More Hatin'

NOTE: Personally, I get way more pissed off about ignorant people of color who ought to know better not knowing better and, in doing so, making us all look bad. This is especially true with other adoptees who "consider themselves white." Shut up; you are not white. Stop embarrassing yourself and everyone else by rejecting who you are. Most of the time, I just feel sorry for people but there's this one person I know who just pisses me off because of 1. how misinformed she is and 2. how loud she is about it.

I should also mention that I am not claiming to be any kind of authority on self-discovery or identity issues but I feel we can all agree that there is something very wrong when a Korean adoptee dresses up like a Japanese school girl at a party and doesn't understand why none of the other Asian people want to talk to her.

This is still a draft.

Banana, Split

She knows all the words to Weezer,

was Go-Go Yubari for Halloween

and, in her white-washed mind, her chipmunk cheeks are the

the hottest you’ve ever seen

dressing like a school girl-dragon lady-

ex-Asian hyping the exotic East

Hangul hurts her hands

so she settles for (what she’s pretty sure is) kanji

Reclaims her hanguk saram handle

But a piece of shit by any other name

still reeks like she’s rotting from the inside out--

diseased with something awful, incurable

no matter how many yellow-fevered topicals

coat that vapid pout.

Hitchhiking--no, sidestepping--toward self discovery

or identity-reclamation all for popularity--

she breaks a sweat, remains half a hemisphere away--

darling, you’ve got to go down the road,

not cross the street

and, remember, before you puke out

that drunken, broken hangul greeting at a party

that solidarity doesn’t mean

I want to stand next to you.

I’ve seen Japanophile white girls less offensive than she is--

all alternating between being full of shit and white-boy dick,

cleavage over-represented like adopted names in suicide rates

trying too hard to carve her story into a history she doesn’t get

when she’d be better off slitting her wrists into the statistics she hasn’t seen.

Bottom-feeding, sub-human, double-race-traitor, wannabe,

I don’t care about how hard you had it,

Mom was too distant, Dad had a whore-habit--

She’s unable to speak--no, unable to be,

all her heart’s sob stories about hidden bloodlines

language lost, and guilty conscience

all turn to pathetic cries for sympathy.

The day can’t come soon enough

when she opens up a vein or two,

lets her complaints pool beneath her

and still can’t tell

if our blood runs the same color.

Soft Handed, Callous

When I was in high school, our youth pastor told us about the summers he spent working construction to make ends meet. He would put in these long shifts carrying heavy things in the heat that kept him behaving himself since it was like a preview of the Hell he believed there was. He told us that, to cool off, what he would do is go sit in the porta-potty where the heat was intensified and the baked shit hung thick in the air. He would sit there for a few minutes and then go back to work feeling refreshed because, the air outside seemed cleaner and the 102 degrees didn't seem so bad next to the 115 in the plastic box.

I'm trying to figure out if there's a way I can use this method to increase my ability to channel that raw emotion I keep hearing about into writing. Is a porta-potty analogous to a passionate but short-lived relationship?

On a related note, there are times I wonder what the context was when someone uttered the words "true love always finds a way" because no one separated from what they think is their true love can be that optimistic.

Or maybe I'm just out of my element.

Look both ways before you cross that street

This is a first draft I vomited out about twenty minutes ago. It'll probably get revised.

2/4 Flash Memoir (code for "untitled")

There was this girl in high school we all sort of made fun of. Either she was going for the goth look or it just came to her naturally and she figured she may as well embrace it. I mean, she was still a total poser since she came from a good home and had probably had a fairly easy life. Her parents might have gotten divorced and, yeah, that sucks, but this was 2002; grow a pair. I knew her through drama club--this was back when I thought I had what it took to be theatrical or expressive or artsy or any of that gay shit. She always pissed me off.

I guess she thought I was cool; I was one of two asian kids at my high school (we had as little to do with each other as possible) so maybe she thought we were both outsiders and marginalized. Sure I got called a chink once or twice and this kid I only kind of knew made a joke about me eating a dog (for more on this, see “The Only Fight I Ever Got In In high School”) but, for the most part, I had friends and was fairly content for a high schooler. This girl liked to refer to me as “her favorite asian” which was benign enough to just ignore. I want to make it clear I was never actively mean to her or anything--I don’t think anyone really was. We were all just like, “write your poems about crows and darkness. Whatever.”

So, some time senior year, she was absent for like a week, I guess. I had just developed this huge crush on Aimee Keys so random poser-goths weren’t my concern. Anyway, when she got back, she had these new bracelets which seemed to be there to hide the bandages on her wrists but they were jangly and shiny so all they really did was let us all know she had something under them to hide. The scuttlebutt was that she had tried to kill herself that weekend but fucked it up because she crossed the street instead of going down the road--dumbass.

My mom got a call from someone else’s mom and sat me down to talk about it and, you know, if this was a story or something, maybe I would have realized how I should have been there to be her friend and I’d have made that step to hang out with her so she had someone to talk to about... how she really wanted attention, I guess. But that’s not the case; that girl was fucking annoying.

Last I heard, she had gotten married to an accountant and they had a kid or two.

The Grey Space

I sort of wonder if the census is going to call me "oriental" and how long it'll be before that gets taken seriously.

I like Humpty Dumpty better.

No one is going to claim that this blog is anything to speak of. When I began it, it was with an understanding that The Cold Shoulder blog, much like The Cold Shoulder writing, would probably be a late-bloomer and hit-and-miss at best. I really do know that drinking + carousing ≠ good writing (see overrated) but, damn it, I'm going to make absolutely sure.

This is not an apology for the early stages of a new blog so much as a promise of better things to come. Better real things. Lord help me if I begin to rely on a trademark gimmick to trick you into coming back. With any luck, my trademark will be consistently enjoyable writing.

Fuck Hat-guy.