So Petrified

Listening to: Kool Moe Dee, "How Ya Like Me Now." They used this track on the early Nineties Hakeem Olajuwon NBA Superstars video -- back when he was still "Akeem," a talented but petulant player. That entire VHS is just the greatest.

Two blogs I'm really into right now: Kink Praxis and This Is Not About Adoption. The first one is by Corey Alexander, who is "a white queer polyamorous transgender stone butch. I am invested in a concept of sex positivity that honors desire, multiplicity and complexity, embodied wholeness, critical analysis, and self determination." All the links Corey drops are amazing -- there's a lot of reblogs -- and along with s.e. smith's blog, it's become my most consistently great reading.

"The American idea of racial progress is measured by how fast I become white."
-James Baldwin, "On Language, Race, and the Black Writer"-

JMZ has been long touting Paris is Burning, a documentary about the minority transgender community, and it popped up on Kink Praxis the other day too, so that's being moved right up my Netflix queue. I mean, as soon as I get done with Jackie Brown, which I've possibly never fully seen. Odd considering I normally just blindly watch any Tarantino film. Grantland did a career retrospective of Pam Grier and it made me realize I'd never seen a single blaxploitation film. Like ever.

Oh, and AMR put me onto Ouran High School Host Club, this anime that is right up my alley as it, minor spoiler alert (highlight if you want), is about a girl posing as a guy as she joins a host club to seduce female students. I haven't watched much anime since I tore through Fullmetal Alchemist but I should really get on it. The problem is that I know I get sucked into series and I can't stop once started. Speaking of which, Mad Men season six is right around the corner. I am still pissed off that Peggy left SCDP but I'll give the show some leeway. More Peggy and Don, please! (But not in that way.)

Oh and not to forget about This Is Not Adoption. I don't know if it's part of an upcoming book or if it's already done and these are excerpts, but author Matthew Salesses is a Korean-American adoptee and his posts explore his story, his relationship with his adoptive parents, and perhaps eventually, his reunion biological parents.

"I arrived a skinny, ill, voiceless child. My parents had waited a long time to have kids. They had wanted badly to have kids of their own, but were unable. I think it was friends of theirs who had suggested Korean adoption -- what did my parents think when they saw me? Did they think they had been ripped off? Like coming home from the outlets and finding that what you picked out so cautiously was already broken?"
-Adjustments 2-

The only real research I did on EC -- unless reading US Weekly counts as research -- was to look into adoption stories and statistics and histories. I wish I had found a blog like this then, it would have been fantastic.

Salesses also writes for the Rumpus and his most recent article, "PSY the Clown vs PSY the 'Anti-American,'" had me up in arms about all the references to his Korean wife, as I initially read the article as if the author was white. (I didn't look at the byline.) When I realized it was Salesses, I had to restart from the beginning to place myself. Then I just read it with a tilted, and sad, eye toward his self loathing.

I'm a little over stories about Asians discovering their Asian-ness, but there are just so many around since those are the ones that get any sort of mainstream traction. Actually, what I should be more concerned about is my complete inability to take seriously anyone writing about something unless they are from that community. I just dimiss them immediately, which is sort of a reverse -sim of some sort. Thus the overreaction to all the perceived (over)references to "my wife is Korean so..."

It's definitely becoming a problem.

Took a break and just read Salesses' pieces on Jeremy Lin. The comments section is a doozy. And Salesses' Guernica story, "High Schools, or How to Be Asian American," is quite good also. Like I said, I'm a fan.

• This Is Not About Adoption: Chapter 1: Home Trip
• On Jeremy Lin and How the Rules of Racism Are Different For Asian Americans (2012)
• Geographies of Kinship: The Korean Adoption Story
• Jeff Yang, "Have Frat Boys Finally Jumped the Pop Culture Shark?"

This Is How You Find Her

Drinks consumed this weekend, over a twenty four hour period: soju that came in a giant watermelon, three beers, two Moscow mules, two shots of some vodka that was very chilled.

That encompassed two meet up for drinks and a karaoke session that went until four thirty. Over the watermelon soju, my friend was telling me about her Relationship Funeral. She recently had a breakup (amicable) and since they often frequented the same places, she went up and down to those bars, drinking in each one and toasting to the past. In an unexpected twist, she said the toasts she did were all positive. It was a purging and a welcome to new things. Great idea right? An uplifting funeral? So many break ups are about cursing the other person afterwards. I say we institute Relationship Funerals for everyone, and maybe trademark that shit right now.

