lady matters

happy mother's day, moms and children of moms! a series of recent events have made me appreciate and think a lot more about women and moms. call it a latent awakening.

when i worked at the firm, one of the very prominent male partners started a women's initiative, which was designed to encourage the retention and promotion of women. some women objected to the fact that a man was in charge, though many others (including myself) thought the program never would have gotten off the ground or supported with actual resources without a male rainmaker championing it. whether it was actually effective remains uncertain, but at least the program existed and not just in name.

say what you will about working at a firm, but i was fortunate enough to have a male supervisor who included me in important conversations, sought to introduce me to his clients, and valued my work. i never once felt singled out or differentiated because i was female. in fact, he taught me to have confidence in my work and also that male bosses could be respectful. he was one of the few men who felt secure enough in his own masculinity to consistently work with--and be challenged by--intelligent women. i definitely appreciated it at the time, and i lament that he may have been an outlier.

call me ignorant, but i really didn't appreciate how different it is to be asian and female in the professional world. thanks to the aforementioned boss, i was shielded from a lot of prejudices. i think growing up in a predominantly asian environment also helped; i never viewed my being asian as a handicap. hongcouver gave me the breathing space to try on different identities, free from the weight of having to represent an entire race or ethnicity. that's why when i got to college, i found it a bit laughable that i had to be part of either the gucci-clad asian mafia or the hymn-singing baptists to be sufficiently asian.

then i got to law school and i think at some point in my first year it hit me: i had never voluntarily spoken up in class. then i looked around in my section and realized that none of the other asians had either (though there were only like 6 of us out of 100 or so students). i thought all along that i just didn't like speaking in class, but this made me think, is it something about being asian that prevents me from speaking up?

before this turns into some gender and identity politics 101 term paper, let me give you a bit of context. this is not false humility, but i've always viewed myself to be somewhat asexual. and i don't mean that in a negative way, if that's possible. somehow i deluded myself into thinking that when people view me, they see just me, not asian. female. i've never felt the need to be overly aggressive to compensate for being female. i also don't tend to be the quiet, stereotypically subservient asian. then recently, i was interviewing this dude as part of my case, and he said something to me in a manner that immediately drew attention to the fact that i was the only woman in the room. it was fucking patronizing and unnerving. the senior male on my side came to my defense and subtly, but definitively, put this guy in his place.

over the following days and weeks, i started asking all of my female friends--who, by the way, are uniformly smart as hell and beyond accomplished--whether they'd been treated differently because they're female. they mercifully did not judge me for asking such a laughably naive question and shared their stories. while a handful of situations were a bit ambiguous and subject to interpretation, every single one had experienced discrimination and i appreciated their willingness to be matter-of-fact about their (sometimes emotionally fraught) stories. then it made me wonder, have i willfully ignored this subtext all along? maybe. it probably was some type of a survival mechanism. there is a fine line between recognizing this prejudice and allowing it to undermine your confidence.

what is the takeaway, if anything? a few things: this deepened my appreciation for two women in particular--my mom and hilary clinton. no, i'm not equating the two, you fools, though my mom was a pioneer in her own way. even though her own parents vocally discouraged her from pursuing any meaningful formal education, my mom defined her own way by building several successful businesses for herself by using her street smarts, instincts, and impossibly dogged work ethic. oh yeah, she had four kids on top of that, bitches! though she's not very traditionally feminine almost to a fault, she taught me many more valuable things than how to correctly apply make-up, cook an elaborate meal, or be a consummate (or even a middling) hostess.

then hillary clinton--i'm late to the hilary bandwagon. i always vaguely admired her for being tenacious and successful, but man, hilary...to make it in that fucking boys' universe! i cannot even begin to understand the degradation and humiliation she has had to withstand.

anyway, the above photo is for all of your amusement. happy mother's day.

ps. best recent purchase? huey lewis & the news's greatest hits. amazing.

Piece of Shit Cry Baby

America. A truly culturally and ideologically heterogeneous country. We have our political differences, sure. These differences sometimes give rise to shrill, unfocused passion, but come on, nothing wrong with that. ("Build the dang fence.") But one thing I have always liked about the citizenry is that it does not abide cry babies. So, what the fuck is up with us now? How do we abide the spectacle above? Nancy Pelosi needs to take the Speaker's gavel and beat the living shit out of that fucking tear-filled turd sandwich standing behind her. Not because he is wrong about everything ever, but because leading the posturing, blustering tough-guy party means you can't be a piece of shit cry baby. I am pretty sure that's in the Constitution, near the part that says black people are fractional human beings.

