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.

crystal vulva

so the new roman catholic cathedral in my city just got dedicated yesterday. no, that's not me in the red ao dai or the nun frock. during the taking of this photo and the dedication of the cathedral , i was 100 feet away walking along the lake on my way to the cathedral to bourgeois green living--Whole Foods.

i think its interesting in this era of populist evangelical born-again undo-the-constitutional-separation-between-church-and-state, that the roman catholic church chooses to name their newest Cathedral "Christ the Light" rather than the usual array of saints and the ever popular Mary of the Sacred Bleeding Heart and its various iterations. (and let's not even get into how they got the $190 million to build after it shelled out hundreds of millions to pay the victims of priest child molestation). i guess they're not immune to the X-n zeitgeist and wanted to assert their own affiliation to christianity... but then the cathedral looks like a vulva.

see, i called it years ago that the cathedral design was vulvular. i say it on a near daily basis when we pass by on the way to and from home. and here's the proof to my puddin'.

ah you say, but it looks like a fish. not just any fish but the tilapia that christ himself ate and that has become the symbol of christianity. indeed, this article about the cathedral explains the design concept thusly:

More than 1,000 sheets of glass will cloak a skeleton of Douglas fir, forming a luminous 12-story dome inspired by the fish shape known as the vesica piscis, an ancient symbol of Christianity. (LA Times 9.2.2007)

ah, i say, and there it is--a Vulva. an exalted yoni in glass & wood. and there ain't no contradiction in that. for those of you who aren't familiar with the symbology of the sacred feminine in the pre-christian mother goddess multi-millineal timespan, the diamond or marquise shape is an ancient symbol of you guessed it, the Vulva--the true origins of human Life. when christianity sought to convert the masses of goddess-lovin' pagans, it co-opted many of the holy days & symbols along the way. and in time, the symbol of the Mother Goddess' yoni became the fish symbol of Christ, and the Mother Goddess herself became Mary, mother of god.

there you have it oaklanders, a lakeside, monumental, sacred crystal vulva nestled amongst the steel & concrete phalluses of downtown commerce.

and can i tell you, that's the biggest yoni i have ever seen! true story!

p.s. while i'm on the topic of female genitalia, may i just say for those of you fond of binary analogies, the female equivalent of the penis (which is a sexual and urinary organ) is not the vagina (internal muscular canal, no urine passeth this way). that is just anatomically incomparable. but, you protest, we like to be reductive and teach our children to say "a boy has a penis and a girl has a [singular noun]". nope you are wrong. if you are speaking of external genitalia the anatomically correct term is vulva. if you are speaking to reproductive ability, that would be uterus or ovaries as the case may be.

p.p.s. and while i'm talking about catholics, (the now Monseigneur) Father Dennis is a racist! While the presiding priest at Holy Spirit, he hated the vietnamese parishoners and called me and my friend Ha "you barbarians!" when he caught us trying to sneak into the hall with the secret method passed down kid-to-kid to use the phone (no vandalism, honest).

some get a kick from cocaine...

i'm sure that if I took even one sniff
that would bore me terrific'ly too
yet I get a kick out of you.
-Cole Porter

i ate a croissant bun. it was a bad idea.

first because i cant tolerate wheat so much; its about on par with lactose-intolerance. and this is my third day of indulging in wheat pastries so there is a build up factor. (sorry T. we can leave the windows open tonight).

and second, because it was loaded with nutmeg.

nutmeg. a seemingly innocuous cupboard spice from exotic southeast asia & the pacific islands. one of the key products of the spice trade and in the motivation to discover a new route to India.
nutmeg has hallucinogenic properties. malcolm X used to smoke it back in the days when he was a lumpen nicknamed "Detroit Red" doin' time and lacked access to the real stuff. nutmeg is considered a uterine stimulant; in large enough quantity, an abortifacient/emmenagogue along with cinnamon and other seemingly harmless spices and is to be avoided in large doses during a pregnancy.

perhaps its the application of liquid heat that releases the essential oil, but even small quantities of nutmeg sprinkled on my latte have been know to get me a little.... stimulated above & beyond the caffeine. so i generally avoid the liberal use of nutmeg by itself.

i ate most of the bun before the realization & aftereffects set in. in addition to feeling a little light-headed, a little high, and cottonmouth/very parched, the baby is simultaneously kicking & punching me really hard right now, a little harder than his/her usual. i've just had a quart of water to try & flush it out. and now, all's quiet on the western front... though my head is still buzzin'.

