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I can take the elevator downstairs for a soda, or I can get a glass of water from the cooler. Not a glass, a plastic tumbler; not the rigid kind, but a soft one with a rounded lip, water droplets adhering along the cascade. I am taking a brief moment away from crafting a memo for an executive; somewhere in Iraq a convoy of contractors is moving along, looking busy, waiting to be shot at, bombed, and driven into. "I really liked it at first," I overhear a tall actress who temps here say from her chair in the copy/mail room. I assume she's referring to a design template for the org chart she's perpetually updating. In Uganda, a rebel group notorious for deploying child soldiers continues to destabilize the northern regions in a way the government either cannot control, or what is more likely, chooses not to. I have lowered my chair to be level with the guest chair across from my Smed unit's desk surface. My guest, my boss, left as I took a phone call from a friend on an island off Massachusetts. The phone call is over, and no one is sitting here with me, but I have left the chair down even as I strain my shoulders typing from below. There, that's better. I can control the chair. I can participate, more or less, in government elections. What else. I can encourage myself and others to keep paying attention, to keep feeling something, to keep talking, and to keep learning how to acquire power. In Bermuda, an authoritarian from England points to a grammar stickler from Lesotho. The stickler lives in Paris. Sometimes the stickler just observes local variations of idiom. Those are the sentences I feel as free of threat. I experience so much communication as fear-inspiring threat. Sometimes I'm distorting my experience, and sometimes I am not. It is quiet in the office: a little typing, a phone conversation in a distant cubicle, a cough, something plastic being torn.