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List of the Week: #2 - Bad pick-up lines.
Ask any woman what her least favorite pick-up line is, and she’ll likely say something to the tune of: “I can only pick one?” Yes, getting hit on is an inextricable part of being a girl, regardless of shape, color, size, sexual orientation, or whether or not the girl in question was even born a female. This is not to say that it is never flattering to be made to feel beautiful, or even to say that the occasional, over-zealous or misguided compliment-giver is grounds to stomp ones’ feet on the pavement and scream “NO MEANS NO!!!!” Rather, this post is about the comments, looks and (worst of all) unwanted physical contact that myself and other girls I know receive while minding our own respective business here in this lovely city of Oakland, Ca. These are the incidents that make our skin crawl, and would be reason enough to punch the perpetrator in the neck (were we not the ladies that we are, of course). So, here they are: my top ten “most obnoxious pick-up lines”.
1- “Hey mama, you wanna suck this dick?”
No. No, sir, I do not want to suck your dick. Surprisingly (or maybe not), I’ve heard this one a number of times. The first time I was so taken aback at the boldness of such a question that I simply laughed and kept walking. What does one say to such a thing? “Oh, gee…I was hungry for something, and I just could not figure out what I was hungry for - but I realize now, it’s your penis! Thanks, I’d love some!”? I suppose I must give credit for the straight-to-the-point delivery, and I have to wonder if this has ever worked on anyone. I mean, shit - you ask one hundred women in one day, and maybe just one of them would be like “Um. Sure.” But maybe not.
2- “Ay girl, I like your tattoo/s”
Okay, I should clarify here: it’s not that I hate getting complimented on my tattoos, I hate when people compliment my tattoos before they’ve even looked at them for more than 5 seconds. Because really, when people do that, they really mean one of the following: a) “I like that fact that you ARE tattooed”, b) “Do you know someone who tattoos, and can you hook it up?”, or c) “I want to see you naked”. Usually, it’s C. The thing is, when you look at someone for only a few seconds and say something like that, it’s obvious that you haven’t really looked. I could have full sleeves of dinosaurs fucking, or a beautifully rendered chest piece of a KKK rally - I don’t, of course, but I’m just sayin’. This one brings me right along to….
3- “I bet you like pain.”
*Cringe* This little gem has been chucked my way so many times I can’t even count them anymore, and is an assumption made solely on the fact that I have a lot of tattoos and piercings. Once, when I was maybe sixteen, I was on Bart going to a show in the city, and a middle-aged business man leaned over his newspaper and said “Did it hurt when you got your lip pierced?”, to which I responded yes, and he continued on immediately with “I bet you liked it. I bet you got that piercing so that you could give better blow jobs.” Excuse me but what the fuck? Why does everyone think I’m some cock-hungry maniac? I told him to go fuck himself, as is my general response to such statements.
4- “What, you don’t like black people?”
This one kills me. It usually follows any number of weak-ass lines that I (more-or-less politely) shoot down. I think the intended goal is to guilt-trip me into giving the man in question my phone number, but it only serves to enrage me. Here’s the thing about shit like that - I can’t win, because any response requires either providing too much information, or silent acquiescence to my supposed racism. Rather than stand there and explain that, in fact, a number of my boyfriends have been black dudes, or pull the “I have tons of black friends” card, I generally just go with something along the lines of “No, I just don’t like pushy douschebags”.
5- “What’s your sign?”
Yeah, people still use this one. Why? God only knows. Few things irritate me more than when someone asks what sign I am, and I tell them, and they go “That makes TOTAL sense, you are SUCH an Aries!”. What? No. Fuck off. I refuse to believe that somehow, the fact that I was born on April 16th dictates any significant element of my personality, let alone any part that is noticeable to someone who has literally just met me. Go stick some incense down your pee hole, dude. (Oh, that was such an Aries thing to say.)
6- “So, where’s your man?”
This is another one of those “talking in circles” ones, because no matter what you say to this, you’re gonna end up having to talk to the dude. You can’t very well admit that you’re single (unless of course this is something that you actually want the man in question to know, like in the rare instance that he is actually super good-looking), but no location of “my man” seems to ever be enough of a deterrent. “At work”, “At home, cooking me dinner”, “Dying in a coma”…none of these work. Next time, I plan to tell a story about how he’s locked up for some diabolical murder, then suddenly go all still and shaky, and point and look frightened and say “…..he’s right behind you!!!”
7- “I’m just trying to be friends with you, girl.”
No you’re not, you’re trying to get your dick wet. If you wanted to be friends with me, you could attempt to involve me in conversation that is not based on my ass, my tattoos, or the current location of “my man”. As though if I give you my number here at the bus stop, you’re going to call me up in a few days and ask if I want to come play Parcheesi with you and your grandma or some shit.
8- “So, why are you doing community service?”
Because shut up, that’s why. Seriously, I experienced this so often when I was doing my sheriff work furlough program, picking up garbage along San Pablo. Dudes on the street or in cars would ask me this, as though it was any of their business. After the fourth one, I said “I killed a man in a fit of rage”, to which he responded “Oh, damn! And all you got was community service?” *Sigh* I guess corrections-orange really brings out my eyes.
9- “Hey vanilla milkshake! Lemme walk witchu a second.”
