Robust McManlyPants on Average Display

Here is, word for word, an email I sent to KJ asking her advice this morning after an incident on the way to work. Any thoughts are appreciated.

(I should note that, on re-reading, I think I failed to communicate the amount of moxie the young woman showed in her responses to him. She had a do-not-give-me-shit shield that she put up from the first moments of their interaction.)

So, this morning I was standing at the bus stop with a very pretty
young blonde woman when a much older guy wearing nice but strikingly
mismatched clothes dashed through traffic to join us. As he ran up he
said to her, “How much is the bus,” indicating that he’s new around
here. He then looked abruptly at me like I had said something, then
turned back to her for her answer. She told him that all the buses
are free and he immediately started “joking” about “Hey, why don’t we
run away together, then, let’s just get on the next bus and see where
it takes us,” etc. She laughed it off with obvious nervousness and
then he got on the bus with us – I got between them when we got on, but
the bus was empty (spring break) and so he had plenty of ways to sit
near her – and started pointing out cop cars in sight. “Are they
looking for *you*?” she asked him, which got a chuckle out of me. He
said no, the only reason they would be looking for him is if he
*didn’t* talk to her because that would be a crime, hardy har.

There were a lot of things about him that sent up red flags: a
generally manic air, the fact that he was wearing two watches and
carrying a third, that he was carrying a pair of glasses he never
seemed to need (a classic of social engineering, as someone carrying
glasses is strongly associated in most minds with professionalism,
doctors, lawyers, scientists, people assumed to have their shit
together). She pointedly asked about the watches and he said “Well,
you know, the recession.” He then launched into a sob story about his
sister and how she died of brain cancer and lung cancer and he had to
decide to pull the plug, and way, WAY before she needed to, she pulled
the cord to ask the driver to stop at the next bus stop so that she
could get off the bus.

Her body language told me – and him – that she wanted to get OUT OF
THERE, to the point that he said, “So, if I got off at the next stop,
with you, and walked with you, would that bother you?” She didn’t
hesitate to say that yes, that would bother her, and she’d appreciate
it if he did not do that. He tried another limp round of boohooing to
try to sway her but she ignored it and when the bus (finally!) stopped
she got off in a hurry with a backwards, “Thanks for an interesting
morning.” He said something inexplicable (“Thanks for an interesting
life,” I think) and then looked at me and I looked back at him the
rest of the way to *my* stop. He got twitchy in a big way and kept
producing this dry sniffle that I’ve always associated with major coke
heads and that would explain a lot of his mania and talkativeness and
generally sketchy vibe. My goal throughout – as I was paying obvious
attention to him throughout his monologues to her – was to make it
clear to him that there was someone else around who was noticing him.
I wanted him to be sure that he couldn’t do anything without someone
having a good look at him first.

My quandary is, should I have asked her if she wanted/needed help
getting rid of the guy? I consciously chose, when she from the get-go
seemed to be onto his antics, to take the stance we’re trained to use
at elections: when someone wants help, they will ask for it. Should
I have intervened, though? More than once I opened my mouth to say to
the guy, look, lay the fuck off, OK? I didn’t want to step in where I
might not be wanted, though, and I didn’t want to suggest that she was
somehow incapable of ditching him and, happily, it turned out that she
was (capable). I honestly don’t know, though, if I drew the correct line on
when to intervene in what seemed like it had the potential to get
weird in a bad way.

…when there’s legal gay marriage happening RIGHT NOW in the District of Columbia!

WOO-HOO!

I’m not actually mad about this at all, it’s just that my car is red.

On Saturday I stopped in at Parker & Otis for something to eat before hitting the Carolina Theatre of Durham for the Oscar-nominated animated shorts program (also playing tomorrow, Thursday 4 March, and well worth it). I parked in a kind of isolated spot adjacent to their building, between a wall and a huge SUV, so I was kind of invisible. After I’d eaten, I came outside to find two of my car magnets – magnetic bumper stickers – were missing. They were one of the old red and blue “Vote for Change – Obama ‘08″ circles and a highly stylized Cthulhu fish that parodies the Jesus fish that adorn so many cars.

