I’ve been a fan of True Blood almost since the start. Given my fondness for sassy service employees (Sookie, who has remarkably become less aggravating this season than in any of the past ones), bitchy Southerners (either Arlene or Tara, though Tara is less outright bitchy and more… hypersensitive about her race and in everyone’s business about it, not that that’s particularly unreasonable in rural Louisiana), hairy-chested gentlemen (Bill of the immaculately-groomed body hair), and anything involving Alexander Skarsgard (Eric, though his little teal cashmere v-neck has been doing nothing for me this season), the show roped me in early and has kept me interested for two full seasons of Bon Temps insanity. I even stayed on the rollercoaster through all that bullshit with Maryanne, who, let’s face it, made for sloppy, rather than interesting, writing.

But this season is something else entirely. Where, to put it bluntly, is all the fucking? I’m not asking for a return to the raunchy graveyard sex of Bill and Sookie a la season one (that was a little too much, even for me) — but throw a guy a bone once in a while. Tara biting a chunk out of the neck of the British vampire whose name is so irrelevant I haven’t even bothered to learn it does not count as an adequate substitute for good, old-fashioned vampire-on-human loving. Even the Twilight movies have been more sexually charged lately. Considering there are more than a few moments in the Charlaine Harris novels that made me blush, I have to hope that the writers remember their roots, and quick. It’s not that True Blood isn’t entertaining anymore; it’s just that it’s providing a kind of action/suspense television that I’m not really looking for right now in my program lineup.

Top Chef, though, is something else entirely this season. It was obvious, from the start of season six, that the Voltaggio brothers and Kevin were going to be in the finale. But, this season, it’s been obvious since day one that Angelo is going to be the winner, and that he’s going to be utterly insufferable until it happens, which makes most of the action in the middle of the season completely irrelevant. Even Angelo, I think, is beginning to understand that the show’s rigged; he admitted that his cucumber-cup canape in this week’s episode was Quickfire bottom fodder, and yet it still won him $20,000 and immunity. They’re not even trying, at this point.

More generally, the fact that relationships between contestants are making it on screen for more than 10 seconds per episode is indicative that the rest of the show has become deeply uninteresting. The drama has become, in essence, who’s getting kicked off in what order, and it’s going to go on until Angelo, Kenny, and some other non-entity of a cheftestant make it to the finale, whereupon Angelo will be crowned winner and Padma can go back to doing whatever it is she does when she’s not shepherding these culinary losers around some city for thirteen weeks and Tom can go back to pretending that any of his restaurants are still relevant. Which, honestly, doesn’t make for particularly compelling television.

I’ll put it this way: I don’t think even the combined bitchiness of Eric Ripert and Toby Young could make this season anything other than a complete snooze. Poor casting, Bravo.

And, worse yet, it’s the summer, so there’s absolutely nothing else to watch. Admittedly, Project Runway is starting again, which I can only hope will regain some of its luster (things have gone downhill ever since the drag queen challenge two seasons ago, which was one of the best episodes of any reality TV show I’ve ever seen, with the exception of the entire season of America’s Next Top Model with Jade)… but this season is shaping up to be the home of some seriously mediocre television. For shame.

Part of the problem, of course, is that sorting out my feelings about Oxford — at least right now — involves sorting out my feelings about my former relationship. While my ex and I parted on acceptably good terms, whenever someone asks me, “How was England?” I find it difficult to respond in any other capacity than as the guy who’s freshly broken up and not particularly thrilled about it. My feelings about my year abroad — and, more generally, about England — are so inextricably bound up with my experiences in and out of my relationship with C. that separating them feels nearly impossible.

In a way, that brings out one of the big lessons I learned from my time in England: getting too invested in anything too quickly is dangerous. As I wrote previously, I found that, upon arriving in an unfamiliar country, all I wanted to do was find a group of close friends and never speak to or see anyone else ever again. I latched onto a handful of people, who ultimately turned out to be kind of awful, and used them as an ersatz support structure, in place of the friends it took me two years to find at Swarthmore. Even once I moved past that initial mistake, most of my social life revolved around my boyfriend; if I fought with him, or had a bad day and he wasn’t available, I was left with perhaps one or two other people to turn to. While I’m a fairly independent person, it was hard to be in an unfamiliar place, under stressful emotional and academic conditions, without any sort of safety net.

