In the meantime, security forces are shooting people in the streets, senior clerics are calling for executions, and The Wall Street Journal reports that the government is charging families $3000 “bullet fees” before allowing them to recover the bodies. Somehow I think that San Francisco’s “strong message” is having slightly less effect than expected. The “activist movement” doesn’t like to admit this, but ultimately, posturing can only change people who are willing to listen. Barring treaty, trade, or threat of war, a people cannot compel a foreign government to heed their concerns, and it’s silly to expect that they could. As Iran too clearly illustrates today, a people cannot even compel their own government to heed their concerns, if it can force them back to silence without fear of reprisal.

Political power comes from the barrel of a gun.

It was true when Chairman Mao wrote it seventy years ago, and it’s true today.

Edit: Last year, the Texas Review of Law and Politics released an interesting comparative study of nations’ civilian gun-ownership rates and their degrees of personal/economic freedom.

There is no Oakland General Hospital. Oakland is served by Highland General Hospital. It’s 9:00 at night and I don’t know this, not without looking it up. When I lived in the East Bay, I went to the Tang Center on the Berkeley campus. “Five dollars?” It’s the Christmas season. Even if she’s lying, I can afford five dollars. She needs it more than I do. I reach for my wallet.

“Oh, thank you, sir, you know ten dollars would help even more.”

The gears in my head turn, clicking into place, and I drop my wallet back into my pocket. Kindness is an important virtue, but I don’t appreciate being jerked around for a sucker. She watches me expectantly as I stand there, my hand inside my jacket. “Tell you what… no. But…”

“Please, even a few dollars…”

I cough. “If you can wait five minutes, I’ll take my laundry back home, come back, and drive you there myself.”

She takes a step back. “Oh, no, I couldn’t ask for that…”

“You didn’t. I’m offering.”

“No, I should really take the bus…”

“I’ll get you there faster.”

“No, sir, it’s OK, just a couple dollars…”

I shake my head and give her a few singles before I head into the laundromat. Sometimes it’s OK to play the sucker. She needs it more than I do.

Granted, I have other problems at the Folsom Street Fair, which is usually a stream of low-grade, distressingly insistent come-ons rather than single undignified acts of borderline sexual assault, but this is another story, for another day.

I first encountered this unfortunate circumstance at last year’s YaoiCon, a few days before this site opened. Friday afternoon, I was walking out back to a friend’s room to adjust my costume when someone grabbed me from behind and started hip-thrusting. It was really very uncivilized, and while someone on Constaff saw it and offered to revoke the person’s badge, I asked them to give only a first-last-and-only warning. People look forward to YaoiCon all year, and it’s easy to get caught up in the sheer vibrant enthusiasm of the convention. It didn’t feel like my place to ruin someone’s weekend only a few hours in. Under certain circumstances, a gentleman is obligated to forgive.

Random hugs are common at Fanime, among old friends, new friends, and even strangers. That’s part of what makes the con special to me; there’s something magical about the way it expresses the simple joy of having so many fans under one gigantic roof. In an average Fanime I probably hug close to a hundred people, so when one more person caught me on the way to the doors, raising his arms for the hug, I didn’t think much of obliging him. It wasn’t enough for him, evidently, because almost immediately he started grinding his crotch against my leg. I didn’t feel much, per se, but being sheathed in skintight napa leather is a deceptively sensitive experience. The feeling was very distinctly anatomical, and I could tell from his motion that he meant it. Even if I couldn’t, the shit-eating grin on his face would have been hint enough.

That was not civilized. He is not civilized. We scold dogs for that kind of misbehavior.

You can see him off to the left here. I’m told his name is Viki. I’m posting his picture as a warning to others. He has no excuses.

