Reading Rainbow

My grey matter has been hyperactive, of late.  I've been getting a lot of mental inspiration from stuff I've been reading/seeing/thinking about and my pistons are firing (in case you couldn't tell from the last post).

Further to that, I was at a dinner party last weekend and when the talk about white people being racist came up, a smug white person (is there any other kind?) of the mansplaining variety said, "but aren't we all racist?" and I was like, okay, yeah, fine.  And then this other mansplainer jumped in, and to his credit, talked about racism being a structural thing, so everyone is bigoted (or can be), but not all people possess the structural power to exclude others.  He said something along the lines of, "I'm sure there might be some cultures where whiteness isn't dominant" at which point I was just about to interject that I don't believe that to be true, when my dear friend gave an example of "racism" when she was singled out and treated differently when she was a white woman living in Japan for a year.

Keep in mind: I was the only person of colour at the table.  The Dotytron had left for another engagement.  In that context, among those people, I consider the Dotytron a person of colour, because he's really the closest thing to it.  He's considered "black-ish" by his colleagues at school.  I tried to make a point that Japanese men fetishizing her whiteness is still a privileging of white skin (although a twisted articulation of it), but it got swallowed up in the din of whiteness and mansplaining (a lethal combination).

It was very difficult to sit at that table and listen to that conversation unspool as it did.  I didn't speak up because I'm not very deft when it comes to doing that.  I would have gone full-bore FRANZ FANON this! and bell hooks THAT! And probably gone berserk with post-colonial, can-the-subaltern-speak talk.

Here's the thing: some of those people are wannabe public policy wanksters.  They're not, because they're the kind of oily political staffers that I see prancing around my work, in shrunken suits, who don't actually know how to do anything but play the "game" of politics, but the point is: they FANCY themselves to be the "right" people to make those decisions.

You've heard me go on and on about the myopic nature of the left and how entrenched positions never yield fruitful conversations.  This was a table full of that.  Big voices from people who don't know anything beyond their own narrow slice of urban smugness.

I'm sorry, but you don't have to go very far to get a sense of the discourse on white privilege and racism.  Like, it got played out in the Taylor Swift-Nicki Minaj beef on Twitter.  It's on Scandal, like, every 5th episode.  It's kind of everywhere?  IF you take a minute to step outside the narrow confines of a limited peer group.  It's weird how rarefied your world can become.  I'm sometimes shocked by how much otherwise intelligent, smart, thinking people I know don't know about stuff.  Maybe this is what happens when you only get a CBC/NPR view of the world?  What is that world even like?

Thankfully, I'll never have to know.

Edit: I love my best friend because I have been working on this post all week and then we went to lunch and basically hashed out all of the above.  She's a glorious, brilliant, magical, inspiring creature who makes me a better person.

This week I saw Jillian and Mariko Tamaki do a talk organized by my friend JT.  It was awesome.  Yes, please smart Asian-Canadian women who are feminists and think about girlhood and coming-of-age, and narrative reliability and are kick-a** illustrators.  Yes, please.

This One Summer is their latest work (they also write independently of each other, although Jillian does illustration whereas Mariko doesn't).  This won a Prinz and a Caldecott, kind of a big deal.  It's covers a summer spent at the cottage with two friends, Windy and Rose, both who are on the cusp of early-adulthood, and who are experiencing that transition and the shifting of their identities in different ways that strain and balance their friendship.  There are confusing things afoot with the adults in their lives, and with the townie teenagers the two spy on.  I love Jillian Tamaki's illustration style.  I just love it.  I couldn't love it more.  It is the perfect balance between clear and expressive and referencing traditional cartooning.  The story is fragmented and the telling of the narrative evokes summer itself - how some days are long and languid and some seem to flash by in a blur.  There is a lot that isn't said through text, leaning all the more on Jillian Tamaki's wondrous illustrations to add the nuance and shading and subtext.  It perfectly captured the confusing miasma of fraught female friendships at a tumultuous time.  

This was OBVIOUSLY an Academic Book Club pick.  I don't know from Ann-Marie MacDonald.  I didn't read The Way the Crow Flies or Fall On Your Knees because I suspected white lady problems and I wasn't up for it then, and I'm rarely up for it now.  This is about a character, not-Ann-Marie who lives a very similar life to Ann-Marie but isn't her, okay?  Even though they are both lesbians living in the Annex with similar professions for their spouses and raising kids and blah blah blah.  I didn't finish reading this to be honest because it was about how she was feeling suffocated by stifling domesticity.  It's a Talking Heads, is this my beautiful wife? Is this my beautiful car? type of book and I'm sorry, but from rich white ladies who are all, "how do I find myself here?" I'm like, figure it out! I don't care!  I couldn't get into her "problems" and I didn't want to try.

