msbehave

I was pleased to see Bright Star by Campion today. I almost never get moved by male actors. But the man who played the role of Keats was entirely attractive that I was astonished by this actor’s ability to incorporate humanity in the role. More about this movie later.

Here is another porn for your taste, porn for American Caucasian female to reconfirmed their supremacy to someone like her mail order bride friend. The marriage institution for Chinese women might not be anything more than what you imagine about long term prostitution and maid, or as the article described with objectification to the fullest, a mail order bride. Still I found the author’s tireless interest in wedding attires novel. Isn’t this author who made such a super big deal out of marriage, and a dress a bride gets to put on is mostly the reason for it.

To summarize the article, the author was releasing a big sigh of ‘thank God I am not Chinese like her, the biggest bargain of human bodies! Crass!’ But do we have to read this kind of article once again as if that was a hidden secret only she got to discover?

I was totally unimpressed by the movie Charlie Wilson’s War, but there was a scene that literally blew me away just by three seconds. The millionaire woman from Texas played by Julia Roberts walked away saying ‘Sluts’ with a big smile to Wilson’s proudly feminine office staffs and left them totally devastated. This unapologetic portrayal of a woman with money captures the dead on fact of the world; what makes women sluts and whores are their economic conditions, not their attitudes toward sex. If you are broke, you are put down no matter what, and when a woman is put down, she becomes a whore. The ways women are used physically and conceptually are no different anywhere you go. But rich women’s sexuality never becomes a cause of degradation.

Yes, this world is shit. Like we did not know?

Question.

This is porn, isn’t it?

If so, we have to question more What do we have to blame?

Why the hell could the concept of ‘interracial’ coupling call upon those pornographic images?

To top it off, why do people have to target their date search to people based upon their ethnic backgrounds?

I never ‘look for’ sex based on their races. The vice versa, though, such as I was sexually aroused by certain elements based on their cultural background occasionally occurs. Do you end up fucking someone because he was from, say, Turkey? Join the club.

But it usually is an insult if someone treats you as something reduced to a country’s name, or one’s ethnicity. If all the men who courted you are more or less the same category—fetishists—then, you only have two choices,

Going insane or killing yourself,

don’t you?

I guess I slept unnecessarily long today. I had such a funny dream that I cracked up after I woke up. I am at work—night job—and serving a man, who was my adviser/supervisor of my school. Other men are around and I overhead them say that I was speaking in Polish. I felt insulted because I was speaking in Russian and that they assumed that I was speaking in a bastardized form of their language was supposed to be based on their prejudice against Asians in general such as Asians are linguistically limited or illogical. So I had to turn to them and corrected their misunderstanding by saying,

‘I AM SPEAKING IN RUSSIAN, NOT IN POLISH,’

in Russian.

I was fully contemptuous when I stated it. Hilarious.

I discovered a ticket price of a theater in Bay Ridge is 9 bucks so I almost went out to see Whip It! But I did not in the end. Come to think of it, I am loaded with things that I have to take  care of. I have two, or possibly three, legal cases that I have to be prepared with and been up to my neck with reading materials. It is a mystery that I still come up with diversions one after another, or it is only a human mechanism.  At least it seems to be significantly mine.

The reason that Bay Ridge came up to my mind was that I happened to be there yesterday, and guess what? The closest branch, Park Slope Library will be closed for another two years. I just discovered it yesterday in Bay Ridge Library where I had my hold kept and went to retrieve. Apparently it was not the first time for me to be in the area, but it might be just the second or barely third time to be around in day time. So now I could see how undesirable the area is to my taste; it is predominantly the Italian neighborhood, or all those who were talking loud enough for me to hear were Italian guys who were roaming and yelling in the street proudly in their distinctive  Brooklyn accent, bossing around with the back drop of Muslim women in black from head to toe. This view with the almost magnified contrast made me think. It has also increasingly become Muslim area, though they increase as another ‘minority.’

Yet I observed a couple of women with hijab working behind counters in places such as

a discount store

a travel agency

and they were visible.

In Starbucks, however, no Muslim woman with hijab that I saw.

I was shocked to discover a movie costs me $12.50 nowadays. I have to admit that I am away from theater views even without the reason but now I have to make the conscious choice that I don’t go see the movies in a theater because of the price. It just stresses me out so much that it would not fulfill its diverting purpose any more. When it comes to a throw away peak that I might have resorted to otherwise, such as today’s entry title, I definitely needed to steer myself away from a box office as soon as I learned the charge. consequently, I did not see the movie tonight.

