There is a good friend of mine… I have to pause here. I don’t know how good a friend he is when I call him and he doesn’t return my calls. I asked him about it and he gave me this explanation that compels me to feel sorry for him: he is so busy, work is cutting his pay and increasing his workload,  it takes all of his emotional reserves to deal with people at work, and when he is home, he wants to tune everything out. As if this type of thing is unique to him. Another good friend of mine works with special ed students, especially autistic and other special needs students. As an educator who works with kids who constantly need his attention, he is drained. All my dealings with students at any level has also placed emotional demands on me. This so-called good friend of mine… he is not special. He is lucky enough to have a full-time job, even if things are fucked-up right now.

Now that I’ve talked smack about why he doesn’t call me back, here’s some more smack: he calls me up asking me “for a favor” because he’s going on vacation. When I listen to the voicemail, I wonder what it is. I call back this time and he actually answers the phone. We chat and the favor turns out to if I could record some shows. Unfortunately, I tell him, I do not have a DVR and that’s the truth. I catch up with most of my TV viewing through the on-demand channels or Hulu.

I suspect the TV show in question is Project Runway. As much as I enjoy the show, I just don’t consider it a life-or-death situation. Some time ago, when I was blogging recaps, I did. But my summer viewing has been about Dr. Who, True Blood, Being Human, and Mad Men, in that order.

Ignore me, call me when you’re drunk, and call me when you want to watch TV. And if I piss you off, what are you going to do? Not talk to me? Geez!

Somehow, we will wind up having a lunch where my friend will get mushy and say we should hang out more often. As long as there isn’t excess alcohol involved, it’s ok.

There are a few events that have found their way into MFA lore at the University. My housesitting adventure in Professor Joseph K’s home, complete with eating “magic cookies,” is one. After our fall-out, Professor K bitched about to any of his acolytes who happened to be nearby. I happened to have found out about it from Rosalyn’s husband, then husband at Rosalyn’s birthday party. Which now bring me to the other: To deflect attention from herself, Rosalyn has happily spread the cookie monster about me. Of course, Rosalyn’s falling down the stairs had many witnesses. There were the few who saw it first-hand and came directly to her aid, and then there were the other party-goers who found out within minutes. With so many people who knew about the fall, it was very hard for Rosalyn to live it down. And the program’s co-director had first-hand knowledge of it, since she was the party’s emcee.

What is an MFA program without a little heresay? The MFA welcome party was canceled and the reason was spread through the grapevine: The co-director said to Rosalyn that the party was canceled because of her infamous drunken fall down the stairs. Using 9/11 and the “spiritual wound” was bad enough, but this was a personal attack. Rosalyn, who was no pushover, did at least say a few things in her defense.

In pre-blog/MySpace/Facebook/Twitter era, some of us used social networking. On a Yahoo Groups board someone set up for our MFA program, Liza Radley and I expressed our anger over what happened to Rosalyn and the excuses used to pull the rug out from under a tradition. The same board was also used to organize several unsanctioned MFA “welcome parties.”

To give some credit to the program, a bland reception was held in the top-level courtyard of the University’s Humanities building, on the south side of the “H.” But a cheese-and-crackers operation in the afternoon of a school day isn’t quite the same as an evening everyone has set aside to meet each other. But the excuses were totally unnecessary.

I had the impression that the English Department wanted to end this whole party business. The year before, I heard from a friend that the department chair Dr. Muir was quite bitchy and garulous when he asked her for the funds to buy refreshments for the party. Perhaps it would be the last banal fall semester for a while and Dr. Muir just appeared unprofessional. My first semester in the program, however, was marked by September 11.

In years past, there was some idea that there would be a party and the date would be announced. The semester’s arriving class, however, had no idea. We were all horrified by the attacks, stressed out afterwards, and frightened by the developments that were rapidly happening on a national level. And life had to go on. We wrote our stories and poems and read them for the workshops, read literature for our classes, and worked at our jobs. We went back to some kind of normalcy, whether we liked it or not. There was, however, no sign that there’d be a party to welcome the new crop of writers and poets.

As part of that new group, I was disappointed. Were we unworthy of a welcome?

Rosalyn and I e-mailed one of the co-directors of the program about it. We both got responses that amounted to that it wasn’t going to happen. In the e-mail I got, the esteemed master poet said something about since there was this “great spiritual wound,” it didn’t seem appropriate for us to be throwing the party.

