Men are from Earth and so are Women

It always amazes me, how hard we all try to figure each other out from the other's perspective. We stereotype each other, we treat race, class, and gender as if they truly define us as individuals. But I think in the end, we're all pretty much the same. We're all equals. We all need comfort and love.

I just spent the last three days driving in the car with my older brother from his former home in Salt Lake City back to our mom's house in Baltimore. At some point we were talking about relationships, and he brought up that he's come to find through his recent experiences that men and women are just very different. I told him that I came to find the exact opposite and realized that men and women are the exact same and that people are just different. Oddly enough, I actually didn't have to make much more of an argument after that for him to agree with me. Still, it got me thinking about the classic gender vs. sex argument.

The very basic distinctions between men and women are mostly biological, aka your sex. But for most of us our gender is planned out before we are even out of the womb. Why else are so eager to find out the sex of the baby? We are socialized to death about who we should be and what we should act like as young boys and girls before we can even slightly comprehend it. I guess that's why we ended up just narrowing down to the opposite sex having cooties when we were little.

Going through the toy aisles in Target make me so uneasy as an adult, because I can see these awful projections of gender on to children screaming out. You can spot aisles intended for little girls because it's covered enough bright pink products to make you nauseous from one walk through. It's mostly dolls or some other kind of crap that place an unnecessary amount of importance on our looks. There seems to be this idea that girls need to ridiculously skinny with long flowing hair, preferably white with blond hair and blue eyes, but these days the token minority is acceptable so long as our only distinguishing features are skin, hair and eye color. Meanwhile boys toys are completely the opposite. Most of them aren't even based on human male "action figures"-clearly not dolls as you can't change their clothes.

I get that in this grand free country of ours, the easiest way of keeping women oppressed and consumer driven is by feeding us an virtually unattainable standard of beauty. This way, we keep ourselves fixated enough on attracting men and tearing each other apart, so we never really fulfill our true purposes and passions. But now that times have changed and we legally be oppressed anymore, isn't time for gender socialization to change too?

Wouldn't it be easier, not to sound cliche but, if we all just got along? Little boys and girls could play with the same toys or toys that they're actually interested in without being outcasted. We could learn and discover what we really want from life at a younger age without worrying about what's expected from us. We could learn to interact with the opposite sex so that we're actually comfortable enough when we reach those awkward teen years to just be ourselves. Relationships and marriages would probably last a lot longer too if we were more comfortable with ourselves and less concerned with attracting others.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, I wish our consumer driven society would give us a chance as people not as men and women. We should all know from day one that it's not about appearances, without our toys and the media screaming the contrary. We should all be given a fair at doing what we loved to do without being told we're weird, or even worse, to add to the still widespread acceptability of homophobia, gay.

Getting sucked in...

So I am officially weeks away from completing my first year of law school. I think it's safe to say that this lifestyle has completely sucked me in. For someone who considers herself to be the epitome of the slacker law student, even I spend an annoying amount of time studying. When I'm not studying, I feel guilty because I probably should be studying (for instance, right now I should really be studying for my Crim Law midterm and not writing this blog). Any free time I get, I want to spend it with other people drinking or smoking hookah or chasing any sort of high that will just make me feel like a normal person again and not some sort of law school zombie.

Before I came to law school, I was told time and time again that the first year is the worst of your life. On the contrary, this year has been one of my best. I feel like I am on the cusp of realizing who I am and what I really want to do with my life. I have made some of the best friends I have ever had, and I have come to many important realizations about life in general. But the further I get wrapped into this new law school version of myself, the more I fear losing touch with the activist in me.

While I am trying to follow the path I lead in undergrad by getting involved with student organizations, I still don't think I can regain what I had. There isn't much time for activism. There is always that lurking feeling that I need to be studying. Unfortunately, studying or the urge to study leaves my brain dead and crying out for activities that don't involve thought. And we all know, there is no activism without thought.

It's funny that the very reason I came to law school is being destroyed by law school itself. It's like having had your cake, and while you can't eat it too, you have to sit there and watch other people eat it. I've seen so many of my peers that I met through the movement flourish and become further involved after college and continue on the path of promoting social justice. And while I am so proud and happy for them, I can't help but envious in the sense that I am yearning to be out there with them. I feel like we were all running on the same course, and somehow I lost my way.

