toastykitten

Am home sick today, but I can't sleep, so I give you links!

• Latest issue of Jump Cut - this month's theme is China and China diaspora film. I have not read this yet, but it seems interesting, and an academic dissection of Kung Fu Hustle sounds like fun.
  
• GreenCine interview with the stars of Hot Fuzz. I can't wait to see this movie.
• Mike Daisey talks to the guy who dumped water on his notes. I really admire Mike Daisey's approach to how he handled this. Plus his act was really funny and it's stupid that he got so rudely interrupted like that.
• I usually like 60 Minutes, and I'll even concede Anderson Cooper can be pretty. But I hated his "Stop Snitching" segment, in which he blames hip hop for being the cause of black people not talking to police. I mean, really, it wasn't maybe Rodney King or Amadou Diallo? Or even just the collective and justified distrust of police that police have done nothing to mitigate? Hip hop is not just Cam'ron, okay? I wouldn't talk to the police, either, unless I absolutely had to. I have no street cred to protect, but where I come from I've yet to see the police live up to their actual job descriptions. It was overall just lazy, lazy journalism. I'd go on but I think I would explode.

I am so spoiled. Mark is making me dinner, and I got home-made cupcakes from one of my co-workers. I have the lazy:

• As a small present to myself, I bought Missbehave magazine. (Warning: website has music.) It is so adorable. It's like Sassy, but with hip hop self-confidence instead of indie insecurity. It's even published right out of Brooklyn, and the editor-in-chief's last name is Choi! So nice.
• I typically implement a news ban around my birthday. I have no desire to re-live the horrors of past years, but I couldn't avoid seeing the news about the Virginia Tech gunman. I read some article (I forget where) which naively described the feeling of relief that each ethnic group found out it "wasn't us". Which is such bullshit, if people actually think most Americans give a shit about the difference between Korean and Chinese or Vietnamese. It's all the same to them.
  
• Really good post on the suck that is American immigration.

I kind of bluntly told a friend that I didn't think she lost any weight, and I got a sarcastic, "Gee, thanks, Kim." I didn't even mean it as an insult - and frankly, I don't think she should have lost any weight. I thought she looked fine. The conversation moved on from there, but I felt bad about opening my stupid mouth.

God, I hate navigating female self-esteem. Because none of us have any.

Some links of interest:
Blade got cancelled.
Tutoring gets outsourced to India. Tutoring costs $25 now? What? Nobody told me that when I was asked to tutor kids!
Blogging teachers get fired, for, um, telling the truth.

Yesterday I spent nearly two hours in traffic, my left foot stuck to the clutch, in order to get to Oakland to see my parents for dinner. My legs were practically numb when I got out of the car.

While I was there, I helped Kaitlin fill out her bazillion and one forms for school. I'm really annoyed that all of the forms were only in English, when the school is well aware that a large portion of their students are recent immigrants and have parents who cannot read in English, and may have no idea what they're actually signing. I explained as best I could to Kaitlin's mom what she was signing for, but I'm kind of aghast at some of what they're signing:

