the morning after

the nice benefit about living in the digital age is the instantaneous access to news across the country and worldwide and the global connection to individual events. the invention of phallogocentric writing systems created history and led to the social construction of the patriarchal nation-state. and so, history is written and sometimes, surpasses individual remembering. benedict anderson pointed to newspapers as a key technology constructing the imagination of a national political community though it may be fractured, nevertheless it remains conceptually cohesive via this print medium of national mythos and ethos (and pathos). maybe your morning newspaper delivery (you still get hard copy?) was stolen today and you don't have $500 to shell out on ebay, or maybe you still see value in print media as an artifact--virtual news is after all so very ephemeral. to see how the world (okay corporate & independent media) scribed this moment in history, click on this.

OBAMA WINS

i can't hardly believe it!

my coworker and i (and VL) were just giving a community needs assessment survey design training for seven black and brown youth leaders who are building a center for the young people of West Oakland. the dream they dare to dream is built on hope and the determination to make change, to stop the violence, to unite young people, and envision a positive future. the news came via text message midway thru the training and electrified us with possibility. what blessed company to be in when history was made.

i just read this:
"Rosa sat so Martin could walk. Martin walked so Barack could run. Barack is running so our children can fly."

as much as i believe in social change and social justice, i never thought it would happen in my lifetime. shame on me for giving into the culture of fear that dominates used to dominate american politics.

hot damn. i guess my breast pump was right. she called it back in april. voteforbarack-voteforbarack-voteforbarack (blackhope! blackhope! black hope!).

red elephant

calling out the (red) elephant in the room.

i was beginning to feel like i was the only one that remembers that white suffragettes successfully campaigned to get the vote to maintain white supremacy after black men were enfranchised.

Belle Kearney, “The South and Woman Suffrage,” Woman’s Journal, 4 April 1903

"The enfranchisement of women would insure immediate and durable white supremacy . . .The South is slow to grasp the great fact that the enfranchisement of women would settle the race question in politics. The civilization of the North is threatened by the influx of foreigners with their imported customs; by the greed of monopolistic wealth, and the unrest among the working classes; by the strength of the liquor traffic, and by encroachments upon religious belief. Some day the North will be compelled to look to the South for redemption from these evils, on account of the purity of its Anglo-Saxon blood, the simplicity of its social and economic structure, the great advance in prohibitory law, and the maintenance of the sanctity of its faith, which has been kept inviolate. Just as surely as the North will be forced to turn to the South for the nation’s salvation, just so surely will the South be compelled to look to its Anglo-Saxon women as the medium through which to retain the supremacy of the white race over the African. . . ."

one hundred years later, the narrative doesn't sound much different.

politics

and now for some perspective...

Time for Some Campaignin' | Funny Jokes at JibJab

a pig is a pig

so lipstick on a pig is the major presidential campaign concern.

Riiiiight. Because cheating on and then abandoning your crippled-no-longer-hot former model wife after she stood by you & single-handedly raised your three brats for seven years while you were in the hole, with a younger, tighter, and richer woman is somehow NOBLE.

Question: What do you call someone who marries a trust fund baby and gets thrown a $450,000 face-saving bone annually from the father-in-law?

Answer: Apparently, you call him a Feminist.

ain't that some self-serving pork in a barrel? those with lipstick on their... ahem, collar, shouldn't be casting stones. it's like the 21st century and name-calling and out & out lying is really the most important issue in a presidential election? so asinine. can we get back to the real fracking issues?

people are dying under this economy. literally, dying. consumed as pearls before swine. it would behoove us to remember, All Animals are Equal, but Some Are More Equal Than Others.

this little piggy had none, and this little piggy
cried whaaawhaawhaa all the way---
biloxi in 2005. not much has changed.

oh weo, there a bunch of new casinos via where
these homes used to stand built via the eminent domain
of tragic circumstance. where are the people?
working for minimum wage in the casino.
what govt relief has been done for them?
weo, the govt subsidized the casinos. duh.

