Well, there was still one more aspect of my identity I had to think about before going back to studying for my midterm. That Peggy McIntosh quote was just too thought-provoking. (“[W]hites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will allow ‘them’ to be more like ‘us.’”)
I dug through the archives of my old blog and found two entries, one I wrote in January 2006 and the other in February 2008. Reading them, I felt both embarrassed and accomplished, embarrassed because I was so fucking stupid back then, and accomplished because I had come such a long way since the last three years.
These were a few lines from my February 2008 entry that made me roll my eyes, “Chuck What?”:
“My goal is not to be ‘whiter’ or ‘less Asian;’ I’d just like to live my life without having to be associated with any kind of racial label that automatically defines my character and likes and dislikes.”
“Today was Tet, or the Lunar New Year, which Vietnamese and Chinese people happen to celebrate for some reason...Of course, to celebrate tet, I wore my special tet outfit: jeans, white shirt, white hoodie, and white shoes. I also emptied out the trash in my car.” [According to Vietnamese lore, wearing white and doing housekeeping on the day of Tet brings bad luck for the rest of the year.]
“I came home from work today to find rice and some wrapped shit (in other words: dinner) spread out on the living room table. There were six places set up, each for my dead ancestors. They got to eat first, and they spent a really long time eating. Hell, I think they were just chatting it up, making racist jokes. The food just sat there accumulating bacteria and digestive juices from flies. As though my parents’ unhygienic cooking methods aren’t enough.”
“I had McDonald’s tonight by the way. 2 cheeseburgers, both with Mac sauce and lettuce added = 1 Big Mac for $1.50 cheaper.”
“Well, I made sure that I was disrespectful as possible today, so does that mean bad luck for the next entire year? No. Because superstitions are just fucking superstitions (and Karma is crap). My only wish is that I could somehow top what I pulled off on tet two years ago (coming out lol). Maybe next tet.”
And these few lines were a few lines from my January 2006 entry about a formal engagement party that I went to for a cousin, “Out of Place”:
“This morning, my parents dragged me along to some kind of wedding. Wait, no, it wasn't a wedding; it was a formal engagement. There's still a wedding that I'll to go to in the future, [fuck]. But anyways, I tend to not like weddings, especially Asian orthodox. Well, it's really just Asian orthodox that pisses me off.”
“They [people conducting the wedding] only spoke Vietnamese. To me, it seriously just sounded like, ‘blarfgh jakllia adfdafdass smakcldkf crackerad dwidge garagh,’ and I spent my time watching the clock.”
“When all that crap was done, people sat down around the kitchen and started eating. I wasn't going to eat because the food was all boring Asian shit, but my mom handed me a plate with rice piled over fried crap piled over more rice.”
“I just can't stand it. My wedding will not be Asian Orthodox (but then again, nothing can really be orthodox if it's homosexual). And at my wedding, I will serve elegant French food. And nobody at my wedding will be wearing those tight shiny Asian dresses.”
“I'm not ashamed to be Asian, and I don't wish to be any other race.”
I used to hate that I was Vietnamese. I was ashamed of it. I didn’t admit it back then, but looking back in retrospect, I could say that I was lying to myself. Shit, I didn’t understand how I could possibly rationalize that I wasn’t ashamed to be Vietnamese back then. I attributed a lot of problems between me and my parents, mainly (what I perceived to be) their disapproval of me having a black friend and a Mexican friend, to some aspect of Vietnamese culture. I didn’t want to be Vietnamese. I just wanted to be “regular,” another human being whose ethnicity didn’t matter.
I was too culturally assimilated, back when I didn’t understand what that even meant. I thought rejecting my Vietnamese culture, language, and history meant making myself racially neutral, but I was really replacing it all with the “regular” culture, language and history. I was glad I came to realize that “regular” meant “white.” When I said I didn’t want an “Asian orthodox” wedding, just a regular wedding, I now knew that I meant a white wedding.
Tuxedos at a wedding? White. Elegant French food? White. Cheeseburgers from McDonald’s? White. Understanding English, not Vietnamese? White.
I’m going to get married, not because I’m a gay guy trying to be straighter in this heteronormative Western society, but because I’m a Vietnamese guy trying to maintain my Vietnamese heritage in this oppressive, white-dominated Western society. And it’s not just for my heritage; it’s for my parents too.
The wedding will thus be a Vietnamese wedding. And I don’t care if I’m marrying someone Filipino. He’s gonna wear that “tight shiny Asian dress” (áo dài), no exceptions, bitch.
Gay
Thursday, February 3, 2011
My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will allow “them” to be more like “us.”
Week 5 meant midterms. I was sitting at my desk in my room, catching up on a bunch of different readings for a multicultural education midterm that I had the next day, when I read the above quote in “White: Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” written by Peggy McIntosh, founder of the National SEED (Seeking Education Equity and Diversity) Project on Inclusive Curriculum.
I immediately drew a parallel to gay rights, particular everyone’s favorite controversy: gay marriage. I wondered, was gay marriage an attempt to make gay people straighter? I concluded that, no, actual marriage itself wasn’t, but yes, the liberal gay marriage “agenda” was, mainly through what I thought was a heavily implied message of No-On-Prop-8 campaigns and the direct messages of individual supporters: “Gay people are normal people too and deserve every right just as much as straight people do!”
Gay people are normal too, but what’s normal? Let’s define it sociologically with regard to the United States. In the case of race, as McIntosh pointed out, it would be being white, which comes with living by Western culture, the dominant culture of this country. In the case of sexuality, it would be being straight. But being “straight” isn’t just about being attracted to the opposite sex; it is also about abiding by the appropriate heteronormative gender role. I’m also going to add that being “normal,” as applied to families, means living the long accepted model of a family: two parents and some kids (this family model is especially pushed by the gay marriage supporters, who like to photograph and show off two dads or two moms with their 2.5 happy children.)
A lot of gay people are fine with being normal. I realize that yes, it is easier if they could just be included. Some just want to make it in the heteronormative society that America is today, and that means conforming to society as much as possible.
But then there are others, others in the diverse LGBTQ community that, by the sociological definition of “normal,” are not normal. And they are proud of it. They don’t want to have to be normal or assimilated into heteronormative culture in order to be accepted by society and to get the rights they deserve.
There are those who reject heteronormativity, those who refuse to conform to their gender roles, the things considered “normal” in Western society. There are guys who wear make-up, guys who cross-dress but still identify as male, guys who will give you a z-snap with extra sass and strut away. (The latter might seem normal if you’re a fag hag who constantly hangs out with your gay friends, but I’ve only had nothing but straight guy friends for the last couple of years and I can affirm that “feminine” gay guys aren’t always considered normal or respectable.) And then there are those with “queer” families.
I recalled an article I read about a year ago, “Resist the Gay Marriage Agenda!” Sounds like some kind of conservative right-wing piece of propaganda shit, right? Well, I thought that it was shit—that was for sure. But it was actually written by “Queer Kids of Queer Parents” (QKQP), people that you’d expect to support gay marriage because they were gay (or “queer;” the word was still very vague to me), but they didn’t. I had very quickly dismissed the article because it was a bunch of sophist rhetoric, and being the logic-seeking left-brain guy (and proposition 8 opponent) I had always been, I didn’t let myself get convinced by artistically arranged words that some angry cocksucking kids painted.
Now, a year later, with more of an understanding and an open mind, I read the article again. I still thought it was shit because it argued one rhetorical fallacy after another, but I at least tried to pick out some of the points I understood (and the ones that were relevant to this entry). The writer mentioned untraditional family structures, such as families raised by three parents or by non-monogamousbut and loving couples. These were the things that the writer had to say about them: “The queer families and communities we are proud to have been raised in are nothing like the ones transformed by marriage equality...We think long-term monogamous partnerships are valid and beautiful ways of structuring and experiencing family, but we don’t see them as any more inherently valuable or legitimate than the many other family structures.”
I had to admit, it was hard for me to stomach these examples of “queer families,” and I knew in the long run, I would adopt the normative model of a family for my own family. And I wasn’t going to deny anyone’s right to marry.
The problem is that when gay marriage supporters say, “Gay people deserve to marry because they are normal just like everyone else,” they probably don’t realize that they are leaving out a huge chunk of the LGBTQ community. These unaware supporters’ lives are still heavily socialized and defined by ingrained heteronormative gender roles and traditional family models, so when they’re confronted with members of the LGBTQ community who defy all these norms, they get uncomfortable. They don’t know anymore how to support their position on gay marriage. They’d rather pretend that controversial chunk of the community doesn’t exist.
To the queer families and those to say “fuck you” to gender roles, I’m choosing to stand in solidarity and to not pretend that you guys don’t exist in the LGBTQ community. I’m done insulting you guys, and I’m done standing back when my friends say anything along the lines of, “Gay guys are cool as long as they aren’t too ‘femmy.’” Why should gay people deserve equal rights and treatment? It’s not because they’re normal like all other people. It’s because all other people need to realize that their own societies are fucked up.
Before I went back to studying for my midterm, I wanted to research one more thing, what it meant to be “queer.” I read the Wikipedia page and a few other pages, but I wasn’t too sure what to make of them. I just found a lot of wordy and conflicting definitions. I thought back to a dinner I had with Trung at Red Robin in Redondo Beach. It was August, last year, the same month that Proposition 8 was overturned. I taunted him about it because I knew that his beliefs about gay marriage aligned somewhat with those of the “Queer Kids of Queer Parents” (but he still supported gay marriage). And then I asked Trung what it meant to be queer, because I knew he identified as queer. I was taunting him again because I didn’t give a shit about what it meant to be queer, but he answered anyway, telling me, “It means whatever it means to you.”
Six months later, I knew what it meant to me. I knew that I was queer too.
---
“Being gay was, as I had always known it to be, nothing more than some social implications and history all based around a dictionary definition: ‘Being attracted to members of the same sex.’ Sex, not gender. Same sex meant to me other people with the X and Y chromosome. On the other hand, the definition of being queer, as I understood it, meant absolute bullshit.”
- XY Attraction, June 15, 2010.
---
“I just wanna punch all the cocksucking faggots in this world, right now. Life to them is nothing more than an excuse to be loud and obnoxious...The first three [letters of the acronym ‘LGBTIQQAP2S’] describe only the gender I’d like to do, while the rest is too different. What’s so similar between a guy who likes to fuck guys and a guy who wishes he had a vagina and boobies? Just because we’re all a sexual minority doesn’t mean we should all be grouped together...I wanna leave, separate myself from them...When I think of being gay, I only think of it in terms of all that I’ve lost, or will lose...I’ve learned that there are such things as uniquely gay experiences, but, they’re not brought on by a heteronormative society, they’re brought on by the male dicksucking community itself. That’s also where I see the parts of me that I don’t want to be.”
- Transcendence, December 20, 2009
Week 5 meant midterms. I was sitting at my desk in my room, catching up on a bunch of different readings for a multicultural education midterm that I had the next day, when I read the above quote in “White: Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” written by Peggy McIntosh, founder of the National SEED (Seeking Education Equity and Diversity) Project on Inclusive Curriculum.
I immediately drew a parallel to gay rights, particular everyone’s favorite controversy: gay marriage. I wondered, was gay marriage an attempt to make gay people straighter? I concluded that, no, actual marriage itself wasn’t, but yes, the liberal gay marriage “agenda” was, mainly through what I thought was a heavily implied message of No-On-Prop-8 campaigns and the direct messages of individual supporters: “Gay people are normal people too and deserve every right just as much as straight people do!”
Gay people are normal too, but what’s normal? Let’s define it sociologically with regard to the United States. In the case of race, as McIntosh pointed out, it would be being white, which comes with living by Western culture, the dominant culture of this country. In the case of sexuality, it would be being straight. But being “straight” isn’t just about being attracted to the opposite sex; it is also about abiding by the appropriate heteronormative gender role. I’m also going to add that being “normal,” as applied to families, means living the long accepted model of a family: two parents and some kids (this family model is especially pushed by the gay marriage supporters, who like to photograph and show off two dads or two moms with their 2.5 happy children.)
A lot of gay people are fine with being normal. I realize that yes, it is easier if they could just be included. Some just want to make it in the heteronormative society that America is today, and that means conforming to society as much as possible.
But then there are others, others in the diverse LGBTQ community that, by the sociological definition of “normal,” are not normal. And they are proud of it. They don’t want to have to be normal or assimilated into heteronormative culture in order to be accepted by society and to get the rights they deserve.
There are those who reject heteronormativity, those who refuse to conform to their gender roles, the things considered “normal” in Western society. There are guys who wear make-up, guys who cross-dress but still identify as male, guys who will give you a z-snap with extra sass and strut away. (The latter might seem normal if you’re a fag hag who constantly hangs out with your gay friends, but I’ve only had nothing but straight guy friends for the last couple of years and I can affirm that “feminine” gay guys aren’t always considered normal or respectable.) And then there are those with “queer” families.
I recalled an article I read about a year ago, “Resist the Gay Marriage Agenda!” Sounds like some kind of conservative right-wing piece of propaganda shit, right? Well, I thought that it was shit—that was for sure. But it was actually written by “Queer Kids of Queer Parents” (QKQP), people that you’d expect to support gay marriage because they were gay (or “queer;” the word was still very vague to me), but they didn’t. I had very quickly dismissed the article because it was a bunch of sophist rhetoric, and being the logic-seeking left-brain guy (and proposition 8 opponent) I had always been, I didn’t let myself get convinced by artistically arranged words that some angry cocksucking kids painted.
Now, a year later, with more of an understanding and an open mind, I read the article again. I still thought it was shit because it argued one rhetorical fallacy after another, but I at least tried to pick out some of the points I understood (and the ones that were relevant to this entry). The writer mentioned untraditional family structures, such as families raised by three parents or by non-monogamous
I had to admit, it was hard for me to stomach these examples of “queer families,” and I knew in the long run, I would adopt the normative model of a family for my own family. And I wasn’t going to deny anyone’s right to marry.
The problem is that when gay marriage supporters say, “Gay people deserve to marry because they are normal just like everyone else,” they probably don’t realize that they are leaving out a huge chunk of the LGBTQ community. These unaware supporters’ lives are still heavily socialized and defined by ingrained heteronormative gender roles and traditional family models, so when they’re confronted with members of the LGBTQ community who defy all these norms, they get uncomfortable. They don’t know anymore how to support their position on gay marriage. They’d rather pretend that controversial chunk of the community doesn’t exist.
To the queer families and those to say “fuck you” to gender roles, I’m choosing to stand in solidarity and to not pretend that you guys don’t exist in the LGBTQ community. I’m done insulting you guys, and I’m done standing back when my friends say anything along the lines of, “Gay guys are cool as long as they aren’t too ‘femmy.’” Why should gay people deserve equal rights and treatment? It’s not because they’re normal like all other people. It’s because all other people need to realize that their own societies are fucked up.
Before I went back to studying for my midterm, I wanted to research one more thing, what it meant to be “queer.” I read the Wikipedia page and a few other pages, but I wasn’t too sure what to make of them. I just found a lot of wordy and conflicting definitions. I thought back to a dinner I had with Trung at Red Robin in Redondo Beach. It was August, last year, the same month that Proposition 8 was overturned. I taunted him about it because I knew that his beliefs about gay marriage aligned somewhat with those of the “Queer Kids of Queer Parents” (but he still supported gay marriage). And then I asked Trung what it meant to be queer, because I knew he identified as queer. I was taunting him again because I didn’t give a shit about what it meant to be queer, but he answered anyway, telling me, “It means whatever it means to you.”