1. A free-lunch/reduced lunch form. This is actually fine - my sister and I filled these out, too when we were in elementary. I looked at her lunch menu for the month, and it's awesome - they get stuff like yogurt and whole-wheat grilled cheese sandwiches. Kaitlin, however, was adamant that they didn't get any of the food that was on the menu, but she couldn't tell me what they actually got for lunch. So who knows how successful this healthy lunch thing is?
2. A textbook form. This is ludicrous - this form states that parents will pay between $30 and $60 if a textbook is lost. The majority of the school's students are from low-income families! How the hell will they be able to afford that? Anyway, if Kaitlin loses her textbooks, I or any one of my sisters could cover it, but still. I warned Kaitlin not to lose her books.
3. An opt-out form for sharing parents' information in some public directory. Basically, Kaitlin's parents are automatically on some sort of list where they will receive junk mail unless they opt out. Arrgh - the only times my sister and I got handed an opt-out form, it was for sex education. That, I could see actually being fine, but this is not.
4. A form where we had to put down the parent/guardian's SSN. I don't remember what it was for, but I remember thinking it was stupid.
5. A form about absences/tardiness. The public schools must be getting really worried about losing their money. It's a lot stricter than when we were in school - if a child is more than 30 minutes late to class, it counts as an unexcused absence for the entire day. If a child is late more than three times in a week, or absent more than two times in a week, then they have to make it up with Saturday detention from 8:30-12:30 and helping out the school with gardening and stuff. Free labor??? Parents are not allowed to drop kids off at school before 8:20 because there is no adult supervision. Hello??? People have jobs to get to, where they'll be reprimanded, and possibly fired if they're late! It's an even bigger possibility for this student population, since most of them work low-wage jobs whose employers don't really give a shit about their employees. A child cannot legally be excused for anything other than "illness or death in the immediate family". If a child is out for more than three days, than a note from the doctor is required. Follow-up verification from the school by phone will be done. (Thank god they didn't implement this part when I was in school...) If a child has more than 3 unexcused absences, then the child will be classified as a "truant" and further steps with the school administration will be taken.
6. The emergency card. Standard.
7. The earthquake form. Wouldn't the emergency card contain all relevant information anyway? When I compared the two, there really wasn't any difference.

People who make cracks about Asian drivers to me WILL GET HIT.

For what it's worth, most of the time, people who do stupid things with their cars in front of me, like cutting me off right as I'm exiting the freeway forcing me to slam on my brakes and pray that there isn't another car behind me, are white guys on cell phones.

Especially now that Guys Gone Wild exists. Favorite title is "Dude, Where's My Pants?"

Other things bouncing in my head:

You know that annoying guy in Office Space who says "Mmmmkay?" all the time? I met the real-life version of him in a very long meeting this week. He is just as annoying in real life.

Random people's opinions on immigration are really pissing me off. None of them seem to get that any changes in the law will also affect legal immigrants, almost certainly not in a good way.

Superman Returns will be on IMAX.

Mark's parents and grandparents are coming tomorrow. Mark previously thought they were coming last week, so I assisted him in the middle of a cleaning frenzy even though I was pretty sick. The good thing about cleaning last week is that there's not much left to do tonight. (And he is doing most of it.)

For whatever reason, lately, I've been resenting helping out with the cleaning. I think I'm just annoyed because even though I spend a lot of time here, I don't live here, and I (rightly or wrongly) don't feel like it should be my responsibility. Maybe I'm just being bratty.

The more I learn about the healthcare industry the more it depresses me.

I finished Danny, Champion of the World, by Roald Dahl. There are a couple of stories taken straight from his autobiography, Boy, and one chapter about the Big Friendly Giant, which would later turn into its own book. It's fascinating watching how the stories inspire more stories.

I hate PG&E. Stupid privatized utilities. (What, you thought California was liberal?) They have not managed to keep the power on continuously for a straight month. Last week, there was a power outage at my office. This week, Mark's power went out.

We just finished having dinner with angeeela and some other friends - it was, as usual, yummy, and we got to meet the owner's cute daughter. She recognizes us now, and is always friendly - we always bring people in to eat there because a. it's French, therefore it is good food, and b. it's so home-y, and c. it is relatively cheap.

Our second and final day in Portland started off slowly. While printing out our ticket confirmations for the flight out that day, we ran into a glitch - I got assigned a seat, but Mark got what was, according to United, a "Departure Management Card". The DMC instructed you to wait at the gate for your seat assignment or for if you were stand-by. Mark bought his ticket from United several weeks before I did.

Mark called the airline, and spent nearly half an hour trying to figure out if he had a seat or not. The customer service representative kept talking around him in circles, trying to avoid the word "confirmation", and eventually Mark broke it down to him: "I am going to ask you a DIRECT question. When I get to the airport, and I do not want to be stand-by, I do not want to be offered stand-by, and I ask the person at the gate if I have a confirmed seat in 10A, will I be able to get on the plane? YES OR NO. And I would like your employee ID number or some identification so that I can refer to you if I have trouble at the gate." Finally the guy confirmed that he had a seat on the plane.

Did I mention that the first time Mark tried to explain his problem, the customer service rep looked at his flight from San Francisco to Portland? Not from Portland to San Francisco, which is what he was asking about. And when he pointed that out, the rep get all testy with him.

