Does Korean count as a career aspiration?  There are so many opportunities for Caucasian featured Asians out there!  I could be an eyelid tape model, a pop-star, a soap actress, an English teacher, a knee sock designer, a spokesperson for home water purification systems, and God knows what else.  The possibilities are tantalizing.  Can’t wait to tell my nana next time she asks me what I plan on doing with myself.

In addition to never reading the fine print, I’m not a big fan of try before you buy.  I have an entire drawer of clothing that I purchased without trying, but was so convinced that it would look amazing that I hurriedly removed all the tags.  ”WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?” I’m constantly asking myself, even as I’m yanking tags off something that I’m clearly not meant to visualize, let alone wear.  A recent example being the purchase of a down filled vest.  I hate down.  I hate vests.  I live in a year round Mediterranean climate.  On top of it all, I look ridiculous in it which I might have known given that everyone else on earth looks equally unfortunate in down vests.  I’ve kind of taken to wearing it around the house, sans layers, paired with fluorescent bootie shorts.  If I can’t be seen wearing it in public, I can at least treat myself to an in home Eurotrash music video fantasy.  Again, I attribute this behavior to degreelessness.

On a positive note, I know what I’m going to wear on my first day back to school.  Rest of my life, ahoy!

I missed breakfast during my morning TV binge and so I stopped off at the food court to examine the offerings.  My mall is an Orange Julius short of perfection. It’s anchored by two major department stores with a few discount shoe stores, a Morrissey shirt emporium and an Asian market in between.  Generally, these offerings satisfy my meager needs.  In terms of a food court, there’s not really a tangible or consolidated space.  It’s more a smattering of Filipino fast food options and a wall of candy vending machines with nothing left but Runts.  Filipino cuisine is truly bizarre.  I’m not even talking about duck fetuses and blood soup.  Even the more mundane aspects of their popular culinary tradition leave me haloed in question marks.  Why do all Filipino beverages contain jelly?  How is it that Filipino fried chicken is 90% skin?  What’s going on with the extra sweet ketchup on everything?  I guess this is one of those rare instances in which cultural relativism is still relevant.

I settled for a Filipino take on dim sum.  I parked myself at a table protruding into the mall.  A few bites into my first char siu bao, an older woman pulled up a chair at my table and asked if she could sit and rest a moment.  Normally, I would have been appalled by the prospect of sharing a table with a stranger, but I’m certainly not so hardened as to begrudge a cute little old lady one of three unused seats.  We sat in silence for awhile as I chomped the gray “pork” down into a substance nearly compatible with my digestive tract.  Then she asked how the bao was.  I told her it was kind of gross.  She nodded and said that Filipinos can’t do Chinese food right.  Then she started to say something else.  I don’t think she even mouthed the entire word “what” before I knew what she was asking me.

“Chinese”, I said.  Half.  Then I asked her if she was Chinese too.  “Yes”, she said.  Half.  The other half Filipino.  We got to talking about clothes.  She asked me if I liked Ferragamo and I told her only from afar.  Then she lifted up her shoe for me to inspect. Genuine Ferragamo.  Under ordinary circumstances, I would have been annoyed by gratuitous label dropping.  But this was a retired school teacher sharing with me the fruits of her pension.  We chatted on awhile longer before she felt well enough to resume her lap around the mall.

Next I went for the siu mai.  It wasn’t bad.  Nana makes hers with water chestnuts and mushrooms, but I can’t fault the chef for not being nana.  As I shoveled a too big piece of ground pork and shrimp into my mouth, the same woman returned to my table, feeling peaked again.  She sat back down and asked me about how I like life down here.  She was from the bay.  I told her I was satisfied with the quality of life.  She commented that it was too hot and too spread out.  Generalized comments about Los Angeles also tend to annoy me but by now I suppose you know how it goes.  Can’t hold it against a cute little old lady.  Soon her husband spotted her and plopped down in the empty seat next to me.  We talked about the current dispute over the territorial boundaries of the South China/West Philippine Sea.  We all agreed that the Chinese are at fault.  Then the woman started poking around about my personal life.  “You married?”  I told her yes.  “To a white guy?”  Affirmative.  “Good for you”, she said.  I don’t even find such comments odd any more.  It’s the way it is in Asian culture.  Ideally, you marry your own type of Asian, but a white guy is the next best thing.  I opted not to tell her that he’s not a doctor/lawyer/dentist/business man.  Let the old woman be happy for me.   The third siu mai didn’t go down as easily as the first two.  I called it quits after that and tried to cut the grease with an overly syruped fountain Coke.  I lingered for another few minutes to find an appropriate point to segue out of the conversation.  I get stuck in a lot of crappy conversations because of this but I was actually quite content to sit and chat with the visiting pair.  We said our goodbyes and I wished them a pleasant stay in Los Angeles.  They both nodded wearily at the prospect.  They were nice people though.  We Angelenos take these random encounters for granted, even if some of them can be a little overly prescriptive.  It’s sad how many of us go out of our way to avoid random encounters, myself sometimes included.