Six months later, I knew what it meant to me. I knew that I was queer too.
---
“Being gay was, as I had always known it to be, nothing more than some social implications and history all based around a dictionary definition: ‘Being attracted to members of the same sex.’ Sex, not gender. Same sex meant to me other people with the X and Y chromosome. On the other hand, the definition of being queer, as I understood it, meant absolute bullshit.”
- XY Attraction, June 15, 2010.
---
“I just wanna punch all the cocksucking faggots in this world, right now. Life to them is nothing more than an excuse to be loud and obnoxious...The first three [letters of the acronym ‘LGBTIQQAP2S’] describe only the gender I’d like to do, while the rest is too different. What’s so similar between a guy who likes to fuck guys and a guy who wishes he had a vagina and boobies? Just because we’re all a sexual minority doesn’t mean we should all be grouped together...I wanna leave, separate myself from them...When I think of being gay, I only think of it in terms of all that I’ve lost, or will lose...I’ve learned that there are such things as uniquely gay experiences, but, they’re not brought on by a heteronormative society, they’re brought on by the male dicksucking community itself. That’s also where I see the parts of me that I don’t want to be.”
- Transcendence, December 20, 2009
Tags:
gay,
schoolwork,
socal,
trung
Project Think Begins
Thursday, January 27, 2011
“Remember me, Brian?” It was a Facebook message sitting in my inbox, sent by Timmy. The last time I had seen and talked to him was at the Breakthrough Summer 2010 celebration night, five months ago. Of course I remembered him. I remembered all my students. But what was I to say to him? I left Breakthrough. I ran, and I had gone too far to turn back.
Timmy’s Facebook message went unanswered.
“We’re in the really red building,” the director had told me. And there it was. I stood on the opposite end of it at the street intersection and waited for my signal in the crosswalk. Cars stopped in front of the building, and teenagers with backpacks stepped out. Others walked or rode their bikes from the opposite side of the street. We were all heading to the same place.
The Episcopal Church of St. Joseph stands at the corner of 2nd Street and Rose in downtown Santa Ana. Its exterior is layered with shingles colored a barnyard kind of red, reminiscent of the 1880s when it was built, long before its grassy meadows became cement sidewalks and concrete streets. The church has one tower capped by a steeple from which a white cross casts its shadow over, depending on the time of the day, a post office, a child daycare center, or a Burger King.
The church extends behind itself into a smaller brick building, which was constructed in 1955 to hold more offices and a large classroom. It is here in the basement of this building where the Abraham Teen Center makes its home. Funded by Project Think, the Abraham Teen Center is an after school program that opens its doors to middle school and high school students Monday through Friday, three to six in the evening.
I had never heard of Project Think until now, and I didn’t know how. I was a third year education minor at UCI in my fourth week of winter quarter now, yet word about Project Think never reached me until my Multicultural Education class that I was taking. This class required me to volunteer tutor with Project Think for at least twenty hours.
I followed the stairs outside on the sidewalk into the basement of the Abraham Teen Center. Inside, I walked down the hallway and turned left, ignoring two rooms along my way. At the end of the hall, I found the office, where I met the director, Gloria. She was busy talking to another student so she showed me to some middle school students who were apparently in charge of giving tours to new tutors or anyone who was interested in the place. They were all girls, and they were all very eager to help me out.
“So how old are you Brian?” A girl asked. “Are you single?” Her friends giggled in the background. I could already tell that they probably didn’t get a lot of young, male volunteer tutors. There were only two other male tutors in the middle school room, one who was, without a doubt, a gay drama major, and the other who was a veteran math teacher with shining white hair and a lazy eye.
The Abraham Teen Center has three rooms, including the director’s office, and a hallway that connects them all. The first and most prominent room is the “middle school” room, where, as its name suggests, the middle school students study. It also triples as the supply room, where students and tutors rummage through cabinets filled with basic school supplies, novels, and a mixture of both American and Spanish board games; the computer room, where students have six computers with Internet Connection to, as the tutors hope, do research and type essays; and the game room, where students sit on a fairly sizeable couch tucked away in the corner and play on a Wii.
The high school room, for the high school kids, is no where near as well equipped. It’s got the tables and chairs for tutoring, and if students need some binder paper or a book or some time with the Wii, they just head to the middle school room. From 3 to 3:40, the students arrive, mingle, play video games on the Wii, watch videos on YouTube, or eat the snacks provided by the center, snacks that range from pretzel sticks to bread rolls and pesto dip and miscellaneous pastries left over from special weekend events at the church. From 3:40 to 5:30 is the strictly-but-not-really enforced quiet time. Students catch up or stay on track by finishing their daily homework assignments and studying for tests, or they get ahead by, in the case that they claim they don’t have any homework that day, fill out science or math worksheets printed from the Internet. The last thirty minutes are for clean-up and free time.
In my Project Think application I had asked to work with high school students, so Gloria assigned me to the high school room. In here I answered to Elena, the high school “program leader.” (Only program leaders get paid, and they have to be at the center every day from opening to closing). She called the attention of the high school students, and they looked up from their homework (and some, from the cell phones not-so-discreetly hidden in their laps).
“Attention everyone, we have a new tutor! His name is Brian, and he’s going to be here...”
“Mondays and Wednesdays, and possibly some Fridays.” I said.
“Thank you. Would you like to say something about yourself?”
I smiled and looked out at the students sitting at their desks, which aligned to form a wide U. They were all definitely Latino (and I would later glance at the complete roster and see that one hundred percent of the students at the Abraham Teen Center were in fact, Latino).
“So, like Elena said, my name’s Brian. I’m a third-year-student at UCI, and my major is Literary Journalism. It’s basically fancy journalism. And uh, my dream career is being a high school English teacher, so if you guys have questions about your English homework—”
“Aw what? English?” A student with a backwards New Era fitted cap sat forward in his seat. “So you get shit like grammar?”
Elena jumped in. “Pedro! Language, please. Let Brian finish.”
“A’ight, sorry man, go ahead.”
Pedro. I could already tell he was going to be a fun one. “Well,” I continued, “I was pretty much finished. I’m looking forward to working with you all.”
For the next hour, I sat down with the high school kids and learned their names. They didn’t have a lot of homework they needed help with. They were in their finals week for the first semester of school, so all they really had to do was study. Another volunteer tutor, Martha, who was also an older veteran teacher, helped Pedro with some homework. One girl requested my help with studying for an English final, so I quizzed her on poetry terminology. When there wasn’t much going on in the high school room, Elena sent me over to the middle school room. The two tutors over there didn’t need any help, but I sat around anyway to get to know some of the middle school students. When I got tired of the girls’ persistent questions on my favorite color, my favorite candy, and my favorite Justin Bieber song, I headed back into the high school room, only to walk into a conversation that I didn’t really expect.
“Back in the eighties all us teachers smoked weed all the time.” Martha told a story about weed as the high school students listened intently. “It wasn’t as much of a big deal back then.”
“Daang, lucky.”
I quietly sat down next to Pedro. I wasn’t too sure where my place was in this conversation, but then he turned to me and asked, for everyone to hear, “Do you smoke weed Brian?”
I stuttered. At Breakthrough, this conversation would never happen. Students knew to never ask about it, and if they did, teachers knew to immediately shut them down, telling them, “I will not answer inappropriate questions.” But here was Martha, someone who had clearly been tutoring at the Abraham Teen Center long before I had. Elena was also in the room helping another student in the corner, but she didn’t stop to protest this group discussion on weed.
“Well, uh—”
“Do you drink? You’re in college man.”
“No, I don’t drink.”
“But you smoke.”
“Well—” I didn’t wanna lie. It looked like I didn’t have to. But I still couldn’t admit that I did, not that it was even a regular thing. I often crossed a lot of ethical boundaries in my past teaching jobs, but I had always been good about keeping my mouth shut on the issue of illicit drug usage.
“Yeah, you smoke.”
Yeah, fuck it. I was building rapport with Pedro, who I learned was a sophomore. The two of us discussed marijuana more privately. I told him about the last time I smoked, which was just last week, and how it was the only time out of my five times that I actually got high. Eventually he started asking me about college parties, and I admitted that I hardly ever went to any, but I knew enough about them to answer his questions. When our conversation about partying, alcohol, and weed died down, I instinctively took the opportunity to steer the topic toward something more appropriate.
“So have you guys had any other tutors in the past?” I asked.
“Yeah, we did. A guy named Ryan. He was here for a while. He had a girlfriend and he showed us pictures. She was a hot white girl.”
“Was he a good tutor?”
“He was tight, man, for a white guy. But one day, he just stopped showin’ up. No one knew he was gonna leave. He didn’t say bye or nothin’. He was just here because he had to, I guess, like you, right? Doing this for some class? How long do you have to be here for?”
“About another six weeks. I gotta do twenty hours.”
“And then you gonna leave?”
“Well, uh, hopefully not.” I was sure he didn’t believe me. Our conversation probably reminded him that tutors like me usually didn’t last, so he drifted back to his homework.
I’m going to stay, Pedro. But I didn’t know if I believed myself either.
Timmy’s Facebook message went unanswered.
“We’re in the really red building,” the director had told me. And there it was. I stood on the opposite end of it at the street intersection and waited for my signal in the crosswalk. Cars stopped in front of the building, and teenagers with backpacks stepped out. Others walked or rode their bikes from the opposite side of the street. We were all heading to the same place.
The Episcopal Church of St. Joseph stands at the corner of 2nd Street and Rose in downtown Santa Ana. Its exterior is layered with shingles colored a barnyard kind of red, reminiscent of the 1880s when it was built, long before its grassy meadows became cement sidewalks and concrete streets. The church has one tower capped by a steeple from which a white cross casts its shadow over, depending on the time of the day, a post office, a child daycare center, or a Burger King.
The church extends behind itself into a smaller brick building, which was constructed in 1955 to hold more offices and a large classroom. It is here in the basement of this building where the Abraham Teen Center makes its home. Funded by Project Think, the Abraham Teen Center is an after school program that opens its doors to middle school and high school students Monday through Friday, three to six in the evening.
I had never heard of Project Think until now, and I didn’t know how. I was a third year education minor at UCI in my fourth week of winter quarter now, yet word about Project Think never reached me until my Multicultural Education class that I was taking. This class required me to volunteer tutor with Project Think for at least twenty hours.
I followed the stairs outside on the sidewalk into the basement of the Abraham Teen Center. Inside, I walked down the hallway and turned left, ignoring two rooms along my way. At the end of the hall, I found the office, where I met the director, Gloria. She was busy talking to another student so she showed me to some middle school students who were apparently in charge of giving tours to new tutors or anyone who was interested in the place. They were all girls, and they were all very eager to help me out.
“So how old are you Brian?” A girl asked. “Are you single?” Her friends giggled in the background. I could already tell that they probably didn’t get a lot of young, male volunteer tutors. There were only two other male tutors in the middle school room, one who was, without a doubt, a gay drama major, and the other who was a veteran math teacher with shining white hair and a lazy eye.
The Abraham Teen Center has three rooms, including the director’s office, and a hallway that connects them all. The first and most prominent room is the “middle school” room, where, as its name suggests, the middle school students study. It also triples as the supply room, where students and tutors rummage through cabinets filled with basic school supplies, novels, and a mixture of both American and Spanish board games; the computer room, where students have six computers with Internet Connection to, as the tutors hope, do research and type essays; and the game room, where students sit on a fairly sizeable couch tucked away in the corner and play on a Wii.
The high school room, for the high school kids, is no where near as well equipped. It’s got the tables and chairs for tutoring, and if students need some binder paper or a book or some time with the Wii, they just head to the middle school room. From 3 to 3:40, the students arrive, mingle, play video games on the Wii, watch videos on YouTube, or eat the snacks provided by the center, snacks that range from pretzel sticks to bread rolls and pesto dip and miscellaneous pastries left over from special weekend events at the church. From 3:40 to 5:30 is the strictly-but-not-really enforced quiet time. Students catch up or stay on track by finishing their daily homework assignments and studying for tests, or they get ahead by, in the case that they claim they don’t have any homework that day, fill out science or math worksheets printed from the Internet. The last thirty minutes are for clean-up and free time.
In my Project Think application I had asked to work with high school students, so Gloria assigned me to the high school room. In here I answered to Elena, the high school “program leader.” (Only program leaders get paid, and they have to be at the center every day from opening to closing). She called the attention of the high school students, and they looked up from their homework (and some, from the cell phones not-so-discreetly hidden in their laps).
“Attention everyone, we have a new tutor! His name is Brian, and he’s going to be here...”
“Mondays and Wednesdays, and possibly some Fridays.” I said.
“Thank you. Would you like to say something about yourself?”
I smiled and looked out at the students sitting at their desks, which aligned to form a wide U. They were all definitely Latino (and I would later glance at the complete roster and see that one hundred percent of the students at the Abraham Teen Center were in fact, Latino).
“So, like Elena said, my name’s Brian. I’m a third-year-student at UCI, and my major is Literary Journalism. It’s basically fancy journalism. And uh, my dream career is being a high school English teacher, so if you guys have questions about your English homework—”
“Aw what? English?” A student with a backwards New Era fitted cap sat forward in his seat. “So you get shit like grammar?”
Elena jumped in. “Pedro! Language, please. Let Brian finish.”
“A’ight, sorry man, go ahead.”
Pedro. I could already tell he was going to be a fun one. “Well,” I continued, “I was pretty much finished. I’m looking forward to working with you all.”
For the next hour, I sat down with the high school kids and learned their names. They didn’t have a lot of homework they needed help with. They were in their finals week for the first semester of school, so all they really had to do was study. Another volunteer tutor, Martha, who was also an older veteran teacher, helped Pedro with some homework. One girl requested my help with studying for an English final, so I quizzed her on poetry terminology. When there wasn’t much going on in the high school room, Elena sent me over to the middle school room. The two tutors over there didn’t need any help, but I sat around anyway to get to know some of the middle school students. When I got tired of the girls’ persistent questions on my favorite color, my favorite candy, and my favorite Justin Bieber song, I headed back into the high school room, only to walk into a conversation that I didn’t really expect.
“Back in the eighties all us teachers smoked weed all the time.” Martha told a story about weed as the high school students listened intently. “It wasn’t as much of a big deal back then.”
“Daang, lucky.”
I quietly sat down next to Pedro. I wasn’t too sure where my place was in this conversation, but then he turned to me and asked, for everyone to hear, “Do you smoke weed Brian?”
I stuttered. At Breakthrough, this conversation would never happen. Students knew to never ask about it, and if they did, teachers knew to immediately shut them down, telling them, “I will not answer inappropriate questions.” But here was Martha, someone who had clearly been tutoring at the Abraham Teen Center long before I had. Elena was also in the room helping another student in the corner, but she didn’t stop to protest this group discussion on weed.
“Well, uh—”
“Do you drink? You’re in college man.”
“No, I don’t drink.”
“But you smoke.”
