A Probability of Being

This was originally posted on Tumblr as a rant, but I thought it warranted cross-posting.   

There was a book I liked a great deal, which was about body language. About how people used space to show their dominance, how much eye contact mattered, how posture communicated a lot about a person's self-confidence. One example had the authour talking to a large, soft-spoken man about how he intimidated others, and the guy couldn't figure out why. The authour realized that the guy was short-sighted but not noticeably so, so he often stared at people's faces to take in more detail, and this was intimidating. Once he got glasses, he found he didn't have to stare so long, and this made others more comfortable.  It also discussed personal space, and how people tend to have their own boundaries as to how much personal space they would prefer to have. Some people don't need much personal space, while others like to have people they talk to at arm's length away, and depending on whether they were interested in their conversation partner or not, would allow that bo...

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...

So, while considering the anecdata of how some men seem to get really affronted when a) their partners refuse to take their name and b) it is suggested that the children take on the mother's name, I wondered how really difficult it would be on a man's psyche to have his wife's name. Somehow, I get the sense that not only is it rather an affront, a challenge to convention, but it is also downright insulting to them. But why? Do men carry the pregnancy? No. Do men do majority of the housework? My dad does, but he's an exception, not the rule. There is the burden of the Second Shift, and I have no doubt it affects women globally. Do men do majority of the child-raising? Not that I know of, or else we wouldn't be so surprised when we hear of fathers taking an active hand in handling children. Do men do anything else other than bring home money, which more and more women are doing these days? Not that I can think of, but hey, I could be wrong! This might be d...

With the new Airbender movie coming up, one thing has really struck me as something note-worthy throughout this process: that M. Night's daughter loved the series. He's said one of the reasons why he's doing the movie is because his daughter loves the series. That she sees herself in Katara.  It is one of the reasons why I, too, like the TV series - when I see the Earth Kingdom, I see people I grew up with, being ordinary people, rather than strange exotic peoples. Moreover, I see them as movers and shakers of the world, rather than passive observers. And I can cosplay Toph, or Mei, or Ty Lee, or Azula. Do you know how hard it is to find someone I can comfortably cosplay? Because most animated characters I see are either characters who I look like but cannot cosplay, or who I like but cannot cosplay without rather betraying the sense of the character.  Now, some little white girl is going to play a little Asian/Inuit girl. You cannot divorce Katara's character from h...

Which I will post in place of an actual blogpost, because even though I Tumblr'd it, it deserves to be its own post. It came on the heels of a discussion about my posts on parental cruelty, but took a religious turn: Tariq:  yeah  I keep feeling that "accept", which is a word people use a lot in that context, is exactly the wrong word to use  I mean... are you saying that it's right?  Jaymee:  yeah, exactly  i think they more tolerate it  Tariq:  what does one mean when one tells another person to "accept" things the way things are?  Jaymee:  usually?  i get the feeling of  "Just give it up, it wont change and you'll only make yourself more unhappy by thinking about changing things"  Tariq:  except that if you think it, and you explore it, the entire premise of existence is pain. it doesn't make the pain and the injustice right.  it means that you can't do anything about it.  Jaymee:  oh, shut up, i ju...

This is just to say that I now have 200 posts. It's not even my blogiversary. Just sayin'. I update like, four times a week, and I've taken months-long breaks, but still, it's pretty awesome, you know? So! I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you all for sticking with me so long, and to get to know you better! Feel free to post and tell me a little bit about yourselves if you so please, I would very much like that!

If you haven't heard already, my friend Tariq and I recently started a new Dreamwidth Community called steampunk_nusantara . This is not a writing community, although there is writing involved. Its genesis began here , as a discussion for a meta-setting set in South East Asia, particularly the region called Nusantara, which is mostly Malaya, the Indonesian islands and a bit of Borneo. Tariq and I had many conversations about how this would work - a collection of documents, some descriptions of stuff that could go in, something to give people a starting point if they wanted to write a SEA-centered steampunk story. We tried using GoogleWave and it didn't work, because Tariq and I are very chatty people, and it just didn't look right as a single document. So we left it on the backburner, although I thought about it occasionally. I just did not know how to make it work. It had to be in a format where a bunch of people could work together on it, but Wave is limited in that w...

