Today's a vacation day for me, and after the weekend it's a good thing. I'm going to need it. I won't forget what happened over the last two days any time soon, and I have some wonderful permanent reminders.

The trip up was unexciting by itself, but with the knowledge that I was going to see Reeny, I could hardly contain myself. I didn't even really mind getting up at four in the morning to be at the airport at five to be on a plane at six, or having to fly through Atlanta. Boston Logan airport is apparently permanently under construction, kind of like Dallas-Fort Worth is, but much much worse.

After five hours of flying, I landed in Boston and then had to make my way to the car-rental place. That was more expensive than I was expecting, but I always forget things like insurance and gas-replacment policies and such, but I was expecting it and it was still worth it. Then I had about ninety minutes of driving from the airport out to Lurene's parents' place.

When I first saw her, it was almost a pleasantly tangible shock. For over six years, we've been there for each other, through good times and bad, supporting and helping and holding and being with each other. I've basically stood in loco parentis for her for six years, and even before she and I had recognized that fact or spoken about it, we were calling each other sister. Until Saturday, though, it had always been online or over the phone. Now, finally, it was in person.

I felt like I'd come home.

She hopped into the SUV that I'd rented (I'd requested an economy car but they didn't have any and I got this one for the same cost) and we went right to the mall. She popped a Crosby, Stills and Nash tape in to the player and she showed me the scenic route to get there. All the way up, we talked about about how good it was to see each other, and...

This is kind of strange, really. I couldn't tell you exactly what we discussed, just that we talked the whole time. I guess that's one factor of being with someone so special. We could talk... or not talk... about anything and the details of the conversations themselves aren't the factor so much as the shared joy of interaction.

Anyway, we got to the mall, and Reeny showed me around. It's a worse den of rampant commercialism than even the biggest offender near my apartment. It has a Target and a Best Buy inside the mall! That kind of shocked me, though I had seen that before in a few malls down in Perth while I was there. After hitting the length and breadth of the stores, we found a place that offered free ear piercing with the purchase of a pair of studs, so we did it.

Piercing our ears together was something that had come up, back when the plan was for Jason and I to come up for her graduation, because at the time she was planning on moving out right after that, and so I said, "Hey, when we come up to visit, you and I can go get our ears pierced at the same time" and she thought that was a really nifty idea. I know it's something we've both wanted to do for a while now, but she could never get her parents to agree to it. She managed to get their permission, though, so we went to do it.

We found a style we both liked and sat down to do it. Reeny went first and the first stud went in fine, but they had to do the second twice which was really annoying. Then it was my turn and I sat down and the guy with the piercing gun cleaned my earlobes and dotted them, then lined up the gun and the next thing I knew I had studs! It hurt, but only for a few seconds and now they're a bit itchy at times but that's all.

After that, we went to get dinner, and we sat in the restaurant and talked for a while more. Then we wandered around the mall a bit more and headed out to find a motel. It turned out that the nicest one we could find was less than ten minutes from her house, after half an hour of wandering around trying to find the mall, but I enjoyed the scenic drive. So, we went up to the room and cuddled for a while, and then Reeny said she wanted to be over at her friend Erin's place to watch something at seven, but she couldn't remember the phone number so we had to stop by her parents so she could call. That wasn't a problem, but when she came out of there, she had a bit of a down expression on her face. I asked what was wrong and she said that her parents had announced they wanted her home at one in the morning, and that tomorrow afternoon she needed to be in at one as well so they could go out somewhere.

I wasn't happy with that, and at first I tried to see if she could talk them out of that, seeing as this was going to be my only real chance to see her and I wanted as much time with her as I could get, but I also didn't want to risk screwing up their relationship after things looked like they were going to get better, so after a brief protest I dropped it and said I'd have her back by about one.

On the way over to Erin's, though, I did ask her why she had chosen to stay behind. She got really quiet at first, and then she basically said she didn't have a "good" reason but that she wanted to believe that when they saw her packed up to move out and realized that she was serious and that someone was on the way up that weekend to get her and her stuff and take her away from them the first day it was legal, they got shocked into realizing that they couldn't keep doing what they were doing and had to either accept or lose her. I admitted I had trouble believing that that was the case, but I told her that I wanted her to know that I supported her decision and would back her one-hundred percent. I still do.

