One of these days, there will have to be a very sad, very drama-laden, angst-ridden discussion with my parents about why I don’t think that my depression will ever get any better if they keep acting the way they do. I was just going to say that my depression is unlikely to get any better, ever, if I keep living with them, but their arms reach a bit father than that and to ignore that is to be stupid.
It all started today when suddenly, after I’ve been talking about moving back to Somerville for the summer for a while and nothing had been said to the contrary — my mother suddenly pops the topic, phrased in a “your home is here and you should stay here” manner.
Then there was the usual cultural crap; the “I won’t lie to the relatives for you” crap; the “omg, what will the Chinese people we know say?!” crap… etc etc etc.
Finally, at the end of my tether, I snapped out that I could just get married and solve all her problems.
See, there’s a Chinese phrase called 嘴贱, which literally translates to “mouth inexpensive / despicable”, but which actually means that someone just doesn’t know when to shut up. No mind-mouth filter. No tact. But it can also mean someone who trolls, who deliberately says inflammatory things.
Yeah. That would be me sometimes. Granted, it’s sort of hard not to trigger things with my parents, but you would think that I would have learned better by now.
Um, clearly not.
As a direct result of that retort, there was more talking at me. The usual topics came up again:
Now is not a good time to get married because you and C both have crappy jobs with no real job security and you don’t make enough money.
You’re fat and so if you don’t shape up, C will ditch you for someone else later when he’s seen more of the world and realized what a bad deal he’s getting.
The Bad Deal consisting of having a wife who doesn’t want to work outside the home, therefore being a life-crushing burden and giving him additional stress over being the sole provider of the family, having to put up with someone who is sickly, stressed, and depressed.
Putting all your eggs in one basket (C) is stupid and haven’t you seen enough TV or read the news or opened a book lately?
If you get married now, don’t anticipate any well-wishes from us.
….more reiterations of variations upon the above points ad nauseum.
…where to even begin?
I didn’t know where to even begin and so I didn’t bother defending myself.
My depression and stress will probably not get better under their roof or under their tender mercies because that is how they see me.
Not having a conventional job and lacking the ambition to have a high-powered career apparently makes me lackluster, boring, and stagnant. In their eyes, I’m a burden, a defective product that needs to be fixed.
I swear, it is on these days when I just want to tell them I’m done. I’m utterly done. Tell them to stop trying to help me because all it’s going to do is drive me closer to the brink and watch out because I’m going to jump.
I was upset because despite my lovely, neat 5 year plan, it turns out that they’re going back to Taiwan once my brother gets into college. Therefore, there would be no one to look after the kids on weekends, so if I kept this job, I wouldn’t have any weekends for 10 months. I didn’t think I’d want to keep this job if it meant I would have to deal with spoiled rich kids day in and day out for 10 solid months.
Now, I think it’s probably for the best if they went back to Taiwan, because I am so tired of this constant bullshit. Maybe if they went back to Taiwan, then I’d stop getting the “this is your home because you’re not married yet” talk. Maybe I could have a social life again without them constantly harping on how I’m utterly consumed by my obsession with my friends, about how I revolve around them and have no properly grounded existence of my own. Maybe we could stop having these talks about how disappointing I am, how much of a failure I am, and why won’t I just get a nice job so they could quit worrying about me.
Something else that came up was that apparently my brother and my parents all think I won’t survive it if C dumps me. Therefore I need to find a job to center myself so when I get dumped, I can bury myself in my job and think that “hey, it’s not so bad after all, at least I still have a job and therefore am not a total failure”.
Too many things wrong with that assumption to even parse. Just. Too. Many. Damn. Things. Wrong. with that sentence.
I swear, what I won’t survive is their particular brand of tender loving care. Yes, lets destroy my ego for breakfast and confirm once and for all that I’m a failure in all things. That’s exactly the sort of thing I need.
After this debacle, I have decided that I need to find a job in Boston for the summer. If I’m working at a summer job, then I have a proper reason to be in Boston, and so they can’t quibble about it, right?
Even if not, I’m going to find a volunteer gig of some sort and not go back more than 2-3 days a week if I can help it. I’ll bloody offer to stand on the street asking for donations if I have to. In fact, I’m just going to not go back except for two days out of the week and then see what happens.
