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Turning 27

March 6, 2013 //
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Basking in the warm glow of my late 20s, that's what.

Basking in the warm glow of my late 20s, that’s what.

I turned 27 last week. “That’s a good age,” a mid-30s friend told me. “Not too young, not too old!” I agreed. It felt good, I told him via Twitter message.

Later, when I was lifting two birthday bouquets into the narrow hallway to my very 20-something apartment (the kind with a futon in place of a couch), my upstairs neighbor asked me: “How old?” I suppose I could have answered, “Young enough that grown men don’t feel strange asking.” Instead I told him, and when he asked how it feels I said, again, “Good.”

When my mother was 27 she’d been married for four years and employed for three by the same people who write her checks today. When her mother was 27, she had two kids (my mom was the second) and ran a farm. Now I’m 27 and employ myself and put off getting married and buy $12 cocktails instead of saving responsibly. I’ll worry about that, I’ve figured, when I’m an adult. Or adult-er.

It’s telling that the show Girls (about 20something women in New York who I guess I’m supposed to relate to) is written by the nearly-27-year-old Lena Dunham. The characters are a couple years younger, but not enough to make a huge difference. I may have been a little more of a mess when I was 24, Hannah Horvath’s age on show, but I was no girl. But if I had been, nobody would have faulted me for it.

Adulthood isn’t a number, but you know it when you see it. My friends from high school are getting married and having babies, for instance, and while I don’t think those milestones define adulthood or togetherness they do signify a place at which lasting choices are permissible. At first it was only the friends I might have gone to wholesome parties with once upon a time but never visited after graduation, but now the group’s expanded to include people with whom I’ve shared books and pubescent angst, Brooklyn cab pukes and 3am dancing. And where I might recently have thought,”This is wrong,” as though other people’s commitment to Big Decisions meant I was on the clock for mine, now I think “This is nice,” because it feels good to get a sense of what the long term is going to look like for the little friend-family I’ve forged, to feel like the girl-flux is slowing down. I liked being a girl sometimes, but it got exhausting. Bring on those late-20s, the thirtyish years. I’m ready to be a woman.

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Guess what! It’s normal to be crazy!

December 16, 2012 //
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Whenever some hugely incomprehensible tragedy happens where a bunch of people are killed by, say, a single gunman who is young, white and male, we react by trying to make sense of things and by straining to figure out how to prevent history from repeating itself. The issue of mental illness and its probable role inevitably crops up, and we debate whether or not the gunman was “crazy” or “normal” as if those two are entirely separate possibilities.

Here’ s the thing: mental illness is normal. Actually, it’s totally banal, as is this entire blog post.  It’s your drunk uncle, your perpetually weeping grandmother, the cataclysmic highs-then-lows of your best friend’s mom. What it isn’t, by default, is some abstract “crazy person” caricature who grimaces through the world with the subtlety of a sonic boom.  

You don’t “probably” know someone who struggles to escape the grip of mental illness; unless you were hatched from an egg and are reading this from a secluded cave that just happens to have wi-fi, you absolutely 100% do. Real talk: you know several. 20 percent of all Canadians will personally grapple with some form of mental illness in their lifetime. For those of you even worse at math than I am, that’s one out of every five people. In the U.S., that rate is even higher—26.2 percent is the estimate. That’s higher than the number of people in the U.S., for example, with blue eyes.

I just spouted off some totally common knowledge that we, as a group, manage so frequently to ignore. So, let’s do each other all a favor and stop talking about mental illness in terms of “some crazy person.” We know far too much about its ubiquity to perpetuate stigma. Instead, let’s acknowledge that it’s something many of us have to deal with, that it doesn’t make us bad or weak, and that it’s something that deserves treatment—and, that most unpopular word, compassion—in order to make people more functional and humane members of society. And then, once we make its care more accessible (LOTS of work needed on that front), let’s not chastise those who make the incredibly courageous and responsible decision to take advantage of it.

 

 

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How I nearly pissed myself on the paperbirch path

October 26, 2012 //
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Every Tuesday night I take a bus, then a subway, then another bus to get to the church where my choir rehearses. I sit on public transit for an hour, give or take, and I get off and walk for three minutes down a woody path that cuts straight through a cluster of apartment buildings and spits me out within view of the church.

I didn’t always know about the path. Before I found it I would get off at the next bus stop and walk, at an impatient clip, for 11-13 minutes through an outdoor mall to get to practice. Sometimes I would stop on the way for a too-hot and too-expensive cup of soup from the luxury grocery store on the periphery of the complex. Then another member of the choir showed me the path. The shortcut saves me a minimum of six minutes.

