Amy Adoyzie

From Razorcake #49.

My dad won the lottery. Or at least I thought he did.
My seven-year-old mine spun and swirled with images of all the pink and purple toys that would litter the carpeted floor of my very own Barbie-themed bedroom.
It was on a Wednesday or Saturday evening, times when I could reliably find my father perched in front of the television intently watching numbered ping pong balls flail and bounce inside a plastic bubble until six settled into a narrow hamster tube. And if my father had somehow been graced by the fortune—from whichever higher being it is who bestows luck onto mortals—if he were so lucky perhaps maybe one of the five rows of numbers contained three picks that matched the winning numbers so that he could redeem his $5 award. He’d been playing the California state lottery for as long as I can remember, diverting funds from a non-existent college savings account. There came a point in my childhood when his guilt and pragmatism converged into turning his minor addiction into a father-daughter bonding activity. Occasionally, he’d hand me a playslip, where circled numbers sat neatly inside peachy grids waiting for another one-in-a-million schmuck to try his luck.
“Here, you pick the numbers,” he would say.
I always knew to use a No.2 pencil and to fill in each oval completely. I consistently used my birthdays of myself and my brothers’. My picks never won.
As I grew older and it was apparent that I was capable of watching many hours of television and transcribing numbers, dad made it my responsibility to jot down the wining digits twice a week. It became one of my chores, like setting the table or folding the laundry.
But on the night that I thought dad had won the lottery, I was too young to have been entrusted with such a responsibility—but old enough to be aware that my family could move into a sprawling two-story home like those that I saw on TGIF’s sitcom line-up if pops could match the numbers on his ticket to those flashing on the screen. I wondered into the bedroom that our family of five shared to ask about the numbers. My father said nothing and handed me a piece of scratch paper with six numbers neatly written in the center of the blank space. Then, like a magician, he slowly revealed his lottery ticket where those exact numbers appeared. He put his finger to his mouth and said, “Don’t tell anything to anyone yet. It will be our secret for now.”
Immediately, I ran out of the bedroom and into the living room of our 3-bedroom home where 11 of us lived. I laid down next to our small color TV, on the chocolate brown carpet, and spun around in explosive excitement. After a few minutes, I found that I was simply too small to contain such a big secret and ran back to my father.
He must have seen the earnest joy in my brown eyes and couldn’t carry on with the farce. I followed his gaze to the written winning numbers and he flipped over the sheet to reveal the real jackpot combination scribbled over and over again. Despite the repetition, that exact combination did not manifest itself onto his ticket.
I don’t think he meant to, but dad taught me something that night. Too bad I am still unsure of what it is exactly.

Odd piles and stacks of paper are hidden in cabinets and drawers throughout my parents’ home. Tucked between old bills and health insurance claims are sheets of graph paper with columns of winning numbers, twice a week for years and years. My father is not an obsessive-compulsive man, but he does indulge in this singular fixation. Sometimes I would find him hunched over, scanning hundreds of numbers trying to decipher a pattern. But dad isn’t a statistician and found nothing that could lead him to a seven-figure jackpot.
“An unexamined life is not worth living.” Socrates
I wonder if I would be able to distinguish a pattern if I mindfully jotted down all the events and experiences of my short life. Might the cyclical and winding nature of our daily existence reveal itself? Might all of the mistakes, inappropriate behavior and reactionary pessimistic misgivings flash and blink from the page? Might the right decisions—the choices that uplifted and moved us forward—glow and hum from the wrinkled and oft-handled life document?
What may be most frightening and undigestable is that we find that the ratio of flashing mistakes is blinding and that these are the exact moments we never regret.
What if I laid them side by side? The boyfriends, the jobs, the hungover afternoons, the sobering nights, the venomous feelings and fights, the giddiness of unexpected kinship, the seconds, minutes, hours, days. What would it all tell me?
“It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.” Ursula K. Le Guin
We ask these questions because we seek purpose. We search, like my father squinting trying desperately to absorb the numbers of the past to find a solution for the present, the future. The danger in this is that we focus so much of ourselves in trying to find an answer that we may forget that the search in itself is the answer.* The journey is oftentimes confusing, almost as baffling as why a father might fib to his second-grader child about winning a lottery. It might find you beneath Mother Teresa’s doorway in Kolkata, India—looking into her small, bare room adorned with a framed image of Jesus Christ, a rosary strand and a crown of thorns she twisted together herself. As I stood here, I imagined her life’s work and how often she was plagued with existentialist crises. Did she ever think, “Damn, life sucks. People are poor and miserable. Fuggettabutit.”?