Before I left Oxford, though, I made it a point to seek out those parts of the city or experience that meant the most to me — independent of the people I associated them with — and spend some time taking them in, on my own.

Academically, this meant revisiting all my writing from the year, all 132,603 words of it. Without a doubt, the three eight-week terms of the Oxford academic year have been the most intense periods of my college education. This isn’t because I was necessarily thinking any harder than I would at Swarthmore (the challenge of the material I was working with was, on the whole, about equal to the upper-level courses I’ve taken at Swarthmore thus far), but rather because a very significant amount of thinking was condensed into a very short period of time. Writing two essays per week every week for eight weeks is exhausting, particularly when you’re a chronic academic overachiever and write well over the prescribed 1,500-2,000 word essay length. (My essays, on average, were 2,729 words long, with the longest running 5,834 words and the shortest 1,981.) At Swarthmore, I became accustomed to burning out at the end of each academic year; at Oxford, burn-out seemed to occur campus-wide somewhere around the fifth week of each term, with everyone kind of limping along for the remaining three weeks.

In addition to rereading and tabulating my essays, I took a lot of long walks. I drank a lot of beer while sitting in Port Meadow (which, incidentally, was one of President Clinton’s favorite places in Oxford, during his time there). Entirely out of character, I went skinnydipping in a river one evening. I revisited my favorite restaurants. I baked one last loaf of banana bread. In short, I tried to create a mental picture of Oxford independent of anyone in it. As this entry suggests, that was only partially successful.

A month later, I’m still not convinced that I’m ever going to be able to look back on my time at Oxford and (with the exception of my academic work) be truly able to objectively evaluate it. I think, on the whole, that leaving the US and Swarthmore for a year was the right decision for me; it’s too easy to get comfortable at Swarthmore, and at least for me, that comfort became a little suffocating after a while. Oxford was a much-needed change. Are there things I wish I had handled differently? Certainly. But, for what it was, I think I can close the Oxford chapter in my life with the conclusion that, good or bad, I made it through, almost certainly less defectively than I would have had I been at Swarthmore. And I’m not sure I can really ask for much more.

Or, more concisely: in the eternally applicable words of Tom Lehrer, that was the year that was.

Had a chip in my front tooth fixed. Somehow, despite using a $150 electric toothbrush religiously, three times a day for the past two years, my teeth are still occasionally fucked up in weird ways. I suspect a cherry pit is to blame this time. My mother has taken to describing our dentist as either a highway robber or a con artist.

Cost to fix a chipped tooth in Boca Raton: $175. Had the passing thought, en route to Apple from the dentist: “I have such first-world problems.” Swarthmore is beginning to make me feel guilty about not being poor. Alarming.

Notes for Thursday, July 15:

Thought about getting a tattoo again. While sitting in the tub waiting for the water to heat up, the idea came to me: the outline of a t-shirt (seams, collar, etc), but not filled in; subtitle, “The Emperor’s New T-Shirt.” Spent at least 15 minutes of shower time thinking of the post hoc epistemological justification. No good answer yet, but I’m sure it’ll come to me.

Later: someone I told my idea to described it as “a good Halloween costume.” Initially positive towards his suggestion, but then realized that I wouldn’t be comfortable walking around Swarthmore shirtless on Halloween because of all my body hair. Once again have returned to the idea of getting my shoulders waxed. Not sure I’m ready to take that step, though.

Notes for Friday, July 16:

Got the safe sex lecture from the person administering my HIV test. (Negative again, though I’m starting to think that I’m showing the beginnings of a psychological disorder.) It’s like there’s a forum somewhere out there for homosexual registered nurses in too-tight Lacoste polo shirts to discuss how best to make their patients feel bad about their sexual choices, no matter how responsible they might be.

