tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-97010782024-03-14T00:58:07.048-07:00bananarchistyour sinister little sisterBananarchisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17889994122106505890noreply@blogger.comBlogger953125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9701078.post-78690409470229092072014-09-10T23:47:00.002-07:002014-09-10T23:47:37.954-07:00inorganic lemonade<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Been a while. Hope you've been doing great. Here are two things I've been working on, both attempts to teach myself music production through trial and error.</div>
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The first is an unfinished synth etude with only two chords (E minor and D major7). Not a complete song, just futzing around for a few hours. </div>
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Lesson learned: a little sound can go so far in electronic music. The formula:</div>
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<ul>
<li>simple sine wave repeating theme (the octave leaping clear tone)</li>
<li>staccato saw wave synth playing ornamentation (high "tip tip tip" sound, just improvising on the chord notes)</li>
<li>slow tremolo strings with long attack and decay playing four-note chords</li>
<li>synth acoustic bass sound</li>
<li>synth drumset (only the kick drum and closed high hat strike sound, playing simple rock beat)</li>
<li>synth brass harmonizing the vocal track</li>
<li>nonsense vocals + nonsense vocal harmony</li>
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If you isolate each element you need no more than basic skills on the keyboard to play each one. </div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/3G70c2QI0jY?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
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The second is a song for M's sister's daughters, on the occasion of the birth of the younger. She's the blurry blob in the extreme foreground.</div>
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I recorded this about six months ago. Things I'm happy with: use of brass sounds and transition to ska section; catchiness and age appropriateness. (I recently sang the song with the older girl! She sang along with all the repeating parts!) Things I'm dissatisfied with: my inability to find the pitch with my voice, poor mixing, overlay on certain frequencies muddying the sound. </div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/qyRsCP9ehc8?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
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<br />Bananarchisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17889994122106505890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9701078.post-51379239198354305702013-01-04T00:23:00.001-08:002013-01-04T01:06:21.112-08:00two short storiesWhile churning my legs on the spin bike tonight, I read two short stories recently recommended to me by friends. I'm recommending both to you.<br />
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Both are science fictiony because they describe events that can't actually happen. But neither fit the genre perfectly.<br />
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The first is <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2012/10/15/121015fi_fiction_saunders">George Saunder's "The Semplica-Girls Diaries,"</a> published in the New Yorker a few months ago. It's a Keeping up with the Joneses story told from the perspective of an untrustworthy narrator (a father in a suburban family) with a voice is so dumb and excitable that you don't notice when the twist sneaks up on you. Here's an excerpt - the story is too long to post in entirety:<br />
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<b>SEPTEMBER 6<span class="smallcaps" style="font-size: 0.8em;">TH</span></b><br />
Very depressing birthday party today at home of Lilly’s friend Leslie Torrini. </blockquote>
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House is mansion where Lafayette once stayed. Torrinis showed us Lafayette’s room: now their “Fun Den.” Plasma TV, pinball game, foot massager. Thirty acres, six garages (they call them “outbuildings”): one for Ferraris (three), one for Porsches (two, plus one he is rebuilding), one for historical merry-go-round they are restoring as family (!). Across trout-stocked stream, red Oriental bridge flown in from China. Showed us hoofmark from some dynasty. In front room, near Steinway, plaster cast of hoofmark from even earlier dynasty, in wood of different bridge. Picasso autograph, Disney autograph, dress Greta Garbo once wore, all displayed in massive mahogany cabinet. </blockquote>
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Vegetable garden tended by guy named Karl. </blockquote>
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Lilly: Wow, this garden is like ten times bigger than our whole yard. </blockquote>
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Flower garden tended by separate guy, weirdly also named Karl. </blockquote>
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Lilly: Wouldn’t you love to live here? </blockquote>
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Me: Lilly, ha-ha, don’t ah . . . </blockquote>
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Pam (my wife, very sweet, love of life!): What, what is she saying wrong? Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you love to live here? I know <i>I</i> would. </blockquote>
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In front of house, on sweeping lawn, largest SG arrangement ever seen, all in white, white smocks blowing in breeze, and Lilly says, Can we go closer?</blockquote>
The other story is <a href="http://io9.com/5958919/read-ken-lius-amazing-story-that-swept-the-hugo-nebula-and-world-fantasy-awards">Ken Liu's "Paper Menagerie,"</a> which apparently is the first work of fiction to win all three of science fiction's major awards. It is nominally about origami animals that come to life, but the treatment of the fantastical is matter-of-fact, and the real story is about the consequences of a hapa boy growing up in a place where he feels unwilling to express the Chinese part of his identity. Beware emotional tumult: it was an interesting experience to be huffing and puffing and sweating and crying on the spin bike.<br />
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"Paper Menagerie"</span></h4>
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by Ken Liu</span></h6>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One of my earliest memories starts with me sobbing. I refused to be soothed no matter what Mom and Dad tried.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Dad gave up and left the bedroom, but Mom took me into the kitchen and sat me down at the breakfast table.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"<i>Kan, kan</i>," she said, as she pulled a sheet of wrapping paper from on top of the fridge. For years, Mom carefully sliced open the wrappings around Christmas gifts and saved them on top of the fridge in a thick stack.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">She set the paper down, plain side facing up, and began to fold it. I stopped crying and watched her, curious.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">She turned the paper over and folded it again. She pleated, packed, tucked, rolled, and twisted until the paper disappeared between her cupped hands. Then she lifted the folded-up paper packet to her mouth and blew into it, like a balloon.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"<i>Kan</i>," she said. "<i>Laohu</i><i>.</i>" She put her hands down on the table and let go.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A little paper tiger stood on the table, the size of two fists placed together. The skin of the tiger was the pattern on the wrapping paper, white background with red candy canes and green Christmas trees.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I reached out to Mom's creation. Its tail twitched, and it pounced playfully at my finger. "<i>Rawrr-sa</i>," it growled, the sound somewhere between a cat and rustling newspapers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I laughed, startled, and stroked its back with an index finger. The paper tiger vibrated under my finger, purring.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"<i>Zhe</i> <i>jiao zhezhi</i>," Mom said. <i>This is called origami</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I didn't know this at the time, but Mom's kind was special. She breathed into them so that they shared her breath, and thus moved with her life. This was her magic.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Dad had picked Mom out of a catalog.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One time, when I was in high school, I asked Dad about the details. He was trying to get me to speak to Mom again.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He had signed up for the introduction service back in the spring of 1973. Flipping through the pages steadily, he had spent no more than a few seconds on each page until he saw the picture of Mom.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I've never seen this picture. Dad described it: Mom was sitting in a chair, her side to the camera, wearing a tight green silk cheongsam. Her head was turned to the camera so that her long black hair was draped artfully over her chest and shoulder. She looked out at him with the eyes of a calm child.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"That was the last page of the catalog I saw," he said.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The catalog said she was eighteen, loved to dance, and spoke good English because she was from Hong Kong. None of these facts turned out to be true.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He wrote to her, and the company passed their messages back and forth. Finally, he flew to Hong Kong to meet her.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"The people at the company had been writing her responses. She didn't know any English other than 'hello' and 'goodbye.'"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>What kind of woman puts herself into a catalog so that she can be bought?</i> The high school me thought I knew so much about everything. Contempt felt good, like wine.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Instead of storming into the office to demand his money back, he paid a waitress at the hotel restaurant to translate for them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"She would look at me, her eyes halfway between scared and hopeful, while I spoke. And when the girl began translating what I said, she'd start to smile slowly."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He flew back to Connecticut and began to apply for the papers for her to come to him. I was born a year later, in the Year of the Tiger.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At my request, Mom also made a goat, a deer, and a water buffalo out of wrapping paper. They would run around the living room while Laohu chased after them, growling. When he caught them he would press down until the air went out of them and they became just flat, folded-up pieces of paper. I would then have to blow into them to re-inflate them so they could run around some more.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sometimes, the animals got into trouble. Once, the water buffalo jumped into a dish of soy sauce on the table at dinner. (He wanted to wallow, like a real water buffalo.) I picked him out quickly but the capillary action had already pulled the dark liquid high up into his legs. The sauce-softened legs would not hold him up, and he collapsed onto the table. I dried him out in the sun, but his legs became crooked after that, and he ran around with a limp. Mom eventually wrapped his legs in saran wrap so that he could wallow to his heart's content (just not in soy sauce).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Also, Laohu liked to pounce at sparrows when he and I played in the backyard. But one time, a cornered bird struck back in desperation and tore his ear. He whimpered and winced as I held him and Mom patched his ear together with tape. He avoided birds after that.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And then one day, I saw a TV documentary about sharks and asked Mom for one of my own. She made the shark, but he flapped about on the table unhappily. I filled the sink with water, and put him in. He swam around and around happily. However, after a while he became soggy and translucent, and slowly sank to the bottom, the folds coming undone. I reached in to rescue him, and all I ended up with was a wet piece of paper.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Laohu put his front paws together at the edge of the sink and rested his head on them. Ears drooping, he made a low growl in his throat that made me feel guilty.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mom made a new shark for me, this time out of tin foil. The shark lived happily in a large goldfish bowl. Laohu and I liked to sit next to the bowl to watch the tin foil shark chasing the goldfish, Laohu sticking his face up against the bowl on the other side so that I saw his eyes, magnified to the size of coffee cups, staring at me from across the bowl.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When I was ten, we moved to a new house across town. Two of the women neighbors came by to welcome us. Dad served them drinks and then apologized for having to run off to the utility company to straighten out the prior owner's bills. "Make yourselves at home. My wife doesn't speak much English, so don't think she's being rude for not talking to you."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">While I read in the dining room, Mom unpacked in the kitchen. The neighbors conversed in the living room, not trying to be particularly quiet.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"He seems like a normal enough man. Why did he do that?"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Something about the mixing never seems right. The child looks unfinished. Slanty eyes, white face. A little monster."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Do you think <i>he</i> can speak English?"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The women hushed. After a while they came into the dining room.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Hello there! What's your name?"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Jack," I said.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"That doesn't sound very Chinesey."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mom came into the dining room then. She smiled at the women. The three of them stood in a triangle around me, smiling and nodding at each other, with nothing to say, until Dad came back.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">#</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mark, one of the neighborhood boys, came over with his Star Wars action figures. Obi-Wan Kenobi's lightsaber lit up and he could swing his arms and say, in a tinny voice, "Use the Force!" I didn't think the figure looked much like the real Obi-Wan at all.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Together, we watched him repeat this performance five times on the coffee table. "Can he do anything else?" I asked.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mark was annoyed by my question. "Look at all the details," he said.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I looked at the details. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to say.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mark was disappointed by my response. "Show me your toys."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I didn't have any toys except my paper menagerie. I brought Laohu out from my bedroom. By then he was very worn, patched all over with tape and glue, evidence of the years of repairs Mom and I had done on him. He was no longer as nimble and sure-footed as before. I sat him down on the coffee table. I could hear the skittering steps of the other animals behind in the hallway, timidly peeking into the living room.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"<i>Xiao</i> <i>laohu</i>," I said, and stopped. I switched to English. "This is Tiger." Cautiously, Laohu strode up and purred at Mark, sniffing his hands.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 13px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mark examined the Christmas-wrap pattern of Laohu's skin. "That doesn't look like a tiger at all. Your Mom makes toys for you from trash?"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I had never thought of Laohu as <i>trash</i>. But looking at him now, he was really just a piece of wrapping paper.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 13px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mark pushed Obi-Wan's head again. The lightsaber flashed; he moved his arms up and down. "Use the Force!"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Laohu turned and pounced, knocking the plastic figure off the table. It hit the floor and broke, and Obi-Wan's head rolled under the couch. "<i>Rawwww</i>," Laohu laughed. I joined him.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 13px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mark punched me, hard. "This was very expensive! You can't even find it in the stores now. It probably cost more than what your dad paid for your mom!"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I stumbled and fell to the floor. Laohu growled and leapt at Mark's face.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mark screamed, more out of fear and surprise than pain. Laohu was only made of paper, after all.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 13px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mark grabbed Laohu and his snarl was choked off as Mark crumpled him in his hand and tore him in half. He balled up the two pieces of paper and threw them at me. "Here's your stupid cheap Chinese garbage."</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 13px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">After Mark left, I spent a long time trying, without success, to tape together the pieces, smooth out the paper, and follow the creases to refold Laohu. Slowly, the other animals came into the living room and gathered around us, me and the torn wrapping paper that used to be Laohu.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">#</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My fight with Mark didn't end there. Mark was popular at school. I never want to think again about the two weeks that followed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I came home that Friday at the end of the two weeks. "<i>Xuexiao</i> <i>hao ma?