The shopping centre route I used to take is the maze with all the recycling signs.

The path is genius. It acts as a bridge where the grid of the city lets up into an unwieldy tangle and smells like forest, to boot. But, also like the forest, my path is unlit.

This past Tuesday, the sun set in Toronto at 6:20p.m. Last week Tuesday, sunset was 6:31. Rehearsal, both Tuesdays, began at 7. Both Tuesdays, the “give or take” hourlong commute gave instead of took and I was late.

Last Tuesday I got out of the bus with my earbuds tucked in. It’s probably not a good idea to walk into a wooded, unlit path after sunset with earbuds tucked in, but I was listening to a podcast about a woman who got attacked by a shark and I didn’t want to stop listening. So I walked into the dark, wooded path without being able to see very well, and also without much ability to hear things apart from the podcast, which was very good.

That’s when the man appeared.

I saw his arm first, which he extended toward me with a piece of paper at its end. Then I saw his hood and his shape. He said something I couldn’t understand.

“NO!” I shouted at him. I half-heard my own voice as it came out of my body, girlish and shrill. I had re-watched Clueless the night before and it occurred to me that I’d just sounded like Cher.

“God!” said the man. He sounded wounded. I could hear him because I’d pulled out an earbud. “I–I’ve lost my cat!”

I could tell from his voice he was telling the truth. He had probably asked me, “Have you seen my cat?” before I could hear him, and he probably lived in one of the apartment buildings adjacent to the mouth of the trail. He was probably trying to hand me a poster he’d made with his cat’s picture on it and a number where I could reach him. He was upset.

“You can’t just sneak up on a girl walking by herself in the dark like that!” I realized I was crying.

A serial perpetrator of sexual assaults in my neighborhood (possibly, allegedly, a teenage boy) didn’t stop my nighttime jogs. I don’t carry weapons and I don’t know self-defense. I walk alone more often than I don’t, usually through the city, sometimes at night. While I wouldn’t say I haven’t been cautious, I haven’t really been scared either. I guess you could say I’ve been macho.

But I wasn’t crying because I’d been macho. My tears were hot and so was my face. I was crying because I was angry.

I was angry because I had acted like an asshole. Fear and a pair of earbuds and a guy who didn’t know not to approach a woman in the dark because he had never lived as one made me into the kind of person who shouts at a guy who’s just lost his cat. Who shouts at someone who just lost their cat? An asshole. And, well, me.

I was angry at myself for other reasons, too–for losing composure, for being slow on my feet. But probably, more than anything, I was angry at the cosmic injustice of knowing that, if guy had hurt me, people would be wondering why I was careless enough to walk down a dark path wearing earbuds. And I was angry at myself for being careless, too! It was all very circular.

Anyway, nothing actually happened. Thank goodness! But now I have to think about whether it’s a good idea to keep taking my shortcut. And it’s a bummer.

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Biculturalism and punk rock–Love and Rockets on NPR

September 28, 2012 //
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As I’ve written about a lot before, I’m a mixed kid who grew up in a bicultural household. My mom moved to the U.S. from El Salvador as an adult. My dad’s grandparents were immigrants to the U.S. from Poland and Germany (so, generic white person). I grew up listening to my mom’s Latin pop (my dad’s not really a music guy) and eventually got into noisy alt rock as a teenager (my fave bands were Sonic Youth and Sleater Kinney, neither of which sound like merengue). But I didn’t discover Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez’ Love and Rockets, the early 1980s alternative comic series, until I was in my early twenties.

I loved the aesthetic of the series, the women-centric storylines, and the punked-out Chicano characters of especially Jaime’s stories. I don’t think there’s been anything quite like it, before or since. Los Bros Hernandez were on my favourite music podcast yesterday, NPR’s Alt.Latino, to talk about the music they grew up on and how it shaped their work. Here’s the link.

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Hair, sleep, baby cats

September 16, 2012 //
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I shaved my body hair six weeks after that last blog post. The legs came first, because they were patchy and looked like they’d been sprinkled in dirt. The pits were last, and those finally went because I was developing b.o. that smelled like celery, which I hate. It may be the way my body is supposed to smell (I don’t wear, or own, deodorant and haven’t purchased any in about five years, so this is a genuine mystery). But my body doesn’t produce these smells when I shave under the arms, so that’s what happened with that.