If it wasn’t that they’d probably be paying me better this year than I’d be making at an entry level job, and if it weren’t that I promised I’d take on the students — I’d be looking for an entry level job right now. Just so I can move back into Boston. Just so I can prove that I can find a job if I have to. Just so they can bloody shut up about how I’m going to end up starving on the streets.
I was a bit intrigued by the concept of HBO doing a collection of perspectives from an Asian standpoint for Asian Heritage Month, so I clicked over to watch a bit.
The second person on is Mariana, an Asian American woman, and at first glance, what she’s saying isn’t that unfamiliar to me. The real hilarity starts when she starts talking about an experience with a cab driver at about 5:42.
…finally, he turns to me and says: “You know, for an Oriental girl, you have big beautiful breasts!”
And I was so shocked, I had no other answer than: “Well thank you, I grew them myself.”
He wasn’t sleazy, he wasn’t hitting on me, he was actually quite proud: ”Good for you miss, good for you.”
Somehow I was an Asian unicorn in his universe, um, he said it in such a way as if I had somehow overcome the shortcoming of my race — by sporting a big rack. I’ve worked hard at a lot of things in my life and if I ever had a Rosie Wong the riveter moment: “You can do it girls!”, I never expected that to be it.
O.M.G. That was so funny in a “this is fucking disturbing, but I can’t stop the horrified giggles for some reason” way.
The woman after her speaks of the disconnect between praying to a blond, blue-eyed Jesus and yet not being allowed to date an American boy — despite her assertions to her mother that if she dated a guy who looked like the Jesus in the pictures, she’d be closer to God.
Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai speaking of the need to efface themselves in order to blend in that some Asian feel struck a nerve somewhere. It seems that I don’t see as much of that need in other ethnicities. To have an Italian nonna or a German grossmutter is not necessarily something to hide and perhaps even something to flaunt. Observing traditions from the “old country” is sometimes a point of pride, a connection that is cherished, and not something to discard at the earliest opportunity.
It is possible, perhaps, that for every Asian who shook the dust of their heritage from their feet, there is another or two who not only keep their tradition but cling to them — but that is not the story I hear.
Maybe I, too, am falling into the myth-trap of the single story.
Maybe I have read too much Amy Tan and other similar authors and thus believing that most Chinese Americans are in a hurry to shed their heritage much the way a snake would shed a skin grown too small and old.
What does it say though, that when I look at Asian American literature, this is what jumps out at me? I have made no comprehensive study of Chinese American literature — but I don’t remember reading anything where the characters celebrate their heritage rather than running flat-footed from it.
I cannot blame authors for writing what they know, what they want to write, what they want to tell the world. Perhaps there is no blame to be cast, but I can wonder how different things would be if I were not constantly placed into the box of the single story that everyone has heard.
Speaking of my parents, my family, and what they think is almost always a trial with my American friends. When I do, it is one of the few times where I understand why sometimes the Asians will seek each other out to the exclusion of their American counterparts.
Everyone has heard this story before. The story of the repressed, suppressed, oppressed Asian girl with traditionally Chinese parents. The story of how sexism fuels sibling rivalries and creates family drama. The one where East meets West and East comes out looking really, really bad.
It’s been getting better, I feel, in recent years. At least now I can point to different friends and say: “Hey, what the fuck, this isn’t any different from _____”
My parents aren’t keen on me marrying outside the race, but then I know Jews who have that same issue.
Nolly’s parents clearly have favoritism issues with their offspring with roots that probably stem from gender. I’d like to clarify here that I’ve never felt like my parents have shown my brother favor simply because he’s male. Now, there’s another can of worms of what’s expected, but there’s been no differential treatment that I can clearly point to.
Kell’s parents can sometimes come across as ungrateful, psychotic, and passive-aggressively controlling. All his words, not mine. *grin*
Zach’s mother used to try to micro-manage his life, in fact, she still does certain things that make Azora twitch.
Dochola knows an American girl whose mother won’t let her drive long distances, wants her to live at home, and keeps an amazing number of tabs on her.
Nalia’s mother has a similar hold on her life.
I’m me; I’m not just that oppressed and repressed Asian girl, if that, and my parents aren’t straight out of an Amy Tan novel.