we've been sold a pig in a poke. the American economy is a house of cards built on trillions and trillions of debt and we've been dealt two ace of spades. it's like [warning stupid power analogize coming up], it's like the higgledy-piggledy house made out of straw; it's like the economy is a HOG being gavage-fattened* with cannabalistic swill comprised of putrefying animal by-products marinated in lard and cardboard filler derived from GMO corn-syrup which is itself over-produced and subsidized by the govt. oh, it turns out that porkbelly of debt has been carved up by the rest of the world. America is bringin' home the GNP bacon for China and like, every Western nation. aw, it so nice to know that my consumer debt is going to such humanitarian uses. i might just go finish up that PhD and contribute more interest points to world congeniality after all.

lament the death of "the true, wise friend called Piggy". with or without lipstick, any presidential candidate who cannot offer some real solutions is leading us down the real Bridge to Nowhere.

I-90 bridge in Mississippi destroyed by Hurricane Katrina (2005)

you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. all the name-calling in the world doesn't change that at all.

*pigs, left to their own innate farrowing nature would prefer to eat acorns & truffles, however a starving pig will eat whatever is in front of it, no matter how unhealthy to their constitution, given no other choice. kinda like american children and processed food. end result is the same too--obesity and imminent death. true story.

sleepwriting

freed from a marathon nursing session (another growth spurt already, my little love?) i perused the bookshelf for what i remember not and happened across a journal that my sister gave me as i was about to embark on my first trip to VN twenty-five years after our phamily left to meet relatives that have haunted our childhood. as with all my journals, it is sporadic, inchoate, inconsistent. when you grow up with two older siblings and a bratpack of cousins you learn to destroy your diaries as you go along.

i came across this undated entry from sometime in 2001 in the house on 25th St where i lived with 10, jujubee, and sometimes el. (i usually cannot remember dates, i still chronicle my history by where i was living at the time.) back at the turn of the century, i used to write creatively & perform while procrastinating on mind-deadening grad school.

this entry was a dream that i had. an electrifying gathering of many and i was giving a toast or a speech. i was me, but i was not. i think i might have been a man. did i dream this or was this something i heard and remembered in my subconscious? perhaps from another lifetime. so powerfully had i been moved in my slumbers, i roused and in the liminal space between twilight and dawn, i scrawled this down. only one other time in my life have i been so productive in my dreams, and that was to solve a particualrly sticky algebra problem. and now since my speechmaking days are a distant memory, i share this with you because many are the corny, trite or trying-too-hard things i've written--especially in the spoken word zeitgeist era (though i've always considered myself a poet not a spoken word artist; i like iambic pentameter, sestinas and portmanteau) that will never see the light of day nor tarnish your coracles, but this is actually good. this is not the truest thing i have ever said or believed (only my sister knows that) and yet there is something sterling about this that gives me that frisson of third eye clarity that i get when i speak from my heart. which happens not enough mired in the mundacity of everyday life. maybe one day when i write the novels i have brewing in the back of my mind, i will use it. [ed. note: the ellipses represent either dramatic pauses or lacunas where my dream skipped a groove or the roaring of the adulating crowd moved to testify like when the warriors were in the playoffs] :

as far as the spirit can see
are many peoples
many waters
many lands
many faiths
many nations

our common belief unites us
our common belief in true freedom, justice & equality
our belief makes us sisters & brothers
this belief makes our numbers multitudes
it is our reason for living and our reason for dying...

we have learned much from each other...
our ancestors give strength, spirit & knowledge to the world...

my sisters and brothers, we are Hope...

and in every particle, every patch of this earth
there is another
who yearns to be free
the earth herself will resound with our fierce hope

my sisters & brothers
stand up and raise your fist
join in this toast salute
and roar together to fill your body & soul
let the winds carry our voices to every ...

