A Probability of Being

When I was about five or six, I had a dream that a new mother blossomed for me, seemingly out of nowhere. She told me she would take care of me. When I woke up, I still saw her, and I contemplated her for a while.  My family and I were in the car. Dad driving, mom next to him, my brother usually sat behind my dad and I sat behind my mom. My dad noticed me staring out of the window, being quiet, and he asked, "what are you thinking?" "A new mother," I replied. My dad giggled, and my mom looked vaguely amused yet insulted. I think I hurt her that day. We didn't really fight in those days; we didn't even have much of a relationship. My mom likes to make a big deal about how she would cut her workday short so she could come home and take me swimming, because I was asthmatic and apparently swimming helps asthma, but while I do remember her teaching me how to swim, I don't really remember it happening a whole lot and besides, that was probably something l...

There was a time when I did not get along with my parents. I say this as an adult who has a pretty strong relationship with her dad, and a somewhat-shaky-but-almost-decent-give-it-a-few-more-years relationship with her mom. My parents are better than most. They gave me freedom when most of my peers were forced to stay home after dark. They gave me a pretty big allowance, once a month. From them, I inherited a strong, stubborn attitude which put me at odds with them but has served me well through my life thus far. But they're not perfect. Who is, right? I'm going to talk about one of those Imperfect Times. For context, when I was a kid, we made a chocolate drink called Milo with chocolate malt powder of that brand, milk powder, and sugar. ... OK, I still do, when my family has moved on to drinking it without the milk powder and sugar. For a while we didn't use milk powder and sugar, but sweetened condensed milk. I'm not sure if there was a reason for this shift, but a...

So, American Thanksgiving! I don't celebrate the Canadian Thanksgiving either. I'm neither American nor Canadian. The Malaysian National Day and Malaysia Day passed by me without so much a whimper in my direction, mostly because I am rather on the other side of the planet from my tanahair (homeland). I've been reading linkspam after linkspam about Thanksgiving and its racist origins and continual racist undertones that keep going unnoticed by general adherents. It's a holiday, and an excuse to spend time with family. I can't argue against that line of reasoning, but it's still a holiday that's founded on bloodshed and genocide. And I understand, fuzzily, the idea behind celebrating it - to give thanks for, well, stuff, and basically, give thanks that America exist, on some level. To question it loudly is to question the might of America, undermine the faith of people in the nation, so on, so forth. To which I ask, what's the problem with that? ...

So this is not going to be a very good metaphor, but it is a decent metaphor from my standpoint anyway. It combines two concepts, each of which I encountered in different places. But anyway. We live in the same neighbourhood. For as long as our families have lived in this neighbourhood, your family generally is very... protective of the big house, the larger garden, the fruit tree. We regularly regale each other with stories of how the patriarch of your house would shoot people who got too close that he didn't invite or just plain didn't like. The shotgun the patriarchs have used through time sits grandly above the mantle opposite the front door for easy reach. But now, you are having an open house. You are inviting as many people from our neighbourhood as possible to just come in, to the beer garden you've set up. To show your good faith, you leave the front door wide open so anybody can just come in. I must admit, you are not a good host, because when we come to the door,...

This is derived from reading Marilyn French, particularly Beyond Power , although it comes up in From Eve to Dawn . I also found it in a book called When God Was A Woman . I have been expressing it in many ways in order for me to really condense it into something more cohesive and so I don't fucking stutter when I talk about it, but the theory does come up often. Namely, what do the Patriarchy, monotheistic religion, men, and power have to do with each other? So, it's posited that way back when, the earliest civilizations were matriarchal and worshipped an Earth Goddess. The Earth Goddess is irrevocably tied to the Earth and all phenomena on Earth - she waxes and wanes with the moon, with the seasons, with stuff that humans do on her soil. Back then, women giving birth was a specific gift, magical, because nobody had figured out how men figured into the whole thing yet. I'm guessing at some point they did, but nobody really gave a shit. A child belongs to the whole communit...

So, I used to hate Kant. Somewhere in my Intro to Philosophy textbook, is scribbled "Kant is a cunt" (those days I didn't know what 'cunt' meant, only that it's a bad word. Well, it still is for me, but bad in a good way) and "KANT U SUCK" and "YOU IDIOT!" and various other sputtered criticisms of his text. I have my textbook in front of me now, reading my reactions to some of his words: "... when a wretched man, strong in soul and more angered at his fate than faint-hearted or cast down, longs for death and still preserves his life without loving it- not fron inclination or fear but from duty; then indeed his maxim has a moral content." I thought it was bullshit then, and it's still bullshit now. A choice to live or die is not in itself a question of morality - it's a question of personal liberty. Certainly, if a person's choice to die affects others deeply, causing grief and mourning, the action takes on a certain l...

There is something to be said about the Chinese government's hypocrisy, demanding some sort of recognition from the Japanese for war crimes committed during WW II (Japan does not acknowledge the Rape of Nanking, for example) while at the same time pointedly censoring any discussion of key points in its own history. The Wired.com reports that Chinese authourities have "instituted censoring measures to block access to several internet sites and services in anticipation of Thursday’s 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protest and massacre ." Twitter, LJ, MSN Spaces, Flickr, Hotmail - all manner of internet spaces wherein the Chinese could communicate, are anticipated to be blocked in a shameful silencing of the people. In a space of two billion people, where it's conceivable that only a slender minority actually have access to the World Wide Web, the Chinese people are being denied the chance to speak about an incident that shook so many people to the core back in...

I've been told time and again, when things are at their lowest point, we as humans revert to animalistic urges to want to inflict pain on each other, to clamber on top of each other to reach the highest branches. No, seriously? 10k+ years of civilization and that's the best you can come up with ? We're animals ? This middle-class university-educated introspective egghead biped who lives in a one-bedroom apartment that has heat, hot water, electricity, and the Internet would like to say that "humans are animals" is a horribly, horribly lazy way of considering the state of humanity, and horribly, horribly dismissive of the 10k+ years of civilization we've been through. I understand that reverting back to the animalistic argument is a form of Occam's Razor, because to believe that it's not our animal selves but how we teach our children, interact with each other in our daily lives, internalize cultural memes, absorb messages from the media blindly - look,...

Kit Whitfield has this incredible essay up on the "Macho Sue" character type - similar to the Gary/Mary Stu, except that rather than being an idealized image of the fanfic authour, the Macho Sue is an image of idealized macho hypermasculinity. The essay is unbelievably awesome . The bit that particularly resonates with me is this: Macho Sue is nothing if not powerful. He may not always be granted full powers by circumstance (he may, for instance, have a commanding officer, at least at first) - but it's clear that the force of his personality grants to him an authority in the eyes of the audience . He is the hero, he is the one whose decisions will most influence this narrative, and consequently is intended to exercise the greatest power over the reader/viewer's imagination. Hence, to an audience member who has a tendency to value power, it's easy to fall into the trap of judging Macho Sue over-charitably , when the same behaviour, displayed by another, lesser man,...