The Haunted Weekend

It all started on friday afternoon. After our last class finished, I told some friends to go to the Juan Valdez Cafe in downtown. The cafe is located in La Candelaria, the historical neighborhood in Bogota, and is surrounded by universities, museums and libraries. It was 4pm, and the streets were really crowded with all the people leaving their colleges, most of them going in he opposite way. I was talking to one of my friends, when I looked at a small group of people walking towards us. When I looked at their faces, I inmediately recognized Eddie among them.

Eddie is 30 yrs old, and I met him on a chatroom about a year ago. I used to like chatrooms not because I wanted tohook up with guys, but because I liked talking to guys, finding out what turns them on, etc. And one day, I met him. He's really good looking, interesting and fun, but he's specially HORNY (The very first time we chatted he gave me a full display of his masturbatory skills through the webcam). We kept in touch through e-mails, and everytime we chatted through messenger, he put himself in front of the webcam. I think he's really hot, but for some reason I'd never wanted to meet him in person. Although I've seen his body and his face a lot of times, everytime we chat, or everytime I see his dick on the webcam I feel like I'm watching a stranger, and I like that kind of mistery. He has had several relationships since we met, but he kept asking me to get together, and I kept telling him I didn't want to ruin that feeling.

I spotted him first. A lot of thoughts went through my mind:

1. He's going to talk to me.
2. He's going to talk to me, in front of my friends.
3. My friends are going to notice what kind of friend he is.
4. The end of the world.
5. He's hotter than what the webcam makes him look like.

We were like a half a block away from each other when our eyes crossed. I think I looked like I was seeing a ghost, or something. He knows I haven't outed to anyone, and I know he probably wouldn't have done anything that could have exposed me in front of my friends. But then the adrenaline took control of my brain. Right when his group of friends was in front of mine, I almost pushed my friends off the sidewalk, and went across the street. Luckily for us, there weren't any cars on the street at that time, because I made them jump to the street so suddenly they wouldn't have had time to tell the color of the car running over them. They all looked at me with a strange look on their face, and I just told them I wanted to go first to a pizza place on that side of the street. I didn't look back to see Eddie's reaction, I just kept walking. I felt awful about it the rest of the day. I wanted to call Eddie and apologize as soon as I got home. But right when we were drinking our last drop of espresso, a friend called us and told us to go to bi place, and then out for a couple of beers, so I arrived home at 3am on saturday.

I was really busy on saturday, and I called him at 4pm, but he wasn't home. I didn't call him back, I mean...not that we're a couple, or anything. I sent him an e-mail telling him what happened. He'll understand. But what happened on friday, almost having my friends and I getting hit by a car just to run away from a guy I met on a gay chatroom, has been floating over my head...I'll have to get out of the closet soon, I don't think I can live scared for too much longer...

The weather and I

You guys have no idea how terrible the weather in Bogota can be. I remember one time I was trying on this really thick jacket at Abercrombie and Fitch, and the entire staff asked me the same question: Do you need a jacket like that in Colombia? You see, Bogota is in the middle of the mountains. It doesn't snow here, but in exchange, is rains a lot. And by a lot, I mean sometimes it rains so much that when you are inside a car, you almost feel it's going to start floating any minute.


It was really cold on Monday, and I was only wearing a t-shirt and a sweater. While we were in Maths, there was one moment when my friends and I actually had to sit so close to each other it looked like a group hug. So on Tuesday, I put on the Abercrombie jacket. My fist class was at 7am, so it was still cold, because it was still early. By 9am, it was so sunny I just wanted to kill myself. I had to carry the jacket under my arm for the entire day, since it's too big to fit inside my locker, and too heavy to keep it inside my backpack.
And today it was really sunny, which was good, since I was only wearing a very light jacket. The problem was that I had to stay at the University more that I thought I would, so I left the campus at 8:30. It was so cold outside, that after 5 minutes I felt I had lost sensitivity on my hands.

The thing is, I'm starting to feel sick. My throat is killing me. So right now I'm just going to self-medicate me and then go to bed hoping the weather won't be so bad at me, and I won't have the flu during next week's exams.

Songs of the Week:
Music Sounds Better with You, Stardust
Hey Jude, The Beatles
Confesiones de Invierno (Winter Confessions), Sui Generis

Maye's birthday

Maye and I have been really close since our last year at high school (what in the US is called senior year, I think). I first met her when I was hitting on her best friend, Francesca(who I met while I was hitting on one of her friends, and deserves an entire post of her own), and we eventually ended up being really good friends. She's the one I tell everything to: The good, the bad, the boring. We both travelled to the US last summer, but we never saw each other (She was working at Yellowstone, and I was a couple of states away). Since we arrived like two weeks after classes started, we have been really busy trying to catch up with the readings, and exams, and stuff. So we hadn't had time to speak since we arrived.

It all sounds worse with beer on your brain

But it was her birthday last weekend, so we went out with her sister and a couple of friends to celebrate. Epic amount of Erdinger beer were consumed at the pub. We were all talking, and making jokes. I spent most of the night feeling really uncomfortable , as her cousin took every chance he had to touch my legs under the table as we were all speaking to each other. Not that I dislike another man's atention, I just don't like such a public display of it, less when I've decided to stay in the closet for a few months. Plus, I don't like him at all, so it was easy for me acting uncomfortable. Eventually, he noticed my lack of interest, so he gave up and went back to his beer glass.

Maye and I finally got to talk as we had wanted to. I had no idea she got her self a boyfriend as soon as she arrived, and by the first month of the relationship, she had already moved in with him. And obviosly, she had sex wih him. For the first time. Ever.