Shortly after making me feel horrible about myself with his litany of admonishments (“There’s still a risk of transmission for oral sex!”), the nurse saw my Apple jacket, took an iPad out of his desk drawer, and proceeded to ask me for technical support. What was I thinking, wearing that jacket outside of the store?

Notes for Saturday, July 17:

Spent the day hiding from customers and repairing computers, in an attempt to stay seated and rest my injured back. Went fantastically well, until a rogue suction cup caused me to smash the glass panel of a 27-inch iMac in a pretty spectacular way. Oops.

Later: realized I may have advised my longest-standing friend to break up with her boyfriend of a year and a half, thereby proving that I learned absolutely nothing from that really boring episode of Sex and the City where Carrie told someone to leave her abusive husband. Potentially projecting my own lack of closure from my former relationship; or, put another way: misery loves company?

Increasingly unsettled by not having gotten over the ex yet. Was told, by another ex who recently made his way back into my life, that, “You never really get over anyone; you just get under someone else.” (He, incidentally, has been telling me about the various men he’s going on dates with lately, which, entirely inexplicably, has made me cranky.) On the way home from work, sang along to “Fuck the Pain Away” by Peaches. Came home and ate dried mangoes and reread Harry Potter. So it goes.

That’s still largely the case — but as with all things Israeli (a friend recently informed me that Grindr was developed by an Israeli company; somehow, I’m not even remotely surprised), Grindr takes a little while to grow on you, and I can now admit that I was somewhat unreasonable in my previous knee-jerk assessment. So, armed with a new iPhone, I reinstalled Grindr when I got back to Florida earlier this month and sat back to watch the madness unfold.

Grindr still isn’t for the faint-hearted. While the pictures are, generally speaking, more work-safe than before (naked torsos abound, but there’s nary a pair of tight underwear in sight, thank god for that), the messages I’ve been receiving from other users are, generally speaking, not. There’s one gentleman in Aventura, near the Apple Store I work at, who, every day at 2:00pm for a week, sent me the message, “Would luv to suck ur toes, man.” When I failed to take him up on the offer, he varied the message slightly: yesterday, I received, “Would luv to suck ur toes and ass, man.” That makes all the difference, it seems, because I went from being casually amused to wholly disgusted, and blocked him immediately.

You’re also still likely to encounter people you know in other contexts on Grindr, which is a singularly awkward experience. One of my Genius Bar customers last week, for instance, saw me on Grindr and sent the rather delightful message, “Hi. You replaced my iPhone today. Give you head to say thanks?” (I politely declined, citing Apple’s policy on receiving gifts from customers.) I’ve also seen two coworkers and the Übersturmgruppenführer of Apple’s South Florida stores, all of whom, I’m pretty sure, subsequently blocked me from being able to see them.

Also out in force are the older gays in open relationships, looking for “friends,” “fun,” or “a third (or fourth or fifth).” While I respect a person’s right to enter into whatever configuration of relationship they’d like, the preponderance of open relationships in the gay community has always struck me as kind of bizarre. Are you really that likely to get bored of your partner, sexually, that you need to define the rules of the relationship such that you can suck some twink from the internet’s toes whenever the mood strikes you? Part of the appeal of monogamy, for me, has always been the sexual commitment; not only are you less likely to catch something that way (herein, my not-so-latent STI paranoia creeps up again), but I’ve found that someone who’s well acquainted with my sexual preferences (by writ of being the only person I’m having sex with, and vice versa) is likely to do a better job getting me off. Also, how does jealousy not become an issue? Can you really be in a committed, long-term relationship with someone if your dick is in someone else’s ass three nights a week?

Anyway, this is all to say that open relationships confuse the shit out of me and contribute to those few moments when I think gay people are just unremittingly slutty and terrible. But that’s not really Grindr’s fault; it’s just the vehicle for people who are already in open relationships to put their fucked up personal lives out in the open.