I also haven’t been sleeping well. This is unusual, as I usually sleep easily and often. Now I’m in a constant state of half-awakeness, and I feel like I have the flu. Maybe I do have the flu, though it’s been a month. Maybe I’m actually dead. Maybe I’m in an M. Night Shayalaman movie.

Finally, one of my foster kittens got adopted Friday. I fostered three of them in June, which I wrote a lengthy post about in July that WordPress promptly deleted (thanks, WP!). Anyway, I meant to get them out of my house around then, because I didn’t want to get attached. But they stayed, and I did. Finally the longhaired one I named Flurkin went off on Friday to a pair of sweet undergrads who are “thinking about naming her Luna” according to the email response I got from them this afternoon, after I casually asked them how she was doing as though I hadn’t dissolved into shake-sobs the moment they took her.

But life is okay otherwise.

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The hair down there

July 23, 2012 //
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Photo courtesy of some insipid Internet gossip blog. Do I really have to link to it?

I got my first armpit hair when I was 9. For awhile it was just the one and I kept it around for quite some time. I was maybe a little mesmerized by its existence.

 When others joined, maybe a year and a half later, I retaliated with a pink daisy-printed BIC razor my mother kept in the shower. I would proceed to retaliate daily for the next 15 years of my life.

Body hair removal is probably the easiest way we women can avoid looking like women (much easier than starving away curves, I’d guess), which is itself transgressive. It’s also something I’d never given much thought until last week, when I decided to stop shaving everything.

I made the announcement to a group of girlfriends in the park. “Oh get over yourself,” sighed one of them, a self-proclaimed hippie who stays away from razors. But she’s exactly that: a hippie. I’m not, and sporting hippie signifiers like hairy pits (and, on the beach, full fluffy bush) doesn’t mesh with whatever it is I’m presenting as. So, as the hair has tufted out over the past days, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about what it means to be a woman in this world, about the boldness of body hair. How puberty makes us enemies of our physical selves. I’ve also realized that, my goodness, I am hairy.

No, I’m not surprised. I’m slavic and Salvadoran. I probably came out of the womb as a mound of fur (must check with mother). At 13 a classmate caught a peek of my bare belly—this was the late ’90s, when we stupidly wore hip-huggers—and shrieked: “Ew *Kellikorducki, you be HAIRY!” which prompted me to depliate the entirety of my pelvis to my ribcage for the next ten years. In sum, I expected there to be hair. What I didn’t expect was how fast.

The hair on my head is a mousy medium brown, wavy and fine. Everywhere else it’s almost black and triumphant. It is darker and starker than the body hair of most of my hippie friends, freckled blue-eyed gals with freckled blue-eyed gal hair.

While visible in this phase, it doesn’t quite look like anything other than its owner being too lazy to shave. When it gets a little longer, it will be a statement. Because that’s what body hair is on a woman.

I find myself talking about it a lot. It’s summertime, so it’s out there. I feel eyes falling on it and then quickly averting. We’re very guarded about our hair, and seeing it on others can feel like trespassing. So, I tell people about my experiment. “I’m growing out my body hair, just to see what it feels like.” Not what it feels like to have hair of course, but to walk through the world as a person who does. As a woman, that is.

The reality is that nobody really cares. But, they do notice. “I didn’t want to say anything,” said a friend at a beach party over the weekend after I’d explained myself, “but I saw it.” Then, “I couldn’t do it, myself.”

So, another day as a hairy non-hippie, a bundle of mixed signifiers navigating July. I dare you to give it a shot. 

 

 

 

 

 

*Yes, my name in elementary school was often Kellikorducki. Sometimes, Kellikorfucki.

 

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When Rick Boogied Down with Ira Kaplan

June 15, 2012 //
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Ira Kappylappy


Many adult daughters talk about their relationships with their fathers differently than the ones with their mothers, because the dynamic between a father and daughter isn’t fraught with the baggage of being a woman in this world. In my case, both parents deserve a hearty pat on the back for abstaining from throttling me in my sleep. But as it is Father’s Day, I will aim my thematic tribute where thematic tribute is due.

I was, to put it gently, a Difficult Child—defiant, rebellious, and, as became apparent around the age of 12, prone to some not-insignificant mental health hiccups. Both my parents dealt with me, their eldest and only girlchild, in stride. The steered me toward the things they thought would save me, some that worked (music lessons, endless books), and others (pill-happy psychiatrists, Catholic school) that didn’t. When I announced at 17 that I was applying to university in Canada—an impulse, a whim, a clean slate—they made their objections clear. But they didn’t try to stop me, because they knew they could not.