See also: “Lemme be the chocolate chips in your vanilla ice cream”, “Hey white chocolate”, “Hey punk rock”, “Hey white girl”, “Hey shorty you thick for a white girl”, and “Come over here and sprinkle some of that white sugar on me”. This is when I pretend I don’t speak English.
10 - “Hey thick-thighs - c’mere and lemme snack on that ass!”
Okay, so I’ve only heard this once - but it takes the cake. It was yelled at me by this dude in my neighborhood that I had the misfortune of running into four times in one afternoon. He cycled through three of the lines listed above before deciding to just go whole hog and really lay on the charm. So, naturally, I totally crossed the street and threw myself into his arms. The wedding’s next week, and you’re all invited to come and celebrate as we commit to a lifetime of snacking on one another’s asses.
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List of the Week: #1 - Guilty Pleasure Music
Oh, the joy of the guilty-pleasure song. These are the songs that you turn up to 11 when you’re in the car alone, not having to lie to your passenger and say something like “Oh GOD, what is happening to music these days” before changing the station. These are the ones that you catch yourself humming along to when they drift from the speakers in Safeway before suddenly realizing you know all of the words. Sometimes, these are the songs that you have a good, ugly cry to - the kind of crying that you can only do alone, where your face gets blotchy and your eyes swell up and you choke on your own snot while you cry-sing the sad, sappy lyrics. These, my friends, are the songs that you only get the courage to play on the bar’s jukebox once you’re drunk enough not to care that everyone in the room is looking at you and thinking: (or saying, out loud, to you) “Did she just play…no…really?!”. I have them, you have them, your parents had them; I’d be willing to bet your grand parents had them, too. So, without further ado, I present you with ten of my favorite guilty-pleasure songs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C61olIkvoks
1) “You Sexy Thing” - Hot Chocolate
I first heard this song when I was a little kid and watched the movie “The Full Monty” which, if you haven’t seen it, is fucking great. This is the song that they strip to at the end, and I remember dancing around and shaking my little ten year-old booty to it. The first time I had sex, this song inexplicably started playing in my head. The band is called Hot Chocolate, which could not be more appropriate, seeing as listening to this song is like having someone eat a melted Hershey bar out of your navel.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKsxPW6i3pM&ob=av2e
2) “The Middle” - Jimmy Eat World
This is the kind of song that needs to be played loudly and repeatedly when you’e feeling sad, particularly after a break-up or after getting fired. I mean, come on, there’s something to be said for a song that just tells you “Hey, it’s cool. Everything is gonna be fine, you’re alright alone, just do your best and ignore everyone else, etc, etc”. Sometimes a person needs that, and this song does it so well for me that it’s like getting hugged by a big, soft, fat, embodiment of everyone’s grandma.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHozn0YXAeE&ob=av2e
3) “MmmBop” - Hanson
Alright, alright - I know. This song is fucking terrible. I mean, it’s really awful. But it came on in CVS a few months back and all of the sudden I was nine years old again, singing along to it, out loud. Back then I thought that Taylor Hanson was pretty much the cutest boy on the planet and I listened to this song so many times that my siblings probably wanted to kill me. I’ve resolved to listen to it incredibly rarely, though, as listening to Hanson is kind of like farting in public: sometimes it just happens, but it’s best not to make a habit out of it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAOxCqSxRD0
4) “Wicked Game” - Chris Isaak
Say what you will about Chris Isaak, the man’s got an amazing voice. When he does that thing where his voice goes all low and sort of talk-sings - like Elvis used to do - and then brings it back up and belts that shit out like he’s about to fucking cry and come at the same time…yeah, this song is what wet panties sound like.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB1D9wWxd2w
5)“Return of the Mack” - Mark Morrison
I kind of can’t really explain why this song is so Goddamned good, aside from its unabashedly 90’s charm. Listening to it, I can almost feel the invisible, furry, Kangol hat and metallic Jnco jeans. The video is pretty great, too, because he looks like a super fly, super tall, Ethiopian lesbian. Leather gloves? Yes, they’ll go nicely with my over-sized leather trench coat and enormous gold chain. Is that Cool Water I smell?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XleOkGsYgO8&ob=av2e
6) “Move Along” - The All American Rejects
There is no excuse for this one. It’s the kind of music that I spent my late teen years scoffing at and judging other people for enjoying. But then, one night about 6 years ago, I was walking home from work, moping over this boy who hurt my little feelings, and bam - this shit came on the radio. And then all of the sudden I had turned the volume all the way up on my iPod and was thinking shit like “Yeah, man. I’m gonna be just fine. Fuck that dude.” (PS: in the video, the drummer is wearing a Filth t-shirt. I would say something like “How do you like a band like Filth and end up playing shit like this?” But I suppose that would be a teensy hypocritical, considering.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZqnqH9s1jk
7) “The Girl” - City and Colour
This song is so saccharin-sweet that it’s retarded. This is the kind of song that women listen to and pretend that their significant other is the one singing it, especially after a fight. Plus, halfway through it turns into a faster version and they do the whole thing all over again, except up-tempo enough that it sort of snaps you out of it. It’s the perfect song to feel a little bit melancholy and wounded to, but then when you’re done listening to it you want to call up your boyfriend and be all “It’s okay, I forgive you. Let’s go have a picnic somewhere scenic and hold hands.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUiTQvT0W_0