At first, I assumed someone had been making an editorial comment. I didn’t see them, like, thrown down and stomped upon by indignant feet, though. The person also left behind my gay equality magnet, though since that’s just a yellow equals sign on a blue background, maybe it was too abstract for them to assign it any meaning? The other weird thing is that they left the other Obama magnet and the other Cthulhu fish on the other side of the car. (Their leaving the Cleveland Browns magnet is entirely understandable.)

So, did they just not see those? Were they afraid of getting caught? Or, is it that they wanted them for themselves? How strange to be left unsure whether I should feel annoyed or flattered by the sight of a blank red fender.

Either way, lame. They could have just left a note if they liked them or if they hated them. I’d find that a much more interesting experience.

Last night we got a little snow and a lot of sleet and when I couldn’t sleep I had to go out in it and take pictures. At one point I freaking huge black Mercedes made its way up our street, both unsteadily and quickly, shocking me into realizing that some people really will drive out in weather like this to get their drink on.

Around 3:00am a truck drove through and then back again, presumably dropping someone off. When they saw me they stopped and stared and even talked to one another about me before moving on. I said to The Boyf that I found this perfectly understandable since it’s not likely that someone standing in the middle of the street, in the middle of the night, wrapped up like a Russian soldier and taking photos during a snow storm was high on their list of expectations.

Pictures I took at night and pictures I took when we went for a walk this afternoon are both up in my gallery installation.

In a few scant hours my flight leaves for my fraternity’s national convention. I hate flying. I hate it so much. I am already packed, yes, but here are the things I’ve done tonight just to make sure I don’t get ejected from the terminal:

• placed masking tape over the ends of all the spare batteries I’m carrying for my camera
• verified on the TSA’s website that I can carry spare batteries in the first place
• researched whether it’s OK to wear my Dr. Scholl’s onto the plane. I can’t.
• identified which slip-on shoes I’ll wear tomorrow
• gone through a weeding process to pick a t-shirt that can in no way be construed as creepy or threatening in case someone at security hasn’t had their morning coffee when I get there
• identified which of my middle-tier dress socks will be most suitable for showing off to everyone in the airport
• packed and repacked so that the baggage checkers hopefully won’t have to utterly destroy the packing job I’ve done on my clothes the way they did two years ago
• learned that one of my TSA-approved baggage locks doesn’t work at all
• faced that it is pointless to try to keep my dress shirts wrinkle-free since they will simply be wadded up and shoved back in by security anyway
• researched whether I can take my camera in carry-on (I can)
• tried on pairs of jeans until I found one that didn’t need a belt
• gone through my underwear to find a pair I don’t mind someone else seeing should I get pulled aside
• learned I’ll have to pay $50 at check-in for my baggage
• been advised that I shouldn’t bother using the luggage lock that does work, even though it’s TSA-approved.

In the happy news column, the hotel is letting me do early check-in, which is good since I plan to get there and immediately find out where there’s a bar. I don’t really care that it will be 11am.

Is this what it felt like at the end of the ’80s? Some combination of “thank the gods that’s over” mixed with “what the hell can they possibly throw at us next?” I suspect it was. I was in high school at the time, so yes, it was like that, but it didn’t necessarily owe anything to the decade in general.

I am going to be mighty glad to see the back of the Aughts. In ‘99 I remember loving the gigglingly prophecied nickname of “the naughty aughties.” Turned out there was plenty of naughtiness but none of it was fun.

I turned 35 this year and on Saturday, at our big family Christmas-ish dinner, my sister admitted that she had been a little freaked out by the thought of her little brother being 35. Then it came up in conversation that the youngest member of the generation after us is about to start driver’s education and my sister turned to me with wide, frightened eyes. “Nevermind about you turning 35 anymore,” she said to me. “I have something new to be freaked out about.”