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...

This is a blog about theory. You might have noticed that. It's a blog about intersectionality, and it's a blog about dreams, and it's a blog about people, particularly of women, and a blog about experiences and stories. I'm no computer geek: I own a Win 7 processor, have never bought an MP3, much less an iPod, I loathed the Mac, and never tried out Linux because I couldn't be arsed to figure it out. I only require basic functions on my cellphone: radio, text messaging, calculator, caller ID - none of that touch-screen, bajillion apps nonsense for me.  However, none of this would be possible if not for technology.  I would not be here today if it weren't for the internet. Hell, I think I wouldn't be half the person I am today, which isn't saying much in the grand scheme of things but saying much for myself, if it weren't for the capability to communicate with people across the world.  I would not even be writing so much if not for the computer an...

So recently I was watching a re-mix trailer of Mean Girls using clips from various Disney princess movies. I have friends who are also into High School Musical. There will be a movie coming out this year on middle-school. When I first came to Canada, I was introduced to shows like Degrassi, which takes place in a school as well. I do not quite understand the American school culture. Or rather, I do understand it, but only to a certain degree in which there may be shared experiences of isolation and loneliness and awkwardness of nerds like myself navigating the whole concept of identity and self-esteem (yeah, self-esteem? What the hell was that?). Hence, the number of high-school movies I see around make me wonder why anybody would go to watch them. The people in these movies are horrible. High school is depicted as this awful place where everyone is forced to participate, whether or not they want to. (I refused to. This is why my high school experience was worse than it should h...

There's been a big of talk going about around the question, "Where are you from?" It's ordinarily asked by well-meaning folks, usually to PoC, and when the PoC replies with a relatively mundane answer, such as, "from Detroit" to another American, they are queried further, "Where are you really from?" and if that answer doesn't satisfy the (usually white) querant, they are asked, "where is your family from?" Perhaps it is to Halifax's credit that I rarely get asked that question. Most Canadians I meet tend to assume I'm from Canada - often due to the way I speak (that is to say, flawless Queen's English punctuated with Americanisms) - so I don't get the question very often. Even when I do, it's often with the air of "New Glasgow maybe?" that I've seen them ask each other. I'm not sure about this phenomenon here and why I don't get it. I used to get it more, though, especially in my early ...

People, tell me this: why is the name-changing debate so fraught in North America? I just read BeckySharper's takedown of this ridiculous defense of making women change their names, in which Dudely Dude makes the case that it should happen, and it's right that it happens, because society tends to be patrilineal, and it's useful to... what? I don't even know anymore.  I really do not understand it! In Malaysia, most of the cultures there are strongly patrilineal. This means, to me, that the father is always acknowledge within the name of the children, and the mother is not. Chinese children take the surnames of their fathers (as I do). Malay and Indian children are "son of" or "daughter of" their father, in their names.  Wives do not have to change their names. They just don't. There's no point! Besides which, the structure of our names do not necessarily lend themselves to name-changing. Siti Kamariah binte Kamaruddin does not have a la...

A while back, I was going through some old fanfiction I had written on Final Fantasy VII. I wrote it back between the years '97 and '02 (oh, adolescent angst) and I was quite shocked to see that not only did I write decent fanfic, but I also had actual plots! Like, plots with people doing stuff, rather than just plots filled with people ruminating about stuff! I'm not sure how I lost this as time passed. But it seems that the more I think about the writing process, the less quality I produced. And I don't just mean like, thinking about writing - it's more stuff like plot, and characterization, and theme, and other good stuff that I should not be writing about before the story gets under way. When I was still at SMU, my writing prof, Dr. MacLeod, would say, "If the paper about the story is as long as the story itself, you are putting way too much effort into thinking about the story, and not enough into the story itself." I'm sure those weren't ...

