It appears that I've acquired a protégé! Some months ago I placed a personal ad on one of those websites designed to facilitate... er... masculine bonding, specifically the type of masculine bonding that involves kisses, erections, and plans to go away together for a weekend of splashing in the surf while dodging seagull guano.

One of the few responses I got was from an incoming freshman at a local college -- extraordinarily bright, giddy with love for the soaring architecture of New York City (he talks exactly as though he'd been standing nearby at the very moment when an Objectivist mujahid, having leapt into a crowd of logic-denying altruists, did then brandish a leatherbound copy of The Fountainhead, and next -- with an ululating cry of al-Ayn-u akhbar! -- detonated a suicide-belt consisting of C4 packed with Rearden Metal ball bearings, thereby driving a fragment of the aforementioned novel into the poor kid's brain, where it lodged and began leeching out into his bloodstream), and irresistibly nerd-handsome with his moptop dark hair and intense blue eyes behind thumbprint-smudged glasses.

Mind you, I'm not really attracted to guys his age -- even when I was his age, my yearning teen fantasies invariably featured men in their thirties, which means that only now am I finally catching up with the very demographic that I've lusted for all these years. (I'll be 31 this November.) But -- Jiminy Christmas! -- did it make me feel like a slab of prime Grade-A beefcake when I realized this kid had the hots for me. I indulged him with a few minutes of smoochin' an older man on the couch of a bar in the East Village, and that was that.

With that one little dalliance out of the way, we have continued to correspond, at any rate, and last night he persuaded me to critique an essay he'd written for a Freshman Comp class. Extremely disorganized as a writer, but orderly transitions are a skill that can be taught, and I hope to teach him.

Hot damn, but this mentor stuff gives you a sense of your purpose...

posted by Throbert | 9/28/2002 10:05:00 AM |

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