middle class guilt

Well, I guess things have happened to me recently.

I just got my Prius 2006. Google sponsors $5000 for the purchase of a Prius, and with a tax credit of $3000 given out for those purchased in the early part of 2006, it's really a pretty good deal. It's a bit too trendy, I concur -- it did take me a year before I reluctantly started using the iPod that Google gave me -- but for once, partaking in a trend actually benefits the environment. How convenient.

On the morning after I picked up my Prius, I was rear-ended.

I hate driving new cars, for all the obvious reasons. I'm happy whipping my '97 Corola around, but whenever I'm driving my Prius, I can't stop picturing a wayward car ramming directly into my side, killing me instantly and worse, cracking the paint and requiring thousands to repair. Sadness falls upon the earth. At my funeral, people gather and whisper softly to each other, "that car only had 300 miles on it, tops. Imagine how much it'll cost to repaint." For me, it seems that middle class guilt will not only be repaid with an ironic loss of things I've purchased to secure my middle class status. On top of that, there must always be certain, horrible death.

These are the thoughts that occupied me as I pulled up to the intersection, stopping at the red light. A few moments, a jerk and a bump later, I was outside of my car investigating the dent.

It happened in East Palo Alto, the slums of the Bay Area. Accordingly, as I got out of my car to face the perpetrator of our little accident, I was met with the most polite resident of EPA, incredibly worried and profusely apologetic. I was dazed and confused, trying to calm him down while jotting down his phone and license plate numbers. There was only the smallest of dents on my rear bumper, and I said my good-bye quickly, with a promise to call him later today. I drove away with a smirk. Middle class guilt. Ha! I only got a little dent!

I got a quote from a local auto body shop for repairing the bumper. It was a breath-taking six hundred bucks. Jorge had braked at the light, but with the ground being wet -- and Californians being unaccustomed to rain -- his car slid forward regardless, and gently bumped into mine. The damage was small enough that he really didn't want the insurance companies to be involved. But six hundred bucks? I didn't think he could pay six hundred bucks. And I know this because he lives in EPA, drives a beat-up mustang, and can't-afford-six-hundred-bucks was the best stereotype I could come up with.

I called him with a cringe. "Six hundred dollars." Silence followed. Inevitably he spoke up. "I, it was, it was such a small dent. I don't think it's worth six hundred dollars."

Of course it wasn't. Middle class guilt is now dancing in the room, flashing stereotypes before my eyes. A decent, poor but hard-working man with a bit of bad luck, running into a new, yuppie car of middle class me, who demands unreasonable repair costs to keep his precious car spanking new, and the man spanking poor. The six hundred bucks will take him months to accumulate, and will be used in service of keeping the rich rich and the poor poor. It's like forcing someone who lost both legs as a child to lick your toe.

"I think it's too expensive too", I followed quickly. "Tell you what, I'll try going to a few different auto body shops and see if I can't find a better price."

Anything to make the toe more palatable, I guess.

A few days and many moments later, we stood at another auto body shop. The repairman offered to pop out the dent for sixty bucks, and we quickly agreed to the attempt. He tried, and he failed. The dent is less obvious, but still very much in existence.

"I could also sand it down and repaint it, which will make it look brand new", the repairman offered. "That'll take $350."

All eyes were on me. Am I going to leave it be, accept the existing but hard-to-spot dent and cost Jorge only $60, or be an asshole and demand the full $350?

"It's really pretty hard to spot", Jorge noted. "But I understand it's brand new, and I understand if you want to sand it down. I just want to do the right thing here."

I can see him lifting his head off the floor, pulling his body forward with his arms, his only means of transport. The right thing for him to do would be to pay the costs necessary to restore my car to the same condition as before the accident. But what's the right thing for me to do?

I hesitated. I didn't care about the dent, really -- God knows many of them are on the way. But it felt like he should pay the $350. It felt like that's how responsibilities fall. That's how the world works. I took off my socks and lifted up my foot.

"I think...", I cringed, and kept cringing as I said it. "I think I'd like to sand it down." The foot is right before his face, his neck strained to meet it in the air.

