A friend of mine once gave me an odd compliment, “Kekoa,” he said, “When I first met you you were nothing to me, just blank. Now though, you’re very interesting.” We laughed and I told him that I knew exactly what he meant. See, we were freshmen when we first met and when I was a freshman I was nothing, blank. I am not implying that this is a quality unavoidably shared by all newly matriculated collegians but, in the story of my life, at the time when I was a freshman, my character was underdeveloped, my personality uncrystallized. Everyone has, to greater or lesser degrees, barring a few truly unfortunate souls, a raw animal magnetism that captures the imagination. Whether you have the dreamboat eyes of a matinee idol or a face like a bomb went off, there is something precious and mysterious and central to all your interactions with your fellow humans. Now, as a freshman, that precious quality in me had been utterly obscured by years of neglect. At some point, I had become ignorant of the wisdom which we innocently know as children and often forget when we hit pubescence: People generally want to be happy; only the hopelessly maladjusted actually desire to be disappointed and enraged. And so, everybody wants to like everyone else. Everybody wants to like you. Of course everybody has their own unique and inscrutable standards of attraction and it almost never works out that a person’s composition of character agrees with another persons composition of desire and that is why great men invented romantic comedies and heart-shaped chocolates. Still, it is obvious that people have desires and they have the desire for those desires to be fulfilled. Losing sight of this, believing that nobody wants anything from you (quite the opposite is true: everybody wants everything from you. For example, I hope that every individual I meet is very rich, very generous, and very interested in my thoughts about what the best Star Trek episode is (it’s Time’s Arrow), I hope that every person I meet is a masseur eager to give me a complimentary session, is actually Scarlett Johanssons’ personal assistant charged with delivering an admission of love and invitation to vacation in Belize from her, has a rare compulsive disorder that manifests in an uncontrollable urge to give me their bank cards, pin numbers, and power of attorney, etc. There are an infinite number of secret fantasies that we color each other with, at first glance) and that you are worthless to them, is the surest way to dull the your magnetic effect on the imagination of others. So, having been diminished by the neurotoxic gases that were surely being pumped through the air conditioning at my high school, I arrived onto the Evergreen campus devoid of self-worth and having not yet made the realization that other people weren’t born despising me. These feelings made me easily intimidated, discourageable, and very unapproachable.

Anthoney Moore, who I intend to interview and center my project around, is an extremely uncharismatic fellow. Hopelessly inarticulate, graceless, forgetful, lazy, filled with misplaced and poorly expressed pride, it is almost mesmerizing to watch him move about a room as his slightest gestures are inexplicably infuriating. He’s like a scab to be picked at. Anyways, I forget how I was going to connect him with that memory of my friend telling me I was boring. If I was nice I would want him to realize that it’s possible for him to change and not be such a turd or else I want to just luxuriate in my superiority over him.