Where YaoiCon is a sexually-themed convention, Fanime is not, and Fanime’s Monday afternoon is its very last dance, an extra day that most conventions don’t even have. It’s an afternoon of goodbyes, almost, and by then it’s time to start fading back to Earth, back to the real world and its very real expectations. Out here, at least, “acceptable behavior” simply doesn’t include dry-humping people without permission. At its core, the problem is only tangentially sexual; really I believe that it’s a problem of respect and dignity. I find it telling that neither of my tormentors apologized; instead, they gave me empty stares, almost as though they couldn’t understand that I might be offended. No modern apology is adequate, but I would have appreciated the attempt.

I suppose I should count my blessings. At YaoiCon I only had to suffer five or six quick thrusts; they stopped when I obviously didn’t enjoy them. This latest incident at least ended with my firm no.

That’s not the point, though, is it? I shouldn’t have to put a stop to it; I shouldn’t have to remind people that some things are out of line.

Apparently, though, this concept is a little more difficult than I thought.

While I think that Teach For America’s mission is tremendously important, parts of the program do concern me. As one friend put it, a lot of the program’s teachers just want their requisite nonprofit time before moving on to Senate appointments, and it really does show. I’ve always been a bit more of a craftsman than a politician, personally, and I worry sometimes about whether students suffer as people for the sake of good-looking news stories. They talk about “dynamic teachers who had not only a command of the curriculum but also the ability to connect with children,” but one US News story they shared described an academy founded by former TFA teachers:

Running or yelling is forbidden; students walk in straight, quiet lines. Though classes average more than 30 students, they are so silent you could hear an eraser drop. If a child speaks without being called on, the teacher stops in midsentence. If a child’s attention strays, the teacher warns: “I’m missing one person’s eyes.”

This doesn’t feel like “connecting with children” to me; it feels like a show of force rather than compassion or outreach. The teacher isn’t saying Look at me, because this is important; he says Look at me, because I can humiliate you. The academy even spends the first week “KIPPnotizing” new students to behave that way. I almost expected the example student to snap to his feet, ramrod-straight, and shout “I am sorry, Mein Herr! It shall not happen again!” Discipline and academic rigor have their places, of course, and I’m an advocate of both, but too much of either can be a socially crippling thing.

We are more than our grades and test scores.

Saying this out loud was probably not the smartest thing I have ever done.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Teach For America decided that I was best not left alone around developing young minds. If they hadn’t done that, my assignment would be winding down now, nearing completion, and I think it’s interesting to look back and think about that alternate self, the one who does get paid to help the underachievers.

He doesn’t get to pick his students. I would hate to find myself forced to deal with a year of this. On the other hand, he gets to devote more time to a noble cause, and he gets to give the Opening Talk.

The Opening Talk was supposed to be my first-day speech, a highlight of my general expectations and the material I planned to cover in the class. It was supposed to run bell-to-bell, or very close to it, an indulgence to my sense of the cinematic. I never finished it, but I do have the ending, and I’m still very proud of it.

I can hear you asking, “Why do I need to learn this? What does it matter? They’re only words.”

I will tell you.

Words have power. People will fight and die for words, in ways they wouldn’t dream for any lesser thing. How much money does it take to pay a man to jump on a grenade? There isn’t enough the world, but he’ll do it for his country, because words will stir him, to believe in Mom and apple pie, to remember Pearl Harbor or the Alamo. The greatest battles that the world has ever seen have been fought over the supremacy of words, when the immortal poetry of We the People of the United States of America and the stoic grandeur of God, Queen, and Country were set against the grim and unyeilding fury of Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer.

Words will set the world on fire. Words will shape the minds of men.

Words are the most important tools that you will ever have.

Think about that.

Dismissed.

Sometimes I wonder if it would work the way I planned. Maybe I could have made a difference; maybe I’m better off out here.

Introduction: I’m not very good at poetry. It isn’t my medium; meter and rhyme don’t come naturally to me. Even more than my other writing, poetry feels like something given to me rather than something I create; at best I’m a transcriptionist for something lurking in my dreams. Even then I’m not very good at it, but it’s a profoundly moving experience, something magical and almost divine.

