February 6th, 2010 at 7:34 pm
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Three brash American teenagers stroll in and break the silence. The one Hebrew speaker among them asks the girl behind the desk for the price. “Two hundred thirty shekels for half an hour; two-fifty for forty minutes.” “Hey,” replies his friend, “chill out a bit. Wait and see if they have any girls who are hotter than these,” he says, gesturing toward the two women.
Although barely eighteen (if that), this guy was not a novice in this house. Raised on McDonald’s and with an apparently sluggish metabolism, he was pug-ugly to boot and I couldn’t help thinking that he would have found it difficult getting laid through more conventional methods. But I was still unable to account for such an inhuman attitude to these women in one so young. My friend Gideon leaned over to me and spoke softly: “You see them all the time,” he said. “Their parents pack ‘em off from the Upper West Side to Israel with a book filled with the phone numbers of synagogues, rabbis, and shuls, and a wad of cash. And then the minute they get here, they head for the whorehouses.”
- Misha Glenny, McMafia
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January 25th, 2010 at 9:22 pm
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A good part of my day in the office is spent gchatting with a particular coworker of mine. I may have mentioned him offhandedly in conversations as “my cynical coworker” - a guy I usually have stubborn (and often pretty ridiculous) debates with. A recurring exchange we have usually goes like this:
Him: This country is going to shit. I’m moving to Canada.
Me: Oh, it’s not that bad.
Him: I can never catch up to my peers because I’m not white or bred into a rich family. It’s not a meritocracy. The corporations run everything, the American public is full of Republican idiots, there’s no national health insurance, and our public education is terrible. Obama’s not going to get reelected in 2012. The Republicans are going to get back in full control and Sarah Palin is going to become President.
Me: Holy shit.
Him: True story.
Me: I don’t think Sarah Palin would even get nominated. Only a crazy minority has any legitimate respect for her.
Him: The Republicans are getting more and more extremist. The whole country is in decline.
Et cetera, et cetera.
I’m not a fan of predicting the future in politics and I’m particularly not a fan of doom-and-gloom scenarios. So when this exchange pops up I try to resist the negativity as much as possible - try to focus on positive aspects, maintain faith in the resilience of individual people. I think it’s fair to say that in general, I’m an optimist. I’m not naive enough to think America’s going to be on top forever, and I’m pretty cognizant of its shortcomings. But all in all, I think it’s an extraordinary place to be. I’ve spent a good number of years researching and writing about free speech globally and the lengths that some people have to go through just in order to say something, write something, distribute something that does not agree with those in power - and I’m always amazed to look at the United States again and marvel at how comparatively far our system reaches to protect that right of free expression. This strange animal we call democracy has spurred innovation and debate and free flows of ideas that other places have only dreamt of. And I would never have thought that by 2008 we would have the collective willingness to elect a black man to our highest office. The American people, varied and divided as they are, continue to move forward. With all our faults, this mass of people of varying color and creed and age and class is still driving forward.
And then came Massachusetts.
Like most others, I hadn’t paid very much attention to the Massachusetts senatorial elections until after the damage had been done. Scott Brown, albeit an energizing force alongside a stiff and distant Martha Coakley, took away the 60th likely vote for health reform and the barrier to filibustering in the Senate. It’s not so much Scott Brown himself - I’ll admit, besides his parentage of a boring former American Idol contestant and his opposition to federal health care, I don’t know a lot about the guy. It’s the aftermath of the elections and the deluge of anger that started to get to me.
The other good part of my workday (besides gchatting with the coworker) is spent listening to news radio. In the aftermath of Massachusetts my favorite radio host started taking calls from voters asking why they had voted the way they did, and eventually expanded the call-in question to “What are you angry about?”
I’ve been well aware of the dimming faith in President Obama nationwide and the disillusionment towards his administration one year down the road. Until Massachusetts, I had thought that these feelings were confined to the crazies in the tea party movement and a few disgruntled Midwesterners who never really understood what Obama stood for in the first place. Maybe this was naive and ill informed, because the outpouring of calls made to the radio station brought out angry person after angry person, pointing fingers at Obama, at Congress, at the structure of the country. Out of these were story after story of people who voted for Obama and “voted for change,” then came to some epiphany months down the road that Obama wasn’t going to magically solve all of their problems, and completely turned on him. Last year, Obama was touted by every news outlet as the “new hope” in Luke Skywalker fashion. People poured their hopes, no matter what they were or how much they may have diverged from what Obama actually pledged to do, into this man because he told them he was for change. Now every mention of the President is preceded by words like “beleaguered” or “embattled” with constant reminders of slipping poll numbers. Fatigue over lambasting the Bush administration for all of our current faults combined with a collective short term memory have pushed blame onto the current administration. There are times when this shining beacon of democracy suddenly seems gnarled and grotesque. Are Obama’s policies and administration deserving of criticism? Of course. Are they deserving of this vitriolic and largely blind rage threatening to completely reverse the political pendulum after only one year in office? No. Despite the Obama Administration’s shortcomings and promises that have not materialized (not to mention constant dickering around by Congress), I maintain that the primary source of disappointment by the American public is largely the Americans themselves that expected so much out of just one person. Not to say that the Obama campaign didn’t capitalize on this during election year. But really - what did you expect? And what’s more - what did you expect in the first year?
