FightingPilgrim

Junior High was invented by the Devil. When I die, and should I be unpious enough to be cast into the Maw, my personal Hell will be El Rancho Middle School. We only had two grades, 7th and 8th, at the school. The reasoning for this is not unlike why the authorities sequester the most violent, flesh-devouring murderers to special wards in prison: seventh and eighth graders are pure evil. Combine their lack of morals with their burgeoning sexuality and bathe that an abject sense of insecurity, and you have a recipe for cruelty that would make Vlad the Impaler blush.

I hated Jr. High. As per above, I was just starting to identify myself as a person and as such was going through a very very bad hair year. Everyone back in the day had the "step" haircut, a sort of genetic precursor to the now ubiquitous "fade" haircut. Anyway, I have wavy hair, and so my step haircut ended up becoming a sort of Asian 'fro. People used to call me "pizza hut head" because my head looked like the Pizza Hut logo from behind. That was strike one in the baseball game of Junior High Cruetly.

Vietnamese people like to eat weird things. One of which is an egg where the bird is already developed inside it. It sounds nasty but it is great. (I once saw it on "Fear Factor and the white people on there almost yacked. But honestly its very good if you, ya know, have an open mind). So this was a very strange dish and I, being Vietnamese, became the brunt of jokes concerning this culinary oddity, to the point that I had another nickname (I don't think anyone called me "Michael" in Junior High) which was "dead duck". Even to this day, just typing that word sends chills up my spine. You have to imagine yourself, walking through your work or your school, and everyone, EVERYONE calling you a horrible name, with no reprieve whatsoever. It really hurt me and I had no idea why it was so funny. I can honestly say that i hated everyone at my school, and I think this animosity is reflected still when I meet new people.

Thirdly, and this last issue was to follow me into high school and even college, was the idea that I was somehow not "Asian" enough. The "Asian" kids at my jr. high wore a distinctive uniform: vans canvas shoes, Gap khakis that were staple-hemmed at the bottom, and polo shirts. It doesn't sound very intimidating, but I learned to loathe that outfit even as I sought to imitate it. But for reasons that still elude my understanding, the Asian kids at my school hated me. In high school I would become the target to their hive-minded bullying, and in junior high suffice it to say I stayed as far from them as possible. I now have an absolute hatred of bullies. I still see the "Asian" kids at the high schools, smoking cigarettes and otherwise trying to compensate for their lack of masculinity, and sometimes I want to jump out of the car and beat the hell out of them. Because I know that somewhere, some kid is having his life turned upside down because his pants aren't the right look, or his hair is funny, or because his family likes to eat certain foods; and nobody is looking out for him.

Sorry about that, hope somebody knows what i'm talking about.

It's been 2 some years since i graduated, a time that has been at times both fast and slow in passing. When you graduate things start to change in you, almost like a sort of second puberty. only this time, instead of growing facial hair and learning to find your where your dad hides his stash of porn, you start to think of the future. For some people, that means a strange genetic trait begins to be expressed: The Viet Conservative Gene.

Don't ask me why Vietnamese people are conservative. i have alot of ideas on why, but sometimes you can just attribute it to the Gene. It occurs equally in both men and women, and begins to afflict us after graduation. The carrier comes home, where s/he comes into contact with things that s/he may have forgotten, namely the Fox News Channel and religion.

Living at home, the carrier begins to express the Gene and behave rather strangely. The Gene affects the carrier's appearance, namely hairstyle and grooming. The Gene also affects mental capacity; it is not uncommon for carriers to suddenly, compulsively talk about "mutual funds" and "real estate" as if these were interesting points of conversation. The Gene can cause the carrier to be deeply, sanctimoniously religious. Newhope Church has a large quantity of VCG carriers.

There is no treatment for this condition. Should you suspect that you or someone you love may be succumbing to this terrible disease, the best course of action is to go out, get that person a job in marketing, and perhaps buy a luxury car.

I love the olympics. For two weeks all the usual crap that is on NBC is pushed rightly to the back as we watch sports which Norway is really good at. But dont get it wrong, winter sports is but a nooner, a way to tide us over until we get to the orgy known as the Summer Olympics. As such, there are some rather...questionable...sports which have made it onto the roster:

Skeleton:
similar to the luge, but where the racer goes HEAD FIRST down the course. The helmet is worn purely for decorative reasons. Skeleton exemplifies the Winter Olympic’s motto of “Ex mortis un omindus qualo” or “the Winter Sports can kill your ass”.