On these levels, though, Grindr is exactly as I remember it being: a little bit tacky, a little bit awkward, and unfailingly hilarious. Underneath the torsos and the overuse of the “TOP” emoji to circumvent the no-sexually-explicit-language filter, though, is an interesting bit of sociology: using Grindr for its intended purpose — meeting friends of the same sexual orientation — means accepting the premise that a gay person is more likely than average to get along with another gay person. (For the record, I don’t think that’s actually true; I find, usually, that I’m less likely to get along with another gay man, relative to a randomly selected member of the general population.)

Stated negatively, the problem becomes a little clearer: why isn’t there a Grindr-style tool for everyone, regardless of gender and sexual orientation? The popularity of Grindr suggests that some subset of people are willing to put small pieces of information about themselves out in the open, visible only to the people in their spatial vicinity. One explanation for that willingness is simple horniness; but, in my case, and in the cases of a few people I’ve spoken with, I genuinely don’t think that hooking up is always on the agenda. Some people are actually on Grindr to find friends.

As an introvert, the idea of a browsable catalog of people around me at any moment in time is extremely appealing. My problem, I’ve discovered, isn’t that I have nothing to talk about with someone once I meet him or her (I’m actually quite good at small talk, once it gets going), but rather that I have difficulty knowing how to approach people I don’t know, or even which people are worth approaching. There’s an extremely good chance that any given person sitting near me in a Starbucks will turn out to be boring. But, with a hypothetical Grindr-for-the-rest-of-us, I could learn at least a little about the people near me before expending the effort required to speak to them; that way, I can instantly filter out some significant proportion of people who, from my perspective, would be uninteresting.

The obvious rejoinder is that normal fucking people would resolve this problem by walking up to strangers, saying hello, and getting over their own little psychoses in order to make new friends. But, as a firm believer in the mantra that technology is supposed to make our lives easier, no matter how absurd the issue in question seems, I see no particular reason why giving people the ability to find interesting individuals in their general vicinities is any more absurd than, say, mobile e-mail would have been in 1992. It all reduces to a question of efficiency, and undoubtedly, the ways we meet and befriend people have almost always been inefficient. (For evidence, see the few disenfranchised children on a playground in almost any school.) Assuming that Grindr’s success doesn’t just reduce to a desire for casual sex (and that’s not an uncontroversial assumption, but it’s one I’m willing to entertain), there’s no reason why its strategy of introducing people electronically shouldn’t work more broadly.

I’ve never really thought of myself as someone who has an abnormally large amount of sex, or has it with an abnormally large number of partners. OkCupid, conveniently, asked precisely those questions in a test I took a few weeks ago, and informed me that I’m less experienced than the average 21 year old, in terms of number of sexual partners. (I have a policy of not lying to computers, so I have to hope that that’s at least somewhat representative of how I actually compare to my cohorts.) While the validation from a site that specializes in gathering too much information was welcome, it merely served to confirm what I already believed: that I’m having the correct amount of sex with the correct number of people — for me.

Of course, the broader point here is that, as someone who makes responsible (read: safe) choices, I shouldn’t have to justify the particulars of my sex life to anyone under any circumstance. But I couldn’t help but feel, in the aftermath of the “you’re a slut, let’s not be friends” conversation I recently had, that it was worth taking a little time to think about the sex I’ve had, what it meant to me, and whether it’s ever really possible to put aside your sexual past.

This year, my road to emotional recovery from my last breakup began with getting an STI test one afternoon. Shortly after leaving the building with a negative HIV test result (and a negative everything-else result by text a few days later), I had to ask whether that really added up to the kind of sexual clean slate that I was imagining it to be. Being sexually active for a number of years, this was by no means my first HIV test, but it was the first that triggered anything other than a temporary sense of relief; I felt, somehow, vindicated, as if karmically, all my previous choices had been validated by writ of not having “won” the STI roulette.

That’s of course a stupid way to look at things: sexually-transmitted diseases aren’t karmic, they’re microbial, and their probabilities of transmission are in no ways affected by the moral or emotional dimensions of my sexual choices. But on a personal level, a clean bill of health gave me some much-needed distance from my sex life. The sex I’d had up until that moment — whether in a relationship or more casually, whether good or bad, whether I walked away from it feeling cheap and used or loved and connected to another human being — was compartmentalized and entirely in the past.