Our eyes strain on the road, the unending flat stretch of grey laid down by men to connect one another, and our field of vision blurs at the edges. The landscape recedes, a pulsating marvel of living breathing earth, fading farther as we myopically continue barreling down the highway. You have to allow yourself the time to pull off of the road and drink in its surroundings. It won’t always be lush and golden, sometimes it charred, blackened, and pungent enough to burn your eyes. But you ought to breathe it in anyway, puff out your chest and inhale until your shirt tightens around you.
“A lollipop is a cross between hard candy and garbage.” Mitch Hedberg
You understand that candy will give you cavities (and garbage), but you eat it anyway because its good. What’s it worth to preserve your teeth if you ain’t got somethin’ sweet to smile about?
It’s like when I met my ultimate crush, the drummer in one of my all-time favorite bands, and he kissed my cheek and kicked me in the crotch all in the same night. I jotted that down to examine later alongside the time I played bass in the “Ed Wood of bands” because we were “so bad it was good” according to a band named after a fortress from the Master’s of the Universe and was fronted by a lady midget. Or when I worked at Disneyland, where I met a girl named Gerlie, and I quit two weeks later because even though I got free admission to the Magic Kingdom after my shift—whizzing through Space Mountain by oneself is just another cruel reminder of one’s ultimately loneliness. Or that night I found myself in a cramped bathroom stall in The Heart of Darkness, a club in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, consoling a stranger, wiping the tears from her delicate cheeks and holding her beautifully bronzed face as she wept about her ailing mother and hospital fees. Minutes later, I was on the dance floor with water-downed whiskey in one hand and some dude’s hips in another. And of course, the time my dad lied to me about winning the lottery for no other reason than to fuck with me.
It’s random, like rows of neat numbers inked onto wrinkled pieces of graph paper. For some it’s about figuring out the pattern, for others it’s the monetary jackpot—either way it makes us ignore the journey. The numbers, the randomness, is the journey. The numbers are the moments that engulf us, the small semblances of hope and the weight tied to our ankles.
Or the numbers are nothing at all.

*More about this ridiculous journey from David Foster Wallace: “”…that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.” (From an essay on the works of Kafka.)

From Razorcake #46.