Biathalon:
To tell you the truth I actually like biathalon a lot. How can you not like a sport where you can carry a gun? The biathalon, in fact, evolved from a “sport” called “military patrol.” So imagine a bunch of large Nordic men patrolling around with rifles. Yea, it scares me too. 2010 will see the introduction of “Assault Biathalon” where the athletes will still be equipped with the standard rifle but have the option of duel wielding with the plasma pistol or Needler.

Curling:
Any sport where you can play in business casual is suspect in my opinion. That means you too, polo.

But as weaksauce as those and other winter sports are, they’re still better than that ultimate farce of a game: vollyeball.

Some of you might not remember this...

You know what i hated? Those skirts/shorts things that were like a skirt in the front but shorts in the back. I hated those things. Who thought of that? An asshole, thats who. It was such a tease, like "oh hey I'm going to wear this sexy skirt...psych! I'm also a dude." Its the fashion equivalent of a mullet, what with bringing together two incompatible styles into one horribly schizophrenic one.

I hated that thing.

My house is an absolute mess. Those sons of bitches from Clean Sweep and the Style network would pure chlorine into their eyes if they ever saw my house. Remember that ending scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where theres that warehouse full of boxes and shit? My house is like that, except much less organized.

But I suppose that is part of the truth behind "home sweet home". I've been to some of my friends houses, all clean and shit, with their "matching furniture" and "shit stain-free carpeting." To me, a house needs to have certain key, aesthetically-challanged elements to make it a true home.

I can't speak for other ethnicities, but Vietnamese homes are practically REQUIRED to have certain items in their home:

1) Catholic icons.
Nothing says "Vietnamese" like guady, gold-encrusted paintings and statues of Jesus and Mary. The iconography is usually ubiquitous: there will be a big painting of Mary in entryway and a Jesus bobblehead in the crapper. Note that the icons are found only in Catholic Vietnamese families, sense Buddhists are very lazy and just have those sweet prayer beads used for strangling failed henchmen.

2) Clocks in the shape of Vietnam.
The Vietnamese diaspora lost their homeland in a brutal struggle lasting decades and costing millions of lives. So how do you hold onto the memories of a faraway promised land? Why, just carve out a cheap wooden clock shaped like the crappy country! Vietnam runs on two AA batteries, btw.

3) Excercise equipment turned clothing rack.
This is probably not unique to Vietnamese, but so consistent in my peoples' homes it must be mentioned. The above mentioned equipment could be anything: weights, abdominizers, that weird belt thing that jiggles your waist. For bonus points, the house has that mother-of-all-equipments: the treadmill. The treadmill in my house has been used for everything from a clothing rack, to a bookshelf, to a desert landscape for when G.I. Joe fought The Ninja Turtles.

4) Cars that the family can't afford.
While not technically something found in the home, the car usually goes with the home. Only Vietnamese people would buy a 2 bedroom shanty in the middle of gang-infested Stanton, and then splurge on three 50,000 dollar BMWs. Nothing says "properous" to a Vietnamese person like driving your white Mercedes E-class carefully into the garage that doubles as your uncle's family's residence.


happy new year bitches!

So this year I decided to be nice and send out Christmas cards to people.

WOE BE UNTO ME FOR DARING SUCH A GESTURE.

My first step was getting the actual cards. This was simple enough; I just had to find a place that sold deep, personal, highly spiritual tokens, but in packs of 8 gross. I went to Costco. I swooped up like 50 cards, each had what looked like a pipe cleaner bent into a different Xmas symbol. Since I was at Costco, I wanted to buy potstickers also but its hard to write “Happy Chanukah” on them.

The next step was getting people addresses, as in their snail mail address. That was a bitch. In this world, it is easy to get someone’s email address. Sometimes people give you their email address when you don’t even want it. I’ll be sitting at like a Starbucks and some son of a bitch will just be like “hey whats your name? how you doing? Have my email address.” Cellular phone numbers are also really easy to obtain, so easy its starting to get scary. Damn you, facebook.

But when you ask someone for his snail mail address, he suddenly gets REALLY suspicious. “Whachu you want my address for nigga? You gonna kill me? What you gonna send me sucka? Have my email address instead.” They literally will have no idea why I would ask for their address, as if the only terrorists ask such questions. Other times I’ll ask people for their address and that will cause them to have a mild stroke. They’ll respond, “What address?” I say, “The one you get mail at,” and then they come back with the snappy, “You mean my home address?” As if they don’t actually have a physical address but merely occupy a coordinate in the time/space continuum somewhere between Narnia and Gmail.