Using 9/11 as an excuse? This was definitely exploiting this event to do something that this director probably wanted to do in the first place. Cancelling the semester and giving all of us a sabbatical, a few months to heal, would have also been appropriate if we really want to measure the appropriateness of things based on how “spiritually wounded” we all were. Of course, we didn’t get that. So a party to help welcome our group was definitely a step for us to to move on.

After some effort, the efforts of those of us who lobbied for the party paid off. The retired English teacher-turned-professional student took on the role of hostess one more time. There was food and drink, and the program co-director welcomed us. We had an opportunity to come out into MFA society, and we got paired up with more senior classmates as our mentors. And everything was going well with wine-facilitated conversations in the kitchen and the living room until we all heard a thud come from the middle of the house.

At the bottom of the staircase that led from the living room to the basement floor, Rosalyn took a fall and bumped her head. There would be no more parties at the retired teacher’s house.

It’s a verb tense that’s used all the time by native speakers of English. There’s a goal, an expectation, some kind of deadline to meet implied. Here is the basic construction:

Subject + will + have + past participle
Example: Tomorrow, I will have completed all my paperwork.

Subject + be (am/is/are) + going to + have + past participle
Example: I am going to be finished with my project tomorrow.

Several years ago, I lived with someone who lived in the future tense. This guy, whom I’ll call Hartwig, never quite did anything in the present tense to accomplish the things he dreamt that he would have done at some point in the future. Now, it is past unreal conditional, most likely something he rarely or never accomplished. At the time when he talked about becoming a singer-songwriter, he was talking about something in the future, something he hoped to accomplish.

In the simple past, Hartwig talked about how he could write songs and how he could really work in a hook. Sheryl Crow, the Carpenters, and few others inspired him in this craft and he was talented, dammit! His only problem was that people held him back: his evil stepmother, his older brother, and several of his other relatives who blend together into composite villains. He left all these people behind in St. Louis, driving out to the promised land of Southern California, and he still felt these people held him back. Instead of sitting down with a tape recorder and some musical instruments, Hartwig was content to bitch and moan about these people. He talked about how he will be a famous person and they’ll all be sorry and be sweeteningly ingratiating to him.

Not while he sat on his duff and did nothing, they wouldn’t.

Hartwig’s problem was that he didn’t want to be a singer-songwriter. He wanted to have been a singer-songwriter. He wanted to have been famous. He wanted to have been a star and receive the adoration he craved from the family members who clearly didn’t love him back. He didn’t want to go through the process of writing songs, finding that bulk of them may not be that good or work at all, and then find some that might. This would mean that he’d have to fine tune them, to get them to play just right. That would take actual work.

The time he spent looking at hanging out at bars, looking at porn on my computer, and moaning about the people who held him back could have been spent actually working on songs. He did go out to karaoke bars and sang, hoping people would tell him that he was great. He was often surprised that they didn’t. No one at any bar likes those “pro” types when it comes to karaoke. A year so so after I kicked him out, American Idol took off. I don’t know if he ever auditioned, but it’s his type of show. I would have tuned in if he had been one of the contestants, just for the chance to hear Simon tell Hartwig that he was awful. Hartwig, it’s not too late, especially if the prematurely gray Taylor Hicks got a record deal out of it.

When I was in my late teens, early 20′s, I outlined goals for myself, some of them too fantastic, and some just a little out of reach. Before I got into the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, I played out the future in my daydreams: After I get out of fashion school, I will become a famous artist and I will have done lots of fantastic work before I turned 30. And, in my mental future perfect universe, I will have lived in San Francisco and/or New York City before I turned 30. When my professional goals turned away from the arts, I had some other future perfect goals such as, After the French degree is finished, I will have become a literary translator. I entertained a lot of these goal possibilities in my mind, most of it never realized. I have to admit I still do, though I try to keep it to myself and from interfering with my present reality.

When I was in my late 20′s, my mindset turned to the past unreal conditional. I bemoaned that I hadn’t done or become all the things I had hoped to. I hadn’t yet finished the BA degree at the time and I felt that I should have earned that PhD. I should have left the supermarket and found a job better suited to my intellect and talents. If I had only finished that degree at FIDM and so on. It got to a point where I friend of mine had to do an impromptu intervention when I got caught up in my self-pitying when we were out for coffee. He sharply told me that he thought I was a big baby and that I didn’t stop to think that other people had some real problems. While I didn’t care for what he said, it made think long and hard about whining over what could have been.

