28 March 2024

misogorny (misogyny + horny [as in 'me so horny']) :: the specific type of misogyny that men exercise on women of specifically East-Asian descent, because, really, there is no specific type of misogyny when considering that men who peddle misogyny are also subscribing to the idea that stereotypes are, across-the-board, true, etc.

I saw some porn montage, a long time ago (not that I don't watch porn, now), wherein some guy sticks his fingers inside of various different shades of women and as he (supposedly) removes his fingers from each woman's pussy, his fingers are covered in something that stereotypically represents the woman's race.

To think that there's some special, very specific type of misogyny for one specific race of women is narcissistic, at best, racist, at face value.

Thus, I'd like to expand "misogynoir" into the very specific type of misogyny that asian women experience from black men.

Because for a group that insists on teaching us all that Racism exists, yet the idea of it is "not real" because some crusty old whites made it all up, they really are full of ... racism. It's like how hate against jews has its own, very specific label, while all other hate is lesser hate, at best, &not real hate, in their minds. 



27 March 2024

On Not Having Enough Time to Satisfy My Own Ego

What did people used to do with their time? Work. Work the fields, work the forest, work the hunt, work the fire, work the shelter, work to survive, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, year after year, until that one bad year decimates your community, &or until you die, like everyone else who has ever lived died.

And now, the modern human bitches, endlessly, about how spending a very-tight eight hours a day, five days per seven-day week, is unethical? That living beyond one's means is the fault of the one who distributes the pay. Understanding that you're a slave, yet you do nothing, economically, to attempt/buy your own freedom. Instead, you spend the only thing that can save you. You take your pay and immediately shovel that money back into the companies that supposedly pay you so poorly. For what? Social clout on your swamp socials?

I do not understand this world in which we currently live. 

And then I realize that people never had "extra time" to "burn."

Or did they? And what would they do with that time back in ancient history? Hard to say. Nobody really wrote things down until we started writing things down, so human history is murky, at best, lost, in reality. 

Have you ever heard someone say something to the effect of, "Yea, I've got an hour to burn." Literally, this person has so much time on their hands, that yes, they can effectively do nothing of any true or perceived value for ONE WHOLE HOUR or ten minutes or days, depending on the experience you've had with this particular way that humans are. Like having so much money that you can literally burn some of it without feeling pain, they can figuratively burn TIME. 

This is the modern* human.

We, as modern humans of These United Colonies of Elitism, have time, aplenty, on our hands. The ways in which we spend that time matters more than how much of it we have. And the way (note: singular) in which we, as a society, spend that time, is on social media. Literally, we spend most of our time alone, watching other people. Imagine how this would work out in humanity's past. It wouldn't really, because to have other people in your sights meant that those people were physically in your presence, so there was no "I'm watching you while you're not seeing me," sorta experience. If I'm seeing you see me, you're seeing me see you see me. I'm not talking about whatever perverts existed back in ancient history who wanted to spy on others, etc. 

There's nothing more isolating than seeing without being seen.

Not to mention how much time we all spend looking at ourselves, being obsessed with our image, our brand, our personality, the way we come off through a screen, to a stranger, the voyeur who watches without engaging or wanting you to know that they're even there, watching, like a fucking freak. These are weird fucking times in which we are currently living, as a very social species that requires social connection. We require social mingling so much, in fact, that you are deemed "abnormal" when you are not socialized "well," etc.

My theory is that most of us feel like we don't have enough time, because what we want is to think about ourselves, all the time, and since we have to job and do dishes and clean poop (not me, obviously, the idea of cleaning poop is why I don't have kids or a dog) we are deprived of time to roll around in our own egos (i.e., swamp in our socials), because we want to roll around in that catnip all day long and give our egos a nice long stroke. And so, for some of us, some days leave us with zero time for an ego toke. Other days, when we are oh-so free and have an entire day to ourselves or an hour to burn, what do we do? We spend all that "free time" in our social swamps, making content for the swamp, ingesting the swamp.

And our socials are completely digital! A figment.

And the psychological crunch is weeding out those who cannot evolve fast enough to keep up with these Tech Times. 

And it's sad that the evolution of humanity depends on one's ability to no longer need physical human social connection and that to do so well comes with financial rewards, The Hollows, aka influencing.

It's been a long time since I wondered what was wrong with the world. It's so obvious from where the harm stems, and yet, to do anything about it would be disastrous (for other people, not me, cause not a penny of my financial well being stems from social media), in a wholly different way. 

To suffer the crime or awaken through the punishment. Is that the question? 










*again, this piece is not about everything, as it is specifically about the economic class that These United Colonies of Elitism deems the ever-shrinking "middle." 

