In Twilight Regalia

Watched 2046 yesterday. (http://www.sonyclassics.com/2046/ ) The movie theater was a cool dark place to hide out of the scalding sun.

Such a sad film, stylishly beautiful, at once claustrophobic and Hopper-esque in its isolation. It was a piece about the wound that cannot be healed, a topic I’ve been dealing with for some time. About the secrets of one’s past that prevent from accepting anything of substance, after that initial loss of something so worthy. A slow demise of hearts pointlessly disconnected because of the supreme inability to love anyone but that first secret someone. Most depressingly, but honestly, it painted out in beautiful colors and shapes the incredible repetition of error in the ones who choose to continue with their secrets, and the rippling effect on everyone touched by that sad falseness.

There was a style of 60s fashion that I think was fantasy rather than anything we ever had, but it was amazing. It glimmered. And there was beauty galore in every kind of woman. The docile romantic writer, the hard-hearted hellkitten, the demure black spider, the innocent and rash child, the calculating dragonlady, the spent and demolished alcoholic. A dark, dark afternoon I spent in it all, like the dank smell of walking into an old ripe barroom.

After all this weight of sadness, I had had but one relief note of lightheartedness.

Outside in the lobby were four small old Asian ladies — perhaps in their late fifties, perhaps 60s. They’d arrived before anyone else, eager to see all those famous lady stars. They had bubble-coifed hair and open toed shoes with errantly shaped, possibly painful toes hanging out (an early life of those beautiful pointed shoes shown in the movie must have done it to them, I thought). They had sweater vests and too much makeup and looked so much more like effort than beauty, but they were happy together, having a day out with the girls.

They were chatting away together, in English — perhaps they were all from that generation that had learned to speak only English to fit in socially in a tight 1950s America. Then they really surprised me. In the lobby, they walked up to an easel with a huge posterboard of Margaret Cho — one of my favorite people on the planet but also one of the most radical ones left on it. Margaret supports gay marriage, among other topics that set flame wars ablaze on the net and in her life. I wondered what they would say, seeing her in Che Guevara revolutionary beret and gunbelt in an only slightly comic powerstance. I wondered if they would not know of her? Find something disparaging to say? Think her sleazy humour was a disgrace to Korean culture? Instead, one leaned in close to read some of the script beneath it.

“Look at Margaret!,” she said. “How much weight she’s lost! She looks great!” Another of them chimed in, “I just love when she does her mother, it’s so funny…. ”

Well that just proved one of my earlier points with Asian moms. Lose weight and you’ve got the world at your feet.

But it pays even better to be funny. And it pays best of all to know who you are in this world, and love wholeheartedly like you know who you are, such that everyone knows exactly who you are, regardless of your secrets. And when they love you, you know it’s real.

I have a way of dealing with this problem of feeling too ugly, too old, never having been a pretty enough girl to land the guys I wanted, never having been a star, never having been enough of a popular type, never having had bevies of beautiful and connected friends, never having had narrow hips, never having had full enough hair, never having looked like so many things I wished….. while others envied even little me….

I try to tune myself out of my Hollywood-spawned media-mutuant aspirations and I look around me on the streets in downtown and try to get some perspective on things. You can do it too, anywhere, in any town for that matter, or if you have other people in it, even in your own house.

Just look at EVERYone you see. IMAGINE underneath the faces of the next, say, five or six people you see, IMAGINE a caption reading “Sexy”.

The fat guy across the hall: “Sexy.”

That dumpy mom with her hair up in those stupid clip things: “Sexy.”

That homeless guy at the gas station terrorizing people with window-washing: “Sexy.”

Your worker in the next cubicle: “Sexy.”

That little Asian chick with the dopey hat and the book bag: “Sexy.”

That old Indian guy who sits on the porch at 80-something: “Sexy.”

Your Mom or Dad or Sister or Brother: “Sexy.”

Because you have to realize who Hollywood taught us to believe we must become, and what unreasonable yardsticks of perfection (and sometimes questionable taste) they subject us to in the way of standards.

