I'm young enough to know the right car to buy yet grown enough not to put rims on it.

I'm supposed to have freaked out about turning 30. I didn't. Still, on my birthday, as everyone wished me well, I found myself asserting all too often how great I felt about getting older. Doth I protest too much?

Maybe. But not because I was trying to convince myself. I think it was because I couldn't shake this feeling that nobody was going to believe me. If I had a husband and a baby--those certain marks tradition says I should have hit by now--it might be more possible to imagine I could embrace my age.

The truth is, though, I'm actually quite thankful I got to live the entirety of my 20s on my own terms. I made a lot of mistakes in my 20s. And they were really fun. I embraced irresponsibility to its fullest, and I didn't cut it one day short. I loved being 22, but it's not something that's worth a second go-round.

What's strange, if anything, about turning 30 is that it happens at all. Even five years ago it seems ridiculously far off. Yes, youth fades, but it's not so regrettable if you're doing it right. Besides, Jay-Z told me 30's the new 20 anyway.

The Golden Bullet

The culture of overachievement at my high school both disgusted and infected me. My decision to attend USC garnered a B reaction from my teachers and classmates; not a respectable Ivy League A, but better than a barely passing University of [Insert Midwest State] C. The school typically sends as many graduating seniors to USC as it does to the local University of Hawaii campus, which ranks as the equivalent of a D.

In undergrad, I told my parents I wanted to be a college professor. It validated my choice of major (first Comparative Lit, then English) for my father. My brother Keola also majored in English. He turned down business school at Oxford and became a radio DJ instead. Almost 10 years later, he still DJs, and he still loves it.

When it became clear that I would not follow some prestigious career path, I wondered how my dad would react to the fact that I would have a B job after attending a B school. My oldest brother, Kalama, received dual degrees in Law and Public Policy from Harvard and UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall. He served as the editor of the Law Review in his last year of school and secured a six-figure job at some high-profile New York firm a solid month before graduation. And he's set to make partner at his current firm next year.

Clearly, Kalama is the golden child, far from perfect but aptly filling the mold that our father so carefully designed. A couple years ago, I realized that this isn't what Kalama wanted. He does it, but like the rest of the martyrs in our family, he took a bullet for his siblings. He became what our dad wanted so Keola and I wouldn't have to. I call it the golden bullet. He calls it paying the bills. I wonder if the label makes a difference.

The Hustle To Tutor

I wish I were a doctor or a lawyer for my mother.

After my sister died, my mother just wanted me to be happy.

I was writing and performing my own material in New York City and was happy, but was poor. Strippers would tell me how much they made in a night, but I just didn’t think I could do the hustle. When I found out prostitutes in Nevada make less than tenure teachers, I was glad I chose teaching as my day job over stripping in my twenties.

But now I’m not so sure. I watched the documentary, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, and realized I’d like to be making $4,000 a client.

Instead, I am hustling to get my students to come to tutoring which is F-R-E-E at our school, but the kids don’t want to stay the hour after school. I’ve been really talking it up lately. Telling them how much I’d be making if I were in the private industry—that those rich parents dole out the dough when it comes to SAT prep.

I think there might be a parallel in my teaching life and my dating life…I can’t give it away for F-R-E-E. Ha, ha. That could get me fired nowadays.

So could saying to a pregnant teen that it’s not too late for an abortion. I said it in my joking manner, not knowing how to react to her teen pregnancy. Yes, I know that is not an option with those Catholics. I told her, “My mom said I’d be taken to the clinic if I got pregnant at your age.” You can’t say those things aloud! “Inappropriate as a teacher” according to another teacher, an administrator and our union rep. Wow. I didn’t know I was in such a conservative environment which would rather have women go back to sticking a hanger up their cooch as opposed to having options for legal abortion.

I watched The Stoning of Soraya M about this woman who is falsely accused of adultery and stoned to death by her husband, her sons, and her father. It really made me appreciate my financial independence. I kept thinking, “Why didn’t this woman just divorce him?” and then realized that was a very white, American view point to have and maybe I missed the point of just how repressed women are in the world and what a misogynistic society we live in.

At tutoring today, my student showed up who is a cross dresser. I love him. I told him how I saw Dan Savage at the LA Festival of Books and told him he needs to watch the “It Gets Better” project when he got home because he had never heard of it. He and his friend had certainly heard of homophobia, but misogyny was a new systematic concept for them, which I was happy to share. I thanked them at the end of the session. Told them getting students at tutoring was a real hustle, but they made it worth it.

So maybe this hustle is a little more meaningful at the end of a session than others.

But all my friends back home are lawyers

Well that's not true. Some of them are doctors too. And according to Facebook, all of them are married or engaged. Their weddings are big, showy affairs in massive churches, to which everyone from my high school gets invited. Aren't people supposed to get less attractive as they get older? Apparently not in Texas. The brides are beautiful. The bridesmaids are beautiful. Everyone is beautiful. And extraordinarily gainfully employed.

It's not that I want any of this, really. I love my boyfriend and our apartment and the time I have to write. It's just...the other day, my uncle introduced me to a friend of his like this: "She's studying writing, but she's way beyond all that. You know, she went to Brown," and I'm still trying to figure out what he meant. At my cousin's bridal shower a few weeks ago, surrounded by girls with blow-dried hair and Columbia law degrees, asked to introduce myself and talk about what I do, I found myself stricken with shyness and completely at a loss. I'm not sure what it's going to take to get beyond all this. A book deal? A staff writer job? Some other impossible token I can wave around to prove to people that I actually do something? Up until about a year ago, I kept an LSAT book in my closet, just in case. I moved to a new place a few weeks ago, and I left it behind. It's time to move beyond that option, I think. I just wish I knew what I was moving towards.

Summer jobs

To comment on Gazelle's last essay more than her blog post, I would like to co-sign on the fact I think it's ridiculous that teachers outside lives should be subject to professional scrutiny. I'm currently looking for teaching jobs for the summer and fall, so I deleted just about all my online profiles, in the oft chance a prospective employer might look at it. I've never been one to be really open about my life on social networks--posting stupid Alexandra Wallacesque stuff--but the idea that anything outside my professional qualifications matters is strange and off-putting. I don't think any other profession--outside of career politician--is subject to the same microscopic lens.

What are you guys planning to do this summer for writerly work? Perhaps we can share resources--I definitely have interesting places to recommend.

(dis)taste

For years, my friend Michelle refused to eat coconut.   I always forgot if it was her or my other Hawaii friend, but I knew it was someone close to me. When a group of us were at a lunch buffet a few months ago, Michelle returned to the table with a slice of coconut chiffon cake. I expected her to at least scrape the shreds off the frosting, but no, she dug right in.

"For some reason, I thought you didn't like coconut." I had already assumed I was thinking of the wrong friend. I mean, clearly, here she was, eating it by choice.

"I didn't used to."

I knew it! She spent all of junior high, high school, and the vast majority of college crinkling her nose at the very mention of coconut. Part of me always suspected it was an intentionally ironic gimmick--a Hawaii resident disliking a signature tropical fruit (nut?), much like our vegetarian classmate whose favorite food was steak. Go figure.

But the formerly anti-coconut friend said she forced herself to get used to the flavor and has now decided that she likes it. I'm not sure it works that way, which makes me that much more suspicious of her initial distaste. She used to hate coconut as much as I hate blueberries, and I puked blueberries out my nose when I was five, so that's saying something.

