Geisha School Dropout

Now We are Six (plus 25)

2009-11-03T16:35:26-08:00

So today is my birthday! To celebrate, Tim and I are going out to grab some Ethiopian food tonight. That's it! And I'm very happy.

I guess this quiet haze of contentment stems from the fact that I finally kept a promise to myself: I started working out a couple weeks ago. The first couple workouts were fine, the third left me curled up on the floor, dry-heaving and almost soiling myself, and the fourth was almost...enjoyable? Dare I say that out loud?

For someone who is as sweat-averse as I am, making it even this far is a huge milestone. I meet with my trainer on Mondays and Wednesdays, and she, the former ballet dancer, has re-introduced me to parts of my body that haven't received any attention in years. Ow! Hello, abdominal muscles! Oof! Nice to see you again, triceps, what's shakin'? But apparently, the pain is a good thing. Healthy people have such fucked up moral codes, don't they?

I don't have any specific weight loss goals in mind, I'm mostly doing it to feel healthier and have more energy. And so far, the only progress I see is that I can do a few more crunches before I pass out. But I'll be sure to post a picture of my 6-pack next month. LOL!

Here is this year's music dedication to myself. The bastards disabled embedding: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veN2gyCEj8s

Harried Halloween

2009-11-02T16:12:13-08:00

This year's festivities seemed a bit hurried and harried, so it was hard for me to just sit back and enjoy the cuteness. But here are our offerings to the spirits of the afterlife; it's amazing to see how much they've grown.

Isaac the Policeman! He keeps a clean beat, but give him a donut and he'll let you go.

Emi as Alice! Yes, those are heels on the shoes, but don't call her Suri: there's a platform in the front.

Village People, eat your hearts out!

The Vagina Dialogs

2009-10-29T15:04:56-07:00

Whew, the Lysol ad I posted earlier this week really sparked some awesome discussions amongst my Facebook friends. Here are some highlights, anonymized:

Amos: is THAT why i saw a lady at the car wash riding through on top of her car?........case solved!

Me: Actually, she was there to get waxed. Ba-dum CHING!!! I'm here all week, folks.

Betsy: this generation's lysol is breast implants and brazilians, yeah?

Me: Totally hit the nail on the head there, Betsy! People of the future will look at Maxim Magazine and scratch their heads over how much we must have hated women to make them go through such extremes to be considered attractive.

Me: That said, I take a Brazilian over Lysol any day.

Amos: i want an answer to this question from an elderly feminist:
how is it that you intelligent, educated, modern ladies still allow the weakling peter pan males of your generation to CONTINUE to manipulate you into thinking that there is something foul and poisonous going on with your girl parts?
y'all had better damn well not let your own daughters, and especially your sons to continue this obscenity-----so what are you going to do? i've GOT to know!

Me: Okay I thought about this for a while. It took me a while because I don't personally have (many) hang-ups about the squeaky cleanliness of my ladybits, BUT:

1. even today, girls are really ignorant about what their own girl bits look like, and what girl bits "should" look like in general. It doesn't help that you basically have to sit with your legs splayed in front of a mirror to really get a good look, but regardless, they probably freak themselves out at their first look because it doesn't look anything like the line drawings in the sex ed brochures or Barbie's ladybits.

2. Assuming they're straight and they want to be with boys...these boys have no idea either. They just know the very airbrushed, sometimes surgically corrected, sometimes totally fictional vulvas of Playboy, Japanese animation, and internet porn. Oh, and that vaginas "smell like fish" which conjures up some weird mental imagery. So it might freak them out when they finally come in contact with a real-life vagina with its varied terrain and water features.

Combine these two things with females' tendency toward insecurity anyway and you get the culture as it is now: where basically you have to get your mons venus waxed, polished, and buffed to a Barbie Doll shine so your vagina looks like a 10-year-old's so it doesn't differ too much from Jenna Jameson's. They even sell vagina "water" so you can have your crotch smell like oranges, geraniums, or lavender, no joke!

That said, I don't really know how to send the message to my daughter without getting sued. Right now I kinda lean towards the hippie "your vagina is a blooming flower" slant. I think I might need Eve Ensler to guide me.

Oh! And in general, boys tend to blame problems on others while girls take blame on themselves. So if their Peter Pan boyfriend is "ew, your girl parts scare me" I think most females would rather go to the nearest waxing salon before it ever occurring to them that actually, *he* just needs to get clued into the real world. So that is definitely a real, teachable lesson to pass down to the next generation.

Amos: well-said, ms. kang....it really is the boys who have the power to help girls overcome many of their insecurities...but boys are ignorant, lazy, and controlling.....

ps. your final comment on this being a "lesson to pass 'down' to the next generation' was the freudian slip of the day!

Betsy: you are right, Julie. Girls don't know what they're supposed to look like, and what is really in the range of normal (as opposed to airbrushed, photoshopped, surgically altered, cartoonized, fetishized.) There is a site which shows pictures of the zillion or so variations of normal breasts at http://www.007b.com/breast_gallery.php ; and there should be one for genitals...but i haven't found it yet.