Erin turned out to be really nice and really cute, and she does look like a pagan high priestess, with long red hair down her back. We all curled up in her room at first to watch Reeny on a televised high school quiz show in which she did really good and the announcer screwed up so many times that I had to laugh at him, and then we went up to her brother's room to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Erin had, shockingly, never seen it so the whole time Lurene and I kept giggling and reminding each other not to recite the script along with the film, but we did sing along with the musical numbers. I think if we hadn't, Erin wouldn't have been able to understand. "Camelot" is hard to understand because of the accents and mispronounced words to make them fit the music. After it was over, Erin said it was probably the most surreal and bizarre movie she'd ever seen, so Reeny promised to subject her to the rest of her Python collection.

After that, Reeny and I went back up to my motel room and we cuddled for a while and I had my first crying fit. I'm still not entirely sure what brought it on but I started crying as I held her and she told me everything would be okay and I felt a bit better. There wasn't really anything that needed to be said, though. We just lay there together for a few hours, snuggled up against each other. All the words had already been said. It was such a wonderful feeling.

I took her home after that, and I went back and got a short nap. I actually did wake up around half past six, but I was too tired to be coherent still so I dozed and then got up at eight and called Reeny. She asked for half an hour, so I picked her up forty-five minutes later and we went to breakfast. After that we went back up to the hotel room so I could pack up and check out. We ended up lying down for a while because we were both still tired, and then we got up and, while I was in the bathroom, Lurene flipped on the television to see what was on and managed to find "An American Tail" on Cartoon Network, and it was right when Feivel and Sasha had started singing "Somewhere Out There". I had my second crying jag at that point. I've loved that song since I heard it the first time, and in this case it was very appropriate.

Check-out was quick enough, so we went up to Barnes and Noble after that and she found me a Robert Anton Wilson book, Ishtar Rising for the flight back, which I bought, and I picked her up a copy of Atlas Shrugged because she didn't have one yet. I asked her to read the first part of Part Three, where Dagny first crashes in Atlantis, up until she looks at Galt and says, "We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?" Reeny put down the book at that point and smiled and said she was going to have to get a copy, so I bought it for her as a birthday present above and beyond the trip itself. Then we hit CompUSA and geeked for a while, and then we went over to Circuit City and I found a bunch of CDs I'd been trying to find and bought them; they weren't really an impulse buy because i'd been looking for them for a while. I keep telling myself that.

By this point, it was one and time for me to take Lurene home. The drive to her house was painfully short. Crying jag number three hit then, and watching her get out of the car and walk back into her parents' house was one of the hardest things I've done in a long time. Then I started the drive back to the airport. I listened to the tape she gave me, the one she put in the player when she first got into the truck, once I got to the Mass Pike. Crying jag number four.

From there, there really isn't much to tell. I got to the airport three hours before my scheduled flight, but there was an earlier flight out of Boston to Atlanta that I could catch, so I did. I didn't know there weren't any earlier flights out of Atlanta to Dallas, so I just moved my three-hour wait from one airport to another, and ultimately I got home at around one in the morning today.

I had a wonderful time, but the trip was far too short. I know, though, that it won't be another six years before I see her again. She finishes high school in three months, and then it's summer and she's got trips to visit schools that have accepted her, and then after that she'll be in college and she'll have lots of chances to visit

I love you, Lurene. Thank you, for the last two days, for the last six years, for everything.

Well, another bout of "so much in so little time" has gone on, or so it feels. Really, not that much has happened, but it feels like a lot.

First, today marks the one-month anniversary of the diary, so I suppose I should congratulate myself. Normally I would've burned out on this sort of thing by now, so the fact that I'm still interested in posting them feels like a triumph worth nothing.

Now for the important part. I went through a lot over this, but I think I've finally resolved everything and I can talk about it with a clear head. Reeny isn't moving down. Monday, her mother came home early, found her packing her things to move out and, to make a long story short, her parents panicked and said that they'd pay for her college and get totally off her back about her life and her future if she would stay at home until she left for school.

When I found out, I was crushed at first. I mean, this is the sort of thing we'd been talking about doing for six years, and we were so close and then it got taken away from us. I know she was upset, and I was upset, but I didn't identify why I was so upset until last night, and I was kind of a bitch about the whole thing.