I realized that I missed America, America Monday night, perhaps because of intensive Freud reading. Now I can’t even afford to go see films, I may as well have any therapeutic activities. For me, going back to Freud’s classic texts is it, not any of those late comers interpretations of his works. I believe even more that he was a physician who contacted human psyche by accident. We are not supposed to idealize his discoveries like a cult.

If anyone has seen a Muslim woman with a hijab — the head scarf— working behind the counter in Starbucks, let me know. As far as I researched, no one was ever observed in the area that I covered, which was mostly in the east coast US. Given the huge Muslim population residing here, though, the demography called upon my interest initially and resentment later. While no woman in hijab has been seen in Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts has the very visible Muslim population among their employees.

Any working explanation that I come up with so far is that Starbucks might have the obvious avoidance from the very visible sign of Muslim population, and they could screen those with hijab legally by asserting its ‘dress code’ even if confronted.

Dunkin’ Donuts’ starting wage is $7.25 hourly whereas Starbucks pays $9.00 from the training process. This might be just a tip of the iceberg, and a chicken and egg situation as well. All the visible Muslim women with hijab seemingly end up in those lowest paying job and the menial openings tend to accept those because the desperate workers make the best employees as anyone knows. Thus the current structure of Muslim women’s hardship is formed and enforced day by day.

Then, why don’t we organize ‘let’s wear hijab day’ and go get an interview from Starbucks, regardless of our religion and creed, in order to make it our simple fashion statement and unburdened the political meaning of hijab imposed upon the Muslim women?

Shoplifting from American Apparel is not enough. I know you know how repulsive those chain stores are and as if to excuse everything disgusting about themselves including their overpriced pieces of rag, they are triumphantly claiming ’sweatshop free.’

I just saw this disturbing copy ‘buy her bag not her body,’ in front of a boutique in SoHo the other day. Because I was instantly disturbed by this unclear, insufficient but apparently provocative and visceral message, despite my company’s suggestion that we go in the store to inquire where they were coming from by the message, I had to come back to the spot alone so that I could find out about what they were and what the message was about.

It turned out that they straightforwardly mean as it goes; they are selling ethnic themed bags to ‘fight against sex trafficking’ that takes place mostly South East Asia, or to be precisely in Cambodia. Some of them that attracted my attention–purely esthetically— are bags made from ‘rice bag material’ that had Vietnamese words on them. Each piece is for $25. Given it is hip, seemingly sturdy and if you can contribute to the positive social cause by purchasing them, it is quite a good deal. Well, good luck.

I might go back to them to buy the bag for myself but after all I would rather have someone to pay for my body. That is my conclusion. And I want them to pay by money, not by bag, nor by social cause, marriage, straight job opportunity, social acceptance, which are  all fronted as alternative forms of payment to obscure the solid transaction of prostitution. You should pay me by money, don’t put any other front.

A co-worker from my temp workplace — straight day job — asked me out one day. So I said, I am not going to buy you a meal, shithead. Besides I have to be here until seven. He said, OK.

By the time we split that night, I was tired although had felt completely comfortable during the whole time we were together. He was only 22 years old, and asked me out believing I was even younger than him. Wow, no wonder I didn’t get respect from my colleagues as someone of my age. In the meantime, this date/co-worker was a handsome and tall film major student. He almost always looked like he did his best to ruin his looks; he seemed to want to make himself look just awful, though he was not quite successful in it.

Still I had no plan to get involved with any man whatsoever, so I had to put an end to the night saying, I will get on the subway from the other station.

He did not want to split with me yet and began subtly nagging, but I insisted that I had to take a train from union square. He said that I could get on the same train in the end even from 14th st. station, where we were.

It is OK, I am just used to the union square station, I said. While I was staring at him in the dimly lit face, I felt some condensed fear. It flashed in my mind, and went.

I said, I will see you tomorrow?

I saw him descend the stairs into the 14th st. station.

Since then he never showed up at work. My heart sank.

But it did not even occur to me until this week that he did not come back to work because he had felt rejected so badly by me that night. I finally recognized that his uncanny disappearance from work had something to do with me when I managed to get his number from a friend in common and called and left a message, to receive a voice mail back by some stranger woman saying, this is not the person whom you are trying to get in contact with, so don’t call this number any more.