Somehow when other people look at me, there’s all this baggage of what they perceive what I should be like, what my interactions with other people should be like, and how my brain ticks because all they know is the last 200 odd years of Chinese fail.
Man, I’d still be in bad shape if they were presupposing me based on the whole 4 thou something years of Chinese history, but perhaps they’d get at least a wee bit more of it right.
Five or so years later, I think we’re in a better place, my friends and I. I think that nowadays we can accept that my relationship with my parents is screwy and messed-up and to deny that there are parts of it rooted in Chinese culture would be lying but not all of it is Chinese, just human stupidity and fail.
Still, that single story, it goes on and on and on.
Supposedly, people are getting all up in arms about the movie Kick-Ass — because Hit-Girl swears like a sailor, gores her way through upwards of 50 people over the course of the film with all sorts of weaponry, is unrepentant to boot, and worst of all: she’s 11 years old.
I really enjoy how sexism immediately comes into obvious, irrefutable play despite all supposed to-do about the age:
Why exactly is it perverse? To see a child engaged in violence? Or is it because it’s a female child engaging in violence that’s the problem?
I really suspect it’s the latter and not the former. After all, it’s not as if foul-mouthed, violent male characters are lacking in the market and yet there isn’t a huge brouhaha about that.
It gets funnier:
Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology weighs in with: “This promotes the idea that infantilising adulthood is ok and that we are no longer expected to draw lines between us and kids.”
Oh. Give me a break. Infantilising adulthood? So what do we call the current trend of putting prepubescent teens in stripper outfits and those high heels for babies?
On a related tangent, here’s a clip of 7 year old girls performing dance moves that look as if they’ve come straight out of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” MV:
Or, if you don’t like videos, here’s some pictures:
Granted, there’s somewhat of a firestorm going on because of these girls, but this isn’t the first or only instance of things like this happening.
Girls have been increasingly sexualized at younger and younger ages for years now and yet that sort of behaviour is alright and yet violence isn’t?
I love how there’s the comments that range from claiming that because it’s dance and therefore an art form, it’s not dirty or inappropriate to those who claim that sexualization is only in the eyes of the beholder and whoever sees this as being problematic should really get their mind out of the gutter.
Deanna:
I completely agree with you. These girls are talented little dancers and have skills! They are doing real choreography! There is a difference between getting dirty on the dance floor and body isolations! and do people not understand the difficult turn sequences in this piece.
Ken:
Unless you are one of these girls’ mothers, shouldn’t you keep your ridiculous ultra-conservative opinions to yourself? Anyone who sees sexuality in an outfit on a 7-yr old needs serious professional help. If your mind wasn’t thinking that way, you wouldn’t have this opinion. Period. Look yourself in the mirror and ask why you would see a costume on a 7-yr old as sexual.
Beammer:
The outfits look like swimsuits.
Peters (executive vp of The Hozman Group):
“It has been taken out of context.” and “There was NOTHING provocative about what they were doing.”
Presch (parent of one of the kids):
“The costumes are designed for movement, unrestricted movement and to show body lines.” Also, this is because “the judges need to be able to see the girl’s movement and technical skills.”
Um. Right. I see we’re going from justifying to rationalizing to flat out bullshit in very short order. I wonder if Presch thinks the rest of us are all idiots who haven’t seen ballet performed before. I’m sure that leotards would show body lines and allow for full range of body movement.
I’m gratified that there’s still people who still think that this sort of dance routine and costuming choice is wildly inappropriate for 7 year old girls, but the fact that we have managed to let public morality slide to the point where this sort of performance is considered de rigeur in this sort of venue is frankly appalling. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if a 17 year old I knew was doing this, I’d still be somewhat taken aback. You know it’s bad when Beyonce was wearing much less skin in a much less provocative manner in the original video.
Back to Hit-Girl. I appreciate how Chloe Moretz, the actress who plays Hit-Girl seems to be taking this way more in stride than some of the people blowing their tops off.
“Hit-Girl isn’t very adult at all. She may say this stuff, but she doesn’t know any better. That’s how she was born and raised. She watches John Woo movies — what do you get from John Woo movies? You get violence and cussing. And that’s all she knows. She doesn’t know how to speak kind words to people. Her Dad tried to raise her like that, she really doesn’t know any better.”
and
It’s a movie for a reason. It’s not meant to be taken as real life.