just goes to show, food is medicinal. in modern day life, we are so divorced from the natural world and that understanding... its pathetic that it takes pharmeceutical corporate testing to re-discover that for us.

my grandmother whups đít

you ever feel like scientists/researchers lack common sense? and maybe some home-training by their grandmothers? as my bà ngoại likes to say "đá cho mày mà đá bây giờ!|i'm gonna kick your ass!"

anthropologist researchers "discover" that grandmothers are productive members of society and have a social-evolutionary role that prolongs longevity & survival in non-industrialized societies. whether its childrearing or economic production, grandmothers the world over hold their own and keep families alive. grandmothers are powerful.

it's a sad commentary on the patriarchal nuclearization of the modern american household in the industrial capitalist era that somehow that piece of info should be revelatory. elders are denied dignity and a social role in this society. i have only to visit the nursing home where my bà ngoại is staying until she's well enough to have the feeding tube taken out to get depressed & indignant about how this society treats its elders. or as i learned in high school with the few non-immigrant schoolmates (and in that area of town, they were white trash and/or military brats), the kids would get kicked out or forced to pay rent at 18 and then they in turn would stick their parents in nursing homes as soon as they got the chance. karmic payback.

we need a council of grandmothers in government. maybe they could make sense of the billions of dollars spent on the war machine, profiteers, and cutthroat mercenaries and straighten out our nonsensical health care system, public education and social security/elder care.

resistance is futile

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/1998/08/14584

where's the silent majority?

hmm... i was watching Sai-Gon TV earlier today and saw that there was yet another anti-comm!e protest in OC. this time outside the office of OC vinamese periodical VietWeekly. Vinamese newspapers are rarely controversial given the high rate of mortality for Vinamese American journalists--Chauncey Bailey's assasinat!on is not an uncommon occurrence in Viettown; it's an occupational hazard of journalism in our community--so, this is noteworthy and commonplace all at the same time.

i don't have anything substantial to blog. as yet. (mom is reminding me not to sit in front of computer too long since i did work from home on my vacation all pm so... it's almost time for second dinner. hủ tiếu|pork & seafood glass noodle soup. mmm. i pity those whose only experience of vinamese noodle soup is phở. so let's do a san jose trip & revive our eat-around-the-world monthly dates.)

here are the articles:

A History of Violence: A brief history of anti-comm!e attacks
Red scare in Lil Sai-Gon
Waiting with red-baited breath

this is the kind of black-and-white manichean binary as Fanon outs it, that we still have yet to evolve from and that keeps locked in a cycle of violence on a global scale. it's all to easy to deny your opposition/opponent/adversary/competitor their humanity and cast them as the (plug in a derogatory fearmongering -ist adjective of choice: commie, capitalist, socialst, racist, separatist etc.) enemy and to employ the same dirty tactics as you accuse the other side of engaging in.

is freedom of speech really only an ideological tool of the Nation-State that only upper-/middle-class white americans purport to enjoy?

life lessons... with a breakbeat

have you ever had to sing "the wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round.. (from the top)" or "we just got a letter, we just got a letter, we just got a letter, wonder who its from?" or "hot dog hot dog hot diggety dog hot dog hot dog hot diggety dog!" or "We're gonna do the monkey (oh oh ah ah oh oh ah ah), Do the monkey (oh oh ah ah oh oh ah ah), Monkey, Monkey (oh oh ah ah oh oh ah ah), That's alright" or heaven forbid, the barney song?

you ever notice the only way to dance to those folksy songs is to rock from side to side or do the knee bend squats and maybe, if the kid is coordinated enough, clap in unison. odd pre-eminem white people dances that don't involve the hips, the shoulders, fluidity, sensuality (in its least erotic sense). without a rump-shaking bassline, how's a kid sposed to get any sense of rhythm and learn to dance? i've wondered. in white bread SD north county-burbia, i've seen the product of those breakbeat-less songs--i had to sit though Ms. Jamie's dance studio recital in may just to see Lily boss the other girls and yell-sing doing their little butterfly ballet performance for three minutes, and i witnessed Ms. Jamie's teen kids breakdance and weo,... they have timing, but they ain't got rhythm. the other product of those bassline-less songs is the noodle dance (no relation to the chicken noodle soup dance) usually performed by a barefoot white girl with fake-dreadlocks, multiple piercings, midriff baring halter top, and a gypsy skirt (african or indian), which involves pseudo-tribal writhing hips shoulders arms and a lack of sense about personal space. give wide berth to the flailing body parts. it really is an under-studied phenomenon; they congregate at Burning Man.