“Well—” I didn’t wanna lie. It looked like I didn’t have to. But I still couldn’t admit that I did, not that it was even a regular thing. I often crossed a lot of ethical boundaries in my past teaching jobs, but I had always been good about keeping my mouth shut on the issue of illicit drug usage.
“Yeah, you smoke.”
Yeah, fuck it. I was building rapport with Pedro, who I learned was a sophomore. The two of us discussed marijuana more privately. I told him about the last time I smoked, which was just last week, and how it was the only time out of my five times that I actually got high. Eventually he started asking me about college parties, and I admitted that I hardly ever went to any, but I knew enough about them to answer his questions. When our conversation about partying, alcohol, and weed died down, I instinctively took the opportunity to steer the topic toward something more appropriate.
“So have you guys had any other tutors in the past?” I asked.
“Yeah, we did. A guy named Ryan. He was here for a while. He had a girlfriend and he showed us pictures. She was a hot white girl.”
“Was he a good tutor?”
“He was tight, man, for a white guy. But one day, he just stopped showin’ up. No one knew he was gonna leave. He didn’t say bye or nothin’. He was just here because he had to, I guess, like you, right? Doing this for some class? How long do you have to be here for?”
“About another six weeks. I gotta do twenty hours.”
“And then you gonna leave?”
“Well, uh, hopefully not.” I was sure he didn’t believe me. Our conversation probably reminded him that tutors like me usually didn’t last, so he drifted back to his homework.
I’m going to stay, Pedro. But I didn’t know if I believed myself either.
Tags:
breakthrough,
project think,
socal,
teaching
Another Level
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Weed? Yeah, I’ve done it. Four times. Never gotten high, or maybe I did. I dunno. The last time I did it—ahh yes, one of my nights with Jerick during winter break, three weeks ago—I probably should’ve gotten high. We were in that car of his outside a damn In-N-Out hotboxing away. I don’t even know how many hits I took. We just passed that pipe back and forth, among me, him, and his two friends. I’d blow out some clouds, and his friends would be like, “Daaang tha’ was a good one!” I figured, okay, this is it. I’m finally going to get high.
All that really happened was I bought In-N-Out: two cheeseburgers and a side of fries. And a banana split at Denny’s. You’d think that I got the munchies from being high, but I was hungry before I smoked. And what I ate sounded like something I’d eat on any regular night. The only difference I felt was that I was maybe a little wobbly on my feet. But I was also pretty tired. I dunno. I managed to rationalize away every possible hint of being high.
But maybe I really was high. It’s was my fourth time—I had to have started doing it right by then. I’m just one of the rare few who don’t get crazy trips like other people. My tolerance for weed probably makes up for my lack of tolerance for alcohol. So, I don’t see the problem with taking a few hits tonight. The leftover potato salad from the potluck can wait for me in the kitchen. I’m in the bedroom with three others from my PD dance family right now, and I’d like to join in on a good time. That Gatorade bong contraption you got is pretty weird though. A Gatorade bottle, a pen tube, and a bowl made of foil; it couldn’t get any more ghetto than this. But whatever, I’m down.
We pass it around. I nervously anticipate each time. I’m a little excited, but mostly anxious. Am I going to get a good hit this time? When exactly do I take my thumb off this little hole? When do I stop lighting the bowl? Fuck I’m such a noob. It’s slightly embarrassing. Oh, but thanks Gerald, you’re going to light the bowl and place your own thumb on the hole for me. You’ll take care of all the complicated stuff; just place my lips over the opening and suck. Sounds like something I can do. And soon enough you guys are now all saying, “Daaang tha’ was a good one!” I’m sucking and looking down and I can kinda see the ashy white smoke filling up the Gatorade bottle. Sometimes it gets so opaque and sometimes the smoke rushes so forcefully down my throat that it burns. Billows of smoke shoot out of my nose while puffs escape my mouth when I cough and cough some more. Shit, my throat. Fuck, that was what I was nervous about. The first time I smoked it burned my throat so bad that it was sore for the next few days, and it later developed into a cold.
The burning this time doesn’t last too long however. I dunno what I’ve been doing differently this time around but I guess I’m learning. Soon enough I’m taking hits again, and now you guys are all telling me that fuuuuck, I’m going to get hella high. Yeah, sure. I smile and nod. I’m not feeling anything yet. This is probably just going to end up like all the other times I’ve smoked.
And, then, well, it uh—this is different. It hit me. Whoa. This, this must be it. High. I’m high. Slow, why is everything slow now. Wait, wow. Turning my head—feels like, shit. Takes a lot of energy. Feels like a dumbbell. All over my body, holding me down. This must be it. I’m high. Words. Are you guys saying something? Yeah, I hear you. Am I high, you ask? That’s a question. I look at them. Then I look past them. I’m looking at the wall now. I look at them again. I’m high. Yes, I nod yes. Oh fuck. How’d this, well, okay. I know how. But how did this happen? My other four times getting high—they were nothing. This time now is something—wow.
Gerald, what? What about him. I don’t hear his voice. You guys say what? Oh, Gerald. He’s spacing out too. I turn—oh god, dumbbells. I’m moving them again. I turn my head, and I look at him, Gerald. He’s sitting on the other bed. He’s staring at the wall, the one to my right. He’s staring. Straight ahead, pretty much. Blank look. And now what? You guys, you’re leaving? Leaving me here, with Gerald, just us two. Ok. Not gonna nod—just saving my energy.
Gerald, it’s just us. Us two alone now. We lie down. Separate beds. The ceiling—it’s never been, I dunno, so interesting. Actually, no. It’s not interesting. But, fuck, can’t stop staring at it. I’m fixated. Corner of my eye, you pick up something. What is that? What are you doing? I turn my head—sooo slowly. I know what you’re doing. But, whatever. I ask you, what is that? What are you doing?
Checking Tumblr. Oh you’re checking Tumblr. Lemme tell you something, something ‘bout Tumblr. You ready? You ready to hear? I have lots—oh god—things to say about Tumblr, and blogging, just blogging really. Things, crazy things, to say about them, I have a lot. Ready? O.K.
I’ve been blogging ever since the eighth grade which was like nearly eight whole fucking years ago and I started like any other blogger but I’m telling you the things I blog about now are fucking ridiculous and fucking crazy and I know every one says that and that everyone likes to claim that their blogs are so fucking unique but trust me they are all really the same but unlike them I can guarantee you that my blog is indeed the most unique blog ever a personal blog in which you actually get some insight into my life and I know every says that they write their own unique insights on their life on their blogs but no they actually just blog a bunch of generic posts about really basic ideas on really general shit like the things they write are some really crappy sparknotes while what I write is the actual novel
which means that yes my blogs are really long and one of the common things my friends will tell me is why can’t I ever just get to the point in my blogs but trust me everything I include in a blog has a point whether it’s there to set the scene give some characterization set the tone contribute to the theme or whatever but most Internet readers are just looking for the plot because everything else is too complicated for them but really they should be able to understand because this is stuff they learn in school but the problem is that kids nowadays think that whatever they learn in school they don’t need to apply outside and so a lot of people pretty much everyone misses all the universal themes and the point of what it is that I try to do
so now you wanna read my blog and well that’s something that I’m cool with but when my friends ask to read my blog I need to screen them which is something I don’t do for strangers that stumble upon it but that’s okay because they’re strangers but when my friends read my blog I need to make sure that they understand it and don’t misinterpret anything so what I’m going to do now it gives you a little test a little diagram that illustrates one of the main themes of my blogs and you just tell me what you think it means so give me a sticky note and a pencil...ok here tell me what this diagram means to you
you don’t know oh but you take that back because you think it actually means that the truth makes up both emotion and logic and well I think that’s kinda close but not quite so I’ll let you ponder that for a while because I’m really hungry now and there’s some leftover potato salad that I haven’t tried yet so let’s go get some.
Lead shoes. Must’ve been wearing them. Really though, I was wearing black socks. But lead shoes, felt like I was walking with them. Earth’s rotation speed—what is that? Thousand miles a second? An hour? An hour. Feels like I’m falling behind, not moving along, not anymore. Excuse my exaggeration there. Seriously though.
And seriously though, I dunno how I got here, here in the kitchen. But this potato salad; it’s bomb. But really though, I always like potato salad. Uh oh I’m rationalizing again. Maybe I’m not high.
Oh hi Caleb =] You’re in the kitchen, god, you’re such a cutie. No, I’m not going to tell you that. You don’t know I think that but you are such a cutie. =] Am I high, you ask? =] Man, you make me laugh. Nooo I’m not. My potato salad, is it fucking amazing, you ask? =] It’s average. Just average? =] Fuck, wait, no, =] Why am I smiling so much? =] Don’t laugh at me Caleb! =] I’m not high! =] I’m just smiling a lot— =] fuck why am I smiling? Oh my god =], I’m a smiler. Fuck no. =] Smiling is like, =] one of my least favorite things to do. Alright, here’s my blank face: =] Am I still smiling, Caleb? Fuck, yes I am. This is embarrassing. =]
Whatever, grin on my face, grin off my face, this potato salad—it’s pretty bomb =] It’s on a whole ‘nother level.
All that really happened was I bought In-N-Out: two cheeseburgers and a side of fries. And a banana split at Denny’s. You’d think that I got the munchies from being high, but I was hungry before I smoked. And what I ate sounded like something I’d eat on any regular night. The only difference I felt was that I was maybe a little wobbly on my feet. But I was also pretty tired. I dunno. I managed to rationalize away every possible hint of being high.
But maybe I really was high. It’s was my fourth time—I had to have started doing it right by then. I’m just one of the rare few who don’t get crazy trips like other people. My tolerance for weed probably makes up for my lack of tolerance for alcohol. So, I don’t see the problem with taking a few hits tonight. The leftover potato salad from the potluck can wait for me in the kitchen. I’m in the bedroom with three others from my PD dance family right now, and I’d like to join in on a good time. That Gatorade bong contraption you got is pretty weird though. A Gatorade bottle, a pen tube, and a bowl made of foil; it couldn’t get any more ghetto than this. But whatever, I’m down.
We pass it around. I nervously anticipate each time. I’m a little excited, but mostly anxious. Am I going to get a good hit this time? When exactly do I take my thumb off this little hole? When do I stop lighting the bowl? Fuck I’m such a noob. It’s slightly embarrassing. Oh, but thanks Gerald, you’re going to light the bowl and place your own thumb on the hole for me. You’ll take care of all the complicated stuff; just place my lips over the opening and suck. Sounds like something I can do. And soon enough you guys are now all saying, “Daaang tha’ was a good one!” I’m sucking and looking down and I can kinda see the ashy white smoke filling up the Gatorade bottle. Sometimes it gets so opaque and sometimes the smoke rushes so forcefully down my throat that it burns. Billows of smoke shoot out of my nose while puffs escape my mouth when I cough and cough some more. Shit, my throat. Fuck, that was what I was nervous about. The first time I smoked it burned my throat so bad that it was sore for the next few days, and it later developed into a cold.
The burning this time doesn’t last too long however. I dunno what I’ve been doing differently this time around but I guess I’m learning. Soon enough I’m taking hits again, and now you guys are all telling me that fuuuuck, I’m going to get hella high. Yeah, sure. I smile and nod. I’m not feeling anything yet. This is probably just going to end up like all the other times I’ve smoked.
And, then, well, it uh—this is different. It hit me. Whoa. This, this must be it. High. I’m high. Slow, why is everything slow now. Wait, wow. Turning my head—feels like, shit. Takes a lot of energy. Feels like a dumbbell. All over my body, holding me down. This must be it. I’m high. Words. Are you guys saying something? Yeah, I hear you. Am I high, you ask? That’s a question. I look at them. Then I look past them. I’m looking at the wall now. I look at them again. I’m high. Yes, I nod yes. Oh fuck. How’d this, well, okay. I know how. But how did this happen? My other four times getting high—they were nothing. This time now is something—wow.
Gerald, what? What about him. I don’t hear his voice. You guys say what? Oh, Gerald. He’s spacing out too. I turn—oh god, dumbbells. I’m moving them again. I turn my head, and I look at him, Gerald. He’s sitting on the other bed. He’s staring at the wall, the one to my right. He’s staring. Straight ahead, pretty much. Blank look. And now what? You guys, you’re leaving? Leaving me here, with Gerald, just us two. Ok. Not gonna nod—just saving my energy.
Gerald, it’s just us. Us two alone now. We lie down. Separate beds. The ceiling—it’s never been, I dunno, so interesting. Actually, no. It’s not interesting. But, fuck, can’t stop staring at it. I’m fixated. Corner of my eye, you pick up something. What is that? What are you doing? I turn my head—sooo slowly. I know what you’re doing. But, whatever. I ask you, what is that? What are you doing?
Checking Tumblr. Oh you’re checking Tumblr. Lemme tell you something, something ‘bout Tumblr. You ready? You ready to hear? I have lots—oh god—things to say about Tumblr, and blogging, just blogging really. Things, crazy things, to say about them, I have a lot. Ready? O.K.
I’ve been blogging ever since the eighth grade which was like nearly eight whole fucking years ago and I started like any other blogger but I’m telling you the things I blog about now are fucking ridiculous and fucking crazy and I know every one says that and that everyone likes to claim that their blogs are so fucking unique but trust me they are all really the same but unlike them I can guarantee you that my blog is indeed the most unique blog ever a personal blog in which you actually get some insight into my life and I know every says that they write their own unique insights on their life on their blogs but no they actually just blog a bunch of generic posts about really basic ideas on really general shit like the things they write are some really crappy sparknotes while what I write is the actual novel
which means that yes my blogs are really long and one of the common things my friends will tell me is why can’t I ever just get to the point in my blogs but trust me everything I include in a blog has a point whether it’s there to set the scene give some characterization set the tone contribute to the theme or whatever but most Internet readers are just looking for the plot because everything else is too complicated for them but really they should be able to understand because this is stuff they learn in school but the problem is that kids nowadays think that whatever they learn in school they don’t need to apply outside and so a lot of people pretty much everyone misses all the universal themes and the point of what it is that I try to do
so now you wanna read my blog and well that’s something that I’m cool with but when my friends ask to read my blog I need to screen them which is something I don’t do for strangers that stumble upon it but that’s okay because they’re strangers but when my friends read my blog I need to make sure that they understand it and don’t misinterpret anything so what I’m going to do now it gives you a little test a little diagram that illustrates one of the main themes of my blogs and you just tell me what you think it means so give me a sticky note and a pencil...ok here tell me what this diagram means to you
you don’t know oh but you take that back because you think it actually means that the truth makes up both emotion and logic and well I think that’s kinda close but not quite so I’ll let you ponder that for a while because I’m really hungry now and there’s some leftover potato salad that I haven’t tried yet so let’s go get some.Lead shoes. Must’ve been wearing them. Really though, I was wearing black socks. But lead shoes, felt like I was walking with them. Earth’s rotation speed—what is that? Thousand miles a second? An hour? An hour. Feels like I’m falling behind, not moving along, not anymore. Excuse my exaggeration there. Seriously though.
And seriously though, I dunno how I got here, here in the kitchen. But this potato salad; it’s bomb. But really though, I always like potato salad. Uh oh I’m rationalizing again. Maybe I’m not high.
