Author Archives: Absence Alternatives

About Absence Alternatives

I have to take on a secret identity so I may speak my mind freely. Nobody famous. Just working while female. Female while thinking. Thinking while breathing. Breathing while working. All done while not come unraveling. This beats talking to myself inside my head.

Polar Vortex vs Tardis

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Many would be mightily disappointed by the misleading title of this post. My apology.

By Tardis, I mean the awesome Tardis fleece blankets found on ThinkGeek. Each of the boys got one for Christmas. I was blue with envy as soon as I touched it. So soft and fuzzy.

Tardis blanket

AND it’s bigger on the inside! My son who’s holding the blanket in the picture is 6’2″. I decided to keep the two extra ones back home that I had ordered for my Whovian friends. I of course promptly forgot about them. The blankets. Not my friends.

Since Monday, Chicago along with the rest of the Midwest fell into the evil grip of Polar Vortex (Great name by the way for 1. a band, 2. a Bond villain, 3. an X-Men member, 4. a super powerful blender). I have proof:

20 below zero

 

This was why this happened at Lake Michigan shore:

Chicago ice town

Photo credit: Getty Images

 

Our school districts were closed for two days and the kids were suffering from cabin fever. As an argument was about to break out over who owned the Tardis blanket that’s downstairs (as opposed to the one upstairs), and I was about to step in and declare that it’s, surprise, surprise, MINE! I remembered and brought out the extra two Tardis blankets. Peace was restored. The boys and I wrapped ourselves in the deep blue plushiness and walked around the house like royalty.

Naturally, they’re late getting ready for bed again.

“Seriously. I am the worst parent.” I added, after I threatened to really enforce discipline this time if they did not go upstairs straightaways.

My 11-year-old boy turned to look at me in the eye. “You are the best parent,” he said quietly, “from a child’s perspective.”

So. Yup. There you have it. Definitely the worst parent.

 

Help! Cuteness is everywhere.

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I had the privilege of flying on one of Eva Airlines’ Hello Kitty planes today.

Here's a screenshot so you know what I'm talking about

 

Everywhere you turn on the plane, you see signs of Hello Kitty: from the pins on the flight attendants’ uniforms, their pink aprons, the pillow covers, to the air freshener in the lavatory.

Eva Airlines is seriously dedicated to Hello Kitty

 

I started chuckling as I stepped onto the plane. It’s cute and adorable. But soon I grew weary. [Yes, I tend to overthink. Are you even surprised?]

There are obvious social and cultural reasons that girls, and in fact, women under 50, are encouraged to be cute, to find cutesy things desirable, and also to screech in delight whenever such cutesy things are encountered: In a patriarchal, male-dominant society, men prefer women that are dependent and docile (or at least seemingly so) and find them to be more attractive.

A nation of young women marching to the drumbeat of cuteness. Some critics have even gone so far to call it the “infantilization of women”.

There is the voice that many women here speak in. High-pitched and nasal. 

The facial expressions: eyes blinking deliberately with eyelashes a-fluttering, better yet if they appear to be watery & starry. Verisimilitude of manga characters.

I imagine myself a reject from the Hello Kitty factory.

I’ve never been able to be cute – partly because I am 5’7″ and not starving myself. By Taiwan standard, I am enormous. I also cannot fake Jennifer Tilly’s voice. Just imagine Lucy Lawless feigning cuteness. That. Did you throw up in your mouth too?

That being said, I begin to lean towards + on the cuteness scale when I arrive. It’s as if when I speak in Chinese, I assume a different personality. Or maybe they’ve spiked all the food here.

I tilt my head. I blink my eyes. I smile vacuously.

I know tomorrow I will start making a bunny sign when having pictures taken.

This is like an emergency note written by a survivor before the inevitable Borg invasion.

 

 

 

 

Flying home. Musing.

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On ASIANA plane less than 5 minutes I’ve Already noticed vast differences. First of all: Flight attendants’ smiles & willingness to help. 3 flight attendants offered to help me with lifting my carry-on to the overhead bin despite the fact that I’m bigger than all 3 of them combined!

They’re also all very young, thin and pretty. If I were some dumb Westerner with yellow fever, they happen to totally fit into the stereotypical images of Asian females. So I’m conflicted in how much I’m enjoying this. Should I give it some feminist and cultural critique as I enjoy being catered to by people who are pleasant to look at and who see customer service as their job and not some inconvenience?

The Ducks

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According to my computer it is December 26 already and therefore I guess it is safe to talk about why I STILL insist on not wishing strangers Marry Christmas in the U.S. unless I am absolutely certain that they celebrate Christmas: Because Christmas in the U.S. remains a religious holiday.