I had finally found that thing, that thing you are so truly and utterly passion about, that nothing else comes close. The love that is so much bigger than you, that it automatically connects the dots between yourself and like-minded people, so that together you can turn that love into something more. While I can throw out these spiffy terms like social or equal justice, civil rights, community organizing, coalition building, activism, etc., it all comes down to that love that is ingrained in all these things.

I am positive that I will find my way back. But right now, sitting on the side lines is both tormenting and satisfying. The fear of losing my way has been creeping up on me a lot recently. I'm afraid of losing touch, forgetting that feeling or worse coming back to it only to find that the fire has died down. But, I think deep down I know, I could never let this be "the one that got away". It's all just a matter of getting back on course and finding the means in my life right now to do so.

"She must be a member of the Taliban"

Oh post 9-11 racism, must you always rear your ugly head after a drunken night out. While I don't remember exactly what happened (just a bit too much tequila), I do remember sitting in the late night carry out by my house with my friends while yet another pretentious highly unattractive man sat down and tried to talk to us. Nothing pisses me off more than this. Do men really think that if girls are hanging out without male company, they are just begging for guys to come over? Why is it everytime I'm out with my female friends, guys think it's perfectly fine to impose themselves on us and continue talking to us even when we show no amount of interest? And the worst thing is, God forbid, if a woman offend the male ego, we could be subject to harassment, violence, or worse. So in fear of being followed home or raped in alley way, we have to be nice to these people.

On this particular night, I was not having it. Maybe it was the tequila, or maybe it was the shear disregard for personal space that this fat, trashy, 30-something was forcing on us that set me off. I mean could you imagine the reaction from a group of 20-something boys, if I was 15 years older and a hundred pounds heavier, and I just sat down at their table and tried to strike up a conversation? Needless to say, they wouldn't have to be so polite. He started getting mad at me because unlike my friends, I wasn't trying to be nice to him out of fear of pissing him off. I kept saying things along the lines of calling him an ugly, fat white guy and trying to get him to go bother another uninterested group. I realize that I may have instigated a racially charged retaliation from him, but for him to say "I don't know what's wrong with this girl, all her friends are cool, she must be a member of the Taliban", is just plain ignorant. Why yes, ignorant sir, anyone with brown skin must be a member of terrorist organization, you clever little man, you.

Why does racism have to surface every time we really want to piss each other off? It's not helping anyone, and it's definitely not progressing our society, yet we all know it is the ultimate low blow to the person of color. While it may be said more out of spite intertwined with humor than actual racially ingrained malice, we know what we are saying and that chances are this statement will set the targeted person off like crazy. There is something about being attached to whatever it is that our skin color conveys to other people, that takes away our individuality, our struggles, and stabs at whatever pride we have built in ourselves. There is something about being attached to the oppression and hatred that our brothers and sisters before us faced, that makes me wonder, just how American are we?

I realize my fourteen letter last name and multiple deity religion doesn't make me seem like the all-american girl next-door type, but this is all I know. All I have ever known really, is Maryland and this country that I love so much. My parents focused on their careers and their hatred for one another, instead of teaching my brother and I about Hinduism and Sri Lankan culture. I really know little to nothing of the land, language, and culture that they grew up in. Why does this event, 9/11, something that happened within my lifetime, need to be attached to me simply because the color of my skin? Joking or not, it absolutely sucks to be associated with terrorist groups. This is the only home I have ever known, and to be tied to organizations and pointed out as an enemy to my home, is one of the most demoralizing, heart breaking thing you can do to someone. I am an American-born citizen, and I will continue to fight for the rest of my life for social justice in this country because I love it.

With that said, I realize it has been a long time since I wrote in this blog. I started at a point where I felt so deeply connected to the Asian Pacific American activist community. At that point, this connection was my strength, my passion, and my power. Now, over a year later, in law school at the University of Baltimore, I am not connected to that community everyday. I no longer sit in Asian American Studies classes or attend weekly Asian American Student Union e-board meetings. The people, who brought me to my passion, helped me foster it, and taught me the importance of this fight are now miles away and scattered around. I find myself reading blog after blog trying to keep up, trying to keep my passion aflame, but I feel somewhat lost without these people. I look to broader civil rights movements, but with all the work I have to do for school, it's been harder and harder to keep connected. I realize now, that regardless of the circumstances, I need to keep up with my activism. It is my true love and the driving power behind my pursuit of my J.D. This incident may have been irritating and I'm sure I'll face plenty more racism, here in Federal Hill (one of the "nicer" areas in Baltimore), but it's good to know that I can still lay the brown smackdown.