</i>" Mom asked. I said nothing and went to the bathroom. I looked into the mirror. <i>I look nothing like her, nothing.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At dinner I asked Dad, "Do I have a chink face?"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Dad put down his chopsticks. Even though I had never told him what happened in school, he seemed to understand. He closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "No, you don't."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mom looked at Dad, not understanding. She looked back at me. "<i>Sha</i> <i>jiao</i> chink<i>?</i>"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"English," I said. "Speak English."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">She tried. "What happen?"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I pushed the chopsticks and the bowl before me away: stir-fried green peppers with five-spice beef. "We should eat American food."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Dad tried to reason. "A lot of families cook Chinese sometimes."</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 13px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"We are not other families." I looked at him. <i>Other families don't have moms who don't belong.</i></span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 13px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He looked away. And then he put a hand on Mom's shoulder. "I'll get you a cookbook."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mom turned to me. "<i>Bu haochi?</i>"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"English," I said, raising my voice. "Speak English."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mom reached out to touch my forehead, feeling for my temperature. "<i>Fashao</i> <i>la?</i>"</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 13px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I brushed her hand away. "I'm fine. Speak English!" I was shouting.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Speak English to him," Dad said to Mom. "You knew this was going to happen some day. What did you expect?"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mom dropped her hands to her side. She sat, looking from Dad to me, and back to Dad again. She tried to speak, stopped, and tried again, and stopped again.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"You have to," Dad said. "I've been too easy on you. Jack needs to fit in."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mom looked at him. "If I say 'love,' I feel here." She pointed to her lips. "If I say '<i>ai</i><i>,</i>' I feel here." She put her hand over her heart.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Dad shook his head. "You are in America."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mom hunched down in her seat, looking like the water buffalo when Laohu used to pounce on him and squeeze the air of life out of him.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 13px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"And I want some real toys."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">#</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Dad bought me a full set of Star Wars action figures. I gave the Obi-Wan Kenobi to Mark.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I packed the paper menagerie in a large shoebox and put it under the bed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The next morning, the animals had escaped and took over their old favorite spots in my room. I caught them all and put them back into the shoebox, taping the lid shut. But the animals made so much noise in the box that I finally shoved it into the corner of the attic as far away from my room as possible.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If Mom spoke to me in Chinese, I refused to answer her. After a while, she tried to use more English. But her accent and broken sentences embarrassed me. I tried to correct her. Eventually, she stopped speaking altogether if I were around.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 13px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mom began to mime things if she needed to let me know something. She tried to hug me the way she saw American mothers did on TV. I thought her movements exaggerated, uncertain, ridiculous, graceless. She saw that I was annoyed, and stopped.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 13px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"You shouldn't treat your mother that way," Dad said. But he couldn't look me in the eyes as he said it. Deep in his heart, he must have realized that it was a mistake to have tried to take a Chinese peasant girl and expect her to fit in the suburbs of Connecticut.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mom learned to cook American style. I played video games and studied French.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Every once in a while, I would see her at the kitchen table studying the plain side of a sheet of wrapping paper. Later a new paper animal would appear on my nightstand and try to cuddle up to me. I caught them, squeezed them until the air went out of them, and then stuffed them away in the box in the attic.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 13px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mom finally stopped making the animals when I was in high school. By then her English was much better, but I was already at that age when I wasn't interested in what she had to say whatever language she used.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 13px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sometimes, when I came home and saw her tiny body busily moving about in the kitchen, singing a song in Chinese to herself, it was hard for me to believe that she gave birth to me. We had nothing in common. She might as well be from the moon. I would hurry on to my room, where I could continue my all-American pursuit of happiness.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">#</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Dad and I stood, one on each side of Mom, lying on the hospital bed. She was not yet even forty, but she looked much older.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For years she had refused to go to the doctor for the pain inside her that she said was no big deal. By the time an ambulance finally carried her in, the cancer had spread far beyond the limits of surgery.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 13px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My mind was not in the room. It was the middle of the on-campus recruiting season, and I was focused on resumes, transcripts, and strategically constructed interview schedules. I schemed about how to lie to the corporate recruiters most effectively so that they'll offer to buy me. I understood intellectually that it was terrible to think about this while your mother lay dying. But that understanding didn't mean I could change how I felt.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">She was conscious. Dad held her left hand with both of his own. He leaned down to kiss her forehead. He seemed weak and old in a way that startled me. I realized that I knew almost as little about Dad as I did about Mom.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mom smiled at him. "I'm fine."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">She turned to me, still smiling. "I know you have to go back to school." Her voice was very weak and it was difficult to hear her over the hum of the machines hooked up to her. "Go. Don't worry about me. This is not a big deal. Just do well in school."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I reached out to touch her hand, because I thought that was what I was supposed to do. I was relieved. I was already thinking about the flight back, and the bright California sunshine.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">She whispered something to Dad. He nodded and left the room.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 13px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Jack, if — " she was caught up in a fit of coughing, and could not speak for some time. "If I don't make it, don't be too sad and hurt your health. Focus on your life. Just keep that box you have in the attic with you, and every year, at <i>Qingming</i>, just take it out and think about me. I'll be with you always."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Qingming</i> was the Chinese Festival for the Dead. When I was very young, Mom used to write a letter on <i>Qingming</i> to her dead parents back in China, telling them the good news about the past year of her life in America. She would read the letter out loud to me, and if I made a comment about something, she would write it down in the letter too. Then she would fold the letter into a paper crane, and release it, facing west. We would then watch, as the crane flapped its crisp wings on its long journey west, towards the Pacific, towards China, towards the graves of Mom's family.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It had been many years since I last did that with her.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 13px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"I don't know anything about the Chinese calendar," I said. "Just rest, Mom. "</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 13px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Just keep the box with you and open it once in a while. Just open — " she began to cough again.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"It's okay, Mom." I stroked her arm awkwardly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"<i>Haizi</i><i>, mama ai ni</i> — " Her cough took over again. An image from years ago flashed into my memory: Mom saying <i>ai</i> and then putting her hand over her heart.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 13px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Alright, Mom. Stop talking."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Dad came back, and I said that I needed to get to the airport early because I didn't want to miss my flight.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">She died when my plane was somewhere over Nevada.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">#</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Dad aged rapidly after Mom died. The house was too big for him and had to be sold. My girlfriend Susan and I went to help him pack and clean the place.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Susan found the shoebox in the attic. The paper menagerie, hidden in the uninsulated darkness of the attic for so long, had become brittle and the bright wrapping paper patterns had faded.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 13px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"I've never seen origami like this," Susan said. "Your Mom was an amazing artist."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The paper animals did not move. Perhaps whatever magic had animated them stopped when Mom died. Or perhaps I had only imagined that these paper constructions were once alive. The memory of children could not be trusted.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">#</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It was the first weekend in April, two years after Mom's death. Susan was out of town on one of her endless trips as a management consultant and I was home, lazily flipping through the TV channels.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 13px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I paused at a documentary about sharks. Suddenly I saw, in my mind, Mom's hands, as they folded and refolded tin foil to make a shark for me, while Laohu and I watched.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 13px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A rustle. I looked up and saw that a ball of wrapping paper and torn tape was on the floor next to the bookshelf. I walked over to pick it up for the trash.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The ball of paper shifted, unfurled itself, and I saw that it was Laohu, who I hadn't thought about in a very long time. "<i>Rawrr-sa</i>." Mom must have put him back together after I had given up.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 13px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He was smaller than I remembered. Or maybe it was just that back then my fists were smaller.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Susan had put the paper animals around our apartment as decoration. She probably left Laohu in a pretty hidden corner because he looked so shabby.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I sat down on the floor, and reached out a finger. Laohu's tail twitched, and he pounced playfully. I laughed, stroking his back. Laohu purred under my hand.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"How've you been, old buddy?"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Laohu stopped playing. He got up, jumped with feline grace into my lap, and proceeded to unfold himself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In my lap was a square of creased wrapping paper, the plain side up. It was filled with dense Chinese characters. I had never learned to read Chinese, but I knew the characters for <i>son</i>, and they were at the top, where you'd expect them in a letter addressed to you, written in Mom's awkward, childish handwriting.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I went to the computer to check the Internet. Today was <i>Qingming</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">#</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I took the letter with me downtown, where I knew the Chinese tour buses stopped. I stopped every tourist, asking, "<i>Nin hui du zhongwen ma?</i>" <i>Can you read Chinese?</i> I hadn't spoken Chinese in so long that I wasn't sure if they understood.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A young woman agreed to help. We sat down on a bench together, and she read the letter to me aloud. The language that I had tried to forget for years came back, and I felt the words sinking into me, through my skin, through my bones, until they squeezed tight around my heart.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">#</span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Son,</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We haven't talked in a long time. You are so angry when I try to touch you that I'm afraid. And I think maybe this pain I feel all the time now is something serious.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So I decided to write to you. I'm going to write in the paper animals I made for you that you used to like so much.</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>The animals will stop moving when I stop breathing. But if I write to you with all my heart, I'll leave a little of myself behind on this paper, in these words. Then, if you think of me on</i>Qingming<i>, when the spirits of the departed are allowed to visit their families, you'll make the parts of myself I leave behind come alive too. The creatures I made for you will again leap and run and pounce, and maybe you'll get to see these words then.</i></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Because I have to write with all my heart, I need to write to you in Chinese.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">All this time I still haven't told you the story of my life. When you were little, I always thought I'd tell you the story when you were older, so you could understand. But somehow that chance never came up.</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>I was born in 1957, in Sigulu Village, Hebei Province. Your grandparents were both from very poor peasant families with few relatives. Only a few years after I was born,</i> <i>the Great Famines struck China, during which thirty million people died. The first memory I have was waking up to see my mother eating dirt so that she could fill her belly and leave the last bit of flour for me.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Things got better after that. Sigulu is famous for its</i> zhezhi <i>papercraft, and my mother taught me how to make paper animals and give them life. This was practical magic in the life of the village. We made paper birds to chase grasshoppers away from the fields, and paper tigers to keep away the mice. For Chinese New Year my friends and I made red paper dragons. I'll never forget the sight of all those little dragons zooming across the sky overhead, holding up strings of exploding firecrackers to scare away all the bad memories of the past year. You would have loved it.</i></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Then came the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Neighbor turned on neighbor, and brother against brother. Someone remembered that my mother's brother, my uncle, had left for Hong Kong back in 1946, and became a merchant there. Having a relative in Hong Kong meant we were spies and enemies of the people, and we had to be struggled against in every way. Your poor grandmother — she couldn't take the abuse and threw herself down a well. Then some boys with hunting muskets dragged your grandfather away one day into the woods, and he never came back.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There I was, a ten-year-old orphan. The only relative I had in the world was my uncle in Hong Kong. I snuck away one night and climbed onto a freight train going south.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Down in Guangdong Province a few days later, some men caught me stealing food from a field. When they heard that I was trying to get to Hong Kong, they laughed. "It's your lucky day. Our trade is to bring girls to Hong Kong."</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">They hid me in the bottom of a truck along with other girls, and smuggled us across the border.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We were taken to a basement and told to stand up and look healthy and intelligent for the buyers. Families paid the warehouse a fee and came by to look us over and select one of us to "adopt."</span></i></div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 13px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Chin family picked me to take care of their two boys. I got up every morning at four to prepare breakfast. I fed and bathed the boys. I shopped for food. I did the laundry and swept the floors. I followed the boys around and did their bidding. At night I was locked into a cupboard in the kitchen to sleep. If I was slow or did anything wrong I was beaten. If the boys did anything wrong I was beaten. If I was caught trying to learn English I was beaten.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Why do you want to learn English?" Mr. Chin asked. "You want to go to the police? We'll tell the police that you are a mainlander illegally in Hong Kong. They'd love to have you in their prison."