may our words be fertile
may our actions be collective

say with me
free the land
free our people!

the politics of malpractice

a friend o'mine was concerned about the fact that homebirth midwives do not have malpractice liability insurance. we talked about the financial barriers--most insurance companies refuse to cover midwives or at astronomically unaffordable rates. and i later wrote this to her:

i read this article about malpractice in southwest magazine (i think. pregnancy brain.) a couple of years ago about malpractice and accountability/ethics. the point of having malpractice insurance is in case you get sued. the ethical part of the question comes in when you look at why or when people sue. so the article was saying that its not just having an undesired outcome that makes people sue, but that the majority of malpractice lawsuits occur when they have an undesired outcome and they are dis-informed or ignored by their care provider afterwards when the patient/family try to understand why/what happened and get closure (usually because the care provider is afraid of getting sued, they don't trust their patient, they clam up usually and this is a fairly universal hospital policy/protocol too). the lack of accountability and violation of their trust rightly infuriates people and they sue to get access to the information not primarily for money nor to "reverse" the outcome. they see the monetary damages as a way to teach the hospital/doctor that it should give the information/closure to patients in the first place. and so now, a few hospitals are now trying a new mediating approach where care providers talk to the families after an undesired outcome, give them what information they have, and admit any mistakes and apologize if necessary. the result--the family gets closure & does not pursue a malpractice lawsuit.

from my perspective, insurance in general is designed to financially protect your assets (whether life, car or home); malpractice insurance is really a way for the medical establishment to avoid accountability and to protect their financial assets. its sort of a moot point for most midwives because of the mutual trust building, the ethics of empowering the client/family particularly with information, and accountability to the client. if midwives had to get malpractice insurance, they would go out of business b/c of the expense & barriers. and if they got sued (regardless of insurance or no), they would go out of business. and that's also one of the reasons why many hospitals are reluctant to grant midwives hospital privileges b/c the hospital would be liable in the event of a lawsuit. what makes it moot is that because of the empowerment, trust and relationship, midwives aren't as likely to be in a situation where a family feels like its only recourse to getting closure about an undesired outcome is to sue. really overwhelmingly midwives are sued/persecuted with criminal charges by doctors and hospitals more than you see midwives sued by clients. so that's the larger context. and from my experience, when my niece died at birth last year, the nurse midwife (similar to CNMs in the East Bay, had hospital privileges) came and talked to my sister soon after. and my sister got the closure she needed around how Anabelle died. it didn't change the outcome or her grief, but she understood why/how it happened even as she disagreed with the standard medical procedure to resuscitate.

malpractice insurance doesn't prevent undesired outcomes. that's a part of the package when we choose to have a homebirth. we are informed about risk, outcomes and prevention and empowered to make choices. and thats part of the very small risk we accept to have a normal and safe birth.

malpractice insurance doesnt protect the patient; it protects the doctor.

plastic morals

i'm utterly scandalized by the series of Mattel recalls.

now, they are doing it voluntarily. is it because they care about children's health? nope. it's because they are afraid of the liability--the lawsuits & backlash that will be generated from the scandal mongering publicity.

it's quite easy to point the finger at China for shoddy manufacturing standards. and yes, it is shady on China's part and it's also the case that the US loves to scapegoat China for economic ills since the 1700s. however let's look a little deeper. Mattel is recalling voluntary while the government remains curiously silent (let's contrast this govt response to the E. Coli breakout in processed spinach or other contagious diseases like mad cow, hoof & mouth, drug-resistant TB...). we could also ask how could our government allow this to happen?

after all 85% of the world's toys are made in China and not one of the European and other industrialized countries are issuing recalls. huh? why the disparity? weo, our government does not have strict regulations on importing toxins in manufactured products because of the powerful chemical industry lobby. The European Union, Korea, Taiwan, among others have evidence-based (from American scientists btw) strict bans on lead, endocrine-disrupters (phthlates), carcinogens and other toxins in children's toys. the US ignores the same evidence (or are bribed by the chemical industry to ignore) and allows toxins in all plastic products. the same Chinese manufacturer which is producing a toxin-free toy for export to Europe is also manufacturing the identical toxin-laden toy for US export.

