love and basketball

I've also been meaning for a while to start posting little things about basketball; I really enjoy following the nba, and the nuggets in particular, and I feel like all those hours I waste away watching games or even just highlights and box scores should feed into something a little more meaningful than my fantasy basketball league... the problem is I feel like I need to qualify/preface extensively any sort of 'content' about basketball. So I'll do my best to explain my hesitancies, and hopefully somewhere down the line I'll get to flippant little raves about J.R. Smith.

So, some personal background: I'd always followed the Nuggets casually growing up. Going to a couple games in the early 90s to see Dikembe, Bryant Stith, and Robert Pack were some of my first sports memories, and I still remember the excitement about their underdog playoff run in... 1994? It seems to me that the most enduring sports team bonds are formed in childhood (like before age 10), even if they go latent for a while, which is what mine did. What happened was the nuggets got bad, like running-joke bad (they even made a "simpsons" episode), and although I still kept some track of them, there wasn't a lot to watch--coaching changes, whining overpaid selfish players (I'm looking at you, Nick Van Exel), bad trades, and, oh yeah, the Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf standing for the national anthem controversy, an awkward anti-Islam moment if I've ever seen one. And then college happened. A friend of mine, a huge Rockets fan, invited me into a fantasy basketball league, to watch games, etc. The nuggets drafted a soon-to-be superstar, the season got really exciting, the two of us road-tripped to Phoenix to watch some March Madness. It was great. I rediscovered the nuances of the game. I did everything short of picking up a ball myself (which is ironic if you've been around me one of the million times when an adult has said, "You're really tall! Do you play basketball?"). Since then is history, in a manner of speaking. I love watching the game, I follow players, I defend my team to the death, except when they make me yell-at-the-tv angry.

And that would be the whole story, only there's NO WAY you can talk about basketball in America without talking about race. And that conversation doesn't happen nearly often enough. I trust some cultural critics, like Spike Lee or Scoop Jackson, to respect the tricky and intertwined relationship between the two, but generally it seems to me that race is given awkward gloss-over treatment most of the time when it's not outright distorted.

Basketball is an important cultural site, at which black popular culture gets spun and packaged and marketed to America, so much so that most reporting on the nba tacitly carries racial assumptions and baggage with it. For example, media coverage of the past few years' Portland "Jail Blazers" teams was all about (but never explicitly mentioned) that they were really sending a message about the irresponsibility of young, wealthy black men. Allen Iverson is iconic not only for his game, but for sure because he has become conflated, in my opinion unfairly, with the "ghettoization" of basketball culture. Commentators get to make all sorts of racial commentary-loaded remarks about selfishness and "fundamentals" without acknowledging the discourse in which they're working.

One of the worst offenders, in my opinion, is in discussions of coaches, mostly because there doesn't seem to be the same level of awareness of the way bias filters the discussion. Most of the coaches regularly ripped apart in the media are black; it seems to me that most nba coaches are lousy regardless of race, but for some reason scathing criticism of white coaches doesn't make it on a national level the way it does for their counterparts. There's something about the combination of reputation and perceived intelligence of white coaches that seems to exempt them from blame (looking at you, George Karl, and Scott Skiles probably too), when the margin for error for black coaches seems to be a lot more slight (Eddie Jordan and Mike Dunleavy are both winless on the road this year; one is black, the other is white; one is on the "hot seat" while the other is about to sign a four-year contract extension; *cough*). Although the double standard is not as flagrant as in, say, college football (I hope they apologized to you, Tyrone Willingham), because at least there are *some* black coaches, the league is far from colorblind.