I don't know why it bothers me so much that my friend apparently willed her taste to change. Maybe because I lost a partner in despising a random fruit. Maybe because it makes me wonder if she was lying about coconut all along. Or maybe because it implies that she, a squealing fan of Taylor Swift, is more mature than me.

Did I say any of this to her? Of course not. If it makes her happy, let her eat (coconut) cake.

Death By Coconut

One of the things I love about the internet is that it provides outlets to people with a lot of free time on their hands. Some create you tube videos, others constantly twitter. Most of the effort is wasted on making useless data, but occasionally something pops up that took someone hours upon hours to make that is actually really worthwhile which would have never been read by millions had the internet not been invented? discovered? created?

A while back, ABC news reported that you are more likely to die from a falling coconut then get eaten by a shark. They claimed 150 people a year die from falling coconuts. SPF lathered tourists around the world stepped more cautiously. Someone with a lot of time on their hands didn't believe it and did some pretty extensive research to show the public how ABC arrived at this ridiculous claim.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2405/are-150-people-killed-each-year-by-falling-coconuts

I'm still impressed at the fact that I can benefit from their hours of time spent on a relatively meaningless (but due to Gazelle's post, now poignant) topic, free of cost. My personal favorite "wayyyy to much time" internet creation is a analysis of what really happened during the Soprano's finale. If your not a fan of the show, you might still be able to appreciate the rediculous amount of time that went into this breakdown. Enjoy

http://masterofsopranos.wordpress.com/the-sopranos-definitive-explanation-of-the-end/

There's this thing that happens to girls around the age of thirteen, wherein life starts to hurt. Noises are too loud (especially your mother's laugh, especially in public), lights are too bright (especially at school, where they make it easier for everyone to see your red, exploding forehead), and silences seem too deep ("where is everyone? why isn't the phone ringing? are all my friends somewhere without me? yes."). This phase hit me particularly hard right around seventh grade, and I spent the next two years walking around like some sort of person-sized open wound, having screaming fights with my friends and my mother (especially my mother) over mostly imagined slights. When I think of this period now, I associate it mostly with slammed doors and missed meals. Up to that point, I'd never been a picky kid. I ate everything, as much of it as I could, as often as I could. Suddenly I could taste food in parts, first as its texture-fatty, dry, salty, grainy, slimy or cakey--then temperature, then flavor. I felt assaulted by everything I ate, so I limited by diet to pancakes, scrambled eggs and breakfast potatoes for far longer than was probably healthy. Although most of this chaos is behind me now, two of the foods I'd liked perfectly well until I was in middle school remain my mortal enemies to this day. One is mayonnaise--I can't even type the word without choking a little bit--and the other is shredded coconut. Something about those dangling strands, and their affiliation with oozy, sticky wedges of German Chocolate Cake.... A few years ago I found out that my mom feels the same way. "I can eat fresh coconut fine," she told me. "And the flavor's not the problem. It's just...the way it feels." I hadn't known this about her, and finding it out thrilled me a little bit. It seems fated, somehow, that even in those years when I was trying to get as far away from my mother as I could, I was still drawing her close.

Food Safety

You're not really supposed to eat in foreign countries. At least not in 'real' foreign countries where there aren't any product labels or FDAs or USDAs or recall alerts. You're told to be pretty wary anytime you're in a place where they don't require the health inspector's grade to be prominently displayed in the window.

You can't eat raw fruits or vegetables, even if you're in a country that sources its produce to your local grocery store. There could be bugs or bacteria or god-knows-what. Cooking is the only safe way to go, and even then, you have to make sure everything has hit a certain temperature to ensure proper sanitation. Do I need to say don't drink the water? Of course I don't. But I may need to warn you not to drink anything that doesn't come directly from a sealed bottle. The ice. The ice in that Coke Light you just got served is made of water that hasn't been properly boiled.

Obviously, you shouldn't eat street food. It's prepared by poor people who are trying to poison you. (Maybe. You never know.) This was a hard rule to follow on my 4th hour into a 7 hour train trip in Ecuador. I was riding from Riobamba to Alousi on top of a train, and the supply of Oreos I'd bought at breakfast had run out. I could smell the empanadas as we pulled into the station. A few of the other starving train travelers bought them and gorged away happily. They looked sensational. I fingered the bottle of Cipro in my bag and passed.

But no one got sick, which almost pissed me off. I missed out on delicious empanadas for no good reason.

Years later, I was in Thailand, and I wasn't going to make the same mistake again. They don't serve street empanadas in Thailand, but they do sell freshly caught shrimp off random shrimping canoes to vacationing sailors. It's a boat-to-boat transaction. There's no way the government can be involved. I purchased live shrimp from a man in a loincloth, and I ate them, and they were delicious.

Cracking the Coconut

One of my students had her mother bring me back a coconut from El Salvador.

She told me that they are the sweetest coconuts, that they bring her back to her childhood.

I awoke Monday morning dreaming of coconuts, a craving deep in my psyche, spreading to my stomach. I wanted sweet coconut milk!

I had my coconut ready to open, but when I took it out of the bag, I noticed it was a bit moist and cracked from when I dropped it on the ground Friday as I was leaving school.

But this crack could work in my favor. I had tried to get my student to open it for me. She had talked me through opening the coconut when she first told me she had ordered her mother to bring me back a coconut. I had tried to convince her to bring it to me straw ready. No such luck. Apparently, she didn’t have time that morning.

So there I sat, cracked coconut and knife in hand. But try as I might, I could not cut that coconut. They are harder than they look. I brought out the hammer and screwdriver. I admit, I worried about rust diseases, so I sterilized the metal with alcohol and told myself penicillin is made from mold, so a little mold never hurt anyone.

My neighbors must have thought construction was going on next door because I was hammering away for quite some time. Appreciative and loved as I felt that my student had brought me a coconut, I wondered why she didn’t bring a single, white woman the coconut already cut in Tupperware. Where were my native roots? I remember eating coconuts as a child, but it seemed like we had special tools to open them with and that Grandpa did the dirty work. Determined not to need a man, I was determined to open this coconut on my own. If I could close escrow as a single woman, I should be able to crack a coconut open.

Those coconuts have a lot of milk. I filled up two mugs with that sweet juice. I kept at it with the hammer, prying at the crack until at long last I had split the coconut in two.

The juice was all the sweeter, being from El Salvador, a gift from one of my top students, traveling all this way. I felt like Ginger from Gilligan’s Island. As I was telling the story to a friend that night, she said there were probably coconut opening instructions on YouTube. Next time.

The Writing Life

The writing life, combined with graduate school life, can get a bit maddening and discouraging at times. I think this line from David Foster Wallace sums it up best: “He has…an expression of deep and intractable unhappiness, as unhappy a face I’ve seen outside a graduate creative-writing program.” Unlike other people, as in non-writers, I think the best way to deal with the stress and setbacks is to bottle it all up and lie to yourself: I will have one more draft to do for this piece before I can place it in a literary magazine. I will get this book published someday to critical acclaim and commercial success. I will get a fantastic and lucrative job related to writing, where my talents will be appreciated on a daily basis. Thus, the hard part is not the writing itself, for which we have plenty of resources in learning how to improve, but the lying part. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary—the scores of rejection slips from literary magazines, the silence from the gatekeepers of publishing, the dearth of any jobs remotely related to a creative writing degree—you have to believe in whatever delusions will keep you writing and rewriting. To date, I have had great success at the lying part. The other part need not ever come, just provide me a reason to keep going.