Completely as an aside, I confess that one of the things that most bothers me about the Detroit would-be bomber is that it pisses me off to think what new indignity I’ll have to endure when I fly in a couple of weeks. What a load of shit. I’m starting to wish I’d opted for the 16-hour train ride after all.

Friday night I went out to grab a bite to eat with KJ, Steve and LeAnn. There is a new Japanese fast-food place around the corner from LeAnn that turned out to have very tasty teriyaki beef. The place kind of looks like an Arby’s on the inside, which is a little weird, but the food was good and the company excellent.

While there, though, I noticed an amusing set of matched misspellings in the cups/plasticware/chop stick/straws section:

The following are things I occasionally find myself shouting from my car, while driving, thus marking the onset of years:

• Cross with the light!
• Cross with the fucking light!
• Don’t wear yourself out trying to get out of the way!
• Hang up and fucking drive!
• Hang up and fucking walk!
• Who taught you to look both ways? Helen Keller?
• It’s the one on your right! The long, narrow pedal on your right!
• That must be some great life insurance, asshole!
• Do not just walk out there!
• DAMN IT I SAID DO NOT

Honest to the gods, I do not know how people survive being pedestrians. When I was a freshman (yes, yes, make the back-in-my-day joke, just go for it) at orientation they made a thing out of warning us – since so many of us, myself included, were from hick towns with no sidewalks or crosswalks or the like – that we needed to use the signals and look both ways and everything. Now the undergrads just walk out in front of you or, better yet, walk out in front of you with their hand up in a STOP motion. That’s real nice, kid. I hope Student Health can sew that hand back on after someone’s grille snaps it clean off.

Dark Stores from the site Not If But When.

Particular People (PDF link), my NaNoWriMo last year, was set in the very real 100 Oaks Mall – a wonderfully ironic name that made me wonder if that’s how many trees they cut down to build the place or if they instead had installed 100 saplings in containers inside the mall. 100 Oaks was a Nashville, TN, shopping mall that opened and closed repeatedly over the course of its life. It’s now been bought by Vanderbilt and is being redeveloped as medical offices or something. When I asked KJ to get me pictures of it last year she couldn’t because it had been closed off in preparation for that work.

On a practical level, of course, it’s always preferable to see existing spaces redeveloped instead of new projects take up new spaces but were I king tomorrow I would decree that a certain percentage of dead retail and development spaces had to be kept around, unmaintained, as silent monuments to… something. Hubris? Ecology? I don’t even know what lesson is to be learned there, just that there is a lesson there of some sort. That the CitySearch page for 100 Oaks is still up is both amusing and insufficient.

Bruce McCulloch, Kids in the Hall, 1990.

Tonight (Monday) the good version of the anti-bullying bill made it through the first of two votes in the NC House. This is the version that includes explicit mention of sexual orientation and gender identity as aspects of a student’s life that may make them more likely to be bulled.

The vote was a very close one – just 59 to 57 – but I am reminded of the time I had to back a truck over a flexible irrigation pipe at the research farm. The irrigation system was made up of flexible hoses joined to one another by metal couplings. Having been warned to avoid backing over a coupling I managed to miss the nearest one but only by about this much. When a co-worker teased me about it my boss said to me, “You know what? An inch is as good as a mile.”

Part of why I’ve followed this bill as closely as I have – I wrote to and called my state representative, who in fact voted in favor of the bill, and I’ve already sent a thank you message – is that I am so utterly galled by the two main conservative responses to this bill: to claim that recognizing that queer students are often picked on will somehow lead to gay marriage being legalized and to claim that the bill is insulting to teachers and administrators because it suggests they don’t know which kids need to be protected.