8) “Nothing Compares to You” - Sinead O’Connor
Oh Sinead, you crazy, bald-headed bitch. This song is so sad and intense that it deserves some kind of medal. I once sat on the floor with a male friend of mine (the name of whom I will keep private, for the sake of his image) sharing a bottle of whiskey and crying together while this played on repeat for almost an hour. It’s THAT kind of song. Prince wrote it, Sinead owned it, I can’t help but love it. Listening to this is like crying while masturbating.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fndeDfaWCg&ob=av2e
9) “I Want It That Way” - The Backstreet Boys
Shut the fuck up because this song is awesome. When I was in 5th grade I went to an arts magnet school where they made us all do a performance at the end of the year. We broke into groups of our choosing and picked a song to choreograph a dance to, which we then performed for our families and fellow classmates (my group did Brandy’s “Sittin’ On Top of the World” and we all bought matching baby-blue tank tops and black, flare-legged jeans). The boy I had a huge crush on, and with whom I later had my first real make-out session with, was in the group that chose this song. And to make it even better, he picked AJ’s verse, which was, like, totally the best one. I still don’t really know what was so bad about wanting it “that way”, or what “that” way even was.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OnMd47ZfWQ
10) “Hooked on a Feeling” - Blue Swede
This song is just plain golden. Of course it reminds me of that lovely little scene in Reservoir Dogs, as it’s almost impossible not to (see also: “Time Is On My Side” and Se7en). But if you can get past the association, this song is pretty much the best example of something to listen to when the person you like tells you that they’re into you too, and you have that first, really really awesome night together and walk around the next day like someone crammed a rainbow up your ass so far that it’s coming out your mouth and giving you that dopey love-grin that pisses everyone else off. Try it sometime.
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Words fall flat.
Within these last two years I’ve realized more than ever that I have these things that i’ve been lugging around for years. And by years I mean literally decades, and by things, I mean baggage. This might be hard to fathom, considering the fact that I’m not even 25 yet, but here’s the thing: I eventually learned that it was easier to ignore people and feelings that made me uncomfortable, rather that face them head on and deal with it. This led to God knows how many issues that I have yet to figure out, and to some that I know specifically why they trigger, what they trigger (this is not to say that it’s fair for those on whom this trigger targets itself..but it does, and will - at least for a while).
So I’ve been on this kick of “what do I need/want/have the ability to fix about myself”. And I think I have it narrowed down to three specific things - all of which I am targeting and tackling in my own way/time. That being said, the hard part comes in trying to understand if my relationships with men have all just been entirely fucked, or if there was a kernel of good (what I’d like to think) with all of them. But here’s what really really really Goddamned complicates shit: text messaging. The advent of text-based communications has certainly not helped this distinction. Remember when you liked somebody in middle school and you had to call them on their parents’ phone to talk to them, and that singular act spoke to the fact that they liked you and you liked them. I mean “like” like. But you knew that, clever reader.
So now, in this modern world we live in we have all different kinds of media conversation. “Friend” is a verb now, as is “Facebook” - as in ” ‘friend’ me and we can ‘facebook’ eachother”. This means that speaking to one another, with all it’s subtlety, and punctuation, and pauses, and tonation get lost in the web of…well, the web. So, here’s my real beef: arguing/ awkward moments/ insults/ cynicism vis text/and/or internet; there is no way to infer emotion from text, save from emoticons, which I have reluctantly accepted over this year.
So this means when you say “Oh yeah TOTALLY” via text, you can mean “yes, totally” and then also you can mean “hahahahahahah fucking REALLY?! NO”. It also means that when you’re kind of in the throws of dealing with a recent break-up, “Yeah. You too” can essentially equate to “Yeah, whatever. Go fuck yourself”. Easily, actually. It’s also the way that a “:)” can change an otherwise bland comment into a nice one, and a “>:(” into a mutual understanding of a bad day or incident or etc.
What I hate is that I am a text based person. So I read into everything, too, too much. I look at punctuation that most of my friends don’t even think about, sequencing of words that they don’t, simple-ass-fucking-responses the way that simple-ass-fucking-responses don’t tend to be viewed.
I guess the point of this blog is: Not to encourage OCD in anyone else, but when I send a text, I read it outloud to myself and listen for punctuation and tone. If it sounds dismissive and fucked, I re-word. But hey, that’s just me.
The rest of you can feel free to carry on.
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I am not a hoarder. (I’m kind of a hoarder)
A RANDOM SMATTERING OF THE TREASURES FROM MY FORGOTTEN BOX OF THINGS….
Not just things, as in “hey, look at that thing right there!” or “well you see, there’s this thing”, but about stuff, rather. Within the category of stuff lies the following:
-Old art, found again, and compulsively collected kitsch to which I have become unhealthily attatched
-Stumbling accross old photographs, which tends to lead to happiness, nostalgia and (also, sometimes rage)
-And baggage, both in the literal and physical sense.
….All of this is connected, I assure you.