Writing Spirals Down

I should be careful falling in to these existential thought spirals about writing.

Why write? Why spend all this time formulating thoughts, shaping them into a whole, editing it, taking out even the parts I like because they don't work or don't fit, rewriting the whole thing then hating it because it's not as good as it could be.

I'll publish it - if I'm lucky - or just post it on Facebook or maybe one of the websites that pays you a penny when someone reads it... like that's what a real writer does.

Eventually, someone might read it. They probably won't like it. (That's my first thought). Ok, they might like it but then what? It's not like they're going to print it and keep it. All this work for, what, a couple minutes of distraction for someone I don't know?

Even good writers, they slave their whole lives to produce one or two works that might be read for 100 or so years after they die... unless you're Shakespeare or something.

The joy is the process, right? Yeah, that sounds like fun. Writing's really hard! The "process" sucks. I agonize over everything, wondering if it even makes sense. Even this "stream-of-consciousness" blog post... I'm working it over, tweaking things, making things sound better - more writerly - than when I first puke-typed them out.

I like photography because at the very least you have a finished product every time. But that's too easy, I feel like I'm not a real artist - is that even the right word? - um, a real creative person when I take photos. It's all already there, all I'm doing is putting it all on a digital sensor. Whatever I've written is always incomplete in my mind, even if it's good, it's still that far from being something perfect. Besides, I'm sure someone else out there can write the same thing way better.

This tweet just popped up on my desktop:

@Quotes4Writers: “You don’t need confidence. Just write.” Paula Fox (Born 1923) Novelist

Whatever, Paula, you may not need confidence but you do need talent. "Just write?" Yeah, sure, sounds like a plan.

I mean, why even write this? So 6 people can skim it? No offense, of course, guys. But really what's the point?

It goes on like that...I'd better stop.

Chicago vs. L.A. (A Personal Account)

In Chicago, I worked for the paycheck. No other reason.

I was an assistant commercial real estate manager. I assisted in managing commercial real estate. I got my license, and the company paid for it. It was a good job in a stable industry. I got decent pay, went to lots of parties and got lots of free lunches. I didn't need to go to grad school--it just wasn't necessary for what I was doing. The company was great about promoting from within. The annual bonus was top notch. This is the kind of job normal people would like to have.

The best part about my job is that I was not overworked. Everything required of me was, for the most part, easily fit into the 40 hours I spent at my desk each week. I carried no stress home with me. Therefore, I had lots of free time.

I spent mine drinking. Chicago is a drinker's town, and I was a drinker. You can find $1 beers somewhere any night of the week, and I did. But the yuppie boys usually treated, anyways. On the weekends, I slept past noon. Frequently. I wasn't missing anything. Brunch was served everywhere until 3 in the afternoon. I had Bloody Marys with mine.

I wasn't an alcoholic. This wasn't about dependency. I just had nothing better to do.

I quit that job to enter a graduate writing program in Los Angeles--one that would certify me to do absolutely nothing in particular. A few months in I landed a job at a free paper, which is the type of place I've always wanted to work. I make shit money, so I do freelance work on the side, which is immensely time-consuming. As is my schoolwork, of course. I drive all the way across town to get to work, then I leave (I'm always running to interviews or to try some new, hip eatery that only serves bread pudding). I'm late to class, always. I get home and there's no time to relax because I have to read something or transcribe something or revise something. If I'm lucky, I can squeeze in one DVR'd episode of the Real Housewives of Wherever before bed, but that's unusual.

And I can't even drink anymore. There's just no time for intoxication. My tolerance has plummeted, and now every time I have a glass of red wine I toss and turn in the middle of the night. God, I'm old.

But I chose this. To live within my work instead of outside of it, to let it take over, and in many ways I'm much happier. That said, every once in a while, I really miss wasting time.

Filling Up

During the middle of the week, I received an email that a classmate’s mother had died. We all wrote blogs together a year ago in class, so I knew about her family, even though I didn’t know her family. She wrote about her father’s death, growing up and living by the beach. Sending a message over Facebook seemed too impersonal. Even when people were sending flowers, it just didn’t feel right. Yet, going to the funeral almost seemed too intimate. My mind came up with the most fucked up excuses, including the price of gas. I was paralyzed what to do, and my death trigger was in full force.

When my sister died in college, I was full of anger and grief. I was angry at the people who didn’t acknowledge it and the grief was so intense I don’t remember much of my undergraduate education. What kept coming up this week though was how Cindy showed up at the funeral home. Cindy and I had language arts class together in high school. We never hung out outside of class, but when she showed up three years later to show her support, I remember sitting next to her in the funeral home feeling her Catholic, Latina heart. Just her being there meant a lot and fifteen years later, I still remember. I was blathering this all through tears to my ex-priest friend while deciding whether or not to drive to the service.

I ran into my neighbor from where I used to live a year ago at Whole Foods on Friday. It’s been almost two years since his domestic partner was killed by a bus. They were together sixteen years. He said it wasn’t getting better. I understood.

I called my Aunt Chris Saturday morning because I wrote about my bee sting when I was little this past week, which happened at her house. She was painting and went to move a desk which was bolted down. She had forgotten that my Uncle Thom had bolted it down years ago so it wouldn’t tip over. It hasn’t yet been a year since he died of cancer.

Sarah, my friend growing up, posted this article when her check was missing money. She works for the military as a mid-wife. Her mom, who worked as a waitress, never lived to see Sarah’s children. The working class aren’t getting paid and can’t afford gas to drive to work. Meanwhile, the people in Congress never have a missing paycheck and I’m going to bet they always have gas in their SUV.

After the service, when I was looking at the collage of pictures of my classmate’s mother, the wash of grief came. There are no words of comfort for death, I have found.

On the way home, I should have filled up my gas tank, but I was too exhausted emotionally and politically to do so. I came home and took a nap, filling up. Then on my walk I imagined myself doused in gasoline rising up like the Sinead O’Connor song “The Phoenix from the Flame” and had a good laugh for my dead sister and best friend.

SMS and Parenthesis

Starting Tuesday night, I had a good 24 hours. Got a dream offer from SCR, spent a solid four hours with this guy I really dig (call him Z) and found out he’s even into poetry. Work on Wednesday was so-so, but at least I could leave at an early 5:30 and join my foodie friend for a Pineapple Pacman at the Alibi Room. I was even in a good enough mood to endure a Korean horror flick that Z recommended.

The film (Thirst, for you K-cinema enthusiasts) was indeed heavy, but I could take that box of chocolates. Other films had done far worse damage to my emotional state, namely Requiem for a Dream, The Last Kiss, and A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints. As the credits rolled and I took this into consideration, my phone emitted the slow crescendo of a brass chord. It was the text ID for my mom. I need warnings like this to prepare myself for any kind of communication with her. Her previous ringer IDs include “Totally Fucked” from Spring Awakening and “Lux Aeterna” from Requiem.

The text read: “Hey mutt, just wanted to tell you that Laura is sharing things you’ve told her with Robin and Robin is sharing it with whomever she chooses…just sayin…” My first thought was, Well, I had a good 24 hours. I guess time’s up.

The only “things” of note that I disclosed to my cousin Laura were the guilt complex fueling my too-responsible-for-22 outlook, and the highlights from a series of self-destructive shenanigans that I survived when studying abroad in Australia almost three years ago.