The slut conversation, whatever its validity (none, I would argue, but I’m the one wearing the scarlet ‘A’, so who am I to talk?), did have the effect of bringing my own feelings about my sexual past back into my present. After the almost transcendent moment of clarity following my STI test in Oxford, I suddenly felt guilty again about the people I’d slept with. Being called a slut was enough, for me, to make me actually feel like one, even if, objectively, there have been no practical consequences for my sexual behavior and, when I think back, I don’t have any particular problems with my own actions.

Is what I’m left with in this situation just an updated version of the high school mentality of being concerned with my reputation, rather than with my own feelings about myself? Possibly. But that’s not going to stop me from getting another STI test in a couple of weeks, just to try to get that feeling of validation back.

And, more out of boredom than anything else, I joined OkCupid.

My relationship with OkCupid actually began about a year ago, when I subscribed to the endlessly fascinating OkTrends blog in Google Reader. Rather than pretend that they don’t mine data from the actions of thousands of users, the people behind OkCupid make all their findings public: on issues like how your race affects your likelihood to get a message from another user, or how to write an optimal first message. This is exactly the kind of data overload that I get off on, and I couldn’t help but admire OkCupid for systematically answering some of the questions that have been haunting everyone since the advent of online dating.

Anyway, despite my mother’s urgings not to seek out a new relationship too hastily, I joined OkCupid to try to at least get a better handle on the population of web-enabled homosexuals in the Philadelphia area. Plus, the site has an iPhone application, which endears it to me almost automatically.

A month later, the site has failed in its primary objective of finding me someone to date, but has succeeded admirably in my primary objective of finding something to occupy my time. Admittedly, I haven’t been looking particularly hard for someone on the dating front, so that’s probably not wholly OkCupid’s fault, but I have to hand it to them: the scientific approach to dating is endlessly amusing.

Beyond the preliminary stage of writing snarkily about myself (for anyone curious, here are my various self-descriptions), the site encouraged me to answer questions about my personality, my feelings towards relationships, and my opinions on certain subjects so as to form a more complete description of my dateable self — and then asked me to give the answer of my ideal match and how important their answer would be to me. For instance, recent questions I’ve answered include:

“Do you believe that men should be the heads of their households?” (No / Very important)
“Is it wrong to spank a child who’s been bad?” (Yes / A little important)
“If you were in a committed monogamous relationship, but had the opportunity for a one-night stand with the most attractive celebrity in the world, would you take it?” (No / Mandatory)
“‘Wherefore art thou Romeo!’ What does ‘wherefore’ mean in this context?” (‘Why’ / Very important)

As a result, OkCupid has concluded that I’m 11.7 percent more organized than average, 14.8 percent less adventurous than average, and 43.4 percent more scientific than average. It also informed me that my “dating persona” is The Slow Dancer, which apparently means that,

Your focus is love, not sex, and for your age, you have average experience. But you’re a great, thoughtful guy, and your love life improves every year. There’s also a powerful elimination process working in your favor: most Playboy types get stuck raising unwanted kids before you even begin settling down. The men left over will be hot and yours. Your ideal man is someone intimate, intelligent, and very supportive.

While you’re not exactly the life of the party, you do thrive in small groups of smart people. Your circle of friends is extra tight and it’s HIGHLY likely they’re just like you. You appreciate symmetry in relationships.

I’m not convinced that questions, quizzes, or the inferences about my personality that the site draws from them, are necessarily indicative of the type of relationship I’m likely to do best in. But, that said, I’m not ready to rule out the possibility that statistical analysis can lead to meaningful generalizations from the 200 or so arbitrary questions I’ve answered. I am indeed more organized and scientific than most people I’ve encountered, and I very much appreciate symmetry in relationships (and in everything else). If OkCupid is able to figure these things out about me by asking whether I’d rather be caught masturbating by my mother or my father (my mother, but I’m still not sure why), all power to them. I just don’t know that all this information, whatever its validity, can translate into a system for matchmaking.