It goes like this:
About a week ago I was having a conversation(argument) with a friend about politics, which made me realize that I need to brush up on some history (There is nothing more awkward for a stubborn person than that point in any argument where you realize the other person is more right than you are). So I decided to dig up my copy of A Peoples’ History of the United States, which has been buried in one of my mother’s closets for years. When I got home this morning, I decided to go hunting for it and silently promised myself I would look for that, and only that, and avoid pulling out a bunch of random shit that I haven’t thought about for years. Well, I found it…really quickly, actually, but it was nestled in one of the boxes of my trinkets that i’d put away for safe-keeping. Before I could make myself stop, I was rummaging through it all as though I’d just found a treasure chest that some poor soul had lost to the depths of the sea 2,000 years ago and saying things like “Why would I ever get rid of THIS?!” and “Oh holy shit, how did I live with out ‘xy&z’?”
Remember the weird, old troll lady in The Labyrinth that hoards shit in her own, private junkyard? Yeah. Well, in high school, that’s more or less what my room looked like. Every square inch of wall space was covered with posters and weird, old-timey toys, and foreign condom wrappers, and 1940’s porn, and spray paint and art work. My floor was covered with empty cigarette packets and sketchbooks and pens and paint and shoes I never wore and remnants of fishnets, too full of holes to wear anymore. When first moved out of my parents’ house, I took a lot of this stuff with me and forced myself to throw a lot of it way, but the rest got packed - somewhat sloppily - into 4, big, plastic containers and shoved into a closet. So today I had the pleasure of riffling through all this crap, which ended up being like a snapshot of me, ages 13-18. And, well….wow.
The first thing I got distracted by were all of my old sketchbooks. Some of the art is actually pretty good, lot’s of painstaking pencil portraits and obsessively penned drawings and cartoons of all the shitty customers I dealt with in my formative years as a slave to the customer service industry. But then there’s the one I call the “break up book”, which I spent the most time on, and have decided I should burn. From 14-18, I had three “serious” boyfriends, all of whom broke my little teenage heart and ended up immortalized on paper - lot’s of paper - with little emo poems and phrases through out. **There are 4, full size pages on which I wrote the words “Ifuckinghateyou” over and over, which, for those of you who have seen my handwriting, is insane. Emotional bonfire, anyone?
Underneath the sketchbooks were three shoe boxes filled with photographs, offensive postcards, and trinkets (ie: tiny glass bottles, little monster finger puppets, bird skulls, a tiny sack of weed from 8th grade, band stickers, miniature rubber babies with their limbs ripped off with painted, bloody stumps, love letters from a boy I knew when I was 12, two break-up-mix-tapes I never actually delivered(thankgod), cheer leading ribbons, and buttons galore (the band kind, not the garment kind). The problem is not that I’m a hoarder, per se…I just form attachments to items; some of them remind me of someone, some of them remind me of somewhere, and some of them remind me of who I used to be.It’s not like I’ve got a living room full of rotting wicker furniture and broken lightbulbs and garbage that I defend with a shot gun, I just don’t like to throw things away unless they’re broken or smell bad or people think I’m homeless if I wear it out of the house.
So, I’ve never really thrown away anything that a boyfriend/person I’ve dated has given me, not that there’s really all that much. I still have boxer shorts and mix cd’s and painting and pieces of jewelry from all of them. I think that somewhere in the pages of one of my books are petals from the first bouquet a boy bought me. Things like that. Eventually, whatever hurtful feelings are brought up by these items start to go away, and instead I can see them as what they are: gestures of affection that were given, at the time, out of affection. And those are the good parts of remembering relationships past; sometimes people are just awful and you want them out of your life forever, but more often than not, you should always be able to remember why you loved them in the first place. It’s better that way.
Which brings me to baggage.
First, and in the most literal sense, once I find a new apartment, I am going to have to force myself to purge a lot of the toys and gadgets and posters and art and old art supplies that I have hanging around. If I don’t, my room mate will kill me, or I may wake up one night to find that It’s all been a dream and David Bowie and I will run off to rule the goblin kingdom.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, this was a good thing for me to do today because it made me look even more at how long my pattern of feeling heart broken and afraid of letting someone near me has gone on. I’ve spent years surrounding myself with little things that make me happy and defending them fiercely. When I go through a break up I start justifying buying more little things to put in my little cave. My cave is safe, stay out of my cave. And reading through all of my thoughts from a particularly bad breakup at 17, it’s eerily easy to draw comparisons to what I’m dealing with right now. I will spare you the details, but damn, I’ve got some work to do.
….but in the mean time, I’m going to play with all this great stuff I found and avoid wallowing.
My marbles.
There was a point to this when I started writing it, in my head, at the bar where I sipped on my second glass of ice water, smelling the liquor around me, sniffing it out like one might do to a pillow, hunting for the scent of a lover’s shampoo. There was something in there about control, something about resolve, something about morality. Somewhere in there was the memory of requests to know what it was, exactly, that I was thinking; and somewhere after that was cheesecloth, wrapping its way over the surface, squeezing out just a little bit, here and there. Somewhere in there were the exact combinations of words and punctuation, semicolons nestled up cozily in just the right place, exquisite and interesting uses of adjectives and verbs that would explain, precisely, what it is that I’m trying to say.There was something beautiful about being alone; it avoided all cliches and metaphors, you should’ve seen it. There was something about being a child, something about rusted tin cans, antique whiskey bottles, half-filled with dirt, earthworms spilling their guts across wet sidewalk cracks, paleta carts and sugary drips of milky cantelope, rusted lantern shells, a blue velvet blanket. Somewhere in there were thousands of rain drops, turning into marbles before they could hit the ground, rolling down streets and into gutters, choking the city and the sewers and the oceans with glass. Somewhere, there was a glowing tip of ash burning its way across the image of an eagle, a numb tongue and fibers winding their way along mucus membranes like a cat’s cradle. Somewhere in there, Al Green sang about a broken heart, and my grandmother sang a song about infanticide. There was something about the moons of Saturn, and something about cosmic dust; I think there was something about the immensity of space, and something about how we are all made out of dead stars. I know there was something about what it feels like to wake up when it’s still dark out, when sleep is still an option, rolling over and finding that spot at the base of a man’s neck that smells like warm milk and sweat, and something about how thick and sweet that sleep becomes, filling you to your pores like molasses. There were memories and memories and memories and the past and the present and the future. And after that, there was something about anxiety and crawling skin and restless legs and rolling eyes and injured feelings and strong walls and bruises and scratchy throats and swollen eyes and exhaustion and words said enough times that they lose meaning. Somewhere in there, in all of that, there was a point. But it’s gone now.
