Thought of the day 9/30/08

If I were a terrorist (which, as far as you know, I am not), I would always dress up like a stereotypical Arab, complete with wives in tow and a smug disregard for basic personal hygiene. People are too afraid of being called racists to actually accuse an Arab-looking Arab of being a terrorist. It's the ones trying to fit in who everyone is afraid of. I'm convinced this is my greatest idea ever (except, of course, for my invention of the word "sucky"). 

Thought of the day 9/29/08

Nowadays, the default response when someone offers a genuine, unfiltered opinion on any given subject is "Wow, how do you really feel?" It's supposed to be clever and sarcastic, but it makes you sound like a psychotic head trauma victim. You sincerely want to know how I really feel? I feel like you should shut the hell up before I set your face on fire.

Sushi and Racism

It's hard for me to think of Asian people as actually a "different" race from my own. I like Asian people. In fact, I tend to identify with them. Maybe some Asian cultures appeal to my sense of order and organization. Or maybe it has something to do with my brown eyes, my round face, and my tendency to confuse the letters L and R. But I digress.

In any case, I was on my lunch break earlier today, and I saw an Asian woman ordering food from a little sushi stand in the mall's food court. I thought to myself, "Self, you handsome devil, why in the name of all that is sour and sticky would an Asian woman eat sushi that was made in an American mall?" That's like a Canadian coming to America and eating some Americanized version of... um... moose meat. And it would probably be spelled "mousse meat." And it would be cat meat.

Everyone who's anyone knows that the American versions of foreign or fancy foods are generally little more than corn meal and rat feet compressed into the shape of a rack of pork ribs. Let's say someone stole your dog and raped it with with a long tube of fake crab meat. Would you still eat that dog? Wait a minute... I think I may have forgotten what my point was going to be.

Anyway, I was surprised at myself when that initial thought occurred to me. If anything, I'd have assumed that I would take my obvious lack of intercultural experiences in the complete opposite direction: I would have thought "Of course that Asian woman wants to eat some sushi. She's probably homesick." But I didn't. I wondered why she would bother with a crappy, watered down imitation of a traditional Japanese style of food.

Is it racist for me to assume that she would have any degree of familiarity with genuine sushi because of the way she looked? Probably. Would it have been racist for me to assume she wanted to eat our ass-backwards version of sushi as a way of feeling closer to home because of the way she looked? Hells yeah. Do I care even a little bit? I'm not even going to dignify that with a response.

Maybe she's an Asian-American who's never even been to the country her great-grandparents emigrated from. Maybe some American sushi isn't as pooptastic as most of us assume it is. Maybe she has specific dietary requirements that restricted her from eating any of the other foods offered in the food court. Or maybe she was just Chinese.

Haircut

After watching some retarded guy hit on a poor, defenseless girl in the food court at the mall today, I had a startling realization: All retarded people have the exact same damn haircut. I then imagined the following scenario.

Me: Excuse me, I've been looking for a nice new haircut that will go well with the white stuff that accumulates at the corners of my mouth. Do you think you could take a Bic razor to the sides of my head, and leave the top part all fuzzy and unattractive ala Kevin Bacon in "The River Wild"?

Barber: Oh, yeah. We can do that; no problem. What you want is "The Retard." It's the standard haircut we give to retarded people. That's why you can usually tell a retarded person from about a half a mile away.

The VMAs

I wrote this a while ago, so wherever it says "last night" (such as at the beginning of the piece), just insert "several days ago" instead:

Last night, I watched [what I assumed was, based on the fashion] the 1987 Video Music Awards on MTV. I was struck by a number of interesting phenomena during the show, and I'd like to share a sample of my thoughts on those phenomena now.

Rapper Lil Wayne made not one but two appearances in the course of the show, each time performing his embarrassingly dated shtick with the subtlety and creativity of a head trauma victim playing checkers on acid. As he performed each of his songs while grabbing frantically at his crotch, one word came repeatedly to my mind: Minstrelsy. I expected him to start tap dancing at any moment and begin asking every white person in the room if he could shine their shoes. If I were black, I'd be ashamed of the blatant pandering and racist stereotyping that characterizes Lil Wayne's act. He does for black people what Larry the Cable Guy does for white people. And comedy. And humanity. But seriously, I haven't seen that much crotch grabbing since I got invited to a slumber party at Michael Jackson's house. We played a whole lot of Twister...

I also noticed several of those "All violence against women is wrong" ads. You know the ones, where the voice over guy says "You taught him how to hit a baseball, you taught him how to hit a golf ball, etc... But why didn't you take the time to teach him what NOT to hit?" I laugh out loud every time. Surely, they couldn't actually mean ALL violence against women, could they? I mean, what if the woman's trying to stab you in the throat? Or what if she burns the roast? How else am I supposed to teach her her place if I'm only allowed to resort to psychological torture without the occasional ball-peen hammer to the base of the skull?

Christina Aguilera also performed, but she showed up in an ill-fitting Catwoman suit that made her look like a constipated dominatrix.

Even Russell Brand, the host of the evening's festivities, seemed to mock the whole ordeal. The VMAs have finally reached the level of self parody that had previously only been known to each of the individual artists who performed last night. The show was nearly as engaging as a Glaxo-Smith-Klein board meeting after a heavy lunch consisting primarily of turkey, boxed wine, and Nyquil chasers.

The whole event is interesting to me. I'm fascinated by an awards show put on by any industry in which Britney Spears is considered a veteran. It's interesting if only as a perfect time capsule, a vivid snapshot of mainstream teenage popular culture AT THE EXACT MOMENT the show aired. In a month, some of the people who showed up and some of the ideas that were expressed last night will already be extremely old news. It must be exhausting for MTV's producers to constantly be on the lookout for the next big thing - not the thing that's popular now, but the thing that will be popular next week and only next week. Most teenagers aren't important enough for most industries to care about their fickle and largely irrelevant tastes, but in the world of televised pop culture entertainment, I guess some of those dumbasses matter after all. At least for this week.

Thought of the day 09/03/08

While watching a documentary about what happens when people with no next of kin are found dead, I suddenly found myself wondering this: After going through thirteen years of primary education and possibly four more of college, after seeing enough of the world to recognize just how vast and fascinating it really is, after meeting and befriending people from many different walks of life and backgrounds, and after seeing the innumerable possibilities and permutations available to the average American in the job market, what kind of person says to himself "You know, I'd really like to be an auctioneer"?