vanity! (sung to the tune of “agony” from “into the woods”)

Posted on January 22, 2012 | 4 Comments

I am actually more on the girly end of the spectrum than the tomboy side, though I think that binary is absurd. I refuse to leave my house if I don’t look showered and generally put together, I own a ton of hair products, and I’m happy to get free makeup samples when I buy my Clinique moisturizer twice a year. But I’m also very forgetful, so my relationship with makeup is generally the kind where I’m walking to the T and then I remember, “Oh, shoot! I was going to put on mascara today so that I would look pretty!” I own a lot of it, and I’m always happy when someone competent is playing with my hair or putting my makeup on for me, but I guess I don’t have the gene where you naturally know how to do your hair and makeup yourself. Also, not being particularly gifted with my optic sense, I am fascinated by people who cut my hair or people who can look at a magazine photo and copy a celebrity’s makeup, because I honestly don’t know what it is that they’re seeing in the follicles or eye folds, because I literally cannot see that kind of detail.

Anyway. This summer, when I was teaching high schoolers, I noticed how much makeup they were wearing. And I came to the realization that at 22 (now 23), I have reached the point where it really is important to kind of bow to society’s demands and wear a little makeup and present myself in a way that will not hinder my ability to get job interviews, be taken seriously, be seen as my age (I got carded for buying a lottery ticket on New Year’s Eve and was told I didn’t just look under 21; I looked under 18). Also, my body seems to have gotten confused about when you’re supposed to have acne, and instead of giving it to me when you’re supposed to get it, when your life already sucks as a teenager, I have it now. Anyway, I’ve now gotten mostly used to being a little more primpy on a somewhat regular basis. My eyebrows are always at some level of plucked, which is good, because I actually like the way they look now. I also wash my face at night before bed. In summary, I do all kinds of things that normal American girls have been doing since they were 12, except I started when I was 22. Continue reading →

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trials of mediation

Posted on January 15, 2012 | 1 Comment

I’m emotionally over Facebook–by which I mean I am no longer invested in it as somewhere I can express my identity and personality. I used to spend hours cultivating the perfect biographical statement, interests and favorites, and group memberships, but now it’s turned into a virtual version of my apartment on its worst days–namely, full of clutter and crap that might express me, but not in any sort of coherent or favorable way. Anything I find interesting–quotes, links, videos, gets posted in a place that I’d ideally like to keep for photographs and messages to and from friends that I can’t see in person. The one day I connected my Twitter account to my Facebook, such a barrage of crap that was probably rather interesting on a feed cluttered up my Timeline that I just couldn’t stand how it looked, nor could I find a message from a friend that I was looking for.

In the fall I deleted Facebook from my bookmarks, and it remains gone. That makes me visit it a lot less often than I used to, and aside from article-link-posting binges, I don’t really do anything on Facebook except play Words With Friends (I love/hate you for that, Zoraida!). I don’t plan on quitting, but it’s no longer a place that works for the way I want to use media and mediation to send messages or create the virtual costume of myself. I don’t like who I am when I spend hours on Facebook, wistfully clicking through pictures of guys I used to like or girls who used to make fun of me, nor do I like how my profile page looks like, littered with shit I find interesting and want other people to find interesting about me. I don’t know why I held out on Twitter for so long, because it’s more my thing. Continue reading →

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evidently

Posted on January 10, 2012 | 4 Comments

It is at 23 that you realize that, even though you were generally unhappy and incredibly uncomfortable during high school, and even though the people who treated you badly did so without question, you were also quite inexcusably a bitch during those four years. But also, it’s a high school memory, and most bad things from high school are at once meaningless and excusable but also totally and permanently scarring. Finally, this realization is an indication that high school truly never ends, by virtue of the fact that angst lives forever.

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young adult

Posted on January 7, 2012 | 4 Comments

I’m doing pretty well with this Fifty Fifty Me thing. Two books down, plus four movies. “A Small Act” is a fabulous documentary that was filmed in Kenya around the time that I was there, in 2007. “The Devil Inside” is a load of crap and is actually comedic (though not on purpose), not a horror movie as advertised. “Source Code” is harmless, silly fun. Today’s movie was “Young Adult,” and it is really, really wonderful.

