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I worked out (shoulders and triceps) while watching The Empire Strikes Back, the second of the Star Wars movies. It was pretty corny, but like all American boys, I identified with Luke Skywalker. (In addition, I think Mark Hamill is cute.)

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She invited me to stay over, but I’m not sure I should. I don’t want Ronna to get too emotionally involved with me just as I’m about to return to Florida. I love her, but I also know that my gayness precludes a long-term commitment to a woman – even Ronna. If I’m to remain a friend to Ronna, I can’t let her waste her time and energy on me.

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I was awakened at about 6 AM by a loud rumble, and for a second or two, the room seemed to shake. The lighting fixture was swinging back and forth. “An earthquake,” I thought – and then said to myself, “Don’t be silly. It must be an explosion or something.” I forgot about it until our break at Columbia, when Dipti said, “Did you feel that earthquake this morning?”

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At 14th Street, a guy grabbed at a woman’s neck; he quickly ran away as the doors closed. What he’d done was snatch three gold chains. The woman, a young West Indian, said she’d just bought the chains and still had the receipt for them. “I never usually sit next to the door,” she told me. As we made our way into Brooklyn, she kept saying “I just can’t believe it.”

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I’d like to take the HTLV-III antibody test just to know, even if the gay health experts advise people not to take it. If I tested positive for AIDS exposure, I’m not sure I’d panic or get depressed, but I probably wouldn’t get so upset at the problems of day-to-day life. (I worry more about Sean than I do myself.)

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Blair apologized for being a space cadet because he’d gotten drunk the night before and was then left alone while “this really luscious cool guy” he’s been hanging out with slept with Blair’s own friend, a girl.

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When I was in kindergarten, my mother found out that there was no full-time computer lab teacher at my school. This was Austin in the early ‘90s, and we had a lot of parents who worked at tech firms like IBM and Dell, but kids were only learning how to touch-type.

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Henri Lefebvre’s 1974 book The Production of Space argues against the concept of empty or geometric space and in favor of social space. He was a committed Marxist and his idea that space is never truly empty but always filled in or mediated is perhaps just a philosophical refinement of the argument against neutrality or objectivity.