I’m still an optimist. I think that the next three years, difficult as they are sure to be, will still produce progress. But my faith in the voting populace has abruptly declined. Maybe it should never have been so high in the first place. The shrill protests of the tea party movement sound louder, and the former Alaskan governor’s face smiling on Fox as Glenn Beck verbally ejaculates all over her seems that much more ominous.
If there is one Obama criticism I will agree with wholeheartedly, it is that he needs to exert a much more forceful leadership, and he needs to do it fast. The State of the Union Address is this Wednesday, and I will be watching and hoping - but not too hard - that he will do just that. He has to. He has to.
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December 15th, 2009 at 10:29 pm
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Scruffy looking man with his leg up on the seat stares at man in yarmulke.
Scruffy Looking Man: Heil, Hitler!
Man in yarmulke ignores him.
Scruffy Looking Man: Hey, what would you do if I said that to you? Heil, Hitler! Lifts his right arm to heil.
Man in Yarmulke: I’d say “How are you?”
Scruffy Looking Man: What?
Man in Yarmulke: “How are you?”
Scruffy Looking Man: It’s freedom of speech! It’s in the Constitution! Begins going on some loud rant about Thomas Jefferson and First Amendment rights, and eventually just gets off the train.
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November 8th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
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I made some half-risotto half-rice pilaf dish tonight, with butternut squash, chicken, spinach, and tilapia. It was amazing. I am an awesome cook, forever, and I am going to kick ass on the Thanksgiving meal we are going to prepare for 8 people in just 3 weeks.
I also drank about 3/4 of a bottle of white wine that we bought from a liquor store across the street and tasted like carbonated grape juice but with all the alcoholic content of actual wine. So yeah. I’m pretty drunk right now.
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November 7th, 2009 at 11:48 pm
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I like to think, sometimes, that I come from a fairly unique background. I’m part of a 5% ethnic minority population here in the States, a 2.5 generation girl with an American-born Chinese father and a Hong Kong immigrant mother, bred into weekends at Jade Villa dim sum and shit-talking Cantonese aunties. I spent seven out of my first 11 years sweetly indoctrinated by evangelical Christians, in classrooms mixed with both pastors-in-training and quasi-Chinatown gangsters.
A one-of-a-kind story in some circles; in California and here in New York, it would probably elicit a shrug at best. What’s more extraordinary about my circumstances, though (I think at least) is the particular culture of the people that have come to surround me in this little life I lead.
You can say you’re born into a family through no conscious will of your own. You can say the friends you call your best just came to you by chance. This is probably the case with me, too. Like a sort of gravitational field pulling in dust and debris, gradually settling together into asteroids and moons in a calm and steady orbit, I guess people have settled into my life this way too. But what’s common among most of them, something that has inevitably pervaded my worldview and life decisions, is this urge to help, well, the world.
Okay, everybody wants to help the world, kind of. Everybody wants to reduce carbon emissions, eat less meat, give aid to starving kids in Africa — that’s all fine. But the people I grew up with, they’ve adopted the principle of helping others full-on. It’s more than reading about a natural disaster and donating $50 before returning to your coffee (not that there is anything wrong with that — provided the organization you’re donating to is legit and doesn’t have massive overheads). It’s a life dedication - for some, in occupation; for others, in just plain everyday life. I’ve probably never really told any of them how proud I am of them — my father, who was a civil rights lawyer for thirteen years and uses his social justice principles in all the work he does now running a city government; my mother, always bringing in kids from China to have a chance to study in the U.S. and personally taking care of all the visa requirements; my social worker roommate who squares off with troubled kids on a daily basis; my sister, a former student organizer and feminist/queer rights advocate who once told me her one goal was simply to “help women”; my boyfriend who has a searing distaste for white collar crime and is working his ass off through law school to make sure companies stay in line; all the students in my graduate program who have worked with child soldiers, given up two years of their lives for the Peace Corps, volunteered for refugee assistance, and campaigned for changes in development policy; my group of friends back home who are all focused on benefiting society in some way through medicine, biology, law, policy, and technology. It’s really not so much the profession or the action - anybody can have a job or do something and say that it helps society in some way or another - but it’s the attitude taken, and the way that responsibility is weighted against other things.
