I Made Chicken Parm One Time Because It Felt Like I Had No Other Options

I didn’t mean to make my last post *about* anything and I worry I accidentally did, which I lament. Today? I have nothing. My boyfriend’s 5-year old nephew called and made me guess what he did today and I said “legos” and he said yes and then he said he wanted to guess what I did so I said OK and he said “just lie around” and I said yes.

Right now, though, I am sitting in a room at Brown University while my same sex partner restores a mural on a wall for money. I do think that I should be a college professor that actually wears product in their hair and is always walking across campus in 71 degree weather with a satchel bag eating an apple. Don’t you think if I did that I would be happy? I think that then I would be always in a good mood and I would never feel tired and I would eat a normal amount every day without even trying. I would live in a 5 bedroom Victorian home a thousand meters off-campus and it wouldn’t cost that much money because it would be in a town that was really cute but no one really wanted to live in unless they worked at the university. 

Other professors would come over my famous victorian for dinner parties once a month and bring red wine which I would have one glass of because I wouldn’t be an alcoholic. We would have amazing conversations about literature (ever heard of it?) and none of them would know anything about the New York alt comedy scene and it would be like I was a completely different person and my 20’s never even existed. And to top it all off? I would deactivate my insta! And all my old friends would sort of forget about me but also they would remember every once in a while and try to search me and be like “I guess he deactivated his account…”

When I was in college I was always drunk or high on the celebrated amphetamine Adderall and I was always looking for bathrooms that no one used that I could throw up in. I never did any homework and it was all an enormous waste of time and now I have crippling student debt that I keep meaning to engage with but don’t. 

My credit score is bad. I’ve never checked but I know it is bad from this one time when I went to Old Navy to buy some business-casual pieces for a job I was starting the following day as a temp gay receptionist at a commercial realty firm on 44th and 3rd. To work at 44th and 3rd is to eat a hurried lunch at Chopt every day while wearing khakis. You bring a book to read while you eat your salad, as if that is even physically possible, but end up staring at a herd of finance bros who’s butts look good in suit pants while you shovel spinach towards your face. I obviously know enough to know that Old Navy is sexless and lame but everything there costs exactly three dollars and for that reason it was my shopping destination.

Anyways, when I was paying for my 3 button-down shirts that I would go on to look bad in, the cashier told me that if I signed up for an Old Navy account I could get 25% off my purchase. I was like: OK, sure, that sounds great. The cashier was the kind of gay man who works at a suburban Old Navy which is to say he was wearing a weird necklace.

He had me type my name and birthday and social security number and I realized that the account was actually an Old Navy credit card. I didn’t think I was allowed to have a credit card because of how I am, but the cashier seemed incredibly confident. He typed a bunch of information in on his screen and then his face dropped into a genuinely shocked expression.

“Oh, wow, this has never—um. Ok. I’ve never seen this before. You actually…can’t have this, and you never can have it,” he said. “What I can do is offer you these coupons for Banana.” By banana he meant banana republic, which was really upsetting.

That’s how I know my credit score is bad, because it shocked an Old Navy gay one time in 2018. Once I start paying my student debt I will go back to Old Navy again to check if it has improved at all. I bet that gay will still be there. They always are, I find.

One of the worst parts of college was my senior year because I had a girlfriend, which is a terrible thing to have when you are gay. When I think about that time period I am confronted with the haunting truth that I was always wearing cargo shorts. Cargo shorts are never the answer but when you are closeted sometimes it feels like they are. It is a medical phenomenon. We laugh a lot, as a society, about cargo shorts, but when you’re in the mental and emotional space where they seem like the right choice, it is really lonely. If you are in that place now, know that I *see* you and one day you won’t wear them anymore.

I was always broke and when it was Valentine’s day I didn’t have any money for a gift for my gf, and even if I did I wouldn’t know what to get her. I didn’t know what valentine’s day gift felt true and correct and from a man who is attracted to women. It feels like you should buy jewelry but then I thought there was probably a specific kind of jewelry that straight guys buy for their girlfriends and I couldn’t really imagine what that was. I couldn’t just think about what she would LIKE, I had to think about what I thought a straight guy would think she would like. AND it had to be under twenty dollars. 

My friend Hilary’s boyfriend JB went to school nearby and he told me to make her dinner as a gift. I had never cooked anything successfully but JB said he had a recipe for chicken parm. That felt like it could work because it was Italian and if I played it just right maybe that could feel inherently romantic. At the very least it wasn’t tacos, a famously platonic dish and the only other thing I knew how to make. So JB gave me his recipe and Hilary drove me to the store. “This just might be crazy enough to work,” I thought.

JB’s recipe for chicken parm was sort of the only real recipe for chicken parm. THIS can’t be right, I thought, while flopping raw cutlets in egg yolk—THIS cannot be straight. But JB was the one who suggested it and he was definitely straight — I could tell because I never knew what to talk to him about.

Later that night when my girlfriend came over, she gave me vibram 5 finger shoes as my gift—The shoes with individual toe slots. I think it could be a fun acting excercise at theater schools for students to have to REACT to being given TOE SHOES in a STRAIGHT way. We ate the chicken parm in silence and everything felt very, very wrong. It is incredibly bleak to try to eat chicken parm with a woman when you are gay. It’s not at all what God intended when he made humans OR chickens. Ultimately the poorly made chicken parm didn’t prove I was straight to literally anyone. And it wasn’t even really fair of me to ask it to.