I've never had many friends, and the ones I do have, the real ones, are the sorts of people around whom I feel I could totally be myself without fear of rejection. In almost all of my casual friendships, I hit some point at which I feel like either I have to lie about myself or be honest and risk losing a friend. I have a select group of friends, of whom Lurene is one, with whom I don't feel that. I call them my second family.

When I was with my previous boyfriend, the first time he came up to Austin to visit, he stayed a month and then left. When he got on the plane to go home, I stood in the airport terminal for half an hour and sobbed, watching until I couldn't make out the lights of the airplane against the clouds. Last night, I had another crying jag thinking about leaving Boston on Sunday, and I realized it was the same feeling.

When I learned that Lurene wasn't moving down here, it felt like I had had one of my second family taken away from me, even though intellectually I know that isn't true. The internet is a poor substitute for in-person contact, but often that's all we get. When the chance came to physically be with someone about whom I cared so much, I became ecstatic. When it went from "moving down" to "visiting," not only did I have the depression of not having her around, but I also felt the pain of being around her for a short time and then trying to go back to interaction at a distance, just like when Rod would leave.

I woke up this morning, after having realized this last night, and I felt sane and stable for the first time since getting the bad news. I had tried to be nice and say I supported her, but the whole time I felt betrayed, though i didn't know by whom or for what. I think I frustrated Lurene's boyfriend to tears at a few points with my stubborn refusal to get over it, but that's pretty normal for me. Once I know why I'm upset, I stop being upset, but until I understand it it sits there and feeds itself, an emotional dynamo.

I can honestly say now I'm just looking forward to the trip. I won't say I won't cry when I leave, but I can say with a clear conscience that I'm happy for her, that I hope her parents really do understand like they sound, and that if anything happens the offer I made before is always open. I hope she doesn't need it, but it's there if she does.

So much has happened in nine days.

First, the important news: my sister is moving down. While this is an incredibly happy event, I wish the circumstances were better. Her father didn't outright say he was throwing her out, but the gist of his statement was that she would be out of the house if she kept going the way she was, so she's taking him up on it and moving down the day after her eighteenth birthday.

I've been looking forward to this sort of event for a long time. I've known her longer than almost anyone else in my life, and we've shared so much in that time that even if we aren't related by blood, we're still family. She means so much to me, and she's been there for me every time I've needed her, just as I've tried to be there for her. We could sit silently in the same room and know what each other were thinking, I bet. Musical tastes, books, dreams and fantasies... we share so much on so many levels. She really is my sister, in every way that matters.

Originally, Jason and I were going to go up to see her at her graduation in June, but now she's going to be coming down here and transferring to a local school for the last three months. I've already got my plane ticket to go up there and both coming back. I've reserved a hotel room, reserved a car and printed maps to get to her house. In eight days, at 6:20 in the morning, I'll be flying up there. I'm so excited.

---

I got recognized.

Two days ago, I went to Sam's Club, which is this big wholesale reseller where you have to pay for membership but can then get some things for incredibly good prices if you don't mind looking around and waiting for the good deals. I wasn't dressed; I just had on my work clothes, though I was carrying my purse, something I do all the time.

Sam's Club ID cards have photographs on them, as well as full names, so when I pulled mine out of my purse and passed it over, I must've grimaced. The lady checking IDs looked at the card, looked at me and handed it back. I started to walk past, catching a blur of her reaching behind her as I went. I'd gotten about two steps past her when she said behind me, "Excuse me, ma'am?"

I turned around, just as blithely, and saw she was holding out some pamphlet to me. As I reached out for it, she looked up at me and started stammering a quite-unnecessary apology. I told her it was quite alright, took the pamphlet and just drifted into the warehouse. I hadn't planned on spending much time or money there, but I dropped thirty dollars and bought Jason two cannisters of snacks and a bunch of other things I hadn't intended to buy.

I used to think, when people sirred me while I was dressed, that they were being rude or hateful or just ignorant. I used to fear that I would never make it. Now it's happened, and I wasn't even trying. I still think that at least some of them are saying it out of crudeness, but perhaps Jason and Lurene are right, and some of them are saying it to reassure themselves, and a few subtle cues will be all it takes toget them to call me ma'am, or at least have them ask.

---

I used the ladies' room for the first time the other night.

Jason and I were at the airport seeing off a friend that had flown through Dallas, and it was about ten o'clock at night. I'd gotten dressed casually and we'd gone to dinner. I knew better, after heavy dieting, to shock myself with a bacon cheeseburger, but it sounded so good that I just had to order one. Of course, twenty minutes later, I regretted it and we had to find a restroom.

