My father says that I don't post here enough

Which is probably true, although it's only been 4 months. There are tons of people who take way longer hiatuses than that. How are things? Things are ok from where I'm at. Although to be honest I don't have much to say. Any time that I'm not eating or sleeping I'm probably working. Which is why over the break I got my annual celebratory post-final getting really sick. It was exciting. I've got a couple pictures leftover from other places not LA that I'll post at some point. Taking pictures in LA is kind of weird. People look at you funny, which makes me self conscious. Why can't I just take pictures of signs and shadows like I used to in the NW?

Anyway, for the last couple days I've been too tired and lazy to contemplate doing much of anything productive or scholastic. So instead I looked at art. Some of these people live here or close to here, which kind of makes me want to stalk them. But I won't. One of my favorite new finds is Deth P Sun. If anyone is still reading this thing, go knock yourselves out. I'll be back. Or maybe I won't.

Apparently

I'm whiter than I thought. Ouch.

Anyway, for the people who actually know me in real life, yes, I am going to go get a PhD. And live in the middle of nowhere and tell everyone how uncultured they are apparently. I will be going somewhere in Southern California. That much is certain. Most everything else is not certain, which would explain a 2 month bout with insomnia.

More later.

Bus people

I don't know what it is recently, but people, particularly male people, have a tendency to hit on me in and around areas related to the bus.

This never used to happen before. As an aside, it's very difficult to not make eye contact for half an hour, when someone sits right opposite you and tries to make eye contact. Of course, as one of my roommates says, once you make eye contact, it's all lost. Let's just say my neck is pretty sore.

On an unrelated matter, I recently learned from Stuff White People Like that Mos Def's Ms. Fat Booty is some sort of white people wedding favorite. Given what the song is about, Mos Def tries to woo a lady but she skips on him due to being unable to commit, this seems rather counterintuitive.

Um, yes

someday I might have time to think or say something insightful again. Today was a day of schooling young punks, haven't done that since I left Taiwan. I may have a story about that at some point. Anyway, I was feeling sort of gloomy for some reason. Possibly because I didn't go outside all day. This is truly the funniest thing I have seen in a while. You should check it out.
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/

Thanks Nien!

Blue Scholars- Joe Metro

courtesy of 生氣亞洲男 (angry asian man). It's about taking the bus in Seattle, and features Beacon Hill. What's not to like.

Links and things

A link, via Angry Asian Man, about Adrian Tomine and Derek Kirk Kim's graphic novels. If I ever get some money, I'm going to check them out.

And also this movie review. Perhaps I'm just totally immature, but I giggled out loud reading this.

It can't possibly be true, I said.

Japanese fishermen couldn't possibly have sex with manta rays. It must be some kind of exaggeration. Well, I clicked on the damn link. I can't unclick it.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

It's hard to imagine that this is the same country that came up with Hello Kitty.

On reading Literature (with a capital L)

I read this Atlantic Monthly article which was linked to in Smart Bitches Who Read Trashy Books. Which, although I didn't agree with it completely, romanticizing the past and past writers as giants of the literary world doesn't sit well. Essentializing anything doesn't sit well with me. However, the gist of the article, that the cycle of today's literary world is a self-referential cycle of producing high literature for the sake of being reviewed confirmed some of my own private suspicions. Even if I've been reading Chinese poetry and Chinese translations of manga for the last couple years, I still remember some things about the literary world.

Beauty

Wendao Jinxin wants some feedback on his thoughts about Beauty, particularly the beauty of women. I have my opinions, however I need some time to sort them out. You all are a lot smarter than me though, so go over and tell him what you think.

Linkin' Park (I really couldn't help myself. I'm sorry.)

A couple things I've liked recently. Skeptical Brotha's theory about a Hillary Rodham Clinton ticket, with another upper class white woman.

And for something completely different petitpoussin's train ride with the Spawn of Satan. Amusing and yet horrifying.

Nerds vs. FOBs

So, I made a private resolution to myself, and possibly Magniloquence, that I would link more. And what does the blogoverse reward me with but a splendid confluence of entries. Ahem. Clearly I need to use or lose the SAT words, whatever.

