8:26PM: alec and i walked to a shell station and i bought ‘krave’ brand e-cigarette starter kit. interacted with the shell station cashier with like…grandeur, i keep thinking. bravado. rapport. i knew what to say and i said it. paid and left, vaguely in the direction of the sushi place neither of us remembered how to get to, sometimes making noncommittal statements about how ‘it must be one way or the other.’ alec asked about e-cigarettes. i said i liked them more than regular ones and have no desire to smoke regular ones anymore. he said ‘that seems mature, a sign of maturity’ or something like that. gave alec a regular-flavored ‘krave’ e-cigarette and smoked the menthol one. alec said i seemed taller and i said something about my shoes. he asked about the shoes, the decision to wear high heels. i said something like ‘i’ve just liked them lately,’ not wanting to talk about how my recent wearing of high heels has been partially due to a pattern of dating men as tall as me or shorter, or taller than me but who didn’t like high heels, and feeling like my ‘high heels incentive’ is stereotypical. alec said he thought he had a spine tumor and i said something about a bump on the top of my spine, that’s always been there, and he moved to feel it and i put his hand on it. i said ‘it’s always been there.’ asked him where he felt pain and he said it was mostly an all-over kind of tension and maneuvered my hand to an area on his spine. i said ‘it’s probably not a tumor.’ he said it was probably not real, just due to anxiety.

passed a hardware store with an intricate window display. alec said something about the display. i said ‘it doesn’t seem real, it looks like an art thing’ and sort of walked backwards for a minute, thinking if alec followed we would look at the display again. shortly after this we saw the sushi place. asked to be seated outside. looked at the menu, sensing both of us doing the thing where you look at the menu without reading it, you just like, ‘absorb’ it at first, because there’s so much information. said things about what we wanted to eat. i held the paper ‘sushi list’ and asked him if he liked salmon, eel, other things/if he had preferences. he said he didn’t. felt anxious about the waiter appearing. i said ‘do you just want me to pick a bunch of things from the list and we’ll get appetizers or something?’ alec said ‘yes, you seem to know much more about this than i do,’ which i felt i didn’t. alec said ‘do you think it’d be okay if i got beer from somewhere and we drank it here?’ i said ‘probably yeah,’ and looked at the menu to see if it said ‘BYOB.’ it did. i said ‘yeah that’d be fine, it’s BYOB.’ we talked about appetizers. decided to get shrimp dumplings and seaweed salad. alec asked about beer again, seeming unsure. i said ‘it’s BYOB, they say it on the menu, it’d be fine.’ felt like he left for beer still uncertain about it being ‘allowed.’