t h o u g h t s

I'm not khaki pants grrl

2006-01-11T23:57:00.000-08:00

packing. is a bitch. but there are moments, where i realize -- hey i really like this brown dress! but just like the last two times i packed it, i also realize i got no shoes and no little sweater whatever to go w/ it. other moments, i want to throw my hands up at all the stupid button down shirts, the multitude of pants that never quite flatter, but fit that "smart business casual bill" (if no one notices holes from my bike chain) ...

this post is stupid. my point is essentially, i can't reinvent myself via my wardrobe. not that i know what i'd wear, but it wouldn't be those stupid khaki pants that i'm going to pack anyways.

Crushing Idealism

2006-01-07T23:22:00.000-08:00

2006, age 26. The nexus between youthful and young adult, the space where the rubber hits the road, or dreams become dead. Visions always seem brighter than reality just as acheivement seems more possible than achieving. It's easy to say -- my shooting staryness has yet to reach peak brilliance, I'm the crackling spitting ever burning fuse to the eternally fabulous fourth of july fireworks show, oh, I'm going to be big, I'm going to really do something here folks, just you wait and see. Meanwhile . . . The essence of possibility, the hope of being utterly and completely fabulous. It fades like your long-grown-out highlights, chips like the cheap & quickly painted walls of your flat. Surrounded by actuality, aspiration takes bravery. Survival becomes pre-eminent, the mudane laden with meaning: (your microwave really should be the top of the line - afterall, how else would you eat?) Society an afterthought, advertising self-indulgence to proclaim your stake and place. An easy facade for the more disturbing thought that you gave up or never gave yourself a chance in the first place. Capital continuously a proxy for something other than whatever it is you were really looking for -- or maybe you never were looking. For your self, god, man, the truth - existence in a nutshell, the ever larger quest of humanity. Constantly we create it by being, and in not being or doing, fear looms, disappointment promises.

Goodbye

2006-01-01T12:19:00.000-08:00

This isn't the first time
I've tried to say
goodbye
to you

All the times you've helped me
Even though it was
just going grocery shopping
or cleaning my room

Those times, without you,
take on a new meaning
because they're empty
of you

and full of me. Myself and my
desire to
be many things

I can confront
- without you there to distract.

Independence
a deep breath
the fragile beauty of my own
small steps
delights, reassures, makes me wonder
why couldn't i do this by myself
before?

before you, before you made me second guess myself
(or did i turn to you because i was second guessing)
panic beating my chest into a cavern
into which i drowned
the eyes through which i peer
seeing, feeling, a swirling world

you were my rope. i pulled myself to a higher place
through you. accepted the depth of life. rushing screaming in
its complexity, meaning, and pain.
so i thought.

we've had a long enough relationship
i won't make accusations and nasty charges
blame everything on you
i've said goodbye and hello enough times to you
to think, maybe this won't be the last time.

maybe this won't be the last
time you hold me
caress
titallate
and scare the shit out of me.

a birds eye view of suffering and fear and pain and hate
in my heart, hearts beating around the world
is enough to drive anyone nuts
you, my friend-almost-lover, have had enough fun
with your dark poems
fantastical visions --
it's just enough.

maybe
saying there's a future
is intrinsic to saynora

but the future i see with you
can be nothing like the
past we've had.

Diversity in Business -- Notes

2005-10-28T16:54:00.000-07:00

today I went to the first annual conference on "Diversity in Business". I began the day by inadvertently spilling coffee all over one of the tables, my notebook and hand bag. Fabulous. Mostly the conference was a blah blah blah experience. It did help me flesh out some of my ideas about my research more. I think. Maybe. Slipped the diss by leaving the conference schmooze fest w/out talking to Sam from GSK. Pulled a drive-by "hi and bye" and feel a little bad about not talking a little or getting his card. Oh well.