then i meandered across this new kids show with a breakbeat, Yo Gabba Gabba! clearly it was created by someone who grew up in the 80s. (click on Foofa, the pink flower bubble to check out the videos). okay so the characters cant breakdance worth shit (or even do a credible version of the cabbage patch or the running man or the snake--and why cant Plex the robot actually do The Robot?--but then they are wearing bulky fuzzy costumes that render subtlety a moot exercise in futility. i'm not sure what DJ Lance's excuse is), but then neither can a 2 year old. i guess it's a good thing they aren't introducing downrock, headspinning, butterfly kicks or other power moves to your toddler b-boy/b-girl -in-training. now, the lyrics are still silly kid-friendly with a moral, but at least the beats are fresh & tight.

check out biz's beat of the day. learn to beatbox kids!

i am a big fan of saving money over proprietary licensed merchandise because paying over $25 for a onesie is outrageous (though i do secretly want a Baron Davis baby jersey) so i like that they have DIY YGG! iron-ons.

i like free even better than bootleg.

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.

mind your own womb!

[ed. i'm having mild guilt pangs about my nice friends who care about me and who probably read this insufferable blog to be nice to me, so let's just say this is all imaginary.]

[ed.#2 okayokay, the more girlfriends i talk to processing my feelings, the more remorseful i feel. so, i won't do like my junior high self and destroy my previous journal entries, so you will just have to categorize this one under "ooh, that is so all about her. obviously she gots some challenging emotions around this topic." but then isn't that the point of a blog?]

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

dear dear friends and acquaintances,

though i recognize that heterosexual union comes with a set of cultural assumptions, societal expectations, legal privileges, tax breaks, and baggage; and though i fully understood that vinamese matrimony comes with three explicitly defined goals*: 1) suy gia-securing familial alliance 2) tổ tiên-propitiating the ancestors and 3) nòi giống-propagating our people; though i knew those things from the outset of this connubial partnership, i am only recently made conscious that regardless of culture or society, the common obsessive genome is that of procreation. and as such, as newlyweds, my lifepartner and i are subject to a heightened level of interest in our breeding proclivities and sexual activities, and ergo, reproductive pressure. as if ye olde biological clock and expiration dates weren't enough.

imagine the scene--there we are engaged in random chitchat, polite, water-cooler variety conversation about work- or life-related exigencies and vagaries--nothing deep, nothing intensely personal, emotional or soul-baring--when abruptly, desultory, all tò mò incongruous intimate inundation:

"when are you having a baby?" or even worse, "are you pregnant yet?"

wince. shall i give you post-coital updates? what is it you *need* to know?

as referenced in a previous blog o'mine, vinamese family planning involves one's goddesses, one's ancestors, one's kin, and the government. and at this time, i would add one's health care providers. if you are one of those beings, i guess this means you know and are comfortable with the fact that i am not a virgin--lạy mẹ maria!--durrr, hmmm... that still does not incline me to discuss sexual matters with you.

if you are *not* affiliated with any of the aforementioned beings, please allow me to say, we appreciate the well-meaning sentiment/intention behind that suggestive sparkle in your eye, your quizzically cocked eyebrows, and your prurient interest and curiosity about our fertility and reproductive status. please be assured that when my womb/egg has selected insemination from among millions of my spouse's spermatozoa, and viably implants a fetus and placenta after the 8th week, you will be the eighth to know--after our gods, our ancestors, ourselves, our parents, our siblings, our kin whom number in the hundreds and our midwife --and that you will receive our glad tidings of conception in person or via phone, email or gossip as the case may be. we hope that knowing your place on the pecking order and manner of information dissemination alleviates your concern, anxiety and non-sequitur questions on our behalf.

until then, please--and we say this with patient affection albeit with a strained smile--please mind your own womb!

thank you in advance for refraining from compulsively banal interlocution and heterosexual attentiveness in/about my womb which reinforces a biologically reductive definition of femininity/matrimony and a societal obsession with managing the productiveness of women's wombs. in the spirit of mutual propriety, i promise not to ask you about: still being single or unmarried, your stagnating career, finishing your degree, the moribund gasps of your life dreams, your financial debt, your retirement plan, the state of your relationship with your parents, your weight gain, your impotence, your credit score, your spiritual disillusionment, or otherwise insensitive personal questions that may trigger feelings of pain, pressure, vulnerability, inadequacy, insecurity and/or failure.

it took eight years of commitment, 1.75 years of planning and only six months of wedded bliss to get to this point. we don't do anything in a hurry.

peace,
the newlyweds

this has been a public service announcement of the MYOB! civic benefit campaign.


