I’m totally behind the interwebz as of late and only alerted to the invention of the Ostrich Pillow recently. Designed to resolve all issues associated with impromptu napping.
It will significantly improve my life and I must have it.
Joy by Zadie Smith
Real love came much later. It lay at the end of a long and arduous road, and up to the very last moment I had been convinced it wouldn’t happen. I was so surprised by its arrival, so unprepared, that on the day it arrived I had already arranged for us to visit the Holocaust museum at Auschwitz. You were holding my feet on the train to the bus that would take us there. We were heading toward all that makes life intolerable, feeling the only thing that makes it worthwhile. That was joy. But it’s no good thinking about or discussing it. It has no place next to the furious argument about who cleaned the house or picked up the child. It is irrelevant when sitting peacefully, watching an old movie, or doing an impression of two old ladies in a shop, or as I eat a popsicle while you scowl at me, or when working on different floors of the library. It doesn’t fit with the everyday. The thing no one ever tells you about joy is that it has very little real pleasure in it. And yet if it hadn’t happened at all, at least once, how would we live?
“Gilgamesh, where are you hurrying to? You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping. As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too is the lot of man.”
—
The Epic of Gilgamesh
(Lately I’m revisiting the important texts mentioned in 9th grade World History and I have to say the cradles of civilization had it all figured out, even back then, and we are kidding ourselves thinking that we’ve made any difference at all with the invention of anything.)
I fell into a k-hole of Eartha Kitt videos after searching for ‘Santa Baby.’ What a voice. I’m not sure what happened to the music industry but I’ll bet that 2000 years later, when some new intelligent life form tries to dissect the remnants of our sadly failed civilization they’re going to wonder how we went from this to Rih Rih (no shade, serious) warbling CAKE CAKE CAKE CAKE CAKE.
“
The Uses of Sorrow
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
— Mary Oliver
Gone Girl is the best beach read, if only for
the thousand word screed that main character Amy goes on about the cult of the ‘cool girl’:
“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.
Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)”
[…]
I waited patiently-years-for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we’d say, Yeah, he’s a Cool Guy.
But it never happened. Instead, women across the nation colluded in our degradation! Pretty soon Cool Girl became the standard girl. Men believed she existed- she wasn’t just a dreamgirl one in a million. Every girl was supposed to be this girl, even if you weren’t, then something was wrong with you.”
Twerk.
P.S.: “President Obama carried 73 percent of the Asian vote on Tuesday, continuing a two-decade-long march of Asian-Americans toward the Democratic Party in presidential politics.
Obama improved his performance among Asian-Americans more than among any other ethnic group between 2008 and 2012, according to exit polling. His support in the community jumped 11 percentage points, from 62 percent in 2008.”
Really though, I think we all love the Big O because because he knows what it’s like to be the smart quiet one. And it doesn’t hurt that his wife has a closet and law degree that every Asian girl would die for.
I support affirmative action (and I’m Asian, biatch).
If conservatives are still seeking proof of the economy’s improvement under the Obama administration, then I encourage them to look no further than Abigail Fisher, the young woman at the center of the recent case against UT Austin. Abigail graduated from Louisiana State University after being denied entrance into UT Austin for being an objectively mediocre student, having failed to place within the top 10% of her class in high school and scoring a 1180 on her SAT. She was hired as a financial analyst upon graduation. Abigail, however, continues to assert that her opportunities would be greater had she been admitted to UT; she would have been privy to a greater “network” and a “better job.”
What could offer more salient indictment of racial entitlement in the US than the seriousness with which society regards this young woman’s case against a school that she failed to objectively meet the admissions criteria for? Published ‘debates’ on the case will often feature the argument that ‘other’ minorities such as Asians are being systematically oppressed by current affirmative action policies. (Of course, the idea of Asians being oppressed is only okay to mention in a forum where the core issue mainly concerns whites.) While it is an unfortunate truth that Asians have to face heightened admissions standards at competitive schools, the reasons behind why Asians inhabit this realm are worth examining. The overwhelming cultural obsession with education, with status, with high-paying jobs: while these concerns are the bane of every Asian-American child’s existence, they are factors that correlate positively with socio-economic ascension. Regardless of whether an Asian student attends Harvard, Berkeley, Baruch, or Queens College, said student is backed by a legacy that takes pride in education and material success. These factors are why Asian-Americans have largely bested the factors that sociologists name as predictive of poor scholastic achievement, such as family income level, school district, and language impairment.
