A recent article on the Huffington Post talks about a new font in the works by Twitterblitz called “Sartalics,” a backwards-leaning italics font which would allow people to clearly denote their sarcastic comments. I guess the land of sarcasm is also the land of misunderstandings and over-analyzing in the digital world, heh! I’m gonna need a real-time conversation version of Sartalics when I get back to Spain.
The Accident
This essay was almost accepted but finally turned down by the Vox personal essays section on the Metropolis magazine, for being a story from the distant past. I seem to be doing a lot of reminiscing these days:
Few memories really stand out in my mind from before the age of eight. This one, however, will surely make it with me into old age because of its competitive standing in “the most embarrasing moment” feature on memory lane.
As a kid I used to go to Holy Redeemer, the only Chinese Catholic elementary school in the city, right on the edge of Chinatown at 10th and Vine. Back then it was just one humble building connected to a church, with a small rusty playground and a parish house. All the children who went there were kids of Chinese immigrants living in the vicinity.
My sister was already in 8th grade when I started school. She was the one who helped to initiate me into the world of phonics, cut-out paper coins, and nuns. She was the one who protected me from her older classmates, whose sage worldliness translated into picking on me. She was also the person whoinformed me that the robed priest who walked around the hallways was, in fact, not Jesus. I was quite the four-eyed, short, bowl-haired, and timid first-grader back in those days, and rather than speaking I would just glare up through my Coke-bottle glasses. It was a little rough-going those first few weeks of school.
It was afternoon on that fateful day. We had just finished lunch, came back from recess, and were in the middle of religion class with Ms. Gladsky. At some point during the class, I started having urges to use the ladies’ room badly. I shyly went up to the front of the classroom to ask the teacher amidst a flourish of group activities if I could please use the bathroom. She firmly responded no, saying something to the effect that I should’ve gone during lunch time. So I dejectedly went back to my seat, too afraid to put up a fight, and sat down squirming. I held it in for the rest of the class.
Then, it was time for Chinese class with Ms. Leung. She was our stern, sometimes scary, yet lovable Chinese teacher who came in weekly in an attempt to salvage our mother language. Some days, she’d come in cracking jokes that made us fall out of our seats laughing; other days she’d drag boys around by their ties if they weren’t reciting sentences loud enough. That day, like any other, she was down to business. As she came into the room, the hustle and bustle of the class died down, and we stood up in silence immediately to greet her and say our afternoon prayers (in Chinese, of course).
And there I was, doing the pee dance in the middle of the prayer while everyone else was reciting Our Father or Hail Mary in drone monotonous first-grade voices. It was one of the longest prayers ever. And then…as I was struggling with all my might and saying my own personal prayers so that the universal forces would help me hold it in, pee started to trickle from under my plaid skirt, onto the tiled floor, between my new leather loafers. My face scorched and turned red, and the more I tried to stop the flow, the more it came. I even tried making the puddle less noticeable with my shoes by inconspicuously stomping on it. Not so inconspicuous, as it turned out.
At the very end of the prayer, Ms. Leung finally noticed the large puddle underneath where I was standing and was a bit confused at first (“What’s that?!”). I was mortified, and stood stock-still. I guess the puddle was self-explanatory. Then finally, emergency action was taken. There were shouts of “Get Maggie here!” throughout the hallways, so I guess someone had to storm into the 8th grade classroom to deliver the awful message: “Your sister just peed her pants.”
My spanking-new checkered school jumper, to be more precise. Then the flourish of paper towels and wet napkins and mops. I seem to remember just staring goggle-eyed and quiet at everything, yet again reverting to my habit of not talking. I’m sure my sister came and accompanied me to the bathroom. After all, what are older sisters for but to help alleviate such situations? I don’t even remember if she laughed at me…I’m sure there was raucous laughter somewhere in that 8th grade classroom.