She also doesn’t suggest that kids watch it nor does she think that Hit-Girl should be a role model. She does see it as female empowerment insofar as it’s a female character who is kicking ass instead of being the damsel in distress.
What I really enjoy is the dichotomy. When it comes to violence, cursing, and such non-feminine pursuits, where are all the comments about it being art, about perversity only being in the eye of the beholder, about taking a chill pill because obviously to pull this off takes talent and that therefore excuses all?
Elisabeth Rappe puts it beautifully when she says that it’s because the violence isn’t sexual in nature.
Charlie’s Angels where they seduce men and then beat them? Perfectly alright.
Death via sex? That’s alright too.
But having a girl get all bloody and spill gore? Oh wait, that’s not ok at all, because a woman is supposed to either be the whore or the Madonna. The Madonna nurtures, teaches by loving pacifistic example, and “lends civilization to a brutal world”. Irony quotes. The whore kills with sex, poisons, and is essentially a back-stabbing bad girl who you do not want anywhere near your mother.
When it’s a girl doing all the bloodspilling, it’s no longer “just a movie” or “just entertainment”, it’s something infinitely more subversive, perverse, and problematic.
Hypocrisy, people. Hypocrisy. You’re so bad at this game.
To start with, I don’t believe we are taught to be good friends. As girls and young women, what is valued is being an obedient daughter, a loving wife, a good mother. This is pretty well illustrated by the eulogies I hear: “She was a loving mother and the best wife a man could have…” Oh so rarely you hear that she was a good friend, unless it’s the friend who is speaking, and even then it feels tacked on, an afterthought. Go for a stroll in the graveyard and count how many headstones celebrate a woman who was a good friend.
Even beyond what we’re taught, the many demands of being that dutiful daughter, that accomplished wife, that doting mother — how much time remains after you throw in the usual work week for interacting with friends? Real friends, not just other women you meet by happenstance during your offspring’s play dates or whilst waiting for them to get out of ballet or soccer or any of those many things that children are saddled with nowadays. Even assuming you have time, do your friends have time for you and is this a loss that is felt or is it just shrugged off as part of what life demands?
Moving past societal expectations and what we learned at our parents’ knees — women are trained to see each other as competition.
Women are conditioned to see each other as being in competition for male attention from a very young age. It certainly doesn’t help that a woman’s shelf life is so short, but the general idea is that there’s a shortage of “good” men and one must needs vie for the attention of all eligible men for fear of growing old alone.
Romance aside, the fact that often there’s only a token number of women in higher places means that all women are keenly aware that if they mentor the newcomers, then they’re just making the competition harder. Doesn’t help that there’s the usual stereotype that women are hired based on their looks, further lessening the likelihood that an older woman would be unwilling to teach the newcomer the ropes for fear of being replaced. This makes an already cutthroat situation even more hostile.
Then there’s the conditioning. Society’s perceived ideal is the nuclear family. This means that to snare a man and pop out babies is the be all and end all of everything. The problem with this mindset manifests in myriad subtle ways:
There’s the women who are simply incapable of having real female friends because they can’t fuck them or some variation thereof. Their lives are barren and meaningless without a man in it and whatever female companionship they do seek out is only to tide them over until they get their next fix of cock.
There’s the women who are one step above the former in that they can attempt some facsimile of being a decent friend — except you start realizing that you get whatever leftover dregs of affection and attention after her man is tired of all her doting.
Then there’s the women who for all they say that they like you and want to spend time with you — if push comes to shove and they have to pick between their boyfriend and you? You get the shaft. This is the sort of woman who you lose contact with once they get married or have a boyfriend because suddenly there’s just not enough time in the world for them to hang out with you. Ten years down the line you might meet her somewhere and wonder just what made you think that the two of you were ever friends.
Then you start venturing into more subtle territory. The one who swears up and down that you’re just as important to her as her man — except when you aren’t. The one that you think is a true friend — except when you realize that you might be willing to donate a kidney to her but she’s certainly not willing to return the favor — but for her husband she would.