On or around May 8, 2003, I was bemoaning the status of my senior (high school) project and the three hours of detention that nearly kept me from graduating on stage.

On or around May 8, 2004, I saw Kraftwerk at Coachella.

On or around May 8, 2005 I met my future in-laws for the first time.

On or around May 8, 2006, my then boyfriend (now husband) and I moved to our current apartment in this, our much beloved part of town.

On or around May 8, 2007, I watched a friend vomit then proceed to make out with an unwashed guy.  There wasn’t much going on that May.

On or around May 8, 2008, I was gloating about my grades that term.

On or around May 8 2009, I walked out of a Target with one of those hygienic guards that comes attached to the bottoms of swim wear stuck to my shoe.

On or around May 8, 2010, I was sifting through my wedding photos for the first time.

And today, May 8, 2011, I’m fondly reminiscing the past eight years (and flailing spastically as I’ve just realized that the tickle on my arm that I hoped was a displaced hair was actually a daddy long legs traversing the path up to my neck).

I feel that much of my melancholy is attributed to the fact that I hardly see my family any more.  I used to see any combination of my mom and sisters just about every day of the work week.  In the month that I’ve been at my new job, I’ve only seen them 2-3 times.  The situation is exacerbated by my mom’s new temporary job in  Florida.  Her employer has been sending her there about every other week and her upcoming trip will be for three weeks.  My poor husband has born the burden of filling my otherwise unfulfilled family rations.  Sometimes he meets me on my lunch breaks.  I only have half an hour for lunch and in the time it takes to find somewhere to eat and order, we’re only left with 15-20 minutes of actual bonding time.  I love it though.  When we were first dating, I used to bring him lunch at work and I had a knack for bringing him things he didn’t want to eat.  He was always sweet about it though and gobbled it up as though he were craving it.  Now he does the same for me and these tiny throw backs to our beginning days are heavenly.  It makes me think about what my dad told me when I announced our engagement.  He said that his favorite thing about being married to my mom was the time they spent struggling together as newlyweds, when they had to work summers on turkey farms or subject themselves to clinical trials just to make end’s meet.  The environment and circumstances may not seem conducive to love, but even now they both fondly reminiscence about that time spent together when the little things meant everything.  Sometimes I feel like I want to be depressed.  But it’s like giving someone the silent treatment only to have them do something idiotic to force you to smile.  I have my husband and my family and a distaste for all things secretarial.  I won’t be doing this forever but I will always be a part of this loving band of idiots who keep each other smiling.

Sometimes I take my husband’s lifestyle for granted.  But look at him.  By and large, he’s a pretty happy guy.  He’s doing what he wants to do in life.  He does the daily grind when he needs to, but as many people fail to understand, art IS a career.  I get tired of people asking what he does a for a living and when I tell them that he’s an artist, they ask, “but what does he actually do?”  It’s even worse when they ask, “oh, you mean like a graphic designer?”  He paints.  That’s his priority.  He alternates between the 9-5 and working at home where he produces artwork.  It’s hasn’t been the easiest life in terms of financial preparedness, but you really can do away with a lot of creature comforts if it means you’re truly happy with what you’re doing day to day.

Sometimes I hate to blog because each post feels like a reworded A-HA! moment from one of those awful chicken soup books, which I have a stack of squirreled away in a file box in the garage labeled “uninspired gifts/to regift.”  In all seriousness though, a lot of this may seem like common sense to the rest of you, but I really, truly thought that you had to subsume a piece of your essence to be able to make the concessions that would facilitate a cushier life.  The simple fact remains, I do need health insurance.  That, and my essence is beginning to smell like cat food.  To the shower!

“And what kind of creative endeavors are you involved in?”

“None at the moment.”

“Well what is it that you do for a living?”

“I’m a legal secretary.”

“Are you sure you’re not an artist?”

“No, why do you ask?”

“You look like one.”

“Oh.”

It’s really neither here nor there when somebody tells me that I look like an artist (or anything else).  Burrow a bit into the subtext of the comment and suddenly, I’m being told that I look like a caricature.   It’s not that the prospect of being an artist offends me.  It’s more a matter of being told that something about me evokes a stereotype.  If somebody told me that I look like an engineer, you might expect me to be bespectacled, frazzled looking, pocket protected, etc. (I only use that example because my mom is an engineer and according to her, that’s the stereotype/reality).

So then, what makes a stereotypical artist and what about me fits that description?  I consulted the internet and this is what I got:

Bemustached artist

Hipster artists

Tortured artist

Hobbyist

I’m guessing that the cashier was comparing me to stereotype #2.  I almost resemble the guy on the right.  Similar hair, glasses, blazer, pallor.

