It's in my jeans

Sara and I stroll through the Equality Forum's sidewalk festival. Gays and lesbians everywhere. I'm surprised how few I recognize from my days as a barrista. Matt, in shades and a blue v-neck, his boyfriend Chris by his side. Patrick. Geoff. Jordan, in a brisk pace (he doesn't see me). Les. Jesse once more with the inevitable (and forgettable) boy in tow. "Let's go get food at Tangerine," he insists. I protest that we haven't the money. He points a finger at my jeans: "Oh, please. That pair of jeans cost you the price of five dinners there!" A sudden image: Myself in briefs in Tangerine, my jeans in hand and proffered to the waitress: "Take these and give me five martinis, three entres, and a table full of appetizers." Sara sees it too and smiles.

At home I'm restless, hungry. In Valerie's book, I find the following: "Gerty and Stephen use language as they use clothes, to conceal their physical desires and fears. Their self-consciously stylized thoughts serve to disguise their sexual urges and their bodily weaknesses, hiding them from themselves and in the process revealing them to those engaged in the voyeruristic act of reading." And later: "As characters, they are not 'self-authored' in any sense; lost in a world of signifiers, they are strangely isolated figures in the solid world they find so alien. Their private, derivative fictions are highly colored, intense, and sterile; indulgently self-referential, they lose all meaning when challenged by the mundaneness of everyday life." Yes, yes; you've caught me Val. And so, my question to you (or anyone who reads this): How does a Stephen blossom into Bloom?