Oh hi Caleb =] You’re in the kitchen, god, you’re such a cutie. No, I’m not going to tell you that. You don’t know I think that but you are such a cutie. =] Am I high, you ask? =] Man, you make me laugh. Nooo I’m not. My potato salad, is it fucking amazing, you ask? =] It’s average. Just average? =] Fuck, wait, no, =] Why am I smiling so much? =] Don’t laugh at me Caleb! =] I’m not high! =] I’m just smiling a lot— =] fuck why am I smiling? Oh my god =], I’m a smiler. Fuck no. =] Smiling is like, =] one of my least favorite things to do. Alright, here’s my blank face: =] Am I still smiling, Caleb? Fuck, yes I am. This is embarrassing. =]
Whatever, grin on my face, grin off my face, this potato salad—it’s pretty bomb =] It’s on a whole ‘nother level.
The Fashion Island Dining Hierarchy
Thursday, January 20, 2011
(Continued from “Fashion Island”)
My Literature of Inequity teacher asked the class if anyone wanted to share the short story they wrote about their observations at Fashion Island the other day. No one raised their hand. I waited, and still no hands. I decided to raise mine.
“Only rich, old, white people shop at Fashion Island,” I read. “This is something that I knew since my first visit here two years ago, and being back here today I can see that nothing’s changed. However, today I want to know what lies beneath this outdoor mall’s fancily extravagant exterior, so I travel over to the side of the mall with all the big name chain restaurant hoping to locate some dumpsters. I end up finding an open garage entrance to a service corridor facing the parking lot, guarded by nothing more than a measly sign that reads, ‘Authorized Personnel Only.’ Not the most welcoming invite, but I head inside anyway.
“Nothing really interests me until I turn a corner and glance down at the hallway before me. It stretches long and narrow, and the walls are an eerie white, lit by fluorescent lights that glow an equally eerie white. The occasional ‘hazardous wastes’ or ‘no smoking sign’ hangs up on the walls. A web of pipes runs under the ceiling, and it concerns me that some are a little red with rust. An ominous elevator stands coldly at the end of the hallway, so I make my way toward it, steadily and nervously, as though I were trying to avoid trip wires lining the floor. I carefully pull out my cell phone to snap a few photos of my surroundings. Unsure about the presence of security cameras, and knowing that taking pictures inside malls is often against mall regulations, I try to make it look like I’m just using my phone to read text messages or whatever; it’s just that sometimes I like to angle my phone up toward the ceiling or to the sides when I read my text messages. Any minute I expect to be stopped by mall security and to find myself at the police station waiting on my journalism teacher to arrive and verify that I was out on an assignment. I replay in my mind an incident three years ago when cops stopped my friends (one black, one Mexican) and me on the way down to the ground floor after we spent an entire hour talking on top floor of a mall parking structure. They ran our ID’s, patted us down for weed and guns and they asked us if we were carrying any rocket launchers. None of us wore backpacks or bags; I didn’t know how we could possibly conceal rocket launchers.
“If a cop stops me now at Fashion Island, I’d be accused of being a terrorist, roaming the internal structures of the mall and taking pictures on my camera phone so I could report back to my terrorist cell and plan out where to plant bombs. Suddenly the doors of the elevator open as I’m just reaching the halfway point, and out come two fat Mexican men rolling a cart of trash. Their faces are dark and dirty, and their white baggy coveralls are blotted with patches of dirt and dust and smeared with stains of food. Caps sporting The Cheesecake Factory logo rest on their heads. I don’t think it hurts to once again mention that they are fat. I wonder if they will stop me as they roll down the hallway in my direction with their cart, but they just roll right on, muttering in Spanish. There’s nothing at the end of the hallway except for a few dumpsters, as expected, so I snap a few more photos and quickly walk out before anyone could arrest me. I decide on a cleaner, less risky change of environment and head upstairs.
“I stroll inside Cheesecake Factory very casually for some observing. When a seating host asks me if I need help, I just tell her that I’m here to look at the cheesecakes on display. She lets me know to let her know if I need any assistance and then leaves me alone. When she’s busy helping other guests, I turn around to conduct a quick survey of The Cheesecake Factory staff. I squint through the dim warm-tinted lighting to see that most of the servers, bartenders, and hosts are white women, and most are thin and in shape. And even then, the occasional slightly chubby server has the full-volume hair and the bubbly personality to make up for it. Everyone wears a button-up dress shirt and pair of dress pants that both emanate a bright white, a white that stood out brilliantly from the restaurant’s mahogany wood finishing on the cushioned booths and the sand-colored marble walls. No one here looks like they ever had to haul trash bags down Fashion Island’s shady service corridors. I also noted that, here on a Tuesday night, the clientele were white and adult-aged, with some being old enough that I could spot the shadows in their wrinkles from where I stood. White and old—the only ones who could afford to dine out at the Cheesecake Factory on a random day in the middle of the week.
“At this point, after looking at all the cheesecakes, I feel a little hungry. Having no more than five dollars to spend, I travel across Fashion Island and head down to the food court, hidden away at the bottom floor of the only indoor part of the mall. Here I find an assortment of fast food restaurants that I can actually afford. I buy myself a chili cheddar cheese dog from Fatburger and sit at a table in front of it. Notably, the workers at Fatburger, just like all the ones at the other fast food restaurants, are brown-skinned Latinos. They speak with a Spanish accent, and they wear baggy black dress shirts, black pants, black caps, and a red apron. Glancing around in the food court, I can see that it’s pretty empty. Only five other tables are occupied. Sitting a few tables away, a white family is having a family night out. Cokes and fries for everyone, cheeseburgers for mom and dad, and hot dogs for their daughter and son, who looked to be nine and four years old, respectively. They all eat in silence, and, except for the four-year-old son who constantly turns his head to every corner of the food court, everyone maintains strict eye contract with the bites they leave in their food as they hold it a few inches from their mouths. Occasionally the mom and dad will stop chewing and open their mouths to say a sentence or two to each other.
“As I reach the end of my chili cheddar cheese hot dog, I muse on the Fashion Island dining hierarchy that I observed today. In the top tier, I found beautiful, young, thin white people who work upstairs in fine-dining restaurants as servers, bartenders, hosts, basically anyone who has to interact with the customers, who were white, old, but still classy. In the bottom tier, I found Mexicans hidden away doing dirty work in the service corridors or working in fast food restaurants. Their customers: middle class parents who avoid awkward conversation with their kids by stuffing them with crispy thin-cut fries and distracting them with the sights and sounds of Fashion Island, minimally enjoyed from the bottom basement floor in the most obscure and most quiet part of the mall (a part that I didn’t even know existed until after my first few visits here). Somewhere a few thousand yards away from the food court, two business partners or a couple celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary clink their wine glasses together over a seven-dollar slice of cheesecake.”
I laid my paper on my desk and looked up at my teacher. She asked if anyone had any comments.
The first was from a white chick. “Did you actually ask the people that you thought were white if they were actually white?”
I saw where this was going. “No,” I answered.
My teacher, who was Japanese, joined in. “You can’t just assume that people who look white are white. That might raise some ethical issues in your reporting.”
Newport Beach is more than ninety percent white. I think there’s a good chance that people who look white at Fashion Island are indeed white. I didn’t think of this response until after class, unfortunately.
“Plus, I’ve seen some Asian parents with their kids shop at Fashion Island before. It’s not just only white people,” my teacher added.
“Well,” I said, “the very first sentence of my story is intentionally an overstatement.” But I knew she was kinda right. I probably should’ve qualified my “facts” more by writing, “most were white,” instead of, “all were white.”
“One more thing, Brian.”
“Yeah?”
“I sense some spite in your story’s tone. Is there a reason to that?”
I shrugged. “I guess it came out this way.” But I really did know the reason. I just didn’t know how to put it into words yet.
My Literature of Inequity teacher asked the class if anyone wanted to share the short story they wrote about their observations at Fashion Island the other day. No one raised their hand. I waited, and still no hands. I decided to raise mine.
“Only rich, old, white people shop at Fashion Island,” I read. “This is something that I knew since my first visit here two years ago, and being back here today I can see that nothing’s changed. However, today I want to know what lies beneath this outdoor mall’s fancily extravagant exterior, so I travel over to the side of the mall with all the big name chain restaurant hoping to locate some dumpsters. I end up finding an open garage entrance to a service corridor facing the parking lot, guarded by nothing more than a measly sign that reads, ‘Authorized Personnel Only.’ Not the most welcoming invite, but I head inside anyway.
“Nothing really interests me until I turn a corner and glance down at the hallway before me. It stretches long and narrow, and the walls are an eerie white, lit by fluorescent lights that glow an equally eerie white. The occasional ‘hazardous wastes’ or ‘no smoking sign’ hangs up on the walls. A web of pipes runs under the ceiling, and it concerns me that some are a little red with rust. An ominous elevator stands coldly at the end of the hallway, so I make my way toward it, steadily and nervously, as though I were trying to avoid trip wires lining the floor. I carefully pull out my cell phone to snap a few photos of my surroundings. Unsure about the presence of security cameras, and knowing that taking pictures inside malls is often against mall regulations, I try to make it look like I’m just using my phone to read text messages or whatever; it’s just that sometimes I like to angle my phone up toward the ceiling or to the sides when I read my text messages. Any minute I expect to be stopped by mall security and to find myself at the police station waiting on my journalism teacher to arrive and verify that I was out on an assignment. I replay in my mind an incident three years ago when cops stopped my friends (one black, one Mexican) and me on the way down to the ground floor after we spent an entire hour talking on top floor of a mall parking structure. They ran our ID’s, patted us down for weed and guns and they asked us if we were carrying any rocket launchers. None of us wore backpacks or bags; I didn’t know how we could possibly conceal rocket launchers.
“If a cop stops me now at Fashion Island, I’d be accused of being a terrorist, roaming the internal structures of the mall and taking pictures on my camera phone so I could report back to my terrorist cell and plan out where to plant bombs. Suddenly the doors of the elevator open as I’m just reaching the halfway point, and out come two fat Mexican men rolling a cart of trash. Their faces are dark and dirty, and their white baggy coveralls are blotted with patches of dirt and dust and smeared with stains of food. Caps sporting The Cheesecake Factory logo rest on their heads. I don’t think it hurts to once again mention that they are fat. I wonder if they will stop me as they roll down the hallway in my direction with their cart, but they just roll right on, muttering in Spanish. There’s nothing at the end of the hallway except for a few dumpsters, as expected, so I snap a few more photos and quickly walk out before anyone could arrest me. I decide on a cleaner, less risky change of environment and head upstairs.
“I stroll inside Cheesecake Factory very casually for some observing. When a seating host asks me if I need help, I just tell her that I’m here to look at the cheesecakes on display. She lets me know to let her know if I need any assistance and then leaves me alone. When she’s busy helping other guests, I turn around to conduct a quick survey of The Cheesecake Factory staff. I squint through the dim warm-tinted lighting to see that most of the servers, bartenders, and hosts are white women, and most are thin and in shape. And even then, the occasional slightly chubby server has the full-volume hair and the bubbly personality to make up for it. Everyone wears a button-up dress shirt and pair of dress pants that both emanate a bright white, a white that stood out brilliantly from the restaurant’s mahogany wood finishing on the cushioned booths and the sand-colored marble walls. No one here looks like they ever had to haul trash bags down Fashion Island’s shady service corridors. I also noted that, here on a Tuesday night, the clientele were white and adult-aged, with some being old enough that I could spot the shadows in their wrinkles from where I stood. White and old—the only ones who could afford to dine out at the Cheesecake Factory on a random day in the middle of the week.
“At this point, after looking at all the cheesecakes, I feel a little hungry. Having no more than five dollars to spend, I travel across Fashion Island and head down to the food court, hidden away at the bottom floor of the only indoor part of the mall. Here I find an assortment of fast food restaurants that I can actually afford. I buy myself a chili cheddar cheese dog from Fatburger and sit at a table in front of it. Notably, the workers at Fatburger, just like all the ones at the other fast food restaurants, are brown-skinned Latinos. They speak with a Spanish accent, and they wear baggy black dress shirts, black pants, black caps, and a red apron. Glancing around in the food court, I can see that it’s pretty empty. Only five other tables are occupied. Sitting a few tables away, a white family is having a family night out. Cokes and fries for everyone, cheeseburgers for mom and dad, and hot dogs for their daughter and son, who looked to be nine and four years old, respectively. They all eat in silence, and, except for the four-year-old son who constantly turns his head to every corner of the food court, everyone maintains strict eye contract with the bites they leave in their food as they hold it a few inches from their mouths. Occasionally the mom and dad will stop chewing and open their mouths to say a sentence or two to each other.
“As I reach the end of my chili cheddar cheese hot dog, I muse on the Fashion Island dining hierarchy that I observed today. In the top tier, I found beautiful, young, thin white people who work upstairs in fine-dining restaurants as servers, bartenders, hosts, basically anyone who has to interact with the customers, who were white, old, but still classy. In the bottom tier, I found Mexicans hidden away doing dirty work in the service corridors or working in fast food restaurants. Their customers: middle class parents who avoid awkward conversation with their kids by stuffing them with crispy thin-cut fries and distracting them with the sights and sounds of Fashion Island, minimally enjoyed from the bottom basement floor in the most obscure and most quiet part of the mall (a part that I didn’t even know existed until after my first few visits here). Somewhere a few thousand yards away from the food court, two business partners or a couple celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary clink their wine glasses together over a seven-dollar slice of cheesecake.”
I laid my paper on my desk and looked up at my teacher. She asked if anyone had any comments.
The first was from a white chick. “Did you actually ask the people that you thought were white if they were actually white?”
I saw where this was going. “No,” I answered.
My teacher, who was Japanese, joined in. “You can’t just assume that people who look white are white. That might raise some ethical issues in your reporting.”
Newport Beach is more than ninety percent white. I think there’s a good chance that people who look white at Fashion Island are indeed white. I didn’t think of this response until after class, unfortunately.
“Plus, I’ve seen some Asian parents with their kids shop at Fashion Island before. It’s not just only white people,” my teacher added.
“Well,” I said, “the very first sentence of my story is intentionally an overstatement.” But I knew she was kinda right. I probably should’ve qualified my “facts” more by writing, “most were white,” instead of, “all were white.”
“One more thing, Brian.”
“Yeah?”
“I sense some spite in your story’s tone. Is there a reason to that?”
I shrugged. “I guess it came out this way.” But I really did know the reason. I just didn’t know how to put it into words yet.
Tags:
ethnicity,
schoolwork,
socal
Fashion Island
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Nearly two years ago, an eighth grade Breakthrough student of mine, who was Latino, told me about how his dad once took him to Valley Fair mall, a high-end shopping mall in Saratoga. Saratoga is a prominently white city that neighbors San Jose on its west side. His dad cautioned him on going there, but my student insisted. Once he walked inside, he felt so nervous and uncomfortable around “all the white people” that he had to ask his dad to take him somewhere else, to Eastridge Mall. Eastridge lies in east side San Jose, where Latinos make up a larger percentage of the population than any other races.
All the times going to Valley Fair during my high school years, I never noticed the race of the different shoppers—I considered myself “colorblind”—and I wondered that if I ever did notice race, if I could ever see race the way a thirteen-year-old saw it, what would that say about me?