I had to be mean the other day. It was not something I wanted to do, because usually I'm pretty generous and charitable, or at least I like to think so (despite many exhortations and declarations that I am a terrible human being, but people are always a work in progress, you know), so having to be really stern with folks on the internet does not come easily to me. Unless like, they're not around, in which case, I let it rip. Wannabe allies always make a big deal about how you attract more flies with honey, so taking an abrasive approach to dealing with continual questions and a lot of FAIL is counter-productive. And in certain cases, it certainly is. What wannabe allies don't get, though, is that when one is at the receiving end of the continual, neverending barrage of FAIL, patience wears thin. Kindness gets overpowered. And then you get the Mean POC who just won't understand that people are trying to help. The thing is, and I said this while I was being mean,...

Recently, I wrote a piece called Countering Victorientalism , which has garnered quite a bit of attention. It does, of course, deal with cultural appropriation, because that was what the Orientalist movement was all about - commodifying Asian stuff and bringing it to Europe to prettify the lives and homes of Europeans who may or may not have visited "the Orient."  Yes, it is a fascinating topic, which is why I'm talking about it here! Because I am both victim and perpetrator of the systems that support cultural appropriation. I can't advocate for either side, because like, you, I don't know enough, and like you, I, too, have questions! .... Except the questions I foresee getting, repeatedly, is this: Where is the line between appropriation and appreciation? Short answer: I don't know. Longer answer: There is no line. There are reasons why this is a debate and why it is tied into systemic racism and other forms of oppression. There are reasons why we talk a...

macon d at Stuff White People Do discussed self-segregation, and he asked PoC if they ever felt the need to self-segregate when they spend a lot of time in white-dominated spaces. He also asked if there were certain things white folks do that cause this desire to self-segregate. I'll be honest and admit that I never understood the purpose of self-segregation. In fact, I used to be extremely critical of international students at my university, because they spent so much time together, even as they were there to learn English. It seemed rather counter-productive. This is not to say all of them did - I volunteered as an ESL tutor to three lovely students, two Koreans and a Japanese, who were all about going out to do stuff with me like hang at the Art Gallery, or listen to music, or mess with vocabulary. But in general, I would see huge groups of students sticking together. (A friend of mine refers to a hallway in the university as "mini-Lebanon". I don't know if the...

So, someone on  racebending   pointed out to me the Occidental Quarterly, which is, according to the Wikipedia article,  "devoted to the ethnic, racial, and cultural heritage that forms the foundation of Western Civilization". It aims to defend "the cultural, ethnic, and racial interests of Western European peoples" and examine "contemporary political, social, and demographic trends that impact the posterity of Western Civilization". Because I'm a sick puppy like that, and it was very late at night, I decided to poke around the website of the web edition. The tagline reads, "Western Perspectives on Man, Culture & Civilization."  Because Man embraces all, oh no, it doesn't exclude women at all, not historically, and we really need more Western perspectives on Culture and Civilization. I guess all those philosophers stemming from Socrates aren't good enough for these fine fellows! It looked innocuous enough , although I could f...

Hi all! It's International Women's Day!  This year's theme for International Women's Day is "Equal Rights For All", which I imagine does not just extend to women only, but also men.  One of the things which undermines feminism is the idea that rights are a zero-sum game: if women get more rights, then men will lose rights. It's as if rights are finite things which are arbitrarily distributed. Like apples. I just bought some. Which means I deprived someone else of the very same apples! Oh nos, that poor person! There are only so many apples in the world! Except, whoever it is I "deprived" of the apples I bought could buy them somewhere else.  Even that analogy fails, because there are some people who cannot afford to buy apples! Fortunately, though, rights are not concrete things like apples. Which means they are exponential! Which means they can reach out to apply to everybody!  Everybody means women of colour, transgendered and transse...

For those who have never read Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape , I have to say, you are missing out. When I first read the book , I was deeply moved, and in its own small way, although it states truths that most of us already knew, having it all in one place distilled the facts and tendrils of knowledge into a revelation of its own.  Yes Means Yes! was edited by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti, both famous names in the feminist blogosphere. Jaclyn Friedman is a writer, performer and activist, and has received several grants, done a lot of cool things, like found the WAM! conference. You can totes look her up . Her main site is CounterQuo.org , which is very flashy, but if you can read it, it's got really neat stuff. Although the talk was on rape prevention, how rapists operate, rape culture and other awful stuff, Jaclyn Friedman was upbeat and cheerful, presenting her argument with pop culture references, using really vernacular lang...