My stomach yanked at my throat, my equilibrium taking a violent swerve. I wanted to puke. To cry. To implode and disappear.

It was 11pm. What could I do? I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep, of course, but I couldn’t talk to anyone. I couldn’t fact-check my mother’s claims by calling those she named, and I couldn’t frantically dial my best friends for advice because they were fast asleep, three hours ahead on the East Coast.

So I replied, “Fan-fucking-tastic.” What more was there to say?

I waded through Thursday, trying to Zen the fuck out of the situation and convince myself to let go of things I couldn’t control. I couldn’t make anyone forget whatever they’d been told. I didn’t know what exactly was out there, but I couldn’t retrieve it. Taoism is great in concept, but ironically difficult to practice.

I was home and in sweats when Z texted, asking if I wanted to join him and his improv friends for “drinks or something” after their show. I jumped on the offer, and though we ended up skipping drinks (too many under-21s in the group), it felt good to laugh over a plate of comfort food at Roscoe’s. Walking back to my car, Z asked what was wrong, why I’d been so eager to get “a solid drink,” as I’d phrased it earlier. I asked if he wanted the short, vague story or the long life story. He said it was up to me.

We ended up at my apartment, and I finally confessed that I wanted to tell him the long story, but was afraid of scaring him away. We’d known each other for two weeks, and the various strings behind my recent drama seemed a little intense for that time frame. He said not to worry, and though I didn’t fully believe him, I gave the long, dirty, shameful story.

Turns out he used to harbor some of the same habits that peppered my past. We shared more than either of us expected in fucked up families, flinching histories, residual fears, the whole lot. We both breathed a little easier with everything on the table, and I finally slept.

During our goodbyes the next morning, he said, “I hope you feel better.” It took me a second to remember what he was talking about; I’d forgotten about the previous day’s low. I blinked at the brief pang in my gut, but that’s it. Just a blink.

It wasn’t as if the situation had remedied itself, or that I was suddenly impervious to whatever would come when I talked to my mom a few days later. No, it was simply that, at that moment, my life went all American Beauty, and with everything Z had given me to be thankful for, I couldn’t be in a bad mood. I wouldn’t.

Kafka was a Bureaucrat

For the first two years after college, I worked as an assistant at a megalithic entertainment agency in Beverly Hills. A big part of my job involved reading mainstream magazines like Elle, Vanity Fair, Cosmo and Scientific American to search for articles that might make good movies. This sounds like a lot more fun than it was. I almost never found anything our screenwriter clients would be interested in , and when I did, my write up went into a database that no one ever looked at. The whole thing was extremely Kafkaesque, which was why, when I came across the list below in a copy of Harper's, I cut it out and kept it.

Kafka, Esq.

From titles of briefs written by Franz Kafka for the Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia, in Prague, where he was employed as a lawyer for fourteen years. The documents are included in Franz Kafka: The Office Writings, published this fall by Princeton University Press. Translated from the German by Eric Patton and Ruth Hein.

The Scope of Compulsory Insurance for the Building Trades

Fixed-Rate Insurance Premiums for Small Farms Using Machinery

Inclusion of Private Automobile Firms in the Compulsory Insurance Program

Workmen's Insurance and Employers

Petition of the Toy Producers' Association in Katharinaberg, Erzebirge

Criminal Charge against Josef Renelt for the Illegal Withholding of Insurance Fees

Jubilee Report: Twenty-Five Years of the Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute

On the Examinations of Firms by Trade Inspectors

Measures for Preventing Accidents from Wood-Planing Machines

Help Disabled Veterans! An Urgent Appeal to the Public

I've kept this list through 7 apartments, and three different jobs. Right now, it's taped to the wall above the desk where I write. Whenever I'm grading freshman composition papers and feeling particularly sorry for myself, it helps to remember that even Kakfa had a day job.

Shrugged

It was a particularly stressful Wednesday. Work was hard. The strange thing about my job is that my performance is constantly quantified by a dollar amount in a little box at the bottom of my computer screen. It’s called a “profit and loss” box. Every time I make a trade, the box updates the number, either adding to it or subtracting from it, depending on whether it was a good trade or bad trade. I try not to attach any emotion to the box (or even look at it for that matter), but at the end of the day it’s nice when the number is large and positive. That day the number was large, but not positive.

I was a tad flustered in traffic, late to night class again, when I realized my gasoline gauge was at a dire level. I pulled into the station. The conversation went something like:

ME:

How much?

GAS PUMP:

Large round number!

ME:

Shit, seriously?

GAS PUMP:

Blame Gaddafi man, I’m just the messenger.

ME:

Yeah, but still. Maybe you made a mistake.

GAS PUMP:

Nope machines don’t make mistakes or talk to people for that matter so you should probably get going because you’re late.

And late to class I was. We had a Hollywood agent come in and tell us about the fruitless years of toiling you have to go through before you can even think about making money as a writer. She advised us to "carefully consider things" before entering the industry. I exited the room feeling like Atlas holding the weight of the world on my shoulders. Things were grim.

As I walked out of the building I felt a surprising warm breeze. It was the first time in months I didn’t need a jacket, or even sleeves. There was a sweetness to the air. I could smell the trees and the budding foliage. Electricity ran through the sidewalks of campus. A buzz. People were loud. It was a happy, enjoyable, loud.

With every breath of warm night air my muscles relaxed, and a thought hit me across the face like a playful slap from a long lost lover.

SUMMER IS COMING!

Oh my God, it’s almost here. The beach, and the girls, and the sun, and the concerts, and the long days, and the tan, and the freedom, and the girls. Everything good was ahead of me. Suddenly I had nothing to worry about. I've decided to take the world off of my shoulders and slip into some sandals.

Locked Up

A few months ago, I got addicted to the documentary series, Locked Up, because unlike other purported reality shows, I knew that the filmmakers could not fabricate scenarios. The prisoners documented were 'locked up' for real crimes. They were facing the threat of real violence from rival prisoners and real punishment from guards--some unbelievably maddening, like solitary confinement. One such episode told of a university within the prison, one of the few remaining programs of its kind, where prisoners could get an associates degree, I believe. As the holder of an associates degree from community college, I consider it roughly the equivalent of a minor in a four-year university, but earning one, to the prisoners, was a huge accomplishment. Yet even the prisoners who took up this education were caught up in a major dilemma. Since most were still gang members, they were expected to fight on behalf of their clique when a conflict arose. Doing so, however, would almost guarantee expulsion from the educational program. Not doing so would incur the wrath of fellow gang members. Luckily, no altercations went down, and one particularly troubled inmate was able to graduate.

Viewing the show made me want to participate in an inmate education program. I know our very own MPW funds internships teaching through Homeboy Industries, which is a program that helps rehabilitated prisoners out in the real world. Sadly, because of scheduling issues, I was unable to apply, but now as I search for post-MPW teaching jobs, I would consider teaching inmates, should a position be made available. I could not think of anything more rewarding than helping people who have a genuine desire to turn their lives around.

The High Cost of the Death Penalty

The only justification for the death penalty is for the state to act as a conduit for the vengeance of the individual against the perpetrator. Any other justification for keeping the practice intact has been consistently refuted by the facts. Let's examine them one at a time.