I always wondered how I lived that down, being the extremely shy kid that I was. Now as a more outgoing yet nostalgiac adult I keep these shared childhood memories with my sister like keeping gold. We collect and trade them like stickers. She doesn’t quite remember this one however, as I’m sure it’s not on her radar of important and/or traumatic moments. Although an old teacher from the school reassured me that I managed to live it down because it happened all the time, as common as rain. I guess in the end it’s always a story worth telling down the line, during those awkward reunions and grade school barbecues.
The Bible may speak, but people don’t read
Just watched a very interesting and captivating documentary last night called “For the Bible Tells Me So.” It explores the Christian condemnation of homosexuality as claimed to be an explicitly-stated “abomination” in the Bible, and attempts to refute that strict reading by telling the coming-out stories of the gay sons and daughters of different families, their struggles with balancing their faith with the fight for their rights.
It shows the perspective of the parents, all of whom had a difficult time accepting their children’s sexual orientation, but who in the end wound up being devout advocates of gay rights, both politically and religiously. Rather than criticizing the Christian faith, the documentary also shows the viewpoint of several highly-read clergymen, as well as the first gay bishop, who propose a more flexible, reasonable, and intelligent reading of the Bible as a way to better understand the faith, rather than hypocritically casting judgment and instating hatred out of fear. There is a clip from the show “The West Wing” which is rather enlightening and really attacks the conservative agenda in a few good punches:
One of the things that my inspiring and fiercely intelligent anthropology professor Aida insisted on was the fact that all the injustices, discrimination, and bigotrous hearsay that people spread can be avoided by the simple act of reading, by not only knowing but understanding. People can read up on their country’s laws, their rights, and I don’t mean quoting the 2nd amendment like a parrot each time people’s gun-toting fetish is threatened. I mean really reading and knowing the full context in which things were written, and how we may apply those concepts in our modern, changing world to make it better, to understand others better. Read, understand, think for yourself, then judge, and BACK IT UP WITH FACTS.
If people really read the Bible, for example, they would understand that Sodom and Gomorrah was NOT a story condemning homosexuality. If people read up on their psychology books they would discover that homosexuality is NOT a choice, or a disorder, or “reversible.” It’s not literary interpretation. It’s a scientific fact. Check it out here, here, and here. If you want to feed me a lie, I’ll believe it if you show me the cold hard evidence, updated and cited, and not from a book that was compiled by many people 2,000 years ago. There is a whole world of information out there, and everywhere we can prove or disprove our biases by simply gaining knowledge. So why aren’t people more open to the act of thinking? Because they are lazy. Because they don’t want to know. Because it’s easier to listen to those around you telling you what you should believe and how you should live your life.
There is also a snippet from a New York Times article about the whole Michele Bachmann fiasco that I’d like to address:
“She stood up as a Christian,” said Bob Battle, pastor of the Berean Church of God in Christ here. “She made her point of view known, and she gave Christians a voice.”
She proved herself an extraordinary organizer. “The social conservative groups were largely isolated; she went to them and made a very hard-edged argument that their deeply felt values were being ignored,” Professor Jacobs said.
All of this just strikes me as very ironic and backwards. First of all, when did the voice of Christians ever NOT get heard? Second of all, does upholding the “deeply felt values” of conservative Christians always mean that the rights and values of everyone else are cut short? Just so these righteous good-doers can sit in their homes and sigh in relief that they won’t have to tolerate two people of the same sex somewhere in the midst of their great state getting married? So they can feel better about marrying closeted men? So they can feel proud about supporting the backwards agenda which describes their lives?
I have never seen a more self-centered, hypocritical, blind, and hateful manipulation of religion. I don’t understand why people waste so much time judging others when they really need to catch up on their fact-checking and focus on themselves. STFU, Michele, and if it really means so much to you go work on your own gay husband. (Courtesy of comedy show “The Sky’s the Limit” on her abortion agenda: “And Michele Bachmann?? You’re a woman for god’s sake! It’s like a chicken snackin’ on some wings!”)
I’m tired of hearing all this bullshit, I’m gonna go become a Buddhist and move to Mongolia. Bye.
mabel lee 