I hate to break it to the conservatives – Republican and Democrat alike – in the state house, but some teachers and principals plain don’t know which kids need to be protected. Worse, though, and much more likely in my experience, they know exactly which kids are the targets of bullying and for one or more of a variety of reasons they simply turn a blind eye. Worst of all, there are some teachers and administrators who actually join in.

This happened to me twice in high school. For various complicated reasons two of my high school teachers had explicit knowledge, or close enough so as not to make a difference, that I was a gay student in their school.

One had become one of my favorite teachers ever over the course of my senior year. She was warm and supportive in her commentary on my work and I did well in her class. When she found out I was gay, however, she immediately went cold. She just froze up like a block of ice. For the rest of the semester she didn’t address me directly that I can recall in any manner other than the bare minimum required by my presence in her classroom – say, during role call – or to criticize me in front of others. On the last day of school I stopped by her room to thank her for what I had learned that year – she remained a gifted teacher – and she simply looked at me before turning around and going back to what she was doing.

The other made fun of me to my face in front of most of our very large classroom. He was known, however, as a master manipulator and so of course he did it in an oblique way that would have required me to out myself to my classmates in order to call him on it. I have probably felt more humiliated in my life but I couldn’t say when. This left such an impression on me that a couple of years ago, when I heard he’d had some major health problems and that some old classmates were sending him cards together, I commented to The Boyf that I wanted to send the guy a card but that I wanted to write in it, “I guess I’m not disappointed that you lived.”

Hell, one of my acquaintances, when he asked an assistant principal to help him ward off some bullying, was told that “things might improve if [he] got a fucking haircut.” Yet another acquaintance was the object of such scorn that when he was assaulted one day in the lunchroom a group of teachers held up makeshift Olympics-style scorecards. Eventually he dropped out of school and, last I heard, had run off to a major city in another state and become a prostitute to support himself. He was in ninth grade.

I don’t think that the existence of these rules would have necessarily prevented the experiences I and others had. I know they wouldn’t have fixed the environment that made such treatment possible. However, having them on the books is important. Bureaucrats live and die by the letter of the law and a smart kid could potentially use these rules to chip away at the ground under the feet of an uncooperative or complicit administrator. A good teacher or a good administrator could use it as a shield against those in their communities who think fags are for beating up. It wouldn’t have stopped that teacher from making fun of me but it would have given me something to call him out on. When I was that age and convinced I was the only person in the world who felt what I felt, I would have taken all the help I could get.

In an ideal world, the conservatives who think this bill goes too far by naming categories of student, who think that teachers and administrators will protect all students equally, would be right. Unfortunately, we live in nothing even a little bit like an ideal world.

So, there’s a student out there in the world who wrote a paper about a short story of mine (PDF) that is posted on this site. That’s both flattering and highly unexpected.

(By the way, he now needs to refer to a review of said story by a third party and there isn’t one in the world because, you know, this is a tremendously obscure corner of the internet. Just in case lightning strikes twice, let me know if you have any interest in reviewing it. Be warned, though, it’s a raw first draft.)

I’ve put up a gallery of pictures from our trip to DC at the beginning of April for the Cherry Blossom Festival. In summary, Kramerbooks & Afterwords continues to be the go-to place for awesome and Rep. David Price’s office gave us a very fun tour of the US Capitol. We had some great food, great times and a very lovely drive through rural Virginia capped off by a stay at our favorite Richmond bed & breakfast, the Museum District B&B. Pictures from our trip are divided into several galleries:

• The US Capitol
• the African-American Civil War Memorial
• the Japanese Street Festival held on Pennsylvania Avenue
• a bunch of pictures as we walked past the White House, Washington Monument and Tidal Basin
• the Washington Monument, WWII Memorial and Lincoln Memorial at night, something I’d photographed before but this was with a new camera and a tripod and I just love visiting these at night anyway

If all goes well, we or at least I will be back in July sometime for the welcome home party of some friends’ who’ve been living overseas for a couple of years. Woot!