These cultural factors are unique, and at times they transcend racial lines. It is why, for example, that immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean attain greater education achievement than African-Americans; when fueled by immigrant desire and unburdened by the legacy of being second class citizens, achievement becomes possible. Here, however, is where the problems start. As an Asian-American, the stereotype that I am confronted with systematically is one that encourages scholastic achievement. At Stuyvesant, I was terrible at math, but surrounded by a peer group convinced me that my failures came not from intellect but that I did not try hard enough. So I tried harder and got better grades, despite the fact that I clearly did not possess the quantitative aptitude of many of my classmates. The failure I felt was a personal one; and despite being an issue that caused me great personal grief, propelled me to achieve at the level that I needed to in order to gain admittance to the college of my choice. Had the reversed happened – in which I was clearly good at math, but was instead told that my skills were a personal fluke due to negative categorizations of my race, the outcome would be markedly different. (On further reflection - I do face this as a writer, which is why I’ve yet to ever take this hobby professionally as it seems like the only acceptable published Asian writers are of the Amy Tan-ish variety or the disturbing new trend of LulzCHinesePPLZrcraaaZY suck hipster writing, but I digress. Point is, you internalize that shit. Every day.) This is the reality that millions of black and Latinos in the United States face every day, regardless of their personal background, regardless of their upbringing; a trial of guilty until proven innocent with regards to achievement. Affirmative action is but one issue in a litany of racist assertions that black and Latino minorities belong to a lower socioeconomic rung because of personal choice rather than systemic oppression. These roles that we assign to those in society based on color-lines are so entrenched that Abigail Fisher deigns it appropriate to sue a school for a role she perceives as rightfully belonging to her.
Affirmative action is by no means a perfect system, but it is an important step in recognizing and addressing a complex stew of factors that lead to educational disparity amongst US minority groups. I do wish that affirmative action is more inclusive of socio-economic factors, which I believe will not only achieve its goals more efficiently and address particularly vulnerable populations such as the new wave of very low-income, Southeast Asian immigrants. But racial affirmative action remains important as long as black Harvard graduates are denied entrance to clubs, as long as innocent young minority men are systematically criminalized by society and the police, as long as the education gap remains. I also believe that affirmative action works, and as our leadership position diversifies, ALL minorities, including Asians, will benefit from a world in which whites are no longer presumed to be the automatic elite. That we will stop doubting our ability to make partner, managing director, officer, CEO, once we see faces like our own reflected in those board rooms. When I look at Obama, I don’t see a man who could have taken my place at Columbia had we applied the same year. I see inspiration in a man who was a scholarship student, who had a meandering 20’s, who spent a long time navigating through the strange seas of being a minority in America, who overcame all of these things to be the most powerful man in the world. And when I see Abigail, I see nothing but a vacuum of undeserved privilege, a girl that purportedly fights for racial equality but has never, ever known, outside of her personal delusions, how it feels like to be a minority.
I’m loving Solange’s 90’s vibe. I think she’s around my age and I know there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t wish the Z100 was permanently frozen on “sixth grade.” Ace of Base, Aaliyah, Savage Garden, Destiny’s Child….
P.S. Art history fact of the day - while older sis Beyonce references Pieter Hugo’s work in the “Run the World” video (Nollywood and Hyena Men series), Solange’s latest vid has a shoutout to Daniele Tamagni’s Gentlemen of Bacongo, which documents the Le Sapeurs men of the Congo.
Real Talk
Why the eff do people read Fifty Shades of Grey on the train?!?!?! 8 AM in the morning is a little early for poorly written descriptions of anal play, don’t you think?
This. On the Train. At least 5 sightings a day. Q train is worst offender.
Also, this review on Amazon sums it up:
5.0 out of 5 stars Loved it!, September 21, 2012
By
This review is from: Fifty Shades of Grey: Book One of the Fifty Shades Trilogy (Paperback)
I loved this trilogy. I don’t normally read, in fact the last book i remember reading because i wanted to was probably Matilda at the age of 10.
