I sometimes think the BBC Language Learning Site is actually just a big ruse to insult my intelligence.
“The thing that sucks about Girls and Seinfeld and Sex and the City and every other TV show like them isn’t that they don’t include strong characters focusing on the problems facing blacks and Latinos in America today. The thing that sucks about those shows is that millions of black people look at them and can relate on so many levels to Hannah Horvath and Charlotte York and George Costanza, and yet those characters never look like us. The guys begging for money look like us. The mad black chicks telling white ladies to stay away from their families look like us. Always a gangster, never a rich kid whose parents are both college professors. After a while, the disparity between our affinity for these shows and their lack of affinity towards us puts reality into stark relief: When we look at Lena Dunham and Jerry Seinfeld, we see people with whom we have a lot in common. When they look at us, they see strangers.”
Excerpted from Cord Jefferson’s piece on Gawker.
I was about 10 when Friends first came out and it was full-blown popular by the time I’d reached “can control the TV remote” age. And this is a little embarrassing to think about now, but 13-year-old me daydreamed about being a recurring character on it one day.
It’s weird to think that, should I have completely gone a completely different route and become an actress, 14 years later, I STILL wouldn’t be able to get a recurring role on a show that’s supposed to be about 20-somethings in New York City… aka my life (at one point, anyway).
Though what’s most interesting to me that Lena Durham and the one racist lady from Vice ended up being the straw that broke the collective internet’s “I’m so sick of stories about New York that only involve white people“‘s back. Why this and not Two Broke Girls?
Oh Things My Asian Mom Says
- Mom: So did the Dutch ever come to visit?
- Me: The who?
- Mom: You know, the Dutch of Cambridge
- Me: The Duchess? Kate?
- Mom: No! The guy! The Dutch!
- Me: OH, the Duke, you mean?
- Mom: Why do they call her a Duchess if he's not a Dutch?!
Goals for 2012!
I’m not really one to make New Year’s resolutions – for some reason, it irks me to think that I NEED to set goals because of some arbitrary date – but lately, I can’t really stop going over and over what I want to do with the rest of the school year. Like, actually over and over – obsessively repeating a list of things I want to accomplish and mentally wondering how to fit it in – to the point of not being able to keep tabs on where I’m headed when I walk or get to sleep at night.
I hate it when that happens!
So, I figure I might as well commit it to paper…er, blog… and hope that by doing something about it, my brain will get from “Elaine, you lazy piece of crap, figure your shit out!” to “Hey, that sounds good, now let’s think about something more fun.”
CONGRATULATORY GOALS
First off, I might as well give myself a pat on the back for doing things last semester that I had pumped myself up for doing. Start this off on a good note and wot wot.
- Participated in class - One of my biggest regrets about my college years was that I never got over being too shy to speak up during classes. Maybe I would’ve paid more attention if I was actually engaged in the conversations… and I wouldn’t have scrambled to find professors that actually remembered me. It took five years, but I somehow found the confidence to put my hand up. A lot.
- Participate in student groups – My second regret about my college years was that I signed up to be included in everything from Habitat for Humanity to the student newspaper… and then didn’t do any of it. That was really dumb of me. I didn’t make the same mistake this time… in fact, I might have overcommitted myself a little too much. But whatever, balancing a hectic schedule is so much more fun than getting fuzzy and depressed at home and needing to take those stupid pills that make me feel nauseous all day long.
- Exercise! – I got a gym membership and actually used it! This is pretty spectacular for me! I am so going to keep this up for the rest of the year. Especially since, while I didn’t seem to lose any weight scale-wise, everything I wear has gotten less tight. It feels awesome.
Yay me. Moving on…
PRETTY ACHIEVABLE AS LONG AS I REMEMBER THEM GOALS
- Keep on Exercising! – Detailed above, but generally, I just want to get down to what I was in sophomore year of college, this time without the drug use.
- Cook More – Since I don’t have a kitchen really, this mostly means being organized enough to arrange going over to other people’s houses to cook. I’ve already done it once, and I was lucky enough to be placed in a study group of someone who has an apartment I’ve cooked in last semester, so there’s really no reason I can’t do this.
- Get More Organized About My Student Activities – I admit I got overwhelmed last semester and maybe didn’t do some things I really ought to have (like scout out venues around Cambridge to host pretty important events). If I’ve been assigned to do something, I WILL do it within the week this year.
- Blog More – I already mentioned this a couple months ago, but I think I need to set a specific post count: like, at least one of these long ones a week.
- Try Harder to Look Good – A part of me wants to stick to the old philosophy that fashion is superficial and it’s of anti-feminist of me to think about it. But while I really believe thinking that helped ground me as a teenager (“If a guy doesn’t like my face without makeup, he’s probably not worth my time”), using it as an excuse to not brush my hair or paint on some mascara in the morning is just me being lazy. Sure, Einstein didn’t care much for dressing up, but let’s face it - I’m not going to discover a new theory of relativity even if my closet consists of only one jumpsuit. In the meantime, I’m 27. It’s about time I took some effort to at least look professional. And figure out how to wear heels and not die.
GOALS I KNOW I WON’T ACHIEVE BUT WOULDN’T IT BE GREAT IF I DID?
- Do All My Readings – HAHAHAHAHA. Yeah right.
- Practice Japanese enough so that I can once again say I speak it somewhat conversationally - It’s amazing how much vocab you forget when you don’t use a language for years
- Learn Spanish – Hola. Que pasa. Puedo tener empleo?
I LOVE IT. I LOVE IT SO MUCH.