now it's easy to compartmentalize this as an issue of children's health or of pet health as the case may be, but it's a human health issue, an ecological issue. these phthlates, carcinogens, toxic chemicals are present in most (if not all) plastics and many common consumer products, mattresses & furniture, cleaning products, cosmetics/nail polish, etc. it's almost completely unregulated--except of course what little consumer products the US manufactures for export, since most of that is regulated by other countries' standards to exclude toxic chemicals. in fact the European Union dumps all the toxic toys (and other consumer products) they don't allow in their countries to the US market. ironic right?

asian women and asian men

while diggin through some of my archives, i came across this angry letter i wrote to Nhà magazine. While they refused to respond or even publish it, i shared it on the VietNam Womens Forum listserv and it was later published in VietWeekly in OC in spring 2004. i had just quit grad school as you could see in my vocabulary, i mean uh, discourse.

Dear Nhà,

Your magazine (www.nhamagazine.com) fills a small and valuable niche for bilingual and monolingual Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans in the US and as such represents an important effort in the oeuvre of Vietnamese periodicals along with Viet Home and the now defunct Viet Now/V magazine. Your magazine represents the Vietnamese diaspora community in the US and as such has a tremendous responsibility to its readership and the community at large. Therefore as a concerned Vietnamese woman, I wanted to write in about the article "Breadsticks vs. Baguette: Does size matter?" (Sept/Oct 2003) which compares Asian penises to breadsticks and to the penises of white, Latino and Black men and to comment how offensive, degrading and dehumanizing it was to our community, and to all Asian men and women. I realize that this letter is rather overdue, but better late than never. And given larger social trends with regards to Asian masculinity, better now. Make no mistake, I am not puritanical; I believe that we should develop healthy attitudes towards our sexuality as individuals, as a community and as a society, and celebrate the range of its expressions and orientations. However this article did not take that route by any means.

Firstly, the author, “The Wayward Wench,” chose to use questionable and prurient methodology by one, speculating from self-professed ignorance of the topic and two, using uncited anthropometric genital measurements which have long been debunked in scientific and anthropological circles as being eugenicist—that would be the same racist biological ideology the Nazis used to rationalize their genocide of Jews. (For critiques of anthropometry and eugenicism, refer to essays by Dr. Stephen Jay Gould).

More importantly in terms of content, the author degrades Asian male sexuality by unfavorably comparing their penises to food products and men of other races. The author clearly recognized that this was derogatory as she “refrained from comparing [her non-Asian husband's penis] to a food product”. One would expect that it should be self-explanatory and blatant how disrespectful this article is, however given that it is not so apparent and that we are supposed to find humor in hurtful dehumanization, I shall also give a parallel example of why this is an offensive, degrading and plain wrong. Were Nhà to publish an article comparing Asian women’s genitals to African American or Latina or white women’s genitals and likening their respective vulvas to food products and considering whose genitalia are “better” for sexual pleasure, the outcry would have been immediate; it would have been absolutely unacceptable and easily recognized as being dehumanizing, racist, sexist and misogynist. Shamefully, there is a larger societal double standard operating that an article emasculating Asian male sexuality in the same way would not be held to the same standard, and speaks to an emerging norm where it is acceptable to degrade Asian men where one would not degrade Asian women.