24 March 2024

Charcuterie, Bored

&Remembering that "Illness is not a metaphor." A sound piece of wisdom I first encountered through Susan Sontag and is a tough idea to shake, and if you don't understand what it means to remember that "illiness is not a metaphor" (like I did when I first encountered it), I've become to understand it as the way that humans who believe in a specific sorta way of human existence wherein there's a "heaven" and a "hell" and that some Being is judging them by their actions here on Earth, which means that if you suffer an illness, of the body or mind, this is somehow some sort of punishment upon the "sinner," etc. If I'm wrong, in my interpretation, please inform, or point me in the right direction, and I will read some book about it. Thanks.

&Wondering why my face skin is, all of the sudden (as opposed to back when we first drastically changed our everyday living environment when we moved from the dry mountains to the moist seaside), not liking the climate. I think it's a combination of my jobplace mask-wearing and the general oilierness of my skin, in general, in this climate. I am curious, though, about why the shortened "combo" for combination is not "combi," which would make more sense, in my mind, but whatever. 

&Realizing that I absolutely cannot get over that brown, turned grey, turned back into dark dark brown strand of hair! It's taped up on a door, cause, What the fuck?! The other thing about the strand of hair is that it's curly where it's grey and for two more curls where it turns back to the dark dark brown, and then it's jet straight all the way to the root. Like seriously, what. the. fuck.

&Wanting to write a lot more fiction. The Listmaker, the character about whom Book III is titled (The Listmaker's Ranch), remains elusive. A lot of the other characters are becoming impatient, and I can hear the impatience in Ladybug's voice nearly every day. Ladybug, in particular, grows impatient when I am obligated to other (menial) tasks that require my brain power, leaving less brain power for the writing of the things that need to be written, etc. 

&Ladybug thinks that this is all a stupid fucking sham, anyway. Cause like, the reality of the situation is that "the few" must do what "the masses" demand, like always, cause like, at the end of the day, the death of "the few" comes at the hands of "the masses" when "the masses" become The Mob. Mob Rule to kill them all. Imagine that. Being ruled by "the masses"! Imagine it! Omffingg. Like, that is one Living Hellscape. *shivers*

&Fantasizing about the British Royal Family's final act upon their inevitable death (as an institution, like relax) being something about how they donate tons and tons of money to the research of cancer, and it is, thusly, because of them that humanity cures itself of cancer! BAHAHAHAHA! A girl can dream. *vomits* Wouldn't that be something, though?

&Great salads require a lot of prep work. You will know you're in "great salad" territory if the preparation of the salad stuffs takes ten times the amount of time it does to eat the salad. 

&Embarking on a loop that will take us through our fave musubi cafe, Daiso, and the bita shop. The weather continues to bring rain, when what we want is a sunny summery beach day. Winter is real here.

&Yea, it's just like really pretentious. 

&Feeling a little freer every day.

&Reminding myself, as often as I think of it, that if it takes my entire lifetime to become and, thusly, be the person toward whom I'm striving, then, like, that's sorta the point, no?

&Singing, "I ran out of tears when I was eighteen," cause old school The Weeknd was ... something else.

&Ladybug finds it very confusing that The Listmaker, someone about whom I know very little (according to Ladybug), would headline Book III, cause like, if I knew The Listmaker, I wouldn't waste my time making "that guy" the main course, "if you know what I mean," Ladybug explains. To which I question why Ladybug cares at all about who the protagonist or subject of the book is or will be? And Ladybug scoffs. Obviously, Ladybug is jealous that I am not writing an entire book about Ladybug. Obviously. And part of me wonders why I am not writing an entire book about Ladybug, but then I remember that the point of Ladybug is to be pointless, and yet, Ladybug is oftentimes the catalyst for spacetime travel, etc. It is because Ladybug has arrived that anything ever happens, really. There are a lot of ladybugs on The Listmaker's Ranch, and Ladybug knows this. Perhaps Ladybug is frightened of my poking around at what it means to be a ladybug, what it means to be Ladybug. Like when the panda in Kung Fu Panda 3 wonders, "Am I the son of a panda? The son of a goose?" Life's greatest challenge is "to know thy self." Man, I've been watching a lot of movies lately. But not too many. Maybe Ladybug doesn't want to go there.

&Intriguing nonsense about how to turn the LOPSIII model into a story-like metaphor, etc. The bodybuddy/lifemate thinks it can be done. I am less optimistic, because the idea is not exciting. The idea is much more suited to a textbook, but I understand what/that the bodybuddy/lifemate wants to do/do it.

&Now we're off on our loop cause everything's finally open.

