Not Again

Someone ran into, well, backed into would be more accurate, my car last night. The car in front of me discovered too late that he had gotten into the left turn lane too late and backed up to try and change lanes, not knowing I was there. It's hard to see in the pic below, but there's divot in the middle of the front of my car, and it's now not possible to open my hood.


This is the second accident involving my car in 3 months. *sigh*

Ambivalence

I have spent most of the day (when I wasn't dozing off) watching youtube videos of Jacob Collier talk about music theory or listening to his arrangements. I have not been so excited about a topic for as long as I can remember. While I'm excited, there's also a degree of  "I could have been studying this for the last 15 years" that I need to work through.

Yesterday Was A Good Day.

I got complimented for my singing voice by a female sitting next to me at church.

I made the extra effort to go to a dance in Santa Monica in the early evening and got compliments from two of the women I met for the first time.

I got in a lot of fun dances while the band played, including one person I'd never met before. Got some more compliments on my music selection as well, But the best part of the night came at the end when someone came in and I danced about 7-8 slow dances in a row with her. She asked for some feedback on her partnering skills so I gave her some pointers on gathering her feet on weight shifts. We kept dancing until the place closed after 2am.

I'm trying to recall the last time I had that much positive interaction with so many different women in a single day.

Bedtime Story

This is a formative event from my past. I'm not sure why, but I feel driven to put it out there.

My parents came to the US from southern China via Hong Kong. After I was born, my mother took about two months of ESL classes before starting work as a seamstress.

My education about American culture and family life came through reading childen's books and watching TV shows such as Dennis the Menace. And one of the things that stuck in my mind was that children were told a bedtime story before going to bed.

I was somewhere between the ages of 6-8 when one night I asked my mother to read me a bedtime story. My mother had discontinued her schooling about the age of ten, and had only two months of ESL before beginning to work full time as a seamstress making parochial school uniforms, and I was too young to understand her hesitation. Eventually, she gave in and began to stumble her way through the story of the three little pigs. She was in tears by the time she finished, as was I. I never asked her to read me a story ever again,

There was a lot of shame in that event. My mother felt shame that she should couldn't even read her son a bedtime story, I felt shame that I had dared request something of my mother that would cost her so dearly. Enough so, that I sought to be self-sufficient so as not to request or need anything from my mother that would cost her again so dearly. And it now occurs to me that she sensed that, and her sense of shame prompted her to try and make up, which complicated the relationship between my mother and my older sister, who perceived that I was rarely disciplined, and if so, never as harshly as my sister was at my age. And I was trained at an early to be aware of how my needs cost other people. And *that* still influences my behavior and choices to this say.

Being A Secret Asian Man

This week it was announced that a network TV show set in Hawaii was losing two asian amercian actors because they were getting paid 15% less than the two caucasian stars. Kudos to them for giving up pretty lucrative gigs.

Of course, there's an irony in that a show set in Hawaii which is predominantly asian in terms of population now has no asians in the cast. More significantly, Kim's departure reduces the types of roles available to asian men in network TV back down to three (3):

- grocers who don't speak english;
- martial artists who seldom speak english;
- geeky lab tech/doctors who speak english with an accent;
while asian women get plenty of roles as babes who play the hot love interest of white guys.

It's fair to note that while asian immigrant men do typically fit the caricatures put forth by mainstream media, those caricatures do not represent a significant percentage of the asian male population, and because of mainstream perception and projection, we are not allowed to be who we are. We hide in plain sight. We are secret asian men.

gun violence

for the record, it saddens me when i hear of shooting incidents. but the bigger tragedy is people using incidents like these to promote their own personal agendas.

i am all for reducing gun violence, but let's use real numbers:

the ~30000 "gun related deaths per year" number that's bandied about is misleading, and here's why:

about 2/3's of that 30000 are SUICIDES. that brings the HOMICIDE rate down to around 10000.

of those HOMICIDES, about 80% are gang related.

that reduces the number of gun homicides in regular society down to around 2000, call it 3000.

that's only a fraction of the 10000 DUI deaths per year.

the point is that if it's just about safety, then addressing the problems with alcohol would actually produce more bang for the buck. and if you want to reduce homicides, address the issue of gang violence and i suggest researching the correlation between the violence and the drug trade.