Merry christmas, suckas!

A lot of magazines like Elle and Cosmo and Hustler claim to know the secrets to pleasing a man. Most of the usually involve weird things like feathers or dressing up in elaborate outfits or writing him dirty notes. Those are not ways to please your man. Feathers are weird. If you got one we’d ask, “My God where did she get that feather?” Think about it, where WOULD you get a feather in this day and age? You’d have to kill a bird. And killing birds is usually not sexy. And when was the last time a guy was impressed with any fancy outfit? And for that dirty note thing: men are illiterate. I only manage to write this journal thanks to my English-speaking monkey, Henre.

So how do you please your man? Its easy! The scenario, which I call “Man’s Ultimate Day” should go something like this:

Your man comes home or over from whatever day he’s had. You say hello, ask him how his day went, etc. He probably will just say “it was alright.” Immediately bring him whatever snack/beer item he likes, without him asking. Turn on the TV and turn to ESPN (if possible, try to have a plasma screen TV). Have videogames ready for him.

After he’s played/watched for a few hours, take him to the bedroom and start with the oral sex. If he likes it, you can start off with some necking, but usually this will last about 15 seconds or so. You don’t have to do anything sexy, just the usual blowjob thing. But do play with his balls, for gosh sake.

Then proceed to the sex stuff. I’m lazy so I like to be on the bottom, but whatever he wants to do is the key. It’s ok to get a lil freaky and talk dirty, but generally don’t worry about it. We men are very easy to please, so a “I’m a dirty girl” here and there will suffice.

So after the deed is done, let your man take a nap. Make sure he is comfy and just let him sleep. Under no circumstances do you talk to him or otherwise to keep him awake. Usually, he won’t sleep long, especially once he notices the sandwiches or cereal you have thoughtfully prepared for him. After he eats (again), let him play videogames for awhile again until bed time. Maybe give him another blow job.

Ultimately, we men are not unlike any kind of zoo animal. We like our food, we like to play around with whatever amuses us, and we like to hump. Like zoo animals, we’re sometimes not very talkative, but rest assured we would appreciate being treated, quite frankly, like an animal. If you do all this stuff for your man, it will seriously make his month. It would be akin to taking a girl out to, say, a day-long shopping excursion capped off by a Ben and Jerry’s-fueled evening of watching “Sex and the City.” I only warn you that if you do decide to do the Man’s Ultimate Day, don’t do it too often lest the zoo animal take you for granted. Good luck, ladies!

Back in the day life was simple. I’d come home, change into my sweats, do some homework, watch some Batman: The Animated Series, and eat dinner. Sometimes I didn’t like what my mom made, but generally, I was a pretty happy camper. For those of you who think Vietnamese food is mainly pho, trust me it ain’t. Pho takes like 4 years to make, and requires beef from the Cow of Cows, found only in the hinterlands of darkest China or Vons, so its not really practical for everyday food. Mainly we eat rice, and sometimes we have some sautéed rice to go with it. Not fancy but whatevs.

This was the routine for years and years.

But when I went to college, my parents started getting lazy. They realized that with me gone, they didn’t have to put in as much effort making nice meals anymore. My parents are goddamn refugees, they’ll eat a tire as long as it had fish sauce on it, and so it was no big deal for them to stop cooking in any vigorous sense. When I would come home for visits they’d cook for me but generally they didn’t have to the rest of the year.

This was fine when I was living off the foodstuffs of Berkeley, where you can’t swing your arms in a circle without hitting Hammad, the Gyro guy; Lo, the Chinese good guy; and Pharatmapimlilit, the Thai food guy. And also Juan Sanchez, who runs the Korean food place (go fig).

But now that I’ve been home for two years now, things are starting to get desperate. I’ve been noticing that my parents have increasingly been negligent, even sometimes disdainful, of having to prepare meals for me. It used to be I would hear “dinner time!” every evening, but now I’ve been noticing other, not so vague hints from my parents that perhaps I should be barking up another tree. Here’s a run down.

