this blog used to be called “rant rant rant”. that angry sociopolitical commentary blog has moved to rantrantranting.wordpress.com.
henceforth, this blog will be for my more silly adventures. or something.
you can also find me blogging with my fellow soon-to-be-displaced women’s studies folks here.
On Saturday, I had lunch with a Nazi. Here’s what happened.
My best friend Brittany had been dying to take me to Mattern Deli (Orange, CA) because she knows how much I love sandwiches. Unfortunately, because Mattern is a small German market/deli, they’re not always open. On top of that, when they are open, they’re really busy. At one o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, they were fuckin packed. When we couldn’t find parking, Brittany had me hop out and go inside to grab a number.
I pulled number 27.
They were serving number 6.
If you peruse th
e small market, you quickly come upon a cooler full of German (and bad domestic) beer. We realized we had a lot of time to kill, so we decided to have a beer while we waited to order. Our original plan had been to grab sandwiches and take them to another bar nearby anyway, so why not go ahead and get started? This seemed common practice, as there was a bottle opener hanging from a string tied to the number dispenser and a request to bring empties to the cash register when we were done.
Brittany and managed to score two of the only available seats in the establishment, adjacent to a group of older gentlemen. They were obviously regulars, and obviously all at least part German. Apparently they were obviously racist as well; Brittany was sending me worried glances, the kind reserved for potentially awkward situations leading to one of my “outbursts”, but I didn’t hear anything, at first. Or, I knew enough about my surroundings to just try to block it out subconsciously. I’m not in the business or pleasure of confronting old men in their 70s about their politics, or anything, really. Old people make me super nervous for reasons unknown. As we dug into the sandwiches we’d be been waiting over an hour for, they grilled us about our ages, our schooling, and told us to take a look at Miss California (who’s apparently quite the looker this year).
All was fine and dandy (more or less) until I was asked to slide over to make room for “Doc”, a latecomer and definitely the oldest of the group of friends with the thickest German accent. Doc immediately struck up conversation with me and Bri, as he was pretty much sitting at our table. Unfortunately, I only really remember the “highlights”. Imagine me, sitting next to a very old man, listening to all of the following statements, as he looks at Brittany who’s watching my face.
First, his friend said, “That guy at UCI, Chemerinksy, he’s a straight out communist!”
Then, among the chatter, these came out of Doc’s mouth:
“You know how I feel about Obama? I see him as the new Hitler. Just another pain the ass we need to get rid of.”
“I’m an ex-Nazi. I fought on the good side in WWII, the German side. I was born in Berlin.”
“I feel sorry for you kids today in school. Too many liberal teachers rotting your brains.”
Those are the only statements I absolutely remember, but certainly not all that was said. Looking back at those statements, this doesn’t seem like that jarring of an experience. But, as time went on I became more and more uncomfortable as I began to realize with every statement that while Doc supposedly shed his Nazi affiliation, he maintained their ideologies.
While Brittany looks like a WASP, I look like a big dykey feminist. This tends to insulate me from overtly conservative conversations en masse, especially homophobic ones. Occasionally, I get sucked into racist discourse, but I’m quick to inform my company that, not only do I not share their opinion, b
ut if they continue espousing their views, I’m likely to fly off the handle (because very rarely do they care to engage in any sort of intelligent dialogue). Anyway, finding myself in such an unabashedly anti-liberal conversation over my roast beef sandwich was not ideal, to say the least. And the more I began reflecting on what was being said and contextualizing what was happening, I began to panic.
In retrospect, I probably should have engaged Doc in more intellectual way (or at all). I stood to learn a lot from someone unlike anyone I’ve ever come in contact with before, and will not likely run across again. But, I was drunk, and kind of hot, and flashing back to learning about the Holocaust in fifth grade and everything I think I know about what happened and I just shut down.
But, the sandwich was damn good, so, maybe next time.
Because I need more ways to [micro]blog from my phone.
Paninis from Panera Bread are the most dangerous of all food items, baring those that are expired and/or poisoned.