Think about how short a period of time it’s been in overall history that the media even existed as it does today. And what a small percentage of life on this planet actually gets anywhere near its ideas in demonstration. And, what that small percentage of life deemed “ideal” actually contributes to this planet, in contrast to the rest.

There is something fun and dream-inspiring about being or having eye-candy, yes. But it’s like candy. It shouldn’t be a steady diet.

Really, we are being ridiculous in our modern society. Think of the times when we lived in villages, say the times of William Wallace or even as late as the 1800s. We lived together in smaller quantities and beauty was more balanced because everyone got more “air time”. Travel was harder, and you saw fewer people. The value of an individual wasn’t strictly their image, because everyone else knew all about everything everyone did, adding substance to every rumour. There were family connections. There was nowhere to hide insincerity or maintain too much of a facade. You couldn’t be a bitch or a liar and not be pinned for it. And you didn’t see airbrushed perfection, you saw face-to-face.

In village times, we knew everyone in our community. We knew three generations out (as they still do in many third world and even second world places). We knew all our families’ friends. We knew their friends. We knew our town-regulars. We knew more about each beauty there was in the village, because it was “realtime” right before your eyes, and there was first-hand gossip to be had, which took away mystique. People were more forgiving because everyone knew someone with flaws, including themselves. Validity ruled the day. Visual and physical truth was just more readily accessible then.

Sure that lassie was lovely, but you could probably meet her rolley polley mom and see her future body shape predicted physically in front of you within the next couple days of meeting her.

(Unless you wanted to meet royalty, but let’s face it, royalty has on the whole not been famous for producing many attractive specimens.)

Beauty has always been sung about and valued, but back then we had enough time and space and experience to run into more real people around us to see the true beauty in each of them too. We weren’t pelted with perfection on billboards and television screens at every five paces. It wasn’t thrown in our face constantly while eating dinner. And food being scarce and hard-won, we would never have thought to toss our cookies to get more like an ideal we saw. To be “fat and fair” in those days was to show prosperity. Rosiness. Health. Someone who wasn’t going to die on you before age 25.

Now we plan on dying before our 30s of a wasting addiction (we all say that at 15) or plan on dying together in some fabulous daring suicide (we say that before our 20s) or we stuff ourselves out of depression and hopelessness into supertripleX-Large (we do that anytime) or are annihilating ourselves in small bits with plastic surgery or implanting objects in our bodies (we do that in our 30s and up).

All this because we’ve lost perspective and become deeply discouraged with our valuable, rosey, fat, healthy lives.

So really look at everyone in the next ten minutes. Give them all captions:
“Beautiful.” “Sexy.” And turn to yourself and see “Famous.” “Hot.” “Rich.”

My life involves a lot of adjustment, not the least of which is cultural shift, being married to a Korean guy. Having been with Asian families pretty much all my life, I can say with some authority that there are not enough sites that address white women marrying into Asian families. It’s always the other way around — a white guy with an Asian girl. There are lots of them in my Korean class. I’m the only one in the reverse role. And if you’re a white GUY with an Asian girl, your experience is SOooooo different.

You get to play provider of Mercedes Benzes.
I get to be the provider of baby sons (50/50 chance!) if I’m young enough (NOT) or …. welll….. maybe just food otherwise.

You get to be the big awkward white thing in the center of the family photos.
I get to be the big awkward white thing at the far right end of the family photos. Your advantage: You get left in. I can be trimmed off if need be.

When you go to a family gathering the first comment you get will be about sports or work.
Mine will be “Have you lost weight?” which of course means, honey, you’re too big.

But there are women who know how to work this Asian setup to its advantage, and they are GRANDMAS. The matriarchs. Yes!~ That’s what I need. Someone to teach me the secrets of cleverness and guilt-mongering, culinary wizardry and how to hold purse-strings. It can’t be in my own family, since they’re not here. I need a shrewd, savvy granny to show me how to be the neck that turns the head.

To Haimonees, Ah-Mas, A-Pos and Oba-sans everywhere. It’s the effort that counts.

How many White Girls and Asians does it take to screw in a light bulb?