The bit of the site I ultimately found the most interesting was the My Best Face tool, which crowdsources the eternal social networking question of what picture of you is the most appealing to your target demographic. The data it returned about my three selected pictures was fascinating:

In the end, I’m not any more positive about the prospects of meeting someone on OkCupid than I would be about meeting someone on JDate, Thingbox, Gaydar, or a Craigslist personals ad. But, if nothing else, it’s amusing to see what a computer is able to tell me about myself that I didn’t already know, and how many Swarthmore students have clicked on my profile without saying a word.

(The answer, for anyone who’s curious, is: four so far.)

That never quite delivered. Swarthmore was my first choice of schools, and in a lot of ways, it’s everything I could have reasonably hoped for in a school. Studying at Oxford this year has, likewise, been as good a university experience as any, I imagine. And yet, fundamentally, I’m still as dissatisfied with school, my friends, and — not to put too LiveJournal-ey a spin on it — my life as I was three years ago, when I graduated from high school, or ten years ago, when I left elementary school. I genuinely believe that, in the nearly 22 years I’ve been tooling around this planet, I’ve yet to actually be happy.

A piece I read on Salon earlier this week suggested, reasonably, that maybe dissatisfied is just how we, as humans, are wired to be:

I’m just not sure that “happiness” is supposed to be the stable human condition, and I think it’s punishing that we’re constantly being pushed to achieve it.

I felt the suffocating pressure to feel happiness most acutely in my 20s. … But I remember knowing at the time that “happy” was the one thing I could not be at that particular point. I could pay the rent, do my job, try not to get too drunk or go home with anyone dangerous, meet nice people, attempt to cobble together the foundation of an adult life that might hold something — Work? Home? Friends? Money? Marriage? Kids? — that might one day yield something closer to contentment. But at that point, I could not be happy, at least not on a regular basis. I was too filled with fear — about future, about money, about loneliness.

And maybe that is the answer. Maybe we’re so enchanted with this idea of “being happy” that we trap ourselves in a pattern of eternal dissatisfaction by constantly striving to achieve the Platonic ideal of a joyous, fulfilled existence.

On an instinctual level, though, I think that’s bullshit. We probably can’t achieve happiness on the model of a Nora Ephron movie; the only reason we watch Sleepless In Seattle is because it’s an unlivable fantasy. But at the very least, I hope for myself that I’ll be able to get out of bed in the morning because I actually want to, rather than because I have a list of tasks to accomplish.

As an aside, the times I feel I’ve come closest to wanting to get out of bed in the morning have been the times when I haven’t been in school. During my four months of working full-time at Apple this summer, even though I had long shifts every day and spent most of my time dealing with frustrating customers, I had a sense of purpose in going to work each morning. This might just have been a manifestation of my goal-driven nature, wherein I’m happiest when I have a set of clear objectives — write this essay, fix this laptop, replace this iPhone, fold this laundry — rather than an empty calendar. But, in any case, working at the Genius Bar, in a lot of ways, was more satisfying than writing papers at Swarthmore has ever been.

I’ve wondered, off and on, whether I should see a therapist or a psychologist to try to talk through all this.

The few times I went to a psychologist in high school, I found that I didn’t relate to him at all, and therefore got nothing out of the experience. He was outgoing and athletic, and seemed like he fell into the role of psychologist because, in between baseball games in college, people told him that he was easy to talk to. When the subject of my sexuality came up, for example, I told him I wasn’t gay. Our conversations were superficial and told me nothing, except that I didn’t like my psychologist. The experience, on the whole, was calamitous; I felt like I’d wasted five hours of my life lying to someone, and my parents felt like they’d wasted several hundred dollars paying for me to do so.

That one poor experience aside, I worry that if I talk to a professional about how I’ve been feeling that I’ll end up on antidepressants. And that scares me for a number of reasons.

My freshman year of college, a professor offhandedly mentioned depressive realism, which is the belief that depressed people actually have a more accurate view of the world than a baseline neutral/happy individual. I proceeded to get an A in that class — and in fact, in every class, seminar, or tutorial I’ve been in at Swarthmore or Oxford since. I couldn’t help but put the two together: was I doing so well, academically, because of undiagnosed depression that gave me a more accurate worldview?

