And so we leave Carrie to enter a new phase in her life when she understands that she will have to find herself (without a man), and in doing so will hopefully be able to find a relationship.

Candace Bushnell, “Sex and the City”

Sex and the City was my bible in high school. My conservative Jewish teacher taught me the Old Testament in class, while four single women taught me debauchery at night.

Together with The L Word, those women turned me straight. But for ten years, I never really understood them, until I fell in love.

It’s time for a re-watch.

Carrie Bradshaw, the main character of Sex and the City, wrote a weekly column about sex and relationships as a straight female in Manhattan in the late 1990’s. I will do the same as a queer male in Tokyo in the mid-2020’s. Every week, I’ll watch an episode of these TV shows, and explore people the way they did.

After a three-month hiatus from dating in Israel, I’m going back to those Tokyo nights that kept me wide awake.

Since blogging about my dating life already ruined my dating life, this time the story will follow a different character. Some of the anecdotes will be inspired from my life, and some from others’ (with their permission).

It’s funny that I’m following Carrie’s four-hundred-dollar-strappy-sandal footsteps. When Sex and the City premiered, my mom looked so much like the main character, that some people still call her Sarah Jessica to this day (after the actress who played Carrie).

But this new project won’t be easy. Between attending school every day, studying Japanese, Korean, and Chinese in the afternoon, apartment-hunting, job-hunting, cooking, keeping in touch with friends and family, dating, going out every weekend, and getting enough sleep, running a weekly blog might be too ambitious. No, I haven’t surrendered to the failures of my travel journal – but this time, I’ll try to keep chapters brief. I wish my phone could detect doom-scrolling on social media and remind me to not waste my life. I wish I could also squeeze into this schedule playing my Nintendo Switch.

I’ve just moved into my temporary share house. Apart from a towel, I own nothing at all. With books sprawled on my bed, a laptop on a pillow, empty takeout, and industrial ice cream, I am taking a page out of Candace Bushnell’s book – literally, since she wrote Sex and the City. Her anthology, Shakespeare’s sonnets, Virginia Woolf’s diary, and Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness (a collection of short stories about the mortality of intimacy that changed my life) will guide me through the bizarre realm of love.

Asians would put me in quarantine if they knew I’m bringing all these germs to bed. But at least my futon is clean of the germs that matter.