</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Six years I lived like this. One day, an old woman who sold fish to me in the morning market pulled me aside.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"I know girls like you. How old are you now, sixteen? One day, the man who owns you will get drunk, and he'll look at you and pull you to him and you can't stop him. The wife will find out, and then you will think you really have gone to hell. You have to get out of this life. I know someone who can help."</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">She told me about American men who wanted Asian wives. If I can cook, clean, and take care of my American husband, he'll give me a good life. It was the only hope I had. And that was how I got into the catalog with all those lies and met your father. It is not a very romantic story, but it is my story.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the suburbs of Connecticut, I was lonely. Your father was kind and gentle with me, and I was very grateful to him. But no one understood me, and I understood nothing.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But then you were born! I was so happy when I looked into your face and saw shades of my mother, my father, and myself. I had lost my entire family, all of Sigulu, everything I ever knew and loved. But there you were, and your face was proof that they were real. I hadn't made them up.</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Now I had someone to talk to. I would teach you my language, and we could together remake a small piece of everything that I loved and lost. When you said your first words to me, in Chinese that had the same accent as my mother and me, I cried for hours. When I made the first</i> zhezhi <i>animals for you, and you laughed, I felt there were no worries in the world.</i></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You grew up a little, and now you could even help your father and I talk to each other. I was really at home now. I finally found a good life. I wished my parents could be here, so that I could cook for them, and give them a good life too. But my parents were no longer around. You know what the Chinese think is the saddest feeling in the world? It's for a child to finally grow the desire to take care of his parents, only to realize that they were long gone.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Son, I know that you do not like your Chinese eyes, which are my eyes. I know that you do not like your Chinese hair, which is my hair. But can you understand how much joy your very existence brought to me? And can you understand how it felt when you stopped talking to me and won't let me talk to you in Chinese? I felt I was losing everything all over again.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Why won't you talk to me, son? The pain makes it hard to write.</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">#</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The young woman handed the paper back to me. I could not bear to look into her face.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Without looking up, I asked for her help in tracing out the character for <i>ai</i> on the paper below Mom's letter. I wrote the character again and again on the paper, intertwining my pen strokes with her words.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The young woman reached out and put a hand on my shoulder. Then she got up and left, leaving me alone with my mother.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Following the creases, I refolded the paper back into Laohu. I cradled him in the crook of my arm, and as he purred, we began the walk home.</span></div>
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<em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Copyright (c) 2011 Ken Liu, first published in THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION, Mar/Apr. 2011.</span></em></div>
Bananarchisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17889994122106505890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9701078.post-53556295279519990782012-11-15T04:38:00.001-08:002012-11-22T23:32:02.046-08:00awesomeNow it is my habit to drive to Palo Alto from San Francisco every Saturday to visit Nai Nai. I usually give her a massage. Only recently did I realize that loving touch might be something she hasn't experienced in decades, my grandfather having died thirty years ago and having been who he was for the forty years before that, and the rest of my family being very loving but not physically demonstrative with her, and that the experience of it might bring her happiness and comfort. <br />
<br />
So I start by opening her waist brace and putting my hands on her lower back. Then her hip flexors and IT bands, her knees, and the rest of her lower body. More often than not when I get to her feet, she giggles and says, "I'm ticklish!" or "Your hands are cold!" and I tug on her toes until both my hands and her toes have warmed. I'm always surprised at how little muscle tone she has and how the skin on her body is still mostly smooth and elastic, though she is 90. Then it's onto the rest of her back, her arms, her neck, and finally her head and face. I get in there: scalp, ears, forehead, eyebrows, maxilla, sinuses, jaw. We end with me cradling her face in both hands and rolling circles into her cheeks with my thumbs.<br />
<br />
Each time my hands touch her flesh I imagine our skin glowing orange as if illuminated from within. I may not say the word "reiki" even in my mind but what I envision are billions of neurotransmitters called love jumping the gap between my body and hers and transforming into white blood cells that attack the sources of her pain with bayonets and bludgeons.<br />
<br />
It has not been a good few months. Desire alone makes the hands of the clock turn no slower. Days go, and bodies age. And they get dizzy up top and frail and pained everywhere else. There was talk of moving Nai Nai to an old folks home so that she could have access to 24-hour care, but the logistics were difficult. "Will we move my hot water kettle?" I heard her ask my uncle. I stopped listening after this question because the details bothered me so much.<br />
<br />
Once after the massage I lay down in bed next to her because my back hurt from being bent over for an hour. We stared up at the ceiling and played with our hands. I showed her the trick where you pretend to disconnect your finger. She couldn't do it herself, but she was totally delighted to watch me do it.<br />
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<br />
I fell asleep and woke up half an hour later to find her sitting in a folding chair next to the bed, nodding off.<br />
<br />
I saw the word "awesome" written in English on an envelope in her kitchen, along with some other English words. From the context, I gathered that she had been reading an article and had written down unfamiliar English words. She'd written translations in Chinese alongside the English, but even without recognizing the Chinese words next to "awesome," I assumed the translation was wrong. So I took a minute to explain it to her. The moment at 1:07, when she realizes what "awesome" means, then points at me and says, in English, "Hey! YOU are awesome" is one of my happiest. I'm so glad I was recording on my phone:<br />
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I write this as a reminder to myself and to anyone who knows any part of me based on what they have seen on this blog: <i>this </i>is what matters to me.<br />
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Apropos of everything else, C. said to me tonight, "Congratulations on getting the most American prize: freedom."Bananarchisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17889994122106505890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9701078.post-65742265924294949382012-11-14T02:16:00.000-08:002012-11-14T02:16:24.331-08:00this is the closest i will get to writing literally about sexI prefer writing about sex in metaphor, especially without signaling at all to the reader that any comparison is meant to be drawn. For example:<br />
<ul>
<li>Beat two eggs in a bowl with a fork.</li>
<li>Pour the eggs into a pan over medium heat.</li>
<li>With a spatula, stir the eggs until they solidify.</li>
<li>Add salt and pepper to taste.</li>
</ul>
<div>
What at first glance appears to be a recipe for scrambled eggs is actually a delivery boy-housewife fantasy involving floaties* in the backyard pool. Betcha couldn't tell! (*First incarnation of this word: "floaters." TOTALLY DIFFERENT MEANING!!!)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I attribute this inclination to general prudishness. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
I believe the circumlocution makes for poetry and one day I hope to write a book of cunnilingus tips, once I have developed the expertise, all in metaphor. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
So in keeping with my recent habit of publishing portraits of people a few years after they are most likely to be discovered, here's one that displays the closest I will come to writing literally about sex:</div>
<div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Here is what I know ab<span style="background-color: white;">out <span class="il">X</span>: he is a tall, heterosexual white man with broad shoulders, symmetrical features and a square jaw. He went to [fratty Ivy school] and played lacrosse and football. His law degree is from [urban Ivy school]. He is considered one of the best ultimate frisbee players of all times - on message boards, people still talk about the frisbee giants of the 1980s, the great X, sundry others. His name suggests royal lineage and has three plosive sounds in two syllables. He drives a luxury sedan. He lives in an expensive small city in the hills in an expensive house. He is a partner in one of the largest, richest, and best known law firms in the country. He has a wife and two children. Once I saw him in the fitness room; he trained on the elliptical machine in front of a television documentary about Bob Marley's death, but pushed himself like no other fifty year-old I've seen on an elliptical. His legs spun violently and he wrenched the hand grips and grunted. He saturated himself and his machine in his sweat. Before the left the room, he turned to me (I was trotting on the treadmill as fast as I could, to impress him) with the remote control and said, "Should I leave this on?" I said, "Why not! I didn't know that's how Bob Marley died." He said, "Do you like reggae?" I scoffed and said, "Sure I do; who doesn't? But dub is more my speed." Then I mispronounced the name "Jimmy Cliff."<br /><br /><span class="il">X</span> arrived late to the law, returning to school in his early thirties after a first career, a creative one. I don't know exactly what he did, but between college and law school wrote an off-Broadway country music musical, published a children's book, and wrote an episode of He-Man.<br /><br />A few months ago, when we were talking about music, I asked him why he didn't stick with his creative aspirations. "Well, it became time to start a family," he said. This was sufficient explanation, I guess, for why one becomes a lawyer. "Look, this is how the music industry works," he said. He pointed to his index finger. "Seventy-five percent of people are talented - talent has nothing to do with this - but they can't hack it at all in the industry. They're great musicians, perfect rhythm, perfect playing, but they can't find a way to turn that into money. They don't even try." He moved onto the next finger. "The next fifteen percent try to make it, but they're barely making ends meet, touring all the time. It's unsustainable. It's a struggle just to pay rent and eat; the starving artist thing. Most of these people will drop out pretty quick." The ring finger now. "Of the remaining ten percent, most will find a comfortable way to live. It won't be a lot of money, but maybe they can be session musicians, maybe they can sell music here or there, maybe they have a second stream of income in the house. It's not riches, but it can be a career." Finally, the pinky. "At the very, very top, there is maybe a fraction of one percent of musicians who become wildly successful in the way that you hear about. Fame, fortune, fans, tours. The chances of this are so slim, but the rest just hold out for the possibility." That's just how <span class="il">X</span> said this. There was no final sentence to this paragraph connecting the state of the music business to his own aspirations, so I was left to infer that <span class="il">X</span> fell into the top 24% of his hierarchy.<br /><br />But <span class="il">X</span> was not interested in being a 99th percentile person. So he became a lawyer. He became a handsomely-paid, well-known commercial litigator for a big, rich law firm. Corporations entrust bet-the-company lawsuits to this type of firm; the stakes can be in the billions. He is invited to speak at conferences in Europe, to which he flies perfectly supine in his first class foldabed. I know nothing about his family other than what one can glean online of his wife (who has kept her last name) and their joint charitable donations, except once he told me that his children are soon to go off to college, and after they left his dream was to build up a music studio in his house and invite friends to come over and play.<br /><br />When X approaches, my body reacts. I can't tell if it's fear or lust -- they have the same physiological symptoms for me, and probably the same psychological trigger too. Who doesn't want to be fucked by something terrifying? He has only seen me red in the face, because there is no other face I have around him. I sweat profusely when he is in sight. The closer to smelling distance he gets the more flooded the center strip of my underwear becomes. If we are in even a large room with many people, I know exactly where he is at all times, and I stumble and twitch because I am convinced that he is watching, even though he is most likely not. <br /><br />But I am not unbold around him. I am scared, but not unbold. Especially on paper, I can be brash. He entered my office once, very shyly - the only time I have seen him even slightly hesitant or vulnerable - and asked me some preliminary questions about my musical interests before blurting out, "I recorded a couple of songs." I said, "Oh, can I have a listen?" He said, "Actually, I have them here" - and reached down to the odd square bulge in his back pocket and pulled out a CD of his songs - "and I wanted to know if you could give me some feedback on these. You know, as a composer?" I wrote back an email full of language like "I want more of you" (I meant I wanted to hear more of his voice on a particular song; at least that is <i>one</i> of the things I meant) and muddier blandishments like "You're sweet and dark in the high registers." I described his sound as "gentle and perfect." I thanked him in German for his edits on a paper I am writing for him for a conference in Germany. "Mit tiefer Dankbarkeit," I said. "Jawohl," he returned. He said he liked an image I chose for the PowerPoint I put together; I replied "Don't we all." I slipped the German language lyrics to "99 Luftballons" into the hard copy of the presentation. He said, "Do you have a cold? Your voice sounds like maybe . . . ?" and I grinned and said, "This is just my natural speaking voice."<br /><br />I want to please him and I am dismayed when I fail. I mistakenly cited to a case without noting that it was the dissenting opinion, and I hated myself when he told me the error was significant. How many times have I rehearsed this dialogue in my head?:<br /><br />Me: Do your children obey you?<br />Him: What?<br />Me: Your children must be very obedient. You have a personality that encourages obedience.<br />Him: What?<br />Us: [tender embraces] ["How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By You," in duet]<br /><br />Just kidding. In my imagination we sing, "Closer," by Nine Inch Nails.<br /><br />There are two strands to my imagination here. The first is very standard. The first imagines that he is exactly who he appears to be, the phenotype, the mesomorph of the mind, the success, the society, the Man. These imaginations are quite boring and can be found by the billion on cut-rate porn sites. "Get on your knees," and other commands, control in the bedroom as in the boardroom, etc. No need to belabor this here.<br /><br />The second imagines that when he peels back his sweaty athletic socks, the toenails will be painted a soft vermillion hue and the corns will have been professionally scrubbed. Under his button-down shirt is a grey t-shirt with a cartoonish face drawn in the center. (Actually this is not an imagination: he took a redeye this Tuesday, and he arrived at work wearing sweatpants, sneakers, and this cartoonish t-shirt.) He lifts it to reveal a chest that shows signs of age, e.g. a topiary of chest hair still luxuriant but now gray, skin that slackens slightly above the muscle tissue, chapped nipples, navel piercing. He says, "Are you ready?" For what? I am confused . . . I am not driving this car, I am a passenger, I am a traveling canine companion who pants out the side window . . . but then he hands me a hard plastic cornichon and tells me he is ready too. "What is this for?" I ask. He turns over, slowly, sweating, and waits for my move.<br /><br />Well! That is not how I envisioned this writing exercise to end!</span></blockquote>
</div>
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I have embarrassed all of you and shamed my ancestors and now it is way past my bedtime. You're welcome.</div>
Bananarchisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17889994122106505890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9701078.post-48215459147033563972012-10-31T03:10:00.005-07:002012-10-31T03:28:37.589-07:00seven years<div style="text-align: left;">
Some new music. I fiddled this with for a few days and heaped on some layers (drum, bass, and harmonium) and finally trimmed all the frills back and now it's just guitar and voice(s). Amazing how a swing on the ride cymbal can turn a glum song into a jazz tune - but you don't get to hear that version yet.</div>
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Keywords: idle time, wandering memory, divorce.</div>
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Bananarchisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17889994122106505890noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9701078.post-56814053126758074242012-10-24T01:29:00.001-07:002012-10-24T02:28:00.314-07:00bananagrams-o-grams<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I'm pretty excited that my new roommate communicates via Bananagrams.</div>