So, problematizing the media? Painted in broad strokes, but off my chest. Where this connects to my wanting to write puffy blog entries about my team or whatever is in how the sport gets unpacked in print. Can someone really describe their appreciation for basketball without somehow taking a position on the aspects of black culture that are being sold? I doubt it. Broadly, one of the reasons I love the nba is because I think that there's a clear and tangible connection between a player's personality and how they interact with the game--watching the nuggets has been an absolute joy for the past couple years because they play at speed, trying to gloss over substantial deficiencies (a game plan designed around not being able to shoot long-range), their offense runs through several different players over the course of a game, and because they're good at the fast break, which basically punishes a team for failing to keep up with your hustle. One of the things I like about Kenyon Martin (critics, say what you will) is his bottomless supply of swagger, and the fact that he always follows shots in on the offensive end for the put-back. These raw displays of... character, for no better word, are what make every team distinctive and every star a target of either admiration or hate. But "character" shouldn't be discussed without some awareness of the racial discourse which underlies whatever traits are up for discussion. Carlos Boozer lying to a blind guy about resigning with the Cavs may be a pretty universally crappy thing, but most displays of "personality" interact on a variety of levels with social constructions and expectations. So, in short, I love basketball, but it's damn hard to talk about fairly.

start of what may be a recurring discussion

I want to go a lot of different directions with this thing. I mean, I know the internet (teh internets? intertron? I'm not cool enough to know exactly what the proper slang would be) is public, but I honestly feel no obligation to write about one thing or another *for* somebody; it makes me happy to know people read, and occasionally enjoy, the blog, but it doesn't have the sort of pedagogical focus of a friend's blog or the keep-you-posted angle it did when I was abroad. There's no mission statement in that sidebar, and I'd like to think that I fulfill that mission rather admirably: some serious stuff that makes me angry, some funny stuff that I noticed and wanted to share, rarely some introspection or condemnation or calling-out of someone I know (i.e. whining)(worrisome both because I don't like doing it and because god only knows, any trash you talk on the internet will come back to haunt you). Anyway, I've been meaning to start writing about how I feel impacted by Serious Identity Issues (which some of you may know pejoratively as the -isms) for some time, and I think tonight is as good a time to begin as any--I have a bunch of writing for classes due tomorrow, and writing here makes me feel useful even as I put off completing assignments.

I'd like to start with a little post about gender (remember: socially constructed) and me, call it "performing masculinity". I hope that I've come a long way in the past couple years, and I hope to do justice to whatever sort of nuanced perspective I've managed to develop. So, since I like little feature-story lead-ins:

A couple years ago, near the beginning of college, I decided I was probably a feminist. I liked the ideas of "men can/should be feminists, too" and "patriarchy hurts men as well as women" (a paraphrase of bell hooks, if I recall correctly?), and figured that a fundamental belief in ending wage gaps/inequality was all it took to call myself a feminist. Yeah. Since then, I've had a chance to see all the ways in which gender roles play into my life, and, frankly, how I benefit most of the time from various aspects of male privilege. I have a couple sort of favorite examples (ask me about the garage owner in Jersey last summer, or about the lack of correllation between college GPA and post-college earnings when comparing men to women), but it's the little things that made me rethink everything. The enjoyment I get out of knowing about cars and how they work, the satisfaction of having the briefcase full of tools tucked under my bed, getting listened to when afterwards I realize I just totally interrupted a woman without even consciously picking up on it, the protection afforded to sports-related excuses, the universalism of sports-related smalltalk among men as a sort of base line of friendship, feeling safe walking around by myself on campus or on the street outside the downtown LA welfare office. I will be the first to admit that it would be really really hard to disavow this privilege, to disown this enormous inheritance of benefits I will be given by everyone I meet, even without asking, because I have a male name and a male voice and am pretty damn tall. In fact, I'm not even going to deny that some of these, like sense of direction or fascination with how mechanical things work, have been traced to concrete physiological gender differences independent of social whatever. Stopping people every time to challenge/attack/educate them about expressions of gender inequality like these, though, is tiring, and I don't think I can say in good faith that I do it--that's why I don't call myself a feminist anymore.