Historically speaking, the racist mainstream American representation of Asians has always been a pernicious tangle of stereotypical racialized and sexualized images—from the cruel bewitching oriental dragon lady, the sexually-available (to white men) geisha to the misogynist Asian pimp and desexualized bucktoothed cross-eyed Asian male coolie. Whereas in the past, Asian communities resented and resisted this racist imagery, in this post-Amy Tan age of representation those self-same images have become to a certain extent acceptable, recuperated, glorified, and even celebrated and commercialized; the dragon lady is no longer a racist & sexist image but becomes a model of the liberated Asian woman (for instance, Lucy Liu’s character in Ally McBeal or the recent NAATA homage to Anna May Wong). What was once malingering representation is now shiny consumer products on the racks of Urban Outfitters and Abercrombie & Fitch. In the tradition of Long Duck Dong from “Sixteen Candles,” the William Hung minstrel show is but the latest re-enactment of the desexualized oriental coolie for the public’s mocking entertainment . And in the oeuvre of Asian American women’s literature, it has become the norm for Asian women writers to enact emasculating images that degrade, desexualize, demonize and dehumanize Asian men. While I am critical of sexism, I do not believe the solution is to degrade men. This does injustice to my beloved Vietnamese grandfathers, fathers, brothers, significant other, nephews, and yes to my future daughters & sons. This doesn't promote us as women and gets us nowhere as a community.

How have our Asian communities (or granted, the middle-class, college-educated, second-plus generation sectors of the Asian communities) come to internalize these racialized and (de)sexualized images as acceptable representations of Asian people?

It behooves us as a community to recognize the larger racialization/stereotyping of Asian men as well as that of Asian women. I would expect a magazine that represents the lifestyle, culture and identity of Vietnamese Americans to have sensitivity to the racialization and sexualization of Asian women and men and to promote positive models of Asian femininity and masculinity (and everything in between).

4 may, 2004

lessons from the french

i read the news daily. sometimes depending on my daily workplan, my deadlines and my desire to procrastinate, i skim up to seven newspapers. granted, it's mostly articles about eclectic things that interest me in the world like the destruction of culture & the extended family resulting from the Nation-State and its impact on elephants (though, could a quote from Fanon have hurt you? seems to me he discussed this in his clinical study "Colonial War and Mental Disorders" in Wretched of the Earth 1963. does anyone even read anymore?)

and then i see headlines like this Christian Science Monitor article that rile me: "How to fight insurgents? Lessons from the French" about the pentagonia using the Battle of Algiers as offering counter-insurgency lessons for the US occupation of Iraq. though the author gently implies that the french lessons from Algeria is the imperative of political support both in the occupier & occupied countries, this misses the larger lesson in history of occupation & occupied people's will-to-power. you cannot talk about french counterinsurgency tactics in isolation from the revolutionary independence struggle in Algeria and in France's other occupied territory Việt Nam.

that some pentagonian thought that french tactics in Algeria hermetically sealed from historical context could be a blueprint for Iraq, tells me this fool's favorite french movie about Việt Nam is that revisionist colonial belle epoque white man's burden mission civilatrice sentimental la-vie-en-rose drivel, Indochine, written-by-the-losers French film about this beneviolent creole rubber plantation owner (uuubiquitously French Catherine Deneuve) who inherits (ludicrous) an ingrate Vinamese princess (Linh Dan Pham) who not only steals her adoptive mother's boytoy French mercenary soldier lover (preposterous) but also dares to join the liberation movement to overthrow the French colonizers. along the way, homegirl gives up her eurasian baby to said adoptive mother to raise in France where he assimilates and rejects his Vinamese mother in favor of Deneuve after the Geneva Accords (incredulous). heavy on the histerical revision, pathos and metaphor. magnaminous French Mother rejected by the recalcitrant Vinamese Daughter. savais?|get it? like its calorie-free fiction-History loaded with corn syrup, hydrogenated fat, and chock full of preservatives and rose-tinted carcinogenic dyes. unlike most french arthouse movies though, there is no incest (unless you consider the sharing of the boytoy incestuous, in which case, then it does like all other french films involve some measure of incest).

it's pathetic when people get their history from movies. fictionalized history supplants what actually happened with romantic half-truths and out right lies, what i like to call Fictory (or Colbert would call truthiness) in the vein of Forrest Gump. about the only thing the movie got right was the Marie Antoinette gilded bubble of privileged ignorance and excess decadence of the French occupiers with their opium and congaie|mistresses, dehumanization of Vinamese, the callous murders by the French and the just rage for overthrowing French colonizer butchers.