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She made soup. I wrote a post-it telling her I ate four bowls between midnight and 2 a.m., but there seemed to be just as much soup as before, so the only conclusion I could draw was that she was Jesus, feeding the multitudes. Her response:</div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-aH8nYOVHtoA/UIegzT29O5I/AAAAAAAAIVw/aK4W5_Q7xfs/s1600/imag1131.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="379" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-aH8nYOVHtoA/UIegzT29O5I/AAAAAAAAIVw/aK4W5_Q7xfs/s640/imag1131.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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I went to Costco and bought some food to share (and then rearranged the fridge):</div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_66HnWghn-Y/UIegy6SPMfI/AAAAAAAAIVo/WKwbpe3lfY8/s1600/IMAG1140.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="379" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_66HnWghn-Y/UIegy6SPMfI/AAAAAAAAIVo/WKwbpe3lfY8/s640/IMAG1140.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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A few hours later, this message appeared:</div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vq0p8uPtWfo/UIegvVWUGdI/AAAAAAAAIVQ/qIAo_nPEcwI/s1600/IMAG1129.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="380" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vq0p8uPtWfo/UIegvVWUGdI/AAAAAAAAIVQ/qIAo_nPEcwI/s640/IMAG1129.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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My response:</div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZYzKKnW_WMc/UIegwyk4SqI/AAAAAAAAIVY/4bLHHcXsou4/s1600/IMAG1130.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="380" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZYzKKnW_WMc/UIegwyk4SqI/AAAAAAAAIVY/4bLHHcXsou4/s640/IMAG1130.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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My morning message to her, and her afternoon reply on the bottom line:</div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KzzUeMg8ZNY/UIegx5KXCWI/AAAAAAAAIVg/-_cUi46AuEw/s1600/IMAG1139.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="380" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KzzUeMg8ZNY/UIegx5KXCWI/AAAAAAAAIVg/-_cUi46AuEw/s640/IMAG1139.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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So far this roommateship is going AWESOME.</div>
Bananarchisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17889994122106505890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9701078.post-72229281012809987132012-10-21T11:39:00.002-07:002012-10-22T11:03:40.788-07:00unlearning shynessWhen I introduced myself to the high school mock trial students whom I would be coaching, I said, "I am interested in being a coach because people once thought I was shy, but I knew that I wasn't. Now I am here to help you unlearn shyness."<br />
<br />
As I said this, I tried to control the shaking in my voice, because the fear was still there. Never mind the message. No matter the audience, the fear is still there.<br />
<br />
Rewind and let me set the scene.<br />
<br />
It was early September. We were going to meet the students for the first time this season. The head coach and a few other coaches and I left work early to drive through slow game day traffic around the ballpark to the foggy canyon edge where the school sits.<br />
<br />
In the main atrium were young ones, some being slouchy, inappropriately attired old-person's-stereotypes-of-teenagers, with skateboards, who stared at us. There were eucalyptus leaves underfoot. Girls whose hair fell into the faces chased each other up a ramp. A trio sat on their instrument cases and looked about to break into a jazz odyssey.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://theinternationalpsychologist.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/teenagers.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>"We are going to tear your limbs off," say their contraposso stances.</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I couldn't remember the last time I had gone onto a high school campus when students were around. Maybe June 2004, my last day as a social studies teacher? I had to take calming breaths before going through the doors.<br />
<br />
The moment the head coach entered the classroom, he was mobbed - <i>mobbed</i> - by mock trialers, who surrounded him and shrieked his name. They squeezed in for a peristaltic mass hug, then peppered him with questions about how his summer had been. With each returning coach, this same loving rigmarole. More mobbing, shouting, interrogation, and then more shouting. That they could keep this level of chaotic enthusiasm up for so long defied my understanding of physics. One girl had made glittery "Mock Trial Princess" sashes and distributed them to other girls on the team. Eventually they returned to their desks, which they sat in or on top of, and then shouted at each other and the coaches from across the room.<br />
<br />
The room belonged to Ms. C., an English teacher, who had covered the walls with artifacts from foreign cultures and bumper stickers that read, "Television Is Drugs," "Feminism Is The Radical Notion That Women Are People," "Don't Postpone Joy," and "I love my country...but I think we should start seeing other people."<br />
<br />
This was when I said to myself, <i>Yesssssssssss.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Re-post from below. I loved teachers like this in high school.</i></td></tr>
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There was the meet and greet. When asked to speak individually, the kids showed off different levels of confidence, the earlier clamor notwithstanding. Some upperclassmen boys knew how to grip and return a handshake; others were clearly mortified at the thought of introducing themselves to strange adults and ducked eye contact; the most nervous fiddled incessantly with the ends of their hair or tugged at the bottom hem of their t-shirts. We asked each to stand and deliver the most basic of introductions (name, class year, other extracurriculars) and some students defused their nerves by forgetting, or pretending to forget, what facts about themselves they were supposed to state, because nobody had taught them the skills embodied in maxims like Fake It 'Til You Make It and Go Big or Go Home<i> </i>and it was still easier aim for dopey likability with, "Hi, my name is X, and...umm, <i>what was I supposed to say again??</i>" than to risk failed sincerity, to stand straight-backed and say, "My name is X and I am a freshman in band." I saw glimpses of the gulf between who a kid <i>wanted </i>to be and who she <i>felt comfortable</i> being, and then I saw how a teacher could bridge the distance.<br />
<br />
Rewind further back to a few scenes of my own shyness.<br />
<br />
Two involve not being able to speak up on public buses when I should have.<br />
<br />
Scene one: M10 bus, 2002. The bus barrels past my stop on 8th Avenue because the driver has missed it and I am too shy to cut through the loud Manhattan chatter to shout "Stop!" Instead I tug the cable for the next stop and walk the extra few blocks, loathing myself. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>How did I end up in Washington Heights??? </i></td></tr>
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Scene two: Chinatown bus, 2001. I'm seated next to a quiet man until we reach the McDonald's rest stop. We pee, then get back on the bus after the break. The quiet man is not sitting next to me. The bus starts pulling away. I see we are getting near the on-ramp. I know we have left the quiet man behind. I start looking wildly at my neighbors, but none of them notice. I raise my hand halfway as if to call someone's attention, and make some guttural suggestions, but ultimately fail to speak. Half an hour later, the agitated instructions coming through the radio system confirm that some 20 year-old fool paralyzed by shame could have prevented the situation just by opening her damn mouth.<br />
<br />
Another scene involves Palo Alto calling Northfield, Massachusetts, 1999. My girlfriend and I were both home for the summer. Her dad answered. We had met several times. "Is M. there?" I asked. "Yes, hold on a minute. Is this [Bananarchist]?" said her dad. I froze. Would I have to make small talk? Would have I have to explain why I was calling his (closeted) daughter so many times? Would I have to use words that white adults use, such as "how odd"? So I said, "Nope! This is not [Bananarchist]." But my voice has a pretty distinctive timbre because of the enormous sarcastic-looking mouth God has given me. Her dad paused. "Are you <i>sure </i>this isn't [Bananarchist]?" he said. I had no choice but to stick to my guns. "Nope!!" I try not to imagine what kind of pathological liar he thought I was.<br />
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Add to these all the times my face has reddened when I know that officemates can hear my phone calls, when I've read book spines at parties in order to seem preoccupied, the two years of college I spent without talking in section. My reaction to being cold-called for the first time in law school, during the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlill_v_Carbolic_Smoke_Ball_Company">Carbolic Smoke Ball</a> contracts class, was to tug my sweatshirt off and get the thing stuck on my head (I continued answering the question despite the muffling); five minutes after the questioning ended I got a spontaneous nosebleed and ran out of the room clutching my face. In the final ten minutes of a middle school volleyball game I asked my coach to take me out because I thought I wouldn't be clutch enough to handle the intensity.<br />
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Of a volleyball game. In the seventh grade. For the B-team. Against <i>Burlingame</i>.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img height="305" src="http://feministsforchoice.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/2630volley_ball1.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="320" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>This ball represents failure.</i></td></tr>
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I am still not as bold as I would like to be, but good God nor am I longer the drooping houseplant I once was.<br />
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So when I saw the mock trialers struggling with their introductions, my mind conjured a half dozen shyness unlearning techniques unprompted. I have a mental archive of them - for my own benefit, as exercises in case I want to do boldness calisthenics, and also because I feel a Promethean urge, probably based also in some self-aggrandizing, let's just be honest, to teach other people the things that have helped me. They range from the basics (like classic icebreakers, e.g. filling out bingo sheets with information about other students in the room or everyone answering an amusing check-in question, or simple unstructured socializing time) to the pedestrian (like shouting when a bus driver misses your stop) (reread for the pun, reader) to the experiential, off-color, wacky, and bold.<br />
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I want to arrange these techniques into a curriculum of progressively more difficult unlearning shyness assignments:<br />
<br />
<b>EASY</b><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="background-color: lime;">Visualize yourself owning everything you see, and approach the thing accordingly. </span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: lime;">Record yourself reading "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" with different accents. </span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: lime;">Moot a TV debate with a fellow student on a ridiculous topic (e.g. "What is better, pie or cake?")</span></li>
</ul>
<div>
<b>MEDIUM</b></div>
<ul>
<li><span style="background-color: yellow;">Give a stranger a compliment.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: yellow;">Organize a party. Send a mass email inviting both friends and acquaintances (a.k.a. people you don't often casually reach out to) to it. Follow up with phone calls.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: yellow;">Wear something outrageous and don't explain anything when you get quizzical or hostile looks. </span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: yellow;">Sing instead of speaking for the length of a conversation. </span></li>
</ul>
<div>
<b>HARD</b></div>
<ul>
<li><span style="background-color: orange;">Give a two minute speech without planning on the first quote you open to in a book of quotations. </span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: orange;">Phone bank. </span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: orange;">Do contact improv dance (with animal noises) for an audience. </span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: orange;">Canvass a farmer's market for donations to a campaign. </span></li>
</ul>
<div>
<b>HABANERO</b></div>
<ul>
<li><span style="background-color: red;">Busk. </span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: red;">Perform on a karaoke stage. </span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: red;">Give a toast at a wedding. </span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: red;">Gibbous peach to a friend, a classroom, a boardroom, a school gathering, a plenary audience, Star Search, etc.</span></li>
</ul>
And so on. The outcome of this curriculum is to become that person who feels comfortable exclaiming to the dentist's receptionist: "A cat calendar!"<br />
<br />
There are similarities between these exercises and pickup artist, drag, and improv etudes. Advanced confidence has emotional valence - e.g. when you truly esteem your blotchy, flatulent self, you'll feel comfortable lifting your arms overhead while dancing - and insincere confidence smacks of sleaze, but for the sake of the uncomfortably shy person who wants to make the first step, let's say that confidence is mostly about the successful performance of confidence.<br />
<br />
Om calls the goal <i>shamelessness</i>, which is the poet's way of wrapping confidence, comfort, self-awareness, self-love, and poise into a nice word with lots of pleasing hissing sounds.<br />
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I talk a lot with Om about this because at her current job she has built a team from nothing (literally, nobody) to a critical mass of hard-working, spirited goofballs, many of them in high school or college. Some were probably as shy as my shyest mock trialers when they joined her team, but they've all seemed to become people who can call strangers and have twenty phone conversations a night on the topic of same-sex marriage. The office is like an atom buzzing with electrons, which makes possible the random, momentary collisions that build special intimacy, stuff like eye contact with a raised eyebrow, questions shouted from one room to the next, ten minute couch naps in other people's offices, sidling past someone in a narrow hallway, joining conversations just to make one clever comment and then walking away. One of Om's staffers said the moment she realized she loved the work was when she was carrying telephones from one room to another. She accidentally dropped one on the ground, and before the clatter ended she could hear Om's voice from an office thirty feet away saying, "You're fired." Everyone seemed to be having fun doing the exhausting work of an electoral campaign. Both times I visited her office, her staff lingered late into the night, long after work hours, just to be in this circusy atmosphere.<br />
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It makes me think about how the unlearning shyness curriculum alone is not enough. You also need reciprocal support from people around you. There should be minimal judgment and maximum positivity, reinforced over time through multiple unscripted interactions. This is not a new concept. This is a team.<br />
<br />
During the mock trial introductions, many of the kids used the word "family" to describe why they wanted to participate. They said that being on the mock trial team made them feel like they were part of a family. I noticed how the returning students roped in the new kids, who at first sat at the fringe desks but by the end of class had relocated closer to the core. It didn't take much to bring the new kids in, just smiles, nods, and other expressions of attention and affirmation from the returning kids.<br />
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Of course, Manny being Manny, I don't experience pleasure without an accompanying dose of caution.<br />
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Most of us (those socialized as women, at least) have experienced the difference between team and clique. I think it will take some coaching to keep the mock trial team from turning the support of the former into the crutch of the latter.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Your hair emboldens mine.</td></tr>
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Recently I wrote Om after watching a different campaign-related presentation by a team-turned-clique:<br />
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I felt slightly disappointed with the in-group attitude. I felt like I was at a fraternity beauty contest where the message, in the form of inside jokes addressed to the other frat brothers, was that XYZ was cooler than Sigma Chi. I think some of the younger folks in the audience - the potential-frat demographic - might have been dazzled by the coolness, but to me it felt like a missed opportunity to build community, to include. Like, y'all think you overcame your shyness because your team had your back, but you're still shy if you're only bold when you address each other. Why didn't anyone teach you to mingle with the other regional field directors, hmmm? (Am I a turd for saying this about kids? I don't blame them; I blame the frat they pledged.) </blockquote>
Om's response described how leadership could guide the culture of the team:<br />
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i love this statement: "Like, y'all think you overcame your shyness because your team had your back, but you're still shy if you're only bold when you address each other." (capitalization intact to preserve your business casual (how does one phonetically represent what happens when one tries to shorten "casual"? i need a linguist)). this is why i want to work with young people. i don't blame young folks for the lack of inclusivity, but i blame adults for fostering environments that replicate/emulate the same dumb dynamics that most of us have felt terrorized by. we should all know better. but a part of me also feels compassion--we all have things to unlearn. at work we talk a lot about radical welcome. i think you asked me what it was and i gave you a lukewarm, possibly sassy, totally unsubstantial answer, but this is what it really is: to radically welcome someone means to do everything you can to make someone feel at home in the space. it means conveying to someone that even if it's your first time in the space or your 100th time, you have a place here and i am excited to have you do this work with me. and it is radical because it doesn't happen often enough! all of our experiences out in the world tell us that we need to work our asses off to be accepted and included, or we have to have a certain kind of look, or charm, or intelligence. fuck that. of course you can sit at my table.</blockquote>