Disappointment Rock

Flip-flops are a symptom of a larger epidemic in America. It’s the footwear equivalent of walking around in your skivvies sans pants. It’s no longer for the comfort and convenience of wearing around your home or to the beach. It’s become a lifestyle choice—a contemporary wardrobe fixture that says I could barely be bothered to slip something onto my feet to prevent getting tetanus and so that the dude at the 7-Eleven will let me buy a pack of smokes. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, still tethered to archaic notions of how we ought to present ourselves to the world when we step out of our homes. There’s something to be said for getting dressed.
I’m not devolving into some type of fashion dictator—I just believe in shoes.
And then I moved to Bangladesh. My daily footwear choices are between two pairs of black flip-flops. Boots, flats, sneakers, loafers, and closed-toe, lace-up shoes are an anomaly. Potato sack-like tunics and oversized pajama pants hang, neatly pressed, in my closet—my lack of shoe choices are the least of my concerns. Long gone are the days of vintage day dresses with cowboy boots, Muslim countries don’t look fondly on uncovered flesh and the subcontinent is no place for muggy boots.
But I expected this, because I’m a big girl and when I learned that I’d be living in Bangladesh I packed away any piece of clothes that may show my womanly shape and my adorable dancing shoes. They’re all sealed in cardboard boxes sitting patiently a Portland basement, waiting for my return to floozy-dom. In the meantime, I’ve stopped lamenting the demise of western civilization via flip-flops, and have even gone as far as to embraced those flattened slices of rubber beneath my feet because this is how they roll in these parts and I’s gots to respect that.
Maybe it comes with age and maturity, but I’m finally learning ways to cope with disappointment by expecting it. Disappointment is defined as the feeling of displeasure when one’s expectations are not realized. In order to abate this feeling of displeasure, I just learned to not expect much.
Don’t expect to wear anything but flip-flops while living in Bangladesh. Done. Disappointment averted.
There’s a short list of other non-expectations that I never imagined would be met in Chittagong. I conjured this list and filed it away under Fugitaboutit, saving space for disappointment in other avenues of my life. But by the grace of whomever or whatever dictates what we deserve—the expectations ended up being fulfilled.

Things I Never Thought Would Happen in Chittagong, Bangladesh—But Did

1. Drink liquor.
2. Get hit on (the flirty-kind, not the having-small –stones-pelted-at-me kind).)
3. See a show.

Remember prohibition?
No, I didn’t think so. In your lifetime thus far, alcohol has flowed freely across this great United States of America. As long as you’re of legal age, because we all respect the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 of course, you’re able to buy and consume as much alcohol as your body will allow before you stumble onto a sidewalk to expel any excessive shots or pints that you may have unwittingly consumed in your overzealous celebration of the prohibition repeal. Isn’t that why we drink, to celebrate our legal right to do so?
As a proponent of liberty and shitfacedness, I’ve always been a hearty celebrant of Hamm’s and Wild Turkey. But when I moved to Bangladesh, I resigned to the idea that there are entire countries where prohibition still exists.
Talk about having to prepare myself for disappointment— I moved to a country where booze is illegal.
You’re thinking, “Smooth move, ex-lax.” But I prepared myself for long stretches of sobriety by tapping into a steely reserve that lies within in me—something called stoicism. And also because I knew that I’d have the opportunity to travel out of Bangladesh during vacation breaks where I would get my drink on in neighboring fun-advocating countries.
So you can imagine my glee, and ultimate bummed-outness, when I learned that there is a loophole in Bangladeshi prohibition laws—turns out that alcohol is only illegal to Bangladeshi citizens (presumably Muslims, even though there’s a Hindu population) and foreigners are free to sully their bodies as they wish. The negatives are that buying beer is a hassle as you have to go through specific clubs and restaurants, thus far the selection has been limited to Heineken and Foster’s and it’s crazy costly. $17-USD-for-a-six-pack-expensive.
A couple months after I learned about the foreigner clause, a couple fellow volunteers and I heard vaguely about a nearby hotel that may house a bar. We were there before you could even say, “I’ll have whatever is your cheapest beer.”
We found ourselves in a dark, velvety-walled roomful of men stare as we took a seat at one of the center tables. Unsurprisingly, we were the only women there and the staff fell over themselves to serve us. As it were, their cheapest beer was $4 for can of Heiney and I’m much too proud, and pathetically broke, to drop that much change for beer. Instead, I perused the drink menu and found something called “Local Whiskey” for two bucks. The bartender wouldn’t stop grinning when I asked for it.
It arrived in a drinking glass the size of a toilet paper cardboard tube, with a dollop of clear liquid at the bottom.
“Well, how is it?” My friends asked after I took a sip.
All I could muster after my taste buds uncurled themselves was, “It tastes like burning.”

