The White Peril 白禍

The reactions to Andrew Sullivan's current pledge drive have been snarkily cute, but I have to say they seem to jump the gun a bit. When I first read his post saying he was starting this year's pledge drive, I saw the part about the bandwidth and interpreted it completely differently, it appears, from everyone else I read. I didn't get the impression that he was asking for a few thousand dollars all to cover bandwidth. My understanding was that the money that was left over from last year's pledge drive had dipped below the point at which he could afford his new bandwidth charges without using his own money--not the same thing.

Sullivan's site was never run like most people's blogs. From the beginning, he had backers who were helping him to set it up as a way to make his archived writings available and make him a web presence as a commentator--remember, he's been around longer than almost anyone else. The Daily Dish was originally just one element of the whole. Perhaps it still is in conception, though I'd bet that the Dish is the only page that most of his readers look at, except when he has a new article of his linked. From the beginning, andrewsullivan.com was presented almost as a foundation. It had different membership levels for different donated amounts, like a museum or the opera. He made it clear that donations were going to go to wages for his webmaster and editor and...an intern, I think?...and whoever else he was going to hire to help with it. He has also always said, up front, that he does quite a bit of research to keep the Dish up and didn't feel embarrassed about being modestly compensated personally for it. Looked at that way, I can see how he could go through nearly $100000 in a year; it's not easy to imagine, but it's not impossible, either.

You can say it's pompous of him to act as if he were PBS. You can say that having a staff for his website is excessive and that it's cheeky of him to expect people to shell out for it. I've sometimes felt that way myself and have never contributed as much to andrewsullivan.com as I have to some other people who were just folks taking time out of their lives to build, for the hell of it, a site people would enjoy and learn from and maybe want to discuss things on. I'm not...well, I was going to say that I'm not very self-aggrandizing, but there's someone who knows me in person who reads this site, so that won't fly. I'm not the Gold Circle Donor type--let's put it that way.

But if others are, I don't see why Sullivan is necessarily being dishonest in asking them to kick in. It's not as if they don't know what they're contributing to.

Wow. That's funny. A few of my friends are flight attendants (you didn't think I only hung out with lumberjacks, did you?), and I'm sure the ability to get more ripped than the passengers would make the work go by a lot faster:

Two crew members on a domestic Aeroflot flight beat up a passenger who had complained that the flight attendants were drunk, airline spokeswoman Irina Dannenberg said.

The passenger, identified only as A. Chernopup, was aboard a recent flight from Moscow to the Siberian city of Nizhnevartovsk, Dannenberg said. She said the crew belonged to another airline, Aviaenergo.

Seeing that the crew were intoxicated and were not fulfilling their duties, Chernopup asked to be served by a sober and competent flight attendant, Dannenberg said. He was then beaten up by crew members.

You have to wonder why they didn't just offer him hits from the bottle until he forgot what he'd been complaining about.

Now that there are a few people reading this who didn't know me before I started the site, I think I should warn you all about something: I'm a total idiot. This was borne in upon me forcefully yet again today when.... Well, see, we were watching Columbo, and one of the episodes on the DVD involved murder by locking someone in a safe and letting him suffocate. And there's this Columbo ripoff here in Japan that started as the usual Japanese series of ten-odd episodes. But it proved so popular that it's become sort of an institution. It doesn't run every season, but there's often, you know, a special movie-length episode over a holiday weekend, or whatever. It's called 古畑任三郎 (Furuhata Ninzaburo, the name of the protagonist).

Anyway, I started thinking about some of the better episodes, and remembered one from a few years back. A woman's lover struck her with a water pitcher she'd used as a makeshift vase for a rose from an admirer. He was caught because, when he looked at the container as evidence later, he called it a "vase." The idea was that anyone who hadn't seen it with the rose thrust into it at the victim's apartment would have just thought of it as a regular old "water pitcher." It was a fiendishly clever episode, because the whole solution to the thing was right in front of you the whole time...there was none of that cheating where the detective faxes the DMV to ask for information and you don't find out until he confronts the killer. And since (as you would on Columbo) you saw the murder, you were tempted not to notice how odd it was that the murderer referred to it as a vase, either. You associated it with the rose. The scriptwriter was very shrewd or worked from a great source. It all used your perspective as a viewer against you, beautifully.

If you're still reading, you're probably wondering what the point is right about now. Well, it's not that I'm an idiot because I didn't notice the difference between a vase and a water pitcher. It's that thinking about that episode suddenly made me realize how trackbacks work and why people get huffy about them. Until April, I just read blogs. I didn't have one. So I'd read a popular site, and there would be trackbacks attached to a post, and I'd think, Oh, some blogger wanted to let this person know he'd referred to this particular post, so he left a trail back to this here site I'm reading now. How thoughtful. And then sometimes, I'd see people get steamed up and be like, "I hate when people track back without linking my post on their site!" and I had no idea what they meant or what could be bad about it.

I swear, it was thinking about that Furuhata episode, with the smug murderer suddenly realizing how he'd incriminated himself by saying the word 花瓶 (kabin, "vase"), that made me suddenly realize my perspective was wrong. You use trackbacks to get people from the site you've pinged to come back to you. As sure as I'm sitting here, I just figured this out thinking about a rose in a water pitcher on a television show. Because I'm stupid.