I feel so entrenched in critical and literary theory that I don’t know how or what makes something “good” anymore, but if it has something to do with being full of things that you can point out as funny or astute or literary or apt, or if you can think of a thesis statement for an interesting analysis of the film/book/whatever, that must be a good start, right?

I have only read Maureen Johnson’s HuffPo review of “Young Adult,” and she and I think many of the same things, so I have no idea of the kind of press or critical reception or mainstream reception the film is getting. But I hope it’s positive. That said, I have little faith in that, just because it’s the kind of movie that could appear to be very silly, and since most people in America don’t care to develop critical skills, I feel like “Young Adult” might end up shoved in a category with silly movies when it is anything but. Continue reading →

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compartmentalize, ignore, or hate outright?

Posted on January 5, 2012 | Leave a comment

I just started reading Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares, which is the first of his three seminal works on the acting process. I decided to read it when I saw a friend reading it to work on her acting career; I’m reading it because I have enjoyed acting when I’ve done it, also because I have found acting difficult when done right, and also because I thought it might be an interesting approach to writing. I think for that third thing to work, I might end up reading all three of his books, not just this one.

But I got it from the library in Tucson, which means I have to finish reading it by Tuesday night, as I leave Wednesday morning. I had trouble getting it from the Boston library. It’s quite interesting so far–somewhat fiction, somewhat like a diary, rather than just “Hi, let me teach you some shit about acting.” I think writers’ guides could take a note from that approach. But now that I’ve trained myself to be critical about fucking everything ever, I’m having trouble getting through it, and so I’m only on page 10.

This is partly because, at least for the kind of reader and thinker I am, this is a book that demands to be read with a notebook at your side for jotting down quotes you want to remember, activities you want to try, or ideas you come up with. It is not a book for bathtub reading, which is what I thought when I decided to Blanche DuBois out and take a bath this morning. Continue reading →

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ummm, except i did sort of sign up for a quantitative challenge

Posted on January 2, 2012 | Leave a comment

I am so bad at doing what I say I’m going to do, especially if what I say I’m going to do is be less busy or committed to things. I signed up for the Fifty Fifty challenge, which is to read 50 books and watch 50 films in 2012. I liked it as soon as I saw it, because I’ve been relying heavily on episodic television, and while a lot of it is good, also a lot of it is bad, so it’s about time I taught myself to watch narratives that take longer than 43 minutes to unfold, and to watch things in full screen without zipping around to a bunch of other open tabs. Television is something I multitask at, but I’d like to watch films again to remind myself to focus.

One of the recommendations at Fifty Fifty is to come up with majors and minors (i.e. follow the work of a specific director, actor, or writer; read books set in a certain country or written in a certain time period, etc) or other thematic lists to guide your reading and watching. Aside from having a to-read list, I can’t really plan exactly what I’ll read because I am so moody about it, but I have some general ideas that I’ll work on making more specific as the year goes on.

Books for school won’t count towards this total. Also, per the rules of the game, rereads and re-watches don’t count. Continue reading →

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bloggish resolutions

Posted on January 1, 2012 | 2 Comments

This year I made myself some non-specific, qualitative-rather-than-quantitative resolutions that will probably become clear as I continue blogging. But as far as this blog is concerned, I plan to focus it more and have more consistent “columns” and themes. I’ll continue doing my informal research updates on biracial literature, but I’ll also be using that reading for actual academic research that I hope to present at a conference or two and then turn into a paper. I’ll write here more consistently, but not at the expense of the stuff I should be writing–namely school stuff and the novel(s). Finally, I’ll keep better track of my reading not just numerically but qualitatively, writing more, privately and publicly, about what I’m reading, why I chose to read it, what it’s meaning to me, and how it relates to my schooling, my creative projects, my intellectual pursuits, or just my general enjoyment/interest. Like Nick Hornby did in The Believer, I also want to keep track monthly of books I buy, books I borrow/check out from the library, and books I read, as well as magazines and journal articles that I read, and do a beginning and end of month roundup of those things.

Also, more extra media stuff. I’m trying to remember how to have a vocabulary for discussing music, another important part of my life, in the same way I discuss literature. Should be interesting, not to mention relevant to one of my novel(s).