My coffee stained notes from George A. Strait, Jr.'s address this morning, say he began his journalism career in radio and television b/c the stations needed someone black to keep their license. He was the first black on tv b/c of pressure from the black community. He talked about the pressure of needing to report on perceived black topics as a black reporter. For example, multiple stations assigned their one black reporter to cover race riots.

That theme was alluded to throughout the day -- that people of color might be recruited for different positions than white people. While blacks (or other minorities) may be asked to serve on diversity panel after diversity panel, those time-consuming activities might not be considered in promotion conversations. In fact, one of the challenges Strait discussed was that as a minority in a higher-level position, a lot of time can be spent mentoring other minorities, and one has to keep a watchful eye on getting their main task/work done.

Strait said he felt responsible to his community first, and in the white-male dominated environment, he was able to maintain his identity as an African-American through his ability to choose who to include in his journalistic pieces, to have a diverse expert pool, and by staying in contact with diverse communities.

In 1972, there were four black anchors on the major television stations. In 2000, there were 19. He mentioned "in such small numbers there's an explicitly discriminatory environment."

B Rolls: used as filler footage, stations have different stock footage for such things as "welfare" or "poverty" which Strait identified as being racist. Eventually at ABC these tapes were all burned through the efforts to have these become more balanced and accurate visuals.

Recruiting for Diversity
This panel included reps from Clorox, Deloitte, PwC and Wells Fargo. Diversity was defined the following ways:
Clorox - primary - traits you're born with, secondary - things tht change throughout life
Deloitte - inclusion of various thoughts
Wells Fargo - appreciate for difference and encouraging and recognizing diversity in everything we do

I found this panel to be corporate feel-good blather with lots of head-nodding and repetition. They agreed that it's improtant to include diversity in the vision and values, and more importantly to include it in people's goals and hold them accountable. For partners, they need to retain and develop certain percentages of diverse whatever (customers, staff?)

The business case for diversity was essentially stated as: US demographic predictions show a much more diverse country, with increased purchasing power of minorities. It would be a heavy risk for companies to not invest in diversity.

Okay, I'm debating how useful this exercise is to type up my notes. This is getting boring, I think I'm going to go do my laundry instead.

blllaaaahhhh

2005-09-14T01:18:00.000-07:00

I have a sneaking suspicion that graduate school is an emotional rollercoaster:
Why am I here? What am I doing? WHY am I doing it? Wait, what are my interests again? What do you mean the fellowship application I submitted last year is "ineligible"??!

work sucks! people do it for the money!

2005-09-11T01:22:00.000-07:00

on a roadtrip long ago cross the US of A - escaping the east coast to be an artist in Colorado (or to "study for the LSATS" as I told my mother) - I thought, what if people just did what they wanted to do in life. That instead of trying to figure out what they "should" do - ie how to most effectively put veal in their williams-sonoma skillets - they just followed their hearts and actualized their dreams?

reading Marx today I remembered that. He wrote:

"The worker does not affirm himself in his work but denies himself, feels miserable and unahppy, develops no free physical and mental energy but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind."

"Labor appears not as an end in itself but as the servant of wages."

So we do it for the money. There's this question out there - what would you do if you didn't have to worry about money?

blah blah blah false needs, creation of needs, system of needs, division of labor... go sing a song or paint a picture like you really want to. seriously, people.

superstardom - or lack thereof...

2005-09-03T01:57:00.000-07:00

there's this pressure, it feels like, to be some sort of superstar. once you reach a certain strata, you can - like the people you've left behind - chill, become a wallflower, be that someone not desinted to reach the next universe, an existence of glory. Or, as you've done before, make it to the next level - The person that others watch fly off to the land beyond....

what is that land beyond? the next strata, the infinite - where you become the watched, not the watcher.

your existence - intruded on - yet, an image for the masses to wonder at, reflect at, to think to themselves, so this is how a star lives...

How many of these superstar people are born into their lives, their destinies, these lives of hierarchy - predestined stratification.... How many of us create these destinies ourselves, want it, become it, need it... and why?