The crust on all of Panera’s breads is crispy and delicious, so long as it remains in baguette form. However, once these breads are sliced, what was once a perfect, not-too-chewy, not-too-hard crust becomes a razor specifically designed to annihilate the roof of your mouth. Not unlike Captain Crunch. While eating a cold sandwich, the doughy inside of the bread provides relief, or at least pause on the assault. However, with a panini, the entire outside of the sandwich takes on almost immalleable properties during the heating process, resulting in a constant onslaught of pain bite after bite.
But, there is good news. Immediately after you’ve Ginsu’d your soft mouth flesh, your new wounds are cauterized by the molten ingredients encased in the bread. Not unlike a Hot Pocket. If you’re lucky, the extreme heat will sear you to such a degree that you’re rendered anesthetized for the entire consumption process. And, at least you’re not hungry anymore.
Yesterday, Roger and I attended the Feminisms and Intersectionalities Conference at UC Riverside. We left a little later than planned, but thanks to FastTrack and the tendency for things to start fifteen minutes late, we made perfect time. The conference was organized around panels comprised of one main presenter, three discussants and a moderator. The audience appeared to be mostly professors and graduate students, only a couple hundred people and some other undergrads as well. We saw HLT Quan and Crystal Griffith, whose rough cut of “The Angela Davis Project” was screened at UCI the other day.
The first session was entitled “Undoing Academia: Creativity, Dissidence, and Feminism” and the presentation was mostly the life experience of an amazing woman, Nawal El-Saadawi. El-Saadawi, a long-time educator, physician, writer and political activist from a poor, Muslim Egyptian family, spoke candidly about the importance of being fearless (of unemployment, poverty, imprisonment, death, hell) and maintaining creativity, particularly in academia. She made a lot of excellent points about how everything is political, and what that means. She said religion cannot be depoliticized and that all wars are economic wars. She illustrated the ways in which colonialist discourse continues to inform language and rhetoric, even in academic circles (maybe especially in academic circles). She cited the regionalization of the “Middle East” as a relic of European imperialism and problemitized the framework of “post-colonial”, substituting instead, “neo-colonial” demarking the fact that colonialist practice is on-going. All of this was part of wider discussion on how processes of learning in modern, Western academia stifle creativity and dissidence in favor of politics of fear and illusory democracy. She expressed that we need to be aware that ideological formations (such as religions) come out of specific political, economic, social and historical conditions. Her candor was inspiring and her words were profoundly resonant of things I’ve heard, read, and experienced.
Jeff Sacks, a UCR professor of Comp. Lit. shared excerpts from an email he recently received from his chancellor’s office that we assume was sent to his entire department. The email stated that UCR faculty were “blessed to have the privilege of free speech”. At a public institution. In America. HOLY CRAP. He also said some interesting stuff about how the university needs to be re-thought, so as to become an institution of knowledge production for its own sake.
Yenna Wu, another UCR Comp. Lit. professor, citing examples of different ways in which Buddhism has been practiced in Taiwan, posed that religion and secularism is a false dichotomy and spoke about the spiritual movement. El Saadawi problemitized this notion of “spiritual” by claiming it reinforces a mind/body dualism, as well as a division between the self and the other. She said creativity abolishes the line between the self and the other.
The discussion about religious and secular segued into the audience discussion, where things got a little heated. Among what appeared to be the other undergraduates in the room, were several Muslim students, many of whom were veiled. El Saadawi had more or less implied that the way to see through ideology, whatever it may be, is to go back to common sense. By this, she meant acknowledging that due to the myriad interpretations of religious texts, we can assume that they’re not all “correct”, and that in fact (most likely), none of them may be correct, as they arise out of these historical, social, political conditions.
However, her invocation of “common sense” seemed to rub some people the wrong way. One of the veiled students challenged El Saadawi on the grounds that “common sense” isn’t very particularly “common” at all, meaning it isn’t necessarily shared among everyone. Different things inform different people’s formations of common sense. For example, the student’s common sense is informed by her reading of Islam. Here, El Saadawi kind of said religion isn’t common sense, and told the student that she changed the terms of the conversation. This back-and-forth went on for about ten minutes.