In lieu of coffee shops, I sometimes find myself trying to write at a local fast-food chain down the street from the school where I work and live. It was during one of these late evenings where I bought a sub-par salad-like meal and a pineapple slushy, settled onto a high stool and tried to scribble thoughts into my journal.
Something inexplicable happened. Of all the situations that I figured I would find myself in while in Chittagong, being picked up never even made the list of possibilities.
He was a Pakistani student studying at the Chittagong Medical College and flirted with me as if he just completed an online course entitled, “How to Make Friendship* with Ladies.”
“Do you believe in ESP?” He asked and proceeded to play this pseudo-mind reading/math game with me where the punchline is “There are no kangaroos in Denmark!”
When he saw that I wasn’t impressed he asked another question, “Have you seen the movie Titanic?”
“Yeah.” I remember watching it with Gus, about a decade ago, at the second-run movie theater in town. We paid $2 each and snuck in a whole bucket of fried chicken to get us through the long film.
“What did you like about it?” He shifted in his seat and leaned in closer to me. I tried to surreptitiously slide my slushee out of his reach. All I could think was roofies.
“Eh, it was interesting, I guess.”
“Anything else?” He leaned casually on his elbow and his shoulders met his ears. As he sat there in his crooked posture, I noticed dark curly body hair peeking out from his t-shirt and was summarily even less interested.
I was trying to figure out where he was going with this, “The special effects were impressive.”
“But was there anything else you like? Like about the story or something?”
It seemed obvious that my obvious girl-response should have been Oh, I loved the romance in the film! It was such a romantic love story. Leo is so dreamy! But I’m not that obvious. “Nah, I just thought it looked good.”
He gave up and moved onto a time-tested line, “Do you believe in astrology?” I braced myself and he asked, “What’s your sign?”
I refrained from saying, “My sign? It’s Stop.”

*Make Friendship is a Bengali term for, you know, making special friends.

The first three things I learned to thump out on my midget cherry red electric bass guitar were the theme song to Adam West’s Batman series, a bastardized version of Danny Elfman’s Simpsons theme and the first few measures to Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” I learned the TV show theme songs because I was a child addicted to television, but I didn’t practice that Metallica riff because I’m a hesher form way back when—I played it because it was easy.
Which makes me wonder the reason behind why metal is seemingly always the ground floor that kids from developing nations will crawl through as their first rite of passage into rebellious music from the west. When Mahreen invited to me to an event she was organizing, Rock-A-Mania at Muslim Hall, I wasn’t surprised to hear Metallica and Iron Maiden covers all night. I wasn’t stoked on it, but I wasn’t surprised either. Being surprised would imply that I expected something more—but I’m on an anti-disappointment mission and try to be devoid of expectations. It was both comforting and disconcerting to see a room full of black t-shirts thrashing about to bands made up of privileged Bangladeshi high school kids. Too bad they weren’t dancing to Japanther or Girl Talk or anything remotely good. But at least there was a show.
This was also the first time I wore flip-flops to a show. And I’m pretty sure a cockroach the size of a mobile phone crawled across my toes. So uncool.

From Razorcake #47.