WAR and The CEB

2005-08-27T16:19:00.000-07:00

I was looking at a drawing I made last year when, during the Chris Mixter hellation, Nate was fighting in Najaf. What a horrible time. I remember a co-worker coming up to give his weekly dose of shit to me and said, "Why are you always so serious. You always have this serious look on your face. You can't always be that serious." I looked at him, wanting him to go away, and said, "my brother is in Iraq; it's a serious time of life for me."

Thank goddess I'm not in The CEB while my brother is at war, having to deal w/ fratty people and their endless vapidity, happy hour after happy hour. Happy about what: That work is done? That another day's paycheck had been made? That college has culminated in a job where the average age is 28 and tonite's draft beers are only $3 a pop?

I did try to maintain some sense of normalcy. Go to the happy hours, people's saturday nite soirees. I tried to put a smile on my face and fake my way through social situations, to pretend like I didn't have cares. do the whole party get to know people thing. But it was disorienting to party and try to have "fun" when I knew my brother was fighting in a cemetery. I felt like so many people, Americans, my co-workers, were just oblivious to what was going on around the world. I couldn't understand how they could be so happy, or have so much fun -- stupid fun, ignorant fun.

Day after day one year ago in August, I would read the newspapers with an unmatched attention to detail surrounding the events in Najaf; sicken myself by looking at Faces of the Fallen, reassuring myself that of course I would find out if my brother had died before The Washington Post. Having my heart turn to ice everytime the phone rang, praying it wasn't bad news.

Those were the times that I really built up walls around me. Even after I had gotten to know people and they knew Nate was in Iraq etc (a lot of these kids closer in age to Nate than to myself) -- it was uncomfortable talking about it. In the work environment of constantly asserting hierarchy and relationships - or at least the facades of such - co-workers could use the question of "how's your brother doing?" (drippingly sweet, I really care, trust me, trust me) to test those walls. Or highlight to me that I had them. A year later, I've learned - unsurprisingly - that I had the reputation of being "cold" and "a bitch" in the FS department.

If I saw a picture of a dead or wounded soldier, my first reaction would be to evaluate the picture for whether or not it could possibly be Nate. A wave of relief would wash over me if I saw light brown hair, or a hand that wasn't like Nate's. Then guilt for feeling the relief and anguish that it was someone else's brother, son or loved one. Even worse were the realizations that the toll on the US forces were and are miniscule compared to that of Iraqi civilian casualties -- that all this pain and suffering that I could be feeling, in my safe little cube - as miserable as it was - was only a fraction of what families in Iraq were feeling.

wtfy -- y stands for "yo"

2005-08-16T02:12:00.000-07:00

you know when you get mad, you want to drop a big f-bomb on the person, situation, thing, world... besides deep breathing, this helps me somehow when words can't:

imagine a huge hand, proportional in size to your madness. it can be the size of your own hand, tiny and petite like a small music box. Or it can be large like a house in a trailer park.

It's curled into a fist and has a crank on the side, right next to the pinky.

Simply, turn the crank and like lambda, a big 'ole bird rises to the occasion to flip your demon off.

safely but securely, in yo head.

Perhaps more interesting would be the nouns / feelings that incite the cranking. But somehow "I'm angry b/c I didn't have time to mourn my grandfather's death (due to the disease I most likely have) b/c I was working like a dog to support myself while my brother was at war" isn't neearly as fun to write about.

on shopping

2005-08-12T19:25:00.000-07:00

editors note: it is best that one, before throwing themselves into the consumerist noise of a shopping mall, does *not* read depressing and enraging passages about Pinoys getting the shaft in racist America.

