Archives:
March 30-April 5, 2008
March 30, 2008
“Well, I have to say—it wasn't a misnomer.”
Chang cracks a smile, lifting up the top bread of his sandwich. “What—the lasagna sandwich?”
There's quite literally a piece of lasagna between his pieces of Italian bread. It doesn't look altogether bad, but it just doesn't seem right as a sandwich. I pick up my roast beef sandwich and take a big bite.
It's kind of nice to eat at The Lighthouse on a Sunday, when half the campus is still asleep. No lines to fight, no din to talk over.
“So you read the story for class tomorrow?”
“The molestation one?”
“Bingo.”
I nod. “Pretty messed up, huh?”
“You think it was all true?” Chang asks.
I shrug. “It's a non-fiction class.”
“It's just messed up to think about, though, isn't it?”
“I've kind of been trying not to think about.” I set my sandwich down. “You know, especially as we're eating.”
“My bad.” Chang looks down at the sandwich in his hands, dripping tomato sauce, then takes a big bite. His mouth, and the area around it are coated with sauce when he sets it back down.
“How's that working out for you?”
He nods, cleaning himself with a napkin. “Delicious.”March 31, 2008
I shoot my little basketball at the hoop on the back of my door. It bounces high off the front of the rim, and to the floor. “How's that book treating you?” I ask.
“Not bad,” Emma says, sitting at a corner of my bed, leaning her back against the wall. “How about yours?”
“Never better,” I say, stooping to pick up the ball. I turn my back to the basket, then spin around quickly firing in a hard bank shot. I pick up the ball again, and head back toward my chair, glancing down at the book I should be reading before I turn back to the hoop. “So let me ask you something.”
“Fire away,” Emma says, highlighting something in her book.
“I'm thinking about running for SA president.” I squeeze the ball, and toss it overhand toward the basket. “What do you say to that?”
“Do you want my honest opinion?”
“No point in lying.”
Emma sighs, looking up from the book. “I think you should shit or get off the toilet.”
“What's that?”
“Ever since we saw that flyer last week, you've been bringing it up—making these little digs at Nick, saying you should run. It's time that you just do it, or drop it.” Emma looks back down at her book.
I pick up the ball again, walking back to my desk chair. I line up with basket, and take my shot.April 1, 2008
I have to remind myself that it's only been a month and a half since I was last in the SA office. It's not as though I ever really felt at home here, but now the place seems downright foreign. There's even a new secretary here, with a shiny new nameplate in front of her desk. Up to the last time I was here, it had just been temps filling in since Dorothy left.
Now, a thirty-ish woman sits behind the desk, Carla Vasquez by the nameplate. “Can I help you?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I plant my hands in my pocket, “I'm looking for a petition to run for an SA position.”
“Well, you've come to the right place,” she says. She wheels her chair back to a filing cabinet behind her, and peels out a small packet of papers. “If you don't mind me asking, what position are you interested in?”
I take the packet from her carefully. “Actually, I'm running for president.”
“Really?” she asks, eyebrows up for a second. “Well, I'm sure you know about the next steps then. There's the petition attached—”
“Of course he knows about the next steps,” Nick cuts in. I turn to see us walking toward us, holding a leather portfolio with a gold emblem of the SA logo affixed to the front. “ Preston here's been writing about SA for longer than I've been leading it.”
“Hi Nick.”
“ Preston ,” he says with a nod, eyes fixed on me now. “I didn't think you were actually going to go through with this.”
“You told me I was couple days early for April Fool's Day the other night.”
“Is that what this is—some kind of joke?”
I roll up the packet and tap the end of it to Nick's chest. “I guess you're going to find out.” I walk past him, headed out of the SA office.April 2, 2008
“What do you think of this one?” Cameron asks, holding up a sheet of computer paper.
I squint at her caricature of me, smiling broadly, extending a big thumbs up. “You really think my nose is that big?”
She looks at it. “Well, not that big. But it's a caricature. Your features are supposed to be exaggerated.”
“Yeah, exaggerated is fine. But that means you think my nose is big to begin with.”
She shrugs. “It's a little big.” She crumples the paper and tosses it across the room, into my wastebasket. “If you don't like my drawings, you shouldn't have asked for my help.”
“I wasn't questioning your drawings,” I look down, “I was questioning the size of my nose.”
“It's not that big,” Cameron says, already starting a pencil sketch on her next sheet. “And don't worry. It's not like I'm actually going anywhere.”
“You sure?”
“It's not like I have anything better to do.” She glances at her watch. “T-Rex is going to be mid-way through her back-to-back episodes of 7 th Heaven now.”
