Feed on POSTS
Much like my Stuff I Miss feature, Stuff I Love is going to use my photos explore all the awesome stuff I dig (but do not necessarily miss because I’ll be home soon to enjoy it [!!!]).
Dang! It’s getting meta-bloggy!
I love me blog! Without this odd jumble of binary code being fed through fiber optic wires and flashing across monitors, I don’t know where all my rants would go (probably in e-mails to weary friends.) I’ve really appreciated all the support from friends and strangers who read. This exists because I can’t help it and also because ya’ll engage me.
Check out the most recent reader map:
I’m gettin’ love from all over! Now I just need to figure out how to work my magic on south American, Africa and the vastness that is Russia. Perhaps I can blog more about futbol, how pop-star Madonna is beginning a cult or the market for eastern European mail-order brides?
Just completed the first rough draft of a short story. I haven’t written fiction in a year and dang it feels good. I’ve sent it out to a handful of folks for notes, and as I await their constructive criticisms I’ve begun on another story!
The main character is coming to me. Sometimes I summon her by name, “C’mon Eunice,” I whisper to myself, “Who are you?”
She is trickling into my consciousness in small phrases and images. The whole process of writing is at once insanely frustrating and miraculous.
In a note to a friend, I described the whole process like so:
Writing fiction is so insane. It’s like you have something bottled up so tightly inside of you, and you want to let it out so badly, but you have to make sure the spigot is turned to just the right angle so that it pours out with the right pressure or else it’ll explode, a flood, and you weren’t ready for it and its just one big gigantic mess.
But if you get the tap to flow just right, it feels so goddamned good.
Filed under: Big Bang, Operation Engrish Prease, When I Grow Up, Writing Junk
An open letter to fellow volunteers,
This is a letter for all fellow volunteers who, like myself, grew up in the relative comfort of a developed nation. This is for those of you who decided to forgo the luxuries and little things taken for granted, like 24-hour fast food drive-thrus and democracy, of your native country to fulfill an altruistic quest for the betterment of mankind. This one is to remind us of the privilege we have and the responsibilities that are inextricably attached to it.
But, to be frank, this is mostly so I can vent.
Because even if we all carry the same passports, we don’t carry the same stories. While we work overtime to exercise cultural sensitivity with the people we serve, sometimes we forget to offer that same courtesy to fellow volunteers. That’s why I’m asking (and its not just a personal favor to me because it could help you out) that you may extend your assumed ability to connect cross-culturally with your own colleagues.
Because even if you and I came from the same place geographically, we didn’t leave the same circumstances and history behind.
Because even if our shared home country celebrates diversity and promotes multiculturalism, people of color are still seen as the other back home and abroad.
Because even if you and I were born and raised in the same country, I wonder how often people ask you, “No, where are you really from?”
Now, take a moment, empathize. I know you have this ability, or else you wouldn’t be doing volunteer work, but this time try empathizing with the people with whom you share your offices. This is for future reference, because sometimes we have one those days.
Those days where seemingly nothing goes right, where you lament what you left behind and how there’s nothing to look forward to, where you just need to whine and vent because words are all you have. You have those days, I have those days. We need them.
We need them because they are superficial and hollow refuges where we can let sad and sorry sentences escape us and dissipate into the air the second they are spoken. Somehow letting those words and ideas float into the space of conversation makes us feel better. It’s a simple exercise that hurts no one and puts us at ease.
Give me that moment. Give me a few minutes to exhume this existential crisis that consumes me every now and again, to shed some light on my worth as a volunteer. Let me ask the question, “I wonder how much we make per hour?” Let me do the math and figure it out to be less than $2 an hour. Let me have this fleeting moment of inconsequential self-pity.
I know that I chose this, I wanted this, this was a path that I decided to walk down. I know this. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t have times where I ponder the ramifications of my career choices. Let me have these questions without making me feel like a whiny asshole. Let me have these uncomfortable questions and answers without you, trotting in on your high horse, dismissively saying, “Yeah, but, think about the cost of living.”
Think about the cost of living.
It’s simple to just think of the cost of living when you don’t have to worry about money, while you’re living abroad or after you’ve returned home. It’s easy to think about it because the act of thinking about it doesn’t make you nauseas with worry and you don’t drown in anxiety after realizing that you’re approaching 30-years-old with an empty savings account. It simple to think about the cost of living when you’re not haunted with tens of thousands of dollars of student loans that you had to defer because you’re too poor to pay them back presently. It’s painless to think about the cost of living when the people who brought you into this world do not have an acute awareness about the actual, sincere price of life- having survived a war, having to live through the inhumanity of others, having nothing.