One’d thought that Christians in this country would be happy and proud that their holiday, the holiday celebrating the birth of the person of whom their religion is the namesake has not gone completely secular despite all the gross commercialization that’s going on.

Although I personally have no problem when strangers wish me a Merry Christmas (and I will wish them the same too), I do not care to assume that everyone I meet in the U.S. is Christian. Of course I know that the “wishing you a Merry Christmas” comes from good will, and it is much appreciated. Nevertheless, the “assumptions” implied in the greeting bother me especially since people simply take it for granted and don’t even realize that they are making assumptions.

[Digression] The irony is? If I were in Taiwan, I would have had no problem wishing anybody Merry Christmas because over there Christmas means Santa Claus, Reindeer, Snowman, Christmas trees, poinsettias, Christmas lights, catchy Christmas music, a great excuse for college students to host parties, a rare opportunity to exchange gifts (vs. cold hard cash in red envelopes <– how mundane & boring) It is an unofficial holiday to celebrate the spirit of giving. Who am I kidding. It is the spirit of spending & shopping that’s being observed…

Christmas in Taipei We do it better

 

I hung up the phone with a customer service rep two days before Christmas and turned to my husband who’d just come back from mass with his mother and our two boys.

“Wow. The rep just wished me a Merry Christmas. I’d say he took a gamble when he said that because how’d he know that I celebrate Christmas?”

My husband raised his eyebrows. “You know. The nice thing to say when people wish you a Merry Christmas…”

“Is to say thank you and Merry Christmas to you too. Yes I know that. Christmas to me is more or less a secular holiday, and I don’t mind celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ because it does not matter to me either way. I am happy for you guys. I am agnostic. I believe in everything.” I raised my eyebrows back at him.

“In the homily today,” he started, “the priest told us a story about ducks. Some guy was in his house during a snowstorm and he heard loud thumping on his windows. He looked and saw a bunch of ducks hitting his window – they’re trying to come inside the house but they could not tell that there’s glass. So the man went outside to open the doors to his barn next to the house, thinking that it would be a suitable shelter for those ducks. However, no matter how hard he tried, shooing them, waving at them, luring them with food, he could not get those ducks to stop hitting the window and change their course towards the barn. He realized that he’d have to wait for the ducks to find their way to the barn on their own.”

He looked at me triumphantly, fully satisfied with his success of being a contrarian. Argument for argument’s sake.

“Hmmm.” I took a deep breath. “That is offensive.”

“Why? I am merely saying that you will find your way on your own.”

“It’s offensive because you are assuming that I am LOST and have to find my way somewhere. I am not lost. I am happy where I am. I don’t need to find my way into the church or whatever. Hey, wait a minute. Were you trying to convert me?! I thought Catholics do not proselytize?! What the fuck?!” I protested loudly, in front of his decidedly un-religious brother too, nonetheless.

My husband grinned sheepishly, with the look of someone who just said something he did not intend to mean and got called out, “Well… Maybe the barn is not religion. Or church. Maybe the barn just means happiness in life. That you will find happiness in life on your own…”

“Hmm. Yeah right. The ducks my ass. Seriously what the fuck dude?” I walked out the room, still annoyed because I was unable to explain clearly WHY the story of the ducks is presumptuous and offensive when told to someone who does not wish to and need not be converted.

Later when the three of us were driving to a bar, the subject of ducks came up and we started teasing my husband about our “interesting” discussion earlier.

“Oh come on. I am never going to live this down, am I?”

“You know.” it dawned on me, “Here’s why I find the story of the ducks offensive. It’s like if I simply say ‘I forgive you’ and then walk away. ‘I forgive you’ predicates that you’ve done something wrong that needs to be forgiven. It is grossly unfair, isn’t it?”

 

I don’t know how to end this post so let me share this idea with you: “I forgive you.” would be a great epitaph.

 

 

 

Dear America… Never mind.

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Two teenagers take a photograph with an Abercrombie & Fitch employee inside Westfield San Francisco Centre during Black Friday in San Francisco, California November 29, 2013. REUTERS/Stephen Lam

 

 

As a mom to a teenage boy, I’ve yet to step inside any Abercrombie & Fitch. (Let’s leave aside whether I meet the standards for the type of customers the jackassy CEO envisioned wearing his company’s clothes) I find the idea disconcerting to shop at a store that showcases relentlessly half-nekkid virile young men. “Hey, look at me! Do I make you randy? Now come in and bathe in the glory of my bare chest. And while you are at it, remember to pick up some clothes from here so your son can look like me.”

Eh. NO.