Now, I felt really happy for her, since she did it with someone she loved, and everything. But you have no idea how jealous I got...I just wanted to travel to Yellowstone and see what the guy was like...I was really close to making an ex-boyfriend-kind of-scene. Not that I feel atracted to her, or anything. But I mean, it was like she had been my secret place, where I kept all my secrets. And suddenly, some loser had just moved in and left me homeless. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it's just what I felt at the time (of course, all the booze didn't make my mind much clearer). I guess I also feel bad about her not telling me about it until two months later. But as I said, we haven't had the time, and since I'm not a fan of long phone calls, it was hard for us to talk. That has to change, since I think She's the first person I'm going to tell I'm gay. Anytime soon.

My trip to the U.S.

This summer I traveled to the US a bunch of friends from college. We worked for almost three months at an amusement park. The initial reason for us to work there was to improve our english, plus we'd get to meet people from "all over the world" that were also working at the park. But it ended up being so much more than that.

The Ultimate "american" experience: Going to a baseball game

I realized I didn't really know my friends. During the summer, I was able to know sides of each one of them that I did'n know. For example my roomate at the park. We weren't really close friends when we arrived (actually, I thought he was really boring). But when you're away from your country and your family, you start opening to other people as if you were best friends. His mother died about nine months ago. It was really hard for him, becuase he had to be the strong one in the family, because his father and sisters were completely devastated. That's why he decided to travel with us to the US, because he wanted to get away from everything, and having some time to organizing his life. I also found out he's a die hard fan of Madonna, (he spent more than 500 dollars going to Chicago for her concert). The Madonna subject allowed us to talk about gay people. He's not gay or anything, but he has several friends who are. He has gone to several gay bars in Bogota, and he told me he really doesn't like how promiscuous and shallow most gay people are. He also told me he has a friend, who he's almost sure he's gay, since the guy is the one who has taken him to the gay bars, and everything, but he's not out, and asked me what he should do about it. Now, I don't know if he was telling me this because he thinks i'm gay, or if it's just my imagination. I just told him (in a very straight and detached way) that if he was gay, he'd probably come out when felt ready to do it. Later I realized I was not only talking about his friend, but also about me.

I guess this summer helped me to see thing from a different view. It's really helpful when you get away from everything, so you can have a detailed perspective of what surrounds you in your everyday life. I also felt in love with the US (although all the references people made to cocaine as soon as I mentioned "Colombia" really pissed me off), specially with Chicago...I lived there one of the most special moments of my entire life.

The First Post - A little bit about me

Right know, I should be catching up with all the things I have to do for the next week (and the week after that, etc). But right now I feel so tired and so stressed about everything that's going on in my life, that the only thing I want to do, is writing. I'm going to start talking about me.

I'm 19 years old, I'm from Colombia, I'm a closeted gay guy and I've been going to college for about three years. The thing is, since the very first day, I haven't felt absolutely certain about me studying to become an engineer. You see, there was a moment, on my last year of high school, when I could choose what to major in, and the two strongest choices were so different from each other, that there just wasn't an obvious choice. Those options were engineering and film making. In the end, I chose the first ones for two basic reasons: the first one, is that if it's already hard to succeed as a filmmaker in the US, it's almost impossible to do so in Colombia.

The second reason is actually really stupid, now that I think about it: you know that when you're growing up, every time you're in a family reunion (Xmas, New Year's eve, or every holiday you can think of) relatives always have a kind of pre-established dialogue: "Oh, I can't believe how tall are you know, you are almost taller than me", or "I bet must drive all the girls at school crazy with those eyes you have" , and of course, the usual question: "So, what do you want to be when you grow up?" Now, my family is an average colombian family: not too tall, catholic and very conservative. So if I had answered something like "actor" or "movie director" I would have caused some harsh reactions among my drunken relatives. So I got used to say "chief of a big company", just because it was something they could be proud of (and to be honest, something I could be proud of too, being powerful and bossy are things that I can definitely relate to). So when I got to choose a career, I stuck to my usual response, just because I felt that was what everybody, including myself, were expecting.

So I got in to college to study Industrial Engineering. Something relatively easy, as I heard to some people, so I should have had no problem on having good grades and everything. The problem is, those people never warned me (not that they had to, since it's a matter of common sense) I had to have at least a little bit of skills with numbers. And that's one thing I don't have ( 2+2=4 is an result that many times I take hours to understand). So basically, Ive' survived these three years hanging on to my analysis capability, more than to my hability of handling number operations. That's the reason why I started to think maybe, just maybe, I made a bad career choice.

Plus, the ghost of movies has always been floating over my head like a black cloud. The problem is I have never known how strong my passion for movies is. I know I'd watch Cinemax rather than studying for Statistics (which is what I should be doing right now), and I know that everytime I turn on my handicam I never want to stop recording, but are movies just a hobbie, or do I really want to put everything in risk for what might be my true calling? And even if I do want to do that for the rest of my life, Am I even talented?

Well, those are only some of the many important questions which I have been too afraid, too shy or even too lazy to answer (like the whole gay thing, which I'm sure will have many posts dedicated to it). Ok, that was a little bit about myself. Hope you enjoyed it.

Most listened songs this week:
Bad day, Daniel Powter
Mas que Nada, Sergio Mendes feat. Black Eyed Peas (I love Bossa Nova)
For the Widows in Paradise, For The Fatherless In Ypsilanti, Sufjan Stevens
Is It any wonder?, Keane
Viernes 3AM, Seru Giran