I stayed up late last night finishing up a post on my other website, judith-chang.com. I will have been writing on this website (23-46.com) for five years in August. I don’t think I’m at the point of terminating Against Public Life, but it’s true that things are slower now for new reasons.

I guess it was slow last spring, too. I wrote in February, in March, and then in July, though I didn’t post “Ledger” until September. Then I wrote in October, twice in November, and once in December. I write a lot in the fall and winter, less in the spring, more in the summer.

I’m relatively proud of my other website, I’m glad to be glad that other people are reading it.

Today I brought my cello to a luthier in Kips Bay. There’s a crack over the soundpost and I need it fixed. My instrument sounds good, but I’m worried about the crack worsening. This repair will cost me an estimated $3500. They make a little indent and a patch of wood and glue it there to reinforce the seam. They have to make a cast of the top of the instrument in plaster to support the wood while the patch is carved and set in. The guy is in the ninth floor of a office building in Kips Bay and he has a motorcycle and a bike in his office, and a small electric cooktop.

Last week my work was fairly successful and it feels like this success is stable. I started playing cello on stream, and it’s paying off—I’ve gotten several thousand token tips (this is about $80 for the customer, and $50 for me). I think I’m going to make my yearly income goal of $80,000, given how it’s going. This is roughly how much I need to make to live alone in a modest $2000/month studio in South Brooklyn. Both of my roommates are moving and I could possibly make the decision to split the apartment with just one other roommate if I feel it’s worth spending about $2000/month on rent. I could make on of the rooms my camming studio, or I could convert one of the rooms into an enclosure for a monitor lizard or a crocodile.

It’s been strange taking on the responsibility of earning money. I’m no longer the obviously unemployed ex-grad student who would wander around lower Manhattan during the day while living with Adam last year. Though I only work 20-25 hours a week, I attend analysis three times a week, attend three 90 minute classes, and have three patient hours. So I’m pretty close to having 40 occupied hours a week, if not already there, if you include the time I need to do readings for class or write notes on them. I also spend a lot of time commuting. I spend about 90 minutes on the train five times a week, though some of those commutes are replaced by bike rides. Increasingly, though, I have been taking the train to and from analysis to maximize my energy and time for camming. I bike more on the weekends, when I’m going out for fun.

I’ve been camming since January 25, and seeing patients since March 20. I’ve stopped dating. It’s extremely fun to be attracted to people and to do nothing about it other than think about it, write about it, and reflect on what makes a person attractive. I spend my free time with Adam now, having decided that I want to be in a monogamous relationship with him. While I can’t predict the future, I seem to be adjusting well to the monogamous life. I remain curious about others, but in a sort of intellectual way. There was one temptation, an attractive visitor to my stream who lives in Crown Heights and who matched with me on a dating app later, before I had deleted it. But he couldn’t meet when I was most open to it, and when he reached out again, I decided that it wasn’t worth starting something new. That “wasn’t worth it” is a little tenuous, or would be, were it not for the fact that I so enjoy being attracted to random men on the train. I think it’s clearer now that I just want to write about fleeting experience of attraction. I fulfill my fantasy of “finding 100 Adams” through interpreting and working through these attractions.

Here’s one: his username is “drownb.” He is a very high tipper; we first met through an hour-long private show in which he must have blasted almost $800. Before he requested the private, I had been reading on stream out loud, and drawing in a somewhat weird crowd that was attracted to my academic aspect. In the private show he asked me to read some more, but I kept on asking him questions. Since the cam-to-cam feature doesn’t transmit audio on the client’s end, he would type reponses with one hand as I watched him sit at his chair and jack off. He was really attractive. There’s something about his longish lithe body that implies passivity to me; the passivity of someone who is extremely intelligent and who has spent most of his life dedicated to scientific research, but who has never quite taken his desire into his own hands. He is married, and when I asked, said that he doesn’t have sex with his wife very often, maybe every two weeks or so. They met at a lab, she was his intern, he was a postdoc at a cancer research center in the city, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Now he lives in Redwood City and works as a pharmaceutical researcher. He kept on telling me that he used to live in Sunset Park.

He had dark curly hair and pale skin, he had a lovely penis, he was in a room with nice slightly reddish-toned wood floors, like the color of cedar, though no one makes cedarwood floors. Though his profile said he was 42, it may not have been his actual age. He looked like he could be anywhere between 32 and 45. He showed me a pendant made of red coral that his mother in law had given him, as he liked the necklace I wear, the jade pendant of a spider on a foot. I watched him orgasm and it was beautiful: the intensity of his face; this is what men look for when they look for videos of women. During our chat, I told him about my love for Jewish men, and he told me that the Jewish girls in Borough Park used to giggle when he passed by. They must have thought he was Jewish: “I suppose it’s the hair,” he said. Once, a woman on the train had asked him about the book he was reading; it was a novel of Umberto Eco’s, and the woman studied semiotics. He grew up in Utah, but not to Mormons. It is a lovely land, according to him.

He came back again last weekend, and did a shorter private with me, 30 minutes or so, and I felt perhaps more attracted to him this time. He almost came, but couldn’t, and then held out his hand to the camera, telling me that he wanted to touch my face. It was a lovely gesture.

drownb bought me an orchid that I had just added to my wishlist last Saturday, from J&L Orchids in Connecticut, which I had chosen because it’s the closest breeder. I bought a blooming size Dendrobium sanderae. This will be the first plant I have acquried online since coming the city. At first I didn’t know who had sent it, but then he sent me a message saying something, something about having seen wildflowers where he lives, and the mild obscenity of flowers.

I got an email last night from one of the guys who seems very interested in my person but who doesn’t tip me very much because he seems to want the “real thing.” Normally these types of clients are known as pests to sex workers, but I think of this as just another opportunity to support and hone my craft as a kind of American Courtesan of the Internet.

The subject line was “2 tokens.” He had no alias email, as he wrote, so I could see his real full name, and it seemed that he was indeed this professor at university in Pennsylvania. He had a nice Jewish last name, Kodish, which honestly made me more willing to talk to him. “To be honest I don’t know what you want beyond tokens, if anything,” he wrote. I looked him up. He seems pretty good looking, and as far as I know, he’s got a partner, and is in his 40s.

What drives a person to infidelity? I don’t quite understand it, but I’d perhaps like to learn.

I replied by saying that it seemed like he didn’t want to engage in economic exchange, and that I was open to reading and responding to his emails if they piqued my interest. The next day, he wrote that “I am not sure getting to know you and financial arrangements are mutually exclusive.” That he’s a short plane ride away and would like to go on a date with me.

When I first started camming, I was very interested in also working as an escort. Now I’m not so sure; does the exchange of money really make feelings less entangled in the sex? Would it not be just as cruel of me to date someone for money as it would be to date someone for free, knowing that I would never truly give them my love, and that they will want to have it?

Anyway, my track record over the last three months suggests that I’ll make at least $80,000 this year. The idea of escorting has come up multiple times, so I’ve already figured out what my policies would be. But I don’t need the income and I don’t know that I want to add this other practice to my career. The reality is that I’d only do it if I was attracted to my potential client. And at that point it will feel like infidelity, right? Or maybe it will just cover the cello repairs.