I have to admit I am still addicted to thinking in terms of the future perfect. There are certain things I will like to have accomplished in X amount of time. I wish I can say that I have learned to to live in the present and to work towards future goals. Having things done in the past perfect would be nice. Instead, I must live in the present progressive, also known as present continuous. I am learning how to live in the present and to work towards my goals.

Henry was a very smart critic and as drunk as the writers he interviewed, wrote about, hung out with, or all of the above. Actually, he was drunker than any of them. Think of Henry as the Keith Richards of the literature scholars.

Even inebriated. Henry was very sharp. When I took his class on science fiction, he taught while drunk off his arse. No doubt he kept a bottle or bottles of something to drink in his office. Don’t quote me on this. The University also had a pub on campus, so there were also legitimate means to drink and then go on to the next class. The University pub wasn’t his style, though. The strange thing was that he was still very lucid and his comments helped greatly in the understanding of those works. He slurred some words here and there, but he always stayed on line, whether in his lecture or in reading passages from the books.

Henry wore Hawaiian shirts and shorts for most of the year. I don’t ever remember seeing him wear a pair of pants. He only got a haircut every few months, but author photos from some books suggested that he previously had his hair cut just once a year. Drunk and unkempt, he did behave professionally. He did his work as a professor and he treated his students well.

There was something utterly perverse about a professor holding “bar hours.” Professor K, who tried to push perversity in his writing topics, classroom reading selections, and his assignments, often retired to his home and drank with very few students. Professor O’Donough’s weekly dive bar party was a place where students could continue conversations that got cut short by the end of the classes or his formal office hours, relax, and get to know each other and Henry and his wife, also a professor of American literature at the University. I don’t remember a majority of the hours, well, because I had quite a few drinks. And I never got as obnoxious as I did on Professor K’s office firewater.

In the middle of my graduate career, the “bar hours” became trendy. Classmates of mine who had no association with Professor O’Donough – they weren’t in his classes, doing thesis with him, alumni, or even writers he had a professional relationship with – figured going to the dive bar in the strip mall in the suburban border of the City was cool. I didn’t attend the bar hours during this period, though I’ve always been simultaneously amused and annoyed at the trendiness.

In my last year, in the fall, during my final semester of actual classes, I decided to go to “bar hours” with a longtime classmate I’ve known since my late undergraduate career, also someone who had some association with Henry O’Donough. I may have said hello to Henry and some other people. My memory’s not clear here. I’ll blame it on the beer. I remember this scene clearly: I saw Mindy Shatner with her University acronym-embroidered sweatshirt hanging out with some classmates, most likely students of Henry’s wife. She saw me, raised her chin at me to say “What’s up?” After my stint of being the TA of her creative writing class and dealing with her being rude and disruptive to the point of verbal assault, I wasn’t ready to forgive. After all, all of this happened in the spring semester before. I quietly turned away and decided to focus my attention on my beer and my friend. She would be invisible to me the rest of the night. It was the last time I attended “bar hours.”

Henry O’Donough had since retired. I missed his final “bar hours” party. I don’t know where I was nor do I remember what I was doing at the time. The things that he taught about reading science fiction and post-modern works took me time to learn. I continued to learn things long after being out of his course. I could have easily learned the wrong thing from him – that in order to be writerly or literary, getting drunk was the way to go. Honestly, I don’t think he even bought into that idea. He was simply someone who drank and one of those rare people who could work through their intoxication. I think of him from time to time and wonder how he’s doing. Fantastic, I hope.

It’s funny that Professor Joseph K would find himself in the midst of a Kafkaesque nightmare at one point in his career. Some time after I ended my academic and professional association with him, he found himself the subject of a University investigation. I only have second-hand information on this subject. Given that I had been a student and employee of his for two years and that the investigation occurred while I was still in the MFA program, I’m surprised I was never interviewed as a witness. Getting back  to the subject at hand, the reason why the University was looking closely into Professor K’s affairs was that a student felt their grade was at stake after she objected to attending Professor K’s class when there was a sexually explicit presentation.

When I first heard the news, I was attending a birthday party for Rosalyn, my friend who essentially replaced me as Joe’s secretary. Somehow we remained friends despite that drama. However, when Rosalyn mentioned that Professor K was facing an investigation, I bluntly said he had it coming.

I’m clearly not the professor’s biggest fan. I definitely did not have any sympathy for him when I heard about. However, the investigation took a strange turn.