2011 just began, as did winter quarter at UCI, and during the second week of January, my literary journalism class, “Literature of Inequity,” held class at Fashion Island Mall for an “in-class” assignment. The assignment was, as expected by the title of the class, to report on some form of inequity at the mall. I immediately knew what I wanted to report on: race.
Fashion Island Mall is a high-end mall in Newport Beach, a small beachside city (as the name suggests) of around 86,000 people, a number that is relatively small to Irvine’s population of around 218,000. With three different Bloomingdale’s stores, an abundance of French cafés that try to outsell each other on overpriced crème brulées, or designer stores that sell you hundred-dollar polos, it’s more high-end than Valley Fair. Even Valley Fair has American Eagle, PacSun, Aéropostale, and all those stores for preppy teens or skater kids, but Fashion Island—nope, none of that. It’s too classy. It’s too white.
More than ninety percent of Newport Beach’s population is white, and the shoppers at Fashion Island reflect this percentage. On any given day, the busiest time is lunch hour, where you can find mostly white men in dress shirts and ties conducting business over pastas, sandwiches and salads. The mall closes at 9 PM on weekdays, and strangely, 7 PM on Saturdays, and 6 PM on Sundays. Maybe it’s no surprise; Newport Beach is a quiet town. If you walk around neighborhoods at night you’ll realize that you can’t see because you can’t find any streetlamps. Residents sleep early in Newport Beach.
Fashion Island stands at the top of a hill that rises about 160 feet above sea level, but the roads from there all slope downhill to the beach, which lies south a mile away. On a clear day, if you walk from the center of the mall toward the southwest parking lot, past the British boutique store, past the world-class jewelry store, and past the Macy’s and its bakery, you’re faced with a view of the ocean. Go at sunset, and you’ll wish that you had a camera on you. The ocean peaks over the dark silhouette of houses and palm trees, and it disappears into a haze of purple and pink at the horizon. The sky retains its blue color, but the horizon’s pink glow gradually overtakes it.
While wandering through the mall and jotting down my observations in my spiral-bound notebook, I realized that this view was the only thing I could appreciate about Fashion Island. Everything else that I didn’t appreciate I wrote in my notebook. My final story was probably going to piss off the white students in my literary journalism class.
All the times going to Valley Fair during my high school years, I never noticed the race of the different shoppers—I considered myself “colorblind”—and I wondered that if I ever did notice race, if I could ever see race the way a thirteen-year-old saw it, what would that say about me?
2011 just began, as did winter quarter at UCI, and during the second week of January, my literary journalism class, “Literature of Inequity,” held class at Fashion Island Mall for an “in-class” assignment. The assignment was, as expected by the title of the class, to report on some form of inequity at the mall. I immediately knew what I wanted to report on: race.
Fashion Island Mall is a high-end mall in Newport Beach, a small beachside city (as the name suggests) of around 86,000 people, a number that is relatively small to Irvine’s population of around 218,000. With three different Bloomingdale’s stores, an abundance of French cafés that try to outsell each other on overpriced crème brulées, or designer stores that sell you hundred-dollar polos, it’s more high-end than Valley Fair. Even Valley Fair has American Eagle, PacSun, Aéropostale, and all those stores for preppy teens or skater kids, but Fashion Island—nope, none of that. It’s too classy. It’s too white.
More than ninety percent of Newport Beach’s population is white, and the shoppers at Fashion Island reflect this percentage. On any given day, the busiest time is lunch hour, where you can find mostly white men in dress shirts and ties conducting business over pastas, sandwiches and salads. The mall closes at 9 PM on weekdays, and strangely, 7 PM on Saturdays, and 6 PM on Sundays. Maybe it’s no surprise; Newport Beach is a quiet town. If you walk around neighborhoods at night you’ll realize that you can’t see because you can’t find any streetlamps. Residents sleep early in Newport Beach.
Fashion Island stands at the top of a hill that rises about 160 feet above sea level, but the roads from there all slope downhill to the beach, which lies south a mile away. On a clear day, if you walk from the center of the mall toward the southwest parking lot, past the British boutique store, past the world-class jewelry store, and past the Macy’s and its bakery, you’re faced with a view of the ocean. Go at sunset, and you’ll wish that you had a camera on you. The ocean peaks over the dark silhouette of houses and palm trees, and it disappears into a haze of purple and pink at the horizon. The sky retains its blue color, but the horizon’s pink glow gradually overtakes it.
While wandering through the mall and jotting down my observations in my spiral-bound notebook, I realized that this view was the only thing I could appreciate about Fashion Island. Everything else that I didn’t appreciate I wrote in my notebook. My final story was probably going to piss off the white students in my literary journalism class.
Tags:
ethnicity,
schoolwork,
socal
Summer 2010 Commentary
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Overview
I was no longer a Breakthrough summer teacher, but I still came back to resolve a few last things. I continued to dance throughout the summer down in SoCal. I concerned myself with my ability to change as a person.
General Comments
This was a small season; I only wrote eleven entries. I wouldn’t say that this was like what happened during Winter 2010. A lot of shit happened in my life during that winter, but I just never had time to write about it (which made it necessary to tell it through flashbacks in the following season), but during Summer 2010, just not a lot of shit happened. Basically, besides the stuff with Breakthrough, I took summer school classes and I danced a lot. Interesting stories never arise from school, and as I’ll later discuss in this entry, there’s not a lot of interesting story material with the subject of dancing anymore.
Select Entry Commentary
“The French Teacher” & “You Are My Best Friend”
The two previous seasons, Fall 2009 and Spring 2010, all you heard about was how I wasn’t coming back to Breakthrough. The fact that the last entry about Breakthrough in the present storyline for Spring 2010 was titled “Breakthrough” gave the entry a sense of finality, and I really thought that that would be the final Breakthrough entry. I didn’t count on coming back to guest teach for Summer 2010, but I did, and these two entries set up for what became the conclusion of one of my blog’s main story arcs.
It’s amazing to see the contrast in everything between these two entries and the “That’s Just the Way It Is,” series. I didn’t intend this; the events of “That’s Just the Way It Is” hadn’t happened yet when I wrote these two entries. But in retrospect, you could say that these two entries began setting up for the idea that my students needed me, and that I needed them.
“Drive”
I only occasionally use figurative language, and when I do, I either use it subtly (something more beginning writers need to learn to do) or use it to exaggerate. I feel like “Drive” has some of the best subtle imagery that I’ve ever written, my favorites including “circuit of city lights” and “pretending to catch the fireworks in our hands as if they were confetti strewn about the night sky.” And usually my entries are heavier on description and narration, but this one combines both all that with a good amount of exposition too. I refrain from a lot of exposition and writing out my inner thoughts in most of my entries (as a stylistic choice), which is the opposite of what every blogger does (they write about their thoughts and feelings but never really include concrete stories from their lives). This entry shows that when I want to, I can write my thoughts and feelings too, and that I do it better.
“This is not a Phone Conversation”
This is a purely thematic entry that reinforces one of my blog’s long running themes: the perception of reality through a logical lens versus an emotional lens—logic vs. emotion, basically. I represent the logic, and Trung, emotion. I’ll probably delve more in-depth into this theme and all the entries in which it appears once my blog reaches its end at the finish of Winter 2011.
“The Gummy Octopus”
Honestly, I regretted writing this entry the minute I posted it. It was a terrible entry. Well, maybe if I had posted it a year ago, it might had been fine, but by this time, I had really run out of refreshing and interesting stories for my dancing story arc. Being self-conscious about my dancing, having small successes and small losses—those stories pervaded my blog during Summer 2009 and Fall 2010. I knew that the only way to really make dancing stories interesting anymore was to combine them with another plot arc on my blog, as seen in “Slave to the Machine.” I just really needed to write this entry so I could set up for the next entry, “Weeds.” (Though I think I could’ve set up for it in like a quick paragraph at the beginning of that actual entry itself.)
Not to mention that the flashback story was utterly useless. Like the present storyline, this flashback could’ve worked if it was still last year, but no, it was Summer 2010. At this point I had already written more than eighty flashback stories. A story about how I didn’t get some gummy octopuses for my terrible spelling tests wasn’t necessary or really illuminating.
“Weeds”
I knew that I would eventually write about the crying-over-Ranier story as a flashback somewhere down the road. This felt like the most appropriate time to do it. The flashback finally confirmed the (surface) reason Ranier and I broke up: I chose to be able to call special ed kids stupid over keeping our relationship. “...[Y]et you broke up with him! And for what, Brian. For what?... It was so you could continue calling special ed kids stupid! So that you could make fun of students with mental disabilities for not being as smart as other kids their age.”
In the previous season it had been heavily implied in entries like “Deficit” and “Look Back, Let Go, and Move On,” probably to the point where you could be 90% sure. But maybe you held onto that 10% because of what Trung said in the flashback for “Deficit”: “You’ll break up over other things, but not [calling special ed kids stupid].” Nah, unfortunately I only threw that quote in there for irony.
Confirming what was already pretty obvious wasn’t the main point of “Weeds” though, obviously, as the present storyline heavily focuses on whether or not I’m going to smoke weed. In this entry, we’ve got the logic vs. emotion theme in play again, but now we’re seeing something different: the desire within me to change, to hop over to the side of emotion.
I realized that by always being so logical, I torched a relationship. I sacrificed a boyfriend so I could remain secure in the logical way I perceived reality. While I did eventually realize the morally wrong way of my thinking, I still feared that I was still the same logical thinker. I definitely wouldn’t break up over the ability to call special ed kids stupid in my next relationship, but what if I broke up over something similar just because I wanted to maintain my logical perception of reality?
I didn’t want to be logical anymore, so I smoked some weed in hopes that I could escape my logical reality. Did it work? I’ll actually detail the outcome of that night in a flashback in Winter 2011.
“That’s Just the Way It Is: Part 1,” “Part 2,” & “Redux”
I think something that has made my Breakthrough entries strong in the past was that I approached each one thinking, “This is going to be my last entry about Breakthrough, ever,” ever since “Never-Ending Story,” which I wrote at the end of the internship back in August 2009. Three or four more Breakthrough entries followed. But this time, writing the “That’s Just the Way It Is” series, I knew that this was really, REALLY it. I figured there still might be minor Breakthrough flashbacks later on, but this was going to be the last Breakthrough entry in the present storyline. I had to make it special. And for some reason, “special” on my blog always seemed to mean “tragic.”
First, I want to clarify a few background basics, for those who might’ve not been reading my blog since I started it (and for those who couldn’t catch all the contextual clues in these three entries): I taught as a middle school English Language arts teacher for Breakthrough summer 2008 and summer 2009. I didn’t come back to teach the summer of 2010, but I did visit as a guest teacher during the second week, and then I came back again to visit at their celebration night the sixth week. The present storyline of the “That’s Just the Way It Is” series deals with this last visit.
The flashbacks in Part 1 set up this idea that the Breakthrough students needed their teachers. That idea is then explored in Part 2 and Redux. These two entries’ flashbacks (which are presented in reverse chronological order) show instances where my students needed me. Patty would rather talk to me then hang out with her friends on the last day of Breakthrough (August 2009). Timmy needed someone he could relate to with dancing (June 2009). Rosalina, Cil, and several other students needed a place they could go to in the morning, and they needed a dance teacher that they didn’t hate (July 2008).
All of these flashbacks are juxtaposed with scenes from the present storyline, scenes in which none of these students clearly needed me anymore. An role reversal is most apparent in these two lines:
Flashback: “Brian! Slow down!” Patty caught up to me as I rushed through the hallway to the staff room to get my lunch.”
Present: She turned around and started running, but I called out her name. “Patty!” I caught up to her. “Need someone to accompany you to your parents’ car? Y’know, just in case the forest monsters come out of the tree and try to grab you.”
Instead of Patty running to catch up with me, I’m now running to catch up with her. I still need them, but they don’t need me anymore.
When I first started teaching at Breakthrough in 2008, I was told that the students “needed” their teachers. I took this a little too close to heart. What eventually happened through my two summers teaching at Breakthrough was that I grew to need them, but not only did I need them, I needed them to need me.
[Fernando] and his family started to make their way toward the exit, so I got up to intercept. I was ready to run toward him, ready to shout his name and to wave my camera around in the air. But my feet didn’t take more than two steps before I slowed to a stop. I didn’t have anymore energy to lift my legs. My eyes followed Fernando as he and his family walked out the door...No more students. Clangs rang through the gym as teachers began folding up chairs.
And I think it’s here in the above paragraph that it really, really hit me that my students had long moved on. They didn’t need me anymore. The present story line ends with this scene of me just standing there, hopeless, heartbroken, and empty. I am defeated. Cut to the final flashback.
The very last flashback (June 2008), I don’t know what to say about it. It’s a flashback to my very first day of teaching at Breakthrough, the very first time I met my students. I’ve written twenty-six entries about Breakthrough leading up to “That’s Just the Way It Is.” It’s surreal to read about the very first day after knowing all the things my students and I went through during our sixty days together (thirty days in Breakthrough summer 2008, and thirty days in Breakthrough summer 2009). The irony, the awe, the emotions, I think they’re all captured with this one line:
“I glanced over my students and took turns locking eyes with each and everyone of them, and they’d timidly smile back as I smiled at them, all of us unaware of the kinds of relations we’d form, the struggles we’d go through, and the breakthroughs we’d make together.”
I don’t know what readers think about my entries about teaching. I imagine that more people tend to pay attention to my family entries, my relationship entries, or even my dance entries, probably because those are more relatable for my audience. And those entries can get pretty intense. My blog’s teaching story arc however is probably one of its more significant story arcs. My first entries were about teaching. They gave my blog its initial plot momentum. And, with no entries about teaching in Fall 2010, you can say that the teaching story arc has finally come to a close.
“Symphony”
Sometimes I get a little misty eyed when I write entries reflecting on the past relationship between Trung and me. (I never cry though.) This entry in particular was a huge tear jerker—I don’t about you guys, but it was for me. I think what made it especially powerful was that I took you from one end of the spectrum (happy) to the other (sad), instead of just starting in the middle (neutral) and going to one end (sad). The entry starts with a flashback to probably one of my happiest moments in our relationship (my amazing Christmas present to Trung), and the entry ends with a flashback to the saddest moment in our relationship (the breakup).
This entry also serves to remind you of something: It’s been one year since the so-called breakup entry, yet you still don’t know why we broke up. (I didn’t intend to remind you guys of this though because I didn’t know the question would be answered within the next few months.) You have the conversation we had immediately after the breakup, but not the actual conversation of the breakup. It’s a tease, isn’t it?
“How to Beast an Interview”
Summer 2010 was kind of a short season and I didn’t have much of a season finale in mind. Preferably it would’ve been the “That’s Just the Way It Is” series, but that wasn’t close enough to the end of summer. And then “Symphony” would’ve been pretty good. But I wanted to set up for the next season, to have myself working a job by the beginning of Fall 2010. With Breakthrough ending (and effectively, the teaching story arc too), I needed something new starting up for some plot momentum. So, I wrote “How to Beast an Interview.” At least it’s a pretty funny entry compared to the last several really dark entries, but it’s not quite a season finale on the same levels as my previous three.