In the evening of Halloween 2004, I broke three months of writer’s block. I can tell you this day exactly because I spent the day with a girl named Teri, and for the next two months I gave her credit for every word that came. It was beautiful; I woke up almost every day with something new, something wonderful, some new and interesting turn of phrase to consider. The best part was the poetry, dozens of pages every week, scrawled in that fuzzy half-awareness between slumber and first light.

I believed it was all from her, and I wanted very badly to know her better.

Ultimately that didn’t work out. We haven’t spoken in years.

She is not the girl I dreamed, and I am not a kind of boy she understands. I burned most of it, trying to find a suitable goodbye to my fantasy. Some of it survived on my old website, but for quite a while I wasn’t sure if I should move it here. I’m proud of it, in my own small way, but it’s also a little badge of shame; it’s a testament of delusion as much as any skill.

Ultimately I think it’s better to be truthful. I’ve picked a few memories to share with you; the rest I’ll leave behind.

I’m reaching out, past the fuzzy edge of the world, to pull the dreams out of the ether, give them flesh. Maybe if I let her pour through my hands and onto the page, I can be happy, even when I know she isn’t mine. It’s not working very well. It’s starting to break up already, and I only remember pieces, fragments, slipping over my mind like some high-speed Hollywood preview, slick and formless and marvelously exciting.

I think I know I’m dreaming;
It’s too good to be real,
But somehow I’m enchanted
By how she makes me feel.

It’s less a premonition,
More a trust in fate,
*next two lines illegible*

Tell me now,
You wondrous girl,
What you think of me.
Stain not today
Those precious lips
With the filthy kiss of lies.

How do you forget a girl,
One part angel, one part Muse,
Who brought back to you a talent
You always feared you’d lose?

I’m still not sure what I expected to hear when she wrote back. Whatever it was I’m pretty sure this wasn’t it:

to anser the last part im not happy with what i make anyway because when ever i finish i think i need to add more and make it better and then even when i do finish it isint my vision of perfect and somewhere along the rode after adding it to be how i want it to be i finally just say fuck it this is how it will be so to answer that question of if thats what i really want to tell u the truth its not that big of a change

I’m not sure why I decided to give her the benefit of one more doubt. Maybe I’m stubborn that way; maybe I have a hard time admitting that sometimes people are lost beyond help. Sometimes people know their shortcomings but can’t summon up the drive to begin correcting them, but I believe in bootstraps, and sometimes you have to try, one more time.

Let’s begin at the beginning, shall we? Find your mistakes in this letter and correct them.

You don’t have to make it perfect; you only have to make it right.
-Adrian

I like to believe that I really would have helped her, if she could do this little thing; I like to believe that making the difference would be worth it. Writing is a hobby to me, and missing a contributor’s copy of the YaoiCon anthology is no big loss. This website didn’t exist then, only my old one, and I already abandoned for months at a time.

She didn’t make it better, though. She gave me this:

To answer the last part, im not happy with what i make because whenever i finish i think i need to add more and make it better, then finish. When i do finish it isint my vision of perfect and somewhere along the rode after making revisions after revisions I finally just say ” eh fuck it this is how it will turn out.” So to answer the question of “is this what you truely want?” the truth is its not that big of a change.

---

Is this what you mean?

This time I didn’t write back. I’m not that patient. I’m not that good.

I think about her sometimes in hindsight, usually when she sends me some inane chain-letter or an invitation to IMVu. It’s not very pretty. Subliteracy isn’t much of an option anymore, not in the modern world. Even high-school graduates barely scratch middle-class; we’ve all but written dropouts out of the American dream. At her level, it isn’t about art, but competence. As I said, You don’t have to make it perfect; you only have to make it right. She couldn’t even do that.

She still has five years, maybe four by now. When (if) she graduates high school, the system will cut her loose. In that time someone might make her see how much she’s missing; someone might make her care; someone might make the most important difference of her life. That someone just won’t be me.

My door stayed open for months.

I will shed no tears.