1. The death penalty reduces the prison population, thus lowering the burden to taxpayers.
Most proponents of the death penalty concede that it costs much more to keep an inmate in prison for life than the cost of the legal process and maintenance of a separate prison - "death row" - for those sentenced to death. In a 2009 Los Angeles Times article, John Van de Kamp - former California Attorney General - cites a study that put the cost of maintaining the death penalty at $125 million a year more than sentencing prisoners to life in prison. In a state that is struggling to make ends meet, it's difficult to justify the practice merely from a financial standpoint.

2. The death penalty is a deterrent.
Opinion differs more on this point but it's hard to argue with the following simple statistic: states that do not have the death penalty have lower murder rates than states that do and, similarly, countries that have outlawed the practice have lower rates than the U.S. To say that it is a deterrent is to assume that murderers, often in the grip of rage or under the influence of drugs or alcohol, is fully conscious of the consequences of their actions. Most think they'll never be caught.

3. No innocent prisoner has been ever been executed.
Proponents of the death penalty have argued that no innocent man has ever been executed. Other studies have suggested that of the 200 prisoners later cleared by DNA evidence, 14 were on death row. It's hard to argue that if even one prisoner is wrongly executed, that the practice should be continued.

Is vengeance a viable excuse for a society to maintain a practice that many other countries have relegated to a barbaric past of slavery, debtors' prisons, and corporal punishment? Our Constitution not only protects against "cruel and unusual punishment" but is in place to protect the individual against the tyranny of the many. Our court system is engineered not to mete out revenge for the victims but to protect society from future harm.

Rejecting the death penalty will not excuse the atrocities of those sentenced to death but it will show that, as a society, we've moved one step closer to a utopia where the state will never abridge the right to live of any of its citizens.

Open Season

As a currency trader for a fund who’s two main offices are in the Chicago and London time zones, my working life occurs in the early hours of the west coast morning. My first trades usually occur around 5 a.m. which means 4 am wake up times. Despite rising before the average person’s alarm clock even thinks about chirping, I usually get to jump in the ocean, thus ending my responsibilities, around 11 a.m.

I’ve chosen this lifestyle because nothing in the world makes me happier than surfing. I’m allowed to do what most people dream of, and that’s doing what I love almost everyday. One funny aspect of surfing in the middle of the week day is that I get the typically busy Manhattan beaches to myself. Being in the ocean alone frightens most, but I relish in the opportunity for solitude in busy Los Angeles.

Without thousands of tourists plaguing the water during the week, the local wildlife has a chance to peak their head above water. I get to see some incredible animals on a daily basis; dolphins, seals, all kinds of fish, although my favorites are still the hunting pelicans. If you know what to look for it’s not as spooky as it seems. Dolphins have a curved dorsal fin and bob up and down whereas sharks have a straight triangular fin and swim in a straight line.

Recently the dolphins have entered mating season. The males are ultra aggressive. They flash their tails and leap out of the water. I watched two compete the other day for a female’s attention by seeing which one could slap the water the hardest. It’s incredible how drastic their behavior changes when sex is involved. The normally docile animals become feverishly active.

After going out to the bars in Venice last weekend after the first warm Friday of spring I can safely say that human males still undergo this same transformation. I also thought it was really interesting that babies were the subject of the first official spring time blog entries. We are decedents of animals and despite our best efforts towards sophistication, we remain animals.

Maybe It Was a Bad Time to Bring It Up

I've spent the last 12-some-odd years doing everything in my power not to have a baby. Born Catholic, I was raised to believe that sex before marriage pretty much equaled pregnancy, so despite all the precautions I took, I spent many-a post-coital hour saying prayers, begging the Lord not to punish me.

As I grew and spent time in more mature relationships, the paranoia subsided, but every late pill sent a chill of fear up my uterus.

That is, however, until just the last few months, as I've mentally marked off the days until my 30th birthday. Suddenly a new panic has set in - what if I can't have a baby?

I, of course, have no real reason to fear this. Plenty of women have babies after 30. Even my own mother did. But in a mere 23 days I will hit that mark, and I'm not married, nor to I plan to be in the next few years. But even if I were, I don't feel anywhere near ready to be responsible for a being other than myself.

Yet there's still this nagging worry that I may actively be missing my window, and no matter how hard I try to be cool and calm about it when I bring it up to my boyfriend (who, mind you, is four years my junior) I always end up coming off something like this:

Look Don't Touch

I'm terrified of having kids. I know how much my parents messed me up, and I can't imagine being responsible for that kind of damage, or on the flip side, the pressure of ensuring minimal damage incurs. Having said that, I love dribbling bits of rebellion into the life of my infant niece, adding some variety to the piano-lesson-calculus-tutor-track-and-field future her overachieving parents surely have planned out for her. As I see it, these are my responsibilities as an aunt:

I want to show her how to turn her hips when she throws a punch
so she'll never have to worry on the playground,
though she may spend some time with the principal.
I want to show her the original Star Wars
while she's young enough to overlook the thin story, stiff acting,
and incest-that-almost-was between Luke and Leia.
I want to show her where to smudge her eyeliner
to look like she's exhausted
so her teachers will take pity and allow late work.
I want to show her old pictures of her father
because even though he's always had those crow's feet,
the light behind them only came after she was born.
I want to show her covers from Cosmopolitan
and tell her that, under no illusion or circumstance,
should she ever believe the articles inside.
I want to show her that tattoos are forever--
even laser removal leaves scars--
but henna will panic her parents just as much.
I want to show her the difference between sunset and sunrise
and fill the night between with inebriated hours that
we'll never disclose to her father.
I want to show her that love isn't like the movies,
but with the right one and a little luck,
it'll feel like it.
I want to show her all my mistakes
so she won't see me as the model her parents want,
but know that the decisions are hers to make.

Bringing Down The Walls

After I received my layoff notice from the school district, I was driving to work, and for the first time, I didn’t want to have a child. Corruption. Seems like I just can’t justify certain things in my mind anymore.

The other week, I went to a panel against the death penalty, and Mark Clements spoke about being falsely accused of arson as an adolescent, tortured into a confession, and spending 27 years in prison until finally granted freedom. What really resonated with me, though, was the lack of education in prison…how prisoners don’t have access to the internet, not training them to be prepared to work in the world when they get out, how the grants for college have been discontinued, how in some states, they can’t even receive letters—only postcards.

When I went to the University of Michigan, I thought higher education was “the answer.” What I found was a lot of students who knew how to work a system, but didn’t necessarily care about the betterment of society. I sought out study with Buzz Alexander and started working in the prisons. We videotaped Detroit at-risk inner-city youth at their high school and brought it back to the prisons where the men responded in taped dialogue to the boys. Here, was my first experience with service learning.

A year later when I was a senior at Michigan walking across the diag, I ran into Nate, one of the prisoners. Out of prison, he told me he was on a grant going to the University. On a sunny Spring day in Michigan, I gave him a hug. He had tears in his eyes.

By examining the literacy levels of fourth grade students and determining how many students read “below basic,” state departments of corrections use student literacy levels as “penitentiary forecasters” to allow them to project how many prison beds they will need over the course of the subsequent decade. I haven’t even touched upon prisons for profits, the ratio of minorities in prison, or the price of a prisoner in comparison to the price of education/mental health services. I’m sure you already know this and the work of The Innocence Project.

We have no computer lab at the inner-city public high school where I work for the students to use whenever they want. I think this is criminal. When I started writing blogs with the students using the laptop carts, some students didn’t even know how to type a word document because they didn’t have the money for their own personal computers.