How to Lose Your Shit in 10 Days

This video is called "Nicolas Cage Losing His Shit," but what's weird is that the only one (thing) losing his (its) shit is the Yale Drama School, which is obviously going to have to go out of business now because there is no point trying to teach people how to act anymore. Nicolas Cage just straight shows fools how it's done.

Anyway, sorry, I'm still busy turning his blog into a Tumblr. Happy Thanksgiving, home skillets!

ps -- We actually have a "Nicolas Cage" label. I love our blog.

wait, so does this mean he's not a secret muslim?

oh dinesh d'souza. who the hell are you? for my own sanity's sake, i usually ignore these pinhead pundits, but his article was actually published in a major and non-crazy-conservative magazine (which i understand is a dying medium and, yeah, i probably shouldn't be reading them anyway).

he penned an article to be published in this month's forbes, entitled "how obama thinks." the proposterousness of the title aside, the basic gist is that barry o is his father's son and his father was an "anticolonialist," which, d'souza helpfully explains, means "the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America. As one of Obama's acknowledged intellectual influences, Frantz Fanon, wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, 'The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races.'"

why does d'souza know anticolonialism so well? "because I am a native of Mumbai, India. I am part of the first Indian generation to be born after my country's independence from the British. Anticolonialism was the rallying cry of Third World politics for much of the second half of the 20th century."

eyeroll. it drives me insane when non-whites pander to whites by claiming to stand for an entire nation, ethnicity, race, etc. this is no better than a conversation i had last night, when a well-meaning liberal friend of mine admonished her equally white friend for challenging my authority on some throwaway fact about korea, "how can you contradict a korean?" um, i dunno, bc i haven't lived there since 1987 and i can be pretty ignorant sometimes?

btw, jonathan franzen hilariously skewers this well-meaning-liberal phenomenon in freedom. jessica, one of the berglund kids, who already hates her dad's too pretty and too young indian-american female protege named lalitha for obvious reasons, cites as yet another one of lalitha's shortcomings her inability to teach jessica anything about bengali cooking--and indeed, doesn't even know how to cook!--even though jessica was culturally aware and sensitive enough to be inquisitive about it. ha ha ha. thanks for understanding my pain, white man.

anyway, d'souza's description of o sr. i guess is meant to denigrate barry o as well: "He was a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya and studied at Harvard. He was a polygamist who had, over the course of his lifetime, four wives and eight children. One of his sons, Mark Obama, has accused him of abuse and wife-beating. He was also a regular drunk driver who got into numerous accidents, killing a man in one and causing his own legs to be amputated due to injury in another. In 1982 he got drunk at a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself."

oh god, if we were to judge presidents based on their family, no matter how removed, i'm not sure if any would escape unscathed.

the more amusing part about this rather disturbing article (disturbing bc it's already caught on with gingrich and will certainly be repeated ad nauseum on fox and their friends, only fueling the othering of barry o) is that many non-sons-of-drunken-polygamist-kenyan-fathers actually kind of accept a lot of the following ideas this more or less as fact: "From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America's power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe's resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet."

c'mon, i don't think all those economists who believe in the existence of negative externalities are anticolonialist, polygamist, alchoholic, capitolism-undermining secret muslims. just sayin'.

then, d'souza boldly proclaims, "Colonialism today is a dead issue. No one cares about it except the man in the White House. He is the last anticolonial. Emerging market economies such as China, India, Chile and Indonesia have solved the problem of backwardness; they are exploiting their labor advantage and growing much faster than the U.S. If America is going to remain on top, we have to compete in an increasingly tough environment.

But instead of readying us for the challenge, our President is trapped in his father's time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father's dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost."

wow. maybe this is some kind of conservative payback for all those times liberals tried to claim that W invaded iraq out of some desire to avenge his father. at least libs didn't lump W and HW's ideological beliefs together.

oh well, shrugs. go djokovic!

Rolling Wid Da Homeez (Clueless Reference, a film from 1995)

Haha. I am the best at doing occasional non-posts. But what can I say -- this picture makes me so happy, I have to share it with the world and cover it in gold dust and post it on my ceiling and look at it every night before I go to bed. Not like ironically happy -- I mean kittens napping with babies on a bed of world peace, for-realsies happy.

ps -- E, wtf do we have a Brittany Murphy tag? Oh, yes, because we're awesome. Sorry, forgot for a second.