1 white girl to stand and expect the Asian guy to screw it in.
1 Asian guy to stand and expect the white girl to screw it in.
1 Asian grandmother to look in the kitchen closet, find nothing, go down to the corner supply store, buy a lightbulb, then spend 15 minutes or more haggling with the shopowner over a proper price for a wooden ladder, be horrified at the price, pretend to walk away in disgust, pretend to ask the shopkeeper next door for his price on a wooden ladder, start to agree to the purchase, be dragged back by the first shopowner, hear the price on an aluminum ladder or a plastic stepstool, spend 15 more minutes asking various details about each, compare those details with the wooden ladder again, finally settle on a plastic stepstool, ring it up, disdainfully pretend to have still paid too much while counting change, spend 10 minutes meeting and greeting a friend she hasn’t seen for the last two weeks due to the friends’ illness, go back up the street, lug the stepstool back up the four flights of stairs, place the ladder, climb up, squint with her failing vision, and drop the light bulb.

****
I need a Haimonee now. One who can teach me the spectrum of spices, kim-chee making, bone soup, and various other disciplines. Post is open, because mine’s in Korea and my husband is culinarily challenged. I’ve tried American cuisine, no luck. Please apply via Friendster mail. We’re starving out here and I need some leverage.

I think in car-lengths nowadays mostly. Whenever I get a long enough stretch to just sit , I get to see the peculiar human confetti of Beverly Hills flutter past.

There was the day I saw the very tall, striking dreadlock-haired black man ride his bicycle. Against a sunny warm day, a balmy one, he was a kinetic sculpture of charcoal skin in a crisp cream linen suit, with most remarkable tan and beige boots of some expensive modern materials and design. They were an unusual streamlined shape. His boots of the future pedaled and pedaled his bright red old 1950s bicycle, with fat black tires, sashaying in and around the pegs of t-shirted pedestrian traffic on the white sidewalk. He was a Viennese waltz without sound, and ee cummings would have said so much depended on his red bicycle.

There are the boney blondes. So many many blah blah blah blonde skeletal jewelry-and-clothes hangers, all on the same cell phones, all with the same dark haired boyfriends, all in the same tan cars. They murmur all around of money money money.

There is Ms. Pink. She must be an old maiden, but still wrapped in her slim girlness. Each clear morning she waits for the bus in her pale pink skin and demure red hair with a different ensemble of pink clothes glowing underneath her pink paper parasol. She exudes dignity even in her cacophony of pinks, being an older Ms. On St. Patrick’s, there she was again with her pink dress and her pink shoes and her pink sweater and her pink purse. And her green hat.

There is the grey woman. She paces. She tails people. She writhes like a banshee in her dirty grey blankets, flinging scrappy dark wisps of arms and cursing — somehow completely one dirty grey color everywhere, even her hair and face a strange ash. How long did it take her to get that way, I wondered. Had she started at white and gone through the spectrum to end in its negative? What purple despair had moved her off an edge to this invisible end?

But I saw some going forward today. I saw only the backs of two identically teal-sheathed med student girls, future nurses or doctors perhaps. In the shadow of an office building their large black bodies rolled along in stride, the left a waterfall of braids, the right all nappy poofs, teal sails waffling in the breeze. I thought about their future. How far their wind would blow them, how much farther than their mommas’. And as I saw their future, they dashed off in unison to grab it out of the world’s grudging hands. The bus came sooner than they’d thought.

There’s this chick below us that is unique in my linguistic experiences. She arrives home at four in the morning most often, sometimes a little earlier or later. She and her probably completely dominated boyfriend throw their glass door open and she steps out onto her balcony below us on the enclosed courtyard with her cell phone flashing torment when we try to get that last 2 hours of needed sleep.

You must understand that our courtyard is like a giant metal trashcan in which sound bounces scientifically perfectly from one diagonal end to the other (a fact I’ve proved by angrily tracking down an ongoing alarmclock one morning, but that’s another story). It actually MAGNIFIES sound. It’s amazing. I can hear the murmur of a mom cooing her baby to sleep at the other end of the building.