While I was working with my mentor teacher on my National Board Certification, she spoke about bringing down the walls of the classroom—how my field trips to The Getty, to The Museum of Tolerance, and to USC have brought the learning into the real world for the students.

When I told my college boyfriend (who was much older) about how I saw Nate in the diag, he kind of freaked out and lectured me about how I had to be careful about an ex-con…how I shouldn’t be such a naive college student. After seeing Mark Clements speak at the panel, I thought about that moment meeting Nate in the diag—how the walls had come down for him, how I saw him as a peer, and that was why he had tears in his eyes. I saw him not as a prisoner, but as human.

Bothersome

The majority of my writing inspiration comes from things that bother me. I’m not sure I like it that way, but you don’t really get to pick what inspires you, do you?

Most of the times that I actually have a reason to sit down and write something is because I feel that it will either A. make me feel better as a venting process, or B. Actually get someone to read my message and hopefully help change the thing that bothers me. Some times it’s both. I get satisfaction from the process. Luckily I don’t think I’m necessarily alone on this. How many songs have been sung about failed love? How many books have been written in attempt to alter the course of something wrong? Didn’t our current president run on the inspiration and platform of change? Occasionally I witness something so beautiful, or something so amazing that I feel the need to share it with others, but it’s less frequent then I’d like.

Recently I had a friend come home from his second tour in Iraq. He hasn’t found a job yet. He told me that unless he wants to be a body guard or police man, his networking options are limited. He feels inferior to my friends and I who had gotten jobs when he got shipped out. While he was risking his life for us, we were making money, and he’s the one that feels emasculated, but there are very few people willing to help. This is something that bugs me. So I write about it.

Life Chronicles

Twitter and Facebook provide a way for people who don't think of themselves as writers to put their lives on paper. Status updates, if modified regularly over a significant period of time, can constitute a sort of unintentional memoir. Facebook chronicles the growth of babies into children into actual people, the blossoming of casual relationships into more serious ones, ("Jack is 'in a relationship'." "Jack is 'engaged.' "Jack is 'married.'") and vice versa (Jack is no longer 'in a relationship'.) I wonder sometimes if we'll show our grandchildren backed up copies of our feeds instead of scrapbooks or photo albums.

Clicking mindlessly through Facebook tonight, I discovered something else Facebook records, and I'm still not sure how I feel about it. A few years ago, I friended a boy who'd been a very close friend my junior year in high school, and with whom I'd since lost touch. I knew he was suffering from cancer because he posted witty status updates about his chemo regimen pretty regularly. I hadn't seen him in my feed in a while, so I decided to look him up. His wall was filled with messages from friends sending their condolences to his family. Apparently, he died in February.

His facebook profile is now a sort of living monument to his memory. Some people still post to it as though he's alive to respond, while others have posted photos and poetry commemorating his life. I suppose the page will live on forever, unless facebook has a policy about deceased users. It seems morbid somehow, but also somehow...necessary? The wall posts themselves tell a story, and allow everyone to celebrate his memory, not just those close enough to him to have been invited to his funeral. The posts are thoughtful and sad, and I would imagine it means a lot to his family to know how much their son was loved. So are virtual memorials tasteful or tacky? This seems like a question that's only going to get more important as more and more people join social networking sites, and I'm still not sure what I think.

A Serious Journalism Student

As a journalism undergrad, I thought writing was serious business. In class, we wrote about serious subjects, almost always in reverse pyramid form. There was no such thing as snark in journalism school. Writing wasn't funny stuff.

It seemed so serious, in fact, that I was scared off of it for a bit. I started favoring advertising/PR classes within the major because I liked the idea that they opened me up to the multimedia forum. I spent most of my time, however, writing press releases for Oreo cookies and coming up with ad campaigns for Gambler's Anonymous. Not of that was all that funny either.

But years later, I worked under a blog editor and news writer who completely warped my view on what living the life of a journalist could look like. As a good reporter should, she had her finger on the pulse of everything going on in the city, but when the story merited it, (which was often) she slipped a joke in. Maybe several. She didn't take everything so friggin' seriously.

Not only that, she loved math jokes and general nerdery, and was a die hard fan of TV. This floored mostly because I'd never really heard anyone openly admit their love of television without fear of being shunned.

I told her I wanted to write about Oprah, and her response was, "Oprah's a goldmine." She let me. I couldn't believe someone was actually allowing me to take the "Oprah beat."

Ok, so writing about Oprah isn't "journalism." I'm not arguing that it is. But no one told the journalism students of 10 years ago that this is the kind of writing life one could have. It was such a surprise.

Picture Books for Adults

Is there a bias against multimedia writing art form? Probably. Is it a form that’s being revolutionized by e-books on tablet computers? Hopefully. Should there be a bias against works that dare to present the written word in unconventional ways? No.

After all, the very first book printed on a press with moveable type, the Guttenberg Bible, was beautifully enhanced with illuminations – painted decorations to the text – and rubrications – handwritten titles, chapter headings, and instructions. Though the Bible was printed on a press, the typesetters left room for artists to hand paint these enhancements. These rare books are not prized now just because of their scarcity and historical worth, but also because they are one-of-a-kind pieces of art.

The negative attitudes toward works that utilize multimedia elements probably stem from the fact that each of us grew up with them. All of your favorite childhood books – Winnie the Pooh, Where’s Waldo, Where the Wild Things Are – are illustrated. Even more interactive are the original "e-books" with buttons that play a sound when you come to a certain part of the story. But, of course, when we grow up we see all this as “kid’s stuff.” As serious adults, we’re supposed to read books that consist solely of words with white spaces in between.

Seriously though, how often do you open a really heavy autobiography or history book and flip right to the glossy pages in the middle that have the pictures? Perhaps it’s snobbery that dictates books should exclusively be a boring, printed word endeavor. It’s a bit ironic, when you think about it. I mean, aren’t books supposed to open minds?

Some hope for multimedia writers is here with the ascendancy of the iPad and its tablet computer cousins. E-books, broken free from their Etch-A-Sketch Nook prisons, have all kinds of possibilities for creative minds to enhance the text, whether it’s pop-up movies, morphing text and illustrations, or new formats that have yet to be imagined. I realize it’s a little hypocritical for me to write this screed in such an archaic style.

So, here’s a picture ---->

What's it like?

As writers/artist/creators of media, we dig for new material. Or we're supposed to, right? Wouldn't we all like to think of that super cool, completely unheard of, 100% original story that audiences everywhere will love for being different? More often than not, I (and I'm sure many others) have to settle for an original re-telling of an old story. It happens. In fact, after millennia of storytelling, it's pretty damn inevitable.

But I don't go into a project asking, "What existing work can I rewrite for my own purposes?" I like to think that the screenplays into which I've poured hundreds of hours are different--maybe not good, but different. The last thing I want someone to ask is that of "what it's like," but the question has come up in every pitch I've ever witnessed. If I thought that my script was as simple as The Matrix meets Ground Hog Day (I'm looking at you, Source Code), I wouldn't have written past the first act. Do people have something against ideas that aren't really "like" anything that's been recognizably done before? I understand the principle of comfort in familiarity, but if all people accept are stories that boil down to x (Oscar) + y (blockbuster), won't we end up with a giant, box office slush pile of things we've already seen? Oh, wait...

Multimedia Dating...Fiction?