The Girl on the Train was last year's answer to Gone Girl but not as good and without the feminism.  An alcoholic woman named Rachel pieces together a mystery from the glimpses of a house she passes by on her train commute every day.  Secrets abound, blah blah.  It's a page turner but I didn't really like any of the characters and the writing wasn't all that great and the twist ending wasn't all that surprising, so the end result is that it was perfect for that time in my life (I read this over a year ago...I think when the twins were quite wee and my life was punctuated with tandem breastfeeds every 3 hours).

All YA books are set up to be like, "The next Fault in Our Stars" or "The next Eleanor and Park."  This was marketed like this but it's quite different.  It's about a Hasidic Jewish girl and a West Indian boy who cross over their respective communities' boundaries in Brooklyn and meet in a hospital elevator during a hurricane.  Their families disapprove, their burgeoning relationship must be kept a secret.  For the most part, the book defies easy stereotypes - Jaxon, the boy, is a high-achieving nerdy student and the book ends with melodramatic elements, but a more realistic ending than most.  I liked this book - it was sweetly touching.

Saga.  You guys.  Brian K. Vaughan is obviously a hero in the comics world.  I love his writing.  But Fiona Staples?!?  Where have you BEEN all my comic-reading life?  Look at those drawings!  The drawings are incredible.  This is about two members of alien races, at war for generations, who fall in love and defect to raise their child, on the run from bounty hunters and government forces.  Brian K. Vaughan's writing is always slyly political, but funny, and very wry.  I love this and can't wait for the next installments.  Again, the illustrations, guys!  The worlds that are created!  

SMcKay recently questioned me because I got midnight screening tickets (thanks, Bruce Wayne!) for the new Star Wars: Force Awakens film.  I was like, dude, I'm a nerd.  And she said, "I'm a nerd, too..." and I was like, whoa whoa whoa.  I am a real, deal nerd.  Like, an old skool 90s alt-Asian girl nerd.  I like Star Trek: TNG, Star Wars, comics, Voltron, Ghost in the Shell, Autechre, Aphex Twin, all the rest of that stuff.  You want to talk Brian K. Vaughan?  Let's talk Brian K. Vaughan.  This is real comics, not the Seth/Adrian Tomine, graphic novel stuff.  It is a brilliant series though...you have to take my word for it.  

Allie Brosh's web comics (and maybe some original material?  I'm not sure) were collected in this book, Hyperbole and a Half.  There is something about her naive (but assuredly time-consuming) MS Paint illustrations that are the best.  In particular, her series on her own depression and wanting to die, is one of the things that has best crystallized for me, what it must be like for someone to be going through those mental health issues.  It's strange, but her writing on her depression is one of the first times I've actually understood what it must be like.  It made that expression of mental illness accessible in a way that it hadn't before, and in so doing, made me able to empathize with people with mental illness on a much more intuitive level.  

I mean really, isn't this like, me all the damn time?!

I know, I'm so behind on book reviews that you read and digested and loaned this to your friend already.  Allow me to join the chorus of voices who loved Amy Poehler's book.  I love this woman.  I was told by people that some of her reactions to situations as detailed in the book reminded them of me, and by that I mean I think Amy Poehler and I share the propensity to be small, smart women who are cocksure and as a general rule, DON'T TAKE S**T LYING DOWN.  I am generally honoured by the comparison.  

I loved this book.  The essays were by turns funny, true, heartening, and revealing.  This is the kind of book that as a woman, you sometimes clutch it to your breast and just breath, "yes."  I get that.  This woman gets me.  Women getting other women is a magical gift and is not to be trifled with.  I enjoyed this more than Bossypants because as a whole, I find Poehler less guarded.  Tina Fey comes off very cerebral and her smart can be distancing, whereas Poehler allows you in a bit more.  Whatever, they're both brilliant, funny, amazing women and there is room for both of them and a whole lot more.