May I Talk the Facts of Life to You?

Some people say they'd like to grow old gracefully. This video is proof-positive there's nothing wrong with the other course.

separated at birth - the genocide edition

aw fuck it, i can't get the formatting right. you get my drift.

there goes our book deal

how are we gonna compete with this, c4ts?

bright ideas welcome.

tale as old as time...

growing up as a kid, i actually never watched this show because "beast" sort of scared the bejeezus out of me and i think it was on at an awkward time in canada. they sure softened him up in the disney version. nonetheless, for those of you who just might care, this press release sure is tempting:

Revisit one of the most romantic TV shows of the 80s with "Beauty and the Beast": Season 2, available tomorrow on DVD. This cult favorite centers around Vincent (Golden Globe winner Ron Perlman), a man-beast living underneath the streets of New York City, and Catherine (Linda Hamilton), the beautiful assistant district attorney drawn to the benevolent Vincent. Together, the two share an emotional bond that allows Vincent to sense whenever Catherine is in danger. This new DVD set features video introductions on select episodes by the two stars, both of whom received Emmy nominations for this season.

i had no idea linda hamilton's character was an attorney. an ADA at that. but wait, wikipedia says she was a "wealthy socialite and corporate attorney." so which is it?

Hey, Look at Me. I Finally Came up With a Catch Phrase.

Billy Packer has been the lead college basketball analyst at CBS for as long as I can remember, which means his old-man surliness is as much a part of the Final Four as say Luther Vandross' One Shining Moment. And, oh, what memories Packer's given us. There was that one time, for instance, when he called Allen Iverson a "tough monkey." And that other time when two Duke co-eds asked to see his press pass at Cameron Indoor Stadium, and he said, "Since when do we let women control who gets into a men's basketball game. Why don't you find a women's game to let people in." And now the gem above. According to one random internet dictionary, there is a non-homophobic definition for "fag out," but the Internet says a lot of things. So, let me join the fray: Billy Packer's a homophobe, a misogynist, a racist, and a biased analyst. Put him out to pasture already, CBS, and give his job to Bill Raftery.

Get Your Mind Correct

Presidential campaigns are really bizarre for a number of reasons, as we all know. In the course of seeking the presidency, your honorable military service can be torpedoed by a bunch of partisan zombies who didn't actually serve with you, your pre-Angelina adoption of a Bangladeshi orphan can cost you the South Carolina primary, and you might find yourself in Des Moines, going through puberty while screaming "Yeeeaaah!" into a microphone. These are examples of the kind of scrutiny you haven't invited on yourself. They're also known as smear campaigns.

But then, there's that other kind of scrutiny. The kind you seek out. Rudy Giuliani (pictured)--perhaps the most attention-starved man this side of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad--knows what I'm talking about: After all, as mayor of New York he saw fit to hold press conferences to decry suicide bombers in the Middle East and to announce the dissolution of his marriage (without consulting his soon-to-be-ex first). His media whorishness--which makes Chuck Schumer look like a wallflower--reached fever pitch of course on September 11th, when lo and behold, without him having to ask, the world's cameras voluntarily turned to him. His brave choice not to disintegrate into histrionics--which, as I recall, can be said of almost every other New Yorker as well--has earned him a Bush-style free pass. But I digress...

You run for President and everything you say takes on new import. Knowing that, why on God's green earth is Barack Obama opining about the civil rights of the three Duke lacrosse players. Yes, it's pretty obvious Mike Nifong, the Durham County District Attorney, hid exculpatory evidence in pursuing his case, violated North Carolina's rules of professional conduct with his inappropriate comments, and drummed up racial tensions so that he could win re-election. These kids were hosed. I have no doubt about that. But it's also pretty clear that they're members of a dishonorable organization, a team that's pretty comfortable with racism and misogyny. (Listen to the 911 calls). I am not saying you reap what you sow. Nifong's an asshole. But so are these kids (though they're not rapists), and in an age when scores of non-assholes have their civil rights routinely trampled on, how is this a cause celebre?

Obama, you need to stay out of this. If you want to be President, your plate should be full already, with things like health care, which you seem to have no imagination about. Ain't no votes in the rape case, son. Get your mind correct...

vows!

i will complete that renga soon. sorry for those who may have been eager with anticipation. i was out of town for a bit.

thank goodness gawker didn't take president's day off bc they've unveiled my new favorite feature about the vows section. i haven't been this excited since they outed that creepy dude who married the taiwanese japanese woman.