&Having trod the loop, I wasn't hungry for musubi on the way out, so we went straight to Daiso, and while we were at Daiso, I remembered that it was B&N that I needed to go to, cause like, I've been in desperate need of a new notebook, but I've been procrastinating/not that desperate cause my whole job situation has been very demanding, but now it's leveled out etc., and so, after swinging through the bita shop, we went to B&N, and it wasn't even open yet! So, we went upstairs, because we needed to burn exactly ten minutes, the perfect amount of time to grab musubi! 

&Feeling the pressure of that new-notebook feeling wherein I deeply ponder what first thing to write in it. Probably something about Ladybug, for Ladybug's sake. *shit*

&Becoming hungry.

&Shouting, "Yes," to the bodybuddy/lifemate, "and can I also have a slice of cake!," a slice of chocolate cranberry fudge cake that he made last night from the recipe off a can of cranberry sauce that was sitting on the "free stuff" table in the laundry room for which he realized he already had all of the ingredients. *drool*


18 March 2024

On Day Trips

So...

my posts about our move from Longmont, CO, USA to Honolulu, HI, USA have been trending every day for a few weeks now, &I've suspected that they're trending because we flew Alaska Airlines, and the video embedded in the second of two posts has hashtagalaskaairlines in its title *yikes*

Whatever.

When an older post trends on this site, I, typically, go check it out, because I, typically, forget the details/specifics of a post once it starts getting crusty, etc. Thus, our "Moving Day" posts are trending on my site, and they have been for a few weeks, and my theory is that maybe my posts are coming up in searches for/about Alaska Airlines. That being said, it is the first of the two posts that is trending this week, and that post does not mention Alaska Airlines at all, in its title or its description. 

Whatever.

None of the above is really my point, because my point is that my bodybuddy/lifemate and I look really fucking good when we travel, and I've not really noticed until now, and it's not because we haven't looked good until now, because we have, but for some reason (the fact that this was a move and not a trip), I am only now realizing how good we must look when we travel. 

Not to brag (really, I'm not bragging, there are a lot of people far more well-traveled than I, but I have traveled a lot for the "average" person, *blech*) but I travel a lot, and as a unit, we(thebodybuddy/lifemate&i)'ve traveled/moved quite a lot. We've traveled &or moved by plane, boat, train, bus, lightrail, subway, monrail, small car, large car, cross country and across countries. We did not used to look good when traveling. We looked poor and gross. But then we learned a few things, and figured out other stuff, and by the time we took our first vacation while living in Seoul, we were looking like serious stuff. Not as serious as that one Korean man we saw walking through Incheon, who walked like one serious. serious. serious. fucking. mothafucking. fucking. fucking. bad. ass. mother-fucker. And he had two young adult "boys" (I, personally, think that any Korean man under the age of fifty looks boyish) at each of his shoulders, behind him, and they parted the sea of people as they strutted through that airport in a perfect triangle of power. It was basically the most amazing thing I've seen in an airport, in my life, thus far. Like, it is my life's goal to look just like that guy someday. *yuh-mee*

My point is that it's nearly impossible to look good while traveling for the first time. It requires practice, like all things. The reason why it's so difficult to "look good" while traveling is because most people do not travel enough to get good practice. Some people, obviously, are more organized than others, and so, will adapt much quicker to the world of travel. Some people will travel more than any could hope to dream and will continue to be totally disheveled. It's whatever.

I've always wanted to be good at traveling.

I started young, and I remember the way that some women would just look while gliding through the airport. They looked like they had it all figured out, this travel thing. I always felt hot and dirty, and I always, always, had way too much shit. Always. All I wanted was to be one of those beautiful women, gliding through the airport with one simple carry on and one simple purse/bag. No shopping bags filled with extra stuff collected who knows where or how. No trash strewn from the top of a tote that's threatening to discard all of its contents all over the floor. No digging all desperate through my bag, melting down at the ticket counter, because, "I know it was in here!"

It was never my goal to look good while traveling. 

My goal was always to be good at traveling.

And the best place to really get good at traveling is in a really big city. 

The city in which we were "travel trained" was Seoul. As an adopted Korean, I could live and job in the country with an F4 Visa. This was back in 2013-2018, and so, no, I don't know if/how its changed since we left, because from now on, we will simply stay in country for the amount of time our passports allow sans visas. The bodybuddy/lifemate was sponsored by his employer, a private English academy called ECC.

Really big cities require you to traverse them with competence. If you do not, you will find yourself lost very quickly. And getting lost, for the budget conscious, can be very expensive, because sometimes it means that maybe you have to pay for a cab all the way to wherever it is you're trying to go, if you can't figure it out by cheap subway/bus. 

Navigating a really big city is like taking tiny little trips every day. It can be a whole thing to go from one side of the city to the other for the day. Really big cities also have very different parts of the city, and so, you sometimes have to travel to a very specific part of the city to acquire a very specific thing you want to acquire. In essence, you get a lot of practice traveling from place to place within a very defined space. And since most really big cities have public transportation, you learn how various time tables and routes work together (or don't, boo.).