I suggested this for Academic Book Club.  It generated a s**t tonne of discussion but I had major issues with this book.  I think Lena Dunham is a creative, gifted, incredibly accomplished woman who has her heart in the right place.  I think the video advice series that she developed to promote the book was brilliant and funny and I loved it.  The actual book however, I do have notes about.  She's...just not that great a writer, guys.  She's a voracious reader and she's been around a highly educated, artistic milieu her whole life (what comes through loud and clear in this book is how much she idolizes her artist parents), and I've heard her speak and she's articulate and insightful...but it doesn't translate as much to the written word.  

I've subscribed to her Lenny newsletter that she does with Jenni Konner and I'd say the same thing.  She's not a great interviewer and the writing just doesn't equal the sum of the inputs.  She is an oversharer with some things, but then when the time comes to discuss her relationship with Jack Antonoff, she gets weirdly shy and reticent and all, "that's private!" and obviously I get that everyone gets to choose what's private for them, but it just seemed incongruous and kind of juvenile.  There are ways to talk about your boyfriend/partner/significant other, whathaveyou, without giving it all away and feeling like you sold yourself (see: Amy Poehler above).  It was worthwhile reading because this book generated a lot of mainstream interest and was zeitgeisty, and as we all know, even though I'm a nerd, I stay on top of the zeitgeist like it's my full time job.

That's it for book reviews today.  Stay tuned for Halloween wrap-up, more musings on parenthood, what I've made for dinner lately, and more!

Fin.

This is a Rant

They see me rantin', I'm ravin'...

Very much not into this ^^^ lately

The Dotytron has some extended family members who are...how do I put this delicately...ummm...RACISTS?!?  They are "old stock" Canadians and lately, I'm like, done with that shiz.  An uncle referred to a musician at a Jamaican resort he didn't care for as a "Rasta piece of crap" (you are surprised that your musician in JAMAICA was [might] have been Rastafarian?!).  That same uncle also believes President Obama is a Muslim, and furthermore, THINKS THERE'S SOMETHING INHERENTLY WRONG ABOUT THAT.  A groomsman at a wedding that I (thankfully) didn't go to, used the N-word IN THE RACIST, NON-REAPPROPRIATING WAY.  An Aunt re-posted a picture of the twin towers with accompanying text to the effect of: "this image is going to offend some people [emphasis mine] that our government is too PC to fight back against but I don't care (blah blah blah insert nationalistic - American! - jingoism here)..." In the run-up to this past federal election, the only people on my Facebook wall who have been posting scare-mongering stuff about how Justin Trudeau is going to run up a giant deficit or op-ed pieces from the Toronto Sun (!), about how stellar Harper's record has been are from his aunts and uncles with accompanying entreaties that we should read their posts and "think before we vote!"  These are people who get their "news" and political information from memes.

I also made the mistake of clicking on the comments from provincial PC leader Patrick Brown's Facebook message wishing Muslims a happy Eid.  It was, as you could imagine, filled with racist vitriol and the linchpin issue for scared white bread old stock everywhere, how you CAN'T SAY MERRY CHRISTMAS ANYMORE AND YOU HAVE TO SAY "HAPPY HOLIDAYS" AND WHAT A TRAVESTY THAT IS AND A HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATION, etc., etc.

At a Dotytron family xmas event a couple of years ago, an aunt mad an off-hand snide remark that someone better watch what they say to me, because "otherwise she'll be posting about you [on social media] with the things she doesn't like" and just the mere memory of that makes me so. damn. mad.  I am filled with a howling, chomping, rage that rises in me and slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

I'm sorry, am I too smart, critical, and outspoken for you?  What's the role of a good woman in your books?  That I should be making shortbread cookies and planning my wedding and taking my partner's last name and accept mail addressed to "Mr. and Mrs. Dotytron"?  HOW ABOUT YOU TAKE SOME OF MY BRILL OPINIONS and sit down and quietly be spoon fed them the way disenfranchised people are forced to quietly be spoon fed your white privilege since time immemorial?  

These are opinions that family by marriage (only - thank goodness), think it's okay to share PUBLICLY.  So I think to myself...why do I want to be around that?  What do I get out of descending into that intellectual decrepitude?  What must they think of me?  What must they think of my beautiful biracial children?  

You know what this is?  This is white privilege folks.  The kind of myopic, "convenient theories for me" narrative that means that women, women of colour, women who don't fit the box that is convenient for us to be place in by the constructs of the dominant hegemony, have to behave in a certain way, lest we be designated as too "loud" or "opinionated" or "untoward."

BE UNTOWARD.

