from post secret
-------Email Message-------
Sent: Saturday, September 30, 2006 8:30 PM
My boyfriend and I knew we had to do something important or else our relationship would fall apart. So we took markers and wrote our deepest secrets on the backs of each other.
I never read his secrets, and he never read mine, but the perilousness of such close contact between us and the other's demons was what we needed to save our relationship.
doesn't that sound beautiful?
please. please leave young kids alone. please. jesus christ.
from the new york times
September 30, 2006
Lawmaker Quits Over Messages Sent to Teenage Pages
By KATE ZERNIKE and ABBY GOODNOUGH
WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 — In six terms representing a wealthy swath of southern Florida, Representative Mark Foley, a Republican, became well known for his ardent efforts to safeguard the young and vulnerable, leading the House caucus on missing and exploited children and championing laws against sexual predators.
On Friday, Mr. Foley resigned abruptly after being confronted with a series of sexually explicit Internet messages he is reported to have sent to under-age Congressional pages. He stands accused of being the very kind of predator he had denounced.
“I am deeply sorry,” Mr. Foley, 52, said in a three-sentence statement released by his office, “and I apologize for letting down my family and the people of Florida I have had the privilege to represent.” The statement did not refer specifically to the Internet messages.
The first e-mail messages to one male page, sexually suggestive but not explicit, were reported by ABC News on Thursday. Mr. Foley, a member of the House Republican leadership, dismissed them as “overly friendly” but not inappropriate.
But by Friday, other pages had come forward with more blatant instant messages. “What ya wearing?” Mr. Foley wrote to one, according to the network. “Tshirt and shorts,” the teenager responded. “Love to slip them off of you,” Mr. Foley replied.
ABC News said it had read him other messages that were far more graphic. Within hours, Mr. Foley resigned in a one-sentence letter to Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida. He left the Capitol without answering questions.
The resignation threw Congressional Republicans off stride on the day they were breaking to campaign for the midterm elections just five weeks away. It also gave Democrats hopes of capturing another seat in November. Even by the standards of Washington, this revelation stunned Mr. Foley’s colleagues for how openly he had courted danger.
According to ABC, he exchanged instant messages with the pages using his initials and year of birth: “MAF54.” And he might have known he would be watched; the pages, teenagers in navy blue uniforms who open doors and carry messages and water to members on the House and Senate floors, are closely guarded, not only for their vulnerability, but because they have been the object of past Congressional scandals.
The page who received the first e-mail messages told ABC News that people in the program had warned his class to watch out for Mr. Foley. The page worked for Representative Rodney Alexander, Republican of Louisiana, and sent the messages to a colleague in the office with a note saying they had “freaked me out.”
Investigators would not say whether they were looking into the matter.
Mr. Foley’s rise in Florida politics had been striking. He told interviewers of getting hooked on politics after he moved to Florida from Massachusetts as a small child, watching people flock around the local congressman as he shook hands at a shopping center in southern Florida.
He started a small family restaurant at age 20 and by 23 was elected to the city commission in Lake Worth, a working-class town south of West Palm Beach. He was known as a tireless campaigner and was elected to the State Legislature in 1990, and to Congress in 1994, at age 40. He was appointed to the powerful Ways and Means committee and was named one of the party’s deputy whips by Tom DeLay, then the House Republican leader.
“He had a meteoric rise,” said Al Cardenas, a former leader of the Florida Republican Party who described himself as a longtime friend of Mr. Foley. “In a span of six years he went through an incredible ascension in our party. He worked real hard, he had a very engaging personality, and people took him very seriously at a young age.”
As a moderate Republican in Congress, Mr. Foley proved a good ideological match for his district, centered in the wealthy northern end of Palm Beach County. He was fiscally conservative but more moderate on social and environmental issues.
He spoke vehemently about the need to protect children from pedophiles. “We track library books better than we do sexual predators,” he said, arguing the need for the Children’s Safety Act, passed by the House in 2005.
Questions about his sexuality swirled beginning with his first run for Congress, when his opponent in the Republican primary sent out mailings saying Mr. Foley was gay. He was single and seemed uncommonly focused on politics. He sometimes referred to his sister, Donna, who often served as his campaign manager, as his “surrogate wife.”
In 2003, when he was considered the front-runner in a crowded primary race for the Senate seat being vacated by Bob Graham, Mr. Foley gave a news conference to condemn rumors that he was gay but refused to say whether he was. A few months later, he dropped out of the race, saying he needed to spend more time with his father, who had prostate cancer. Many believed he had left the race to avoid questions about his sexual orientation.
“There were accusations made that he was gay, and clearly that had an impact on him deciding not to run for Senate,” said Jim Kane, the chief pollster for Florida Voter, a nonpartisan polling organization. “He knew the scrutiny was clearly going to be much different once he stepped up a notch.”
Mr. Foley reportedly sent the messages to the first page in August 2005.
Representative John Shimkus, Republican of Illinois and chairman of the House Page Board, issued a statement late Friday saying he had known of the first e-mail messages “in late 2005.” Mr. Foley, Mr. Shimkus said, had said he was simply acting as a mentor, but Mr. Shimkus told him to cut off contact with the page and “be especially mindful of his conduct” with pages.
Representative Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader, called late Friday for an investigation into who knew of the messages, and when. After Republicans criticized her move on the floor, the House referred the request to the ethics committee.
