Cleveland rocks

decomposition, originally uploaded by pwilnyc.

So they've found out that the VA Tech psycho was a 23-year-old South Korean resident alien. Not exactly what I was expecting - especially that he was an English major, what the hell, how many English majors do you know who can shoot guns? But I still get it.

When I was at Case, I had me a little stalker once. A kid from Syria who lived in my dorm, or had a class with me or something. Maybe he played soccer on our intramural team or was a friend of Samir's. The fact that I have no idea how I knew him speaks to the whole process. Anyway, he was a casual acquaintance that I acknowledged when we passed in the cafeteria.

And, you know, time passes. With no further basis for our acquaintance, I guess I stopped nodding to him. Also, I had something of a nervous breakdown, stayed in my dorm room for about 3 months, didn't speak to anyone, stole loaves of bread out of the dining hall to sustain myself - so with all that going on I might have walked past him a time or two without acknowledgment.

So I started getting these phone calls, a male voice telling me what a bitch and a slut and a tease I was. I was kind of flummoxed. In that state of mind I was perfectly willing to accept that I was all those things, but I didn't know who was so mad at me. I kept demanding, "Who IS this?" and he kept saying, "You know who I am." I would hang up on him, but I really wanted to know who he was and what I had done. His accent was thick, and he was always angry and possibly drunk when he called, so I had trouble understanding what he did say... which, kind of laughably, made me feel even worse. Not only was I a slutty bitch tease, I was a culturally insensitive one!

So eventually he called and said he was coming over to teach me a lesson once and for all, and I picked up the phone for the first time in weeks and called my friends, who showed up with nunchaku and clenched jaws, and they talked the guy down.

I honestly don't recall what else transpired. I know it blew over, and I do remember that he didn't come back the next semester. But college is such a fraught time - you actually have enemies, and jilted lovers, and people cheat on each other, and roommates sleep with each other's crushes - being threatened was just kind of another inexplicable float passing by in the Halloween parade of college emotional experience.

Sooooo... yeah I have a pretty good picture of what could have happened at VA Tech. First victims were a girl in her dorm room and an RA. You get that bitch slut tease girl taken care of and after that clean up everyone else who didn't understand your accent, didn't invite you to sit with them in the dining hall, all those stupid American children living their American soap opera college lives.

UPDATE: Ok he's been in the US 15 years. So... back to the original picture - a boy with a head full of dust and weevils.