Sunday, May. 25, 2003 - 5:31 p.m.

1:05 p.m. Four hours into my second date with Bean and we�re sitting in screening room six of the over-hyped over-priced under-patroned Arc Light Theatre watching the romantic comedy Down With Love starring two of Hollywood�s hottest and skinniest actors Rene Zellweger and Ewan McGregor live, work but not love in a 1963 New York City.

1:38 p.m. Without actually being privy to her international best seller, Down with Love, I, like many characters in the film, find myself a self-diagnosed believer in feminist advice columnist Barbara Novak, played thinly by Ms. Zellweger. I have, in my life, been successfully able to separate love and sex. As Barbara clearly explains in stage two of her three stage process that everyone should be able to have as much sex al a carte as they want without having to be bothered or hampered by that nasty four letter word, love. Miss Novak goes further and explains to her readers that the eating of chocolate is the key tool in satisfying the craving for love. And she had me at hello.

1:40 p.m. I have found in my personal research that chocolate truly does cooperate in the deflecting of love. It not only triggers the body to release euphoric amounts of serotonin giving me that lover's high it also triggers production of fat cells, which aids in the diverting of potential suitors.

2:11 p.m. As the film continues I wholeheartedly agree as to how great it is to separate the two and be able to have sex and not feel love or passion or intimacy or feel much of anything other than spent. But something happened today much like what happened to Mr. McGregor�s Catcher Block. I looked at the man seated next to me, the man who�s hand I�d been holding for the last hour, the man who I�d been having amazing conversations with for the last week, the man who I had an instant chemistry with the second we met (yesterday) and realized I�m not a Novak-ite-Down-With-Love-Boy. No, not me not anymore or maybe I never was. I want to fall in love and feel in love and feel loved and be in love and I�m excited and frightened by the possibility that it might be with this man that I dragged to see this film. This handsome, funny, smart, clever, real, charming, artsy, guy who has cute nicknames for his dog, and speaks with his mom pretty much everyday, and has similar clothing quirks, and finds the same things funny that I do, and loves Paris, and still has friends from high school, and calls his sister at 7:30 on a Sunday morning just because, and recites poems in German just because, and is obsessed with airline mileage, and doesn�t cook, and only buys organic, and isn�t too afraid to be honest.

2:19 p.m. Yikes! What will become of me if I transform into a happy, self-confidant, self-assured, angst and irritant free guy with a dorky smile covering my face? What will become of my blog if I can no longer see life through gray colored glasses.

2:20 p.m. Until then, could Rene and Ewan be any thinner? Could this movie suck any bigger? As Rene delivers a revealing plot-twisting monologue it appears she has used the last of the carbs from yesterday�s dinner of a singular frosted cheerio. I can picture her with her number 2 pencil-figure alone in her hotel room with a knife scraping the delicious frosted coating off her cheerio thus creating two distinct courses for her meal.

2:28 p.m. Yet another scene with Ewan shirtless looking like a twelve-year-old boy wearing a sparse chest merkin.

2:40 p.m. The film finally over Bean looks at me and smiles. I think he thinks I�m an idiot, which is no big deal because I think a lot of people think I�m an idiot.

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