He asked for it.
He penned his own fate in destiny’s ledger when he named those kittens. They were salt and pepper grey sisters whose forlorn lives began when they were given to Graham who, in his limited abilities, named them Tits and Ass. Graham and his sophomoric humor didn’t recognize the responsibility one bore in caring for and naming domestic pets. His mistake would eventually catch up with him as the universal creed of karma made itself known.
The notion of karma is the idea that an action a person takes in the present will somehow effect and create experiences in the future. It’s cause and effect with ju-ju. Karma might reveal itself when someone is most vulnerable, to spotlight the consequences of their decision beneath the harsh light of what-goes-around-comes-around. When, exactly, might a person be most vulnerable? Perhaps it is when they are as naked as the moment they popped out of their mama’s special bathing suit area. It is when we are without these woven pieces of fabric covering our bare flesh that we feel most susceptible to the elements.
If you’re one to believe in reincarnation, Tits and Ass themselves may be the ones to blame for their fortune (or lack thereof). Maybe those little balls of ash-colored fur were rotten souls in a former life and were being punished as they were reborn into house cats named for salacious body parts.
Ass’s life ended prematurely when she crossed a busy street, which left Tits distraught and ill. A symptom that a cat is suffering from an ailment or grief over the loss of a family member is that she will begin pissing anywhere but her in her litter box. That’s a feline way of saying, “Dude, take me to the effin’ vet. I feel like shit.” But Graham heeded no such warnings and figured Tits would eventually heal from the pain of losing her best friend and sister— the A to her T.
It was months after this tragedy that I found myself laying in Graham’s bed, a brand new $700 queen-sized, pillow-top mattress that felt like a cotton ball cloud on top of spongy marshmallows. It was heavenly, even with Graham awkwardly groping me as I tried to drift off to sleep.
I ain’t no prude, but I just wasn’t into it. As it were, this was the last night I’d spend in his bed. We had been dating for months and I could no longer overlook his character flaws (like naming his cats Tits and Ass wasn’t enough of a deal breaker) such as poor taste in music (unintelligible screamo masquerading as math rock) and a bad eye for design (bland vector drawings were his forte). We were fizzing and his last ditch effort to get fresh with me got him nowhere and forced me to the edge of the bed.
Tits must have sensed my discomfort and hopped into bed to distract Graham who was dressed only in his thin boxers and laying on his side. She slowly climbed up behind him and crawled onto his bony hip.
The mattress jolted suddenly.
“Fuck!” Graham jumped out of bed, teetered on his lanky legs and yanked off his underpants and tossed them into the corner of the room. “Tits just pissed on me!”
I looked behind to see the cat scurry away and a small puddle where Graham once laid.
“And the bed,” I added nonchalantly. “She peed the bed too.”
I leisurely rolled out of bed, stood back and watched as a naked Graham pounced onto his new mattress with this bath towel. His long limbs perched on all fours, every freckle of his red-headed body exposed and his flaccid penis swayed from side to side as he furiously scrubbed out cat piss.
If that wasn’t karmic retribution, I don’t know what is.
We broke up the next day.

The comfort of the rising steam and beat from the stream of a hot shower after a seemingly endless, arduous day cannot be understated. It is sometimes the last refuge one has in a space void of any semblance of solace. It’s simple enough: heated water forced through pinholes from a showerhead nozzle. A spray of warmth to drown out your tiresome day, to sooth and wash away all those miserable minutes you were awake when you would have rather not been.
My first four months in Bangladesh were rough, exhaustive 15-hour days of continuous meetings, research and planning. Worse even was my lack of outlets for decompression, no friends around and dimly-lit bars to whine about work in. It was just me, a dozen other teachers, and a ten-storied building amidst the chaos of a developing nation’s second largest city in a Muslim country. It was much akin to the antithesis of fun.
And, of course, as the gods willed it, we had no hot water.
I wasn’t sure what I had done to deserve this. Had I coveted too much (Hamm’s, Gus and Marah’s Crunchitos, boys)? Should I have stayed at that brain-numbingly boring new media job at the local public television station, fulfilling my parents dreams while giving myself a career lobotomy? Was I in Bangladesh for all the wrong reasons, to assuage first-world guilt rather than out of pure altruistic motivations? How had I become so karmically damned that our modern building was without hot water for those desperate nights?
My brain began to fry on an average of four and a half hours of sleep every night and under the weight of being responsible for the education of 128 underserved young women from south Asia. A pixel went out in my left eye, there was a small grey splotch right in the lower center field of vision. I was too terrified to self-diagnose myself via the internet and a friend from home did it for me. She said that I had a floater, something to do with retinal gel that gooped up in my eyeball. I figured it was from stress and lack of sleep.
I found myself disturbingly sleep-deprived, stressed to the max and possibly exhibiting signs of early retinal detachment in the middle of a country where the literacy rate is less than half and people leave the city to get serious medical care (if they can afford it). It was during one of those nights in the early months where the only remedy I could figure for my condition was a hot shower.
The combination of hope and stupidity has lead me to do many things in vain. Drinking for courage, pining after boys who won’t even acknowledge my existence, deluding myself with pipedreams about how I’m going to be next Asian not-gay David Sedaris. But on one particular night, I turned the left shower nob hoping by sheer force of will that the water that jetted out of the showerhead would be heated. All in vain.
I stood there, without a stitch of clothing on, next to the flowing spout that formed a tepid pool of slightly chilled water at the drain by my feet. My fatigue and frustration coalesced into me sobbing loudly, physically unable to stand beneath the lukewarm shower, pleading with the powers that be and asking why I was at that juncture. I was a pathetic, cold, naked sight.
The only way I could justify that sad scene was to think that perhaps, in my moment of stripped vulnerability, I was paying karma forward. That some of us live in discomfort, sacrificing convenience and some bits of sanity, in hope/vain that somewhere, someone may benefit from this.
I asked for it.
And I wonder how about the folks who have given up much more for the betterment of others. Or how simple, small selfless acts can set in motion karmic energy that may find its way back to complete a circle (if you’re lucky, while you’re naked).
Mind your Ps and Qs, don’t name your pets T and A and we’ll all get along fine as karma winds its way.