There's a NY Times article about race and nerds. I haven't read it yet. But I've read two blog entries directly responding to the article. One at Sepia Mutiny and one at Rachel's Tavern.

Rachel reads nerdiness against whiteness. Examining the question of whether acting nerdy for people of color is acting white. And concludes, at least in the case of black nerds, Urkel you are clearly alive and well in the cultural imaginary, that it is not the same thing. There's something else other than whiteness that is not cool about nerds.

Ennis at Sepia Mutiny (who I like a lot a lot) raises another interesting point, that dovetails rather neatly with what Rachel is talking about. In a discussion of race and nerdiness, Asians have to be front and center, in my opinion by necessity, we're located right at the confluence of both things. Ennis's point is a good one, I think.

Growing up in New York City, we had nerds of all colors, sizes, shapes and flavors, but the median nerd was probably an immigrant kid of some sort. It didn’t matter where your parents came from, just that they weren’t born here and that you yourself may have emigrated as a kid.

Since I went to a geek high school, I grew up with Eastern European nerds, tons and tons of east Asian nerds, and yes, brown nerds. And it wasn’t about people definingthemselves against blackness — African nerds with their white short-sleeve shirts, slacks and ramrod straight posture were just as nerdy as an IITian or MITian around. [Which is precisely why “blackness” gets tricky when talking about immigrants - are you going to call African immigrants Oreos just because they don’t fit stereotypes of “black Americans”?]

As a matter of fact, I would go as far as to argue that brown nerds aren’t hyperwhite but ultrabrown. They weren’t trying to emulate the squarer parts of American culture, in fact they were uberdesi . They wore polyester short-sleeve shirts, coke bottle glasses, were very earnest and spoke grammatical english. And yes, before somebody brings up the distinction, they were not just geeks but pukka nerds.

However, brown nerds (and immigrant nerds in general) fall outside of the black-white dichotomy that Bucholtz sees at the heart of nerdiness. They’re not trying to “deny themselves the aura of normality that is usually one of the perks of being white,” they’re simply not white. Sure, that means that they don’t acquire the popular culture markers of being cool, many of which have to do with African-American culture, but that didn’t make them any closer to white culture either.

The overlap between FOB and nerd is a fascinating one to explore. I'm not convinced that they are the same thing. FOBs and nerds are most certainly both uncool. And there are nerds who are FOBs, however there are nerds who are not FOBs. Conversely there are FOBs who are not nerds. I.e. the Korean guys in puffy vests who smoked too much and stood around together in the hallways of my high school. FOBs perhaps, but nerds definitely not. The conflation of geek and nerd may come from the equation of Americanization and cool and immigrant = not cool. Which is where the term "boater" comes from, overtly Asian and not cool. I would even argue that the term "ghetto"(adj.) functions in a similar way.

However, Ennis makes an excellent point, that Asian nerds, and in particular immigrant nerds do not conform to American culture, as per the findings of this study (apparently.) What this means in my opinion, I'm not sure exactly, I'll have to think more about it.

Oh Facebook

Apparently some idiots made an Anti-Asian Facebook group. Angry Asian Man as usual has a nice group of links covering the story.

I think most people will agree that this is quite fucked up. (If you're not willing to admit this, I'm quite willing to come to your home and beat you over the head with a hardcover copy of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.)

Why is it that when something goes wrong in America, we always blame the "foreigners"?

I generally

don't link to stuff I like as much as I should. But I suspect that no one actually reads the things I link to. However, following Magniloquence's linking was really what got me started reading a lot. So maybe I should do it more often.

Black Amazon's on fire today. She's given me a lot to think about.

Alas a Blog's talk about Iraqi's resistance fighters as freedom fighters. Although honestly, I've kind of been thinking along the same ways privately for a long time. But it was nice to hear someone else point out its conspicuous absence from public discourse. And I just used the word discourse, someone shoot me.

And for those of you who are into that kind of thing. Vox Ex Machina talks about racist cartoons, in relation to Tin Tin, which made me discover that I in fact have a lot to say about Tin Tin. Make of this what you will.