I don’t think I realized how tired I was after this week until Sunday hit, the first day I didn’t have anything I absolutely had to do. My body realized that and basically shut down - I’ve been napping on and off throughout the day (I think I’m going to go to sleep again right after this post), and the moments I’ve been awake haven’t been particularly lucid.
The picture above is one of the reasons I’m done in. Silicon Valley came to Cambridge near the end of what was already a pretty intense week and I was a volunteer. It was extremely hectic (as any conference event would be), but turned out to be a pretty awesome experience - actually way more awesome than expected. I really walked away from it with a lot of things to really think about.
It helped that the speakers were so willing to just chat in person. I volunteered expecting maybe to get several lukewarm responses to my “Hi! Here’s where you need to go.” Instead, I managed to chat about China with Megan Smith (VP of New Business Development at Google), joke about Kaiser Kuo with Andrew McLaughlin (Exec Director of Civic Commons and ex-Director of Global Policy for Google), talk journalism documentaries with Hans-Peter Brondmo (Director of Social Experience Group at Nokia) and get lectured on the “slavery” of forced data sharing/how engineers are all socialists by Johan Stael Von Holstein (dot-com golden child of Sweden)… and that’s just a sampling of what happened.
I’ll try to write something up about the particular subjects that caught my fancy on Friday soon, but for now, I’ll just talk about the photo.
It was taken yesterday. In the picture is Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and subject of a recent NYTimes “start-up” whisperer piece, with SVC2UK founder Sherry Coutu. The venue is the Science Museum in South Kensington.
Seriously, can I take a moment to gush about how awesome is it to frickin’ drink and dine in a SCIENCE MUSEUM!? I was downing champagne next to the LUNAR LANDER. I was mingling next to the original BABBAGE DIFFERENCE ENGINE. I frickin’ chowed down on pudding underneath the SPITFIRE. At least I think it was the Spitfire? I’m not really a plane geek.
I’ve been trying to tell people about how cool that particular part was, but either I’m not doing it justice or I’m the only person who can actually get, like, high off of being able to party in a museum.
Anyway, I’m not sure how to conclude this. Cambridge has been way too cool so far. Those speakers are crazy with their ability to keep up their grueling schedule for a week - it makes me wonder if the real difference between highly successful entrepreneur-minded folks and the rest of us norms is just their energy levels. I’m pooped.
UC Davis police officer pepper sprays sitting students because, well, just because.
Think that’s %$#ing horrible? The video’s worse.
Via John Aravosis at AmericaBlog:
I’m sorry, this has gone too far. This has happened in police department after police department, and it has gone too far. Our police look like the goons in Russia and China. Please watch this video and send it to everyone you know. This has gone too far.
One of the weird things about being connected to news feeds from all over the world (well, mostly detailed ones from the U.S. and China), is that whenever I’m about to exuberantly type about something I learned over here about innovation and the goodness of technology and CHANGE(!!), I open up Tumblr (or Twitter) and come across this and the wind comes out of my sails.
I’m used to seeing it from my China feed, which is currently tweeting and RTing this story of a nine-seat van carrying 63 kindergartenders that crashed into a truck and killed 20 of the passengers. It’s a stark example of the outrageous injustices that happen all the time in so many places thanks to badly enforced regulation and no effective method of stymieing political corruption.
But man. The US feed is supposed to be about funny charts and occasional videos of politicians acting stupid. Instead, there’s been horrible pictures like this or this (of a maced granny) which AmericaBlog has pointed out seems so… aberrant.
I’m not complaining or saying that now that it’s happening, it shouldn’t be on my feed. I’m just so so so disappointed that this is being allowed to happen at all in America. It’s inexcusable enough in China, where there hasn’t been a long debate about human rights and sticking to the charters we’ve created to protect those rights. In America, where we love to tout our democratic process and our love of peaceful protest and always having a voice… what the fuck!
—
Random notes:
a) The amount of cameras/cameraphones all around.
b) Does that cop have his hand in his pocket?
My Tumblr has become a twitter feed
Which I guess is inevitable when 1) you dont have a lot of time and 2) what time you have is spent trying to catch up on all the trillions of feeds you have going. It’s so much easier to just forward something along, essentially like-buttoning it and hoping that’s enough to remind people “hey! I’m still here and I still think about things!”
But I’m beginning to feel like as much as I shove content around, I’m losing a lot of the value (eek, b-school term?) blogging about it otherwise brings me… Some person’s innovative new farming venture, a topic I would’ve written an essay about a year ago, appears like a blip here and then vanishes, both from the front page and (I’m pretty sure, considering I can’t think of the details of any innovative farming ventures I’ve read about recently) my already limited memory.
So I should do something about it. Like, write a paragraph every time I put something up instead of a one-liner. Link to a different source or two. Maybe resume that blogger motto i set for Shanghaiist of “a post is only as good as its ability to jump you to another related idea.”
Actually, that’s what I will do from now on (barring the occasional funny picture). If I used to churn out 8 stories a day, I’m sure I could write a measly lil’ paragraph… Right? Riiiiiggghhhht.
“You may not see it now, but whatever we learn has a purpose and whatever we do affects everything and everyone else… . Whenever you learn something new, the whole world becomes that much richer”
Lessons that still hold relevance via the 50th anniversary of The Phantom Tollbooth. (Via The New Yorker)
President Barack Obama poses for a photo with world leaders at the United Nations and waves, briefly blocking the face of Mongolian President Tsakhia Elbegdorj.
Sometimes I feel exactly like President Tsakhia Elbegdorj in this moment.