I have been internet dating nine years. It’s almost like a second job—weeding out the scams from Nigeria, the middle-aged fat, bald men who post avatar model pictures to represent themselves, the men who say they are ten years younger, or thousands of dollars richer. But it’s also my own warped escape…I’m like a hamster on a wheel pretending to get somewhere, feeling like I am exercising in the search for my baby’s daddy.

I had just seen the film Trust when this very hot, young man IMed me. Of course, I was suspicious. I told him I had just seen the film Trust and that he could very well be a predator. Being a film major, he had already seen Trust, which I was most impressed by. Plus he had a high gradepoint when he was in high school he claimed during my vetting process, so this too impressed me. The dumb guys never last long when they become offended when I correct their grammar. He wanted me to go on me.tokbox.com so he could prove to me he wasn’t a middle-aged fat, bald man. I, however, thought it was a scam to steal my bank statements. So I slept on it.

But after a day, I decided my curiosity could get the better of me. I went on and checked it out. He had given me an email and password, and although I suspected he could be a terrorist bomber, when I didn’t blow up, I thought perhaps I could let go of a little of my paranoia. So that night, we met on me.tokbox.com. Well, I saw him, but having no web cam, he didn’t see me. He really was a hot, young man, but of age, and yes, I did make him show me his ID. But I told him NOT to show me his penis because I would be TRAUMATIZED.

He inspired a sonnet. I’m always up for a good muse as a writer. But since he is one of those artistic types, I had to lay down the copyright laws right up front. I told him I owned the rights to our dialogue…that it was my play we were writing, not fodder for his next film.

He pushed me into newmedia dating. My girlfriend had told me I could download the skype app to my iphone. I had thought my Silencer Sonnet had scared him off, but the other night, there I was IMing him and downloading the skype app to my iphone, having the most titillating first experience holding up a mirror to my 3GS trying to see his face and my face at the same time on my iphone.

I think it is all fiction. He is creating who he wants me to see and I am writing Haikus for this boy at NYU because I like the way it sounds:

OkCupid

Maybe not cupid
He was too young anyway
New media gone

But while it lasted, it was great fun. And relatively safe, 3000 fictitious miles away.

The Bias against Multimedia Writing

As I've been working on my own multimedia fiction, I've been looking for inspiration. I want to see what different authors have done with the form, and how they have done it. I'm always excited to see, along with the prose, experiments in graphics (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Collected Works of T.S. Spivet, Breakfast of Champions, etc), typography (House of Leaves, The Raw Shark Texts, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, etc), the book design itself (The Original of Laura, Flatland, Tree of Codes), or unusual formats (stories told through Facebook as we've seen, Egan's powerpoint chapter, etc).

Despite my love for multimedia writing, I find it enormously difficult to find works of this sort, both online and in the stores. I'm left scouring the Internet for books deemed similar to the ones I have already read, and I feel like I've nearly exhausted those recommendations. My last resort is often to just go to a bookstore, and flip through the pages of novels that look like they might be multimedia candidates. This method is of course extremely inefficient and whenever a bookseller sees me doing this, I feel like an idiot. I almost want to say, "I'm not a lazy reader looking for pictures. I'm a writer looking for inspiration." But I never do. The embarrassment is worth some of the recent finds I've located: Criss Cross, The Last Invisible Boy, The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

Do you have any recommendations of multimedia writing? How do you find the model works for the writing you want to accomplish?

Stop Acting White!

I’m a white male. I’m not accustomed to being on the “wrong side” of racism ... well, beyond the trivial “white men can’t dance” (or play basketball, or run fast). So I was sincerely confused when, a few years ago, I was shopping in an Inglewood Target with my girlfriend – who’s Hispanic… uh, Latina? …Caucasian? – and heard a mother yell at her son, “Stop acting white!”

I joked to my girlfriend, “What did she mean: Stop acting like an upstanding member of society?” She looked at me weird and said, “No, she meant stop acting out of control.” I was dumbfounded. She explained that she’d heard the term a lot growing up and that it derived from a belief amongst some people “of color” that white parents aren’t strict enough with their kids and let them run amok.

I was surprised. It’s not like before this incident I was unable to understand how a pejorative slur could hurt (I hated being called a nerd in elementary school) and I sincerely felt that I was empathetic enough to understand how the N-word or any other ethnic putdowns could be devastating. But to experience racism – especially when I had no inkling that “acting white” was even an insult – was eye-opening.

I can truthfully say I wasn’t offended – my Mom was pretty strict so I knew better – but up until that point I thought white people were only seen as oppressors and elitists. How could the proponents of the “nuclear family” be bad parents?

But to think that there are defined stereotypes for each race is to possess the same mindset that fosters racism. I needn’t list the stereotypes here – we all know them – but realizing that they are as ephemeral and, thus, as meaningless as the slurs that evoke them is actually sort of comforting.

Even the terms that we generally accept as “safe” are, well, kinda silly.

What’s an African-American? Isn’t pasty-white Charlize Theron from the Transvaal one of those?

What’s black? Isn’t it really closer to brown?

“Of color?” What, white isn’t a color?

Hispanic? Um, if all people who were once ruled by Spain are known by this term, call me British!

I’m supposed to be white. But I’m really more kind of tan.

I don't mean this to sound flip. Yes, of course the hate that backs these words causes the real harm but a little ontological reality check can’t hurt. Therefore, the next time someone hurls an insult my way, I’ll try to remember that, well, it’s all relative.

Barack Obama: Our First Black President. Or is he?

Sometimes I feel a bit strange that we call Barack Obama our first black president. As we are all well aware, really he's biracial, but it's as if we called it "close enough" in order usher in the historical moment with that much more vigor.

Perhaps we consider him black more so than biracial because his father is African, and therefore passed on a stronger presence of those genes than many African-Americans would. I don't know the stats, but we know that many African-Americans have Caucasian blood woven into them, so it makes sense that the combination of his father's genes with those of his white mother would give him a similar biological makeup.

Or maybe we consider him more black because he married a black woman and had, for all intents and purposes, black children with her. The Obamas, based solely on appearance, look more like a black family than a biracial family.

But this is not about Barack Obama not being "black enough." Not at all. He can be anything and everything he is. But by labeling him "black" as opposed to biracial, is that not somewhat of a slight to the biracial people of this country? As the pot that is America continues to melt and each generation's heritage becomes more and more blended, would it not be far more encouraging to celebrate Obama's multicultural story?

The seeds of this thought were planted when I read a fellow scribe's blog the day after the 2008 election. A biracial person herself, she wrote, "I feel like America has seen me and has said that I’m okay. I really feel a part of America. My family has never given me reason to believe that I can’t achieve anything I want, but I think that today I truly believe it. I mean, there’s a biracial President headed to the White House and he didn’t have to pick or deny any part of himself to get there."

But as a nation, we kind of did pick, and maybe that's a shame. Perhaps we did ourselves a disservice in forcing Obama to fill in just one of those bubbles on the Scantron survey.

The Only Black Girl at the Literary Fiction Reading

So I wrote about this already on my other blog a bit, but here goes:

I spend a lot of time thinking about the ways in which the books you read define who you become. Growing up, I was obsessed with Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver and Flannery O'Connor, mostly because the writers I knew and respected told me I should be. As I got older, I leaned primarily towards American literary fiction: first Jeffrey Eugenides, Rick Moody, Bret Easton Ellis and Jonathan Lethem and, later, Joy Williams, Chris Adrian and Lydia Davis. I read everything these authors wrote, and when they came to read their work in Houston, or Providence or later, Los Angeles, I made sure to sign up for tickets early to get a front row seat.