“7 th Heaven?”
“Two episodes, every day.” Cameron turns her pencil, erasing something. “So how much space do you want on the page here? Just enough for ‘Vote Preston Burns' or do you want campaign information and stuff too.”
I rub my chin. “Vote Preston Burns—maybe a slogan or something. That and the URL.”
Cameron shakes her head.
“What?”
“I just can't believe you're setting up a website.”
“Well it's not that big—I'm just using my web space on the college server,” I say, turning back to my computer. “It's not like I'm trying to buy out the domain for prestonburns.com.”April 3, 2008
“Why are you laughing?” Emma asks, heaving my little basketball at the hoop on my door.
“No reason,” I say, looking away, down at my computer, where an Instant Messenger window flashes. “I'm not laughing.”
“You definitely just snorted.”
“I definitely did not.”
Emma shoots the ball again. It bounces hard off the backboard and back toward her. This time, I can't deny that I let out a chuckle.
“OK, seriously, what am I doing wrong?” she asks.
“It's just—here.” I stand behind Emma, and take her hands in mine, positioning them on the little ball, I raise her arms, in the process, pressing my chest to her back. I don't mean to be touching her like that, but I'm not sure she's even conscious of it, so I don't make any big movements. I plant her right hand on the bottom of the ball, her left hand to the side. “That's how you hold the basketball. You're shooting it with your good hand, and the other hand is just holding it steady, helping you aim.”
“But what if you're not strong enough to shoot the ball, then? What if you need two hands?”
“Then it's time to hit the gym.”
Emma swings an elbow back, hitting me in the ribs, and demonstrating that she knows exactly where I am. She shoots the ball with better form than she has all afternoon, even if she is just kind of hauling it out there, and not getting any rotation on the ball.
To her credit, the ball drops straight down through the hoop.
“All right, enough basketball. It's time to get back to work on those flyers.”
“Yeah,” I say, looking down at the mess of papers, all sample designs Cameron and I drew up yesterday. “Guess it's time to get to work.”
April 4, 2008
“I'm just saying that I told Emma I was going to stop by right after class,” I say, following Chang down the hallway toward his room.
“And I'm not trying to be a cock block here,” Chang says. “I just need you to stop in the room and give your honest opinion.”
Brad wants to rearrange the room. Chang isn't feeling too good about it. I figure I'd might as well humor him. “So he really wants to have his bed just sticking out of a corner?”
“He said it would be artistic,” Chang says. “I say he's going to kill half the room with that crap.”
We each turn, backs to opposite walls of the hallway as a group of guys who look like they've just gotten up wander past. It's a little past one, and I'm wondering if I should grab a nap after I check in with Emma.
We pass Chang's RA's room. He's standing outside, talking about Mike's last game with some of his residents. I give him a nod as we pass. He looks at me for a second before going on talking to his residents. I remember sitting in a couple sessions with him during RA training in January. I guess he doesn't remember me.
Chang stops in his tracks, mouth open as I catch up to him outside his door. It's only a second before I can see why.
Across the whiteboard on the door, the word “HOMOS” stretches out in black ink. Both Chan and Brad's door tags are marked too, “FAG” written on each.
I put a hand on Chang's back. “I'll grab your RA.”April 5, 2008
“It's open,” I call, not looking up from my book.
My door opens, and when I do look up at the end of a paragraph, I'm surprised to see Chang standing there.
“Hey, buddy, what's happening?”
“Not a whole lot,” Chang says. He doesn't look so good, with dark rings under his eyes, somehow paler than usual.
“You doing OK after yesterday?”
“I've been better.”
“Why don't you have a seat,” I say, gesturing toward my bed. As he heads over there, I go on, “You want something to drink?”
“Yeah, I'll take a soda or something.”
I open up the fridge and grab a Mountain Dew for each of us. I hand him his, then have a seat back on my chair. The can's cold between my palm and fingers, and I look down at it, trying to figure out what I can say next.
“I'm sorry to come here and bring you down,” Chang says, cracking his can open, and peering straight down through the opening in the can. “I just needed to get away from the room for a while.”
“Well yeah, I can't blame you,” I say, and a take a sip. “I mean, I can't imagine what that's like—just looking at my door and knowing somebody hates me.”
“I'm not so sure that RA tag on your door doesn't tell you the same thing,” Chang says, cracking a smile for a second. “But yeah, it's whack. And Brad just keeps ranting about it. He's just so pissed, and keeps talking about finding who it is and messing up their door.” He shakes his head. “It's just so stupid.”
“How are you dealing with it?”
He shrugs. “Guess I'm just kind of sad to see it happen. But what are you gonna do?”