In really big cities, you can take a tiny trip as often as you like, and when you take tiny trips, trips that maybe take you hours away from your home location, and if you don't have a car, like we don't, you kind of have to pack for a whole day. Day trips are hard to pack for, but what is an international flight day but the best day trip? When you fly internationally, you're packing for the trip trip but also sort of packing for a whole day spent between beds on the outgoing/incoming travel days. And so, all of the day tripping practice that a really big city provides is the perfect amount of practice time because that amount of time is a typical international flight day. 

What are international flight days other than long day trips at the bookends of a full-trip trip?

Which brings me to the first trip wherein I'm fairly confident we looked pretty good, cause we were getting pretty good at this thing called travel. Vancouver, BC. That travel day was the best travel day, on record, to this day. We left Seoul early in the morning, flew for ten hours, and when we landed in Vancouver, it was only like noon on the same day (I can't look up the specifics in the travel notebook at this time. I went into my job late and left early cause I'm feeling like shit from something we ate over the weekend, so I'm not up for a deep dive from that trip, at this time. Perhaps another opportunity will present itself in the future from now). Flight went perfectly, our new luggage worked perfectly, our first foray into AirBnbingit worked perfectly, the location of our ABnb and the Bnb itself was perfect, our first slice of pizza was perfect, and the weather was perfect, and every fucking little thing was absolutely perfect. 

We even met a friend who was willing/able to purchase us some vitamins, and then we sat in a park overlooking some water as the sun set and created this perfect sliver slice of sunlight across the grass that made its way all the way through the park until, at last, it was night, and so, we hunted down a grocery store and stumbled into Urban Fare (the best grocery store of all grocery stores), bought up charcuterie stuffs, stopped for froyo on the way back to the Bnb, and smeezed some bita and slept like happy little babies until I awoke at 0500, at which point, the bb/lm strolled sleepy-eyed into the kitchen, and I was like, "What the fuck?," and he was like, "What the fuck?," and I was like, "Why are you up?," to which he responded, "You're up." And I was like, "But I just got up for a minute," and then we decided to stay up, take our vitamins, and when he asked me what I wanted to do, I said, "I wanna watch The Lego Movie," like a demanding infant that the bb/lm took as a challenge, and so, he turned on the Bnb-provided Xbox and logged onto the Bnb-provided Netflix account, and we watched The Lego Movie, until we got hungry and went out looking for breakfast, at which point, we found a place called Breka Bakery & Café, and it was the best breakfast we had ever had. And that was literally the first twenty-four hours!

For me, the most important thing you can learn from day-tripping (without a car!) is how little you actually need to get through one day. It's liberating. I used to pack way too much, in general, for month-long trips, and even for like a week-long trip. Day trips can really help to put into perspective exactly what you need and what you definitely don't. In the context of a day trip, you're not in a survival state. You are, however, exposing yourself to the elements of an entire day away from/between homes. There are some things that you are going to be really happy you packed. There are going to be other things that are going to weigh you down the entire day, and you never even used it once! But it's the learning of a thing that we call practice. You're simply going through the motions over and over again, and with every try, you're learning something new about the thing and about yourself.

And so, it is in my opinion that day trips are a really important skill to have in this day&age. 

A day trip's amount of time away from home (and without a car!) teaches you a lot of things that are not threatening to your survival. Day trips can teach you about how to thrive. The metaphor of carrying around what you need for a day can really inspire you to whittle down the amount of stuff you have, in general. If you can learn to be comfortable with less on a day's long outing, maybe you'll start to feel comfortable with less on a day-to-day basis. And maybe, eventually, you start to feel uncomfortable with how much shit is just like, Why is there so much crap in this house?! 

On a side note, Remember, you traded real money for all of that shit that's just taking up space in your home. Save yourself the hassle. The next time you want to spend money on some stupid shit on the internet, just go flush the money down the toilet. It's the same feeling you'll have when you realize that you haven't even used that piece of shit, so you use it once, and it breaks, so you throw it away. 

Day Trips. They can change your life, because they change your perspective.



14 March 2024

When One Becomes Two

our ivory coast has been so vigorously growing
that
it tipped over &nearly ejected itself from its pot.
i even knew (read: read about)
that
the ivory coast needs to be pruned.
&now, what i knew
i, now, understand.
&i was thrilled to find out
that
there are, in fact, two root systems; so, naturally,
we split them.
the larger of the two consists of
the two largest, youngest stems, w/a third spear on its way in,
the smaller,
two stems, one of which is on its way out,
w/no new spearling in sight,
yet.