All of this boils down to one simple point: We women have no equivalent of the rallying call of “bros before hos” and we know it. As a woman, I know that I’m seen as competition by my own gender, that I’m never going to rank as highly as the spouse in the minds of my female friends, and so I’m less likely to want to even try to forge relationships that could prove as fragile as plaster. I don’t think I’m the only one, even if I’m the only person who will admit it aloud.
For those who are reading this and shaking their heads:
Would you agree to donate a kidney to a friend as quickly as you would agree to donate to your spouse? What about your liver? Corneas?
How much more inconvenience in your life are you willing to suffer for your spouse than a friend?
How much more willing to compromise when it comes to dealing with your significant other?
How much less money are you willing to spend on maintaining the friendship if it is long-distance?
I was reading an article from the Gastronomica about the dearth of famous female chefs and the author said that the status quo needed to change.
Unless we start from the ground up, it’s not going to happen. Women aren’t ever going to manage to get the rights they deserve unless they manage to stop the in-fighting and manage to rally together for each other. I believe that we are our own worst enemies.
A friend emailed me an article from the Economist.
He asked me my thoughts on the article, and one thing really stood out to me: the author says that “most obviously, China should scrap the one-child policy”.
I think that’s just rank stupidity talking.
The authors says in the article that other countries without the one-child policy also suffer from a skewed sex ratio. This, to me, says that the one-child policy may be a significant cause in causing the numbers to be as ludicrous as 200 boys to 1 female, but it’s not fixing anything to scrap that policy.
There’s a couple of problems with the entire situation:
For those couples who can afford multiple children, they’ll simply keep having children until they get their desired boy. If there is enough affluence, then this would just cause a population surge at worst and at best there would be more girls brought into this world to live in a world of passive abuse and neglect with names like “bringing brother” and “summoning brother” or “might as well keep feeding”. Yes, that last was actually a common name.
For those who cannot afford to feed, clothe and school multiple children, then abortion is still the answer. As standards of living rise in China, more and more couples are realizing the immense amounts of money, time, and energy required to raise a child to be successful. With this in thought, it is more than likely that under those circumstances those people who would prefer sons would abort girls anyways to keep the best for their sons.
In rural areas, I can all but see rag-tag armies of girls doing the chores, working in the fields, toiling whilst their brothers go to school. For a family who has to scrimp and save for tuition, the only person in the family who will go to school is, of course, the son.
As a Chinese female, I would rather die than live in the above scenarios. It would be kinder to strangle me at birth or even much more humane to kill me in the womb. To live and be denied education, to be seen as lesser simply because of my gender, and to be seen as a breeder on legs? No thanks.
Of course, others may not share my view. Others will probably think that life as a slave is better than death. That’s alright. We’re all entitled to our own opinions.
Speaking as a Chinese woman living in today’s times seeing the gender inequality and the crimes that rise from it: bride-napping, sharing stolen wives between brothers, gang rape by villages of men who just want to breed their next generation of rapist sons — at this point I’m not even particularly keen on living in China. Sounds like a rather dangerous proposition to me, actually.
It speaks rather eloquently to me that when the demand for women rises, violence against them also rises in proportion to said demand instead of more respect. Instead of having more choices, our lives are put in more danger.
Nothing is going to change, not the sex ratio, not women’s rights, not anything unless some fundamental views are changed. Before that, perhaps scientists can comfort themselves that at least the numbers aren’t looking quite so horrible at the expense of having more people on the face of this earth — but nothing is fixed.
Thene told me that when I say feminazis, not only am I not being politically correct, but I’m not really communicating what I really mean to say.
That troubles me — the latter more than the former. Much, actually.
So, to be clear, when I say feminazis, I don’t mean all the feminists in the world.
I mean, specifically, those women who de-value women’s work. They are opposed to women living subordinate to men in the roles of housewives and SAHMs. They consider women who are not desirous of climbing the corporate ladder with the best of them as “throwbacks” and a waste of the “foremothers” who suffered for the cause.
I mean those women who seem to all but hate men. The patriarchy and by extension, all men, is the root of all evil. The world would be much more peaceful if only women were in charge. Society as a whole would make more sense if only women led the way. Men are nothing but hulking brutes who are all capable/willing/desirous of raping women, in thought if not in deed. Those women who get terribly offended when a man opens a door for them or waves them onto the train first. God forbid that a man give up his seat or something equally archaic.
