obsessive worries--- meeting someone, my looks, performance anxiety, hopes for a romantic weekend. And the hope that we’ll be able to plan the NYC Adventure there in our hotel bed. Money is always a fear: money and time and my own worth as lover and travel companion.

I’ll obsess over this all week. Friday evening I’ll be standing in a hotel on the beach with a beautiful green-eyed girl in my arms--- and at midnight we’ll be drinking Sofia Coppola faux-champagne on the sands. I know that. But I know that by Friday noon I’ll have worked myself into a serious fit.

Two bottles of Reyka vodka did arrive today. I suppose that might help.

I will not take counsel of my fears. I won’t. I can’t. Last October I boarded a plane to JFK after years of being afraid to fly, afraid to leave town. I know what I can do. I know what the weekend means to me. The Eduardo-kun who danced in punk venues in Pittsburgh and who lived in Vienna is still part of me. Listen to Joy Division and head east down the highway. I know that I can do that. And it is worth it. That’s the thing I have to hold in my mind always: this is very, very much worth it.