When I think of the cost of living, I think about how disappointed my folks are. How they’ve struggled in working-class purgatory, devoting their lives to our future so that we wouldn’t have to toil in factories or food service industry jobs. How I had it, a firm grasp on the American Dream, an office job where my entry-level salary matched the salary that my father was finally earning after almost 20 years of being a machine operator. How I gave it up.
When I think of the cost of living, I think about how my folks picked a fight with me days before I left for Bangladesh. How they wouldn’t speak to me because they were insulted that I abandoned their dreams, thereby negating what they’ve worked for their entire lives. How it isn’t that my working-class folks don’t believe in altruism, they just can’t afford it because nothing in life is free but for some deranged reason I’ve chosen to work for very little money. How hurtful it must be when your kid insinuates that pay stubs are not the be all and end all of existence and you’ve spent the last 30 years breaking your back for those slips of paper.
You think I ought to consider the cost of living? You don’t think I already have?
Yep, the cost of living in Bangladesh is minimal. I’ve thought about it.
I’ve also thought about the cost I’ve incurred before arriving here, while here and after I leave. That cost is beyond dollars, yuans, takas and exchange rates.
That cost lies deep inside stories of the past that my parents won’t tell me and swells beneath their chests.
I’ve thought about it.
Have you?
How do folks find this darn thing? Here are a handful of search queries that have brought strangers to this strange web space.
Semi-Expected:
reading a paycheck lesson
“live in the along”
dishwashing job
careers when i grow up
big paragraph example of nerd talk
good feng shui tattoo
beer and pizza
Chuckle-Worthy:
“i’m a superhero” t-shirt
double eyelid sticker
tape eyelids
brain explode jap encephalitis
big lady crushes small girl videos
does one hyphenate up-to-par?
i was little girl i asked god i said
“vacation constipation”
what is booty-rubbed dancing
Odd:
chinese amy hood
four-six stance kung fu
flower petal hot
low hyphen
“balloons popped”
prease polise movie
“white people,latinos,black people”
background communist
how my brother parties
who has the same name as me
watch the music video that goes like thi
she sat at her toilette pale skin face
Creepy:
big tailed women
goth bang
There are some truly mega creepy ones that I’d rather not repeat because they’ll just lure more weirdos.
Maybe I've been preparing for this moment since I was nine-years-old. My parents bought an electronic typewriter, a box of black ribbon and a small package of clear eraser tape. When guests came over, I lugged that big hunk of black and grey machinery into the living room and gingerly placed it on coffee table so that my parents could do their own working-class immigrant version of “The Price is Right” while I transformed into one of Barker's Babes and mimed typing. Mom and dad talked about how expensive it was, but ultimately worth it because their kids should know how to type and it was the late 80's so everyone was stoked on technology and cocaine. (But our family was only stoked on low-end technology, no coke-except for the cola type.)
Between the typewriter and a small stack of wide-ruled notebooks, I wrote my first stories about classmates or fictional white girls, inevitably named Angela, with curly blond hair and impeccable clothes straight off the racks at Mervyn's. Nobody read them, except for me, and I was fine with it because something wound its way through my little kid body and needed to be released out my fingers and onto paper. It was like all those narratives that children create as they play with their toys, but I felt the urge to write it down.
Almost two decades later, I'm still clacking on keyboards and scribbling on blank pages, overwhelmed with the urge to say something, anything. But in all this time, I've been extremely hesitant to ever describe myself as a writer.
Sure, I write. But so do you, and them and everyone else. Everyone writes.
In a working class family with immigrant parents, being a writer was never presented as a career option. Working class folks are pragmatic, and they only wished tangible careers with health benefits for their kids. Writing as a profession is terribly abstract and nothing I felt comfortable admitting to even though I've been putting out zines since I first discovered them when I was 15-years-old and have been a columnist for Razorcake for the past two and half years. But I still never felt like a writer.
Odd.
Again, this is probably rooted in my upbringing that you can do whatever you please, but it doesn't count until you get paid for it because otherwise you're just a fool wasting your time. Razorcake doesn't pay me a dime for my bi-monthly smatterings of nonsense or any of the design work that I lay out for it. I work for the magazine because I respect that it's representing a counter-culture that's valuable and supports great artists. All of those altruistic reasons don't pay the bills, therefore my family treats it more like a hobby than real work.