The problem I have, though, goes deeper than a whiny "It's toooooo hard to do." I'm pretty sure I genuinely enjoy some of these things. Social conditioning or no, I really do like knowing how car engines work, I really do enjoy the minutiae required of a conscientous fantasy basketball GM, and I will happily answer the random stranger who strikes up a conversation with me about the BCS because I'm wearing my Michigan hoodie. Maybe it's because these spaces are gendered and thus privileged (unequal) that they're comfortable. I'm not going to deny that there's a little bit of guilt every so often when I step back and look at all the things I did [today/this week/recently] that drew on the security, familiarity, camraderie of masculinity as it is popularly understood. Recognizing the social expectation that I make the first move with a romantic relationship and the power it gives me doesn't mean I don't fall into that role. It just means that I'm delineating the grades of in-between in the ever-important gulf between knowledge and action.

This post isn't a "feminists, tell me how to be an ally" cry for help. I've asked friends of mine already, and they've had some constructive suggestions: be the stenographer at a meeting, consciously affirm that you're listening, play Frisbee not like an ass, sympathize with and defend to others friends who are feminists. It's a start. Recognizing privilege is a start, too. The place where I get stuck (and still am stuck) is when I'm pretty sure there's stuff I'd be good at anyway, would like even without it being part of a current of privilege that has been flowing much longer than any of us have been around. I can't deny that car-knowledge and violent-movie-appreciation, and do-it-yourself repairs are ridiculously gendered, but I also can't deny that they're all *fun*, independent of how society chooses to spin them. I don't know that we, as in society, can deconstruct a set of norms that most people like at least some part of. Giving something up, something everyone takes for granted and uses frequently, is not going to be more popular than the status quo. On the other hand, it breaks my heart to know that I have friends who get the raw end of the social construction of gender deal every day. On a de-personalized, abstract level, gender values seem like a reasonable target, but when I look at my own life, I don't know what living without gender roles would look like--even when I'm personally acting "against type" (somehow subverting the construction of masculinity, which incidentally *does* cause people to ask me if I'm surprisingly often), that shared knowledge of what social norms actually are plays a role. It's tricky, I guess, is all I'm saying.

what may be my favorite holiday

Thanksgiving, especially in the context of Thanksgiving break, manages to include everything I like about a celebration: spending a day with extended family, eating way too much, the collective watching of sports (Broncos - Chiefs, in this case), and cooking. These activities generally seem to be so rare in contemporary American society (except the overeating one) that circling a day on the calendar and giving everyone the day off work seems an appropriate amount of recognition that these things are, in fact, important.

This year, as my family has done with few exceptions for as long as I can remember, we're having some extended family over to our house for the holiday. I was fortunate enough to grow up in the same town as my auntie and uncle who have two kids, one the same age I am, so most holiday occasions easily became family ones; when I was younger, I had a great-aunt and great-uncle who also lived nearby, and for a few years an aunt and uncle on my dad's side lived in Telluride, in southwest Colorado. We've always had to put the extra leaves in the dining room table to accommodate everyone, and the dinners have provided, in a sense, a rough timeline of major family events (people moving here or there, bringing a girlfriend who they later married, etc.). Also, since the adults in my family are infrequent drinkers, Thanksgiving is one day that dependably features "family secret time," always a highlight and indeed the subject of anecdotes and gossip for the balance of the year.

This conflation of Thanksgiving and family is so important to me, in fact, that last year, I seriously considered flying back from Budapest to Boston for Thanksgiving to spend it with the entirety of my mom's side--I was the only one of thirty-odd people not to make it--although in the end the vacation wasn't quite long enough for the trip to make sense. That's one of the draws about Thanksgiving, though; despite being one of the most important family-gathering days during the course of the year, the time off work is relatively brief, forcing everyone to criss-cross the country over the span of a couple days right beforehand. I flew home Tuesday evening on a not-quite-full flight, and the trip was made that much more enjoyable because everyone on the plane was happy.

As far as the meal itself goes, I've noticed that I have by now been conditioned to have my strongest appetite when eating "Thanksgiving food." Even when turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, and the like are served as a normal dinner or at the dining hall, I find myself going back for a second plate. I remember one year, when I was in middle school or so, beating everyone at the table by consuming six full plates of food. I like to think that my appetite shines when with a large group at dim sum, but I honestly think I eat more at Thanksgiving, somehow repressing my feeling of satiation until everyone else is clearly ready for dessert.