Afterwards, my friend jaunted off to a club on the east side to perhaps put the moves on a hot young man. She was nervous, since she'd been away from singledom for a few years. Fortified with the aforementioned shots -- she took twice as many as I did -- and my pack of gum, off she went into the future.

At a bar on the Lower East Side the next night, I finally caught up with a friend about his relationship. A few months ago he'd introduced us to someone new and then said "He's my boyfriend." All nonchalant and just like that. I was taken aback because this friend hasn't called anyone his significant other in quite awhile. So yesterday we talked about how that was going, what he's learning and experiencing. We are similar in some ways, as we tend to be good at being friends but possibly not so good at being in relationships. It was an enlightening and warm talk, long overdue.

When I say we "talked about it," what we were actually doing was comparing notes. Doing my best to imitate my friend's nonchalantness and absolute fact of it all way, I'm here to say: I have a girlfriend. (I haven't said that since 2007.) We go on dates, I wore a knit tie once, she said "yes," I bought flowers, it's quite something.

There's a lot of stuff I'm trying to wrap my head around, mostly the idea of actually being together with someone. It feels foreign and familiar at once. Given my track record with relationships, there's some trepidation for all parties involved. But hey, you don't know till you try right?

• Aziz Ansari gets candid about love: "elusive and sadly ephemeral"
• New Love: A Short Shelf Life (2012)
• Match.com Presents Singles in America 3
• Inside OK Cupid: The Math of Online Dating
• I Googled My Dates Until One Of Them Googled Me (2010)

One of the first blogs I followed, and possibly anybody followed, was BluishOrange, who won Best Designed Weblog way back in 2002. Alison came back after a long hiatus with a post reviewing her twenties. I sort of tried to do something similar a couple of years ago, but that was for a reading and the end result was very tongue in cheek. I think I'll give it another shot -- focusing on relationships perhaps -- even though I'm far past that bridge. I must have learned something during that decade though...

• You, Me, Us: My "Letter to My Twenty-Something Self"
• Wayback Machine for Bluish Orange (2000 - current)
• All The Boyfriends I've Ever Had in Chronological Order, Pt. 1 of 4 (2010)

Family Business

I thought this would go away, but it won't. Macklemore! I was sour on him from the beginning, and didn't really think about why until my friend came out as pro Macklemore. He thought that Macklemore's "Same Love" was amazing and asked who else had made that kind of track. I don't know, but I simply thought his rapping sucked, ever since hearing "Wings" through a basketball blog.

I tried to open my mind and get into Macklemore, but to be honest, I kind of hate listened to it. The topics he covers, while perhaps authentic to him, rings inauthentic and calculated to me. Insert eye roll. So thus, I was highly appalled the other day when I caught myself bobbing along to the beginning of "Thrift Shop," before I realized what I was doing. Damn those horns are catchy aren't they?

There's a lot of problems with Macklemore, besides his crappy rapping, but I'll link below. I can't decide if he's one step above or below Michael Franti for me, so for now I'll call it even. And of course, I feel the same way about all the Harlem Shake business. Although I have to admit that I've seen the Miami Heat one quite a few times, as there's just too much good stuff in there. Mario Chalmers as Super Mario, Ray Allen as Phantom of the Opera, Lebron is the king, the opening Birdman swoop in. Chris Bosh as Chris Bosh. I can't stop watching. (Do Macklemore and Chris Anderson look alike or can I just not tell white people apart?)

Keep in mind I have been wrong about hating before. But I can come around. Somehow, back in 2005, I managed to hate on Kanye, John Legend, and Beyonce all in one post. Plus Harold and Kumar. But that one I still stand by.

• A Hip-Hop Moment, but Is It Authentic?
• Race + Hip-Hop + LGBT Equality: On Macklemore's White Straight Privilege
• Long Before The Harlem Shake, We Did The Shimmy
• "Thrift Shop" Is First Indie Hit to Top Charts in Nearly Two Decades

Tragically, Posterous is shutting down, thus putting my podcast at risk. Clearly, choosing Posterous was the wrong move years ago. Luckily I exported everything over to Blogger, my OTP, and really should have done so from the beginning. So now You, Me, Us lives on, albeit in semi non-working form as some of the archived individual posts are sort of messed up. I'll have to go back to fix them one by one. Luckily I am a man used to such menial tasks. The best way to access them for now is to click by month and use the new handy dandy exFM player.