(and while i'm on this tip, by the way, the Nguyễn dynasty sold us out to the French in the first place in addition to invading and conquering Laos, Kampuchea, and Champa. Gia Long was a ignominous traitor who turned to French missionary Pigneau de Behaine after the peasants got done being slaves, revolted in Tây Sơn and overthrew the decadent corrupt exploitative complacent dynasty. as we all know what colonizers bring to civilize the heathen savages, just flip the Cross and you get the Sword. missionaries & religious righteousness have historically been the pretext for military invasion and genocide in the name of the lord from the crusades on. now like any literate/literary person worth her salt, i've read the bible several times and i can't seem to find the commandment, parable, psalm, beatitude etc where god or jesus-the-prince-of-peace says "thou shalt kill in my name. blessed are the christians for they will dominate the earth. god hath given free will except for savages and heathens who art particularly dispensable when interfering with the machinations of capitalism. convert or die. peace." so, predictably, the imperial republic of France (liberté-egalité-fraternité!) invaded in 1858 to protect the catholics, persecute the buddhists, enlighten the savages with democracy, set up occupation shop for a couple hundred years, oh and turn a tidy profit in the process. religious righteousness & democracy are such convenient ideologies to rationalize invasion, domination, oppression, and exploitation. So all you Huế-imperial-superiority people can suck my little pinky toe. as my mama says lưỡi không xương|mealy mouthed fantacists. the last 150 years of Western violence in VN is your royal contribution to Vinamese history. thanks.)

Here's some fun life-under-the-french trivia for you:*

Rubber plantations were nicknamed nơi tàn sát|slaughterhouses because of their enslavement trickery of luring folks in with promises of wages and then starving, brutalizing , torturing and killing them in the process of extracting latex for Michelin among others. the Michelin man is morbidly bloated with depraved profit cannibalistically drained from the masticated marrow and blood of innocents. the only way to escape the rubber plantations was DEATH. or as it turns out, REBELLION--or what in today's doublethink parlance is dubbed "terror!sm" or "!nsurgency".

In the plantations, pregnant women--who had been raped & impregnated by the french overseers and owners--were ordered to dig a hole in the ground for their bellies before they were beaten for asking to use the bathroom. torture tactics borrowed from american slaveowners. in a sick parallel irony to today's article, the au courant news article in France at that time would have read "Comment pacifiions des coolies? Les leçons des américains|How to pacify coolies? Lessons from the Americans"

There was an excrutiating French tax on salt and alcohol to fatten the colonial coffers further. now you may dismiss this as no particular hardship after all, don't we pay an extra five cent "tax" on every bottle or aluminum can we buy (and recently plastic bags). so in the spirit of the Food Stamps Challenge take the seven day Colonizer Salt Challenge: go do some manual labor. alot of it. from dawn to dusk. then make your meal from thin rice gruel and jungle weeds and don't use any salt. not a drop of nước mắm to be had, nor soy sauce. not even the condensated saltine sweat from your own brow. then you'll understand what kind of suffering this is and why there are folksongs about the hardship of the salt tax. and on the upside, you'll lose some weight though you might have a heart attack in the process. there's a reason why gatorade is made with salt yo. salt is the foundation of civilization.

