It's a somewhat chilly December night. Chilly, at least it seems, to everyone around me. Despite my southern Californian upbringing, cold weather has never been a real problem for me. Heat's another story. Not sure why it's worked out that way, but somehow I've wound up acclimated to the opposite weather as everyone else I grew up with. It's hardly the last bougie thing I'll say, but, I always looked forward to snowboarding trips with my dad. An opportunity to spend an extended period of time in a genuinely comfortable, cool environment was a real treat. If anything, the actual snowboarding was a bonus on top of the food, bonding, and weather. I find myself making a nearly 2-AM run to the corner deli, hands stuffed into my gloves -- for whatever reason my hands don't seem to have gotten the whole cold-weather memo -- and vape in my back pocket. Today, I spent most of the day with my girlfriend at her place in Manhattan. I live in Brooklyn, but certain circumstances later to be revealed have resulted in my requiring a roommate and I'd rather spend time with my girlfriend at her place than mine, at the moment. We spent the previous night re-attempting to make the perfect at-home gluten free pizza. I haven't quite figured out how to get the cheese just right. The flavor was there, but there wasn't nearly as much color as I wanted. My suspicions are that it'll require first cooking at a lower temperature to get the crust warm and somewhat crisp, before cranking the heat up to or nearly to broil and allowing the cheese to really get some color on it. The difficult part is just getting the crust to not burn. It's especially hard since she can't have gluten, and gluten free pizza crusts don't really work the same way as your standard-issue flour-and-yeast pizza crust. At the deli, I pick up a bevy of incrediby unhealthy snacks, and some tea and seltzer. Ever since I got sick and went on some strong antibiotics, my sleep schedule has been totally out of wack and I've been having 1 or 2 AM snacktime before finally hitting the hay sometime around 3:30 or 4. It's definitely not ideal by any stretch of the imagination. At least I live in a city where stuff is still open this late. Three years ago, I was living in Minneapolis with my first real roommate in my first real room to myself at my first real tech job in my first real "new city". It was a lot to take in at once. I was, to put it delicately, a completely different person. Different name. Different pronouns. Different sense of self. Much smaller -- some might say non-existant -- tits. Some of those I guess are more-or-less to be expected to change in three years, but it's still pretty significant. Minneapolis was a good town for me, at the time. A newly twenty-one kid with significant gender issues and a whole host of other anxieties. Most nights found me at a bar, or if not a bar a restaurant with a damn good cocktail list. I lived on this large park at the edge of downtown. I'd walk through the park on evenings or weekend mornings and go to one of the host of restaurants on the other side. Or I'd head down towards Uptown to get this tidy spot that had great food and even better drink specials. They called it "Social Hour" instead of "Happy Hour". For the price of one beer you'd get two. I'd see myself sitting alone up at the bar with a healthy portion of poutine that'd make a canadian cry foul, and two full pours of a strong beer. It's no wonder I had a small beer gut by the time I left to head back to LA. This is all a bit scatterbrained right now, but it's hard to figure out where to start on a project like this. Life is never so clear, and chapters never clearly marked. It probably doesn't help that I'm not exactly writing with a purpose. This isn't some piece of functional therapy. Nor is it an exercise in pure documentarianism. I'm certainly not a figure worthy of bibliographic cataloging. I kindof just felt like writing, so, here I am. On my couch early in the morning with snacks laid out beside my and my laptop keeping my lap just a little warmer than entirely comfortable.