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    Xenology: Something Borrowed 01/05/2009
    Emily asks whether I am upset. I immediately shoot back a question in response to her question, does it matter if I am? As I feel she hesitates in answering, I clue her in that it absolutely doesn't. I'm really not any part of this. In fact, had only Tim changed his profile, I wouldn't have much noticed or cared. He'd been listed as "married" since July, as part of some joke even Emily doesn't get. I informed her that she would have to kill whoever was married to Tim up to this point, ...


    Xenology: Knowing Everyone 01/04/2009
    After this limited topic has begun to exhaust itself - how much can one sustain the comparing of notes of a guy they dated nearly a decade apart - Hannah grows quiet in a way I regard as nearly antithetical to her usual attitude. I can't blame her. Whether or not Tina happens to like me - and she gives me absolutely no indication I am unwelcome in her home, so I may have been incorrectly assuming the reasoning behind our distance - we do have a history of associations (those countless many ...


    Xenology: Of Tinsel and Eggnog 01/03/2009
    This is the first time I am experiencing Christmas without my partner at my side since 2001. But, on the other hand, this is the last time any holiday is happening for the first time since Emily and that is indeed a cause for celebration. I have completed the cycle. I promise you, it irritates me as much as it likely does you that I have to invoke her name as a means of comparison, some bittersweet to a dish already flavorful enough. But I've made it a year, though some apparently thought ...


    Xenology: Snowbind 12/28/2008
    I am not sure she even has time to verbally respond, and certainly not time enough to exit her room and negotiate a flight of stairs, before opening the front door of her dorm to let me in, leading me to believe that she was sitting in the hallway and staring at the door as though it were a tombstone. She clings and kisses me hard, chastising me for trying to bring bags of supplies in before our lips could get properly reacquainted. She acts as though she hasn't seen me for a month or, in ...


    Xenology: Friends and Partners 12/16/2008
    I don't doubt her intention to remain faithful to our friendship, but I am all too aware of the previously established pattern. Significant others detract from friends. I know I am guilty of this, cloistering myself in my apartment with Melanie most every weekend, though I make obvious efforts to include friends in my plans with her. But I have had dear friends withdraw from me totally because they were sharing their beds with someone new. The most extreme case was Keilaina ostensibly ...


    Xenology: Sister To Sleep 12/10/2008
    I pull Hannah against me and whisper, "I love you." I hold her a little tighter and can't squeeze the words from her, but instead something similar but less committal. She is my sister, a rare quality shared only by Melissa, someone with whom I feel instantly and irrationally comfortable no matter the outward circumstance. But even as that, I can't make love something totally safe to her as long as I persist in being male. To her, at this stage in her life, I can't imagine any male not ...


    Xenology: On Remembering 12/08/2008
    It is easy to believe the stories we tell ourselves, especially if no one has the evidence that will promptly and definitively contradict our stories. Quickly, possibly instantly, something artificial supplants what was objectively real. Maybe it is more convenient or flattering to remember something false, but it is usually unconscious. Lapses in memory are rarely malevolent, almost by their nature cannot be since we would have to consciously acknowledge that which we are subconsciously ...


    Xenology: I'm a Believer 11/13/2008
    Every weekend, I fall in love again. By Sunday, the last thing I want to do is let her go, release her (as she puts it) back into the cold water of life. Yet Sunday, Melanie leaves and I panic, because I had been swaddled in the bliss of her kisses and am now naked again--often too literally. I am so sure of everything, so soothed into believing in the benevolence of the universe as long as I can place my lips to her forehead. She closes my door behind her and all the petty stresses of life ...


    Xenology: On Forgetting 11/09/2008
    Our memories the seeds on which we justify the formation of our personalities. We are warm or cynical, pacific or violent, all based on prior experiences. But memories are not infallible. That they are allowable as testimony is almost laughable to anyone who has read a little into social psychology. The egocentric bias, for example, overemphasizes our importance in any given event, provoking paranoia or pride where, objectively, we should have neither. Furthermore, the right implication ...


    Xenology: Slouching Towards Atlantis 11/04/2008
    During our pre-road-trip sleepover with Hannah, Melanie came up with a back story for our version of Atlantis, Atlanteans discovering America owing to BBC radio broadcasts after having been kept out of the world since the time of the Roman Empire (Atlantis was one of the great empires in the universe Melanie spins). Thanks to the broadcasts, they speak English with British accents and are equipped with the sea version of steampunk technology, but they are also grossly unprepared for the ...


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