I mean those women who have issues with women with long hair, who wear skirts, or who actually might want to have children.
That’s the sort of person I mean when I say feminazi. For the sake of being politically correct, and much more importantly, to be clearer in speech — I shall just refer to them as those women in the future.
Thene mentioned the use of “second-wavers”, but I’m fairly sure that there has to be some second-wavers who don’t hate men and who wouldn’t mind wearing skirts.
Radical and extreme has been ruled out — because as Caesura pointed out, there’s more than one way of interpreting them.
I’m going this year! Azora isn’t working crazy hours and Nora isn’t out of state — so Arisia 2010 is a go.
At first, to be honest, I had my reservations about how much I’d get into it. After all, I’m not usually a people person and the thought of spending a couple of days in close proximity to a ton of people usually has me screaming for the hills. Epi-pen please! Not to mention, I’m not really part of any fandom and my World of Warcraft raider card expired a while ago — I think effectively booting me from the geek/fen community.
I can’t even claim to be a Bioware fangirl since I gave up on Mass Effect. *grin*
These reservations lasted only until Nora and I were talking about food options — because allowing certain people to get hungry can get ugly really quickly — and we were talking about Legal Seafoods. This conversation led to looking up the food options, which led to looking at the schedule…
All I can say is: After looking at the schedule for Arisia 2010, I’m pretty sure I’m going to subsist on hotdogs grabbed in between mad dashes between the events. Some of the events didn’t even look that interesting until I started reading the blurbs. Then things just started rolling downhill from there. I am reminded of college, where all the “I must take this” classes were invariably all in the same exact time slot.
It’s not just that I have almost every hour slotted for a particular event, it’s that I’m going to bet that it’s going to be really hard to coordinate people so we share the same meal time. If that’s so, I figure we might as well just throw ourselves to the wolves and pretend junk/faire food is good sustenance for three days or so.
Although, I will say that if I had the money, I’d totally just eat at the buffets because the menus from last year look really tempting. Seafood in saffron broth, tea sandwiches and chicken pot pie? I’m so there. I’m expecting that the offerings will be just as good, if not better this year. If not, I guess that’s one more temptation shot down before it can assault my pocketbook. All to the good, I figure.
I’m hoping that the guys will be able to join us, but between work and more work, it’s starting to look really dismal. Oh well. Perhaps next year?
So I was in my psychology course the other day and it came up again.
The question of being “too nice”, applied both ways and again the question of why women fall for the bad guys.
People — start using your words carefully because otherwise you start to sound stupid, mmmkay?
From what I can tell, “too nice” happens when:
Girl in question cooks and cleans and essentially slaves away for houseful of men who aren’t related to her and asks constantly if there’s something, anything, that she can do for them.
Guy in question hears about girl wanting a specific type of food and scours Boston to find places selling it late at night and finally shows up on her doorstep with three or four servings from different places of this type of food.
Guy who calls constantly, asking if there’s something, anything, that she wants to do.
….
Alright people.
You’re not complaining about someone being “too nice”. You’re complaining about desperation.
Which is fair. Desperation is never attractive.
Ladies and gents? Do keep that in mind. Desperation is never, ever attractive.
Desperados might be — but that’s for later.
The thing is, when a guy has nothing better to do than to incessantly try to revolve around a girl, that’s unattractive on many levels because:
If he has nothing better to do, that implies he has no hobbies of his own, which is a no-no in my book. Anyone who relies on others to entertain him/her is just more work than I’m willing to handle and just might be a tad boring once the hormones wear off. It also implies a certain lack of maturity, I feel. If you’re a 20-something and you still don’t know what you like and what to do with yourself when you have no duties, I don’t want to date you.
If he has no one else he can hang out with, that’s a huge warning sign. Either he’s incredibly socially inept and therefore has no friends, or he’s a jerk and has no friends and either way you probably want to steer clear. Or if he’s ditching all his friends to dance attendance on you — I wouldn’t put too much stock in someone who would drop their friends like that either.
If he’s that eager to please, that implies that he very likely has a low self-esteem, too little love for himself, possibly that his self-worth depends on having a significant other, and that he needs someone else to actualize him. None of which are good traits.
So, onto why girls often fall for the “bad guys”.