The same way I found it disturbing when I overheard a mom say to her preteen/teenage daughter, “Ooo. You look sexy. Do you want to get it?” Really? I understand the concept of treating sex and sex talk as a natural/neutral subject. But we’ve got to draw the line somewhere. Somehow in our eagerness to promote girl empowerment, we’ve found girl empowerment in places where there was none. [Advertisers surely have taken great advantage of our wishful thinking. The branding efforts by many products surrounding Hunger Games – Catching Fire are some of the most brilliant yet infuriating, ok, at least annoying, marketing campaigns. Nerf guns for girls – sized for smaller hands. About time! And they’re pink! Of course…] We’ve pushed the line way way way back. It is so easy to equate sexy = empowered, and call it a day.

Sex does not equal power. Sex became a means to power for women because we were left with few options and recourse.

 

Katy Perry as “Geisha” at AMA sparks a serious discussion on multiculturalism, political correctness, authenticity and appropriation.

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Only in my dream.

This post could also have been titled, “Why women of Asian descent, especially those with the ‘privilege’ of living in the West, are fucking tired of seeing images of Geisha representing US when so few of people that look like ME (if I were younger and needed a role model in pop culture, on the stage, in celeb magazines, in my formative years) are properly represented on TV shows, in the movies, on the stage, and heck yes, even in gossip magazines.”

Or simply, “That is not a fucking Kimono (& I’d have been less stabby if this many people were not calling it an ‘authentic’ performance)”

Or, how about this? “Dear stupid, cherry blossoms, rice paper screens and umbrellas do not ‘authentic’ Japan make”

Or, we could have gone with, “Stop saying it is AUTHENTIC when you clearly have no idea what the heck you are talking about.”

Or, “That is not a ‘traditional Japanese dress’, Stupid. Authenticity has nothing to do with it.”

Or, “Dear Katy Perry, thank you for giving the ‘traditional Asian’ dress a sexy high slit. Now it’s a lot easier for me to run to serve my masters.”

I chuckled at this one myself: “Katy Perry ventured into fashion design for hostesses at pretentious Asian fusion restaurants”

To be honest? I give up.

Let’s just stick with a caption contest, shall we?

 

Thank goodness my team did not make me tape my eyes.

 

I’ll go first.

Thank goodness my team did not make me tape my eyes.

 

Ok. Your turn.

This is why

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Yesterday I stepped on the soapbox and pontificated on why we need more feminism, now, even while some famous and influential female celebrities refuse to be identified as a feminist when asked point blank “Are you a feminist?” My cerebral writer and thinker friend Christine left a much more eloquent comment highlighting the significance of the confluence between “feminist” and the word “bitch” in popular imagination.

Being identified as a bitch opens a woman up to disrespect, disdain, renunciation, and violence.

“The bitch deserves it.”

 

Someone on my Twitter stream was exasperated that something called “rapeseed” even exists. I laughed because I’ve always felt the same way about this and would never want to be caught dead with a bottle of “rapeseed oil” in my kitchen. Just because. I decided to find out WHY it has such an unfortunate name. So I searched for “Why is rapeseed named” only that I did not get far before I caught sight of this and had to pause and hyperventilate…

 

This is why we need more feminism and not less

 

Really? Really?!

 

By now you must have come across images from the ad campaign for UN Women (dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women) created by Memac Ogilvy & Mather Dubai. It’s infuriating, to say the least.

In the face of “prevalent opinions” as revealed by Google searches, we remember what Arundhati Roy said about the Voiceless:

[T]here’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.

— Arundhati Roy (2004)

 

UN-Women-Ad-1_495x700 jpg UN-Women-Ad-2_495x700 jpg UN-Women-Ad-3_495x700 jpg UN-Women-Ad-4_495x700 jpg

I am a feminist. (With a necessary disclaimer)

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Jezebel collected statements from several famous (and influential and therefore powerful, and yes, many are influential simply because they’re famous. We could sit down and ponder on the curious progression from fame -> influence -> power in this Social Media age. Think Kim Whatshername. The fact you know who I am referring to without her last name is proof itself…) women declaring that they are in fact NOT a feminist, and why not, in this post “The Many Misguided Reasons Famous Ladies Say ‘I’m Not a Feminist'”

It’s enough to make Gloria Steinem turn in her … Oh, never mind. I am glad that she’s still around and actually active on Social Media, even providing the last word to end meaningless controversies surrounding Miley Cyrus.  

My gut reactions aside, I am torn. I can see why these women are wary of being associated with the label “feminist” for which there is a profusion of entrenched negative connotations: man-hating, belligerent, combative, complain-y, chip on the shoulder, even militant. Marissa Mayer’s statement said it all:

I don’t think that I would consider myself a feminist. I think that I certainly believe in equal rights, I believe that women are just as capable, if not more so in a lot of different dimensions, but I don’t, I think have, sort of, the militant drive and the sort of, the chip on the shoulder that sometimes comes with that. And I think it’s too bad, but I do think that feminism has become in many ways a more negative word.

