A Probability of Being

Some context for non-Malaysians On May 13, 1969, riots broke out on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. These were racialized riots, between the majority Malay and minority-but-still-sizeable Chinese factions, a result of racial and religious fractioning between political parties of the people. Malaysia was still a very young country at the time, and had not really had much time yet to grow used to its multi-cultural identity now that the overwhelming British influence was gone. I would still argue that the Malaysian identity is still in flux; cultures take a long time to change and syncretize with each other.  Since then, May 13 has become a force under which we have all rallied to do away with race-based politics, with a certain degree of success. We recognize now that we are Malaysians - born, bred, raised in similar environments and contexts, with a shared history (that can also be called propaganda), in a particular cultural context that is similar but not quite exactly the same ...

This is where all Malaysians and residents of Malaysia are welcome to leave links to their participation in the May 13 Blogswarm. For more information, check out LiveJournal and Facebook . Comments Policy:  Please note that moderation is turned on for comments older than 7 days. I try to check in regularly, but this may be hard as I will be traveling. Do not use this place to debate what others have said. If you do and you crash my site in due process, I'll get very irritated at you. That shit is rude. Don't do it. 

A friend of mine directed me to this post by Diana Gabaldon , who I understand is a successful authoress, about her objection to fanfiction. Her main points boil down to the following: it's illegal, it takes control of the material from the original author, and omg-ew-yuck-what-are-you-doing-to-my-characters. Fanfiction is not my first choice for entertainment. I find it incredibly difficult to sift though fanfics to find stuff I really enjoy, and I imagine it's like an editor's slush pile. (So, I let other more dedicated people than I do my work for me.) I'm also a fan of reading an authour for their own personal writing style, not just what was written, but how. I've got no guarantee this same experience will be reproduced when I read fanfic. I've written fanfic before, and while it's a pleasant exercise, I don't do it often for reasons of my own I'll explain later.

Sometime when I was home earlier this year, my dad and I noticed this Indian man struggling with a walker in our housing area. He wasn't very old, and we'd seen him, walking, sort of tottering, past our road, along the football field, down a road which has several road bumps, because it's a one-way street passing through several.

I've recently started saying that I have an invisible disability. It's not easy to do, for several reasons. 

Much has been said about writing the Other. It was one of the keystones of RaceFail, and has been the cause of much angst on the part of predominantly-privileged writers who would like to write marginalized cultures without being attacked for it. For a long time, marginalized cultures have been represented by the descendants of colonizers, who benefit from the imperialism of the past and continue to be so: their writings are taken more seriously than that of a marginalized person's, they are more likely to receive a larger platform, they are more often lauded.

I'm going through my clothes right now and giving a way a lot of my old t-shirts. They're actually really awesome (if you guys want, I will take pictures, and if you like anything you see, I will send it to you) but they're a) black and b) mostly too big for me to tuck into my jeans comfortably. Yes, I know, baggy t-shirts never go out of style, and believe me, I'm keeping a couple of them, but on the whole I do not wear them as much anymore, so I see no reason to keep them. I'm phasing the black out of my wardrobe, ya'll. So, I've also got a ton of shorts, and I refuse to keep those that are too tight to wear comfortably in the near future, so I'm trying them on. Yes, a few really don't fit. I may not agree with What Not To Wear's shaming tactics, but Stacy and Clint were right in one thing: don't buy stuff that don't fit with the secret promise you'll get slim enough to fit. I'm wearing a pair right now, which is kinda tight...

The other day, I browsed Youtube for Alexander Rybak videos and songs. I have a liking for the songs he composes, because they tend to be simple, carefree, and non-jarring - just like light'n'easy pop should be. He has some sad songs, some very emo songs, and most of them are all sentimental with a taste of frivolity. Essentially, fluff, but good fluff. But I was squicked out to find that he covered Frank Loesser's Baby, It's Cold Outside . Now, I understand why he would - it's a pop standard, and has lasted since the 40's. His voice suits that song perfectly, and much of his fanbase is in the Northern Hemisphere, who would understand the song. The rest of this doesn't have much to do with Rybak, but the song itself and the fact that it is April.

One year ago, I started this blog because I noticed that I was posting a lot of non-personal and non-academic  stuff on LiveJournal. I had so much more to say, but I didn't want to flood my f-list with a lot of meanderings on topics which probably interested only me. I noted that Blogger had a scheduling feature, which meant I could write several posts at once, and not overwhelm my readers too much. Since then, I've moved from focusing on gender issues only, to including issues about race, to touch on LGBT and other such items that do not directly affect my life. I've also started a new blog, Silver Goggles. I've renamed this blog, from Rebellious Jezebel Blogging to Intersectionality Dreaming, because the more I wrote, the more I figured stuff out about myself.  My thing with this blog has always been about consistent content. It unfortunately trumps the quality of my writing a lot, even though I try to develop the discipline of writing regularly. My writing has alwa...

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...