okayokfine is the voice inside my head!

I spent my Memorial Day weekend

traveling back and forth between two graduations and discovering that while I was gone, a little mouse had crept into my apartment.  A disturbing discovery to say the least.  I borrowed the family cat in an attempt to flush it out (multiple traps had failed, I think these mice are on IQ boosters) and after crying her heart out in the cab ride over to my place (you’d think I was dumping her back into the city shelter), she spent most of the day hiding underneath my couch.  When she emerged, she gave me this look:

Needless to say I don’t think she’d be much help.

Back to life, back to reality

“The Defining Decade” by Megan Jay has been making its way around my circle of girlfriends recently.  The book’s contents aren’t exactly groundbreaking to those of us lucky enough to have an immigrant mother, but being that it is by a therapist with a legit PhD chastising you for your useless behavior instead of your ma muttering under her breath about how she was married by your age and a year away from having her first baby (!), ALL WHILE SHE FINISHED HER MASTERS IN A COUNTRY WHERE SHE DID NOT SPEAK THE LANGUAGE, it’s a little harder to ignore.  Mainly, it does make you think twice before you waste another evening clicking away at Fashiontoast and Manrepeller wondering why you can never find any of the goodies they ever manage to find at Zara and H&M.  In short, the book makes you feel like shit for being the useless waste of space you are. As a bonus, it also clocks the female readers over the head with some hard statistics about your declining fertility.  Ladies: Women’s lib is great and all, but at the end of the day, we’re nothing but refrigerators holding increasingly moldy eggs.

What Not to Do: Your 20’s. 

I love a good self-flagellation.  It keeps me on me anxious and sleepless at night.  Although I may seem harsh in my assessment of the book, it really did provide me with a much needed beatdown on the direction my life is taking. I’m fine, relatively speaking, and fortunate that I am where I am given this perma-recession that America has slid into. (Sorry, Microsoft Outlook and Wikipedia are here to stay and took half of the jobs in this country.) But, as your mama would say, there’s always room for improvement.  Read it, weep, and get on it.

Go on with your bad self, Ms. Khan

Check out Do We Amuse You?, an excellent article by Sarah Khan on the recent Ashton Kutcher brownface ad debacle.  The touches on a few shared experiences specific to the particular minority-but-not-minority status of Asians.  

Good Reads

I never thought that there’d be a day in which my love affair with fiction would end, but in the past few years or so my relationship with genre has been dying a slow, blah death.  My favorite books from the past year or so have exclusively been of the creative nonfiction variety - to name a few:  Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo; The Snakehead, by Patrick Radden Keefe; Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff.  The best book I’d ever been introduced to in a college course was The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer. I’m currently reading Maximum City by Suketu Mehta, a native Queens resident.  It’s also great.

Having a Kindle makes it all too easy to fall under the sway of popular marketing for new fiction, and with a click I’ve purchased too many overrated works for the not-so-cheap price of $12.99.  I know myself well enough to know that certain books (the ‘quiet desperation’ books, basically anything by FranzenCo about the oh-so-crippling ennui of  millennial American suburbanites) will piss me off, but so many of them have been so genuinely disappointing that I often find myself questioning my own taste in literature.  I jumped at the chance to read A Tiger’s Wife, an acclaimed novel about the Bosnian war by a 25-year old woman; I found it poorly structured and meh.  I was equally excited for Super Sad True Love Story, which I alternately adored (as I think any Stuy alum would) and loathed; the latter for its inability to search past its own stereotypes for any deeper truths and the author’s tendency to float adrift in a sea of self-adoration.  I also know that the books that I DO love aren’t universally loved either; The Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao remains my favorite contemporary novel.  I would read an Ikea manual for fun if Junot Diaz wrote it.  Asides from Mr. Diaz, however, I’m a bit lost in trying to name a contemporary fiction writer that ignites my imagination and passion for writing.