Similarly, I worry that the parts of my personality that I like best — my generally bitter sense of humor, my prolific writing, my ability to think critically and argue a point well — are a product of that same potential depression. I can’t help but picture McMurphy at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, lobotomized, when I think of what taking antidepressants might do to me. The only thing I fear more than being unhappy for the rest of my life is being falsely, medicatedly cheerful.

So, instead of speaking to someone, I’ve put my head down, thrived academically, and focused on graduating from college and making it into a good law or graduate school. I’m increasingly worried, though, that I’m headed for the same kind of disappointment I experienced at the end of high school, when things didn’t magically get better. But, trying to balance my fears about psychopharmacology with my persistent, occasionally overwhelming dissatisfaction, I’m not sure what would be worse: keeping things the way they are and hoping that, eventually, they’ll get better on their own; or risking new and different problems by trying to solve the ones I already have.

As Manhunt articulates rather clearly with the above photo, “gay social networking” generally means “twinks finding older bears to feel them up and fuck away their low self-esteem.”

And then there’s something like Grindr.

First of all, any gay man with an iPhone (so, all of us) who says he hasn’t installed Grindr at least once is lying. We all have. And then most of us uninstalled the app 20 minutes later and deleted the .ipa from iTunes to erase all evidence. I speak from personal experience on this matter.

Anyway, Grindr combines the insatiable collective libido of the gay community with Sims-style heads-up omniscience about the sexuality of others in a way that most people can’t help but find fascinating. Discovering, in seconds, that the man across from you in a Castro Street Starbucks has a six-pack and a ten-inch cock is at once disturbing and endlessly amusing; you get to know people around you intimately, without actually having to know them at all.

(It’s worth noting that, apparently, the next frontier in Grindr is women pretending to be the naked torsos of horny gay men. Because apparently gays can’t even be trusted to arrange clandestine hookups for themselves anymore.)

But, again, we end up at the same result: gay social networking reduces to sex.

There are a handful of exceptions. For instance, American site DList bills itself as “a social network for gay guys and their friends,” with advertisements elsewhere describing it as “a sexy, messed up Facebook, but hotter.” When I visited earlier today, the following came up, which I think encapsulates the DList experience quite nicely:

Yes, if you’re a crazy scenester in New York City, you probably do belong on DList. And odds are, if you try hard enough, you can find one of the other four members of the site who isn’t cruising. And you can talk about Of Montreal and the best rice pudding in SoHo. But, having used DList for ten minutes (long enough to gather evidence for this post; not quite long enough contract any STIs), I get the impression that most of the headless, hairless torsos of DList members are gathered in the pursuit of, again, casual sex.

The whole situation really does begin to seem hopeless, until you ask the basic question: what is the market for a gay but basically nonsexual social networking site? If I’m not looking to get fucked, what appeal does interacting with gay people online offer, versus interacting with anyone else? And, considering I swore off online forums years ago, there isn’t even a place in my life for that.

Enter Thingbox.

At the outset, its concept doesn’t seem to be vastly different from that of DList. But, crucially, where Thingbox has differentiated itself — and what has kept me on the site for two months now, despite being in a relationship and not remotely (sexually) interested in any of the people I’m meeting — is that it developed a culture where facilitating casual hookups isn’t the dominant order of business. There’s a collective recognition, amongst Thingbox members, that even as you might be a horny, lonely single man in London, Thingbox isn’t the most effective venue to get your rocks off. And that recognition creates a space for conversation that isn’t totally objectionable.

I have to qualify my endorsement of Thingbox in a few ways:

First, it’s not some de-sexed intellectual playground for Oxbridge gays. There are more than a few naked torsos, and if you scratch the surface, there’s more than enough smut to go around. On any given day, you’re as likely to see a discussion of peanut butter cheesecake brownies on the front page as you are the somewhat infamous thread, “Would you fuck the previous poster?” (both of which were on trending at the time of this posting). Of the few hundred groups you can join, two of the most popular are “Bears” and “Stupendously Large Cocks.” And, as if this weren’t enough, every day or two fashion blogger BryanBoy posts the sordid details of his thoroughly unsafe sexual encounters for everyone to read. And, like the wraparound sunglasses he often wears, they’re not pretty.