Nobody ever tells me that I look like a secretary, except for that one sleazy client a few weeks back who said “you look like what a secretary should look like.”  I’m certain that nobody has ever told me that I look like a rocket scientist and relevant to my last post, I’ve never been told that I look like a lawyer.  It’s always an artist.  The funny thing is, I’ve never had any desire to be an artist beyond the thought when I was five years old that to be an artist was a life of crayons and paste.

To what extent is appearance linked to what you do in life? Sometimes appearance dictates profession and other times, profession dictates appearance, but for me, neither has ever really been the case.  I’m about to start a new job and I’m going to have to look more professional in my new capacity. Maybe then the questions about being an artist will cease? Nevertheless, after years of being asked the same question, I wonder if it will effect me in some way down the road.  Or has it already?  Husband is an artist.  Is he a byproduct of this recurring question?  My mom always told me I should be an artist.  Maybe I’ve subconsciously been acting the part all these years.

Dad,

I think you and I have arrived at the same conclusion. I don’t want to go to law school. I wanted to go for the wrong reasons. I’m going to apply for traditional grad school.  Thanks for everything.

Love,
Daughter

And just like that, I feel human again.  Of course, I’m back to square one and this gives me ample excuse to keep on lollygagging and pussyfooting through life.  I won’t though.  I’ll have a real plan soon.  It might not be a good plan but at least maybe it will be a plan that I don’t have to lie to myself (or anyone else) about.

My dad just called in response to the e-mail and has lent his support.  He’s being very judicious, despite the fact that this has been a total time and money suck for him.   Yay for unconditional parental love.

He gave up college after a semester and a half.  School wasn’t for him.  Now he’s an entrepreneur.  A consultant to be precise.  What’s a consultant you ask?  According to him, a consultant is someone in the business of business.  Is that not a businessman?  No, it’s a consultant.  He told me of his plan to leave LA for Portland.  In his experience, LA is a city too obsessed with all things superficial.  The movie industry is going to swallow us all up.  It’s not really the kind of place for a kid with a dream.  Portland on the other hand, well he just had a good feeling about it.  He hasn’t actually been there though.

In between his lengthy musings on the shortcomings of my hometown and the futility of a formal education, he’d stop to ask about my own plans in life.  I told him that I didn’t really have any as of now.  He asked what I studied in school.  I told him I studied Russian history. “Like Lenin and Stalin?”, he asked.  That made me cringe.  Then he asked my thoughts on totalitarianism.  What a weird thing to ask I thought.  Unless you’re a dictator, I think the vast majority of people would agree that totalitarianism is bad.  So I said, “totalitarianism is bad.”  I think he expected to engage in some lengthy discussion on the matter but I think even a pseudo-intellectual can agree that there’s not much to be said on the subject.  Isn’t there a bumper sticker somewhere that says “dictatorships suck?”

It’s an awful thing when both parties to a conversation know that it’s doomed.  And yet he kept trying.  He started talking about the Chinese economy, which seems to be the fall back talking point of choice these days, and how this country is doomed by the fact that we’re not nationalistic enough and too willing to send our work elsewhere.  I believe the KKK  and tea party have similar gripes.  Then he really biffed things by referring to that arcane figure, “the China man”.  Apparently I can pass for white with sunglasses on.  I let him rail on against the Chinese for awhile longer  before I mentioned that I’m half Chinese.  He actually asked me to take my sunglasses off to prove it.  Then I thought, “why, so you can check to see if I’m slant eyed?”  I was going to throw it out there but he was already beginning to squirm.

I can’t recall a single more awkward conversation that I’ve had in recent history, and yet there I was, not really making any significant attempt to discourage it.  Every time he said something, I replied with a thinly veiled insult to which he was seemingly oblivious.  The deeper he pushed himself into a topic he couldn’t elaborate on, the more interested I was in its outcome.  I think the draw of the situation was that even though I knew he was going to fail, there was still some degree of uncertainty as to where the conversation would go next and what he would do in an attempt to salvage it.  When speaking with someone you are intimately familiar with, you almost always know from what angle they are approaching or the probable outcome of the conversation.  It’s not that I’m a glutton for punishment or punishing.  It’s not even that I felt vastly superior, because God knows I’ve been at the supplying end of some really mediocre conversations.  I can’t say why I stuck around for so long.  I think he needed someone to talk to and to validate him.  There have been so many times in the past where I’ve made some kind of fleeting connection with someone I didn’t even know and if the best I could get from the situation was a half-hearted “me too” from them, it was still enough of a boost to know that I’m not entirely alone in my beliefs and desires.  That, or I was in too much of a cold medicine induced haze to get gone and salvage those 30 minutes of my life.  C’est la vie!