I’m a huge proponent of nostalgia in general; I love old things, I think new glass condos dotting New York look like shit, I deactivated Facebook because of timeline, I don’t think anyone will ever write anything that even approaches Nabokov.  But I do love Kindle and the Amazon, because it’s allowed me to read prolifically and discover all of the above about the evolution of my taste and my own horizons through nonfiction.  (Dumb reason, but nonfiction books are usually enormous and I would never have room in my bag to carry them onto the train, where I do most of my reading.)  I’ve always felt that criticism of Amazon had very little weight; I know that independent book shops are squeezed out, that Barnes and Nobles is dying, that physical bookstores no longer have a place in society.  But I feel no sadness for this supposed loss; as an avid reader I can’t think of the last time I went to an independent book store and felt accepted into a community of some sort, instead, as a young woman in heels I’ve always felt ignored by the self-deigned true literary geniuses that take their craft of book-storing oh so seriously. I’ve been glared at for taking my time in reading excerpts of various books before deciding to buy them, for asking about the placement of a particular work.  With my Kindle and with Amazon I deal with neither and am left to explore on my own terms.  I think it’s ironic that part of the publishing industry’s defense against Amazon and co. lies with the fact that advancing populism in literature is somewhat akin to destroying the creativity of the industry, when the publishers that be (like the cable network heads that be, and media powers that be in general) have advanced homogenous works neatly placed and sold in separate categories.  There’s the Pulitzer-Bait, written by the FrazenCo about their ‘universal’ quiet desperation experiences, the Ethnic Exotic (MY MOTHER WAS A CONCU-BINE), and the Chick-Lit (which honestly can be great, and it’s so insulting and misogynistic for enormously talented authors like Jennifer Weiner to be compartmentalized as not-to-be-taken-seriously).  Ironic that this industry is rails against the forces of capitalism only when it begins to tip in Amazon’s favor.  I love nostalgia, but when it comes to writing, the arts, and media; the “experiences” deemed as universal that are not really, and we are long overdue for some serious change.

Trayvon Martin, Girls, and General Musings

There was a moment a few weeks back when the justifiable amount of outrage over Trayvon Martin’s murder was so strong, so solid that I thought that we’d finally as a country reached some kind of tangible consensus and that somehow, Change Could Be Made and that We Would Start a Real and Honest Dialogue on Race and Gun Violence.  Of course it took exactly less than a week before the sub-sapien species at Fox and friends accused Martin of a litany of sins, among them: causing his own death by wearing a hoodie, dealing drugs, having a dumb Twitter name, and looking different in various photos.  The internet chorus, of course, followed suit; and I have to say my favorite type of commentor on sites such as Gawker are the ones that preface their totally pointless opinions with, “I’m just being fair. I just want both sides of the story to be heard.” Ah, my favorite type of person: the contrarian. Unfortunately, we’re not hearing much from Trayvon these days.  How quickly the brief consensus and horror has shattered here and devolved into an ugly taking apart of a 16 year old’s personal life; as if being caught with marijuana became reasonable cause for his execution.

I spoke to a friend recently about the startling impasse we’ve seemed to have reached at this particular time in our nation’s history, in which national identity has been so polarized that Americans no longer have a common ground on much at all.  The malaise has crippled our government and frozen our ability to maintain; much less make progress, and while it’s evident in the depressing state of affairs, it’s also depressing to how quickly and easily we give into consensus in popular entertainment.  It’s sad to think that most likely a show like the Fresh Prince of Bel Air would never make it past BET today; cable itself has divided up into a million specialty channels to make it easier for advertisers to address an intended audience.  Recently, as a card-carrying Twenty Something Female Living in New York, I’ve been assaulted with a highly targeted media campaign to try and get me to watch (or talk about) the show Girls.  The media powers that be proclaimed show creator Lena Dunham to be the “voice of my generation,” ironic given the fact that I’m entirely sure that she could not be further from speaking for me or the majority of the people I know.  The fact is, HBO has already given her a show because it’s already pegged me as a potential audience member; a twenty-something female that cares about things like being cut off from your parents (I paid for college myself?), bad boyfriends (mine is mostly nice), cellulite (don’t have it), and living in Brooklyn (Queens, actually, the most unglamorous borough of all time).   Ironic that as a country we cannot agree on whether healthcare should be deigned a universal right, and whether being murdered in cold blood was a legal accident; but it’s been agreed upon that the current generation of women can be spoken for by four white girls that live in fantasy-land Greenpoint.