From Razorcake #45.

(D)Arranged

My tits are debatable.
Their very existence is shrouded in mystery and speculation like the Yeti of the Himalayas or Scotland’s Loch Ness monster. There have been alleged booby sightings during drunken groping episodes in the darkness of night, but those accounts are unreliable as they invariably involve severe levels of inebriation. All evidence suggests that I may be a biological anomaly. The lower half of my body is that of a woman with a booty and a certifiable cooter to match, but from my beer gut to my collarbone I resemble an 11-year-old boy who prefers video games over sunshine.
What’s the purpose of all this information, other than to reveal the Almighty’s cruel hand in creating my vessel?
All of this is to offer context should I ever use the phrase “Before I had even sprouted tits” to signify my childhood and hopefully you shan’t immediately question “Wait? What? You’ve got tits?” I’m well aware of my lack of boobage, but more than a decade ago I entered the vast mindfuckery that is womanhood and began bleeding from my crotch and did, indeed, sprout barely-A boobs.
(An undergarment manufacturer wised up and realized that there was a small population of women who were ta-ta-deficient and produced bras with barely sizing for our barely funbags [I’ve never ever had a piece of writing where I used the word funbags, please allow me to use it now unapologetically.] Bras are literally sized barely A, which is lingerie code for “Who are you kidding?”)
But I digress.