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Have you ever visited the normal breasts gallery? It really is a breath of fresh air. I've known about the site for a while and have even located a few facsimiles of my own breasts, and words cannot describe the emotions that flowed through me when I saw my own boob doppelgangers staring right back at me. I also loved the fact that they separated out the breasts of women who have been pregnant. There is also a blog called "Shape of a Mother" that displays the breasts and midriffs of real women who have carried children that was equally empowering.

On a related topic, one of my favorite newer websites is "Make Love Not Porn," where a lot of porn world norms like no pubic hair, women just gagging for anal sex all the time, women coming a million times while men do nothing to stimulate their clitorises (clitori?), etc. get corrected in a no-judgment, laid-back way.

So, do we also need a normal vulva gallery? I definitely think so! Even with the few face-to-face encounters with other women's ladybits I've had in my time, I know there is a huge amount of variation out there, and they were all healthy and normal and nothing to be afraid of. Let's all say NO to 10-year-old vaginas!

Lysol as Douche?

2009-10-25T11:03:55-07:00

Holy squeaky clean vagina, Batman! "Yo Mama so OCD her pussy tastes like Lysol" was actually a REALITY 50 years ago!

Thanks, Jezebel!

A Message from the Greatest Generation

2009-10-21T09:55:16-07:00

Hey Maine! You raised a fine man in Philip Spooner. He is an 86-year-old WWII veteran, and he's showing us how it's done. And by "it" I mean "how to make your point so your opponents seem like gnats."

The woman at my polling place asked me do I believe in equality for gay and lesbian people. I was pretty surprised to be asked a question like that. It made no sense to me. Finally I asked her: what do you think I fought for in Omaha Beach?

No on 1, Maine!

I Wasn't a Poet, and Didn't Know It

2009-10-15T14:45:07-07:00

I was cleaning out some files over the weekend and found an old journal chronicling September-October 2001. I was living in my parents' house, recuperating from my latest clash with psychotic depression (sounds scarier than it actually was, basically depression + paranoia). I was apparently *so* psychotic, I wrote horrible songs with lyrics that make my eyeballs bleed. So of course I had to share! Check it out:

Sail Away

You say you'll reach the stars when you don't even get out of bed
Watch the world spin by you as you live through the dreams inside your head
What are all those sounds outside your window?
What are all those sounds outside your window?
You'll never know, you'll never know

You sail away, hide from yourself
You sail away, you sail away
From it all

I see you, you look so cool, your skin is oh so crystal clean
Now disinfect yourself, don't touch your face, you don't know where it's been
What makes your black eyes seem so hollow?
What makes your black eyes seem so hollow?
They're like open graves, like open graves

I don't know whether to slap you or to hide you
All I know is I hope I won't be like you

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Untitled

As I lay on the ground
The sky looks so astounding
If I just take a step
From the cliff that I've made
Close my eyes, take a breath
Blow a kiss at the moon
I might look and see
What's up there for me

I write all these words
So one day you'll find them
And then when you read them
Throw your head back and laugh
Then reach back, hold your head
Hold your head and weep for me
And you'll be just fine
You'll be just fine

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Do any you guys have similar records of when you were young and thought you were deep? *head hanging in shame*

An Open Letter to Serena Williams

2009-10-07T10:02:36-07:00

Dear Ms. Williams,

Not a lot of people know this, but I played some tennis back in the day and I love the sport. I have always been a fan of yours (and your sister's), and have had the honor of watching you play on several occasions. Always a delight. But wow, you have just rocketed yourself past the world of man to become an astronomical object, a celestial body. Literally.

Holy Moses, lady. You are Wonder Woman.

I know there will be some trolls out there saying "OMG WTF FAT." Please ignore them. Do not allow their brain-curdled exclamations get within 100 miles of your gorgeous ears. They are maggots. There will also be some people who will say "Finally! A real woman's body with real curves!" but they are naive in their inclusivity. *I* have a "real" body. It does not look like yours. Yours is the body of a gladiator; a body that comes once in a millennium and only from a lifetime's love for sport combined with an otherworldly work ethic, and should be worshiped and celebrated as the divine ideal it is.

Please keep doing what you're doing, preferably in the buff.

Sincerely yours,
Julie Kang

(Image from Just Jared)

Pulling the Heartstrings

2009-10-01T16:41:24-07:00

Tim is in the East Coast, blissfully hanging out with some college buddies for a week. As he sips champagne on some dude's yacht in Narragansett Bay, I'm holding down the fort like Davy Crockett. As in, this is my Alamo and I'm going to fucking die!!!

He took the red-eye on Tuesday and left the house while I was trying to put Emily down. Isaac peeked at his daddy load his bags into a taxi and drive off through his bedroom curtains. When I got to him, he was sobbing.