(Too bad the “Promod” story arc didn’t really go anywhere in Fall 2010.)
I was no longer a Breakthrough summer teacher, but I still came back to resolve a few last things. I continued to dance throughout the summer down in SoCal. I concerned myself with my ability to change as a person.
General Comments
This was a small season; I only wrote eleven entries. I wouldn’t say that this was like what happened during Winter 2010. A lot of shit happened in my life during that winter, but I just never had time to write about it (which made it necessary to tell it through flashbacks in the following season), but during Summer 2010, just not a lot of shit happened. Basically, besides the stuff with Breakthrough, I took summer school classes and I danced a lot. Interesting stories never arise from school, and as I’ll later discuss in this entry, there’s not a lot of interesting story material with the subject of dancing anymore.
Select Entry Commentary
“The French Teacher” & “You Are My Best Friend”
The two previous seasons, Fall 2009 and Spring 2010, all you heard about was how I wasn’t coming back to Breakthrough. The fact that the last entry about Breakthrough in the present storyline for Spring 2010 was titled “Breakthrough” gave the entry a sense of finality, and I really thought that that would be the final Breakthrough entry. I didn’t count on coming back to guest teach for Summer 2010, but I did, and these two entries set up for what became the conclusion of one of my blog’s main story arcs.
It’s amazing to see the contrast in everything between these two entries and the “That’s Just the Way It Is,” series. I didn’t intend this; the events of “That’s Just the Way It Is” hadn’t happened yet when I wrote these two entries. But in retrospect, you could say that these two entries began setting up for the idea that my students needed me, and that I needed them.
“Drive”
I only occasionally use figurative language, and when I do, I either use it subtly (something more beginning writers need to learn to do) or use it to exaggerate. I feel like “Drive” has some of the best subtle imagery that I’ve ever written, my favorites including “circuit of city lights” and “pretending to catch the fireworks in our hands as if they were confetti strewn about the night sky.” And usually my entries are heavier on description and narration, but this one combines both all that with a good amount of exposition too. I refrain from a lot of exposition and writing out my inner thoughts in most of my entries (as a stylistic choice), which is the opposite of what every blogger does (they write about their thoughts and feelings but never really include concrete stories from their lives). This entry shows that when I want to, I can write my thoughts and feelings too, and that I do it better.
“This is not a Phone Conversation”
This is a purely thematic entry that reinforces one of my blog’s long running themes: the perception of reality through a logical lens versus an emotional lens—logic vs. emotion, basically. I represent the logic, and Trung, emotion. I’ll probably delve more in-depth into this theme and all the entries in which it appears once my blog reaches its end at the finish of Winter 2011.
“The Gummy Octopus”
Honestly, I regretted writing this entry the minute I posted it. It was a terrible entry. Well, maybe if I had posted it a year ago, it might had been fine, but by this time, I had really run out of refreshing and interesting stories for my dancing story arc. Being self-conscious about my dancing, having small successes and small losses—those stories pervaded my blog during Summer 2009 and Fall 2010. I knew that the only way to really make dancing stories interesting anymore was to combine them with another plot arc on my blog, as seen in “Slave to the Machine.” I just really needed to write this entry so I could set up for the next entry, “Weeds.” (Though I think I could’ve set up for it in like a quick paragraph at the beginning of that actual entry itself.)
Not to mention that the flashback story was utterly useless. Like the present storyline, this flashback could’ve worked if it was still last year, but no, it was Summer 2010. At this point I had already written more than eighty flashback stories. A story about how I didn’t get some gummy octopuses for my terrible spelling tests wasn’t necessary or really illuminating.
“Weeds”
I knew that I would eventually write about the crying-over-Ranier story as a flashback somewhere down the road. This felt like the most appropriate time to do it. The flashback finally confirmed the (surface) reason Ranier and I broke up: I chose to be able to call special ed kids stupid over keeping our relationship. “...[Y]et you broke up with him! And for what, Brian. For what?... It was so you could continue calling special ed kids stupid! So that you could make fun of students with mental disabilities for not being as smart as other kids their age.”
In the previous season it had been heavily implied in entries like “Deficit” and “Look Back, Let Go, and Move On,” probably to the point where you could be 90% sure. But maybe you held onto that 10% because of what Trung said in the flashback for “Deficit”: “You’ll break up over other things, but not [calling special ed kids stupid].” Nah, unfortunately I only threw that quote in there for irony.
Confirming what was already pretty obvious wasn’t the main point of “Weeds” though, obviously, as the present storyline heavily focuses on whether or not I’m going to smoke weed. In this entry, we’ve got the logic vs. emotion theme in play again, but now we’re seeing something different: the desire within me to change, to hop over to the side of emotion.
I realized that by always being so logical, I torched a relationship. I sacrificed a boyfriend so I could remain secure in the logical way I perceived reality. While I did eventually realize the morally wrong way of my thinking, I still feared that I was still the same logical thinker. I definitely wouldn’t break up over the ability to call special ed kids stupid in my next relationship, but what if I broke up over something similar just because I wanted to maintain my logical perception of reality?
I didn’t want to be logical anymore, so I smoked some weed in hopes that I could escape my logical reality. Did it work? I’ll actually detail the outcome of that night in a flashback in Winter 2011.
“That’s Just the Way It Is: Part 1,” “Part 2,” & “Redux”
I think something that has made my Breakthrough entries strong in the past was that I approached each one thinking, “This is going to be my last entry about Breakthrough, ever,” ever since “Never-Ending Story,” which I wrote at the end of the internship back in August 2009. Three or four more Breakthrough entries followed. But this time, writing the “That’s Just the Way It Is” series, I knew that this was really, REALLY it. I figured there still might be minor Breakthrough flashbacks later on, but this was going to be the last Breakthrough entry in the present storyline. I had to make it special. And for some reason, “special” on my blog always seemed to mean “tragic.”
First, I want to clarify a few background basics, for those who might’ve not been reading my blog since I started it (and for those who couldn’t catch all the contextual clues in these three entries): I taught as a middle school English Language arts teacher for Breakthrough summer 2008 and summer 2009. I didn’t come back to teach the summer of 2010, but I did visit as a guest teacher during the second week, and then I came back again to visit at their celebration night the sixth week. The present storyline of the “That’s Just the Way It Is” series deals with this last visit.
The flashbacks in Part 1 set up this idea that the Breakthrough students needed their teachers. That idea is then explored in Part 2 and Redux. These two entries’ flashbacks (which are presented in reverse chronological order) show instances where my students needed me. Patty would rather talk to me then hang out with her friends on the last day of Breakthrough (August 2009). Timmy needed someone he could relate to with dancing (June 2009). Rosalina, Cil, and several other students needed a place they could go to in the morning, and they needed a dance teacher that they didn’t hate (July 2008).
All of these flashbacks are juxtaposed with scenes from the present storyline, scenes in which none of these students clearly needed me anymore. An role reversal is most apparent in these two lines:
Flashback: “Brian! Slow down!” Patty caught up to me as I rushed through the hallway to the staff room to get my lunch.”
Present: She turned around and started running, but I called out her name. “Patty!” I caught up to her. “Need someone to accompany you to your parents’ car? Y’know, just in case the forest monsters come out of the tree and try to grab you.”
Instead of Patty running to catch up with me, I’m now running to catch up with her. I still need them, but they don’t need me anymore.
When I first started teaching at Breakthrough in 2008, I was told that the students “needed” their teachers. I took this a little too close to heart. What eventually happened through my two summers teaching at Breakthrough was that I grew to need them, but not only did I need them, I needed them to need me.
[Fernando] and his family started to make their way toward the exit, so I got up to intercept. I was ready to run toward him, ready to shout his name and to wave my camera around in the air. But my feet didn’t take more than two steps before I slowed to a stop. I didn’t have anymore energy to lift my legs. My eyes followed Fernando as he and his family walked out the door...No more students. Clangs rang through the gym as teachers began folding up chairs.
And I think it’s here in the above paragraph that it really, really hit me that my students had long moved on. They didn’t need me anymore. The present story line ends with this scene of me just standing there, hopeless, heartbroken, and empty. I am defeated. Cut to the final flashback.
The very last flashback (June 2008), I don’t know what to say about it. It’s a flashback to my very first day of teaching at Breakthrough, the very first time I met my students. I’ve written twenty-six entries about Breakthrough leading up to “That’s Just the Way It Is.” It’s surreal to read about the very first day after knowing all the things my students and I went through during our sixty days together (thirty days in Breakthrough summer 2008, and thirty days in Breakthrough summer 2009). The irony, the awe, the emotions, I think they’re all captured with this one line:
“I glanced over my students and took turns locking eyes with each and everyone of them, and they’d timidly smile back as I smiled at them, all of us unaware of the kinds of relations we’d form, the struggles we’d go through, and the breakthroughs we’d make together.”
I don’t know what readers think about my entries about teaching. I imagine that more people tend to pay attention to my family entries, my relationship entries, or even my dance entries, probably because those are more relatable for my audience. And those entries can get pretty intense. My blog’s teaching story arc however is probably one of its more significant story arcs. My first entries were about teaching. They gave my blog its initial plot momentum. And, with no entries about teaching in Fall 2010, you can say that the teaching story arc has finally come to a close.
“Symphony”
Sometimes I get a little misty eyed when I write entries reflecting on the past relationship between Trung and me. (I never cry though.) This entry in particular was a huge tear jerker—I don’t about you guys, but it was for me. I think what made it especially powerful was that I took you from one end of the spectrum (happy) to the other (sad), instead of just starting in the middle (neutral) and going to one end (sad). The entry starts with a flashback to probably one of my happiest moments in our relationship (my amazing Christmas present to Trung), and the entry ends with a flashback to the saddest moment in our relationship (the breakup).
This entry also serves to remind you of something: It’s been one year since the so-called breakup entry, yet you still don’t know why we broke up. (I didn’t intend to remind you guys of this though because I didn’t know the question would be answered within the next few months.) You have the conversation we had immediately after the breakup, but not the actual conversation of the breakup. It’s a tease, isn’t it?
“How to Beast an Interview”
Summer 2010 was kind of a short season and I didn’t have much of a season finale in mind. Preferably it would’ve been the “That’s Just the Way It Is” series, but that wasn’t close enough to the end of summer. And then “Symphony” would’ve been pretty good. But I wanted to set up for the next season, to have myself working a job by the beginning of Fall 2010. With Breakthrough ending (and effectively, the teaching story arc too), I needed something new starting up for some plot momentum. So, I wrote “How to Beast an Interview.” At least it’s a pretty funny entry compared to the last several really dark entries, but it’s not quite a season finale on the same levels as my previous three.
(Too bad the “Promod” story arc didn’t really go anywhere in Fall 2010.)
Tags:
non-canon,
summer 2010
A Fresher Start
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Hundreds packed the dance floor. White v-necks glowed and sweaty foreheads glimmered underneath the black light and through the haze of perspiration and body heat, a haze in which everyone moved together like a single blur as the stereos pumped out the pulsing bass of techno remixes to mainstream songs. They bounced up and down, rocked side to side, and thrust forward and back. I slumped over the railing and watched from the second floor, alternating my attention between tracking any piece of eye candy and completely spacing out. Someone took an opening on the rail next to me, and I recognized him again, but not soon enough to dodge him cupping his hands over my ear and yelling into it. “Com’n, just give me one kiss!”
I winced. Even my ear could smell the alcohol in his breath. I backed away a step, dragging my arms along the railing, and I turned my head at him. “I said no earlier and the answer’s not going to change. So, no.” I forced a crooked smile because I didn’t wanna seem too bitchy.
“Just one!”
“No.”
“You haven’t found anyone to kiss at midnight yet, and you got like thirty minutes left. You think you’ll find your New Years kiss at this rate?”
“No.”
“Well, if you wanna, I’ll still be up here in thirty minutes.”
“Thanks Shaun.”
I decided I wanted some fresh air, so I squeezed, ducked, and pushed my way down the stairs, through the bar, and outside onto the patio. But I was stupid to think I could get fresh air outside here. Cigarette smoke invaded my lungs as soon as I stepped out the door. It wasn’t as loud out here, but it was cold, just a little, and still crowded. I didn’t realize that the back of my shirt was soaked with sweat until I felt it cooling my skin, chilling my back while the cigarette smoke warmed my front and my sides.
I found Walden congregating in a circle with his teammates. I joined them for about five minutes, and then they all left except for Walden to go dance on the main floor. We managed to pull aside a few chairs by the fence and sat on their edges. I pulled out my cell phone to glance at the time and put it away again. 11:40.
“Shaun’s bugging me about reenacting two thirds of the Halloween threesome,” I told him.
We laughed it off and continued a more casual conversation.
“So how was your Christmas trip back up to NorCal?” Walden asked me.
Not bad. There was, however, that one thing that sorta just defined my entire NorCal visit, but I danced around the subject first using the conventional, “It was fine,” “Got to spend time with my family,” “Got some money,” “Did some shopping and eating,” “The usual.” But Walden knew there was more to my one-week visit back up North, so I finally told him all about it: My holiday hook-up.
“Five days before Christmas, it started like any other regular hook-up, the only immediate striking difference being that he, Jerick, was by far the cutest. Dark skin Filipino? Check. Clean face? Check. Height-weight proportionate? Check. And a sleeve tattoo—bonus points times a hundred. After the sex was over, we just sat there on my bed in the dark, talking about dancing. And then, well, I asked him if he was hungry. He was, so I had him take us to my favorite Vietnamese banh mi sandwich shop in San Jose. Since he didn’t live too far away, he took me back to his place afterward, and we cuddled on his bed and watched This Christmas, which was a really terrible movie. It was basically a two-hour long Chris Brown music video, but what mattered was the cuddling. And the kissing. And just being in his arms. And then we fucked again. Later we went back to my place, where he spent the night. And it went on like that for the next few days, culminating on Christmas Eve.
“San Jose has this ‘Christmas in the Park’ festival downtown every December. They close off a few streets for the entire month, throw in some carnival rides and a bunch of Christmas trees made by community organizations, and boom, it’s a romantic stroll through the park. Jerick and I went. And well, it was fun. We went on that one ride that swings you back and forth until it gains enough momentum to overshoot and you end up swinging upside down, or just getting suspended in the air for a while with the concrete some several stories directly below the top of your head. Dude, that ride is fucking a lot scarier than it looks. Jerick and I held each other’s hands, but at one point I think I squeezed too tight and hurt him a little.
“After the ride, we must’ve been in some sort of awe-struck daze. We were walking along the park, being openly flirty, openly touchy, openly affectionate with each other. He’d grab my hand and I’d let him. He’d stand up on his toes to kiss me and I’d meet his lips with mine. Walden, this is shit I never do. Even when I was with Trung, even after we were going strong for more than a year, I’d freak out and pull away if he ever tried to grab my hand while we were out in public. He’d persist and I’d eventually let him loosely latch onto my elbow, but kissing in public never happened. I never allowed it. Jerick brought out a side of me that I’d been trying to shut away for the last five years of my life. And it felt good. That night at Christmas in the Park with Jerick, it was a high point for me.