And now I feel as if I've been blogging without a license, or something. Since trackbacks seemed to get people so burned up--for reasons I couldn't fathom, remember--I made a practice of only putting one in if I'd corresponded with the person I was linking. A few times, I linked a post of someone's and deleted the URL from the "Ping these sites" box, figuring that using a trackback on a stranger put me in danger of committing a rudeness without knowing...like some kind of excessive intimacy, you know? But every so often, MT would ping the linked site anyway, even after I deleted the URL. And then I'd spaz and hope I hadn't somehow offended the site owner. I guess it's okay, though, because I've always linked whenever I've sent a trackback.

Um, right? That's okay? I'm not trying to...what would you be trying to do by tracking back without linking? stealing readers, or something? I'm clearly too much of an airhead to figure this stuff out myself.

And I haven't dyed my hair blond for a good three years, even.

Only twelve hours left in this week. Good. Last Saturday, I got a message from a church friend of my parents--like an older sister to me growing up--that another friend of ours--like a little sister to me growing up--had died. So I wrote back asking what had happened, of course. I'm thinking, Oh, no, leukemia. Or a car accident. Well, that wasn't it. I don't want to name her or give details, but suffice it to say that I was listening to Zen Arcade this week, and "Pink Turns to Blue" hit me like a sledgehammer. I've lost touch with most of the people I knew at home--I can't blame anyone, since I'm the one that was eager to leave--but (I know this sounds dumb) I just kind of assume that the friends I went to church with are okay, you know? Sure, there were a few who had scarily repressive parents and ended up rebelling and getting pregnant at sixteen. But most of us turned out okay, even those who didn't stay in the church. And C. was so sweet. She was neurotic, she dressed in black, she listened to the Cure--I hated the Cure and was always pushing New Order on her, go figure--but unlike me, she wasn't a neurotic and brittle and mean teenager. She was disaffected, but she didn't resent other people who were ordinary and happy. Knowing she's not around anymore has made me feel hollow all week. She's buried in my hometown, so it'll be easy to make time to visit when I'm home in the autumn. 安らかに休んで下さい。

So I've been feeling low, and last night, I had the misfortune to run into two of the people I'd hoped most to avoid. 30 million people in this city and--again, go figure--there they were a few feet down the bar. One is an old acquaintance who refuses to shut up about how he thinks Atsushi's moving away is the perfect opportunity for me to be a ho. Normally, I'd be happy to walk away or push him off the bar stool if he didn't cut it out, but last night he was so pitiably schnockered that it would have made me look like the one who was picking on him. I know what the popular image of urban gay life is, but in truth I know very few effed-up, insolvent alkies and have a hard time dealing with those I do know.

Thankfully, my buddies behind the bar weren't far from cutting him off. But he managed to get in a last dig: "It's easy for you to talk about self-discipline, because you're one of the guys who get to choose, and everyone does what you want." I'd shrug something like that off normally, but something about the way another guy we know giggled gave me one of those moments of paranoia: Jeez, is that the way people see me? I mean, I'm probably the least attention-courting man in the free world. I take no pleasure whatever in rejecting people who are attracted to me--unless they obviously believe they're irresistible. I'm very fortunate to have Atsushi, but it's not as if we don't work at being good to each other. And furthermore, the only reason we were talking about this in the first place is that this character wouldn't change the subject even after I tried the old "The weather is really extraordinarily muggy this summer, isn't it?" routine twelve times.

So the last thing I needed, having been accused of being a princess, was to keep talking about myself. Enter acquaintance #2. Well, actually, it was two friends. They're in college, both 20, and they come out together. We met a few weeks ago, and one of them grilled me about Atsushi and me for--I swear--two hours. I kept trying to ask them what they were studying, how long they'd been in Tokyo, you know, keep the conversation two-way. No such luck. And I couldn't really get irritated, because here's this kid who's 20 and saying that he never meets any guys who are interested in anything but one-night stands, and what a relief it is to know a foreigner in a committed relationship with a Japanese man. I was flattered--who wouldn't be? (And yes, I know what it means that he's extra gushy and chatty around me, and yes, you can trust me not to do anything about it.) When I was coming out, I made older friends who took care of me, you know? Sometimes they practically had to body-check me away from scummy guys. One of them gave me the talk about not getting so into having sex all the time that you forget how to connect with guys any other way--all that big brother stuff. So now I'm 32 and it's my turn. I'm happy to do it. But last night, I was no longer in the mood to make my relationship the topic of conversation. Unfortunately, my 20-year-old friend can't talk about anything else. And being 20--was I this oblivious to older people's wisdom ten years ago? Sheesh!--he doesn't seem to understand what I mean when I tell him that he's not going to find the guys he's looking for by hanging out in pick-up bars. There are 100-odd gay bars in Shinjuku, and only four or five are flat-out cruising spots--want me to introduce you to one that's not? No, it's late. So okay, let's sit here and talk about me.

Time to go home. All this talk about Atsushi has helped to remind me that I really am lonely without him, a lot of the time. I can deal, and that's life, but it isn't easy. So just to cap off the night, I came home and gave an unsuspecting friend of mine an avalanche of raw it's-hard-to-be-faithful-pity-me drivel, probably convincing him to give me a wide berth from here on.

It's hard to write about any of this without coming off smug, I realize. But I'm really not looking for a backdoor way to brag about how perfect my life is. What drags me down is when other people act as if being happy and together somehow puts you outside the great human drama that everyone else participates in. I'm not going to start publicizing all my disppointments for the sake of "humanizing" myself (my whole point is that I'd like not to talk about myself), but I've walked around this week feeling like some kind of museum piece. It sucks, even though my friends have, naturally, told me not to let it bother me. My next post will be back to normal--I know how to ride out my down cycles--and the week will, in any case, be over soon. Can't come quickly enough for me.