I see the point on both sides. Obviously, someone’s religious beliefs are going to impact the way they think about the world. It’s simultaneously ideological and common sensible. But, not being religious, I can’t help but personally side with El Saadawi. Watching this near-argument, which oftentimes became a debate about the function(s) or dysfunction(s) of the veil, I was reminded of what arguing with people about homosexuality is like. When debating with people about Prop 8, for example, and speaking from a position not informed by religion, but rather by what I consider the common sense that everyone deserves the same rights, it’s frustrating when people revert to the familiar rhetorical script, “my religion says homosexuality is wrong, therefore I believe it is wrong”. Realizing that is some people’s “common sense”, whatever that means, I attempt to shift the terms of the debate back to politics and away from religion. I incite separation of church of state. I remind them that their religious beliefs should not be writing my secular laws; that civil marriage has been made a property contract, not a religious institution that it may have been before. Somehow, this never works. Frustrating.
The conference allowed two and a half hours for lunch. Roger and I made our way to Del Taco where we ate and studied for a while. We were some of the first ones back to the conference. Probably less than a hundred people attended the second session, and Roger and I were certainly two of the only undergraduates. Among the audience was Laura Kang and Lilith Mahmud from the UCI Women’s Studies department, but we didn’t say hi to them until after.
The second session was entitled “Archive, Affect, and the Everyday: Queer Diasporic Revisions”. Roger and I both took Queer History Making last quarter, so I went into this presentation thinking a lot of it would be familiar. The presenter, Gayatri Gopinath, compared the work of two queer diasporic visual artists (Allan deSouza and Chitra Ganesh) with Saidiya Hartman’s [apparently] heteronormative memoir, Lose Your Mother in order to give it a queer reading. She drew on some work that we were familiar with, particularly Jose Muñoz and Judith Halberstam.
Her analysis opened up a lot of discussions about what queer theory means, where it diverges from post-colonial studies, and a bunch of other things that kind of went over our heads/I don’t know how to paraphrase, hahaha.
She drew some interesting connections using the idea of “waste”, particularly waste as generative; how queer archives are made up of the “waste” (and ephemera) or excessive material of mainstream history that’s rendered irrelevant. She used this concept of waste in her analysis of deSouza (who superimposed actual human waste on his pictures) and Ganesh (who animated her representations of mug shots with “warm data”, or the information about people not extracted through interrogation—“cold hard facts”). All of this was about “lives that have lost the luxury of the mundane”. It was all really interesting.
Someone in the audience drew our attention to thinking about affect as a hegemonic mode of feeling, which could potentially be really, really interesting.
After the second session there was an hour break before performance artist Monica Palacios. Roger and I went outside and sat at a table where Keith Harris, one of the discussants, and several other audience members joined us. It was cool to converse with these professors about what we’d just seen, as well as the other sessions of the conference. Some seemed surprised we were from UCI, and especially that we were undergraduates.
Lilith Mahmud introduced me to Dr. Kang, who I’d never actually met, but she already knew of me from Prof. Terry, apparently. I’m still geeking out over that. Inside, Roger introduced himself to them both and we all talked more. It was really nice.
Monica Palacios’ performance wasn’t bad. She made me say “lover quesadilla” in front of a roomful of professional academics.
As an aside, the moderator of the second session was Jane Ward, who I recognized right away as being a presenter at the 2007 Pacific Sociological Association Conference that I attended in Oakland. Ward’s presentation on the [in]visiblity of lesbian femininities in non-queer space was one of the first time I start thinking about bodies as text in any sort of academic way. Very cool.
Overall, the conference was incredibly fulfilling and engaging. I look forward to attending more such events in the future.
so, as many of you already know, I drive Blake to and fro Disneyland every friday. as a thank you, she bought me a ticket about a month ago. before yesterday I had only been to Disneyland three times; the first time was a very awkward trip with Serena when she was engaged to Robert and right after I started dating Alex. the other two times were with my sister and my nephews.