But back to the cell chick at 4:30 in the dark wee hours. Her conversation is all in Korean, and I know some bits of Korean but not nearly enough to tell what it is. But you have to understand, she’s from Seoul, and she’s obviously watched every soap drama there is to be had in Korea, because she sounds just like them. They WEEP. They SWOON. THEY GUSH. and they WEEP and cry again. She makes a dramatic swooping rise and fall of her speech, particularly when she’s pouting and whining, which she does …. well, almost all the time. I’m sure she thinks it’s her signature style. She’s the drama diva extraordinaire of our nore-bang of a building.

Language is a curiosity of mine, I like it. And music and sound of all ilks, even to certain John Cage pieces. The Koreanness is not annoying to me. Her face, which I have seen, is not annoying.

But her voice is like trailing an ambulance. Picture your hair flying straight back and your eyes barely keeping closed in the G-force of it.

It’s the kind of grating sound I once noticed that Nancy Reagan had tried so hard to tone down, but that still clung on, making her hated by so many. But try turning it way up, both in pitch and volume, into a field call, into a whining anime brat of a cartoon. Let’s just say she sounds like she has pigtails without them and somebody just stole her Pocky.

We figured she had to be drunk from the pitch and rise and whine and fall and pout. Maybe she’s had too much soju? we thought. She seems to fall into whining fits, go back to giddy laughing, return to whining, followed by more wailing.

We waited in a pause. Maybe she’s just psycho? But that was after we had already decided she had to be muffled, stuffed into a bag and pitched off the balcony and her cell phone confiscated and picked clean of all its dingly-dong things.

If it were English:

Drunk Chick with Loud Mouth: Hey?!!! Heh-YUN wassup?? Are you coming out to party with us to tomorrow? I need you to cut my hair again, you gotta come. NOOOOOOOOOOO!! You gotta!!! YES REALLY GIRL, you GOTTA!!!

NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

HEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEAAAAAAAAAAA. Hell no! I don’t wanna! Heeee.

HUH???? who else is going? NO I didn’t take it. No that’s my belt, the pink one, and I left that blue one with YOU… huh???? AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!Did you get that one???

(—————pause long enough to lull you back into partial sleep——————–)

HUHHHHHHHHHH????!!!!! NO FUCKING WAY!!!!!!!!! (a gunshot could have been less painful to the ear)

Yeah I DID. YEAH YEAH YEAH. HEEEEE HEEEE hHHHHEEEEEEEE.
Oh NOOooooooooo don’t say THAT!!! You know he likes you!!!

NOooooo. Huh???? I gotta go…

Mumbling Boyfriend: memmmemmfnnmm mmmm mbmbmemm bmmmmbm.

Drunk Chick: WHYYYYYYYYY???? (starts to sound like she’s five years old and you just stomped on her birthday cake) I NEVER did… Why you always say THAT????? You always hate me. I know you do. YOU DO DON”T YOU!!! (cries and sobs in ridiculous tantrum like fits). YOU HATE ME.!!! WAAAAAAAAAAA!!!

Mumbling Boyfriend, noticing that everyone’s glass doors onto the courtyard are slamming shut: mmmm mmmfjfjmdmsj dfjmammda smsmmsmsm dddd. Memmnnf.

Drunk CHICK: I DIDN’T, I never DO THAT.. ….. I FUCKING HATE you, you know that? I hate you, you never let me do ANYTHING…. WHY do you hate me when I love you so much????? WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY?WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.
EAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHwhimper whimper AAAaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!

By now the Dad-guy across from us in the courtyard, who’s the noisiest member of the noisiest family in the bunch, who sleeps through anything because he has a snore like a chainsaw that we can all hear, is awake and he’s PISSED de la fuego. He opens up his glass door to yell something unrecognizable at her in Spanish.

I hiss out my window, “She’s ….. ummmmm…. (I pause)…. dang, how do you say that….La Senorita es barracho? barracha?”

I’m getting too old for this shit. Language lessons at 4:30 in the morning.

For the Recently Arrived Angelino

Sooner or later, or perhaps every day, you may have to take this dreaded route instead of the parking lots known as highways in the Los Angeles area. Here is the primer for your experience.