• now the alcohol tax was different. it was a gavage alcohol quota. each village was obligated to purchase alcohol and consume it or be punished with conscription in the coolie corps (those railroads & french colonial architecture got built somehow) or menfolk forced into the colonizer army or face imprisonment (aka the School of the Revolution). i guess the french were hoping to create a society of pacified alcoholics rather than belligerent drunks. lucky for vinamese people, our beer is weaker than Utahian beer. but our rượu đá|rice wine will burn a hole through your liver. in Eastern medicine, the liver is the seat of anger, so if your liver is looking like pâté de foie gras your concern is more likely to be your bequest than rebellion.
• Untold numbers of Vietnamese die under the beneviolent colonist regime (they didnt bother to count how many savages & heathens they threw in the mass graves). 2 million died of famine under the beneviolent Japanese (so much for "Asia for the Asians"). 1 million wounded, ½ million died resisting the beneviolent French back for seconds. over 2 million died under the beneviolent Americans, the number of wounded is still rolling exponentially as leftover landmines and agent orange continue to deploy three decades later. 25,000 died fighting the Khmer Rouge. 10,000 died resisting the 1979 Chinese invasion. not to mention how many perished in the re-education camps and as refugees. 5 wars in the space of 130 years. the price of liberation and independence. (though it begins to make sense why civil society would unravel...)

Revising history doesn't change that Việt Nam, Algeria, and all the other feral natives invaded, conquered, occupied and colonized by France got tired of being it's socio-political experiment under the doublethink banner of liberté-egalité-fraternité while being slaves to fund France's corpulent prosperity. we freed ourselves of the white man's burden and yes it was by any means necessary. Điện Biên Phú suckas. twas the shot heard round the colonized world. with all its la sale guerre|dirty war counterinsurgency tactics (or in today's doublethink "bringing Freedom & Democracy to other people"), its Sûreté|Secret Police, its army of African & Southeast Asian colonized peoples and its army of professional euro legionnaire mercenaries, France lost. badly.

France lost in Việt Nam. France lost in Algeria. major military and moral/political losses. and so then, it gave up the Empire lest it hemorrhage to its own death. people under occupation and domination will never give up the struggle for liberation and independence no matter what the counter-!nsurgency tactics. that's the real lesson from France. the Western world would do well to remember that lest they be condemned to repeat it...

*oooh, Book Learning about the French in VN. don't just take my word for it.

• Before the Revolution: Vietnamese Peasants under the French by Nguyen Vinh Long
• Red Earth: A Vietnamese Memoir of Life on a Colonial Rubber Plantation by Tran Bu Binh

irony is the new black

Fatworld is a new web game in which hyper-anime characters court morbid obesity. for fun.

There are some calorie-free class politics including the surfeit of subsidized, processed foods and a lack of parks/gyms in poor neighborhoods in this virtual world of convenience stores and high calorie meals. it's nutritious for your brain! or not. this takes the gamer god-complex--which omnipotent obsession the reverend doctor Andrew Greeley already explored in the novel God Game in 1986 back when BASIC was the o/s, computer screens were camo black & green and the cursor was called "Turtle," Logo anybody?*--to a whole new american level discourse writ in code the decadent bipolar ethos of excess consumption (bulimic impulse, tract homes) and of protestant ethic of ascetic control (anorexic impulse, martha stewart).**

There is a Choose-Your-Own-Moral™ in here somewhere. i mean i spose i could go on a rant about processed foods, toxic chemicals for consumption and morbidity. but eh, its sunny outside so if people want to put cheetos, big macs, cokes devoid of any nutrition and chock full of preservatives and poison in their body and choose slow cellular death, weo, shrug. i have better things to do. ironic, right?

*the last time i programmed it was a pythagorean theorem program on a floppy that single-handedly delivered me from an 'F' in Geometry class.
**i completely forget the anthropologist lady (Orbach?) who wrote an insightful article about the dual ethos of capitalism and its cultural manifestation in eating disorders. She predicted/called out how anorexia is more socially acceptable even admirable as manifestation of personal control than bulimia which reads as a lack of control, based on the Durkheimian treatise of the Protestant Ethic of Capitalism which fundamentally undergirds american society.

mapping genocide

Google earth is now mapping the genocide in Darfur.here's the Wired article
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2007/06/google_darfur#

and here's the Darfur mapping website
http://www.ushmm.org/googleearth/

food stamps

Congresswoman Barbara Lee (California 9th District) is living off of $21 a week.