From what I understand, especially from what this grad school classmate told me, was that her complaint was about feeling forced to attend a class session where she was not comfortable with the subject matter. Joseph’s guest speaker was a member of the fetish community who did a presentation on S&M. She also felt how Professor K responded to her request not to attend put her grade in jeopardy. So when the University’s offices responded to the complaint, it seems logical that they would look into if this complaint had merit or not. The investigation, however, went much further.

This is what Rosalyn told me about this process: the University’s investigators interviewed Joesph’s students, about the event. They must have been keeping a dossier on Professor K, for they went after things not relevant to the case at hand, such as allegations of favoritism, unprofessional behavior towards other students, and substance abuse. Joe’s students, including Rosalyn, were asked about these things. And the character issue would become much bigger than the original complaint about a student being subjected to explicit sexual content.

The charges regarding the original complaint were dropped. However, the investigation uncovered Professor K drinking hard liquor in the office. This is something I can definitely verify. When I worked for Joe, he did keep things such as Central American firewater in his office. During my first semester of grad school, I even helped myself to some firewater when I was working in his office. In fact, I helped myself to most of that bottle. One night, when I was the student who administered the class evaluation, where we all filled scantrons about the professor’s performance, I was wasted. Somehow, I thought it would be funny if I hammed up reading the evaluation instructions to the class. Looking back, I must have been grating. There was also the time when I house-sat for Joe that I found his “special” cookies and ate them all. If I were asked about these things, I’d have to tell the truth. So it was a good thing for both me and Professor K that I wasn’t interviewed.

Even without my testimony, the evidence regarding Joe’s drinking in his office must have strong. From what I heard from Rosalyn, the University placed a reprimand on Professor K’s records about the drinking despite dropping charges.

As for the student who complained about the inappropriate class session, she was ostracized for a while because of the loud backlash from Professor K’s acolytes. Then a friend of mine in the program found herself in the midst of this drama even though she had nothing to do with the compaint. Her only crime was that she shared the same first name.

Shortly after I resigned from working for Professor K, I prayed for some kind of justice. I’m sure some of my predecessors who also have their own fall-out stories did the same thing. I hoped enough people would see Joe for the arse he is, especially the sub-literate acolytes who think he’s brilliant because they don’t read. I might as well hope that George W. Bush repent of all the horrors of his presidency.  It’s possible Professor K’s the victim of an over-zealous investigator who wanted to make the case stick against him at any cost. Knowing that they did go beyond investigating the original complaint makes me a little more sympathetic to him, though it doesn’t endear him to me. Whether Joe evolved personally from this experience or not, I don’t know. Perhaps the investigation and the reprimand were more than punishment enough.

I should be over something like this. As much as I can dwell on the whole MFA experience and what a racket it was, people like the Professor Joseph K are a joke. Unfortunately, my dealings with him and his self-serving behavior haunt me to this day. At the start, he was the mentor figure, the one who gave me admission to his inner literary circle. In the end, I got tossed aside. As much as he told people that they should do what’s beneficial to them as writers, he wanted people to take his workshops and tell him how brilliant he was for publishing his slender little volumes of deviant behavior. Regarding his writing workshops, there wasn’t much to get out of them. Publishable in his terms meant “I publish you, you publish me.” As a grad school friend of mine said, fiction could not create a villain as evil as Professor K.

As much as I may feel like I’ve forgiven him, the anger still surfaces from time to time. Personally, being cold shouldered by someone who once built me up hurts. The drama where he took his anger out on me for rejecting him took its toll on me creatively for a while in grad school. Who would think that taking another fiction workshop professor would be tantamount to saying, “Professor K, I’m blowing you off!” Looking backwards, there are infinite possibilities of what I could have done to have avoided being a casualty of Professor K’s unprofessionalism. Unfortunately, there’s no way to change any of that. Looking forwards, I do not need Professor K. I can’t really depend on the history. He is not someone I can count on to be  mentor, a reference, or even friend.

Perhaps if I stuck with Professor K, I might be publishing sick little volumes of my own, dwelling on the same kind of topics that caught his fancy. I could have easily used his name as a reference for my work with his university press journal, though I can’t say I’m completely proud of the work published during my tenure as his assistant or even before or after. I’m not sure if the potential benefits outweigh the price. This person inspired me to get caller ID for my landline phone several years back. This was pre-cell phone for me and it doesn’t speak well of him.

All that Joe is good for now is a character in one of my stories. I’m not interested in a literal novel about the grad school experience, so he may find his way in some other story. After all, I wonder what professor was the source of Sabul in Ursuala K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Be warned, Professor. You are a fair target for my writing, whether in fiction or creative non-fiction.

