Come out, come out, where ever you are!

This is hilarious.

Pent up priests become child fuckers. Mark Foley says no to pedophilia...because he is a pedophile. And now this anti-gay rights activist Senator.

What makes me sad is he has to get busted for such a freaky-deaky activity: cruising in a bathroom of an airport. Also, he's damn fugly. What would make it really gross is if we combined his and Foley's stories.

Imagine this:


(desiring) having sex with this:



(images taken from CNN.com and http://z.about.com/d/cameras/1/0/n/2/LittleBoyBlue.jpg&imgrefurl=http://cameras.about.com/od/digitalphotographycontest/ig/March-2006-Photo-Gallery/Little-Boy-Blue.htm&h=375&w=500&sz=85&hl=en&start=3&um=1&tbnid=u7VvnwgeYp-_qM:&tbnh=98&tbnw=130&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dboy%26svnum%3D10%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DN)

"Yay! White people!" -Wonder Showzen

I taught my first class o the semester today. A room full of 24 students. Every single one of them white.

For me, tt's less of a racial thing than it is a visual aesthetic. There's too much blond and not even pigment. I've said it before and I'll say it again:

It looks like I am teaching the kids from Village of the Damned, and they're all wearing Abercrombie & Fitch and Ugg boots.

Mousetraps

I went to the allergy doctor where they pricked my arms up and down with over sixty different allergens -- from grass to dog, mold to dust mites. And my arm began welting up like a battered wife in a Lifetime movie. It was gross.

Turns out I am allergic to Indiana. I am allergic to all 12 grass unique here to Indiana, all but three of the weed pollens, all but five of their tree pollens. I feel like a nerd in school again, with my newly perscribed artillery of nasal and inhalation sprays. Two types of inhalors, and Nasonex.

I also have been finding little black slender droppings in my kitchen pantry. My tea bags (does that sound sexual?) and pasta packages have been getting chewed upon. I bought mousetraps at Target and in less than five hours after seeting them up, I killed two mice. Their tails were sniff as I disposed of their bodies. Actually, I only disposed on one. The other one is in a black baggie next to the trashcan, on the floor. If you want, I will snap a picture and post it.

I was so hungry, and so low on food supplies, that I ate the green tea soba noodles that one of the mice had chewed into. I hope I don't die of some disease. But if I do, I hope I cause a plague outbreak.

America's Funniest Predators

I have been throwing out all the moving boxes and putting my place together. I even decorated a wall with one of those 80's porcelain jester masks that Denay gave me. It is tacky and beautiful.

Orientation is on Monday. And right now I am refusing to do my pre-orientation reading and am, instead, watching DatelineNBC's To Catch a Predator "spin-off" show: Raw Predator, which is just a behind-the-scene outtakes version of the original show. Is it just me or does the title of To Catch a Predator seem a little deceptive? It sounds like a How-To Guide for parents looking to protect their children, and instead offers looks into men and their efforts to pork children. I imagine these parents tuning in, expecting one thing only to get something else, and gasping, "Filthy!...But genuinely arousing..." (<-- that's a Simpsons quote by the way.) What is disgusting about this spin-off is that Raw Predator's title somehow manages to sound disturbingly more like that of a porno film's. More than To Catch a Predator. (Or am I just sick for thinking To Catch a Predator sounds somewhat erotic? I'm probably sick.)

David has been watching this show religiously. (I wonder if it turns him on.) My friend Carissa calls it "America's Funniest Predators." What i find so hilarious about this program is that it pulls on so many heart-strings for American audiences. It exploits the paranoia of parents, it feeds the reality TV craving, it has overtones of taboo sexuality, it involves youth -- all packaged together like a pedaphelic (and less ghetto) version of Cops. With interviews! The kiddy factor reminds me of a Marilyn Manson quote regarding America's obsession with human exploitation: "Is adult entertainment killing our children, or is killing our children entertaining adults?"

(Funny enough, as I'm watching this episode, one of the predators is getting cuffed by the cops right now. And both the cop and the man are wearing yellow rubber Live Strong bracelets. It almost looks harmonious.)

In this episode I'm watching, the host says something along the lines of: This investigation was to uncover how these predators think, what is their thought process in making these decisions to stalk children on the internet.

Lies!

This is the least emphasized part of the show. They didn't come here to show something so deep and meaningful. They came here to offer the sensationalism of the idea of child-fucking, not the psychology of child-fuckers. The show normally just concentrate on the predators chatting on the internet with the decoy kids (messaging statements like "I want to stick my $%^& up your @$$...itll hurt, but its a good kind of pain, you know?"). Then they spend the rest of the time showing the host re-reading these chats to the busted predators. Of course the explicit suggestion of sex acts being done to teenagers by 43 year old computer engineers and truck drivers is going to dominate the audience's main interest -- not the investigative merit. Though, I can appreciate that kind of pretense. It hurts, but it's a good kind of pain, you know?

What I am now noticing about To Catch a Predator is how it reminds me of my very own youth with the internet. I would chat online and older men would approach me. Most of them stopped chatting after I said I was 13 or whatever. But every once in a while I would find a man who would take it into the sexual arena of conversation. They'd ask how big I was, and whether I've even had sex with the boys at my school.

I never did meet up with any of them. The first and only guy I had ever met back then is my friend Ryan, who is just a couple months older than me. We remain friends to this day. Something I'm finding disturbing about watching To Catch a Predator is how it profiles these men. They offer these guys a name, an abridged backstory (husband? father? occupation? etc.). And that makes me consider the hypothetical of the men I had refused to meet. What would have happened had I agreed to meet RNance408 at the McDonald's on Lawrence Expressway? Would I have been scared for my safety? Would I have been digusted by what he looked like -- how he was even uglier in life than he looked in the ratty photo he emailed me? Would he have suggested getting into his car and going for a ride? Would I have said yes and went for it out of curiosity? Afterall, nothing is perhaps more dangerous to a young person than confusion and intense curiosity of their own budding sexuality.