1) Realize that every carlength is a moral victory, and respect it with the appropriate battle yell. “HELL YEAH!!” is no longer enough. If you cannot muster something more than that, you have not had your Starbucks yet. Head for Highland.

2) The right lane is the only proper place to speed. There are in fact straightaway spots on Wilshire, but you must seize them. You must do this by hopping the stackups (busses in tandems or groups of threes which cluster in the right-most lane), while keeping an eye peeled to your far right for any pedestrians who might want to cross along the street that that IDIOT IN THE BUICK ahead of you will undoubtedly stop for when he decides to turn right at the next light without signaling.

3) Your shock absorbers were put there for a REASON. Potholes, drainage tilts and cross street dips got NUTHIN on you. Floor it. Don’t worry, there are no cops till you’re in the vicinity of The Beverly Hilton. When your control arms give out and land you in the ditch, I know a good cheap mechanic on 7th.

4) Never travel behind anything you can’t see past. That includes EVERY SUV. Your mission is clear.

5) Memorize the buses and where they stop. This way you can avoid being the chump stuck in the dead zone behind the bus that is local (#20, among others) and instead find yourself zinging along behind the Rapid (#720). Remember that line in The Joy Luck Club where Auntie Ling-Ling says if you play mah jong and don’t keep everything in your head, it’s just like Jewish mah jong? Well, this is the automotive equivalent of that. Most would never tail a bus, but You’ll know WHEN to tail it and WHEN NOT TO.

If you don’t remember where they all stop, and prefer to play brainless mah jong, you must rely even more heavily on #4, and you’ll miss vast opportunities. Actually at that point you belong in the middle lane with all the Nissans and Lexuses and other midroad sleepyhead vehicles with AAA stickers.

6) Road rage is something we haven’t got time for. No one bothers flipping the bird here, they just shoot you or collect insurance for letting you follow too closely and crash into them. Don’t do anyone any favors. We’ve no time for colorful outbursts. They’d ruin the botox, anyway.

7) In order to alleviate the temptation for #6, you must have the appropriate standard equipment in your car, i.e., a headset and cell phone. THAT is what you do with your time in the areas in which the right lane is looking like the middle lane. Use your Quality Time when there is no way out. Happify and maximimize your life, since most of it will be spent right here.
Bicyclists deserve courtesy on this street only if they can maintain a minimum of 35 mph at all times. All others deserve a good honk at close range.

9) Find a cutter if you can. This means a young ghetto gearhead with a rice rocket, a mad granny with a good shift, or a clueless young hottie with a speedy sports car, who are willing to make insane cutoffs to weave through the holes, — alert, irreverent and properly impatient. Use them, they are your friends. Tail them like there’s no tomorrow. Re: Tickets, see #3.

10) Vehicles to note and stay away from:

A. Vehicles that tell you Jesus is Dios and you must read the biblio. Not because they’re religious, but because they’re too polite and will inevitably stop at the first sign of yellow. And that accordian polka music they’re listening to won’t clue them in to the approaching firetrucks either.
B. Anything that has a gear shift stick longer than 20″ (Metro Bus, food truck, cement mixer, postal vehicle, Fed Ex, El Gardener Dude)
C. Balding fat guy in red mid-life crisis car on cell. He’s retired or consulting, and could care less how soon he’ll get anywhere. Or else, he’s busy pitching a film.
D. Dazed and confused neck-craner pausing at each corner. They’re just trying to find Rodeo Drive shopping parking.
E. Just about anything Buick.
F. Majority of those with Bush stickers.
G. Anyone who cannot see over the steering wheel. But you knew that.

11) Places to take out your phone (see #7): In front of various schools, and particularly 10 blocks in either direction of La Cienega.

12) Best times to drive: basically between 12:30am and 5:00am. That’s about it, sorry.

13) Place to report potholes that nearly swallowed your vehicle but were narrowly missed by dodging the cars parked in NO STOPPING zones:

http://ladpw.org/general/faq/index.cfm?action=NewQuestion&AppSubject=Request%3A%20Pothole&Category=Roads&ReqDivision=RMD&crossStreet=1

Good luck my friends.