Did Congress suddenly decided to rollback on their self-determined wealthy wages of $165k/yr starting salary plus lifetime pension?

nope. she is taking a House Hunger Caucus' "Food Stamp Challenge" because the program is up for re-authorization this summer. $21/week is the national weekly average benefit for a family on food stamps. it's not the first time that Congresswoman Lee has subsisted off foodstamps. so she's keepin' it real.

my family was on food stamps play money after my parents split and we moved from waikiki to san D, trading ma'ona pua truck, sho pao & li hing mui for public assistance, while my mom worked at the Cannon towel factory, and up until my mom got her GED, some english language skills, & a clerical job where she's been underpaid for the last 25+ years. this challenge reminds me of all the crappy processed poverty food (velveeta, powdered milk, uncle ben's, instant macaroni & cheese, spaghetti, margarine, jelly, genero-genero) that was my introduction to mainland american cuisine back in the day before there were vinamese groceries in 'Dago. and creating unhealthy childhood nutrition patterns that i'm still trying to unravel in my adult years.

now see, this integrity and Congresswoman Lee referencing the Tonkin Gulf resolution in her sole (and vindicated) opposition vote against the Authorized Use of Military Force resolution (2001)
is why i actually go to the polls after a five year boycott of the Nation-State's dog & pony show

(self) important disclaimers

i'm a procrastinating and therefore frustrated storyteller/wordcrafter (elementary school teachers assessment in neat cursive penmanship still applies "Bright, But Does Not Apply Herself") and therefore i reserve the sole right to continually and arbitrarily (one might say compulsively) paraphrase pop culture zeitgeist, make obscure irreverent/irrelevant allusions to literary trash and treasures with gimpy metonymic or metaphoric intent, endlessly anthropologize, fanatically reference the sacred feminine, paren(pa)thetically editorialize, and whimsically edit historical posts thereby rendering temporal chronology into a flexible relative narrative raging rapid river of archaic adjectival alliteration, immigran onomatopoeia, involuted neologisms, vernacularistic grammar, consciousness & being, and run-on sentences, simply because meaning and authenticity are human constructs to interpret mere homo sapiens sapiens phenomena as phenomenological events. and philosophy itself is the Nation-State's B!tch. pardon my engulish.

and anyways, weo, i hate linearity. it's like, soooo phallogocentric. oh my goddess!

so in versimilitude to the epistolary novel, mixquiahuala letters, i posit to you, dear (non-existent) reader, nay i urge you to read this blogage as a Blogarary Choose-Your-Own-Adventure which series enticed us as oppressed/repressed/suppressed adolescents with the sucanat Fantacist Lie that there is such a thing as Free Will when met with the Glaring Reality of Parental Authority. this was a deceptive ruse because in actuality the CYOA series had a Moral about Consequences and the Righteous Path, which we all know is the conjuring Mythology of the Nation-State which has subjugated and exploited all of humanity these past two hundred and some score years. and so i compel you to Resist Authority. Read Non-Sequentially and Non-Sequitorally. this is what 4.5 years of grad school did to me, a sum total of 20.5 years of schooling, roughly 2/3rds of my life (the other third apparently having been spent in species anomalous regenerative sleep). Read at your own Peril.

she's a killer queen
gunpowder gelatine
dynamite with a laser beam
guaranteed to blow your mind
anytime--
and yes, yes i did quote Farouk "Freddy" Mercury. it's my soliloquy universe, i shall do as i please, savvy?

i hereby predict i shall get even less work accomplished on my days off--ahem, i mean when i "work from home" natch.