“And that night was the last time I’ve seen him. I thought we were going to hang out for a little bit on Christmas Eve, but then he decided on making an impromptu visit back up to Sacramento to visit his parents. That was fine. We texted a little bit. He wasn’t responsive. We didn’t see each other on Christmas, which was expected I guess, but the day after, my last day in San Jose, he was back in San Jose. I texted him to see if he could hang out, but he said he was still with family, but at that point, I sensed that it was just an excuse. Since I’ve been back in SoCal, we’ve had like one really brief text message exchange. And that was it.”
I paused to think carefully about my next few words. I didn’t want this story to seem like a parable about the player who finally got played. “I don’t know what happened. Maybe whatever ex drama he was having got settled. Or well, I was going back to UCI, and I was going to be there a long time while he’d still be up in NorCal. Maybe reality hit him. The truth was, well, it was just a hook up. A hook-up gone horribly wrong or horribly right. A holiday fling. Shit. I don’t know.” The truth was, well, I got attached. And now I had to sever myself if I wanted to move on.
It was 11:50. Walden offered me a few comforting words, but I got distracted and spotted in the corner Jeremy, a guy that Trung had been low key dating for the last month (low key, as in Trung didn’t approve my usage of the word “dating” to describe his relation to Jeremy because according to some certain background information that Trung collected by means of the Internet, Jeremy happened to have a boyfriend some several thousands of miles away, one that he never mentioned and one that Trung never wanted to bring up). Right behind Jeremy I saw another guy, who wore a thin unzipped jacket with no shirt underneath, and whose arm was snaked over Jeremy’s chest and under his shoulders. I excused myself from my conversation with Walden and rushed inside to find Trung.
Normally I would expect to find him dancing in a circle of his friends, or being the center of attention with his ghetto drunk dancing, dropping it to the floor like he owned the whole club. But instead, I found Trung sitting next to the entrance to the hip hop room, on the couch in the corner on the second floor, alone and sober, both hands holding his phone under his face and his thumbs twiddling away on the touch-screen buttons. I sat beside him and adjusted myself until our shoulders rested against each other’s. Trung didn’t break his intense focus on his phone, so I pulled out mine and mimicked him. We didn’t need to say anything to each other to understand where we each stood emotionally.
I browsed statuses on Facebook and read entries on Tumblr. Nothing but New Years resolutions, thank you’s for a great 2010, fuck you’s to a terrible one, and handles of vodka or rum and several colorful varieties of UV crowded together on a counter top, looking like a miniature metropolitan city—photos which foreshadowed a night that was only just beginning. I noticed the time and turned to talk into Trung’s ear.
“It’s 11:57. Do you wanna go into the hip hop room and dance a little?” He nodded.
The hip hop room on the second floor was a little less crowded than the main dance floor on the first floor; I at least had enough space to lift my elbows, but it was still just as hot and as loud as downstairs. Trung and I faced each other as we danced, leaving enough room between each other in hopes that someone cute would perhaps come over and ask one of us to dance up behind him (I usually hoped for this more than Trung did). I only began getting into the music however when a sudden storm of cheers and applause drowned it out. I looked up at the TV monitors in the corner and saw that a countdown ticked sixteen, fifteen, fourteen... Once it hit ten, everyone started shouting out the numbers as they ticked closer to zero.
Trung and I glanced at each other. We shrugged, and halfheartedly, nearly inaudibly among the screams around us, we mouthed along to the last few seconds of 2010: Four, three, two, one...
One single, thunderous “HAPPY NEW YEAR!” erupted throughout the entire club. Strobe lights flashed. Confetti fell. And fake smoke poured into the room. People clapped. People kissed. People hugged. And then they hugged some others. But Trung and I found ourselves locked in our hug as people around us moved from person to person, taking turns giving each other hugs or kisses on the cheek. Eventually the black light replaced the strobe light again. The last piece of confetti fell to the ground, and the fake smoke faded away at our feet. Most celebrants now resumed their dancing. But Trung and I were still hugging, my arms wrapped over his shoulders, the side of my head resting in his hair; his arms around my back, and the side of his face on my chest.
“Happy New Year, Trung.”
“Happy New Year, Brian.”
I winced. Even my ear could smell the alcohol in his breath. I backed away a step, dragging my arms along the railing, and I turned my head at him. “I said no earlier and the answer’s not going to change. So, no.” I forced a crooked smile because I didn’t wanna seem too bitchy.
“Just one!”
“No.”
“You haven’t found anyone to kiss at midnight yet, and you got like thirty minutes left. You think you’ll find your New Years kiss at this rate?”
“No.”
“Well, if you wanna, I’ll still be up here in thirty minutes.”
“Thanks Shaun.”
I decided I wanted some fresh air, so I squeezed, ducked, and pushed my way down the stairs, through the bar, and outside onto the patio. But I was stupid to think I could get fresh air outside here. Cigarette smoke invaded my lungs as soon as I stepped out the door. It wasn’t as loud out here, but it was cold, just a little, and still crowded. I didn’t realize that the back of my shirt was soaked with sweat until I felt it cooling my skin, chilling my back while the cigarette smoke warmed my front and my sides.
I found Walden congregating in a circle with his teammates. I joined them for about five minutes, and then they all left except for Walden to go dance on the main floor. We managed to pull aside a few chairs by the fence and sat on their edges. I pulled out my cell phone to glance at the time and put it away again. 11:40.
“Shaun’s bugging me about reenacting two thirds of the Halloween threesome,” I told him.
We laughed it off and continued a more casual conversation.
“So how was your Christmas trip back up to NorCal?” Walden asked me.
Not bad. There was, however, that one thing that sorta just defined my entire NorCal visit, but I danced around the subject first using the conventional, “It was fine,” “Got to spend time with my family,” “Got some money,” “Did some shopping and eating,” “The usual.” But Walden knew there was more to my one-week visit back up North, so I finally told him all about it: My holiday hook-up.
“Five days before Christmas, it started like any other regular hook-up, the only immediate striking difference being that he, Jerick, was by far the cutest. Dark skin Filipino? Check. Clean face? Check. Height-weight proportionate? Check. And a sleeve tattoo—bonus points times a hundred. After the sex was over, we just sat there on my bed in the dark, talking about dancing. And then, well, I asked him if he was hungry. He was, so I had him take us to my favorite Vietnamese banh mi sandwich shop in San Jose. Since he didn’t live too far away, he took me back to his place afterward, and we cuddled on his bed and watched This Christmas, which was a really terrible movie. It was basically a two-hour long Chris Brown music video, but what mattered was the cuddling. And the kissing. And just being in his arms. And then we fucked again. Later we went back to my place, where he spent the night. And it went on like that for the next few days, culminating on Christmas Eve.
“San Jose has this ‘Christmas in the Park’ festival downtown every December. They close off a few streets for the entire month, throw in some carnival rides and a bunch of Christmas trees made by community organizations, and boom, it’s a romantic stroll through the park. Jerick and I went. And well, it was fun. We went on that one ride that swings you back and forth until it gains enough momentum to overshoot and you end up swinging upside down, or just getting suspended in the air for a while with the concrete some several stories directly below the top of your head. Dude, that ride is fucking a lot scarier than it looks. Jerick and I held each other’s hands, but at one point I think I squeezed too tight and hurt him a little.
“After the ride, we must’ve been in some sort of awe-struck daze. We were walking along the park, being openly flirty, openly touchy, openly affectionate with each other. He’d grab my hand and I’d let him. He’d stand up on his toes to kiss me and I’d meet his lips with mine. Walden, this is shit I never do. Even when I was with Trung, even after we were going strong for more than a year, I’d freak out and pull away if he ever tried to grab my hand while we were out in public. He’d persist and I’d eventually let him loosely latch onto my elbow, but kissing in public never happened. I never allowed it. Jerick brought out a side of me that I’d been trying to shut away for the last five years of my life. And it felt good. That night at Christmas in the Park with Jerick, it was a high point for me.
“And that night was the last time I’ve seen him. I thought we were going to hang out for a little bit on Christmas Eve, but then he decided on making an impromptu visit back up to Sacramento to visit his parents. That was fine. We texted a little bit. He wasn’t responsive. We didn’t see each other on Christmas, which was expected I guess, but the day after, my last day in San Jose, he was back in San Jose. I texted him to see if he could hang out, but he said he was still with family, but at that point, I sensed that it was just an excuse. Since I’ve been back in SoCal, we’ve had like one really brief text message exchange. And that was it.”
I paused to think carefully about my next few words. I didn’t want this story to seem like a parable about the player who finally got played. “I don’t know what happened. Maybe whatever ex drama he was having got settled. Or well, I was going back to UCI, and I was going to be there a long time while he’d still be up in NorCal. Maybe reality hit him. The truth was, well, it was just a hook up. A hook-up gone horribly wrong or horribly right. A holiday fling. Shit. I don’t know.” The truth was, well, I got attached. And now I had to sever myself if I wanted to move on.
It was 11:50. Walden offered me a few comforting words, but I got distracted and spotted in the corner Jeremy, a guy that Trung had been low key dating for the last month (low key, as in Trung didn’t approve my usage of the word “dating” to describe his relation to Jeremy because according to some certain background information that Trung collected by means of the Internet, Jeremy happened to have a boyfriend some several thousands of miles away, one that he never mentioned and one that Trung never wanted to bring up). Right behind Jeremy I saw another guy, who wore a thin unzipped jacket with no shirt underneath, and whose arm was snaked over Jeremy’s chest and under his shoulders. I excused myself from my conversation with Walden and rushed inside to find Trung.
Normally I would expect to find him dancing in a circle of his friends, or being the center of attention with his ghetto drunk dancing, dropping it to the floor like he owned the whole club. But instead, I found Trung sitting next to the entrance to the hip hop room, on the couch in the corner on the second floor, alone and sober, both hands holding his phone under his face and his thumbs twiddling away on the touch-screen buttons. I sat beside him and adjusted myself until our shoulders rested against each other’s. Trung didn’t break his intense focus on his phone, so I pulled out mine and mimicked him. We didn’t need to say anything to each other to understand where we each stood emotionally.
I browsed statuses on Facebook and read entries on Tumblr. Nothing but New Years resolutions, thank you’s for a great 2010, fuck you’s to a terrible one, and handles of vodka or rum and several colorful varieties of UV crowded together on a counter top, looking like a miniature metropolitan city—photos which foreshadowed a night that was only just beginning. I noticed the time and turned to talk into Trung’s ear.
“It’s 11:57. Do you wanna go into the hip hop room and dance a little?” He nodded.
The hip hop room on the second floor was a little less crowded than the main dance floor on the first floor; I at least had enough space to lift my elbows, but it was still just as hot and as loud as downstairs. Trung and I faced each other as we danced, leaving enough room between each other in hopes that someone cute would perhaps come over and ask one of us to dance up behind him (I usually hoped for this more than Trung did). I only began getting into the music however when a sudden storm of cheers and applause drowned it out. I looked up at the TV monitors in the corner and saw that a countdown ticked sixteen, fifteen, fourteen... Once it hit ten, everyone started shouting out the numbers as they ticked closer to zero.
Trung and I glanced at each other. We shrugged, and halfheartedly, nearly inaudibly among the screams around us, we mouthed along to the last few seconds of 2010: Four, three, two, one...
One single, thunderous “HAPPY NEW YEAR!” erupted throughout the entire club. Strobe lights flashed. Confetti fell. And fake smoke poured into the room. People clapped. People kissed. People hugged. And then they hugged some others. But Trung and I found ourselves locked in our hug as people around us moved from person to person, taking turns giving each other hugs or kisses on the cheek. Eventually the black light replaced the strobe light again. The last piece of confetti fell to the ground, and the fake smoke faded away at our feet. Most celebrants now resumed their dancing. But Trung and I were still hugging, my arms wrapped over his shoulders, the side of my head resting in his hair; his arms around my back, and the side of his face on my chest.
“Happy New Year, Trung.”
“Happy New Year, Brian.”
Tags:
norcal,
relationships,
socal,
trung,
walden
A Writer’s Creation
Monday, December 20, 2010
One B, one C, and one C-. I don’t even wanna see what GPA that amounts too. Once again, I find myself questioning, why the hell do I attend UCI? I want to be a high school English teacher, something that I can go to a state college for. Okay, so maybe I study at a UC for the UC-standard quality of education. But who am I kidding? It may be a prestigious education, but at the same time it’s one that I’ve all too often slept through, not just this quarter but also all throughout my first and second year.
I tell myself and try to believe that I’m meant to go to UCI for a reason, the only one I can deduce so far being to dance. And this quarter was exactly about that. Dancing, yes, this was a quarter for dancing I tell myself. My mom dropped $3975.75 so I could spend the last eleven weeks dancing. Something tells me I could’ve gone to an actual dance school for a hell lot cheaper price, one that wasn’t subjected to quarterly percentage increases. I could’ve actually studied this quarter. I could’ve not gone to UCI. I could’ve...done something else.
As I sit in my chair and brood over my grades, I reflect on all I’ve done this past fall quarter, both all the good things and all the bad things. Everything about this quarter: the grades, the dancing, the guys, the hook-ups, the friendships, the parents, and yes, the lies—everything is coming together in a way that I can hardly understand, but the one thing I do understand is that everything is coming together over a common denominator, one that has been there for years but whose presence I’ve only recently realized: blogging.
Through blogging, I’ve learned how to detach myself from the person I am and the things I have done. That person becomes a character, and I become his Writer. I’ve come to realize that that kind of detachment is dangerous.
What was I thinking the whole time when I was in that bathroom, getting my dick sucked by Shaun and Tyrone? Yes, I was thinking about Trung, but I was thinking about something else too. I was thinking, Damn, this is going to be an epic blog entry. My mind seriously buzzed with all the potential storylines I could produce from this god damn threesome. I really could’ve walked out of that threesome a lot sooner, but I told myself, no, the direction that this and the falling out that I’d definitely have with Linh would take my blog in a direction more suited for this season’s main focus: Lying. And that paved the way for my confession to Trung that I cheated on him five times and the ultimate reveal of why we broke up, a question that had been repeatedly brought up but left unanswered on this blog ever since it started. Before this blog ended, I knew the question had to be answered if I wanted that “perfect story,” and I knew something in the present would have to force the answer to the surface. I just wasn’t aware of when and what that present event would be until the threesome.
Essentially, the threesome had to happen—fated, not by a divine power that maintains the natural order to the cosmos, but rather, by myself as the Writer, who maintains the narrative coherence to the universe contained within my life’s so-called “literary narrative,” one in which I, as the character, am nothing more than the Writer’s creation: my words, actions, and motivations written to serve a higher purpose of conveying some kind of theme.
Is it all worth it, fulling this fate? I ask myself. Are the sacrifices worth making just to extrapolate every point of a theme?
No. The story isn’t worth it anymore. It’s time to quit.
I tell myself and try to believe that I’m meant to go to UCI for a reason, the only one I can deduce so far being to dance. And this quarter was exactly about that. Dancing, yes, this was a quarter for dancing I tell myself. My mom dropped $3975.75 so I could spend the last eleven weeks dancing. Something tells me I could’ve gone to an actual dance school for a hell lot cheaper price, one that wasn’t subjected to quarterly percentage increases. I could’ve actually studied this quarter. I could’ve not gone to UCI. I could’ve...done something else.