Then I encountered the guy who lost his shirt on schwag. This is what can happen when you blow all your money. He said he would dance for schwag. Gotta love that he actually found use for the ginormous bag. For the past few years, there were the “free hugs” people. One guy took it one step further and offered “free sex.” These bikini-clad Princess Leias were everywhere. They all seemed to work for Gentle Giant LTD, but enough of them were set loose on Comic-Con. I came across them posing with some weird “cute” creature. Something is very wrong with this juxtapostion. As for male skin, there have been a group of half-naked warrior men wandering Con yesterday and today, but I haven’t been able to stop them for a good photo. Perhaps on Saturday I might be lucky. Boba Fett and Darth Vader pimping it. So wrong it works. Who says you really need to go all out on your costume? Is it really necessary to spend all that time getting yardage and materials, sewing, wigs, prosthetics, and try to look as realistic as possible? What does this mean for guys who can’t afford to be unpaid character impersonators. With construction paper, paper plates, Coke boxes, and plastic buckets, all this is needed is some imagination and earnestness. They sell it for sure. Fortunately, I have less clutter. Though my day is definitely cluttered tomorrow. But the umbrella would have been nice.

At the west side of the Convention Center, where it meets the Marriot, a few guys had large bubble machines that pushed very light suds through human-shaped stencils. When the guys cut the mass of bubbles away from the stencil, it looked as it people were floating off to the heavens. The process went so fast that lots of them were in the air. Comic-Con attendees were lined up trying to get a good shot. Here’s one of my attempts.

Comic-Con is all about the badge. I procured my badge Wednesday night, got to experience the Exhibit Hall, which I was soon over, and got to experience one of the longest bus rides I ever had going across downtown, all thanks to the badge. The next day, during the early hours, I lent my badge to a friend of mine and met up with him close to the Gaslamp Quarter gate at noon. The borrower’s definitely a good friend of mine and I got my badge back on time. However, I don’t think I’d do it again, unless it’s Sunday (by which time I’m usually over Comic-Con and just don’t go). By then, anyone can have my badge. Hopefully someone I can trust not to go psycho in my name.

I got to see the Charlaine Harris panel and she gracefully put the distance between her books and te TV work of Alan Ball, giving credit where credit is due, but clearly establishing her line of continuity in her work. Much of the discussion was on her work and writing in general, all in response to questions from the audience. She was charming with her answers, talked about Anne Rice, and laughingly drew the line at Twilight.

Later in the afternoon, I got to attend another writing-related panel, this one on twisting genres. The featured writers included China Miéville and Scott Westerfeld, whom I found fascinating and is now on my to-read list. What I took away from it was that a writer should challenge a reader’s expectations without confounding them. Also, works don’t have to exist in terms of literary or sci-fi or mystery, etc. Which has been my feeling all along. Fiction should never be boring.

I briefly got to chat with my friend Melissa, who now only comes out to San Diego for Comic-Con. Her Army husband’s assignments take them to various parts of the world, including the US. She’s here for a few weeks, doing some work for the Masquerade show on Saturday and trying to take care of personal things. And then staying in touch will be on Facebook later.

The Westboro Baptist Church gets subverted by Comic-Con attendees who in turn protested America’s most infamous bigots. Photo by SDGeek.

Because I was attending a panel at noon and catching up with Melissa, I missed the lovely Westboro Baptist Church protesters. I heard through the Twitterstream that I wasn’t missing much, that there really wasn’t much to it. With the gay prides, they had a focus. Here, from what I gathered, they may have felt Comic-Con was about idolatry, but wasn’t quite enough. Of course, the fanboys and fangirls of Comic-Con diffused their message with equal parts camp and style. They beat the bigots at their own silly game without having to get seriously ugly. Perhaps the Phelps just need to call it quits. No one really cares like they used to.

My evening was spent watching a sneak preview of the Doctor Who season finale and the Being Human second season premier. I got to the showing late. Somehow, I expected that they would show the two Doctor Who episodes first and then Being Human. Nope. Being Human came on first, and on top of that, the cast made a surprise visit to the screening. So I missed double, but I got to see the Doctor Who finale (the first half I’ve already seen last week) and then the second episode, which aired in the UK a month ago, even on that very significant date. Can’t tell you what happens. Spoilers.

Getting back to the badge, if it were only made out of psychic paper. A few security guards at several points of the day shined what looked like a sonic screw driver at my badge to reveal a hologram in the upper right corner. Yes, the badge is real and it’s good for a few more days. And I’m holding on to it.