Blake pretty much knows everything there is to know about Disneyland, so I knew I was going to be getting the most possible out of my day. we got there around eleven and stayed until 12.04am. due to fatigue and sensory overload, I was a little woozy for the first couple hours, but I didn’t let that slow us down. I tend to fare none too well at theme parks, as a rule. normally I’m tired because I woke up early, it’s entirely too much movement for me, and the unusual smells and close contact with a TON of random people and hustle n’ bustle usually throw my body into shock until I adjust. I’ve been known to faint.
anywho, besides having a fuckin AWESOME time, a few interesting things happened to me/us while we were there.
upon our first trip to bathroom, I encountered a creeper. I was in my stall, doing my thing, when all of a sudden a camera appears from under the wall between my stall and the one next to mine! holy inappropriate batman! since I noticed it right away, I had time to make a stern face at it before it disappeared. thinking the person next door would see that I was onto them, I assumed that would be the end of that ridiculousness. however, the camera reappeared! so I made another stern face! by then I was done, so as I was collecting myself I hear from the offending stall, “wtf?! *random name* where are you?!” then, from the stall on the other side of me I hear, “I’m over here!” then, from the first stall, “are you in the stall right next to mine?” this is when I interject, “NOPE!” and walk out to wash my hands. RIDICULOUS!
when we were on the Monsters Inc ride in California Adventure (which I hadn’t been on and is way cute and fun!) I got called “young man” and then my hair was insulted by the person occupying the Roz position at the end of the ride. silly.
the geniuses of Disneyland had the wherewithal to capitalize on swine flu by bottling what I presume to be generic hand sanitizer in “Disneyland” bottles and selling them for what I can only imagine is a ridiculous price. we saw them everywhere on the belt loops of children and the knapsacks of their panicky parents. as a precaution, Blake and I did wash our hands slightly more than usual, and every time someone sneezed I couldn’t help but whisper “swine flu!” faux-alarmingly.
while we were in line for Thunder Mountain was probably the most colorful part of the day (despite the fireworks!). we had been in line for at least fifteen minutes, moderately canoodling throughout, nothing too heavy. I’m not into uber pda in front of strangers (as we all know, I have no such issue in front of people that I do know, which is why most of my friends have heard me having sex). anywho, as Blake and I were closing a quite sizable gap that had been created in line when the large choir group in front of us moved up, I felt a forceful hand on my shoulder yanking me backwards. I assumed that this was the result of someone in a dire situation trying to get somewhere with the quickness, so I did not resist. however, as I turned towards the grasp, I was met with a middle-aged white man who began yelling “hey! hey!” in the general direction of Blake, who stopped moving upon realization that someone was yelling and I was not right behind her. once he decided he had our full attention, he not-so-kindly removed his hand from my shoulder and began yelling, “look, I realize you guys are ‘together’ or whatever, but NOT in front of my kids!” his “kids” were in fact two 13ish year-old boys who couldn’t look more disinterested in what was happening. at this point, I interrupted his rant about our impropriety and informed him that his homophobia was absolutely not my problem. as he continued on his tirade, I began to think about how unbelievable it was that he dared to lay his hands on me. then, I got really mad. I took a firm step towards him, reminded him again that his homophobia was not my problem and informed him that he needed to get away from me and that it is completely unacceptable that he touched me, and that he’d better not to do it again. I did all of this without swearing and barely raising my voice. upon realizing that I was not a teenager and that I was not even remotely afraid of him, he retreated. I made sure Blake was ok (which she was) and then she informed the kind Disneyland worker that the guy behind us in line had just grabbed me and started yelling at us. the Disney employee apologized to us profusely and moved us into the fastpass line. wooow. what really blows my mind is that someone thought it was even slightly okay to put his hands on someone else. let alone to start yelling. excuse me. tap me on the shoulder to get my attention. tell me politely that you disapprove of my “lifestyle” and ask me to knock it off with your kids around (to which I would politely reply that your homophobia is not my problem, but because you were polite, I would make an effort to be “less outwardly gay” for the rest of the line). DO NOT grab me, with some sort of self-appointed authority and begin yelling at me with any air self-righteousness. competely unacceptable. he was really lucky to have caught me at one of the peaks of happiness of my day, otherwise there may have been both swearing and yelling accompaning one of my rage blackouts. but, I mostly found him ridiculous, and a poor excuse for a decent human being. so I continue to laugh it off.