Something completely insane has happened. I've come to terms with my lot in life at this young age. It turns out that I am, indeed, a writer. I am so committed to this notion that I even phoned my mom last night to announce this newfound realization. I could hear just a tinge of pride in her voice when she asked, “Oh, really?”
“Just admit it,” Gus said.
“I can't. It's too weird.” I flailed my arms around my head, trying to physically represent how weird it felt.
“You're a writer,” he took a sip from his pint glass. “Just say it.”
“Noooooo…” I whined.
“You've been doing this stuff since I met you. You were made for this.”
I was floored that Gus, my most favorite and harshest critic, declared that I was made for this.
“I know, but it still sounds so pretentious and weird and… squeal.” When I get too excited, I can't help but to emit a soft squeal. The bar was filled with people chatting away and no one heard my yelp. I inhaled the cigarette-tainted air for a single deep breath and quickly confessed, “Okay, fine, I'm a writer.”
Gus smiled.
I giggled.
“See? You're a writer.”
Where'd all this come from? Why this sudden urge to name myself as one who writes?
Because, *deep breath*, someone is paying me to write a story. Any story I want. A story.
It's bizarre that I needed my writing to be validated by a paycheck, but I can't think of a better way to do so than to get my bills paid with something I wrote.
It feels incredibly awesome to finally be able to say it and believe it.
(Thanks Greg!)
My kids' lives are state-mandated. They're in class six days a week. Six full days, from dawn to beyond dusk when the final bell rings after 10 PM. Much of that time is spent inside the stark walls of their classrooms memorizing exercises that they'd rather forget, cramming to pass a single exam. My goal, amidst all of this anti-learning pro-robot-making system, is to give them choice and an outlet.
I asked my students to contribute to their very own zine as an outlet for self-expression and an exploration in independent publishing. I was their age when I first discovered zines and how intoxicatingly empowering they were. It's been ten years and I'm still putting out my own stories.
I gave them a choice, all 1,350 of 'em, to submit something or not. The exact numbers aren't in yet, but I think less than 10% contributed. It's disappointing that they didn't jump at the opportunity to do something in the classroom that wasn't geared towards studying for examinations, but secretly I'm glad that the number of submissions is manageable because I'm the one who's going to put it together.
What were the kids doing, if they weren't zine-ing? Here's a list of the activities that I observed in lieu of self-expression:
- Clip fingernails
- Work on math and physics problems
- Sleep
- Read Chinese magazines and newspapers
- Stare at inanimate objects
- Listen to MP3 player
- Tell me that they have “no inspiration”
- Play Tetris on electronic dictionary
- Countdown minutes left in class out loud
- Scrape gunk off fingernails
Late last month, on the one-year anniversary of me quitting the real world, I finished The Post-It Diaries.
The Post-It Diaries is a chronicle of my time served as an adult, working 40+ hours a week and generally feeling like a schmuck. It's about 50 pages long and two years of my life. If any of ya'll want one, it's only $2 and you can PayPal me at amyadoyzie@gmail.com.
Sanks!
I am a true believer in keeping physical, tangible journals. Not just stuff constructed of binaries and exists only on this virtual superhighway of emo congestion on every on-ramp of blogtown. Since I was a wee thing, I've been keeping diaries, journals and sketchbooks that are so comforting and disconcerting to flip through- to remind yourself that you're holding someone from the past in your hands. In high school, most of my ramblings about boys and being so angst-ridden and depressed filled the pages of lined notebooks, so that my parents didn't know I was just mind vomiting and they thought I was doing homework. The older I get, the more I realize the importance of keeping journals as memories and reminders of where I've been and how it looked on paper.
Partly inspired by Julie Doucet's intricate designs on the covers of her sketchbook diaries, and my own OCD with aesthetics, I began experimenting with creating distinct covers for each of my journals of the past few years. See the evolution:
One of my favorites is this one:
The packaging of a the translucent spring roll wrapper case was sewn on top of the box for Asian French cookies! It just came together so perfectly.
Here is my latest journal:
I'm super proud of this one! The font face is inspired by Futura and I embroidered it all while working at Green Noise during one of my shifts. Corey got a new journal for his 27th birthday in April too! (Oma is his Gramma in German! She's one of the most raddest and sweetest ladies ever!)
These are very fun and easy to make, and I may crank out a couple more as gifts before I leave for Chiney Town. Oh! And I can't wait to finish the next batch of Lum Jums and show 'em all to ya'll, cause they're bangin'!