(what my mom might say to me on a certain day)
Monday: Alright Mike heres some rice and spinach.
Tuesday: Here’s some uncooked rice and luke warm water
Wednesday: Here’s a cup.
Thursday: Try this...get it your damn self
Friday: Heres a spear...it ain’t been sharpened
Saturday: AHHAHAHH, sucka
Sunday:

Last night I went to the Foxfire, which is a large grill/restaurant/bar near my house. On the outside it looks to be just another homey family restaurant. But since I can remember the place is famous, or rather infamous, for being the “divorce bar.” Every weekend the place is PACKED with rather more…mature…people. For a better sense, imagine that all your aunts and uncles decided to slap themselves into the tightest clothes they owned and go dancing. That’s the Foxfire.

The place had this kind of hometown/lodge feel. It was as if Marie Callendar had turned evil and opened up a nightclub. The place was dimmed, but looking at all the patrons, it could have been dimmer. There was no DJ, but rather there was a live band that played all sorts of covers. They played Blackstreet, Next, Justin Timberlake, Alicia Keyes, etc. Honestly, the music wasn’t half bad, except the songs went on FOREVER. I guess where as young people want to have their dance music constantly changing via a disc jockey, old people – being afraid of change – prefer to have songs last for 8 minutes at a time. I had a hard time really looking around because I was afraid I might see a relative or something. My 360-point-of-view was as follows:

12 o’clock: In the corner I see some bags of leather…wait, those are women.
2 o’clock: Oh, there’s my high school physics teacher
4 o’clock: guy in a wheelchair
8 o’clock: I see the band…most of them look like they play Dungeons and Dragons.
10 o’clock: Dad?

Other notable notes:
• There is no “circle dancing.” That is, there are no groups of people just dancing in a big circle. Everyone on the dance floor has a partner. I assume this comes from the medieval traditions that all the old people grew up with.

• On a few occasions they played slow songs. I have to admit that was actually pretty fun slow dancing. There are no slow songs in clubs anymore, probably because if DJs played them, the dance floor would be full of girls dancing with each other and a bunch of guys looking on forlornly.

Friendster vs. everything else (11/29/05)

In the beginning, there was the Computer. And the computer said, "Ye, let there be the Internet", and there was the Internet. And the computer took some lines of code and created HTML, and It saw that it was Good. And the Computer said, "Ye, let there be websites of all kinds", and websites sprang forth – .gov, .edu, .net, and .com. And in the beginning, the Computer formed Friendster, and It saw that it was good.

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It was only a matter of time before our alienation at the hands of technology, and our love of this technology collided into a maelstrom called Friendster. They even have a damn Friendster movie coming out. But with the success of Friendster, there were bound to other social-networking websites. This is a guide to them.

Friendster – The original. Vanilla. The standard, so to speak. Supposedly, this is an “Asian heavy” website, but you wouldn’t be able to tell from the welcoming page. Friendster has a search ability on it that allows you to look up certain topics, the most popular topic being “How to win back your ex”. Recently, Friendster decided to scare the shit out of all its members by introducing a feature called “See who has viewed you” – effectively ending the cyberstalking which was why anyone signed up for Friendster in the first place.

Myspace – The “barrio” of the internet. Here, you can find all sorts of crazy things. When you sign on you almost half expect to hear that song that plays in the background of the Cantina scene in Star Wars. Even though Friendster has no prerequisites for joining, myspace for some reason seems to attract the seedier of internet dwellers. Porn stars? Go look them up on myspace. High schoolers who think they’re pornstars? On myspace. Hip hop thug types who somehow can log onto myspace despite obviously being incarcerated? Myspace. When viewing myspace, be sure that your speakers are turned OFF lest you be berated by mp3s of Fallout Boy or Celine Dion or 50 Cent.

Facebook – If myspace is the Junior College of social-networking websites, then surely Facebook is the preppy Ivy League counterpart. The interface is simple and modest. There aren’t any garrish pictures of “Cool people you should meet” pasted in every corner. However, the website tends to promote an “us vs. them vs. ugh State Kids” attitude by organizing everyone by their alma mater. Facebook is also chock full of naïve ass freshmen who were born in like 1998, so be warned as they may ask you if you’ve ever had Frechet for Ochem.

Orkut – Google’s social-networking website. It’s inexplicably filled with Brazilians. The combination of computer nerds an Brazilians guarantees that first your computer will get a virus, then your genitals.

Asian Avenue – This bad boy was around since people signed on using twenty eight-eights and Compuserve. Back in the day, it was just another way for Asian kids to disseminate the sticky pics and glamour shots they took. Everyone had names like AzNcuTIeTHugGanGsAHo24398. I had the displeasure of going there and now its sort of like Friendster and Monster.com smushed together except all the pics of white people are now of Asian people in business casual.