A few weeks ago, we had gone somewhere and I had needed to use the ladies' room but waited until I got home because I was still very self-conscious. Tonight, I just went in and went about my business. Probably my lack of hesitation came from the fact that the airport was almost totally deserted. Perhaps I'm just getting used to being Kristina in public. Either way, I didn't really think about what I was doing until i was doing it, looked down and saw myself sitting there.

It sounds like such a little thing, using the ladies' room. I mean, in the scope of activities, using the bathroom is a negligible one. However, it's one of the few places where separate-but-equal is alive and well. Almost every public building on earth has both ladies' and mens', and never the two shall meet. I found one movie theater that has a unisex bathroom, marked "Unisex", and some percentage of places that simply don't make any distinction at all, but the norm seems to be one facility for one-half of the populace and a second for the other.

As I sat there, taking care of paperwork, I wondered briefly what would happen if someone were to try to make an issue of it. Realistically speaking, were there any laws that, prior to my surgery, I was violating by using the appropriate bathroom? My therapist at some point has said that she'll give me a letter of intent stating that I should be afforded all of the priviledges due a woman, but as of yet she hasn't and I'm not going to stop being myself because I'm not certified.

I'm putting these up faster now than I think I planned on doing when I first decided to start this project. I never intended these to be anything deep or profound or meaningful; I just wanted a record of my progress somewhere I could look at it. Knowing that anyone could read these is a good way of keeping myself honest. If I don't want people to see it, do I really want to say it, and if I don't want to say it, then should I really be thinking it?

I was driving home from work today, on my way to pick up Jason at work, and I've gotten into the habit of turning off the radio and practicing my voice in the car since there's no-one around to laugh at me when it breaks. My thoughts turned to the events of the previous few days, and then I started talking to myself about the diary and everything that's been going on, and something came to me that put the events of the weekend into a new perspective.

A while back, I had a conversation with someone online that only knew me as Kristina, and at one point the topic turned to history and where we had gone to school and so forth. At the time, I found myself wondering if what I said would give me away, and the whole sensation of fearing discovery came back to me, though from the opposite direction. I actually caught myself being vague about certain areas of my past, and then later found the whole incident rather enlightening.

Only today did I realize how like passing that is.

I want to be recognized as female and treated as such, but at the same time I don't want to give up who I was for who I am. I said on the front page to this site that I'm not going to pretend to be something I'm not, no matter how much I may want it. Passing, to a large extent, is the art of bluffing people into thinking that you were born female, and I wasn't. So, while I want to be treated as female, I don't want it to be at the expense of who I am.

I don't want to call gender a trap, but it is, in a way. In order to pass, at some level I'll have to learn how to avoid bringing up who I used to be. How much I have to avoid is dependent on the setting, but the fact that I wasn't born female will eventually come out and the party will be over. I don't want to have to hide that part of my life and pretend that it didn't happen. I'm not going to make up a past I didn't live in order to keep people from knowing who I used to be.

I think part of my frustration right now comes from the fact that society as a whole still attempts to pigeonhole people into exclusive-or categories, and I don't quite fit into either one. More aggravating is the fact that most people, in their attempts to fit me into their world view, will probably put me into the wrong pile.

If someone sirs me and then fixes the mistake later when I offer a polite correction, I can accept that. I can forgive any amount of mistakes made in error, or at least I should be strong enough to do so, even if they do frustrate me. The ones that refuse to recognize me as female, they're the ones that I can live without. They're part of the great unwashed throng of humanity on which I know it's unproductive to waste my emotions.

Besides, as my boyfriend pointed out to me, I'm doing this for me, not for them. They're important, but only to the extent that I grant their importance. I knew this before, but I'm having to relearn it in a new light.

Well, life never ceases to throw me curveballs, and I keep trying to hit them. This morning when I got up, I had an email from my therapist. She apologized in advance but said that she thought she had been hasty in telling me that I didn't need any more individual sessions. She did say I'd made a lot of progress, but that there were more things she wanted to discuss with me.

At first, I admit I was a little upset with it. Here I thought I'd been making all these great strides, and she said as much, but to "go back" felt like a retreat. Then I thought about it some more and I realized she's right. I'm still very new at this, despite how comfortable I am with it, and there are still things that have been happening that I need to work through.