Last week I started a new job as full-time staff of the university I attended as an undergraduate. Here are the really surreal experiences I’ve found on going back ten years – almost to the day! – since my eventual graduation from that institution:

• My old email address still exists and is still assigned to me. It was ready for me on Day One.
• My old personal ID number, from my old student ID? Still assigned to me. It’s now my staff ID number.
• My office is half a block from my freshman dorm. If you want full-circle, I’ve got full-circle.
• When I went to get my staff ID made, in the same office where students go for their student IDs, they still had my old student ID photo on file. The kid behind the counter asked me if I wanted to use it for my staff ID. My response was, “Well, I’d love to, but won’t everyone wonder why I wore a wig to have my staff ID photo taken?”

It’s so strange. It’s also very, very comfortable. I love the job and I really like my co-workers and my manager. I love the work I’ve done so far, and I have tried to dive in with both feet. I am in love with the variety of work and the cooperative atmosphere on my team. This is how the technology-related organizations were not when I was a student. I am really, really glad I made this move. Still, it’s weird. It’s weird to feel a sense of ownership over a place where hardly anyone has heard of you before. It’s weird to return to a place after a decade has passed and find out that all the identifying details that you thought had been put to rest were just waiting for your return.

In my fraternity we have a saying that no one really leaves town so much as they enter a highly eccentric orbit. So true. So very true.

So, we’re at the Cherry Blossom Festival in DC, feet worn down to tiny nubs by now from all the walking. Today was the Japanese Street Festival part of the celebration of the peak blooming period for the cherry trees that populate vast swaths of downtown DC. I went ahead of The Boyf, who caught up with me later, and while walking around on my own I noticed some people dressed pretty elaborately as various characters. Aha, I thought, Of course there are cosplayers here.

There were some really amazing ones, some of whom I managed to photograph, but the most interesting was this one guy whose character I in no way recognized but he had big, white hair and a fedora. Physically, he strongly resembled my friend and fraternity brother Donald B.: tall, thin, strikingly handsome. He was of that general physical type, anyway. White Haired Guy and several other cosplayers had kind of set up shop with a “Have Your Picture Taken with a Cosplayer” sign, and a band of late-teens young women had set up camp around them. The young women would stand and watch people get their pictures taken and then, whenever any of the cosplayers in any way changed their pose or struck a particularly character-specific pose, these young women would squeal as with one voice and clap with excitement. It was very charming, actually, and my heart went out to them.

Then some other guy, with big red hair and of the same general morphology as, for instance, my friend and fraternity brother Damien (average height, athletic build, boyish good looks), happened to walk by at that time. Their characters seemed to have something to do with one another, as the two guys looked at one another with surprise and shouted something at one another and the chorus of young women took up sustained squeals of surprise, fingertips pressed to their lips as though to hold back some measure of their glee.

The White-Haired Guy ran over to The Red-Haired Guy, and they hugged, and the chorus of young women all squealed. Then Red Hair and White Hair pulled apart just a bit as though to go their separate ways but after a moment Red Hair threw his arms around White Hair’s shoulders, hoisted himself aloft and wrapped his legs around White Hair’s waist. White Hair made what I can best describe as a cry of pleasure and proceeded to hump the living hell out of Red Hair, right there, right in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue.

The chorus went wild. They shifted directly from squeals to screams. They were turning to one another in pleasant shock and screaming at one another, then turning back to the extremely… vigorous display of dry-humping – both Red Hair and White Hair were really getting into it, I have to say – and then they’d scream some more.

I was so surprised I didn’t manage to get a single picture of them in action.

That isn’t my point, though. My point is that for thirty seconds I was in the middle of a crowd of thousands on Pennsylvania Avenue and at the same time I was trapped in a small space with what appeared to be the gay softcore anime equivalent to The Beatles and half a dozen of their biggest fans and it was fascinating.