I chose Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me for the next Book Club I'm hosting.  We had just read (or in my case, hate-read and then dropped 1/10th of the way through), Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend and I was looking at options and I was like, you know what?  I'm tired of reading about white women!  I haven't finished this, but the review is forthcoming.

Last night we finished watching Fruitvale Station, starring the hotness that is Michael B. Jordan. I suggested the film as an accompaniment to the reading for Book Club. After the last few years where the black community has become increasingly visibly radicalized in the face of systemic and visible murder by entrenched racism and the demonization of black masculinity, the film enraged me.  Oscar's story happens all the freakin' time.  We have a confluence of entrenched racism in the United States, lack of class mobility, segregation, disempowerment, a heady gun culture, and the simultaneous fetishization and demonization of black masculinity contributing to black bodies being treated as disposable.

Then you read reports about how something was "disrupted" by Black Lives Matter advocates.  You see news reports that fix the rioting in Ferguson in a fetishisitic gaze while simultaneously moralizing and wagging a finger at our collective entrancement with the activities images of black bodies "acting out."

Why do we hold oppressed people to a higher standard?  Why do we grind people under our heels and then expect them to be "good corporate citizens" or to protest in a way that we deem acceptable and not give in to that rage?

All my life I've been told that I'm too angry, too outspoken, not basic enough for this world.  I was born with a surfeit of confidence and the privilege of an upper-middle class upbringing in a developed nation to back it up, but still, rage is

Can you imagine what it must be like to be black in America?  To be Hispanic in America?  To be First Nations in Canada?  To be Muslim around the Dotytron's extended family (lol!)?  

I just finished reading Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist.  It is a collection of Gay's essays.  This was good stuff, folks.  She talks about how we have to stop lobbying accusations of privilege, how it feels being a feminist but still liking questionable pop music (e.g. "Blurred Lines") in spite of yourself, what it means to be a "bad feminist."  I loved this collection, even if I didn't agree with all her points.  There was an essay about the N-word and I gotta say, as someone who has studied language and writing and meaning,   Surprisingly, my favorite essay is about Gay's entré into the world of competitive Scrabble playing.  She balances the line between anger, indignation, reflexivity, passion...I can't believe I'm only discovering her now, but I'm so glad I did.  It's nice to have a woman of colour be represented in mainstream feminist discourse, especially one as funny, self-aware, critical, and whip smart as Gay.

I saw Straight Outta Compton a few weeks ago with a friend.  Dotytron had gone right when it was released with his Record Club homies.  I saw it after ingesting all the information that circulated in the immediate aftermath of the movie's release about how Dre has a history of beating up women. I don't know much about rap history or about NWA, other than the hits from that era that everyone knows.  It was definitely an entertaining movie and the performances are almost all uniformly good, especially Jason Mitchell as Eazy-E and O'Shea Jackson Jr. as Ice Cube.  In particular, Jackson Jr. is incredible.  It helps that in a film where the actor's likeness to the character they played could be tenuous at best (I'm looking at you, the guy who played Snoop), Jackson Jr. looks EXACTLY like his dad and the mannerisms were perfect.  The guy who plays Dre, Corey Hawkins, got daps but he relies too much on the squinty eyes (admittedly, so does Dr. Dre in real life).  All that aside, there is no denying that the movie is very entertaining.  However, there is no denying that the guys who comes off the worst in the film are a) the guy who is dead (Eazy-E) and b) the guy who is a known psychopath (Suge Knight).  Dre and Cube come off as angels, and as I linked above, we know that is certainly not the case.  It could be because Cube co-wrote the film?  Who knows.  I did like the fact that Eazy-E's widow is one of the executive producers.  The other thing is that the film trades on a LOT of misogynistic depictions of women and quite frankly, I don't have the stomach for that anymore.  The film also glosses over the fact that the fetishization of young black male inner city culture was packaged to a white audience to sell it.  In fact, I think the film does the same thing, and trades on it to sell this film to a mass white audience (the film did remarkable box office).  Once again, you have the Narcos phenomena of the simultaneous glorification of the violence, and misogyny and the vague finger-wagging happening in the sub-sub-subtext.  We glorify the exploits of this disenfranchised black masculinity as a means of selling movie tickets.

Rant over.

Fin.

Off My Chest

Iggy Azalea looks exactly like the Wayans brothers as "white chicks."

THE RELIEF!  I've been sitting on this for a while.