The sports argument is tied to the return home for Thanksgiving that I've pulled off twice now in college and will probably end up doing intermittently for the foreseeable future. Not only do I believe in professional sports as one of the only spaces in which people with nothing else particularly in common can sit and develop a camaraderie, but it's also really difficult to get Denver sports in LA. I miss them. I feel like I'm realizing that many of the things I find irreplaceable about my hometown have to do with the displacement of community identity onto our Broncos, Nuggets, and Avs. Tonight, I definitely watched my first nuggets game of the year, and I now have all sorts of new conversation fodder to mention in the next 4000 conversations I have about the nba this year; I may have even convinced the fam to go to the game on Friday night. Although dinners out (tonight, Saturday) and the art museum's new wing (Friday morning) and the new Lightrail line (also Friday morning) and general errands (all week) are a good way to get back into the feel of being in Denver, there's something very satisfyingly concrete about emotional investment in a bunch of men running around with "DENVER" written on their jerseys.

Finally, the cooking. I really enjoy it, and over the past summer or two I've started cooking dinner while my parents are at work. Thanksgiving causes the kitchen to transcend its role as a room in which food is prepared and become a stress-filled nerve center for an entire social gathering. Although I'm normally welcome to help out in the kitchen, Thanksgiving reduces my dad and I to the most menial sorts of labor, running to the back pantry, getting a specific dish down from a high cabinet, or polishing the silver, while my mom (sometimes with an aunt) does the work of five or more people. It's kind of exciting to watch, but I could never stop long enough to enjoy the moment before I was yelled at for not getting started on ironing the tablecloth. This year marks a paradigm shift: we've finally given up on our oven, purchased from Sears in the early 1980s, deeming it no longer fit to serve as the bottleneck through which all the most important parts of the meal had to pass. Instead, we found a gourmet grocery store in the south suburbs and are experimenting with *fried turkey*. I can't begin to tell you how excited I am. As well, because the cooking burden has been shifted elsewhere, I got some oven time this afternoon to try my hand at the cranberry sauce recipe we made a couple times in Budapest. Although we didn't go all-out last year and try to make turkey or pie, we found that the asian/specialty foods store in the basement of Budapest's main market carried bagged cranberries; in fact, cranberries identical in packaging to the ones I used today. Say what you will about the horrors of globalized agriculture and frozen produce and whatnot, those cranberries were a godsend last year, and I can only hope my rendition does the dish justice. In the meantime, I hope to get close to the remaining cooking we're doing this year and figure out casserole, one of those things I think we inherited from Scandinavian (or Scandinavian-American) tradition and now dutifully apply to at least two or three of our Thanksgiving sides. It is, after all, a day that's supposed to be about history, too.

the written word

... and my consumption of it. If we (and I use this not in the presumptuous/royal sense but in the you, reader, and I, Sam, sense) have ever been someplace to which I brought a book, you may have noticed I set it on the table cover-down. This may have come up because you wanted to see what I was reading and had to physically handle the book to get a look at the title, or it may be because you are completely attuned to your surroundings and can recall small details. Whichever. As it happens, I only really realized I did this yesterday.

It was one of those epiphanies, though, in which the sight of a friend turning my book over to give the cover a look triggered countless other flip-book-over moments, and even hints of the anxiety that must have caused the formation of the habit/compulsion in the first place. Basically, I'm pretty sure I'm embarrassed by a combination of 1. what I'm reading and 2. how the cover was designed relative to what the book is actually about. Thus, by always, compulsively, setting books on surfaces cover side down, I interrupt any sort of nascent judgment others may have been forming about me based on my reading material. Now there are exceptions: the Barack Obama book I'm in the middle of reading to sustain my faith in The Process has never been anything but face-up, even when I've fallen asleep reading it. However, it's a library hardcover, and so the actual cover of the thing is a textureless grey, and the title on the spine is worn off enough to make the text look like some kind of religious relic. This is not a problem. Books that cannot be for anything other than school, like math books, sit face-up in piles on my floor and desk; this may be a subconscious attempt to remember to actually read them one of these days. But in general, covers go down, ISBNs go up.