I did not mean to hurt him just because we went home separately that night, to say the least because I went to the other station. I did not have to, or want to, make the occasion so finalizing one, if not prepared to start anything romantic with him yet. There were always another day/night, wasn’t it?

I got shocked and what is more, puzzled because I never thought there was any reason that he had to end up avoiding me or showing any aversion to me. But I learned that he was super-sensitive for rejection and I might have hurt him badly just because I did not get on the same train.

He is young, even younger than Mr. Tao Lin. What is more, this young (ex-) friend/co-worker of mine was also from Florida. I feel like any piece of advice that a young man as himself could offer for this bizarre aftermath of a frozen yogurt date. I wished I could stay in touch with him after the temp period was over and maintain something nice and hopefully innocent with this man.

Now I will start another day job in another work place from next monday. I still carry his number that I ’should not’ use to reach him, if I followed what a sequence of events indicated, and odds are he still knows my number, unless he has discarded it by now.

According to what I briefly got filled in, the recent storms that took the city by something mango, or something berries, have already been phenomena in West Coast for years, therefore, nothing new. In any case, I am one of the victims in East Coast this summer, and I have been spending almost ten bucks daily on this frozen yogurt obsession. Since I have got this addiction that I need to kill anyway, if not in any %$&^mango or %$#@ berries’ business hours, and does not really matter to me which store, for they are all the same—I occasionally had to step in one of those 24 hours delis for their compromised or secondary form of off peak frozen yogurt consumption.

So it was one of those extremely late/early hours that one of those Korean deli clerks came on to me when I rushed in asking if they had frozen yogurt at six o’clock in the morning; he instantly took a liking to me and seemed to decide that he would marry me whereas I was really running around to fix this addiction after having sold crack and sex in another ethnic escort agency that I had begun working run also by his fellow country people.

After I had eaten a cup of unprofessionally made yogurt in the seating area in the second floor—the toppings were practically not living up to what the idea conveyed usually;  they were buried under yogurt instead of being on the very top of it—he came to me with another cup of yogurt saying ‘this is service,’  and touched my shoulder (!) This Korean clerk who overtly and openly appraised me  and seemingly determined to court by offering another round of yogurt for free. Since I knew their characteristic behavior in courting and mating— they matter-of-factly decide and would not admit women’s side of opinion about the situation, to say the least to seek for an agreement from women— this needed some extra caution. Because in the linguistic and cultural context, the word ’service’ means ‘for free’, or ‘on the house’ , I might have been thrown in a good way and got warmed up, only if I were a stranger to their custom/ Unfortunately I was a bizarrely twisted insider of their culture and this supposedly nice gesture only got my guard higher for this man’s intrusion. I at the same time felt bad for this twist came from that I was an eternal outsider who got involved in their criminal diaspora too much too long.

Since I had already eaten a full cup already, this offer became not only meaningless but stupid. I was literally fed up with another anachronistic and brutal operation that night—and it’s no laughing matter for we deal the felony material. We are always so close to both known and unknown danger. All I wanted to ask him was to give me a break. I had enough of Korean anachronism, their scary patriarchical structure and desperate greed justified by their fanatic spirituality in the business.

Though I was thinking of the opposite, I just took the cup saying thanks though telling him at the same time that I had already eaten enough. He asked my name, and I gave him my current trick name in the Korean agency. He gave me his full schedule in the store–probably to insinuate that he expected me to come by to see him again (!) That was all he could handle in his limited English. And the pitch of his voice abruptly raised when he started his cultural guidance to say who had established the currently thriving, flourishing frozen yogurt business. He did not mention any individual name or any company but just one word to include everything he knew about frozen yogurt.

“Korean! Frozen Yogurt, Korean make frozen yogurt!”

I sighed and got back to reading that I had been at before he came to interrupt. I was enough tired of dealing with crazy clients and abusive treatment from the Korean agency, who happened to be run by the frozen yogurt people as this guy claimed, beamed by his pride. With no energy left even to laugh, I felt relieved that I did not give him any chance to go into any more rudimentary and silly inquisition that would possibly reduce me into any nation’s name and I was content by the fact that I did not let any word out to indicate I also understood Korean he was speaking in even when in English, supposedly.

Recently my assimilation reached the level that I wish I did not know a word from the language, and you would understand if you lived a life of an Asian woman that equated ethnic escorts.