I made the conscious decision to suspend my critical awareness for most of the day so that I might enjoy the park and so as not to drive Blake completely insane. however, an exception was made for It’s A Small World, because it’s just too much! I had to ride it because they made new additions that Blake insisted I see, so I told her there was going to have to be commentary afterwards and she agreed to the terms. I try not to overload Blake with my “cynacism” as a general rule; especially while we’re in her happy place. since most of the earlier rooms of the ride were for the most part unchanged (the “European”, “Asian”, “Arctic”, and “Central and South American” areas) I didn’t pay much attention to them and instead focused on the newness of the “African” room and the last two rooms (Blake remarked afterward that she was going to show me something in the room right before the Africa room but I was “all over Africa already” with my critical outrage face on). whereas most of the aforementioned rooms were represented overwhelmingly by puppets of people, the “African” room was not. rather, a man on a camel and some others denoted Northern Africa. where one would imagine to see people from Central Africa, there were instead puppets of animals; jungle and savannah animals. towards the end of the room, there was a circle of dancing African women, darker than the fellow on the camel on the beginning of the room, but very few men of the same color. hm. the second to last room depicts what one immediately recognizes as “cowboys and indians”. presumably, this is a room for the United States. one side has a big red barn with three white farm boys and a blond girl sitting on a haystack. the other side, has a white man on a horse wearing a cowboy hat and a row of standing Native Americans, almost entirely women. the final room has everyone “represented” in the same clothes we saw them in earlier, only now everyone is dressed in white. in fact, the entire room is white. the entire world has come together peacefully under a cover of pure whiteness. wooow.
it was surprisingly humid and overcast all day. which was kind of nice because I didn’t get sunburned, but simultaneously kept me in constant fear of getting cold. a little after 8pm, roughly an hour before the fireworks extravaganza was expected to begin, it started to drizzle! there had been a slight breeze all day, so we were already a little worried about the likelihood of the fireworks going on and when it started to almost rain, we got really worried. when we started making our way towards a primo fireworks viewing position, Blake asked a kind Disney fellow what the likelihood was, in light of the slight rain. he told us that the rain was actually no factor whatsoever and the only thing to worry about was the wind. he said there was an 87% chance the fireworks were a go. we waited for the announcements. fifteen minutes to scheduled firework time, the fireworks might not happen announcement came on. expecting to hear this announcement again ten minutes later, instead we heard the fireworks are happening announcement! knowing they would at least start them, we were immediately pleased. the rain stopped, and the air stilled, and the fireworks went off without a hitch. 
magical.
we rode everything we intended to, and even got another pass at Big Thunder Mountain, this time sans [overt] homophobes. although, apparently the teenaged boys in front of us kept looking back at us. I told Blake they were probably just looking at her boobs. when I kept getting curious looks from youngsters all day Blake told me it was because I was wearing cool sunglasses.
Blake took me on the subs for the first time because I love fishies! it was easily our longest wait, and I had to close my eyes for the jellyfish part, but it was excellent!
all in all we had a fantastic day. exhaustive, but wonderful. I don’t know how she does that every friday.
I love finding myself at gatherings with people completely unprepared to encounter someone like me. particularly when the people at these gatherings are the sort of people that think everyone else feels the same as they do about everything, by assuming everyone has the same or less life experience as them.
I ended up going over to a friend of a friend’s house last night where I watched a Napoleon-complexed racist spend his entire evening trying (to absolutely no avail) to get into my bestfriend’s pants.
here, are some highlights:
stupid guy: yeah, I’m not racist. I have a lot of contact with black people. guess where I work. what’s the worst neighborhood in LA you can think of?
Brittany: Lennox.
me: *rolls my eyes* Watts. [I don't know why I played this game. too much wine.]
stupid guy: Compton!
Brittany & I: uh…
stupid guy: yeah, I know, scary right?
Brittany & I: uh…
stupid guy: yeah, luckily enough my old truck was a piece of shit. I don’t want you to think my uncle is racist or anything, but he said my truck was so beat up “not even a nigger would steal it!”
Brittany: *shocked gaspy sound*
me: how is that not racist?