The brains! The heart! Swoon!<br />
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A few weeks back, the mock trialers went to a pizza party for all high school kids in San Francisco participating in a mock trial program. Recall memories of middle school dances and you'll have a sense of how awkwardly segregated the atmosphere was, this time by school instead of by gender. I burst with pride when one of the kids on my team went up to a table of kids from another school and extended a hand, saying, "Hi! I'm C! I'm from Q High School!" I wasn't the only person who noticed this. Pretty soon the rest of the kids from Q High School were prying conversation loose from the students from other schools. I deserve no pride because I have nothing to do with C's instincts. I approached her afterward and thanked her for modeling fearlessness for her teammates.<br />
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Monday will be the first time that I meet with my small group and start practicing in earnest. I get six hours per week for the next five months with the same few kids. I have Googled "how to help students get over stage fright" and bought a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Improvisation-Theater-Directing-Techniques-Performance/dp/081014008X">book of theater techniques</a> by the improv guru Viola Spolin. I have begun drafting the questionnaire I plan to distribute to my kids on the first day (a mix of personality test and OkCupid questions, mad libs, and creative writing exercises). I am really, really excited to start eradicating unwanted shyness from the world!<br />
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Bananarchisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17889994122106505890noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9701078.post-44448086752006457562012-10-10T15:59:00.003-07:002012-10-10T16:08:17.509-07:00october 14, 2010<br />
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Om and I were talking last night about how relationships with your relatives develop as you get older, and then I found this journal entry from that strange period not so long ago where I was 30 years old and living with my parents in Palo Alto, which is not so much about relationship development as it is about having more words at 30 to describe feelings that bothered me just the same as at 15:</div>
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<br /><span style="background-color: white;">Big <span class="il">fight</span> with Dad this week. He can be so cruel. He was yelling at Mom for wearing what he thought was a really ugly outfit. He said some really mean things to her. I said, "Dad, stop it!" He said, "This is MY marriage, and I can do what I want! Don't interfere with my marriage!" I said, "But she's MY mom, stop yelling at her!" Then he said, "Get out of my marriage! Look what happened to YOUR marriage! Who are you to say anything?"</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: white;"></span><span style="background-color: white;">Even writing it right now makes me really angry and sad. I don't know how it happened that my parents' approval can mean so much to me and their judgment can make me feel so bad. I had forgotten that I spent a lot of energy as a younger person trying to distance myself from my parents' desires, not only because I disagreed with what they wanted for me but also because I hated feeling their disapproval. In the last eleven years, I did a good job staying away and doing what I wanted, so to be thrust back into an environment where their wishes, strange habits, and stubbornness dominate leaves me exposed to emotional risks that I had very carefully guarded against. It's still not really clear to me what it means that I am living at home, but the patterns and feelings are starting to emerge more clearly.</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white;">After he made that comment, I stalked out of the room, then returned with my middle finger extended and said, "Fuck you," and then slammed the door to my room and locked it. Good God. I haven't made a move like that in many, many years. I'm thirty. Good God. And then I cried.</span><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white;">I spent Sunday at work, partly because there were documents to be reviewed and mysteries about 28 U.S.C. Section 1782 to be solved, but partly because I did not want to be at home. Mom and Dad weren't even there - they'd intended to go see the Blue Angels flying over San Francisco for Fleet Week. But I just could not be in that house.</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white;">I have the option as a thirty year old to leave. I have a workplace close to home but private to me, unreachable to them. I can sit in my Aeron and face my ergonomic workstation and work at things I don't really care about, two and a half miles from where I spent my childhood. Should I hide like this, at thirty?</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white;">The emotions took a long time to subside. S. called later in the evening and we tiffed about something really stupid. I can't even remember what it was. And we were getting into that part of the <span class="il">fight</span> where we were making motions to be conciliatory but still <span class="il">fighting</span>, the "I'm sorry, but..." portion of the festivities, and I asked her, "Please just be nice to me." And she paused, then said, "Yes, but..." and I interrupted to say, "Please, please, I had such a hard day, please be nice to me." And then she stopped talking for a long time, and I just cried. It wasn't about </span><span style="background-color: white;">S. </span><span style="background-color: white;">at all; I was just still upset about Dad. To her credit, after the long pause, she relented, and encouraged me to visualize her petting my head.</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white;">Just last week, while scraping food into the garbage can, I wondered when Dad and I were going to <span class="il">fight</span>again. I opened the trash with my knee, and dumped not-yet-rotting food onto half-rotted food that was in turn layered onto now-indecipherable decomposing organic matter. We <span class="il">fight</span> in a horrible way once every 12-18 months. In 2004 or 2005, about burnt toast scraped into the garbage can. In 2007 about who knows what, ending with my declaration that I never needed to speak to him again. In 2008 about a dog barking. In 2009 in Taiwan, he looked upset one afternoon. I sat down on the bed next to him and put my hand on his shoulder. "What's wrong?" I asked. "Some people have daughters who perform in front of other people," he said. "What do you mean?" I said. "Some people's daughters dance around in front of other people." It dawned on me that he was talking about the time I invited him to see my rock band perform in Chicago. I had been so desperate to please them that night - to schedule the show while they would be visiting, to arrange the day so that they would come, to get them into a cab headed for the venue, to rustle up as many friends as possible, to perform as charismatically as I could - because I had wanted them to see that I could make it alone, that I could find people who liked me, that I had talents, that I was strong and capable and confident and unique.</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white;">So there was Dad's takedown. Something I had wanted so badly - just their fucking approval - had turned into his distant, offhanded insult. "Some people's daughters dance around in front of other people."</span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: white;">It makes my heart heavy even to write this now.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: white;">Dad sensed that he had committed a big error by being so cruel to me about my divorce. I mean, who does that? Make somebody feel shitty about a <em>divorce</em>? Is that something that I need help feeling shitty about? I guess he wanted to apologize. When I came home, there were post-its up along the fence to the front door, then post-its all over the hallway to my room, and post-its all over the door of my room, and then post-its all over my desk, my bed, my computer, my water bottle. Each was slightly different, but most had a variation of "Love, Mom and Dad" and "M & D" (with two interlocking hearts), or "Mom" in one heart and "Dad" in another heart. I pulled the post-its off my possessions but left the ones in the hallway and fence up. It is day three or four now of the silent treatment; not so much any intentional shunning, but just a feeling that I am so hurt that I cannot bring myself to talk to him.</span></blockquote>
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Bananarchisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17889994122106505890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9701078.post-43620713389457529372012-09-27T00:57:00.000-07:002012-09-27T00:57:56.751-07:00read my weave you wasted pony czarMe: What was the last thing you did before reading this email?
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R: The last thing I did before I read this was look up what the longest word is that can be typed on one hand of the standard keyboard position: left hand tie between aftercataracts, tesseradecades and tetrastearates. Right hand winner appears to be hypolimnion.
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Me: OMG ridiculous!!! Tesseradecades!!!!! My desktop password is "defecate" because I anticipated I'd want to be eating a sandwich with my right hand each time I log into my computer! A fun game is to come up with sentences that alternate between left-hand and right-hand only words: Savages limn faces in feces milk. Try it!!!
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R: breasts in area kill erect oily secrets.
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Me: effete polyp secretes monopoly crazed pinky
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R: read my weave you wasted pony czar
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<span style="text-align: center;">Lesson learned: I am so lucky to have the friends that I have.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c2/Michael_D._Brown,_official_FEMA_photo_portrait,_2003.jpg/220px-Michael_D._Brown,_official_FEMA_photo_portrait,_2003.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c2/Michael_D._Brown,_official_FEMA_photo_portrait,_2003.jpg/220px-Michael_D._Brown,_official_FEMA_photo_portrait,_2003.jpg" width="216" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><i>Read it, you <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Brown">pony czar</a>!</i></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>Bananarchisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17889994122106505890noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9701078.post-69963945178809337842012-09-26T01:42:00.000-07:002012-09-26T01:42:41.965-07:00December 31, 2001, 3:18 a.m.Thoughts of a twenty-one year old.<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>December 31, 2001, 3:18 a.m.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
H. died two days ago. He was drunk and he slipped and he fell under the Tube, the subway in London. He died like that. Some suspect suicide, but information is incredibly sketchy. He was an only child. M., his mother, collapsed when she heard the news. He used drugs. He constantly smoked pot and was either almost kicked out of or actually kicked out of Cambridge for selling drugs. He was frequently drunk.<br />
<br />
He lived in Palo Alto for a while, and went to Paly for a year. We were freshmen, and he was in my photo class. I remember his curiosity about the edges of life, and those beautiful eyelashes that always made him look angelic, no matter what he was doing. I heard through the grapevine that he had (facetiously?) suggested to B. that they were so intelligent they could easily kill someone and get away with the murder, because they knew how to plot and plan perfectly. I was afraid of him after I heard that he’d said this, but the last time I saw him, we were both nineteen and he was rolling a perfect joint. He was spending that summer in Palo Alto, after years of living in Kazakhstan and England. I never really knew him. I thought he was a curiosity. Once K. told me that H. thought I was interesting, and she said he’d said this with a hint of a sexual suggestion, and I was at once flattered and intrigued by this grapevine knowledge. Everything I heard about him I heard about through grapevines, because have spoken to him directly very few times. When we were fourteen, we played soccer with C. in the mud pits behind Paly. C. had a crush on him and I did also, but I didn’t know how to express that and I didn’t know how C. and I would reconcile that. I knew so little about him. Years have passed since I’ve thought of him.<br />
<br />
Today, I arrived at T.'s house late for a night of board game-playing. T. said to K., “Does she know the news?” and immediately I knew something was very wrong. K. said, “No, I don’t think so.” And then she paused. “H. died.” T. released a paroxysm of laughter. I was shocked, holding a donut in my lap that I’d picked up to eat. K. reprimanded T. for laughing, and I felt disgusted that T. had laughed, but mostly I was scared and stunned by the news. I hardly knew him but it turned my stomach to think of it. “He was very drunk and he slipped and he fell under the Tube and was hit.” Everything turned leaden and I struggled to breathe. "Why did you have to show up late?" T. said. "We went through the same trauma earlier."<br />
<br />
We chatted, nonsensically, about the possible circumstances of his death, and how we would tell our other mutual friends, and whose task that would be, and how his family was dealing with his death, and finally, about memories we could piece together about a person briefly and vaguely in our lives. K. knew him best among us in the living room but B. had spent a summer as his best friend. The summer capped with an expression of desire undercut by fear. B. is in Turkey with his family on vacation. K., unwilling to write him an email, left a weeping voicemail instead and now we dread to see how B. will take the news.<br />
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I’m frightened of it, the premature death of this insanely taut-skinned youth. But mostly I didn’t know H., I didn’t know him when he became "Fred" in London, and I knew almost nothing of the person who slipped under the Tube. Would he have killed himself? Why was he so drunk? Who was he with? What did he think those last drunken seconds as he was waiting for the train to kill him? What of those plans he’d made to go to grad school to major in “rocket science,” whatever that was?<br />
<br />
K. and O. and I, unwilling to go home without having spoken, drove out to Lake Lagunita on the Stanford campus, and stood on a drain cover for two hours talking and balancing on the metal lip. When we arrived the stars were clear and the moon was full, but by two, a thin layer of storm clouds covered the moon entirely. O. didn’t say much of anything, but K. wanted to talk. And I was relieved that she expressed sentiments similar to mine; we grieved, but we didn’t know why, or really, for whom. Neither of us knew him so well, and we felt guilty in our grief as we knew we’d feel guilty if we didn’t grieve. We didn’t know if we pained for him, or for his family, or for the generic fact of a young person dying. K. loathed herself for not feeling immediately able to grieve for him as a person, but rather for the circumstances of his death and for his devastating youth. I didn’t know how to respond to her but to understand, to empathize, and to stand silently beside her on the drain, hands thrust into pockets with shoulders shrugged. We stayed late and then drove home, talking distractedly.<br />
<br />
After we dropped off K., O. and I drove to her place in silence. I hugged O. when we arrived. She is leaving for Seattle tomorrow. I feel like this is sort of an end, because most of our high school crew will graduate this June, and then scatter indefinitely. What now? Our friendships have survived through college, with the aid of the regularity of our returns to Palo Alto. O. is going to grad school next year and can probably be counted on to return, but where will everyone else be? I will be at Harvard, and then I will visit Palo Alto and write very similar words in my journal about the crushing ennui that is Palo Alto, this and that, etcetera. I will sit at this desk and sleep in the bed that is now four feet behind my back, and I will swim in Rinconada if I am still able to swim. I don’t want to move on. I don’t want to think that I cannot always see everyone I love, all at once. I don’t want to think that there won’t be the reassuring regularity of board game nights, or movies where we all scream and clutch at each other and annoy the other theatergoers with our commentary and giggling. O.’s leaving tomorrow, K.’s going back to Boston in four days, R. is going to Vancouver. I detest the ends of things. They leave me so hollow. I don’t even know if this is the end but I'm not considering it. I don’t know anything else. I didn’t know him so well.Bananarchisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17889994122106505890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9701078.post-29021416366789033282012-09-21T13:24:00.002-07:002012-09-21T15:07:14.395-07:00twenty-two photos<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<b>1. My morning commute. </b>This is my bike ride to work. Past the Vietnamese supermarket, left at the climbing gym, dog park on the right, under the highway to the roundabout, dodge left, dodge right, follow the train tracks, zip past the new architecture, watch out, techies from the Caltrain! and hit the Embarcadero for the cruise. The bike is named Killer, but the name is no longer appropriate because I fixed the brakes and secured the rear wheel. It has a coffee cup holder, to make the mornings easier.</div>
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<b>2. The bay. </b>This is the waterfront. The gantry cranes you see are at the Port of Oakland. I bike with this view for a mile. I accelerate when I go under the Bay Bridge because I remember the 1989 earthquake. Many days it is sunny. Moody days it is foggy and immersive.