I'm not feeling remorse for never putting myself into a scenario where I would have had to answer these questions. Instead, while watching these studdering pedaphiles get interrogated on TV forces me to imagine the possibilities. It's not an intense reaction, but rather a dampened dread, a muted feeling of violation. Unwillingly, I end up revisiting how fragile and lonely it felt as a suburban kid raised by immigrant parents who went to Catholic Church 3 times a week. How naughty it felt to meet other guys that loved guys, even if they were older, even if it was only through words on a screen in some chatroom. How dangerous and good it felt to connect with them, with little regard to the age gap. It hurts -- being forced back to this sort of memory -- but it's a good kind of pain. I think.

Just finished moving into my new apartment

And now I need to sort through the boxes and actually turn this place into a home, instead of a shanty-town of storage cartons.

In the mean time: Entertain yourselves with this delightful number.



I want Fancy to perform Bolero (Hole Me In Your Arms Again) at my wedding. Or, even better, a bad Vietnamese wedding singer (1 woman, with huge hair and monster-claw bangs) performing this song with the support of a synth keyboard band (3 men, all wearing shimmery fabric vests).

And we shall all do the same dance choreography that the singer does.

Quote of the day

"I’m only judgemental towards people I don’t like." -David

Packing Vampire

Again, I'm up at 3:30am, packing my apartment. I can't wait to move next week. The shitty thing is that all the U-haul places are rented out (what with this being a college town, and August being the peek moving month). I was lucky though...in securing...a 16-foot truck...with a fork lift. I don't even have enough things to fill half of that monstrosity, let alone need a fork lift in the back.

As I was cleaning my folders and folders filled with paperwork and story drafts, I came upon the admissions folder that Columbia had sent me. How sad it is that as a pack rat I had held onto this fleeting opportunity even when I chose to come here to Indiana, where the NY skyscrapers are replaced with cornfields, and the taxis are replaced with pick-up trucks with confederate flag decals. It's not that I regret coming here (hell, I stand by my belief that the Mid-west is exotic!). It's just that looking at the Columbia brochures and the literature on their program made me wonder for the very first time: What would my life be like had I decided differently.

Then I remembered that I would absolutely broke; Columbia estimated my first academic year would cost around $60,000. I wasn't even making half of that the last year I was living in SF.

In something completely unrelated:

I found out that David's first and last name (same as mine) is an anagram for "I've dandy gun."

I (HEART) China!

If not simply because they came up with such brilliant slogans to promote their 1-child law as:

"One more child means one more tomb."

It's 3:54am and I'm Still cleaning my place

I have been on a strange sleeping pattern. Haven't been able to sleep until around 5 in the morning since I got back here.

My apartment is a mess. I had to scavenge through dumpsters to rally up a mere few cardboard boxes for my upcoming move. The worst part of moving/cleaning living quarters (especially having left it abandoned for months on end) is having to work through the congregation of insects that have armied together since you last set foot in your own home. There are pill bugs crawling across the carpet. There are even dead, dried up husks of pill bugs curled up on my carpet. Hell, I somehow managed to even smash a few of these shells into the carpet throughout the week, and now they're a pain to even suck up into the vacuum cleaner.

The spiders have taken over all the corners of my house -- in my room, the bathroom, the kitchen, the living room. And Indiana spiders lay damn thick webs too. I try to wave my hand in the bottom corner of my room, where a spider had been collecting littler bugs above my laundry basket; I wave my hand there to destroy the web like picking up a cotton candy from the machine. But instead of breaking easily, my fingers just seem to pluck the threads like taut harp strings. I imagine these spiders, despite even the smallest of sizes, probably pack a strong irritating bite.

I also forgot, since last year, that the summers out here also assures that you will be walking and without expecting it, you would already walked into a spider web. It gauzes over your face like a warm film, and I can't help but imagine a spider hiding somewhere on my person, only to bite me later. Or lay eggs in my nose. I once got bitten by a spider three times on my face, during my sleep, when I was six or seven years old. The doctor made me rub meat tenderizer on the raised bumps "to bring down the swelling."

I got bitten by a mosquito almost immediately when i got back. I was outside trying to see if my car would start, and the bitch nailed me on the right bicep. I'm allergic to mosquito bites, and this one swell up into a nice golfball.

***

I miss David. A lot. The thing about long distance relationships -- compared to say, dealing with dead lovers (and here I'm going to be super pretentious) -- is that you don't have the same kind of void. You know that the person is there, out somewhere, without you. Having broken up with someone, or having them walk-out/die on you gives a definative sharp hole. You don't have to ponder what they are doing without you, what they're eating for dinner, or what song they're listening to on their headphones.

Long distance doesn't offer this sort of clarity. Instead you are given a muddy question mark of what could be. I wanted David to move on out here with me (even though I know that's not possible right now), and what I am left with is the frosted idea of what could be. His presense floats only in my imagination: there he is sitting at my kitchen table, there he is lying on the couch reading a internet printouts of celebrity gossip. It is the hypotheticals that feel sharper than pure, complete lack.

Back in Indiana

Thanks to everyone back in the bay for the warm send-offs.

I need to sleep, so this posting is abreviated. In my last few days in San Francisco I can show these two pictures:

from the Farmerbrown's send off




And Dore Alley on Sunday (where I got "woofed" at for the first time by a bear!)