Unreliably Yours

My friend Mike Weiss (http://www.myspace.com/mwdonk), who is also hapa (Pogilicious! Rrrr!),  and I had a conversation a few years ago over IM, about what culture means, and I though it would be really cool to post it, since it’s made me (and continues to do so) think really hard. Which is really good.

mweiss@laphil.org says: maybe there is some sense of horror at becoming “american” even when trying to survive in america

mweiss@laphil.org says:
ok thats harsh… I’ve become cynical about “culture”, maybe because I don’t feel any sense of community in my life

mweiss@laphil.org says:
sometimes I think culture is just a diorama in  an exhibit at the mall

mweiss@laphil.org says:
sometimes I would equate being “ethnic” with being “country folk”

mweiss@laphil.org says:
ethnic customs are usuall tribal, traditional and usually not performed and perpatuated by the urbane and educated.  discuss.

allison says:
ok, i think that certainly the most “ethnic” one can get is by being from or of the background of a rural-ass tribal background, yes, a thing that even the urban or “wannabe urban”  immigrants cannot touch….

allison says:
the ones from manila, hong kong, and tokyo, can they really be at the heart of what it truly means to be filipino, chinese or japanese?

allison says:
just living in the city nullifies them a little bit, i think

mweiss@laphil.org says:
ethnicity by degrees may be impossible to measure, but it is possible to be so steeped in locality, so as to be more ethnic, which is not to say backwards necessarily, but more directly impressed upon with a simple sense of right and wrong; a culture

allison says:
yada yada yada culture, i’m starting to think it’s bullshit

allison says:
those people are just taking on what someone else arbitrarily created

allison says:
is that being real?

allison says:
or ethnic?

allison says:
or just doing what someone else told you to do, whether it makes sense or has any sort of good in it?

mweiss@laphil.org says:
I think what I am saying is I don’t know if culture truly exists exept in a vacuum, unless that

mweiss@laphil.org says:
is all you know, unless that is the only culture that exists within reach

allison says:
then that is really what culture is..

allison says:
i don’t know, perhaps it doesn’t matter anymore. the cultural and linguistic mutoids that people like you and i have become-maybe that’s not bad-i mean it’s inevitable, that if you stay somewhere hospitable for a while, like, say, a few generations, assimilation of any kind will occur, right?

mweiss@laphil.org says:
it can’t be bad (to be a godless heathen), but its all very confusing.  especially when being educated in a “culture of diversity”, when I was growing up “ethnicity” was something to be celebrated, while lionizing the stories of all the immigrants, but in diversity the real power of culture, is lost, because the notion of culture is something that happens over there

allison says:
i know that is the paradox of diversity

allison says:
one might think think there was a conspiracy on behalf of the repubs to dilute all immigrant cultures by promoting diversity…

As every queer, or paranoidly insecure straight girl knows, hair length can supposedly determine or differentiate one’s sexuality. It seems stupid that something that evolved merely to maintain body warmth should be so irrevocably attached to gender. We all know society dictates that shit be like this, though.

I have short hair, and am actually not a fan of long hair. Medium’s aiight, short is cool, but long hair tends to distract from one’s face and seems less flattering. Now that we’ve established my aesthetic standards (which everyone surely felt compelled to know), we should further discuss this gendered paradigm.

We are told, as women, that long hair=femme/woman, short hair=butch/boy, and I think enough of us graduated elementary school to realize how lame this is. Problem is, even some queer girls think like this. Yet all of us know giggly fag girls with short hair, and tough ass long haired bitches-so what’s the deal?

I wanted to wait to post this blog with a silly pic of myself contrasted with a long haired girl, but fuck it, I want to get this up and out.

HOWEVER-

Short hair, it’s true, is one of the queer girl’s most efficient tools. I must admit, while I love to narcissistically stroke my own hair after just cutting it (Feels like a Chia Pet!), last summer I also self-consciously realized it would be extremely helpful as a queer mating call. It truly feels like a pimp daddy move, on my part, as well as a guilty pleasure. (The Pitcher also comments on this:http://pitcher.wordpress.com/2008/08/19/the-matter-of-hair/)

Even when a girl is femme and her hair is short, there seems to be a stronger possibility, even though many straight, femme girls look straight and femme still. In this day and age of whatever wave of feminism, queer rights, etc…, we shouldn’t need to rely on stereotypes or antiquated notions of gender to get laid, but we do.

So I’m going to keep cutting my hair short, and not just cause of the LA heat.

Yo, fuck this shit (Go read the article):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7501768.stm

Glad to get that off my chest.

I mean I know that the Olympics are over,  but the I’ve wanted to make an entry of this for a while. I’ve been a vegetarian for 7 years, and I think it’s super fucked up for anyone to impose this kind of cultural imperialism (to use big, juicy, PC kind of vocab.) on my people.

Let them eat dog!!! (They tend to be lactose intolerant, so cake won’t work)

I find those that get moralistic about it, cause they’re animal lovers or whatever, seem to value only one life, that of the dog. My belief is eat ‘em all or none of them. Comments?