Season Two should be ending soon, as I reconsider what to do with it. Corralling guests has been tough work -- apparently an out of the blue "Hey, wanna Skype right now?!" message is not enough advance notice for some -- so perhaps I will just have recurring guests.

We did a freeflowing episode the other day, "Three Man Weave," with the highlight coming at the end when we gush about Kevin's baby blog. You'll get an exclusive insider's look at it by following along.

• New site: youmeuspod.blogspot.com
• Best of Season One

And speaking of podcasts, I used to listen to David Choe's old one, Koreans Gone Bad, but right when I started getting into it, KGB shut down. Now Choe's back with a new series, DVDASA. I actually haven't started it, as I'm a bit afraid of its contents, plus I may too young for this. But I feel compelled.

"'Do you care about your life? Do you care about your career? Do you care at all about your romantic partners feelings? Basically do you care about important things that make you human?... we don't,' Choe says. 'If you want to hear what self destructive nuclear nervous meltdown group suicide sounds like, if you want to hear popular mainstream guests get verbally ear raped and have their careers disappear within minutes, then tune in every Tuesday to all the fun and hilarity of what is DVDASA.'"

Ways and Means: Feb

This new budget club we've started has me eagerly anticipating the end of each month. Few things are as exciting as updating that spreadsheet and then carefully combing through each entry to make sure they match. I do struggle to remember my cash expenditures precisely, but I will continue to strive in that arena. George is so good about it, she literally writes down to the dime what she spends as she's spending it. I need to get in this habit.

Back in November, I downloaded and read Ashley's ebook, A Story of Debt. Inspired by her blog, I am going to document my spending for the year. Because heaven knows, I am shitty with money. Easy come, easy go!

Also, this article from 2006, "Money," by Keith Gessen of n+1 about how much a writer makes is great, and sobering. I have no idea how people are full time writers. It happens, of course, but it seems nigh impossible. Thank goodness I'm not a writer anymore. (My new business cards say "itinerant," although many have already confused it with "intern." Which is about right I guess.)

In January, I went 250% over my budget, but that was to be expected, as there was carryover from a ton of end of year stuff plus some large expenses, as mentioned in my first budgeting post. I figured February would be a true gauge of how much I really spent. After seeing how other people in the budgeting knitting circle went over by just a few hundred dollars, I was ashamed to admit that I'd blown February completely, to the tune of 155% of my estimated budget. Hey at least there was a -100% improvement right? Wait, my math is off.

Anyway, here are the main culprits from February: 175% on dining out, 180% on shopping, 640% on gifts, 300% on public transportation, aka taxis. Also there was a bunch of miscellaneous expenses having to do with passports, visas, and Wifi startup costs. (We still have no Wifi, sigh.)

The good news is that I was under on play money and groceries, 72% and 60% respectively, which means I can dial back next month's budget on those categories. For February, I had lowered my dining out budget by 67%, but clearly that needs to be moved right back up. I don't eat home nearly as much as I aspired to. Play money I'll keep the same, because really, I should be playing more, right?

The big hit last month was public transportation. After careful analysis, I got six MTA refills at $20 each, meaning I spent $120 for the month. Even with the upcoming fare hike, it will be worth it -- just barely -- to purchase a monthly pass. The main transportation cost wasn't MTA though, it was taxis! Part of that was by design, as I resolved to taxis home from the city if it was late. The other reasoning behind all those taxis was the blistering cold. A few dollars to get out of the wind, or to not be late somewhere, super worth it. Spare no expense I say!

As the weather warms up, I anticipate the taxi cost going down as I toughen up and get back to walking and riding the subway more. This will also translate nicely to an uptick in reading, which is highly necessary as I've only finished three books so far. fiftyfifty.me is gonna be a real challenge this year, I can already tell.

Big question for March: Do I get a Movie Pass? My heart says "yes," my inability to commit says "maybe." And while we're talking about money, this track I blogged over at TEST is just killer. I think it should be the official budgeting club anthem.

• ATM Visits: Nine, three times with fees
• Dining out: Thirty times, high of $78
• Cabs: Twenty one, average ride price of $22
• Bobas: Four
• Cigarettes: One pack
• Shopping: Gap 1969 jeans, two pairs of gloves, three Target hoodies, socks, Uniqlo thermals, a tie
• Play: three movies, five nights out, two concerts, no karaoke
• Biggest expenses: Expedited passport ($195), Greyhound ticket ($90), Dinner ($78)