Isaac shuddered in my arms and said how lonely, sad, scared, and small he felt as he saw the taxi disappear into the horizon. He fell asleep in my lap, and as I tucked him in, the look on his face transported me back to when he was 18 months old. He was chubbier then, but already so adamantly stoic and strong, my independent little boy. But clearly he was still fragile in some ways, so I vowed to pay extra attention to him and his little boy worries this week.

The next day as I picked Isaac up from school, he asked me "Mom, what's the best way to kill yourself?" I clutched the steering wheel really hard and tried not to veer into the sidewalk,

"W-w-w-w-hat do you mean?"
"How's the best way to die?"
"Uh, with, um, honor?"
"Nooooooooooo...I think it would be better with those light sabre things."

Turns out that was just his way of asking for a light sabre for his birthday.

Boys, I swear!

What Mama Did in the Bay Area

2009-09-23T14:17:28-07:00

Dear Isaac and Emily,

First off, thank you for letting Mama go on a trip all by herself and entrusting Daddy with your lives for 5 days! Great teamwork! I thought I'd share a few pictures and show you the cool stuff I did, and hopefully also explain why I had to leave you guys in SoCal.

When I landed, I drove across the Bay Bridge to see Uncles Jim & Chris. We had lunch at a cute little cafe called StarBelly:

Do you guys see the decor? The only seats were these really high backless stools, and the glasses were so delicate and probably vintage, I just knew if you guys came we would have had a disaster on our hands: unfinished wood and concrete is not very forgiving of little skulls and barware that may be hurled upon them. Plus, you would have found the food really unappetizing: the eggs were poached and extra runny, the bacon was house-cured and would have tasted strange to you, and even the orange juice had alcoholic bubbles in it. You also would have found the conversation boring. When Mama ordered a tuna arugula salad for breakfast and offered some to Jim and Chris with a "What, you guys don't like fish first thing in the morning?" and when they demurely said, "Um, not really fish fans, thanks," Mama thought that was the funniest thing ever. Weird, right?

Mama spent the next couple days watching TV shows and drinking wine from a box. She made a pit stop in Oakland to visit some Bay Area Kimchi Mamas and although no alcohol was involved, a bunch of moms went to sing karaoke and Mama may or may not have actually sung a few songs. And George Michael's "Careless Whispers" may or may not have been on the set list. Oh, you guys would have died from embarrassment. Again, you are very welcome that I saved you from that.

After that, there was just a bunch of shopping and then the work week started. Nothing much to report there, although we could have used your help at dim sum. There were some leftover dumplings that Isaac easily could have polished off. But again, it was in the middle of Chinatown, we would have lost you two in the sea of Asian people in a nanosecond. And you guys would have been picked up by some Chinese family and fed dim sum everyday for the rest of your lives! How horrible would that be?

Okay, fine. You guys might have had fun if you came. I hope you weren't too mad that I left, although it seemed like you guys had some adventures of your own:

To be honest, I gotta give you guys props for this one. Great job on getting Daddy confused about the location of your swim lesson, AND you guilt-tripped him into taking you to the BEACH??? You guys are absolute pros, I can't believe I worried about you guys even for a second.

Anyways, now that we're back in the swing of things, I just wanted to tell you that I am very proud of you two for holding up the fort while I was away. And please tell Daddy that he's a trooper, and of course I realize that the text messages quoted above were the only bad news in a sea of good news. It's just that bad news is always the funniest (and therefore the most quotable) news. :)

Love,
Mama

Google Voice No Habla Espanol

2009-09-17T16:14:55-07:00

One of the cool perks of Google Voice is that they write down your voicemails so you can archive them, search for them, basically use them like email. I haven't been able to use that functionality because no one knows my Google Voice number, but someone accidentally left me a message on my account the other day. My language skillz have atrophied since I stopped living with Spanish-speaking illegal immigrants (that's another story altogether), but I'm pretty sure I'm better than Google.

Here is a line-by-line analysis of the voicemail transliteration. The Google version is on top, followed by what I believe the lady actually said.

My idea, so you might be on the court deadline
Maria, soy yo, Mariana, como te va?

and if that we think wanted to know whether to get some of the
Bien. He esta ahorita encontre tu numero de telefono.

day on Monday the 30th.
Queria llamarle ese dia

I don't know inquiries tile when I came up on things.
pero no lo habia encontrado. Dame una llamada cuando

Temple tickets of this and I'm gonna leave you a
tengas tiempo. Se que eres una persona MUY

call. Talk to you know but no Cadillac in.
ocupada, pero, um, no te voy a quitarle

Most of the info.
mucho tiempo.

Okay, Hi, this is in the new it's been a lot of people. I guess.
Okay? Ojala que estes bien, y espero que hablo contigo pronto. Pues, adios.

PS: If you Google Image Search "no hablo espanol" you get a bunch of shirts like the one above, basically telling Spanish speakers that THIS IS AMURRICA YOU BETTER SPEAK ENGLISH HURRRR. We sure do keep it classy, no?