Let us take a moment to escape from out present reality and rewind to a time where I was a bigger nerdy thing than I am now. No, not sophomore year of high school when I published my first clichéd angst-ridden zine about getting detention or how my dog had “penis surgery.” Farther back, even before middle school where the Gods of Geekdom bestowed my first pair of prescription eyeglasses and a mouthful of metallic braces upon me. Let us climb into that rickety time machine that is my memory and return to a time filled with Capri Sun juice pouches, Alvin & The Chipmunks and Beverly Cleary books.
My childhood was typical, in that working-class-first-generation-refugee-immigrant-family kinda way. The act of growing up was an exercise in bi-cultural negotiations, trying to understand my folks and trying to get them to understand me. Even at a young age, I had an acute understanding that the life path I wanted to traipse down wasn’t exactly aligned with their old-school expectations. Granted, my life goals at the time revolved around flipping Maniac Mansion and writing a series of stories about a white girl with curly, blond hair named Angela.
It was during this precious and precarious time of my young life that my father felt it was necessary to sit me down for a special talk about my future. When dad talks, I just listen. Sometimes I nod and look him in the eyes, but I mostly just stare off and hope he doesn’t catch me mouthing “Shut up” over and over again.
Some children, by their very nature of being both extremely inquisitive and skeptical can be an incredulous bunch. Especially those who spent their elementary school years learning fractions in math class and then going home to call utility companies to dispute billing discrepancies. Calling customer service representatives for my parents reversed our roles and thickened my skin. Even so, at the very least I always have, and still do possess, unending respect for my folks, but that doesn’t mean that I heed their words.
Dad began that talk with awkward references to my adulthood and how every decision I make will always reflect the family, my mother and father, ancestors, chickens we’ve raised, etcetera. Therefore, every decision I make should be in accordance to my family’s guidelines. On this particular occasion, dad was briefing me on whom they expected me to wed.
“No white, no black, no Mexican,’ he declared. He was on a roll and continued, “No Korean or Japanese. Just Chinese.”
Should I deviate from these expectations, my father, the man who is one-half of the awesome force that created this Monster of Fun, said that on no uncertain terms will I remain a member of the family if I didn’t marry a Chinese dude.
My dad threatened to disown me if I fell in love with the wrong ethnicity. “It will be as if I never had a daughter,” he emphasized. All this pressure, obligation and ultimatum was suddenly thrusted upon me, a kid who still pretended to be Adam West’s Batman with a pink and yellow fanny pack as my utility belt. All of this nonsense being asked me before I had even sprouted tits.
I respect the man because he is my father. But my reverence for him is tempered by the fact that I know he’s full of shit. In hindsight, my ten-year-old self should have looked him straight into his slanty eyes and asked, “You want me to bind my feet while I’m at it?”

I’m learning, A lot.
I’ve learned more about south Asia and Islamic culture in the past three months than I had the entire 27 years leading up to my arrival in Chittagong, Bangladesh where I am a volunteer teacher at the Asian University for Women’s Access Academy. The work is grueling and exhausting, but I’m begrudgingly studying grammar so that I may teach it to my students. In between learning about state verbs and discovering that the world ‘like’ can be used in six different ways, I was also enlightened to the fact that arranged marriages are still very popular in this regions, even among some of my all-female student population.
Suffice to say that even though my moms and pops had some crazy notions about who and what they wanted me to become, they never presumed to choose my future life partner.
Even as I am armed with cross-cultural sensitivity and understanding, I’m still surprised that discussions about how love marriages versus arranged marriages is still debatable in 2008. I divided a class in half and they took sides—all of the young women who were on the pro-arranged marriage team were actual proponents of the cultural relic so I knew they would defend it adamantly. As their teacher, I had to exercise impartiality and bit my tongue as they argued in favor of letting someone else decide what’s best for you. I can barely handle it when I’m not clutching onto the remote control as someone is flipping through channels on the TV set, no less have someone choose who I am supposed to make babies with.
The cultural crutch of tradition keeps people from standing on their own two feet, without wobbling ahead to make their own mistakes. The argument comes down to two basic tenets: 1) your parents love and care for you and would only desire the best for their child and 2) love makes you do dumb shit and you’re not to be trusted by such an overwhelming surge or emotion. While I agree with both sentiments on a superficial level, I’m unwilling to concede that breeders are innately superior decision-makers by virtue of their ability to reproduce and mistakes made within the fog of love are hard-won chapters in everyone’s lives.
Even if love, that blinding swell of dementia that permeates every cell of your body, consumes you and makes you sink into abysmal chasms of despair—it also has the ability to make you float to euphoric peaks. The notion that one needs to be protected from it, to save them from themselves, bums me out.
But who am I kidding? What the eff do I know? Some of the things I love most are inanimate objects like Cilantro, my mixte bike, some pillows my mom made me and Hamm’s beer. Is my opinion to be taken seriously if I sincerely believe that Hamm’s is the best tasting beer? Maybe some folks do need to be told what to like?
Not me though. Gimme a can of the stuff from the land of the sky-blue water any day.