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<b>3. The space shuttle.</b> This is the waterfront with a space shuttle in the middle of it.<br />
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<b>4. The piggyback.</b> C. had told me to expect the flyover of the Endeavor, but I hadn't planned to watch. The crowds on the waterfront this morning convinced me otherwise. It was delayed coming west from Sacramento. Thirty minutes late. I was happy to have applied sunscreen this morning. The natives grew restless. Youngish smartasses I read as Googlers (they were making fun of Leif Ericson - who else would do that?) pointed at every airplane and said, "There it is!" Heads spun. Then the shuttle appeared, low to the ground, touring Oakland. It flew west over the Golden Gate. Then, finally, it passed over the Bay Bridge. Those grumbling about the delay stopped grumbling. Thousands of photos were taken. Murmurs in the crowd: "Wow." R. called it "cute": a shuttle piggybacking on a plane (with a T-38 trainer escort). I put down my camera and gaped. A seagull could have shat in a thousand open mouths then, had it had the initiative.<br />
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<b>5. The oceanic crowd.</b> People everywhere. The rooftops were filled. The waterfront was lined. When the shuttle dropped out of sight, the streets rang with applause. It made me shiver. "Good job, NASA," said one youngish smartass.<br />
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<b>6. My office.</b> My sweetheart the drunk sent flowers and macarons yesterday, to ease a difficult morning. Ordinarily I keep my things more orthogonal, but anyway it's a losing battle because the window is an arch and the muntins are angled. At least my binders are color-coded.<br />
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<b>7. My view.</b> I look out onto the <a href="http://www.ferrybuildingmarketplace.com/">Ferry Building marketplace</a>. It's an internal view but there is a skylight so the light feels natural. Every day I look at the fruit stand for a while, to see if I will catch a shoplifter in flagrante delicto. It hasn't happened yet. Ordinarily this walkway is crowded with people. The din reaches my office but the reverb acoustics of the space makes it an indistinct background sound that feels sometimes like companionship.<br />
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<b>8. From the skybridge</b>. I am lucky to look upon this geometry every day.<br />
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<b>9. Friday night at the Ferry Building.</b> The mezzanine level is sometimes rented for parties. Maker's Mark held a "country"-themed one. Barrels were rolled in; a wooden shed was erected. This was late at night on a Friday. Why was I in the office? I rolled Killer through the throngs to reach the stairs. I hope my blinky lights and fluorescent green safety jacket added to the intrigue.<br />
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<b>10. Saturday night at the Ferry Building.</b> The Saturday before Labor Day, I worked until 4 a.m. on a research project that made me say to myself, "Fuck yeah, genius!" and also, "What the fuck am I doing, here, now, how, why?" On the weekends there is neither heat nor light in my office. I spent eighteen hours at a desk without speaking or laughing. When I left the bakers had already started the day's work. It was just the lawyer and the bakers, toiling. I paused to take this photo.<br />
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<b>11. Market Street at 4 a.m.</b> Here is one of the busiest streets in San Francisco, at one of the least busy times of day. Mid-Market felt like an apocalypse. No cars, just disturbed people staggering in the street.<br />
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<b>12. Supermarket</b>. Instead of going home that night, I biked down Market until I got to the 24-hour Safeway in the Castro. Why? Because between work and rest I need a spell of being alive. Everything was empty, quiet, and off. People inside were either restocking the shelves or homeless and staying warm. Here is where one leans a single-speed commuter bike and fills one's basket with unprocessed food.<br />
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<b>13. </b> <b>Walkways not for walking.</b> The aisles become work sites.<br />
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<b>14. Dairy in the dark.</b> The supermarket shuts off the lights in the dairy section. To save money?<br />
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<b>15. Consumer decision making. </b>One pauses before the cheeses for five, ten minutes. Which of these fragrant plasticities to place into the basket? One molests one, and sniffs another. Finally one settles on the least likely choice, a "raspberry Wensleydale," perhaps recalling Wallace and Gromit. One's cheese selection is disgusting, but must be ingested for the next two weeks.<br />
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<b>16. Rainbow fantastic. </b>Unicorns have apparently come alive to sprinkle processed foods with fabulousness. Why do GOLDfish need to be multicolored? I had to leave after this, because I was losing my mind. It was 4:30 in the morning.<br />
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<b>17. Fish car.</b> From Castro to the Mission is mostly downhill. I threw my weight into the turns and hopped over the tracks at Church. Nobody saw me. Then I ran into this, parked on my street. A Burning Man art project, a dusty van that looked like a piranha. This day turned out to be one of the best I've had in San Francisco.<br />
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<b>18.</b> <b>Bumper stickers.</b> The English teacher whose classroom hosts our mock trial practices is the best kind of English teacher, someone who lets you feel free to be your weird-ass self. I guess that is what happens when you love expression. Here is her podium, which captures only a third of the bumper stickers posted around her classroom.<br />
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<b>19. Double rainbow.</b> B. stepped out of my house recently and screamed, "Oh my God!!" This is what she saw. The color of the atmosphere was an unreal shade of pink. Directly in front of us was the most magnificent double rainbow, visible end-to-end, spanning the sky. We walked out to 18th Street, where people were leaving restaurants to look at the sky. I overheard conversations people were making to their loved ones, to share the moment: "You have to look outside right now . . . " I left breathless voicemails. A woman in a van driving the opposite direction craned her neck out the driver's side window while still rolling the car forward, exclaimed, "DAAAAAMN that shit is HELLA beautiful!!!!" It only lasted fifteen minutes.<br />
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<b>20. Dahlias. </b>They're in bloom at the dahlia garden next to the conservatory of flowers in Golden Gate Park. Mom, Dad, Boo and I toured it last weekend. Daaamn that shit is <i>hella </i>beautiful!!!<br />
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<b>21. S&M flag.</b> I stepped out of the Muni yesterday and heard a popping overhead. It was this bedroom-sized S&M flag snapping in the wind above Castro Street. This weekend is the <a href="http://folsomstreetfair.org/">Folsom Street Fair</a>. This city plays to its strengths.<br />
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<b>22. Naked pedestrian.</b> I saw this man strolling down Castro immediately after I noticed the S&M flag. He is wearing flip-flops, sunglasses, and a fedora. I happened to be walking the same way as him for four blocks, so I took this surreptitious photo (haste indicated by finger in lower half of photo). Most people didn't look twice, until he passed, and then they gaped. He ambled along. I bubbled with delight. A tourist murmured, "Is that even legal?" I responded, "It's legal, but it's cold." Because it was shady, and windy, and cold.<br />
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Bananarchisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17889994122106505890noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9701078.post-40383681117762973192012-09-13T14:12:00.003-07:002012-09-13T14:23:03.961-07:00work culture<div class="tr_bq">
This was a journal entry from my last day at work at my last law firm. Just some thoughts on the work environment/culture that I need to be happy:</div>
<blockquote>
I dressed in a suit yesterday. I spent some money putting this outfit together, but I wanted to go out with a bang. Black suit, skinny black tie, red silk pocket square, high heeled spectator shoes, pompadour. People noticed. I showed up at my going away party and they gawked. I wonder why I waited so long to be this person. I wonder if I had been more daring with my expression earlier, I might have been happier? </blockquote>
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I stopped by John's office to thank him for teaching me legal writing. This was sincere. As much as I've been unhappy with his management style and the culture he creates around him in the last two years, John is a fine lawyer and a fine person to learn writing from. I told him that I remember working with him as a summer associate and him being the only person the entire summer to pay attention to the work I was doing. I said, "I learned a lot just watching you take the first draft to the final." He said, "Stay out of trouble," a few times, because I don't think he knew what else to say. The first time he said it, I said, "Wait - no. I can't guarantee that I will." </blockquote>
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I asked him, finally, about having ass-length hair and facial piercings at the start of law school. I wanted to know where that person went. We talked about his nipple piercings. I told the story of Jessica Rockstar shooting me in the face with her breastmilk, how the piercing left holes that made the spray come out like a showerhead. He talked about his brother's Prince Albert doing the same. Yesterday at my going away party I felt like I could express my personality, say the slightly off color things that are so important for me to say. Not even risky stuff, but things like, "I want to eat my own name" when offered a slice of "Good luck, [Bananarchist]!" cake. M. talks about being a prankster at work, of disregarding hierarchy and being playful. I'm fascinated. This is the person I need to be in my workplace, otherwise I'm not going to like it. Why did I wait so long to wear a suit? </blockquote>
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I took the suit to Home Depot and Ikea yesterday. I was running some errands. People really don't know what to do with a person of indefinite gender wearing a tailored women's suit, a necktie, a pocket square, and high heels. Double takes and stares. The kind of staring where you look back and they look away quickly, as if they were just looking at something in your direction. This used to bother me so much when I was young. When I would get called sir. I would feel the urge to correct. When people would say, "Are you a man or a woman?" But now, the running dialogue in my head is not that they stare because they hate or judge or anything negative. I say to myself, they stare because they have never seen a person so striking and attractive. If someone asks me, "Are you a man or a woman?" I want to answer, with a smile, "I don't know! Take your pick!" and lick the side of their face. The latter I mean metaphorically only. I wore a chest binder yesterday for the first time. Note to self: ask boi friends how to get in and out of the thing without dislocating a shoulder.</blockquote>
Bananarchisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17889994122106505890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9701078.post-68484464074132968992012-09-10T19:34:00.000-07:002012-09-10T19:34:04.825-07:00a lesson on dominance<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Watch this performance of power, then pant. </div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/3L2513JFJsY?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
<br />Bananarchisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17889994122106505890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9701078.post-85423024202414251542012-09-05T01:59:00.000-07:002012-09-05T02:11:28.017-07:00richard bigman<span style="font-family: inherit;">Readers, for many reasons, the absence.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">One, the last year involved considerable low-level angst of my own doing, precipitated by life changes I was pretty smug about at this time last year but turned out came faster than I was ready to process. The ambiguity is deliberate because somebody told me not to write the specifics, says the asshole who signals the specifics in the very sentence claiming to suppress them. At the lowest levels I found myself asking my empty office, aloud and alone, "Is this it?" It's hard to write when one is not happy with oneself.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Two, Angst beseitigt, I write now for my best reader, in private. Sometimes the parts that would not trigger diabetes make it onto the blog, e.g., thoughts on Justin's Beaver, but you're really just getting the dregs.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Three, this blog is at 972 posts. <i style="font-weight: bold;">972 posts</i>. EIGHT YEARS. I told myself long ago that I wanted to do something with it before I hit 1,000 posts. A child born when I started this blog could have grown big enough to span the distance between San Francisco and Portland, Maine. Yet this blog remains the same old shit it was eight years ago, evidence of my continuing failure to mature past the "Why do girls make me cry???" stage of boihood development, now with legal vocabulary. Well, I cannot blame the girls, because in pari delicto melior est conditio possidentis.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">What in the fuck am I saying?!!!! One thing this blog <i>has </i>taught me is how to be totally obscurantist in my writing, because I want to share, but I am afraid to be too public. So I just write in puzzles! SOLLY! The first time I joined an online dating website (screenname "DogEater") I embedded my personal email address into the profile, in an acrostic, to see if anyone would bother to decipher it and write me directly. Nope! I dismissed the entire universe of online daters as literalists I would not want to date anyway.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Two years ago I took a memoir writing class. Not much came out of it, except I wrote notes on one of my classmates and said to myself, "I'm going to post this on my blog in two years, when I have let enough time pass that there is little chance the subject would discover his portrait."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Well, it's two years later, so you get to read about Richard Bigman. The name is slightly changed but is very true to the original, in spirit.</span><br />