Malls are so agonizing. I dislike them. The short story is b/c they make me feel poor and inadequate. The longer story is b/c it's such a blitzkrieg of rampant consumerism: buy your way to beauty, happiness and fulfillment, all in one place! Pull out the credit for the purse that will bag a new (richer) beau -- of course you need shoes and accessories to match. (Presumably you're getting a manicure and your hair done, too.) Don't forget those over-priced glue on / tape your boobs together bra things.

while you're in a mall, your desires and "needs" increase. Of *course* I need this, of course I need that. Afterwards, you kick yourself for buying sparkly bracelets (so 2003) and not buying new lipstick (berry shade, yet one that matches your bronzer). Meanwhile you ponder your rapidly disappearing youth -- how you're already, according to them, past your prime. The boobs you never had are already sagging. The way you make up for it is to buy more, or rather, buy more expensive things to showcase your "style."

On the plus side (besides having new things?) spending time in a mall is an anthropological exercise. Watch people dress nicer, uglier, poorer than you.... Wonder what types of houses they live in, watch them interact with their relatives, friends, co-workers; wonder what it's like to live in *that* family; reminisce about your own childhood or han solo teenage shopping experiences. (One of my college friend's first kiss was in a mall....)

Ikea is similarly painful and the opposite of fun. Okay, it can be a little fun. But I'm not going to go over what's fun, b/c we all know how exciting it is to find cutely decorated napkins for $1.50. Whatever. Besides rampant consumerism, Ikea is "personality in a box". You have seven options of cheap-ass storage containers to choose from that will

EXPRESS
who
YOU
ARE

(hopefully you like red coral this season.)
Ethnic's in?
Oh, there are *tons* of ethnicky rugs for only $7. It's almost like you picked it up from a sweatshop in China or India or... made in Ecuador!... all by yourself. Complement it w/ huge photos of... something artistic... to hang on your wall next to (finally) pictures of you and your friends in cheap-ass frames.

I appreciate cheap, don't get me wrong. And goddess knows, I appreciate organization and believe - as Ikea does - everyone should get organized. (if I were in charge of Ikea's advertising department, I'd make commercials like Fanta or Old Navy and get some cute cheerleaders, witty rhymes, and more hits on my website stat.)

Ultimately, what provokes my ire on this whole shopping thang, is its relationship to the gap b/t rich and poor.

...stay tuned for how it all gets spelled out!

. . . . . . . .

The Falkan Islands Have Another Name

2005-08-12T01:50:00.000-07:00

Discoveries

Apparently when Filippino men immigrated to the US, they were very well known for their love making. Which white dudes didn't dig. So they interpreted that when the law said it was illegal for whites to marry "Mongolians" that included "Malays..." hello um duh
Bobby Brown's daughter Bobbi Kris has a belly
man, I know I talked about this before, but it is *chilly* here in the evenings! Even in random shadows during the day it's THO city
Some of my neighbors have lemon trees. I contemplated scaling fences or climing up garden slopes to harvest them -- but you know... social norms ...
Sonatas are pesky little devils to play - what's up with the left hand always hanging out in treble clef land?

Re-appreciated "Discoveries"

Meat is tasty. And so is corn on the cob.
Grilling and tiki torches are fun
Yay wine.

Berkeley -- Day Two

2005-08-11T00:30:00.000-07:00

Commentary on the War

Today I was talking with Nate, who was chilling -- not the normal life of a Marine at 2:00 pm -- thanks to the arm he broke during the dunking contest days before his 21st b-day. I commented that he seemed secretly glad he broke his arm. "Yes" he responded, "I'm really happy I broke my arm."

"People see me and my broken arm and say, 'man, I wish I could break my arm.'"

Twisted.

Commentary on the Administration

As I now live in MBA house, "The Economist" abounds. In which I read today that of the $15 B the US spends abroad on AIDS/HIV aid, 1/3 is spent on abstinence only programs.

wtfy.

Berkeley

Berkeley is good so far. Lots of flowers and interesting looking plants, nice smells and the food opportunities excite me. I look forward to becoming more expressive and someday purchasing clothing from the store Wicked. It is far chillier here than I expected; goosebumps are not infrequent. I got my student id today and my picture is positively primate. I'd make (or am?) a very cute monkey... oooo ooooh aahhh aaaa aaaaahh!