As I sit in my chair and brood over my grades, I reflect on all I’ve done this past fall quarter, both all the good things and all the bad things. Everything about this quarter: the grades, the dancing, the guys, the hook-ups, the friendships, the parents, and yes, the lies—everything is coming together in a way that I can hardly understand, but the one thing I do understand is that everything is coming together over a common denominator, one that has been there for years but whose presence I’ve only recently realized: blogging.
Through blogging, I’ve learned how to detach myself from the person I am and the things I have done. That person becomes a character, and I become his Writer. I’ve come to realize that that kind of detachment is dangerous.
What was I thinking the whole time when I was in that bathroom, getting my dick sucked by Shaun and Tyrone? Yes, I was thinking about Trung, but I was thinking about something else too. I was thinking, Damn, this is going to be an epic blog entry. My mind seriously buzzed with all the potential storylines I could produce from this god damn threesome. I really could’ve walked out of that threesome a lot sooner, but I told myself, no, the direction that this and the falling out that I’d definitely have with Linh would take my blog in a direction more suited for this season’s main focus: Lying. And that paved the way for my confession to Trung that I cheated on him five times and the ultimate reveal of why we broke up, a question that had been repeatedly brought up but left unanswered on this blog ever since it started. Before this blog ended, I knew the question had to be answered if I wanted that “perfect story,” and I knew something in the present would have to force the answer to the surface. I just wasn’t aware of when and what that present event would be until the threesome.
Essentially, the threesome had to happen—fated, not by a divine power that maintains the natural order to the cosmos, but rather, by myself as the Writer, who maintains the narrative coherence to the universe contained within my life’s so-called “literary narrative,” one in which I, as the character, am nothing more than the Writer’s creation: my words, actions, and motivations written to serve a higher purpose of conveying some kind of theme.
Is it all worth it, fulling this fate? I ask myself. Are the sacrifices worth making just to extrapolate every point of a theme?
No. The story isn’t worth it anymore. It’s time to quit.
Tags:
dancing,
fall 2010,
norcal,
relationships,
schoolwork,
spirituality,
trung
Made in America
Sunday, December 19, 2010
I am...
...made in America, where the extent of our culture is backyard barbeque burgers on the Fourth of July, and the paint-coated picket fence shines so white underneath the blue sky;
...made in America, where history as it is written suffers splashes and spills of white-out, but no worries as all that is still readable is beyond doubt;
...made in America, where politicians always act in the best interest of the people, where police uphold laws to the protect the people, and where government hears the voices of the people;
...made in America, where “the people” means “some people,” “no people,” or “themselves”;
...made in America, a post-racial society so proudly represented by a giant melting pot—just make sure you use white pepper, white onions, and no variety, because keeping the porridge white is our number one priority;
...made in America, born and raised, proud and ignorant, patriotic and silent.
Trung and I were on our way back up to NorCal. I drove as always, while he sat in the passenger seat, and Sang slept in the backseat. Trung and I casually talked about the last few months of our second year in college.
“Nothing new is really going on with UCI,” I said. “I think the biggest thing that happened was stuff with the Irvine 11 that happened like four months ago in February. Have you heard about them?”
“No, what’s that?”
“The Irvine 11 are these people from our school’s Muslim Student Union, and they got busted for speaking out during this one speech from some Israeli ambassador, who was invited to speak at UCI by the law school and political science department and some other sponsors. While he was talking, one person would stand up in the audience, shout out some shit, and when that person was escorted out, another one would stand up and yell out some more shit. That continued in succession, eleven times, so that the ambassador guy wouldn’t get to speak. Now there’s controversy because the Irvine 11 are getting arrested. What’s stupid though is there are actually people standing up for the Irvine 11.”
“You don’t support what the Irvine 11 did?”
“No, why would I?”
Trung raised his eyebrow at me. “Brian, do you understand anything about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict?”
“I thought I was talking about Israel and Muslims.”
Trung grunted. “Brian, Israelis practice Judaism, making them Jewish in case you didn’t know, and Palestinians practice Islam, making them Muslim. And that’s just a general blanket statement, but I’m telling you this because you’ll probably hear stuff about Jews versus Muslims too when talking about the conflict.”
“Okay, this is too many names, and either way, my understanding of the Israelian-Palestinny Conflict doesn’t matter.”
“Why not?”
“It’s clear who’s at fault here, isn’t it, Trung? The First Amendment, the right that the Irvine 11 and their supporters are claiming to be violated, doesn’t allow you to go into a meeting at a ballroom, sit in the audience, and shout over the speaker at the front. The First Amendment has regulations so shit like this wouldn’t happen, so that no one can yell ‘fire’ for kicks in a crowded room or walk into a lecture hall and start yelling obscenities over the professor. Even though the Irvine 11 disagreed with the ambassador, they could’ve voiced their opinions in a less annoying and less unlawful way. Hell, what happen to common courtesy and respect?”
“See Brian, this is where knowing something about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict comes into use. Do you know about the Gaza Massacre? No, I know you don’t. There were close to one thousand Palestinian civilian casualties, and well over one thousand total if you include those who fought, all thanks to Israel, who suffered around ten casualties total. If I was in their situation, the students of the Muslim Student Union, I’d protest too because I’d be outraged to hear that my own school would be sponsoring a visit from the Israeli ambassador, a representative of terrible war crimes against my homeland. That would be a huge inconsiderate ‘fuck you’ to me.”
“Well, we’re not talking about emotions here.”
“And that’s exactly the problem, because the rules and laws, Brian, don’t understand emotions. The Irvine 11, I can agree that they weren’t justified by the law, but they were justified by their emotions. It’s too bad that our fucked up system prefers only to look at the law, which is in and of itself imperfect.”
At this point, I was checking my rearview mirror to see if Sang was awake to watch me, for the millionth time, get owned by Trung in a car ride between NorCal and SoCal. Fortunately, he was sleeping, or at least he was pretending to be sleeping.
The first to-do item on the agenda after arriving back in NorCal was always to go downtown and get authentic Mexican food, specifically for me, a Super Burrito with chorizo. Trung and I picked up our orders along with a bottle of sauce and sat down at a table inside, watching the line stretch out the door with sobering students just getting back from the club. We ate in silence for our first few bites, but then I brought up something that had been on my mind for a while.
2010 was ending explosively with protests over fee increases and budget cuts, which erupted all over California in the last few months of November and December, and one of the controversies that stemmed from the protests was an incident where an officer, Jared Kemper, pulled out and aimed a gun at unarmed protesters at UCSF. When this story initially spread, I naturally reacted by thinking, whatever the protestors did, it must have been deserving enough to provoke Kemper’s response.
I discussed with Trung, over burritos and quesadillas, what the rebuttal for my reaction would be, because I wanted to instead be able to believe the rebuttal. He reminded me, first of all, that police officers weren’t robots that operated one hundred percent by the law; they were human too, capable of making mistakes, and that’s what Kemper did. It was something human within Kemper, a kind of fear or frustration, exacerbated by a realization that he had no training in handling the type of situation he was in, that made him desperately reach for his gun. In this case, however, his reaction was still inappropriate and inexcusable, Trung concluded, because it unnecessarily endangered lives, and under no circumstances would a police officer have a lawful reason to draw his gun on unarmed student protestors. Simple as that.
I nodded. Trung remarked that it was nice to see me trying to see things in a different light, because even if it was just half a year ago, I still would’ve been rolling my eyes at students playing victim and whining about having a gun pulled on them. And if it had been high school, he added, I still would’ve been parading racial colorblindness.
“Remember in high school when all your friends were taking that Asian American summer leadership program at DeAnza? You’d very openly accuse them of wasting their time because all they did was, and I quote you, ‘get together with other fob Asians and whine about racism.’ ‘Maybe if they integrated better and got over their race and other people’s races they could actually accomplish something blah blah blah only one race—the human race!—blah blah blah and I’m insensitive to race and ethnic issues.’ You’ve come a long way since then, Brian, and I know I don’t deserve all the credit, I’m sure, but I still like to say you changed all thanks to me.”
I shrugged. Trung might’ve been right. Something that I didn’t wanna tell him but had also been on my mind was the DREAM act, a bill that would’ve provided illegal “aliens” an opportunity for permanent residence if they satisfied certain conditions, one of which was getting into a four-year college and finishing at least two years. The bill was defeated in Senate one day prior, and how I felt about the news shocked me—I actually felt angry, upset. I don’t know if it was because I knew that Trung, who had been posting a bunch of stuff about the DREAM act on his Facebook and Tumblr, really hoped it would pass; or because throughout my last three years of teaching and tutoring, I’ve taught one or two outstanding students who weren’t legal residents in the United States. Whether or not I changed because of Trung or something else, however, there was at least the one important thing I learned to fully understand: Fuck the system.
...made in America, where the extent of our culture is backyard barbeque burgers on the Fourth of July, and the paint-coated picket fence shines so white underneath the blue sky;
...made in America, where history as it is written suffers splashes and spills of white-out, but no worries as all that is still readable is beyond doubt;
...made in America, where politicians always act in the best interest of the people, where police uphold laws to the protect the people, and where government hears the voices of the people;
...made in America, where “the people” means “some people,” “no people,” or “themselves”;
...made in America, a post-racial society so proudly represented by a giant melting pot—just make sure you use white pepper, white onions, and no variety, because keeping the porridge white is our number one priority;
...made in America, born and raised, proud and ignorant, patriotic and silent.
Trung and I were on our way back up to NorCal. I drove as always, while he sat in the passenger seat, and Sang slept in the backseat. Trung and I casually talked about the last few months of our second year in college.
“Nothing new is really going on with UCI,” I said. “I think the biggest thing that happened was stuff with the Irvine 11 that happened like four months ago in February. Have you heard about them?”
“No, what’s that?”
“The Irvine 11 are these people from our school’s Muslim Student Union, and they got busted for speaking out during this one speech from some Israeli ambassador, who was invited to speak at UCI by the law school and political science department and some other sponsors. While he was talking, one person would stand up in the audience, shout out some shit, and when that person was escorted out, another one would stand up and yell out some more shit. That continued in succession, eleven times, so that the ambassador guy wouldn’t get to speak. Now there’s controversy because the Irvine 11 are getting arrested. What’s stupid though is there are actually people standing up for the Irvine 11.”
“You don’t support what the Irvine 11 did?”
“No, why would I?”
Trung raised his eyebrow at me. “Brian, do you understand anything about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict?”
“I thought I was talking about Israel and Muslims.”
Trung grunted. “Brian, Israelis practice Judaism, making them Jewish in case you didn’t know, and Palestinians practice Islam, making them Muslim. And that’s just a general blanket statement, but I’m telling you this because you’ll probably hear stuff about Jews versus Muslims too when talking about the conflict.”
“Okay, this is too many names, and either way, my understanding of the Israelian-Palestinny Conflict doesn’t matter.”
“Why not?”
“It’s clear who’s at fault here, isn’t it, Trung? The First Amendment, the right that the Irvine 11 and their supporters are claiming to be violated, doesn’t allow you to go into a meeting at a ballroom, sit in the audience, and shout over the speaker at the front. The First Amendment has regulations so shit like this wouldn’t happen, so that no one can yell ‘fire’ for kicks in a crowded room or walk into a lecture hall and start yelling obscenities over the professor. Even though the Irvine 11 disagreed with the ambassador, they could’ve voiced their opinions in a less annoying and less unlawful way. Hell, what happen to common courtesy and respect?”
“See Brian, this is where knowing something about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict comes into use. Do you know about the Gaza Massacre? No, I know you don’t. There were close to one thousand Palestinian civilian casualties, and well over one thousand total if you include those who fought, all thanks to Israel, who suffered around ten casualties total. If I was in their situation, the students of the Muslim Student Union, I’d protest too because I’d be outraged to hear that my own school would be sponsoring a visit from the Israeli ambassador, a representative of terrible war crimes against my homeland. That would be a huge inconsiderate ‘fuck you’ to me.”
“Well, we’re not talking about emotions here.”
“And that’s exactly the problem, because the rules and laws, Brian, don’t understand emotions. The Irvine 11, I can agree that they weren’t justified by the law, but they were justified by their emotions. It’s too bad that our fucked up system prefers only to look at the law, which is in and of itself imperfect.”
At this point, I was checking my rearview mirror to see if Sang was awake to watch me, for the millionth time, get owned by Trung in a car ride between NorCal and SoCal. Fortunately, he was sleeping, or at least he was pretending to be sleeping.
The first to-do item on the agenda after arriving back in NorCal was always to go downtown and get authentic Mexican food, specifically for me, a Super Burrito with chorizo. Trung and I picked up our orders along with a bottle of sauce and sat down at a table inside, watching the line stretch out the door with sobering students just getting back from the club. We ate in silence for our first few bites, but then I brought up something that had been on my mind for a while.
2010 was ending explosively with protests over fee increases and budget cuts, which erupted all over California in the last few months of November and December, and one of the controversies that stemmed from the protests was an incident where an officer, Jared Kemper, pulled out and aimed a gun at unarmed protesters at UCSF. When this story initially spread, I naturally reacted by thinking, whatever the protestors did, it must have been deserving enough to provoke Kemper’s response.
I discussed with Trung, over burritos and quesadillas, what the rebuttal for my reaction would be, because I wanted to instead be able to believe the rebuttal. He reminded me, first of all, that police officers weren’t robots that operated one hundred percent by the law; they were human too, capable of making mistakes, and that’s what Kemper did. It was something human within Kemper, a kind of fear or frustration, exacerbated by a realization that he had no training in handling the type of situation he was in, that made him desperately reach for his gun. In this case, however, his reaction was still inappropriate and inexcusable, Trung concluded, because it unnecessarily endangered lives, and under no circumstances would a police officer have a lawful reason to draw his gun on unarmed student protestors. Simple as that.
I nodded. Trung remarked that it was nice to see me trying to see things in a different light, because even if it was just half a year ago, I still would’ve been rolling my eyes at students playing victim and whining about having a gun pulled on them. And if it had been high school, he added, I still would’ve been parading racial colorblindness.
“Remember in high school when all your friends were taking that Asian American summer leadership program at DeAnza? You’d very openly accuse them of wasting their time because all they did was, and I quote you, ‘get together with other fob Asians and whine about racism.’ ‘Maybe if they integrated better and got over their race and other people’s races they could actually accomplish something blah blah blah only one race—the human race!—blah blah blah and I’m insensitive to race and ethnic issues.’ You’ve come a long way since then, Brian, and I know I don’t deserve all the credit, I’m sure, but I still like to say you changed all thanks to me.”
I shrugged. Trung might’ve been right. Something that I didn’t wanna tell him but had also been on my mind was the DREAM act, a bill that would’ve provided illegal “aliens” an opportunity for permanent residence if they satisfied certain conditions, one of which was getting into a four-year college and finishing at least two years. The bill was defeated in Senate one day prior, and how I felt about the news shocked me—I actually felt angry, upset. I don’t know if it was because I knew that Trung, who had been posting a bunch of stuff about the DREAM act on his Facebook and Tumblr, really hoped it would pass; or because throughout my last three years of teaching and tutoring, I’ve taught one or two outstanding students who weren’t legal residents in the United States. Whether or not I changed because of Trung or something else, however, there was at least the one important thing I learned to fully understand: Fuck the system.
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