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No. I didn’t make a sign…
Here’s the thing….
I know that I’m a young, tattooed, white girl that was raised in the East Bay (one of, if not THE hub of liberalism in the U.S.). I know that growing up here has had its influence on me. I feel lucky to have gone through adolescence in an environment where my hair could be whatever color of the rainbow I wanted, my face could be filled with piercings, and I could speak openly about how I felt about the government, gender roles, sexuality, feminism, etc, without being judged in the way that many kids my age were, and still are, in other parts of the country.
That being said, I feel as though living here has made me resentful. People take these freedoms for granted, they forget how lucky we are, how good we have it, comparatively, at least with regard to the rest of the nation, let alone the world (you know, that OTHER 99% that live without fresh water and food and shelter). I grew tired, long ago, of the same burnt-out hippies preaching the same, burnt-out drivel. I grew tired of the street kids on Telegraph Ave, claiming to be living some sort of “free life”, while most of them ran away from decent homes only to sit and drink beer all day and verbally harass those of us that work hard for our money when we choose to say “No, you can’t have a cigarette” and “No, I don’t want to buy you a tall can.” There is an attitude of unbelievable entitlement that one develops, more often than not, when one lives in a place that caters to such a mind frame. And yes, my parents instilled me with a hefty dose of liberal views. And yes, I suppose I’d have to align myself with the democratic party, given my unwavering views on certain issues.
But let’s get some things straight:
I do not have to agree with you, your protest, your “movement” or your “martyrs” in order to be a liberal thinker. America has gone horribly awry politically, this much I will give you. More and more, the American population succumbs to a sedentary ignorance that only serves to further the gap between We The People and The Powers That Be. The police use excessive force with a startling frequency; it is not okay, and they should be held to the same legal standards as everyone else - this much I will give you. The fact that 1% of the population controls 40% or more of the wealth of the nation is reprehensible, unfair, wrong - I’ll give you that, too.
But….what the fuck, exactly, do you think you’re doing?
I’m not saying that among the masses “occupying” shit, solid, intelligent opinions don’t exist - I’m sure they do. But look at it. Who pays for the grass that dies underneath those tents? Oakland taxpayers. Who pays for the flowers that get ripped up out of planter boxes downtown? Who pays for the windows that get broken, for the graffiti to be removed from the faces of stores that did nothing wrong? Oakland is broke, it’s starving. You want to make a statement, make a difference? Show people that you can organize as a group and keep calm. When those cowards in masks start breaking shit and spraying paint at store managers who are just trying to do their jobs, stop them. All of you, together. If your message is one of peace and of change and the call for reform that you claim it to be, you have to do this. You have to do this or you will do nothing more than get on television, and solidify the notion held by many that the nation’s liberal youth are nothing but ignorant, wild, hooligans with nothing better to do than camp out in a plaza for weeks.
Yes, Oakland police are awful. They use force unduly, swinging their dicks around while shining their badges. But come on - look at the odds. Be reasonable. If there is one cop for every ten protestors, all it takes is one shove, one bottle thrown, one rock, and the tear gas will follow. Always. You can’t ask for leniency and restraint when you don’t give it. I’m not saying that it’s fair. I’m saying that this is how it is. And you can’t change a damn thing if you try and change it all at once.
(And I know that someone will be mad at me for this but…)Fuck it, I’m saying it. It’s FRANK OGAWA plaza, not OSCAR GRANT plaza. For fucks’ sake, people. Really? Oscar Grant died an unfair death by unjust hands. The man who killed him got off far, far too easy. His death, and the subsequent case only highlighted the remaining issues of racial tension and abusive (or in this case, fatal) behavior on the behalf of the police force. It was one of the most important political events in my life to date. More so, even, than September 11th; it hit closer to home, and all of us young people felt unified by the injustice of it all. We had a face to align with what we’d known to be true for a long time. But, be that as it may, Oscar Grant was not a fucking saint. He did NOT deserve what happened to him, not by a long shot, but it peeves me that he is being reinvented as the poster-child of injustice, his face painted on murals alongside people like Maya Angelou, Bob Marley, and Martin Luther King Jr. He was a rowdy kid, he had a long record, and even his friends admit that the had a tendency to get into fights and get confrontational with anyone who intervened. What happened that night in 2009 was absolutely tragic, but please, let’s all try and keep a realistic lens on things. Oscar Grant deserves his place in history, but let me go on record as saying that he does not deserve to have the city center renamed after him.