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<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">Richard Bigman</b><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This class is giving me insight into one of the most self-centered people I have ever met. The very pejorative meaning of the word is hard to escape but that's not exactly what I mean - Richard </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">is <i>not </i>cruel and petty, but merely unable to conceive of the world as separate from his inner life. He is like those infants you read about in child developmental psychology textbooks who delight in peekaboo because they believe the thing disappears when they cannot see it. Though he is mostly blind to other people's needs, and this leads him to say and do appalling things, he is nonetheless appealling because he is friendly, positive, scruffy, stupid, and well-meaning. In this way, Richard reminds me of America.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">A few examples of what I mean:</span></div>
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<li style="margin-left: 15px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Professor tells a story about her afternoon. She is riding the bus in San Francisco, reading a book of poetry. A man approaches her, looks at her face, looks at the book of poetry, and says, "Now that's an <em>old</em> girl with a <em>dream</em>." A kind of mean but funny thing to say. I point out that it requires insight to see a poetry reader (especially an older woman reading on a city bus) as a dreamer. Richard follows up: "Oh yes, was this person black? He sounds like he was black. Black people are just so insightful! They are just more intuitive than other people. They just really <em>feel things. </em>Have any of you all found this to be true?" He looks around the room, nodding, expecting support, not noticing the horrified rictuses on our frozen faces.</span></li>
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<li style="margin-left: 15px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Professor asks us all to bring an object with deep personal meaning to discuss at the start of class. Her object is a fragile coral necklace - so fragile, in fact, that it breaks as she is handling it, scattering red beads across the table. She gingerly re-ties the strand and passes it around for us to inspect. We each cradle the necklace like a baby bird, handing it carefully to the next person. When it is Richard's turn to pass it on, he drops it on the table and slides it four feet to the person sitting to his left. Nobody notices this, because somebody else is talking, except Professor, who gives the necklace a quick glance, and me.</span></li>
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<ul style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">
<li style="margin-left: 15px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Richard tells a story about the year he spent living on an Outer Banks island after his divorce. He picked up some new hobbies, including collecting sea shells. Around the holidays, he thought it would be a cute idea to write messages onto the shells - one letter per shell - and send them to his friends. M-E-R-R-Y C-H-R-I-S-T-M-A-S, and so on. "When they got the packages, they didn't understand," he said. "It was just jumbled up letters." It wasn't some fun word game he was playing with them. He just <em>failed to understand</em> that letters on sea shells would become jumbled in a shipping box and would be hard f</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">or other people to decipher.</span></li>
</ul>
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<li style="margin-left: 15px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">He is obsessed with sex. He is a flaccid-bodied 65 year-old man, but he is obsessed with sex. His stories feature girls' tits and asses; not in any crass way, but in that deeply interior and self-centered way, as in when his protagonists think, "Why do girls wear thongs in churches? They must know how easy we men are!" He also says, in his stories, that he knows when it is gross when older men hang around younger women, hoping. He praises stories as "sexy" if they involve sixteen year-old girls getting a little bit of tongue kissing from 37 year-old men.</span></li>
</ul>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">R.W. brought a game called Stix and Stones to game night last Friday. It's sort of like Pictionary, except with a limited set of drawing utensils. You're given a clue, and then given a certain number of plastic twigs and rocks to illustrate it. Gets pretty difficult when your teammate draws a three-stick triangle and you guess "hat" but he means "pizza slice." The game really shines a light on the dark inner workings of another person's mind. It's all about the execution of an inner vision. For example, I tried to draw "UFO" - it looked so good in my head! - but on the coffee table looked exactly like a vulva. O.L. made something that looked like the kind of pronged branch you use to spear marshmallows for roasting; the clue was "gondola." S.E.'s two-story house with a chimney? "Ice." One woman illustrated something patently nonsensical, directed us to look at a certain portion of it, and could not understand why we did not see it as "tunnel."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I think this is what is going on with Richard. He sees something in his head. Most people see things in their heads. What's notable is that Richard's vision is farther from the truth, and he believes his vision much more strongly than most people do theirs. Add to this the fact that he is a white man named "Dick Bigman" who feels entitled to speak his mind, and you get this very weird, chummily ignorant man who cannot control <em>at all </em>what he thinks and says. I am more appalled then intrigued, but nonetheless I am still intrigued.</span></div>
Bananarchisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17889994122106505890noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9701078.post-60250024079042356662012-09-04T03:16:00.001-07:002012-09-04T03:16:33.318-07:00so happy i could die<div style="text-align: left;">I set up a music studio in my basement. Here's a piece of candy I recorded. Thinking of you.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="344" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/a0ZnuJgHCgg?fs=1" width="459"></iframe></div>Bananarchisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17889994122106505890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9701078.post-1133549949415196832012-08-31T11:26:00.001-07:002012-08-31T11:35:56.591-07:00if i was your boifriendI'm interested in Justin Bieber's transition from clean teen pop cute to aggressive masculine sexual. As you can see from the video, the transition is not yet complete and the signs of his coaching are obvious: someone has said, Justin, lick your lips when you touch a woman's abdomen, because it signals desire, and Justin has duly performed.<br />
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Also obvious is that his talent is for music, not for dancing, but aggressive masculine sexual pop stars must dance, so some quick edits have made his four seconds of jerking toward the end serviceable even if not special.<br />
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Even with these limitations, his image remake feels successful, and I wonder in five years when his jaw and body have hardened how they will be promoting him. Maybe by then he will have just become a sex toy, like the <a href="http://www.google.com/aclk?sa=l&ai=CSoMMlgFBUKCUC6r_iQK8voDAAeyNznaAr-C4F9foip8QCAAQASDJmKILKANQtIG05_r_____AWDJ9viGyKOgGaABoJem-gPIAQGqBCJP0AlFqKoCKy9L-NvX0MicaL_9EIKOEhzMB_jGC7DZ4lg4gAWQTg&sig=AOD64_1unJyN_zu6YcIPaX9XJVBibILXcw&ved=0CCAQ0Qw&adurl=http://www.edenfantasys.com/njoy-pure-wand-vib332937&rct=j&q=njoy+pure+wand">NJoy Pure Wand</a>, which would make singing and dancing impossible, but damn would he know how to entertain.<br />
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Bananarchisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17889994122106505890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9701078.post-60017460920634733162012-07-26T17:33:00.000-07:002012-07-26T17:33:27.689-07:00i can not argue with you from a long ling time ago... but as i'm a father..Mom is turning sixty today. I'm driving down to Palo Alto in an hour to celebrate with her, in the modest way we usually celebrate (serve-your-own-salad buffet restaurant with Grandma, stroll around the block with Boo).
<p>Events in recent days have turned my attention to the past. I'm digging through my emails for clues, but I'm finding more questions than answers. How did I miss this? Or, What does this mean? What erratic wind blew me back and forth from fretful to bold twenty times in a day?
It sounds neurotic but actually the exercise has lots of pleasures. One of them is unearthing this email from Dad, from last August:
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<blockquote>
dear [bananarchist],<p>
i have been bullied since my 2nd job.
<p>my boss then, was a half-german half ugoslavia man, has very bad temper, looking down on me all the time.
<p>( my english was even poorer than it of today, and just changed major from math to EE, with no lab experience )
<p>Gave me all the dirty jobs to do, i have to wake up at 6:30AM and show up at work around 7:30AM every day,
<p>Listened to him in a narrow office for more than one hour for job status of me or other colleagues, often got humiliated by him, then worked until midnight in the Labs.
<p> i endured for 5 years until i got green card, we're in US immigration office SF 2~3 days before you were born, then the next mondy day i applied transfer and got accepted to test engineer department. my boss got divorced a few weeks later and stayed in mental hospital for several weeks after 5 guys quit him the same day.
<p>We've done it for our family to stay in a safe country, U.S ( Taiwan was kicked out of UN few years before we left, communist was looming to take over ), to find a still considered as a good job to feed our family and for my kids to have better opportunity for healthier educational environment.
<p>but at least i've learned or developed some skill that i can use to transfer to other group.
<p>I got more bullied for my next so many jobs, assigned with dirty jobs on almost all holidays and weekends.
<p>Mom was also bullied by her Taiwanese boss, M.X., almost every day, enter dollar values of thousand piece of receipt with her finger, no zero fun. physical abuse ( no heating the winter, and seat next the the chilly door) in combination with harassing to replace her with other newly interviewed candidates, and she interview everyday.
She has same culture.. same town in taiwan, same street, in Zhong Li..
<p>They has their own circle, we are always outsider. Same culture , same race.. no difference at the end.
<p>Unless you own a business and have business partners and you guys run a successful, money making business.
<p>Then pretty soon you're suspicious about each other, there will be more politics .
<p>If you decided not to have family with kid that you can sacrifice for , may be you should endure more for you present work,
<p>Do every dumb thing they told you to do, but , hermetically learn every skill they know, then hermetically find a new job then hermetically learn ...... in these cycle until you are ready and have found partner, chinese/indian/mexican etc,
to start your own kingdom, and in parallel to this process , you are investing your enviable high salary reward, marching toward your 40 year old retirement, as a backup measurement.
<p>forgive our poor IQ.
<p>a poor dad. and mom ,
<p><p>love you</blockquote>Bananarchisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17889994122106505890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9701078.post-11647258299351865022012-07-26T11:01:00.001-07:002012-07-26T12:00:48.739-07:00cupcakeYesterday on my bike commute home, I saw something brown and soft drop from the window of a big rig in front of me. It hit the ground heavy.<br />
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I rolled past it a few seconds later. It was a Hostess cupcake, smushed.<br />
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At the next red light, I peered into the cab of the truck. The three guys sitting inside wore their facial hair in trimmed, narrow, straight lines, in the manner of certain heavy-lidded men in their <span style="background-color: white;">early 20s who live in cities and get the munchies and drop their cupcakes out of trucks. </span><br />
<p>I shouted up into the cab, "You dropped your Ding Dong!"
<p>"Whaaaat?" They smiled.
<p>"I said, YOU DROPPED YOUR CUPCAKE!!"
<p>"I knoooow!" said one.
<p>"It's so sad!"
<p>"Awwwwwww."