To illustrate, I had my first full-time weekend last Saturday and Sunday. I had geared up to go over to a friend's house dressed for a gaming session, and that didn't work out; the game got cancelled. Then everyone with whom Jason and I would have gotten together was alternately busy, but I'd taken all this time and effort to putting together a good outfit that I decided I wanted to go out and enjoy being out. I'd been out a few times at this point, nothing really new. I didn't plan on anything going wrong; who does?

I shaved my face again, arms, chest, everything I thought would show. I styled my hair, made sure my outfit was alright, put on my nice shoes, and in short I did everything I could to look good. Jason complimented me on how I looked, and I thought I'd done a good job.

The counterclerk at the coffeeshop took one look at Jason and I and said, "So, are you two brothers or something?"

At the time, I just got irritated by it. Here I was, putting out all this effort into looking nice, and that's what I got back. Now, earlier in the day I had spent all the energy telling Jason and Lurene and my older sister Jennifer to politely kick me in the rump if I started going off on how I didn't pass and all that, and now I was getting frustrated over it again, so I managed to talk myself down off of my irritation, but it still wasn't very good for my self-esteem.

Monday, I think I just walked around in a state of post-ecstasy depression. I had gone out, as myself, for two days without any real thought into it beyond what I wanted to wear and had I shaved adequately and in all the right places. Then, bright and early Monday morning, my carriage turned back into a pumpkin. There's an entire mindset change, really, that's more than just what outfit I have on. Over the weekend, I was myself, Kristina Davis. Then, when I went back to work, I entered an environment where I had to remember that, as much as I understood who I was, nobody else did yet. I felt like I was trying to project being someone I'm not, even though I don't really act any differently at work. I guess that's one more part of it all.

Then today hit. Between what happened on Saturday and the email I got this morning, suddenly it felt like all the progress I had made really didn't amount to much. By the time I'd gotten to work, I'd recognized that I did have a lot left to work through with Feleshia and I sent her back a note saying I didn't mind coming back in for more one-one one sessions, but I was still very down about it. I thought I'd been doing so well, and then suddenly I felt like I hadn't really done much of anything.

Fortunately, my fourteen-weeks-of-no-work-at-work winning streak hadn't broken yet, so I had no productivity to interrupt with my moodiness, but I still wish I'd had something during the day on which to focusto get my mind off of all of this. It didn't happen. I was supposed to attend a meeting at 4:30PM, but by the time it rolled around I was in a miserable mood so I showed up, heard about ten minutes' worth and then left. Jason had to work late, so I just went home and tried to make dinner, but I'd worked myself up into a good funk by then so I just hopped online.

Jennifer was on, thankfully, and I related the whole sordid situation to her. She was very supportive, as was Lurene when I talked to her later that night, but they both essentially the same thing: "Hon, you've been doing this for two months, tops. Don't get discouraged by what happened, and don't take it as a sign of things to come." They both said a lot more than that but that was the gist of it.

As usual, they're right, and I've been beating myself up over nothing. Well, not nothing. I've been getting angry and frustrated that all the things I think I ought to know I don't know, because I never learned them. Being a girl was simply not something taught to me. I'm having to unlearn twenty-five years of habit and adapt to my future, and there's a lot physically that still hasn't shaped up. Being depressed over my first day being a failure is silly, however understandable it may be.

Things felt for a while like they were going really quickly. Not unpleasantly so, but just fast enough that I wasn't really able to think about things as they happened. These are feelings that have been hidden inside for a long time, and they've only been near the surface for about eight months, two of which I've been in therapy, and suddenly I'm fulltiming on the weekends. I'm actually glad for what my therapist said. I have made progress, but I still have a long way to go.

---

Lurene did make one interesting point in our conversation tonight. She said, "Part of the secret to passing is to think of yourself as a girl. Not transsexual, not in transition, just female". Looking at it, it doesn't seem like much in the way of wisdom, but it makes a lot of sense. I have been thinking of myself as transsexual, because that's the best word that I had to describe what I was. One day, though, I won't be. Many years from now, after all is said and done, I'll be as female as the next woman. At that point, my transsexuality will be past-tense. I should start thinking in those terms now. It may make the illusion of who I have to be legally harder to maintain, but it will probably make the reality of who I am easier to be.