This isn't the first time it happened, either - last time it happened, we woke up at 6 in the morning and I drove him to the airport. Then an hour and a half later I got a phone call from Mark saying that United overbooked his flight and that he would have to go back to the airport eight hours later. And I had to go pick him up and drive him back. This wasn't some vacation thing, either - it was corporate travel to a short conference, and time taken out meant that he had less time to prepare for his stuff at the conference. He lost nearly a day's work because he couldn't be at that conference. United offered him some compensation, but still - I don't think it's any way to do business. And especially not with your corporate customers, who don't have the kind of time that they seem to think stand-by passengers do. Conferences won't stop just because you got pushed off a flight.

Anyway, so Alice made breakfast for us. Man, foodies are awesome. Zack and Alice are so endearingly liberal it's cute. I noticed that they had a ton of Aveda and Body Shop stuff, and Alice's eggs were from "Vegetarian-fed, cage-free" chickens. Her bacon had "forty percent less fat than regular bacon", and it actually tasted better! She explained that they'd probably cut the meat from a different side of the stomach than normal bacon.

Mark and I made plans to meet up with his friend Matt, who works at IBM. Matt doesn't have a car, so we had to wait for him to shower up and get on the train first. We spent nearly half an hour looking for a place to eat - it seemed like every restaurant we went to was closed. Finally we ended up at a seafood grill place. Along the way, we passed by some street festival - I think it was Pride weekend or something, but I didn't want to believe it because it looked kind of sad. There was hardly anyone there, and the people who were there were just sort of milling around with no energy. It's nothing like it'll be here in San Francisco.

Oh, and we did not get smited. Perhaps there wasn't enough energy.

I fall in love with places so easily. I could see myself living there, but I haven't confirmed that they have any good dim sum, and their produce doesn't seem to be as good as what we get in the Bay. I love walking around all the old church buildings, though, and I love all the greenery. I love that the blocks are so short, and that there's a lot of interesting literature. I love how laid-back it is - time seems so slow and mellow compared to the way it is in San Francisco, where everyone's sort of bouncing off the walls with energy.

We left early to ensure that Mark would get a seat. It was a good thing we did, because less than an hour after we arrived, the people at the gate started informing other stand-by passengers that they were kicked off the flight.

Dear Senate,

I just read that you decided to make English the national language of the U.S.

1. Fuck you.
2. And FUCK YOU Senator Salazar: Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., introduced an alternative amendment that Democrats who opposed Inhofe's bill hoped would draw enough senators from Inhofe's bill to defeat it. Salazar's proposal said the U.S. government "shall preserve and enhance the role of English as the common and unifying language of America."

I'm sorry; I just can't make any coherent commentary when I read the news these days other than "Fuck you, you fucking fucks".

I got really pissed off reading slashdot today. Man, slashdotters sure are *confident* in their ability to get another job, and in their certainty that people in unions - people like my dad, their nurses, their teachers, their firefighters are just total lazy ass fuckers only in unions so they don't have to do any "real" work.

I think I am a masochist.

I really want to see Death and the Compass for two reasons: 1. It's got Doctor Who in it! 2. It's based on one of my favorite Jorge Luis Borges short stories.

I finished Mind of My Mind by Octavia Butler a few days ago. I was on a Butler kick for the past few weeks, rereading the Xenogenesis series, and Wild Seed, then I bought Mind of My Mind. I'm starting to see common threads throughout the two series, and remembered just how much I loved her protagonists - the thing they all have in common is that drive to survive. I remember this being somewhat of an obsession for her; people in her books compromise themselves and their morals a lot, in order to just live.

Right now I'm reading Women Romantic Poets, 1785-1832. It's the era of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats. Where Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats are all very emotional and idealizing the pastoral and concerned with the "sublime", Women Romantic Poets are overall a pretty hilarious lot, with one moralistic exception. There are poems in the form of Scottish drinking songs, poems about classist prejudices, poems that make fun of the rituals of "romance", and domestic poems about raising babies. The Scottish drinking songs are my favorite so far.

My apartment almost looks clean.