On Frank Ogawa, for whom the plaza is actually named:
“Frank Ogawa was a remarkable person because he could take personal misfortune and turn it into a positive learning experience for himself and others. When Frank and Grace Ogawa were forced to sell their belongings and live in internment camps during World War II, they had to sleep on straw mattresses in horse stalls for six months before being shipped to a camp in Utah to spend another 3 1/2 years in confinement. Despite this mistreatment and injustice, he never lost faith in the United States. Just the opposite—he strived to prove his loyalty to his country and became an internationally recognized champion of Asian-Americans in the process.”
Call me an asshole, but it seems that he deserves his name on the plaza.
So I suppose what I’m getting at it this: YOUNG PEOPLE! Read about politics. Find out which candidates are ones you can (at least kind of) get behind. Locally, vote for your mayors, your city council members, your police chiefs and your judges. If you want to protest, do it. But please, do it with respect for the city (and its residents) for which you claim to be fighting for. Pull your money out of big banks, put it in credit unions if you want to, but don’t harass the people that work there. They’re a part of our “99%”, too. Stop breaking things, keep trying to fix things. Don’t attach #OCCUPY to the end of everything you post, it cheapens your words. Keep at it, but keep focused, keep literate, keep organized. Without those things, you are just everything they want you to be.
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Sometimes the hard-A makes a difference…
As you all know by now, I made some poor choices in December which resulted in, among other things, my becoming the un-happy recipient of a DUI. The circumstances of the event are certainly not something I’m proud of, and they have caused me previously unimaginable levels of stress financially, socially, professionally and pretty much every combination therein. Now that almost all of the thousands of dollars of fines have been wrenched from my limp hands like so much dirty water from a dishrag, I am still left with the task of completing the required 9-month long “Substance Abuse Offenders Program” (a lovely little institution to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for giving me something other than student loans to worry about.) The program consists of three parts:
Part One: Group Meetings
Group meetings are essentially group therapy sessions which one has no desire to attend. My first day felt more or less like the principle had rounded up all the bad kids and made them sit in a circle, introduce themselves to one another and explain the circumstances which made them misbehave, exactly how badly they had misbehaved and what their plans are for avoiding such behavior in the future. There are a lot of what they call “I statements” (as in “I feel uncomfortable when you ask me about my sex life, as it has nothing to do with alcohol, and I would appreciate it if, in the future, you could avoid the subject entirely.” It’s not so bad once you get the hang of saying enough to be telling the truth without saying enough to further complicate your situation. Though I swear to Christ, once I’m done with this, I will not hesitate to strangle the next person who asks me to “draw what you’re feeling right now.”
Part Two: Face-To-Face Sessions
These are more or less mini versions of group, with only yourself and the counselor. The intention is that you have a window in which you can feel more at liberty to discuss things you might feel uncomfortable talking about openly in group, though if you’re smart you won’t do this, because the counselor might just bring it up in group at a later point in time, which usually sounds something like: “Now, some people may find that a painful, personal, emotional trauma may trigger something we call ‘Binge Drinking’ in order to numb feelings of inadequacy. Chloe, would you care to share any of what we discussed earlier? I’m sure the group would love to hear from you.” At which point I get red and huffy and vow never to share anything with anyone that wears a sweater vest ever again. Also, this is a great time for your counselor to ask you when the last time you drank was, and help you discuss and over-analyze at length what provokes a person to have a single glass of wine with their dinner.
But the best part, which I had the privilege of beginning this evening, is….
Part Three: DUI Education
DUI Education is exactly what it sounds like. Everyone shuffles into a muggy class room filled with foldable metal chairs. In front of you is a pull-down projector screen with an image of a stern-looking police officer pointing out at you, which a caption that reads “Over the limit? Under arrest!”. To the right is, of course, a TV monitor on a wheely-cart which a good, old fashioned VHS player underneath. Now, I’m really, really trying to be a good sport about all of this. After-all, I did this to myself and this is intended to be a punishment. Still, in keeping with the grade-school analogy, DUI Education is kind of like when the Chemistry teacher came down with the flu, so the school sends in the gym teacher to attempt to explain chemical kinetics: A lot of blank faces staring at a bumbling idiot who cannot pronounce the majority of the words they are attempting to use. The major difference being that a gym teacher is not intended to teach chemistry, and it is therefore understandable that he or she is not very good at teaching it. So forgive me if I find it absolutely ridiculous that this woman, who DOES have the job of teaching this stupid class, can’t pronounce things like “habitual”, or “excretion”, terms which one hears and says a million times in the course of finishing this whole process. Combine that with the fact that she read the curriculum from her binder as a second grader might read a book report that is largely plagiarized (As in “Hi, um my name is _______ and I’m, um, here to tell you about the dangers of driving while um…under the in…in…in-flu-en-ce..”). I don’t mean to be a dick, but I have a very hard time taking people seriously when they are supposed to be in charge of me and have an over-stated-authority attitude but can’t finish a sentence properly.