*anthropological note: the primacy of romantic love as a singular cultural goal for wedlock being a bourgeois, individualistic, ideological invention of the Nation-State resulting in a 50% divorce rate and below 1 reproduction rate in the West.

Lessons in Vinamese Decisionmaking Process

SITUATION: how to make a vinamese plan of action for a decision involving more than one person.

WHO: anyone who is impacted, anyone with experience, guests, neighbors, third parties, anyone with an opinion (does not have to be present to participate).

WHAT/HOW:

1. engage in lengthy crosscutting discussions with all parties. weigh out all the options and variations conceivable with unstated assumptions based on self's reality and way of thinking. multiple onsite/offsite side conversations as well, sometimes via telephone or third parties. decisionmaking process is influenced by who is most experienced, most vocal, and/or high status/elder.*

2. come to understanding and consensus on plan of action with all parties.

3. all parties must them come to consensus about which party implements decision or which person(s) will delegate implementation of decision and who is ultimate implementor(s). implementor(s) does not have to be affiliated with decisionmaking process. additionally, other parties will take action on auxiliary actions needed to satisfactorily accomplish decision, usually involves significant quantities of food.

4. because of culturally-based cosmological flexibility (i.e. the epistemological lack of Platonic diametric binaries, absolutist Cartesian logic common in simplistic Western way of thinking and capitalist cultural understanding of time whereas multiple truths and realities co-exist simultaenously layered with animist, ancestral, Daoist, Confucian, Buddhist beliefs in complex Vinamese way of thinking**), each individual walks away with entirely different interpretation of what consensus entailed based on own reality, preference & assumptions and who was the most vocal and influential vis-a-vis self.

IMPLEMENTATION PROCESS:
implementor can then take any or all of the following options:
a) implement own understanding of the decision based on own reality, interpretation, assumptions & preferences. if they were not affiliated with consensus process, they will implement own interpretation of delegator's own interpretation which will vary from original interpretative decision consensus.
b) be influenced into implementing variation of own interpretation of decision consensus--possibly, but not always, one previously discussed in the descionmaking process--by entirely unaffiliated opinionated people or circumstantial shifts or vagaries of Life, Supply, and Bureaucracy in Viet Nam.

RESULT:
once decision is implemented, regardless of outcome, have conversation rehashing, processing and sometimes arguing about decisionmaking process, any and all deviations from one's own interpretation of consensus decision until mutual understanding and satisfaction is reached. conversation can take place over extended spans of time and can involve any parties named above and occasionally, wholly irrelevant parties who will insert their opinions as to an alternative course of action.

CONCLUSIONS (or my trademark Choose-Your-Own-Moral™)

• it takes an extended family of at least 3 generations, plus kin (based on marriage alliances 3-4 generations removed), and give or take some community members, totalling approximately 42 people to get 15 people (4 Viet Kieu and 11 uncles, aunties & cousins) on a combi to go on a mini-vacation road trip 20 km away. the absolute number and who attends is subject to change given (un)affiliated opinionated people, circumstantial shifts or vagaries of Life, Supply, and Bureaucracy in Viet Nam.
• there is no absolute Truth or Reality. Reality and Truth are context based.
  
• linguistics & anthropology dual bachelor's degree and doctorate-track anthropology grad school are put to amusing if inconsequential use thereby justifying the incurred debt from student loans. use-per-wear theory of finance would indicate that this blog is worth $1 every time it is read.
  
• and that my friends, is how we won the wars...
  

anthropological notes
* an elder/high status person can exercise decisive authority and make an autocratic decision at any point in the process which nevertheless will be subject to vagaries of Life, Supply and Bureaucracy.
**a linguistic or grammatical analogy is the lack of universal definitive articles 'a' or 'the' in vinamese language. articles are context-based on the being of the noun and fluctuate ('con' animate, 'cai' inanimate, 'qua'/'o' form, 'cap'/'chiec' set) or be entirely omitted. pronouns are also based on kinship context and flux according to the reality/status of the person speaking and that of the indicated person and under certain contexts can be entirely omitted or personal names used in its stead.

(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.