 

What we need is not less feminism, but more. Instead of disavowing feminism because a long-standing smear campaign has been waged against it, more of us should claim it, changing the negative connotations so prevalent in pop culture and mainstream consciousness.

I fell head over heels in love with Caitlin Moran when I read this passage in her How to be a Woman and laughed out loud with my fist pumping [only one fist because the other one was holding my Kindle. In case you wonder…]:

We need to reclaim the word ‘feminism’. We need the word ‘feminism’ back real bad. When statistics come in saying that only 29% of American women would describe themselves as feminist – and only 42% of British women – I used to think, What do you think feminism IS, ladies? What part of ‘liberation for women’ is not for you? Is it freedom to vote? The right not to be owned by the man you marry? The campaign for equal pay? ‘Vogue’ by Madonna? Jeans? Did all that good shit GET ON YOUR NERVES? Or were you just DRUNK AT THE TIME OF THE SURVEY? ― Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman

We need more Caitlin Morans amongst us.

We need more feminism even though right now we need to claim the label for ourselves with a caveat,

I am a feminist if by being a feminist you mean someone who believes in equal rights for women.

 

Quite often feminism is explained by what it is not, and the litany often begins with this disclaimer:

Yes, I am a feminist. No, I don’t hate men.

So here we are, having to first appease men, to prove that nothing reverse-sexist is going on here, while speaking out against inequality. Although it is factually correct – feminist <> men hating, am I the only one who finds this ironic?

We need more feminism exactly because most of us need the caveat in order to feel comfortable identifying ourselves as feminists. We need to somehow “temper” feminism so we could function and interact with the others peacefully in the society by providing a more socially acceptable, less threatening definition for the label.

We need more feminism because, well, we are still renouncing it for fear that we may appear aggressive, demanding and complain-y. In short, a bitch.

Just ask ourselves, “What do we call a man who asks for his fair share, who asks to be treated with courtesy, who asks to be dealt as he deserves, who stands up for himself?”

A real man.

Exactly.

Et tu, Brute?

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I am in mourning.

Yes, once again I am taking things that have absolutely nothing to do with me personally. Very personally.

I was being naive.

I just thought that geeks would be different.

Brains over beauty, right?

It is not even beauty per se. It’s youth that we are competing against.

In the end, you can’t fight youth.

Well, you can, literally, if you are Simon Pegg and his merry band of old school chums in the movie “The World’s End”.

As much as I laughed at the slapsticks in this movie starring my favorite duo Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, and my favorite reluctant detective/doctor, Martin Freeman, I now think of Pegg’s character as a Shakespearean fool. One of those tragi-comic figures who in his outrageous conduct and verbosity states the truth that nobody wants to admit.

To make it brief, Gary King (played by Pegg) peaked in high school, and he’s been behaving the same ever since, driving the same car, wearing the same long black trench coat, listening to the same mixtape, while his high school buddies moved on and over their high school glory days. It was hilarious and at moments, endearing, to watch Gary trying to hold on to the residual of their shared youth.But it also made me wince.

Gary was the King back then. A real badass. In high school. We all know how that turned out: you graduate, you get a real job, you move on. Life happens. Reality sets in. Welcome to the real, fucking, world. We all did it. We moved on.

Gary though is different. He is committed. He’s been forestalling the march of time in his own way – you know, the car, the clothing, the hair, the mixtape. He refuses to “move on”.

Is this pathetic or heroic?

I winced because I could relate to Gary and I probably should not have admitted to that. In life, it’s always the former. Only in movies and in literature would we have been convinced of the latter.

 

It is something to do with death and time and age. Simply: I am eighteen in my mind I am eighteen and if I do nothing if I stand still nothing will change I will be eighteen always. For always. Time will stop. I’ll never die.

Nadie Smith, NW: A Novel

 

 

CODA:

[SPOILER ALERT. PLEASE STOP READING IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE MOVIE AND YOU PLAN TO.]

 

 

To be honest, now that I’ve been chewing on this movie over and over in my mind, the ending of the movie depresses the heck out of me. Not because it portrayed a post-apocalyptic world… No. In fact, during the last scene of the movie, I felt happy for Gary – here he is, leader of the five musketeers. King again finally. He looked so truly fulfilled in the final freeze frame, his eyes glistening with excitement and purpose.

I find it depressing exactly because of this: that the ONLY thing that enabled Gary to defy the rules of growing up/old was literally the end of the world, that it will require a deux ex machina (an alien invasion for example) to stop life from turning into a long, drawn-out requiem for youth.