Scarred for Life or Saved from geeky fandom?

You decide!

I Was a Teenage Novice!

Stopped by this salad/sandwich place with B and the parents. We were only stopping for a bite but I somehow ended up chatting with the salad guy. Salad guy disappeared and G showed up - even though we have never really met in real life - and talked about graduate school for me. 

We went on this three-hour walk around the town and ended up climbing roofs. While climbing the dome of the capitol roof, my parents found me and reminded me that I ruined this daytrip. So after all I've done in the past months, they had this message for me:

"Get thee to a nunnery."

What? Immediately I thought of all my stuff. My stuff!

I considered bringing my favorite scarf - a woven red thing from Ireland via thrift store - but  I worried they would take it away from me. Additionally, I remembered to throw away all my very...private things before leaving the house for good. I have so much stuff.

But I didn't really mind as I realized I would get to shave my head. And the religion? Whatever. So stuck in this room that was about to burst into flames - somehow an initiation to this nunner - I tapped out a tune on a piano made of antique berry spoons. I forgot what it was later on though. Boo. My parents came back to tell me I could go home, but I was feeling not too bad about becoming a nun. The room was heating up like a sauna with flames tickling the walls.

As I walked up a ramp made of rubber, I continually tripped over my hems. All the other novices were pretty titchy and laughed. It was embarassing but whatever. I was going to get my head shaved!

Stuff you need to buy

Do you have eighty dollars lying round your house? Are you dying to be trendier-than-thou? Look no further than right here.

For only eighty dollars you can buy a crystal-encrusted Madagascar hissing cockroach and accompanying leash set!  For only eighty dollars you can have a creature with stingy legs, an unsettling hiss, and a tendency to muck around in gloriously germy filth!

Needing only mushy bananas and damp towels, your awesome accesory can live up to a year! Tinier than toy dogs and containing more bling than a gold chain, there is not much more you can ask for.

Just make sure that you do not fall asleep with this thing crawling around your body. God knows where it might end up, especially if you sleep with your mouth open.

Harry Potter in about forty years...

Hahahahaha! Just kidding, it is just Drew Carey with a scar...Harry Carey?

Yeah prunes!

Prunes a la secret messages, that is. Actually, this reminded me of a documentary from Nova about Colditz and the many interesting methods employed by the British to get information to the prisoners. This is where I also learned that Jello is a cheap way of making photocopies.

More info:
Silk maps
MI9

Book Review #12

Yesterday I started and/or completed:
White Ghost Girls by Alice Greenway
Fake Liar Cheat by Tod Goldberg
Covering by Kenji Yoshino

Not a fan of the first two; I felt they had a weak storyline, was boring, didn't speak out to me. Greenway's childhood in Hong Kong gave the background of the story a certain authenticité, but her characters were rather unbelievable by their actions without grounds. The last half of the book fell flat as well, making Hong Kong out to be just another exotic local a necessity to keep one's attention.

Fake Liar Cheat disappointed me because I loved Goldberg's Comeback Special; it had vibrant, believable characters and a hilarious but tender tone of an Everyman who happens to have a ubiquitous velvet portrait of Elvis, only bleeding to match a religious artefact. Fake Liar Cheat made me believe that he is better off with short stories at the moment. The only character I loved was Charlie, a minor guy. Fake Liar Cheat had the feeling of a quickie trendy novel of the early 00's that is full of Fight Club-esque action without meaningful goodness. I'll have to post the Comeback Special on my official (nee seldom updated) blog sometime soon.

I definitely recommend reading Covering. I've read a few memoir/scholarly books lately and have not been too impressed by the level of synthesis overall. I believe that memoirs are easy to write but difficult to write well. The flood of memoirs/life rants into the market have really turned me away from reading lately.

However, I think Yoshino does an admirable job of employing this method; the few autobiographical stories he uses are pithy yet empathetic,  personal yet universally relevant to his topic of covering.

Yoshino moves away from the issue of civil rights as a central focus because he feels there are already enough laws and bills on protecting the one's race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. However, he points out the crucial lack of laws protecting the behavior consequent to identity. Being told to act less gay, Asian, motherly, etc; everyone, even white heterosexual males are told sometime to tone down a part of them that is perceived to clash with a non-existent mainstream. A modern-day version of brute assimilation into the "melting pot."

Yoshino's stories mainly focus on his gay identity, but what I like so much about about his writing is that he is able slide neatly into discussing scholarly issues with relevance and vice versa. His concepts really appeal to me and other embittered by cyclic, futile student/community activism (which may only be localized to my old campus.)

PS: Does anyone have access to law journal archives? I'm interested in reading Jean Shin's "The Asian American Closet." 11 Asian L.J. 1-29 (2004).