BUT, since it’s always fun to be a little quantitative when you can rub your awesomeness in other people’s faces, I did decide to make an infographic of what I read this year. Continue reading →

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requisite end of 2011 post

Posted on December 31, 2011 | Leave a comment

This has definitely been the year of the most change, transition, growing up, getting my ass kicked, learning what’s important to me, freaking out for the first time about my future, etc etc. It’s been a year. Whatever. So are all other years. I don’t really do New Year’s Eve stuff if I can help it–last year I went to dinner with friends and then refused to go to a party, went home, and got a really good night’s sleep, starting at about 10:30pm. It was awesome. This year I’ve conceded to at least partially celebrating, but I never really cared for celebrating holidays much (by never, I mean for the last six or so years), which is why I try not to do stuff for my birthday, Halloween, etc. It’s never as fun or meaningful or what I want it to be anyway, and I don’t like forced sentimentality when random moments that are good or bad or whatever are so much more meaningful anyway.

That said, I do like to keep track of how many books I read in a calendar year; I do my taxes, so I keep track of how much money I make in a calendar year; and between semesters is as good a time as any to reflect on how my life has changed most recently.

So behold: my list of stuff that 2011 was made of. Tomorrow I’ll tell you how many books I managed to finish, and what I plan on doing with my 2012. And then I’ll get back to my normal, Scroogey, unholiday self. Continue reading →

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researchin’

Posted on December 23, 2011 | 2 Comments

Last week I went down to New York for a day and a half to do research for the novel I tell people I’m working on. It was a really illuminating experience for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that I don’t really know what doing research with primary documents entails. For a library school student at a college that boasts a huge archives program, I’ve never really been in an archives, so stepping into Schomburg was new for me. And then I’ve also never done research to write a novel before, not having finished a long narrative work since the novel I wrote when I was 12 (I think it was 54 pages, single spaced, which is actually not all that bad). But I’m in the school of fake it til you make it, so I was all prepared to fake it.

Fake it I did. But I felt rather awkward. The biggest two things I’ve learned in library school thus far are that everyone is excited that you’re in it until you ask working librarians for help/interviews/jobs, and then they stop being interested in you, and also that you can’t work in a library unless you’ve already worked in a library/you can’t know how to use an archives unless you already know how to use it. And that’s exactly what happened at Schomburg–I’m sure it’s not on purpose, but archivists tend to kind of look at you like you’re a jackass for not knowing how to behave in an archives, but really that’s absurd, because it’s not even a library, so it’s not exactly like you learned the proper usage of one back in elementary school. Anyway, I figured it out, got my temporary NYPL card (!), and found out that the sound archives I requested weren’t there yet, but that I could go upstairs and look at the rest of the stuff I wanted. Continue reading →

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new worlds: cinder, worldbuilding, and current ya sci fi

Posted on December 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

I want to talk about worldbuilding in sci fi and dystopia. And just the qualities of sci fi itself. Lately it’s my favorite genre of television, but I can’t quite figure out why. It’s pretty elementary to identify social fears and how they transfer into imagined technological advances, but that’s part of what makes it such an ever-relevant genre. There are always new societal fears and scapegoats and advances and changes that lend themselves well to commentary in the form of fantastical re-imaginings. But when too much sci fi or dystopia comes out during the same era, especially when that era is also characterized by fast, serial publishing, hyper-commodification of literature, and technology-dominated culture, it ends up all the same and ends up being derivative of itself, rather than clever or astute.

I know I’m kind of writing my own dystopia right now, but I’m satisfied that it’s more speculative than outright sci fi dystopia, and I think it’s fairly different from a lot of other YA dystopia. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be better, but we’ll see how it goes when it’s done. But in the meantime, I still want to read in my one of my favorite genres, and I get disappointed when it all starts to be the same old story: society controls teens as far as who they marry, and some plucky young girl decides that that’s not right. Touchscreens run everything, people have silly names, and daily life is controlled by a faceless, totalitarian government. Obviously that’s the hallmark of most sci fi because it’s the fear of most societies, but the plots are starting to run so similar that it’s dull as doornails. Not even the execution of the same old ideas is unique anymore. Continue reading →

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