It’s not about the being “bad”.
I’d get into the saviour complex that so many women seem to have because society expects it of them, but that’s another lengthy post by itself.
What is attractive is the confidence, the masculinity, the willingness to take charge and do something. That’s always attractive. The charm that most successful bad boys necessarily need to have to remain at large and not in some juvenile detention center doesn’t hurt either.
It’s really, really, really not about the potential abusiveness, the drug use, the machismo that can kick a women in her teeth.
If you’ll notice, this is why most athletes on winning teams have so many followers. Masculinity, confidence, proactivity, etc? Sound familiar?
To simplify it all into “women just fall for the bad boys” and glossing over the real issue with “she/he’s just too nice” is stupid and counter productive.
So we were learning about the psychology of the family, and it mentions somewhere in my textbook that in certain societies, it is considered standard and accepted for all elders of said society to educate the youth.
Alright.
Today I was on the bus, sitting in the section near the front, where they often have one blue sticker point down towards one of the seats asking people to give the seat to the elderly or handicapped. To be clear, the stickers points to one seat and says: “Please give this seat…” not “please give these seats…”.
What happened was that I was totally spacing out and didn’t notice an older woman getting on the bus. The first inkling I had that something was going on was when an African American woman stood up and told the woman that had just gotten on the bus that she could have her seat. I watched, somewhat bemused, because there was an empty seat opposite me and I wasn’t clear on why the woman would give up her seat when there was already one there. Besides, the empty seat was one with the blue sticker above it.
Then an elderly woman leaned over and snapped at me and a girl next to me: “You girls should be the ones giving up your seat.”
Utterly taken aback, I just said: “Sorry, I didn’t realize.”
At one point, I heard the black woman who gave up her seat complaining to an older white man beside her about the etiquette of people and so on…
At first I felt rather ashamed of myself. Then I thought about it, and got very confused.
For one, why would I be expected to give up my seat when there was a free seat available?
For two, I wasn’t sitting on a seat with that sticker above it — regardless of that we should give up our seats to the elderly and handicapped — what gave her the right to scold us in public?
For three, now that I think about it, a rather big girl was sitting on one of the seats opposite us, so that might have been why the elderly woman who got on didn’t sit down in the empty seat. However, why snap at us and not at the women who were sitting opposite us? Both of whom didn’t make any gesture to make room for the elderly woman? Were we just easy targets because she didn’t feel comfortable pointing out that the rather big girl was taking up more than her share of the seat?
For four, is it really still accepted in the US that random older people can call younger people to task if they feel like it?
I keep having these discussions with Thene about what we call food things.
So those fluffy, round, thickish cake-like things we make on a flat hot surface with flour, eggs, milk, and a bit of leavening?
Thene calls those drop scones. The USians I know call them “pancakes”. The Chinese call them “fried flatbreads”
The thin sort of carbohydrate vehicle that is common made from a slurry of egg, flour and milk that you cook on a flat, hot, surface?
Thene calls those pancakes. The USians I know call them crepes. The Chinese call them “French style thin fried flatbreads” when they’re trying to be ostentatious and accurate.
The fluffy inside, golden brown on the outside, thick disk-like things that are baked in the oven and commonly made with eggs, flour, sugar, fat of some sort, and leavening?
Thene calls them scones, the Americans call them biscuits, and I don’t know what the Chinese call them. I haven’t seen them so perhaps they just haven’t caught on. Happily for Thene, the Joy of Baking agrees with her definition.
The golden-brown, crispy exterior, sometimes crunchy or crumbly interior carbohydrate vehicle that sometimes has the buttery richness of shortbread that often looks like this, a.k.a in wedges?
Thene calls them flapjacks — which the USians use as a synonym for pancakes (the fluffy sort) — which apparently in the UK is a “tray baked treat”. The USians call them scones.
As for those round, usually sweet confections that are often thin, crispy and have added stuff like nuts and dried fruit?
Thene calls them biscuits, USians call them cookies. The Chinese call them “dry flatbreads”.
As for our “muffins”? The UKians apparently just call them cake. What we call English muffins is their muffins.
…any other definitions that need to be clarified? I have decided that when I speak of such baked goods, I shall describe it in excruciating detail so as to leave out all confusion.