There's a song by the Cocker Spaniels called "The Only Black Guy at the Indie Rock Show." I can sympathize. For much of my life, I've been the only black girl at the literary fiction reading. This wasn't something I really even thought about until about a year ago when I went to seen an obscure (so obscure I don't think he's ever been published) fiction writer read in the lobby of the Standard Hotel. After the author finished, he thanked everyone in the audience and then looked at me and said "as for those of you who just happened to be passing through, thanks for listening." The reason this affected me so greatly, I think, is because I'd gone through considerable pains to attend the event. I'd recently totaled my car, which meant I'd had to take the bus. (I don't know how many of you have ever attempted to take the Metro from Koreatown to Hollywood, but let me tell you, it's no easy feat.) I know the slight (was it even a slight?) was unintentional, but it still hurt. It also made me think. When I'm reading, I tend not to think about the color of the writer, or the characters s/he creates. I love good literature in a way that has nothing to do with my feelings about race. I wonder, though, does it work both ways? Do authors ever stop to consider the color of their readers? Should they?

Selling Your Individuality

When I worked for a big investment bank in New York City, I used to get passed on opportunities simply because I wasn’t an alumni of an Ivy League School. Those schools had a huge presence in the firm I worked for and their alumni would favor the younger workers from their schools. It bugged me like crazy at the time. I knew I was a better worker than most of the Ivy Leaguers, but I had no control over the decisions being made.

In my annual review I brought this up to a managing director I respected (in a professional manner of course). He said to me, “If we had the time to truly review all of the analysts work I’m sure this type of stuff would never happen.” Oh wonderful, I thought. Someone is finally going to sympathize with me. “But”, he followed up, and there always seemed to be a “but” in that industry, “We will never have the time or money to properly do so, so instead of bitching to me, why don’t you work out a way to sell yourself? Until you do that, you will always just be a kid who didn’t go to Harvard.”

Luckily at that point I was already numb to the harsh feedback that came with finance. Being a young white male I rarely get the bad end of categorization, so I don’t have too much experience. But the business world did teach me a harsh lesson. People in positions of power will always operate with fixed resources, especially time, and as long as they do, they will make decisions by categorization. To them, the average Ivy grad is a better banker than one from a non-Ivy school. To some particularly awful ones, a white banker is better than a black banker. Complaining didn’t help me alter that. I just had to work that much harder to change the managing minds.

Breaking out of a bubble

Reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X changed my life in high school. But it was also the beginning of my race education. Right around that time, our school had some guest lecturer do the blue eyes/brown eyes experiment. We also read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

After that, when someone commented on how they liked my eyes, there was always guilt mixed in with a race education discourse I felt I needed to dispel instead of just saying thank you.

In college theatre, I played a few evil racist white women.

When I was seeing a guy in New York City, I was told, “My mother wouldn’t have a problem with a white woman, but my sister would.”

Teaching in South Los Angeles for years, I am constantly dealing with race, class, and culture. It gets tiring. Especially when programs like UCLA and TeamsAmericorps bring in lecturers who pound our country’s racist history in our face, leaving me feeling powerless and drained.

My colleague who also teaches in the inner city once said through tears that being “the rich white woman from Beverly Hills” gets old. She’s never lived in Beverly Hills, was married to a Latino while living in Mexico, and is now pregnant with a Latino baby.

When my students ask, I tell them about my Finnish grandfather who didn’t go to high school because he had to drop out and help on the farm. He was the oldest of fifteen children. Or how my great grandmother was part of the Polawadamee tribe, but her mother died very young from tuberculosis. Or why The Magdalene Laundries are so devastating to me because of my Irish ancestry.

It’s easier to put people in bubbles…because once people aren’t able to categorize, data isn’t as simple as making a statistical graph to support your presentation.

Just today, as my students were taking the high school exit exam, they asked me what to bubble in for ethnicity. Thinking in the bubble keeps people in a bubble. One of our standards is 2.2 Write responses to literature that show understanding of key ideas; analyze language and theme; provide textual support; reveal awareness of author’s style; and address ambiguities, nuances, and complexities in the text. Until we can understand the complexities of ethnicity, I don’t know how we expect our students to graduate high school prepared to be part of a community.

Other

Are you:

a. Caucasian

b. African American

c. Hispanic

d. Asian

e. Other

Chinesehawaiianrussianspanishitalianfilipinopuertoricanturkish

Is there a bubble for that? Let me shade

a pie chart instead of this scantron.

Am I Chinese because someone I never met

lived in Shanghai two hundred years ago? Or

should I label myself white because I can

trace my DNA to three different parts of Europe?

Call me a bastard

because my birth broke my father’s first marriage.

Masochist, because I’ll let you hit me

just so I can kiss you back.

Sick because I coughed,

Tired because I yawned.

Happy because I smile

and you buy it.

Classify me with a bunch of half-true lies;

I’ll leave your survey blank.

I wrote this a while back, and though I’m not very proud of the quality of writing, I still feel strongly about the content. Very few things get a rise out of me, positive or negative, but surveys and profiles that request ethnic/racial information but provide limited options have always bothered me. When I wrote this poem “Other,” my frustration was directed at college surveys, standardized tests, scholarship applications, etc. I don’t mind providing my ethnic information as long as I can provide it in its entirety (see below).

Funny side fact in an otherwise serious rant: apparently I’m not even really Chinese. I’m Scythian, which basically means I come from a tribe of nomadic Mongolians that pillaged the borders of China, Russia, and Turkey way back when. My 1/8 Russian comes from another source, but because there’s no way to tell how much of the Scythian was Turkish, it’s not part of the graph.

My irritation with the ethnicity question doesn’t flare up often, but recently, I’ve heard the phrase “of color” used several times in a professional environment. The first time, I flinched and shrugged it off. Before then, I’d only heard the phrase used in Dave Chapelle and decades-old archival footage. Surely, it must have been a fluke.

Then the phrase came up at another meeting. And another. Now more people are using the phrase, and I wonder if they understand the meaning they create by using those two words. They don’t want to say black, Hispanic, Asian, Middle Eastern, or go through listing every possibility in fear of forgetting someone. I get it. But “of color” translates directly into “not white,” and doesn’t that just emphasize the divide between Caucasians (who are often mixed anyway in that most are Euro-mutts) and everyone else? It also groups all non-whites in a single blur of any-shade-will-do; pretty counterproductive when one is trying to be politically correct.

When I first had to answer the dreaded ethnicity question, I asked my teachers what to do, and they told me to fill in the bubble for whatever I’m the most of. My two biggest chunks are equal parts Chinese and Spanish, but there's room for consolidation by continent, right? Take a closer look at that graph and do a little math--I’m technically more white (7/16 or 43.75%) than anything else I could mark (37.5% Asian, 6.25% Hispanic, and don't get me started on the remaining 12.5% being Hawaiian vs. Asian Pacific Islander vs. Native American), but no one looks at me and thinks white.

So what do I count as? Am I just a functional minority, a little bit "of color” tinting all my paint? When I was first hired full-time, the HR director asked the mandatory question of my ethnicity for paperwork purposes (apparently for a staff survey, but is that even legal?). Before I could say anything, she guessed Chinese, but I told her I was also part white, among other things. She flat out laughed, did not believe me, and asked what she should really put me down as. If I can’t check more than one option, and if there’s not a “multiracial” option, I have to go with “Other.”