Twenty minutes in and I had stopped counting the grammatical errors, blatant mispronunciations and unfinished sentences that trailed off into nothing. That is, until we got to the slide titled “Reasons For Being Pulled Over”. She proceeded to read all of them, slowly, aloud and then ask us what it meant, you know, “to us personally.” The fifth one down was DRIVING ERRATICALLY, which just so happens to be one of those words where the way one pronounces it is pretty important. See, with the semi-hard-A sound, as in “ass” or “grass” or “cash”, the word means unpredictable, irregular or deviating from a normal pattern. When pronounced with a soft-A, however, such as in “saw” or “paw” or “awe”, the word becomes something else entirely. So when she got to number five and said “Hahaha, that’s funny that they put that one up there! I never noticed that one, but I guess that driving erotically would be a no-no too. Can any of you relate to Driving Erotically?”, it took a whole lot of grown-up-style composure to simply raise my hand and say “I’m sorry, but do you think that might actually say erratically?”, at which point she got very upset and flustered and put on a VHS entitled “DEAD IN FIVE SECONDS!” for the duration.
I am going to hate the shit out of part three.
When I was a kid, my mom had this Carmen Miranda lamp in the attic. Every year at Christmas time I would climb up the ladder to pull down boxes of decorations and stockings, and every year the lamp would startle me as my flashlight glanced across the surface of her face. As the years passed, her paint chipped here and there, dents found their way into her hair, cobwebs built up with the dust. I grew up, I moved out, and I didn’t think about the Carmen Miranda lamp at all until one night a few months back when I saw one sitting behind the bar at Forbidden Island (a wonderful tiki bar in Alameda). When Sunday dinner rolled around I asked my mom what ever happened to the lamp, if we still had it up there gathering dust, and told her that someday I’d love to take it off her hands if she were so inclined.
When my birthday rolled around, my mom and dad told me they had a special present for me. I had absolutely no idea what it might be; I hadn’t asked for anything and we’re not exactly the type of family where people go out blindfolded to the driveway to see a new car with a bow on top. There was a big buildup before the big reveal: they had taken the lamp out of the attic, patched up her chips and dents, and given her a fresh coat of paint and a new lampshade. She looked nothing like I remembered, not in the least big creepy but also the new, flat coat of paint had taken away the vestiges of her glamour. “I know it’s not the best paint job”, mom said, “but we figured you could doctor her up a bit when you’ve got the time.”
She’s sat on my counter for the past 2 months, watching with flat eyes as I blow dried my hair in the morning, begging for a little attention of her own. So tonight I finally caved. My boyfriend wanted to play video games, so I took the opportunity to stay home and finally give Carmen a makeover. It took me the duration of two bad movies and one good one, but I finally finished! I’m pretty happy with it, I think she’d be pretty stoked, too.
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Above are photos from a lovely little advice column from the 1930’s, letting us ladies know how to behave on a date in order to secure a good man. Scroll through them, it’s worth it. Thank God, apparently I’ve been doing it all wrong.
1. Makeup in privacy! Always look effortlessly beautiful by the time he arrives and make sure to maintain appearance (in private!) for the duration; a man must never see evidence of imperfection and certainly should never watch as your correct it. Which brings us to…
2. Don’t use the car mirror, you silly goose! Driving is very mysterious and complicated; the mirror is for the man to see things, not for powdering your nose.
3. Don’t behave sluttishly. Once you have arrived at your date location, a proper young lady will pay attention only to her date. The man deserves your undivided attention and is not interested in watching you acknowledge or socialize with other individuals, especially other gentlemen.
4. Don’t bore him with your interests. Discussing clothes with men is very frustrating and boring for them. After all, wouldn’t you be bored and confused if he were to discuss business type things with you? Let him pick the topic, he will be grateful not to have to hear your prattle on. And of course…
5. Never look bored. Try smiling instead! Sometimes men say confusing things that may bore you. You must not let him know you are uninterested in what he has to say! A warm smile and well-timed nods will let him know you are paying attention and enjoying yourself.
6. No talking while dancing. When a man wishes you to dance with him, he wishes only for you to dance with him, not to listen to you speak. Dancing can also be quite confusing, so make sure to follow his lead lest you loose concentration.
7. No heavy petting! This is very important. Men do not like women who are openly affectionate in public, as it humiliates them greatly. In the timeless words of Ludacris, men want a lady in the streets, but a freak in the bed. Let us not disappoint, ladies.
8. Don’t drink too much. You may think you are making an excellent and clever point, but you are almost certainly being silly and embarrassing your date. When in doubt, simply leave the drinking to the man.
9. Don’t cry, it’s terribly unattractive. This is another reason ladies should generally avoid drinking, as it aggravates our already tender dispositions and makes us prone to fits of crying. Also, do not attempt to make a man express his emotions to you, ever, but most especially in public. If you must cry, the powder room is an acceptable location in which to do so, and will provide you with the privacy to touch up your make up once you’ve finished feeling emotional.
10. DO NOT PASS OUT! This will most certainly annoy your date and cause the waiter to raise his arms into a silly pose, which no one will enjoy.
There you have it, ladies. Happy hunting!
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Girl uniform.
Three drinks in, but here goes…
There is no real way to describe the feeling of being entirely out of one’s element. Most of us have done so, maybe in as minimal a way as spending an evening with a boyfriend or girlfriend’s family with whom you feel you have nothing in common. Or maybe with that one really good friend from childhood from whom you have grown worlds apart but still love dearly, and so when they say “a bunch of us are going to ____ and I know ____ is not really your thing but I think you’ll have fun” you smile and say “Of course I’ll go” because you love them and you are willing to grin and bear it because their friends will at least have to be nice to you.