Now this is why I read the Fighting 44s

you may not agree with it, I'm not entirely decided on what I think about it yet. But agree or disagree, I'm willing to bet that you'll find it kind of interesting. There's even a small amount of humor.

http://www.thefighting44s.com/archives/2007/07/18/inter-racial-dating-by-asian-americans/

Well

I just saw Spiderman 3. It wasn't as bad as Ilyka Damen's review said it was. However, it was nowhere near as hilarious as the review was either. The movie made me chuckle grudgingly once or twice in a theater full of laughing people. However, the review made laugh out loud in an empty house at least 3 times and I read it twice.

So overall, I recommend the review over the movie. Plus the review is free and much shorter.

In other news, Little Light started posting again about identity and labels in general and her Pinay label in particular. They're both really really good. You should read them. I really like the Pinay one in particular, but I've got a one track mind.

Uh, also the typhoon season just started like right now. It's thundering mightily and pouring down rain, and it was sunny about an hour ago. Who's really glad that she didn't procrastinate about mailing the last box? Me!

The bright side

Y'know sometimes you get to the point where there's so much fuckedupness going on that you just don't want to hear any more. So it's good to remember that sometimes there's good news out there.

We have our first transgender prom queen, from Fresno.

And Oakland and San Francisco have decided they will be "cities of refuge" for undocumented immigrants.

That's kinda heartening, isn't it?

News Flash Asian Americans exist

Well, apparently only for the month of May. The Fighting 44s posted the CNN Defining the Asian American Experience article.

I'm not sure whether it's possible to "define" the Asian American experience. The responses chosen do seem to share some similar sentiments.
1) Asians are invisible.
2) Asians experience racism too.
3) Asian Americans are not foreigners but are in fact American.

None of this should be a news flash, but as the 44s note, rather cynically but accurately, the amount of focus on API History Month, which generally passes without comment, is probably due to V Tech.

It's actually kind of amazing how invisible we still are.

Y'know

I'm biased, but how could anyone not like them?

Thinking Blogger Award (there will be much linking and gnashing of teeth)

So Magniloquence nominated me for a Thinking Blogger Award. Which is very sweet of her and of course, extremely gratifying. The rules are

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote

However, she also eliminated herself and Little Light, from the selection pool, which takes out a lot of my options, and also the two blogs that I read with great regularity that also make me think. We are, as she says, all alumna of a Certain Venerable If Hella Whitewashed Institution. Funny how that stuff works out sometimes.

Another tongxue from a More Diverse Secondary School, Wendao Jinxin is also someone who I read frequently and respect tremendously. My sole complaint would be that he's usually too busy selling his soul to corporate America to post very frequently. His blog bounces around between breaking down ways of selling things and what this means for communication, the datasphere,and repping himself as a sex god and lots of other good stuff.

Most of my other blogs of choice are written by Asian Americans, while attending this Certain Venerable If Hella Whitewashed Institution, I was pretty much the only Asian American, who actually identified as Asian American. Thank you, the Internet.

The Fighting 44s is a website I recently discovered that does make me think. They generally post articles culled from other sources but they're generally pretty good. The rape in the military article was particularly thought provoking, if incredibly grueling and heavy. As well as the evangelist vs. atheist debate.

Probably the site that I go to every day, and which definitely kept me connected to Asian America is of course Angry Asian Man. I'm not sure how much his comments, which are relatively short and to the point make me think, but the stuff that he posts sure does. Generally hate crimes, particularly those against Asians are often unreported by the media, which naturally does not give a fuck. Reading about it on his site reminds me that there's still a lot of progress to be made and things that we can do about it.

I also like The Angry Arab News Service from time to time. Since he provides a perspective on the Middle East that's pretty much at odds with every other American commentator, liberal or conservative. He's also got an awesome sense of humor, much of it involves the King of Jordan and PS3s.

I can't really think of anything else that makes me think. There are other things that I read which amuse me, but generally they do not really induce mental cogitation. Clearly I need to broaden my horizons. Although via Magniloquence's post I did find The Unapologetic Mexican, who looks pretty interesting as well. Hooray for linking.

9 more days until my next day off.

God

Kal Penn is awesome.