It was around this time that I started making a concerted effort to pick myself up and put myself back together. Over the past three years, I’d gone from a straight-A student who’d sung in three choirs, played violin in the orchestra, acted in numerous plays, and occasionally defeated opponents on my high school’s tennis and debate teams, to Ally Sheedy in the Breakfast Club. But this university I suddenly really wanted—needed—to attend didn’t care about my past. If I performed really well in my last year of high school, I stood a decent shot of getting in. So, I tried to start over.

The mission was clumsy but earnest, and while my mother totally lovingly suggested I pursue a practical life—in-state college, a line of study that would amount to something—it was Papa who quietly encouraged my wacked-out plans. For whatever reason, Papa had faith.

Then, there was the Yo La Tengo concert.

I don’t need to explain what music means to a 17-year-old. Anyone reading this has either been there or is on its precipice. Anyway, being the kind of kid that I was, artistic temperament* and all, music was a Very Big Deal. And, again, being the kind of kid that I was, it was very unusual that a band I was super into would find its way into Brew City, U.S.A.** When I discovered that Yo La Tengo was hitting Wisconsin on its Summer Sun tour, I announced to my father that I was going to take a bus to Madison “and sleep on someone’s couch” (Whose? Who cared!) to catch their weekend performance. Papa, ever so wisely, rejected that proposal. Instead, he offered an irresistible alternative: he would personally accompany me to their Monday night performance at Shank Hall, an intimate 21+ venue in downtown Milwaukee. Though I was under age, with my father in tow, State of Wisconsin law allowed the predicament of my youth to slide.

Did I mention that this was on a school night?

Most of my adolescence no longer resides in my memory. The vast bulk of it’s been relegated to a pit at the base of my sternum, wilfully forgotten or buried away for self-preservation. Dancing up against the stage to Yo La Tengo in frenzied, sober exhilaration, is not one of those. I remember Ira Kaplan’s glorious New Jerseyan sweat droplets flicking onto my own with better clarity than the events of even this morning, and the way it felt when I turned to Papa—wearing the same black-and-white Chuck Taylors as my own, in a size 13—and noticed he was dancing, too.

“These old guys aren’t bad,” he mused.

We were the only two people in the whole joint who weren’t too cool to dance.

He may not remember this event, and I’m not sure he even reads this blog, but it’s one of those moments I’ll never forget–and definitely my favourite concert experience, ever. Nothing so perfectly encapsulates the kind of Papa I grew up with: the kind, patient, and slightly nerdy wind beneath my freak flag. I love him desperately and am grateful to have his influence and his genes–even the ones responsible for my chin.

*This is the way nice people say “mentally unstable asshole.” I am not a nice person and would therefore just go ahead and say “mentally unstable asshole,” but I want to feign some semblance of self-esteem here.

**e.g. snob

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Mother’s Day

May 13, 2012 //
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1988:

2010:

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Ethnic Aisle: Who let the blondes out?

March 31, 2012 //
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(This post was originally written for the Ethnic Aisle blog, but I just realized all my links in that post are broken, so here’s a corrected version. Please do check out the other hair-related posts on that blog,though!)

I have never been one of nature’s blondes, one of my aching desires as a kid. Before I come off like some Aryan Nation weirdo, I should mention that my motives were strictly pragmatic. See, my future career backup plan was to become a Spanish-language television personality.

Outlandish as it may seem, this vision was fairly sketched out. Ideally I’d host my own song-and-dance variety show—something Xuxa-esque, but weirder—but I’d have settled for a telenovela gig too. (This seemed less far-fetched than my other ambition, to one day make a living by writing things.) The overwhelming majority of women on Spanish TV, the ones who weren’t playing maids on the prime-time soaps, looked a lot like me—as in, they too were white as hell. Univision, the Miami-based Spanish television network we picked up at our house, was (and continues to be) a virtually Mestiza-free zone. I figured a Caucasian-looking halfie like me stood at least a semi-decent shot.

It didn’t seem like talent was much of a factor for getting onto Univision. I’m no actress, but neither are many of the ladies on the social mobility-bent love dramas I grew up watching with my mom. A fair complexion, a little surgical enhancement, and flowing locks seemed the requisite criteria for climbing the Latin programming pyramid, as a woman.