The people on Thingbox are, by and large, also the people with Gaydar or Eurowoof profiles. But, on the whole, I’ve found Thingbox members to be more articulate, better informed, and somewhat more intelligent than your baseline internet gay.

Second, the reason I think Thingbox is so successful is also one of its biggest pitfalls: namely, there’s a pretty standard character profile for a Thingbox member, and the various people you interact with don’t deviate terribly far from it. Thingbox is, without a doubt, the cult of the skinny, bearded scenester with tattoos and lots of body hair. Between 90 and 100 percent of posts are sarcastic, bitter, or self-deprecating. The number of members over the age of 35 can be counted with two hands, and possibly one or two toes. The number of nonwhite members is comparably low.

The upside of the Thingbox dynamic is that, generally, you can find interesting things to talk about with people you’ll likely find interesting. A self-selecting community of educated, city-dwelling British gays is almost necessarily going to have some convergence of areas of interest. The downside, of course, is that at times, it seems like a bit of an overly-preening echo chamber.

Two months in, though, I find myself thankful that I joined. No one I’ve met on Thingbox is someone I would necessarily want to meet for drinks in London. But it made me realize that there is something useful about being able to discuss gay issues in the company of like-minded gay men. It’s possible that this is just the undercurrent of horny intellectualism of Thingbox meshing well with the way my brain works; but, at the very least, it’s an encouraging instance of a moderately successful not-entirely-sexual gay social networking site. And, in a world of Guys With iPhones and Craigslist casual encounters, that has to count for something.

The contented sigh inevitably following a return home from vacation has always struck me as the validation of the opening passage of The Phantom Tollbooth:

There once was a boy named Milo who didn’t know what to do with himself — not just sometimes, but always.

When he was in school he longed to be out, and when he was out he longed to be in. On the way he thought about coming home, and coming home he thought about going. Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he’d bothered.

I worry, sometimes, that my feeling of always wanting to be somewhere else, even when you’re exactly where, ten minutes ago, you wanted to be, is representative of more than just the usual discontent/wanderlust of the Generation Facebook twentysomething. For instance, despite having a truly excellent trip to Spain with my sister, I found myself more holistically satisfied once I arrived at home and was able to unpack, shower, and eat dinner at a familiar restaurant. It’s almost certainly not a problem to appreciate the familiar; but I’m concerned that sometimes, I don’t appreciate the unusual (especially re: traveling) quite enough.

Of course, being unsettled while on my particular vacations this spring is hardly surprising, given the destinations and cirucmstances. In London, I discovered that having the wrong travel companion can render me utterly unable to function, even with regards to the most elementary decisions of what to do or where to eat. In Israel and Spain, I discovered that I’m extremely uncomfortable when I’m somewhere where I don’t speak the native language fluently — even as, in both countries, I had at least a passing acquaintance with Hebrew and Spanish respectively. (I’m conversationally fluent in Hebrew, for that matter, though my lack of public confidence with the language led to me speaking in a quiet mumble the entire time I was in Israel.)

And, for the duration of the trip, I realized that I don’t function well when I’m denied the telecommunications lifeline of my iPhone. Not being able to instantly receive notifications of new e-mail or Twitter mentions stressed me out very fundamentally, and to a greater degree than I really expected. (This has brought back to mind my usual concerns about being over-connected, although at this point I hardly see a way to break that particular pattern.)

Being in Oxford again the past three days has brought back a lot of my usual routine, albeit with a somewhat improved spin. I’m actively appreciating things like 3G data, the functioning of the Oxford library system, and the fact that I don’t pay a 2 percent surcharge when I use my credit card in a way that I didn’t before I left the country. Maybe that, ultimately, is why we go on vacation: so that, when we can look at our day to day lives with some measure of critical distance, we realize that it’s not actually that terrible after all.