Work has been very busy and I've taken on a lot of new projects and leadership opportunities so I'm feeling excited and engaged and committed.  These are all good things.  Even as I complain about being swamped with stuff, there's nothing I love more than having all pistons firing, a holdover from my adrenalin junkie days as a line cook.  I love skirting the line between being comfortably in the weeds - in control, feeling the rush and pressure, teetering on the edge - and full-on, ohgodnevergettingoutofthisone, f**ked.  Being busy is good.  Slow is not good.  Just starting back up at work after an extended 15 month leave and after finding out I didn't get a job I wanted slow is even worse.  I'm feeling more like myself.

One of the reasons I could never work at home - I love, love, love my work clothes.  I've got a good thing going on this year, style wise, and while some of you would scoff and think that how you look is the least important aspect of the job, I respectfully disagree.  Putting on my work clothes and looking good is a key component in my mindset when I set off to face 10 hours away from my family, home life, and my true self (braless in pajamas and home clothes).  That moment when you take off your bra...it's f**king magic, guys.  I've remarked on more than one occasion that I feel sorry for the Dotytron that he will never experience the unique pleasure that is taking off an underwire bra at the end of a work day.

Anyway, because I can't fit gracefully into a lot of my existing work clothes, I've had to revisit and rejig.  I'm doing a lot of scoop-necked t-shirts tucked into my ever-reliable black Gap skinnies, or pencil skirts, blazers, and my equally workhorse booties when I want to look a bit extra (flats the rest of the time).  Inspired by this Madewell pic:

Flannel shirts with the sleeves rolled just-so (mastering the J Crew sleeve roll while on maternity leave this time around was a major milestone), booties, fishnets.  These flannel shirts do double-duty on weekends when I throw them open over neutral scoop necked t-shirts and jeans/skinnies.  Lady dresses in colours with slouchy blazers.  Button down shirts under crew-necked form-fitting sweaters (untucked) or short-sleeves layered over long sleeve slim-cut dress shirts.  Sleeves rolled over blazer cuffs.  I want things to look a little unpolished.  A little undone.  Basically like as if I was a million feet taller, was a baller, worked in a more creative industry.  I'm currently on the hunt for a big, oversized, boxy outer coat that I can wear with the insouciant jeunesse of a Madewell model - looking thrown together in casual neutrals:

It's such an effortless style.  I like it to be punched up a bit with colour, some fancier pieces, but I like this look as a building block or foundation.  My non-pajama weekend clothes have been suffering lately.  After buttoning and stocking and heeling myself up during the work week, it's really hard for me to get behind anything even vaguely constrictive on weekends.  I've settled on a semi-uniform of sweatshirt dresses and leggings or boyfriend jeans and thin T shirts.  But boyfriend jeans are a summer phenomena.  What shoes go with winter boyfriend jeans, I ask you?  Short answer: I don't know and since this post was first drafted (two weeks ago), I've developed a new winter casual uniform which is basically dressing like any 90s era grunge rocker.  

The No Warning guys set up a commemorative shirt honoring Cousin Al, with proceeds to benefit his wife.  I bought one, so I've been wearing that, with stonewash boyfriend jeans, and a flannel shirt, layered on top.  I look like the cast of Wayne's World, in character.  It's kind of awesome.

I've got many thoughts and many feelings about various issues - parent council related (I joined the Big Yam's school's parent council), parenting related, politics related, tickling related, pop culture related (recently finished Lena Dunham's Not That Kind Of Girl and watched David Fincher's Gone Girl), vacation related, etc., etc., so I'll just end with some random ephemera that wouldn't necessarily fit anywhere else (as if these posts are ever thematically/structurally sound!)

I saw a woman on the TTC, headed to work, and around her neck she was wearing a big, chunky, silver, Tiffany-looking necklace, which had a little square charm on it (like 1" square) and in it was a picture of her toddler son.  OK.  Am I wrong for finding that super weird and gross?  Obviously it is SO NOT ME, but even at that, I'm like, isn't that kind of unprofessional?  You expect to be taken seriously like that?  I dunno, I wouldn't take someone seriously if they came to work or met clients in a business setting like that.  It's so...suburban.  

Someone we know was talking about Cirque du Soleil and how prior to having kids they had gone to EVERY production that had come to Toronto and I was relaying that to the Dotytron and he said, "That almost verges on 'TMI' for me."  LOL!  It's so true!  Finding out that you are super-into Cirque du Soleil is way too revealing.  

Lagerfeld, out.

Fin.