Oh yeah. You also had to be blonde.

Okay, so blondeness wasn’t exactly required. It was more like the silver bullet that could make even the most marginally negotiable amount of onscreen charisma sufficient for stardom.

It’s no shocker that I’m not the first person to make this observation. A Google search for “blondes latino television” pulled up this LatinoLA blog post that criticizes Spanish TV for perpetuating a “Euro-cute” ideal of beauty rather than represent characters who reflect the Mestizo majority of its viewership. That search also brought up a Yahoo! Answers forum that asks: “Why is Latin American television so blonde obsessed?”

I feel like, if you’re reading this, you probably don’t need a basic lesson on the history of Colonialism and the remaining correlations between economic stature and whiteness in Latin America, or the uneasy identity baggage of Meztisaje. If you do, the Internet is an excellent resource. At any rate, the answer to Latin American television’s blonde obsession can almost certainly be found within that complicated history. Just like back in the day, when flaxen locks meant you probably came from European stock and were on the side of the conquerers rather than the defeated, or a little later when they meant you were of the land-owning instead of the workers, or now, when it still means that you’re likelier to possess greater wealth and power than someone whose hair is not blonde, the reasons for the appeal are clear. Blondeness is power. It’s post-aspirational.

So, back to me. I am not a telenovela star. I used the funds I’d squirreled away for breast augmentation to pay international tuition fees, for better or worse. (Just kidding; I never possessed that kind of foresight). But I still watch Spanish-language television whenever I visit my folks back in the states, and it’s still more of the same: Euro-cute with a bonus for blondeness. At least no one can accuse Latin American television of ignoring minority populations.

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Why I sort of felt sorry for Mike Daisey and now totally regret it

March 19, 2012 //
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As much as it pains me to admit this, I sort of felt for Mike Daisey last week.

The performer behind “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” which was adapted for radio to become This American Life’s most downloaded episode to date, was revealed on Friday to have totally made up some of the most heart-wrenching details of his personal account of the goings-on at China’s Foxconn factory, where many Apple products are made. I first read This American Life’s retraction of the piece, then listened to the solemn retraction-focused episode that followed it and, I’ll admit, it was hard to hear the guy fumble against the pointed interrogation of my beloved Ira Glass. Daisey had lied, and he was embarrassed to have been caught. In a way, I could understand why he would be cautious to admit–to listeners, to Ira, to himself–that that was precisely what he had done: lied. Instead, he skirted around the issue of his crime–which involved deliberately misleading fact-checkers to pass off falsehoods as truths–by saying that the tools of the theatre are not the same as the tools of journalism, and that ultimately the truth he meant to convey, regarding the gravity of what he encountered in China, was still there. Okay, fine. I didn’t agree with the guy, but I could relate to his impulse to dig himself out of a self-created hole. After all, haven’t we all been there? I certainly have, and there’s nothing dignified about it.

A part of me could even understand Daisey’s impulse to fudge some of the details of his story for dramatic flair. Even as someone who IS a journalist and takes the profession quite seriously, I could understand, on some slimy and shameful level, his temptation to include those fudged details in his monologue’s adaptation for This American Life–one of the most beloved and highly-regarded entities of English-language reportage in the world. The exposure! The prestige! These are the things we, in creative industries and otherwise, find alluring.

What I cannot forgive is Daisey’s continued insistence that this impulse, which he acted upon, wasn’t wrong. Further to this, the faux apologies, such as this nugget from today’s post on his personal blog:

To radio listeners: I apologized in this week’s episode to anyone who felt betrayed. I stand by that apology. But understand that if you felt something that connected you with where your devices come from—that is not a lie. That is art. That is human empathy, and it is real, and even if you curse my name I hope you’ll recognize that and continue reading, caring, and thinking.

“I apologized…to anyone who felt betrayed.” How insulting is that? It’s like when Rush Limbaugh, a couple of weeks ago, fauxpologized to people who might–somehow, miraculously– be offended by his choice to call Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke a “slut.” As UC Berkeley linguistics professor Geoff Nunberg would point out on NPR’s Fresh air, “That’s the standard formula for these things — you apologize not for what you said but for the way you said it.”

The same is the case with Daisey, who continues to insult the intelligence of the thousands of listeners he duped by refusing to admit his wrongdoing. He is not sorry for lying to us, but sorry for our hypersensitivity to this deception. It’s a patronizing avoidance of moral responsibility, and that I cannot abide.

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