Wednesday night, I had what will be my last individual therapy session unless something happens that I need to process in another one-on-one. Feleshia said she felt as a therapist that there wouldn't be anything further to be gained from private sessions, and she had a duty as a professional not to keep me in something I didn't need.So, my next meeting with her is on the 25th, for my first group session.

I'm looking forward to group, really. The chance to meet others face to face and talk with them about what it's like will be good. What I find funny is that, of all my concerns, my biggest is how good a visual presentation I'll make. Will I pass in the eyes of those who have studied how to pass? After going out in public, being told repeatedly by my boyfriend that I look good dressed and even going shopping by myself at the mall, my concern is what?

How do I look?

Strange, isn't it? I can go to the mall without batting an eyelash, but when it comes to an environment where I know everyone will be supportive and helpful and no-one will be negative, only constructive, I worry that I'll feel like the outsider because everyone else is within the ideal of "normal."

I wonder if they're all sitting around feeling the same thing.

What I'd like, honestly, is one "ma'am" from someone who has no reason to say it. One "Miss" from someone who doesn't think about it. Right now, without hormones, it probably won't happen. It might never happen.

I'm willing to wait.

---

Last night started as one of those routine days that ended up becoming important not by virtue of any action of mine, but of just the events of the night. In Masks of the Illuminati, Robert Wilson has James Joyce utter words to the effect of, "Suppose this had been an ordinary night, four men sitting around drinking champagne and talking. None of us would have remembered it later. If one of us had died the next day, though, the survivors would have perfect recollection of totally ordinary day, not because of the evening itself, but because of its context."

Jason and I came home from work and grabbed a quick bite to eat, then I changed into something more casual and we went out to a mall over in Dallas to do some looking and windowshopping. I made the mistake of wearing new shoes to do this (I know better, I really do) and so I gave myself blisters on my toes as expected, and as we were leaving, I asked to sit down for a bit so I could rub my feet and look at my toes which were really starting to hurt.

When I looked over at Jason, he had that expression that said something was on his mind and it wasn't pleasant, so I asked him about it. After a bit of prodding, I found out that, in one of the stores we had visited, the salesclerks had been staring at me, exchanging knowing glances and laughing behind my back. Now, I had been totally unaware of this, and I suspect that if I had been in a position to see it, it wouldn't have happened. However, Jason did see it and he was upset by it. He'd wanted to say something but didn't think it would have helped, might've hurt and generally would've just wasted our time. He expressed disappointment at the status of things and said to me, "You don't deserve that kind of treatment".

Well, he's right, I don't, but I don't expect otherwise. As much as I'd like to be treated as a normal woman, I'm likely to forever be questioned, and I accept that. I was when I was overweight and trying hard to be male, only then I thought the problem was with me and not with everyone around me. Now I know the problem isn't mine, but I don't expect other people to change how they act. I'm being myself, and as long as they don't try to pigeonhole me I don't care how they act behind my back.

As we were getting ready to leave, though, someone did just that. A polite older gentleman walked up to us and held out little pamphlets to us, saying something like, "You two might need this". I took one, but Jason just stood there and silently stared at him until he started backing away.

I still have it. it's a little tacky two-color printed once-folded sheet with WHAT EVERY YOUNG MAN SHOULD KNOW! in bad lettering on the front, two checkboxes on the back for accepting or rejecting God, and some Bible verses in the middle. One of the cartoons shows a picture of some people standing around pointing and laughing at someone being bitten by snakes with the names of alleged sins on them, such as pornography, drugs, liquor and "queer 'civil' rights".

I'm not Christian. I've never professed to be Christian. If anything, I'm an agnostic with amerind, SubGenius and Discordian leanings. Nevertheless, I have several friends that are Christian, and on matters of faith we agree to disagree because we accept that there are many roads to enlightenment. This, however, was a blatant insult to me. Here was some person deciding, most likely on the basis of my clothing that I wasn't Christian, that I considered his advice important, and that I would think his attempts at intervention were praiseworthy.

In hindsight, the whole thing is funny, if a bit irritating. If I had made the same presumptions about him, he no doubt would have been highly offended and said as much, though perhaps not in front of the children he was trying to escort out of the mall. Maybe I should've made more of an issue of it, but what are the odds that I ever see him again? Negligible. It wasn't worth my time.

I checked the rejection box and mailed it to the address on the back of the pamphlet, though.