Although his current race was considered competitive, Mr. Foley had been favored to win re-election; President Bush won his district in 2004 with 54 percent of the vote. And yet the campaign between Mr. Foley and his Democratic opponent, Tim Mahoney, had been combative. Mr. Mahoney, a businessman and former Republican, sued Mr. Foley this month, saying Mr. Foley had defamed him in campaign advertisements.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had included the campaign in its list of “emerging races,” or the 50 seats most primed for takeover. Mr. Mahoney, Democrats said, was a good candidate even before the scandal, with $1 million in his campaign chest.
State Republican Party leaders said they would meet with officials from each of the counties in Mr. Foley’s district to nominate someone to replace him. But an election official in Florida said Friday night that Mr. Foley’s name would have to remain on the ballot. Any votes for him will be counted for his replacement, the official said.
(by tom stoppard)
AEH. If only an army should be made up of lovers and their loves! - that's not me, that's Plato...'although a mere handful, they would overcome the world, for each would rather die a thousand deaths than be seen by his beloved to abandon his post or throw away his arms, the veriest coward would be inspired by love.' ...But there was such an army, a hundred and fifty pairs of lovers...At the end of that day, says Plutarch, the victorious Philip of Macedon went forth to view the slain, and when he came to that place where the three hundred fought and lay dead together, he wondered, and understanding that it was the band of lovers, he shed tears and said, whoever suspects baseness in anything these men did, let him perish.
HOUSMAN. I would be such a friend to someone.
AEH. To dream of taking the sword in the breast, the bullet in the brain -
HOUSMAN. I would.
AEH. - and wake up to find the world goes wretchedly on and you will die of age and not of pain....Lay down your life like a pack on the roadside though your days of march are numbered and end with the grave. Love will not be deflected from its micheif by being called comradeship or anything else.
HOUSMAN. I don't know what love is.
AEH. Oh, but you do. In the Dark Ages, in Macedonia, in the last guttering light from classical antiquity, a man copied out bits from old books for his young son, whose name was Septimius; so we have one sentence from "The Loves of Achilles." Love, said Sophocles, is like the ice held in the hand by children. A piece of ice held fast in the fist. I would I could help you, but it's not in my gift.
HOUSMAN. Love it is, then, and I will make the best of it.
(from the invention of love)
fellow collegemate and blogger jaggd has some interesting thoughts on happiness.
meanwhile, a more academic and new-york-centric look at the same topic. it's v. long but well worth a skim.
as for me, i'm not where i want to be right now, but working on it. or toughing it out at least. or surviving. aren't they all just words for each other, anyway??
i want everything.
i want to be the center of attention, the center of the universe, the universal answer, the answer to no question.
that's a lie. i want to be a black hole. i want nothing to come near me out of fear of what i may do, what i may take, how i may ruin.
i want to be understood, but i don't want to put in the effort.
i want to be insulated from everything that hurts. twice over. i want to be strong enough that pain never breaches my outer walls, that it never pierces my armor and stabs through the skin. i want to have no achillles' heel, no soft spot, no sweet spot. i want to be all sweet spot.
i feel like i deserve to be punished. like my whole life is a righting of wrongs. unsuccessfully so. i want to be successful. but i want the world to measure success with the same barometer i'm using, not the impossible, daunting scale it has now where my efforts don't even register.
i want to be loved, but i don't want to put in the effort. i've already put in the effort. i want it to be given to me instead of being taken from me. but i don't want anyone to know.
i want nothing.
aah. this is one of my top favorite concepts. i kid you not, i am actually excited to write this. (check here for the first ridiculously nerdy post.)
when form parallels the story
okay, so i absolutely love when the form or structure of a story parallels, or accentuates, the story itself - i think it's a smart, slick move on the writer's part, and tough to pull off, but ever so satisfying when done correctly. i'll give you an example - the movie memento, or adaptation. the way these stories are told are, in a sense, imperative to get the greatest impact of the story, imperative to understanding what the story itself is all about. ever read nabokov's pale fire? (ohmygod, or mark danielewski's house of leaves?!?!! purchase it. immediately. it is a suspense film AND an indie drug film, somehow disguised as a postmodern book. i am still not sure how it is quite able to do that.)
it's all about how the storytellers really f-ing USE their medium, and push the boundaries of what they are trying to do in order to tell a .better. story. okay, these are obvious, glaring examples; but this is also something that i love when used subtlely...a good example of this is in an author's rhythm. have you ever noticed how a writer can "stop" a reader - just by changing his sentence structure? like, in the middle of a story, all of a sudden there is one line: "The phone rang." and, it's the shortest sentence in the entire book so far, and you get there, and its simplicity just makes you stop. when i read this (nabokov short story), i was just like, this is brilliant! because the characters in the story had also just stopped from the startling ring as well - and here we were, the characters in the story and me, just holding our breadth for one split second, because nabokov TOLD us to. this is why dan brown can essentially write a page-turner/movie book, but his prose is god-awful -- he has no sense of how to use the medium, and really affect his readers with his words.
all right, so what does this have to do with comic books, yeah? i think that graphic art is (*sigh* or WAS, even just a couple of years ago. maybe not anymore) very much a medium that does not know its place, and thus isn't restricted by it. the whole concept of a "panel" IS this idea of making your form tell your story. the very fact that an artist looks at a blank page, sections it off however he chooses, and then translates that stillness and those restrictions (sections) into movement is awesome. it's the parallel to peter parker keeping his hero identity quarantined from his "real" life (and loves) and being unable to do so . . . or to professor x trying to tear down the hatred that divides mutants but finding that dividing lines happen no matter what one does. it's many, many individual stories and lives (be it individual characters, or even individual issues) being stitched and patchworked together into a whole. and there you go.