…
Brittany: ya know, D’s black [that's me, and that's a lie].
stupid guy: what? really? how black? you look Irish to me.
me: am I only allowed to be not-racist if I’m part black? are people only allowed to be black if they look black?
there was a lot more, but I can’t remember them. but, you get the idea. it’s the best kind of racism; when they think they’re not racist, and then they attempt to impress you with how not racist they are… by being racist.
so, for the last several days I’ve been experiencing a heightened anxiety about:
1. my car being towed
2. my car being broken into
3. getting jumped (often while walking to/fro my car)
what. the. eff.
you might be thinking, “hm. finals perhaps? are you overcaffeinated?” no sir. if anything I’ve been undercaffeinated!
perhaps I’m channeling all the worries I should be [but, as yet, am not] having about finishing all my finals on time into this uncharacteristic paranoia about the immediate safety and security of my self and my things.
well, I’d like it to stop.
also, I came ridiculously close to being hit by a car last night. how close? I leapt out of the way, and had I not, I would have been very hit, very hard. I venture to guess that the driver was pretty drunk, as he swerved quite a while after what could have been our point of impact, then slammed on his breaks. holy slow reaction time batman. lucky for me, I was not drunk and have the reflexes of a cat!
it’s not as though I don’t understand the appeal of Rockband. I do. it just doesn’t appeal to me, in any way, shape or form. and it’s taken me until now to nail down why.
it’s not just the extreme commercialization of art (how many bands are out there right now writing songs and saying “dude, you gotta simplify that bass-line or we’re never gonna make it on Rockband!”?) or anything about performity and video games, or even that it strips songs of all musicality when people are “playing” them.
no. there are two major things that annoy me about Rockband (and Guitar Hero). the first I’ve known for a while, and it’s true about pretty much all video games: it’s only entertaining for those who are playing. this is so annoying with Rockband/Guitar Hero because these are so often played at social gatherings, because they do require (for maximum experience) so many people.
the second thing, is that unless you’re BLASTING the tv, even if they’re “playing” perfectly, all you hear is the “tap tap tap” and the “tick tick tick” of the drums and guitar, not the song. which gets really old, really fast.
and, I mean, I dunno. if I’m gonna pretend to be playing the drums to a song I like, what’s wrong with doing it in the air (as it’s always been done) so that it doesn’t obstruct the sound of actual drums? why add my own enhancement of “bang bang bang”?
I dunno. I just can’t get into it.
and I can’t help but resent a game that makes me not want to listen to several songs I used to really like ever again.
I don’t care if other people have a blast with it, it’s just not for me.
so after several months of pretty much ignoring Park West’s parking lot restrictions, my car finally got towed.
last night I had a feeling I should move my car. I’d been pushing my luck more so than usual lately, but laziness abounds.
sigh.
I called the number on the sign…
“Irvine PD.”
“hi, I believe my car was towed this morning.”
“oh, really? why do you think your car’s been towed? is it not there?” <– what? I really wish she had said “is it not where you left it?” what the hell kind of question is that?
she said she needed my license plate or the vin number to find out. typically, that’s information you find ON your car, so I was a little worried. I only know 5DZY_ _ _ of my license plate, so I had grabbed my insurance card out of my wallet (luckily I keep one in there and in my car) which luckily has the vin number on it. then she informed me that my car was in fact towed (which is good, because it never really occurred to me that my car might have been stolen [HA!] until the long pause) and gave me another number to call.
“South Side Towing.”
“hello, I believe you towed my car this morning.”
“oh. what are you looking for?”
“a beige 1983 Mercedes 300D.”
“oh yes. I’ll give you the address of where you can pick it up and how much it’s going to cost if you get it today before five.”
“oh, thank you.”
if I get it today before 5pm it’s only going to cost me $180 (at least I think that’s what she said. I HOPE that’s what she said!). my registration is current and so is my insurance. my car is my car, meaning registered in my name, so I should have no problem getting it. the registration is actually in the car, or at least I really really hope so. I have just barely enough money to cover $180 without getting my parents involved, and luckily Nikki doesn’t have work today so she can take me to go get it in Costa Mesa which shouldn’t take long.
sigh. my baby better be PERFECT!