"Okay", he muttered. He took out his wallet, and counted his money. One hundred, two hundred, three hundred.

One lick, two licks, three.

Yes, I'm a terrible person. I promised to get him a Google shirt, to decorate him with the emblem of my success, a mockery of a sympathetic gesture. The shirt should say, "I licked a middle-class man's toe, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt." On the back of the shirt will be a sticker, secretly and jokingly applied by me, that says "This man is poor. Kick him."

And so the affair ends. Middle class guilt sits across from me in the room, smirking. "You'll never be rid of me", it mouths, completely satisfied with the loud, droning noise as the system churns forward. Before disappearing into thin air for a while, it blinked, its eyes shining with the promise of my demise, an ironic, justifying collapse of my economic status.

Oh, and certain, horrible death.

me talk one day

Yeah, it's been a while.

I am currently a victim of a series of impeccably timed mistakes, all small but fatal. I had decided that today -- yes, today! -- would be the day when I finally work on my personal statement. I had been asking around for a nice cafe for this purpose, and was recommended this one. Unfortunately, I had been running my laptop without recharging it for a while -- my first mistake. I didn't realize that there are no power outlets in this cafe for my laptop -- my second mistake. I ordered a hot cup of coffee -- my third mistake. And I didn't bring anything but my laptop with me -- my forth mistake.

And so here I am, sitting at my table, with my laptop about to run out of power in 30 minutes, a cup of coffee too hot for me to gulp down, and nothing else for me to do. At last, the only productive thing to work on is writing a draft for this blog entry. And so here it is.

And yes, it's been a while.

Clearly, I'm terrible at this blogging thing -- only in the most unfortunate of circumstances do I grudgingly write up an entry. Yet there is little for me to write about, my daily details too mundane, creative writing too time-consuming (and its stench too relentless). Nowadays, I can barely formulate a proper sentence without giving myself a hernia, my thoughts too jumbled and abstract to be tied down in words (at least, by a writer as terrible and lazy as myself). I have thought much, but mostly of tree structures in javascript, of things I should be doing but aren't, of the never-ending backlog of things I need to get to but won't. It's been exhausting.

And it's been like that for a while.

In situations like this, you wonder why you're so much more stressed out than you really need to be. But when all the answers you can find are unsatisfactory, behind them lurking the promise of this lasting into eternity, you get more stressed out. You tell yourself that it'll be better after the next milestone, and it does, but only until another milestone looms on the horizon. The milestones make for neat paper weights, paper or otherwise, and you watch, without much pride, as they build slowly into a very tall tombstone.

I just realized that a blank piece of paper invites me to think somber thoughts. It's the middle-class my-life-is-so-tragic symdrome. Also, I didn't even bring a power cable with me, so scratch the no-power-outlet mistake, and substitute in this one.

Perhaps that's why it's been such a while.

when I'm feeling melancholy...

It's one of the rare times when I'd race home to play my guitar, pray that no one's at home, and sing my brains out. Depression. It's good to sing. It's like screaming, but with an excuse. Talking to myself, but for good reasons. And it feels like crying, a little.

M$ supports anti-discrimination bill again

And it's just flip, flop, flip.

Three cheers for M$, though, for so publicly and bravely promoting gay rights within its company.

more on M$ and gay anti-discrimination bill

And now, from the other side. Scary.

in the heat of the argument

All friendly debates start friendly, and most end friendly. But some reach an elusive boiling point. After this point, the debate is no longer about what you're arguing at all, but for some reason, about trying to hurt the other person as much as possible (under the mere disguise of intellectual masturbation). Every remark turns snide, designed to hit you personally where it hurts.

