Dear profile reader,

0. I don't like profiles. They encourage misrepresentation, and operate under the silly idea that what you read here has anything to do with how well we (reader and writer? What happens when I read my own profile?) would get along. (I tell myself: this is no way to start. Billy, you sound like you're complaining. You sound like you are trying too hard.) I have an idea. Instead of slaughtering myself (not myself, your image of myself) by talking about myself, I'll talk around myself, and let you leave with what you will. Without an aim, I cannot miss.

1. Why do we start counting with "one"? Before we even think about counting, we have already said zero, (not "zero.")

2. (I tell myself: Billy, they want to know why they should talk to you. Help them out. Quit flattering yourself with wordgames. This is no place for verbal masturbation. You can do that on your own.) Okay, kids. My mom thought I was autistic until I was six. (No! That is not attractive. Try again!) She still brings it up from time to time, more often after a few beers. "I swear it. You have just a little bit of autism. I don't know any other kids who played with numbers and spun things in the corner all day. There's nothing wrong with it, honey, having a little autism. Nothing at all," she says, with perhaps a little alcoholism herself. A prosperous family we are! (I tell myself: don't be surprised a year from now when you are still single.)

3. I used to do karate and gymnastics. (I tell myself: Good! Talent is attractive. No one likes someone who sits around and does nothing all day.) I reherniated a disk last summer that was first operated on when I was seventeen. My doctor says I risk paralysis by doing flips. I still do aerials most days, but am nowhere near what I was when I was nineteen. (Fool! No one wants to date a cripple.) I play piano, too, which people seem to like, but I don't have much to show for having played since I was ten. (Self-deprecation: a one-ingredient recipe for long, sexless stretches.)

4. This is the embarrassing evidence of who I used to be: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYVV1AIlUBY . It was my twenty-first birthday. I was already drunk, and clearly so was my friend who taped this. (My opinion is that you can kind of tell. Let's face it: who does this sober past a certain age?)

5. (I burgeon between parantheses. Why can't I be honest outside of their aegis? I am not ready to discuss colons.)

6. I hate cops. (Strategic! Now you shall attract no officers.) I take issue with people who give me attitude when I do something wrong ("wrong") when their job security depends on my doing that thing.

7. I have vague and lofty aspirations of one day being an English professor and publishing novels. Time will beat this out of me, and when it does, I'll stick a pistol in my mouth at the unremarkable age of thirty-seven. (I tell myself: you are a sick fuck. What if someone thought that was serious? There's nothing funny about ending your life by fellating a firearm.)

8. Octopus: a fish bent on being a spider. On the one hand I approve. On the other I feel upset. On the third hand I am glad for what they allow this sentence to do.

9. Around eighteen I started reading too much. My favorites: Coetzee, Beckett, Woolf, Vonnegut, Nabokov, Foucault, Derrida, Salinger, MacDonald, Morrison, and Joyce. This is where my handle comes from. The last lines of Lolita are some of my favorite: "I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita." I'm caffeine-sensitive, and two Mountain Dews and Nabokov's writing made me become over-excited and tear up in a public place. (I ask myself: how embarrassing do you want to seem?)

10. I do not think anyone has written the gay situation correctly yet. These are the problems I have with nearly every gay story I have read: flat antagonists, wishful storylines that smell like things the author wishes happened to him, self-stereotyping, and a tendency toward histrionics. Augusten Burroughs and David Sedaris: self-perceived heros and victims in edited worlds where they are slightly more clever than everyone else.

11. I think heavily about how I think. I've become circular. People say, "You come off shy because you overthink and second-guess yourself."

Naturally, I begin to think about how I'm trying not to overthink. I have high hopes of liking myself one day, in spite of myself. (Also: I have high hopes of liking someone else beyond the bounds of friendship. This has not happened in five years.)

12. (I ask myself: what are you doing? What have you done and what has it accomplished?)

13. Final Fantasy swallowed up a shameful amount of my adolescence. The years spanning seventh to tenth grade characterize themselves for me in terms of leveling up and slaying beautiful female villains. I mention this because I wonder from time to time if I haven't grown up into a character. In more than one situation I have made decisions based not on what I want for myself, but on what seems most aesthetically pleasing against the rest of my life. It is not surprising I have persued study in literature. Academia has validated my drive to live mostly in my head. (In this place,

in the middle of nowhere, I fill the space between me and non-me with fictions. They stream northward and southward to any number of somewheres I'd rather be. What they do for me remains unclear.)

14. Who put sex on a pedestal? Who threw up a bunch of rules surrounding it? To give sex this privileged position is to pit what the mind wants against what the body wants. If we place sex before love, instead of waiting for love to have sex, don't we take a step toward ensuring that the eventual love is unadulterated by sexual desire? (I tell myself: say what you mean. Sex is nice.)

15. (I tell myself: you are distracted. Tell them more about yourself.) I've had to execute a naked cartwheel outside of a high window in the middle of a cold October night to evade my ex-boyfriend's grandmother. (Delightful. Outstanding.)

16. I will tell a story. Billy is my name. Billy is also

the name of the first guy I messed around with. Ten minutes after sloppy oral sex under a cheap bridge, I went to his house and ate dinner with his family. "This is how we eat tacos," the mother said. "We put the hard shell inside a soft shell. That way you can have both without a mess!" No one prepared me for the emotion that comes with saying a poker-faced "thank you" to a woman whose son's name is my own, and whose ejaculate sat in my stomach along with her mediocre cooking. (I ask myself: how old will you be when you finally regret making this information public? Have you lived twenty-one years without developing a sense of shame?)

17. My cat drools when I walk in the room. I drool when an

attractive

homosexual male walks into the room with a burrito for me. (Nota bene: this has failed to happen.)

18. I'm going "crazy," in the sense of the word I knew before I stopped believing in it.

19. I worry my friends have spoiled me. With the type of friendships I tend to cultivate with people, my bar seems set too high. I suspect the only type of successful relationship I could build would sprout from a strong friendship in which I was unaware of the other person's sexuality. (I tell myself: you have never been in a successful relationship. You cannot have any idea of how it would begin.)

Candy canes and samurai swords,
-Billy