<p>I turned right at the next intersection and I will never see those boys and their cupcake again.Bananarchisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17889994122106505890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9701078.post-71439944321788247992012-07-03T16:16:00.002-07:002012-07-09T09:05:47.912-07:00In defense of Magic Mike<div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white;">The scene that ends the first act of Magic Mike layers irony on so thick it's hard to remember what your expectations were in the first place. The eponymous character should be the embodiment of power. He is a lantern-jawed, tall, symmetrically-featured, white, straight, male, 30-something mesomorph who has all of his hair. From his mouth comes charming banter in unaccented English. On him are a suit and a tie and an expensive wristwatch. The setting is a private office in a bank. </span><br />
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But he is sitting on the wrong side of the table. Not lender, but borrower. He needs a loan to start a custom furniture company. His various day and night jobs - mobile auto detailing, roofing, and, most spectacularly, on weekends, headlining a male stripper troupe billed as "the cock-rocking kings of Tampa" - don't cut it anymore. He has ambition, but he needs a lender to realize it.<br />
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So he begs. The woman sitting behind the desk bends the slightest to his appeal - in the manner of the successful pick-up artist he is, he flatters her with individualized attention,<span style="background-color: white;"> and presumably because his sweaty testicles emanate invisible spores smelling of evolutionary supremacy, she responds</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><span style="background-color: white;">("That is a </span><i style="background-color: white;">really</i><span style="background-color: white;"> nice necklace!" he says, to which she responds with flustered self-molestation) - but his Magic Mike ethos fails to persuade her logos and she says that his all-cash income doesn't give him the credit score he needs to secure a loan. The audience can barely watch as he becomes first desperate, then angry, powerless even when holding a comically large stack of bills, telling the banker, "Distressed? Does <i>this </i>look distressed? I read the news, lady, and the only thing that's distressed is <i>y'all</i>." Nobody wants to see a straight white man lose. </span><span style="background-color: white;">Pathos wins.</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">In Louis C.K.'s bit about white male privilege, he says, "If you're a straight white man in this country and you're <i>not </i>the president, then you've <i>failed.</i>" Perhaps my understanding of power is primitive, but when I take my change back from the cashiers at the organic co-operative market/cafe/vaginal suppository shop in my gentrified hipster neighborhood, sometimes I want to ask, "Did you learn <i>this </i>at Vassar?" (Spare me, for one moment, the homily. W</span><span style="background-color: white;">henever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had, </span><span style="background-color: white;">blah blah blah I know.) </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">What makes Louis C.K. funny is what makes Magic Mike feel so topsy turvy. The movie asks its viewers to suspend disbelief of this fantasy of disempowerment. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">That it <i>succeeds</i> makes the ticket worth its price.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">Because you find yourself rooting for this guy . . .</span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 21px; text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Hark! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings.</span></span></div>
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. . . even when your mind knows Channing Tatum doesn't need your help at all. But you still care, because we have all felt infantilized and disempowered in that way, where you are a god in an arena you suspect doesn't really matter - lord of the stage at a stripper bar, owner of the stiffest fauxhawk at a queer dance party, head of your household, most upvoted commenter on YouTube, seventh most-shared meme on Facebook, huge in Japan - but a loser when it comes to the rest of the world. Outside of the party this fauxhawk is just a silly crown on an androgynous thirty-something clown who has to walk the lonely half mile home with a cheap liquor headache. Outside Club Xquisite, Magic Mike is just Mike, no magic.</div>
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Another irony that is pleasurable to watch is the inversion of the normal chiasmus. We have two simultaneous narratives, one character's rise and another's downfall. A desultory musclebound youth everyone calls the Kid attaches himself to Magic Mike. The younger adores the elder. "I want you to be, like, my best friend," he says after a night of drugs, sex, and swimming in Tampa bay shitwater. The Kid's star is on the rise. He starts out a violent, apathetic college dropout who can't talk to girls and ends an equity partner in a Miami business venture who can, as he says, "fuck anybody I want to fuck." On the other hand, Magic Mike is nearing the end of his dancing career (he is approaching the age where his stripper acrobatics could herniate discs), he has lost six years of savings to angry drug dealers, his fuck buddy stops returning his calls, and a preening narcissist named Dallas (Matthew McConaughey, playing himself) tells him he is cold product. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Shining, shimmering, splendid.</span></td></tr>
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But here is the thing: <i>Magic Mike's</i> is the upward narrative. The Kid's fame and fortune foretell his fall. Redemption in this movie comes with traditional values! </div>
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I have managed to get through this post without talking about the most obvious reason to go see this movie: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BpcArRYTpE&feature=related">MAN FLESH</a>. Copius, chiseled man flesh, forty feet high in high definition. Moving athletically, squeezing here, thrusting there. R. accused me of watching this movie because of my "undying thirst for gyrating meatheads." Which he then described with this picture, of shawarma:</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4EgFifxJeiY/T_N7L03R0nI/AAAAAAAAIRA/9kmSe_Rje8M/s1600/101025_cairo_egypt_shawerma_chicken_mutton_meat_shave_cook_shawarma_egyptian_fast_food_travel_photography_MG_4203.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4EgFifxJeiY/T_N7L03R0nI/AAAAAAAAIRA/9kmSe_Rje8M/s320/101025_cairo_egypt_shawerma_chicken_mutton_meat_shave_cook_shawarma_egyptian_fast_food_travel_photography_MG_4203.jpg" width="213" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">The epilogue: when dancers retire, they can feed a village.</span></td></tr>
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Mea culpa. Yes, the visuals will titillate generations of straight women and gay men. But don't hate the movie because it's beautiful. It's also pretty on the inside.<br />
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After the movie, M. looked over and asked, "Are you straight now?"<br />
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Yes, yes I am.</div>Bananarchisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17889994122106505890noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9701078.post-46580107777554151142012-06-25T13:06:00.002-07:002012-06-25T13:09:15.231-07:00just some dad faves<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Recent hits from Dad.</div>
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He was very proud to show me his homemade violin shoulder rest. Rubber bands and a $1.50 self-massage implement from Daiso:</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_H7csGFIFcI/T-jCeOv2IHI/AAAAAAAAIPo/1dnSCwshyxo/s1600/IMAG0548.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="191" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_H7csGFIFcI/T-jCeOv2IHI/AAAAAAAAIPo/1dnSCwshyxo/s320/IMAG0548.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">He threw this away after a few days of use. Onto version 2.0.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: white;">Here he is enjoying the fruits of his labor:</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Ve2TcsrzmNo/T-jCfVGS7NI/AAAAAAAAIPw/cjbmCHJRdIs/s1600/IMAG0553.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="191" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Ve2TcsrzmNo/T-jCfVGS7NI/AAAAAAAAIPw/cjbmCHJRdIs/s320/IMAG0553.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">It improved his posture but not his playing.</span></td></tr>
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Dad showing me the card he keeps in his wallet to remind himself of the things he has in his life. Best encouragement: Mom. Best kids: Dr. R., Dr. A., Dr. [Bananarchist; he considers a juris doctor a doctor]. Five brothers. Google Translate, Wikipedia, Baidu, FNN and assorted sheet music websites [Dad loves learning via the Internet]. A photo of Mom eating soup.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Just looking at the card gives him this happy, wistful feeling.</span></td></tr>
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He left a cup of tomatoes on my desk with the label "Cancer Cancellation." The second word did not all fit on one line:<br />
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I had to go to the dentist for an operation. My parents drove me there and picked me up after it was over. Dad said, "I have a gift for you!" Then he gave me this $3.99 toy boat they had bought at Walgreens. He said, "If Whitney Houston was my friend, she wouldn't have died, because I would have given her bath toys to distract herself with." This was the week after Whitney Houston drowned in a bath tub:<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Afterward, we had soup from the hot bar at Safeway and they drove me to World Market and I bought a stool.</span></td></tr>
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And this is not a Dad fave, but here is an arrangement of my plush toys that M. left for me to discover in my living room one morning:<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sMDdJIH1bWM/T-jEgleaUYI/AAAAAAAAIQQ/aIQ4mzUJv98/s1600/IMAG0786.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sMDdJIH1bWM/T-jEgleaUYI/AAAAAAAAIQQ/aIQ4mzUJv98/s320/IMAG0786.jpg" width="191" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">The horse head is from my brother. The vulva is a costume.</span></td></tr>
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</div>Bananarchisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17889994122106505890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9701078.post-57552319316905520022012-06-22T14:24:00.002-07:002012-11-22T23:54:35.616-08:00pet - kickFriday roundup. YouTube videos that I have watched today.<br />
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Technotronic, "Pump Up the Jam." Athletic stomp-dancing woman in green spandex and fanny pack demanding somewhat forcefully that the jam be pumped up, against a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of rotating peace signs, fluorescent-colored angular shapes, and a transcription of green eggs and ham-esque lyrics.<br />
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Neil Young, "Heart of Gold." Start crying around :01, when he hits the first of the pulsing E minors. The modulations from minor to major - on "live," "miner," and "expressions" - just slay. If you notice the music thrums along at Em when he sings "keeps me searching for a" for twice as long as any previous appearance of that chord, which gives that line tension and momentum until you get to that cracked wheat voice saying "haaaarrd a go-old," with its harsh American tongue-curling "r" sound on "heart" and dropped consonants on both "heart" and "of." God. I attempted suicide by heartbreak listening to this song on repeat this morning.</div>
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Vengaboys, "We Like to Party (The Vengabus)." Because Neil Young and minor chords are damp sweaters on a foggy soul, this was next. There's an official video for this late-1990s dance hit that shows everything you expect it to - a bus - the VENGABUS - and people - young FATLESS people - who like to party - WE LIKE TO PARTY - but I prefer this version instead. If you get past the first thirty seconds (showing the lyrics in rainbow script font), you get to somebody's Microsoft Paint interpretation of this song, showing two black stick figures "partying" against a muted rainbow fade, around multicolored music notes (with the stems attached in all the wrong places). Just imagining some insomniac (screenname PiNKLaDyApPPlesYeY) making this image and posting it to YouTube - because WHY? WE LIKE TO PARTY and SHARE OUR TERRIBLE ART WITH EVERYBODY - fills me with giggles.</div>
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Then it was onto two '90s hits where gibberish substitutes for words. First, Spice Girls, "Wannabe." "I really really really wanna zig-a-zig ah." Indeed!</div>
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Then Wrekx-n-Effect, "Rump Shaker." "All I wanna do is in my zoom zoom zoom and a-boom boom." Sir, you give voice to my heart.</div>
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Finally, Guns 'n' Roses, "Welcome to the Jungle." Best listened to while going through a box of correspondence between malpractice defendant and his clients in the underlying action, singing along to "You know where you are? You're in the jungle, baby, you're gonna DIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!"</div>
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Today, X. taught me a new technique for disagreeing with an unpredictable irrational person with power over you, that she referred to as "pet, kick." Very simple. Pet until their egos purr. Then kick. No kicking without petting first. Also referred to as "roses before thorns." But "pet, kick" has more poetry. <span style="background-color: white;">Practice it. </span><span style="background-color: white;">Pet. Kick. Pet. Pet. Pet. Kick.</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span>Bananarchisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17889994122106505890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9701078.post-16358345074829701202012-06-20T16:56:00.003-07:002012-06-20T17:02:53.180-07:00"Oh, have it?"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Loved this unnecessary snark at the end of a New York Times <a href="http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/20/can-athletes-perform-well-on-a-vegan-diet/?hpw">article</a> about vegetarian/vegan diets and athletes:</div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jc46mK4wxEk/T-JcqKj-QiI/AAAAAAAAIO0/X4VKJyrw914/s1600/Capture.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jc46mK4wxEk/T-JcqKj-QiI/AAAAAAAAIO0/X4VKJyrw914/s1600/Capture.JPG" /></a></div>
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In related news, I read all of the posts in the Well section of the Times because mental space occupied <span style="background-color: white;">in recent months</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><span style="background-color: white;">by calculations about my health/fitness/body can be measured by the cubic shit ton. Imagine a rococo room where every curlicue represents a tangent about fats in almonds, VO2 maxes, Yasso 800s, nerve impingement, and the invariable Huffington Post slideshow on the ten meditation techniques that will give you runny bowels. It's all so tangent there is no curve. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-7uY4oRiKCow/T-JhMkhvFKI/AAAAAAAAIPA/urBuqG9_Ww4/s1600/rococo-amalienburg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-7uY4oRiKCow/T-JhMkhvFKI/AAAAAAAAIPA/urBuqG9_Ww4/s400/rococo-amalienburg.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">There is no empty space, just invisible Google searches for "mouse lemurs."</span></td></tr>
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This is what happens to your brain when you turn 31 and your body revolts, both in the transitive and intransitive sense. <br />
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Sorry, once-readers, if I remember how to string together a post that is not esoteric and irrelevant I will return with something properly considered and enlightening yet tender and laffy. Until then:
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">The heart wants what it wants.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span>Bananarchisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17889994122106505890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9701078.post-86766521421811812302012-06-14T13:56:00.004-07:002012-12-04T11:44:21.102-08:00the price we pay for the prices we payPithy:<br />
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I do not regard myself as having opted out of the agony and anxiety that plague men and women who are slaves to lives they did not choose and denizens of communities they hate. I think especially of the citizens of the great industrial and commercial towns -- New York, London, Bombay, and my own Manchester. "In the sweat of thy brow shall thou earn bread": the Book of Genesis says it best. The maintenance of a complex society depends increasingly on routine work, work with no zest or creativity. The things we eat, clothes we wear, places where we live become increasingly standardized, because <b>standardization is the price we pay for the prices we are able to pay</b>.</blockquote>
Not sure about the sentimentality for a bygone idyllic natural state this implies but I like how neatly the phrase in bold summarizes a sociopolitical analysis.<br />
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Otherwise I found <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/06/04/120604fa_fact_burgess">this article</a> by the author about "A Clockwork Orange" somewhat disagreeable, but only because libertarians have made me associate fictional narratives of personal freedom with xenophobia and racism.<br />
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In the New Yorker article, Burgess quotes "Bishop Blougram's Apology": "We called the chess-board white,--we call it black." Did you know? Clockwork Orange was supposed to have a happy ending, which would have called the chess-board white:<br />
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The 21st chapter was omitted from the editions published in the United States prior to 1986. In the introduction to the updated American text (these newer editions include the missing 21st chapter), Burgess explains that when he first brought the book to an American publisher, he was told that U.S. audiences would never go for the final chapter, in which Alex sees the error of his ways, decides he has lost all energy for and thrill from violence and resolves to turn his life around (a slow-ripening but classic moment of metanoia—the moment at which one's protagonist realises that everything he thought he knew was wrong). </blockquote>
But it was more credibly black:<br />
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At the American publisher's insistence, Burgess allowed their editors to cut the redeeming final chapter from the U.S. version, so that the tale would end on a darker note, with Alex succumbing to his violent, reckless nature—an ending which the publisher insisted would be 'more realistic' and appealing to a U.S. audience. The film adaptation, directed by Stanley Kubrick, is based on the American edition of the book (which Burgess considered to be "badly flawed"). Kubrick called Chapter 21 "an extra chapter" and claimed that he had not read the original version until he had virtually finished the screenplay, and that he had never given serious consideration to using it. In Kubrick's opinion, the final chapter was unconvincing and inconsistent with the book.</blockquote>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Horrorshow! Ha ha ha ha ha</span></td></tr>
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<br />Bananarchisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17889994122106505890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9701078.post-34630610715884604822012-05-01T10:19:00.004-07:002012-05-01T10:21:37.440-07:00悄悄话 (qiao qiao hua)What ingredients go into a Sichuan dish called (in translation) "Whisperings"?<br />
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Pig ears and tongue!<br />
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This beats Mother and Child Reunion as my favorite menu item. That one is eggs cooked with chicken.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Also a favorite <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXsyXjZPvGU">Paul Simon song</a>!</span></i></td></tr>
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<br />Bananarchisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17889994122106505890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9701078.post-50641037131922615462012-04-25T17:43:00.000-07:002012-04-25T17:43:37.483-07:00pathology<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
What is wrong with me that I took a screenshot during my online sexual harassment training because I was aroused by one of the images?</div>
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