Now sometimes, it is not this easy. As we grow older and develop our respective personalities more fully, most of us find our niche; our subculture which, within its welcoming arms we are unlikely to ever feel overly judged, watched, pitied, or mocked. I thought I had found mine when I was twelve. Back then I had cornrows and a dumb nickname and I’d “fight a bitch” that looked at me sideways. Something never quite fit though (largely, admittedly, because I tended to be the lone white girl surrounded by black girls, *see: Save The Last Dance) When I got to high school, I went to my first punk show. I remember feeling as though I had come home. Here were the equally poor, angry and prematurely bitter companions I had been searching for. It was heaven for me, being able to go to a show and spend a night in steel-toed boots, shoving against the bodies that slammed their way into me from the sidelines of the pit, waking up to bruises in places I didn’t know could bruise, and feeling free from the need to define myself in any overly “lady-like” way. People on the street looked at my dyed hair and tattered clothes and instead of just seeing a poor kid, they saw a culture. I had an excuse to not have the newest shoes, and jeans that fit me, and expensive makeup. I loved the music, too, but I think that’s what I loved the most about discovering punk: I could be a poor white kid, in poor white kid clothing, and it was fine.
But any young woman will eventually be bombarded with the notions of what she “should be”. As a kid I dreamed of being able to buy myself anything I wanted, whenever I wanted. When I was an adolescent I would fall asleep imagining, as I would presume many adolescent females do, all of the things I would change about myself, my appearance and my body, if I ever had the wealth necessary to do so. This tormented me not only because it is a shitty thing to do to oneself, but also because I had a hippie mother who insisted that everything about me was beautiful and that “she should know, she created me”. But it had been solidified in me from a young age that I was in a separate class than many people. I was not the kind of child who received many new things and so, over time, I became perfectly fine with that. In fact, the other kids on my block who complained about being hungry but wore designer clothes and new sneakers seemed ridiculous to me. “After all”, I thought, “why bother fitting in? Why spend so much effort to look like everyone else?”
When I left high school and got to college, I eventually began dating someone I would classify as the most elitist, awful type of “punk” there is out there. It was a few months into this that I began really noticing how protective we all are of our various subcultures. “Oh, you call THAT punk?”, “Oh, you call THAT hip hop?”, “Oh, you call THAT techno?”, whateverthefuck. I was getting older, growing out of being fine with dingy jeans and worn out shoes every day of the week. I wanted to have some nice things, some fancy shoes and dresses. And every time I got myself one of these things, my then-boyfriend and my housemates would look at me and say “Wow, what are your trying to be?”. It was frustrating. I wanted so badly to be able to feel feminine, but when I wore “girly” clothing (you know, the kind my boyfriend would stare at on other girls) I was reminded, again, that it was not my place to do so. The line in the sand may be faint, but it is there: With us or against us…do you really want to wear those high heels?
Once I amputated that godawful person from my life, I began to realize that not only is it okay for me to want to look nice sometimes, it’s also kind of the healthy way for a person to be. I did not want to be 40 and clinging to the vestiges of my punk days, and besides, the scene had (and has) proven itself to be just as judgmental, hypocritical, and closed-off as any other genre. I bought myself a nice thing here and there, usually something far out of my price bracket, and it felt so good to treat myself to things that made me feel good. Not anyone else, but ME. And now I feel as though I exist on the outskirts of various subcultures; not wanting to commit to any because, no matter how hard they all may argue to the contrary, they all have the capability to be just as shallow and cruel as the next.
Which brings me to tonight (sorry, I know it’s a roundabout trip to a shorter point). Tonight I went to a friend’s going away party at a dance club in the city. I wore heels and a tight skirt and plenty of makeup and perfume, but as soon as I got to the door I felt as though I would never, and maybe should never, belong in such a place. When I walked in the doors, girls looked me up and down, sizing me up either for a fight or to see if I posed any threat or competition. The black-lights made the makeup on all of our faces sit like batter on a frying pan, baking and sliding around in the musky heat of the various gaudily furnished rooms. Seven times, seven separate girls called me a slut or a bitch or a whore or some equally derogatory name as we simply crossed paths on the stairway (It took every ounce of restraint to remind myself, seven times over, that I am on probation and cannot hit anyone in public). And I realized how little I fit in, how much less I cared that my hair was kind of messy and my entire outfit was second-hand and, though I thought I looked nice, I could never bring myself to squeeze and paint myself into something the masses of arrogant, equally primped men in attendance would want. I like nice things, I want nice things, and I want to feel pretty but I also want and need to surround myself with people who can appreciate me without those things.
Those men and women are “out of my league”, as it were, because they are the types that people in society fantasize about. They are are the girls who will put on a full face of makeup before their husband gets out of bed in the morning, they are the men who expect it. That is their subculture, and it is just as awful and strange to me as mine might be to them. And just as I scoffed at the preppy girls who came to punk shows in my youth, they may equally scoff at me and my attempts at blending in. I’m fine with that.
I would not trade a thing to be anywhere near that league. I’m just a girl who is trying to be a woman who has some nice clothing, some expensive accessories and the ability to dream of having more without ever sacrificing myself in the process.
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