I am so inexperienced with techie and web things it isn’t even remotely humourous. It’s true I’m older than the web generation, but plenty of people my age do just fine at it — I still have no website after all these years and probably never will. I try to make a bunch of reduced sized image pics for upload to a future website and get bored halfway through the process. I try to make a layout plan and end up too overwhelmed with choices and YAAAAAAAWWWWWWn oh man it’s been three hours I have to go to bed.

I decide valiantly to make a simple Friendster blog and the damn thing won’t come up with anything but a header URL. I make a stab at understanding what Typepad is, I read the help stuff; no, sorry, it’s still pretty much not giving me a clue. What’s all this jargon mean? Have I got these things? Do I need these things? What am I DOING? At least I have design friends who savvily told me the problem was not with me, but with the typical Friendster overload problem.

Oh yeah. That was why I left Friendster in the first place, I’d forgotten.

But here I am again trying to make another stab at it. Why? Self therapy? I hope not. To connect somehow with someone who’s exactly like me but perhaps lives in Ohio or some godforsaken whitewashed corner of Georgia? Probably. Blogging is becoming the new, freer, better looking, and more flexible AOL world that once was. Everyone and their dad has pics up of their vacations and their kids and their ramblings about their daily psyche.

I ask a friend what she thinks would be good topics for me to put out on my blog, since I don’t want to bog friends down with ramblings. She shows me her ramblings, and I realize she’s fine with ramblings, which was not my point. Oh well, on to the next friend’s opinion.

I begin the ramblings of mind in a blog to see what kind of fish you can catch with it.

Who is this person anymore? There’s a limit to how crazed I can be these days, but there is still a hunger in the head for those ventures I had, and hopefully new ones.

I went to a doctor the other day. Something I have not done in years — I don’t actually trust medicine. But things were cropping up: I wasn’t sleeping more than two hours without interruption, my stress level in the day was immense, the pounds were pouring on though nothing tasted good, home was awkward, friends in this town had still not been found. It was a beige cement wasteland by day and a recurrent field of green in my dreams, past events, past people, all flowing in to try to comfort me, only to go awry in the night and I’d wake once again.

So I went with a list of symptoms in hand that he didn’t want to read, this tan and virulent doctor, and I explained that it was a holistic thing, it wasn’t just one definable problem, it was kind of cyclicle thing, you know, and I’m hot and I’m cold, and there’s this too and I poured out my panic on the stainless steel for him. He was such a cheerful powerful life force kind of guy, such a car-salesman strong person, who looked a little like Joe Montegna.

“Well”, he said, aiming his gaze into my green contacts, and then being very distracted by them, commenting on them cheerfully, trying to distract me with a compliment, and then resuming: “…well, if your tests for diabetes and any thyroid deficiency come back negative, I have to tell you what I think it is: You’re depressed.”

This was a jaw-dropper for me. That happened to other people, to my sister, to my mother, to my ex friends, to my bevy of gothkids across the bleak wasteland looking for friends at age 15 — not to ME.

He went cheerily on describing the various medications they have for such things these days and that it’s not what it used to be…. I was thunderstruck that this garbage was spewing out. This is why I detest medicine. This is not about healing, after all, it’s about patching the symptoms. I had known that before I went, but SHEESH, this was a moral insult to me. He couldn’t have known that, humanmechanic that he was.

But in weeks afterward, I have been picking myself apart (when I’ve had enough sleep). So much more has to happen. I had been putting little effort into rebuilding myself after the fall of my life in Seattle. I’ve had no energy and no direction, and I need a map.

So that’s what I’ll be doing now. I brilliantly beaned myself with a simple revellation the other day while lying on the sick couch in our company restroom sickroom, which we all use for naps when we’re out of it.
Thinking comes more easily to me in the madrugada before sleep.

You’re not doing anything forward.

Everything is looking backward, everything is being carved out in comparison to the past, past people, past loves, past deaths, past happy places.

You’re not doing anything that plans for any new future.

And that was when I planned to do more planning. And I’m planning on it. Here.