politic

If you read any political blogs, you may know about a big fallout between Kos and a large contingent of progressive women (and some men). I am not going to recap the issue here, as it has been covered up the wazoo in many places, so I am going to say that the cool thing I am getting out of this is learning about the awesome women blog scene. For instance, I’m thinking about adding feministing to my daily rotation. I’ll probably evaluate a bunch in the coming weeks and add permanent links to the ones I like on the sidebar.

Via MyDD (yay Philly blog which is awesome), I learned that a Choi has won the Democratic primary for mayor in NJ! Ah, a Korean American Democratic mayoral candidate from my extended family (ok, so he’s probably not family, shut up). Not only that, but it is gratifying to see that he won the nomination after some annoying racist crap:

Choi, who made his first bid for public office, was virtually unknown until two radio hosts on NJ 101.5 FM poked fun at his Korean heritage, asking who would vote for someone with that name and insisting Americans should vote for Americans.

The comments from the “Jersey Guys” brought a deluge of criticism from Asian groups, and gave Choi weeks of free publicity. He was invited on the show two weeks ago for about two hours during which Craig Carton and Ray Rossi apologized for their remarks.

[via The Star Ledger]

A minor tick is that the silly reporter should really have been referencing “Asian Americans” and “Korean Americans”. The original cited title for the article was “Korean voters against Walmart too” makes it sound like the country of Korea rejected Walmart, which is what I honestly thought the article was gonna be about. And what’s with the “too”? Like, Americans reject Walmart, and these non-Americans also reject Walmart. Duh, you can’t vote for a mayoral primary race unless you are an American citizen. It’s like when Michelle Kwan beat Tara Lipinski (sometime in the 90s) and the article headlines read, “Kwan Beats Out American!” It’s not like I’m screaming racism or anything remotely like that at all, but little slips like that reveals the subconscious drawing of the lines between “us” and “them” that is easy to ignore, until one day when you find yourself in the position of “them”. It’s important to become clued in to the nuances and the subtext at play, because this helps you to really get it and know it, and you know, knowing is half the battle. Ahem.

Speaking of getting clued into nuances, there is a contingency of progressive people who think the best thing to do about racism/sexism/homophobia/etc is to suck it up and show them you are better than “that” (whatever The Powers That Be think “that” might be) or that you can have a sense of humor about it, but I disagree firmly and fundamentally. Ignoring a problem and/or joking about it does not make it go away. Pretending that all races in the US face the same obstacles in their everyday lives doesn’t make it so. Let’s put it in terms of illness. If you are diagnosed with an illness (in this example, the illness is racism, not your race — duh), do you simply say, “I am going to ignore this because I will not let it affect my life,” or do you acknowledge that there is a problem at hand, learn everything you can about it, and actually DO something? I think most reasonable people would learn all they can and do something about it. Similarly, if sexism (or whichever particular intolerance you are dealing with) exists in your workplace or classroom or whatever, the thing to do isn’t to pretend it’s not there. The best way to address it is to first acknowledge it in fact exists and to go from there.

work it out

I am thinking about starting a series of writing exercises to ramp up for this November’s NaNoWriMo. I think I need to learn more about the building blocks of writing. For instance, I could go a couple of weeks of learning to write individual paragraphs with a purpose and a dramatic arc. Then I could build up to writing scenes. One of the big things I learned about my writing is that I have a good sense of what I want to happen in a given scene, but I can never seem to close one off with any finesse. I’ll have to be pretty disciplined about it, but I think that I can set a reasonable schedule to do it. I might try writing on pen and paper, but we’ll see how long I last that way.

The BBC is allowing free downloads of Beethoven’s symphonies as performed by the BBC Philharmonic. As I am pretty ignorant when it comes to classical music, I figure I can learn to appreciate and identify these works by listening to them on my iPod everyday.

My pet peeve while driving is drivers who do not signal for turns or lane changes. More than anything else, this action drives me to what I know to be an unreasonable amount of anger, but it amuses me to cuss a little and give them the “why don’t you signal, you buffoon?” gesture, which looks like closed-fist-open-palm-closed-fist-open-palm with my palm facing outward, which I know no one understands. That gesture, and my “let me merge like I’m supposed you, you moron” gesture, which looks like my left hand held out like I’m going to shake someone’s hand with my right hand held similiarly but at ~30 degree angle to that where I’m ramming my right hand into the middle of my left hand, which I also know no one else understands, are my favorite to use on the road. The other person gets confused, and this makes me giggle.

My favorite song to sing while driving has to be, bar none, Bon Jovi’s “I’ll Be There For You”, because I know all the words and it requires some screaming. Runner ups include any Motown and Dance Hall Crashers, although it kinda sucks because I don’t know enough words, so I end up doing that weird mumbling thing that everyone does when they don’t know the words.