REID #70

Feb 01, 2022

SHORT:

My teeth hurt so badly right now that it sort of feels like I’m gonna vom… any way this could be interpreted as a good sign? :)

MEDIUM:

Today I woke up at 6am (like a superhero) and made myself coffee (like a superhero) and then went to school (like a superhero) and wasted 70 trees printing out a bad first draft of my play about the Holocaust (like the Lorax’s worst enemy) and then rehearsed it with actors who just graduated undergrad (cuties).

When it came time to do the play in front of the class, our TA came in and said “actually the front desk guy won’t let the professor into the building because of some weird COVID protocol” so we all had to go downstairs and the cutie actors loudly performed my nutso play where people scream about Auschwitz and Nazis and football and sex in the lobby of the building.

In the middle of the performance, the security guard told the professor she got clearance to go up, so we went upstairs and did it all again.

Grad school is good and what I’m doing matters and the world isn’t ending and the planet is not on fire.

I made myself an incredible sweet potato snap pea pepper rice dish for dinner and am eating it and telling myself that.

While I was cooking, I tried to memorize all the Ben songs in Sondheim’s Follies because I have to drunk-perform it at my friend’s birthday party in a month.

Things are totally fine and that I’m making smart choices and someday I will figure out who I am and what I want and be so happy and never worried.

LONG:

This weekend I did extreme dad cosplay by trudging to the train in the blizzard and nodding to the only other dude I saw on my way and saying “mornin!”.

Matthew McConauhey heard about me doing this and is now begging to play me in my biopic (I don’t think he’s twink-y enough tho... perhaps he can study the art of the twinkdyke and get back to me…).

Before I left for the train, I tried to put my girlfriend’s geriatric cat out in the snow and have her go get us breakfast. I screamed “Mush!” at her like she was Balto, but she didn’t move. She will be played by a rock in the biopic. Because she’s equally as USELESS. Just kidding, I love her.

Did everyone watch LGBTQIANDJUSTLIKETHAT this week? I cried during the scene between Carrie and Steve where he announces that he’s never going to take his ring off even though his chaotic wife Miranda is leaving him for a nonbinary nightmare named “Che”. He’s so strong and wholesome and perfect.

I cannot believe they’re calling the other nonbinary character’s B-Mitzvah a “They Mitzvah” – I sent my therapist an email about it with a screenshot of them saying “They Mitzvah” even though he doesn’t watch the show and has told me multiple times to stop sending him screenshots from it because he doesn’t care and tried to watch the show but it was so bad and will never watch it again despite my begging and pleading.

Last Tuesday my girlfriend and her gay brother and her roommate and her gay brother’s straight friend made plans to go to an adult gymanstics class at 9pm but then the gay brother’s straight friend didn’t come because “one of his balls sort of hurt”. He should’ve sucked it up and been strong like Steve and gone with us because we had a blast.

At the gym, I watched the gymnastics boys and parkour boys and thought about what it would’ve been like to grow up as a boy. When my brother was 12 he went outside to water the plants at 6am in his robe that he for some reason wore every single night and then he locked himself out and spent two hours banging on my window and my sister’s window and my parents’ window but we were all dead asleep and then finally two hours later I woke up to him shivering in his little robe, hose in hand, slamming himself against my bedroom wall, and I let him back in and was like “are you okay?”. Maybe if I grew up a boy that would’ve happened to me too.

I spent yesterday frozen in a chair because I pitched a teen rom com but then realized I deleted TikTok so I no longer know what teens are. The other queer person in my screenwriting class pitched a beautiful movie about singing pumpkins. I wish I was the type of gay who writes about queer whimsical metaphorical things like beautiful singing pumpkins, but instead I’m always like “here’s my script that’s basically Love, Simon”.

While I was working on my Love, Simon-ass pitch, my girlfriend ordered takeout. Something that makes me smile is the fact that my girlfriend cannot eat anything without spilling on herself so every single time we get takeout, she sits on the couch with a little makeshift bib and smiles and I watch her and melt. YEAH. While u gays are all watching Drag Race, I’m watching my gf stick a towel down her shirt to use as a bib so she doesn’t get pad thai all over herself. AND THAT’S THE BEAUTIFUL SPECTRUM OF LGBTQ.

I’m not making much sense because I’ve had a long day and my brain is scrambled eggs.

Also I watched the Getting Curious Jonathan Van Ness show and it made me lose all perception of space and time.

I did, however, learn, that there was once a girlboy pharaoh named Hatshepsut.

The program did teach me that fact.

And then I went around the house trying to say Hatshepsut a million times.

Hatshepsut was a girlboy Pharaoh and I’m a girlboy idiot — huge for history, huge for me, huge for the concept of legacy and evolution and queer ancestry and gender and sisterbrotherhood.

I think I love And Just Like That because I’m going thru menopause and puberty at the same time, so I relate to every single character. Even Steve who’s going through male menopause (divorce).

I just bought a shirt that says, “I had a great time at Rock’s They-Mitzvah”.

C u next Tuesday!!!

LOVE, REID.

(That was supposed to be a reference to Love, Simon. Did you get that? Remember when I recorded a 3 minute parody video of the Love, Simon trailer called Dove, Simon that was about Simon Cowell being stuck in a bird body? Have I talked about that in this newsletter before? I DO NOT REMEMBER, MY BRAIN IS SCRAMBLED EGGS)