Four years ago, when I was alone in Burma, a monk I had met at a famous pagoda in the then-capital city turned and asked me, “When you graduate from school, what are you going to do to help people?” And he proceeded to tell me stories about monks who had gone into the woods in order to teach children, risking and often suffering from malaria in the process.
I don’t remember what I answered, or if I even had an answer. I’m still not entirely sure. I care about a lot of things - rising inequality and unemployment, free speech, journalist protection, violence against women, education, warfare, international development. I’ve studied all these things. But what am I going to do? is the $16,000 question. And I can’t tell you how many times my dad has hammered this question into me growing up — In what way is this privileged existence I’ve afforded going to somehow dedicate itself to helping someone else?
Still figuring it out. But with a social circle like this, there probably is no better environment to figure it out in.
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November 1st, 2009 at 8:12 pm
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(09:12:30 PM) Mark Chen: haha I got Lady Gaga’s “The Fame” album :’(
(09:13:25 PM) Brianna: hahahahhaha
(09:13:26 PM) Brianna: YOU LOVE HER
(09:13:31 PM) Brianna: ……can you send it to me
(10:49:37 PM) Mark Chen: what does impecunity mean
(10:55:03 PM) Brianna: a state of not being pecunious
(10:55:18 PM) Mark Chen: I don’t know what I’d do without you
(10:55:32 PM) Mark Chen: except go directly to a dictionary
(10:11:23 PM) Brianna: po po po poker face po po pokerface
(10:11:30 PM) Mark Chen: (mah-mah-mah-mah)
(10:11:35 PM) Brianna: we’re disgusting
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October 27th, 2009 at 7:29 pm
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“The degree to which a person can lose their mind is infinite.”
- Dr. Julie Holland
“If I have to eat nine servings of fruits and vegetables a day to live, I don’t want to live. I hate goddamn fruits and vegetables.”
- Woody Allen, Whatever Works
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October 20th, 2009 at 6:18 pm
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September 9th, 2009 at 8:33 pm
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Most stars die normal, boring deaths. They burn out their fuel, and then most of them cool and then sit around, dead cold blocks in space with little radiation. Red giants are only about one in a thousand, and when those die, they die violently, and dazzlingly, expelling their material back out into the interstellar regions and radiating an incredible amount of energy. I like the idea that some people are this way in death, too. And when they die, it’s like a fist being tightened until it finally explodes, rendering them larger than they ever were in life, radiating light in the space all around them.
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August 28th, 2009 at 9:15 pm
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After a long heat wave it rained today, 65 degrees and misty outside, and I was surprised I had to actually wear a sweater. Normally I hate gloomy weather like that but it was such a sudden and rare shift that it made me really happy and nostalgic for San Francisco - in a good way, not in an “I wish I was there and not here” way, but just a little nudge of a reminder that there is no greater place than home. I know I was just there two weeks ago, but it was so hectic I didn’t have time to soak in the city fully before I was back on the plane. I miss taking the N Judah down Irving Street and Green Apple Books and driving down Portola to the Castro and eating food I can’t afford in North Beach and I miss our crappy, trash-filled beach by the Pacific Ocean.
I made an impromptu 70s KOIT playlist at work and listened to it on repeat, and then it really felt like home: an overcast sky outside and REO Speedwagon in my headphones. I wanted to take BART down to Powell and go to Boudin’s and read a book in Union Square until the wind made it too uncomfortable, and then watch an indie movie at the Landmark where Jo used to let me in for free.
This is a crappy picture John took of me with my camera’s black and white setting during one of our downtown adventures back in high school (or was it college?) that kind of sums up where I’d like to be.
And in case you’re curious, here’s the playlist I came up with:
REO Speedwagon - Keep On Loving You
Firefall - You Are the Woman That I’ve Always Dreamed Of
Hall & Oates - Your Kiss is On My List
Stealer’s Wheel - Stuck in the Middle With You
Dobie Gray - Drift Away
England Dan & John Ford Coley - I’d Really Love to See You Tonight
Peaches & Herb - Reunited
Hall & Oates - Every Time You Go Away
Loggins and Messina - Danny’s Song
REO Speedwagon - Can’t Fight This Feeling
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