The worst thing about these debates is that you never thought your friend could be so mean and nasty to you (and probably vice versa). The best thing is that, once you move past the pain, you'll probably never argue again.

on asian stereotypes pt. 1 (or: Panda Expresses vs. PF Chang's)

Ever since a sophomore theater class, when a TA told me that it's not okay to call asians "oriental", I've become somewhat sensitive on the subject. And now, in my film class on Japanese auteurs, where I constantly read European criticisms of Japanese cinema (and am constantly exposed to my professor's distaste for it), I seem to have a radar out for western fetishization of eastern culture. People (even asians) often don't find this an issue. But my thoughts can be summed up in a shocking comparison between Panda Express and PF Chang's.

YOU WILL BE SHOCKED if you read the following post with a finger in the electrical outlet.

Consider the Panda Express, the emblematic Chinese fast food restaurants. The mere mention of the name brings a cringe to any self-respecting chinese. They sell food laid out in trays cooked in the most exaggerated versions of popular asian sauces -- sweet & sour, mandarin, or teryaki. And everything is either fried or drenched in oil. Clearly, the target audience here is Americans. I mean, seriously, when the hell did orange become one of the primary flavors associated with Chinese food? The restaurant has taken all the Chinese dishes, looked at what is most different from American dishes, and exaggerated the differences 100 times, in fear that the poor white kid eating this stuff won't realize it's Chinese. This is fetishizing at its finest. It cheapens the Chinese culinary arts down to three sauces, makes Chinese cuisine look easy, and bets that Americans won't be able to tell the difference. In fact, it makes the bet that Americans will like the fetishized version of Chinese food even better. Because of this -- and because the food is crap -- we hate Panda Express.

And then there's the PF Chang's of the world. PF Chang is actually not a good example, but I'm talking about certain expensive, lavishly-decorated and up-scale Chinese restaurants in general. There are large calligraphies hanging on the wall. Dividers with Chinese paintings dot the room. And frigging stone lions guard the entrance. These places cannot help to keep hitting you over the head with the fact that you are dining in a chinese restaurant. But is this so bad, if the food is good?

These restaurants are businesses after all; therefore, their intention is not to educate customers on Chinese culture, but to attract customers hungry for Chinese food. As a result, the decorations are there to create an atmosphere that is emphatically, undeniably Chinese -- or, at least, Chinese according to the Americans. Will they know it's Chinese if there aren't calligraphies on the wall? Will they know it's Chinese if we don't give them fortune cookies at the end? Most of the customers don't actually care about Chinese culture; they just want to satisfy their thirst for the exotic, the unfamiliar, for one night. And so these restaurants wrap up Chinese culture neatly into a marketing package and sell it to customers interested in indulging in Chinese for a night. The package therefore is a highly fetishized version of the Chinese culture, and there is something very unsettling about that to me.

Is it the restaurants' fault? Not really; they are a business after all, and they do what they can to attract customers. It is the customers' fault? Not exactly; god knows I've done it countless times to countless other cultures. But this is my culture, damn it! If I don't raise the issue, who will? How can I stand on the sidelines and watch my beloved culture cheapened and solicited on the street, like a prostitute with too much make-up or Yang's mother after 10pm? I can't, and I won't.

We don't see this demonstrated to an extreme often. Living in the Bay Area has spoiled us; we are usually surrounded by ethnically-enlightened people and businesses, and don't get fetishized packages shoved down our throat. But if you venture a little farther away, you start running into these things.

Another thing. Why can up-scale Italian/French/etc. restaurants have a hip, modernist decoration that is ethnicity-agnostic, while an up-scale Chinese restaurant must be decorated in a fetishized manner? Etc., etc. I could go on and on about this, but it's getting late...

the scary christian right

this is starting to get out of hand. M$ bows down to the Christian right. And you thought M$ was the devil.

problem

Ah, I just realized the character flaw that defines me. I take too close to heart the saying that "the higher you climb, the harder you fall". And I'm so afraid of a fall that I hardly attempt a climb at all. So there I am, sitting half a mountain up, going to classes, doing homework, working late nights, with no intention of reaching much higher, but content that I'm not any place worse. Sure, it's nice to have no illusions, but I've also become utterly predictable and stagnant. Certainly I can achieve nothing greater in my life than what I can recover from in its failure. And that's boring.

And now I'm starting to be dissatisfied with my contentment...