I realize that this "don't judge me by my book's cover" fear basically makes it sound like I don't trust anyone's judgment, but I think the issue is more complicated than that. Part of it may well be that I know sometimes a friend's or even a stranger's reading material helps me form an impression of them (and I suppose most everyone is guilty of this at one time or another--consider the contrasting images triggered by hearing about someone "reading the New Yorker", someone "reading US magazine", or someone "reading Lord of the Rings"). In other words, giving someone a clean look at your book jacket amounts to allowing them to know some information about you without having to ask; I don't feel comfortable with this process because I don't get to control what the other person is thinking when they see a book on my desk. And if you notice, this explanation is borne out by my need to describe and somehow justify whatever it is I'm reading as you (the reader again) pick up my book to look it over. Some of the fear may be leftover from a childhood during which I at times wished I was less noticeable. Being told by a parade of adults that I was awfully tall or well-spoken or whatever and never once finally figuring out what you're supposed to say back ("thank you"?) left me bereft of desire to stand out without trying. In a way, then, the glossy, colorful cover on that novel I'm reading seems to blare out my presence to others in the same way being a tall kid did; though I couldn't become physically shorter, I can hide the market-imaged part of my book and leave you only with the earth-tone synopsis/reviews that's too small to read upside-down and across a table. It's almost like I feel protected from having to answer questions by flipping the book over--you would have to really make an effort to engage me about it, at which point you'll have to sit through my actual opinion about the thing.

It was only maybe a couple years ago when I snapped out of it, so to speak, and recognized the importance of public impressions. Before that, I would readily admit to being pretty clueless about the external, believing that some sort of objective measure of character would allow me to get away with adolescent male "functionalism" in my attire and indeed lifestyle. Some of you may recall me freshman year, with my baggy jeans and godawful need for a serious haircut, both symptoms of this disregard for the possibility that other people had their own ability to see me as I actually looked. Having started to deal with more serious stranger-meeting, interviews, office appointments, and generally being in public places as an adult, I found I wanted to give people some guidance in how I wanted them to perceive me. Thus: hair, grooming, clothing, posture, lexicon were upgraded, but there were also cuts in acting like an ass (college people, be glad you didn't know me in high school; high school people, be glad you didn't know me in middle school; middle school people, I would be almost shocked and kind of pleased if you were reading this, and I want you to trust me that I'm now friendlier in person as well) and, generally, in losing control over the public self, a process managed effortlessly thanks to the subconscious. Thus, every act, even setting a book on the table, is part of this whole sort of... pageant (to get all history class intellectual word-appropriation on you) of daily life.

a little fun

Because not everything that happens to me results in whining/ranting. I'm actually really pleased at the amount of quality time I've been able to spend with people this semester, especially compared to last spring. I've had a chance to meet a lot of new people, drink a lot of coffee in that social way that makes it take upwards of an hour to get through the cup, and I've had a chance to try a whole bunch of new restaurants, which is always a plus. And I just finished a generally good weekend, so in the spirit of blog-as-travelogue upon which this page was originally founded, a year and thousands of miles ago, I present: Going to the LA Coliseum to see a USC game.

Dan and I had actually been casually discussing this since probably the first or second week of the college football season back in September. We're both Michigan fans, but he's a native of Ann Arbor (I'm a fan by way of my dad, who went there undergrad and law), so he's interacted a fair amount with the Big House in various capacities, whereas I've only marveled at photos, our home computer's mouse pad, and the like. One of the bits of senior-year baggage we found we were both carrying was anxiety at the prospect of our last season of college football while still being in college. Along with the same sort of "Oh god, their star QB is younger than I am" fears we shared was my worry about having never seen a real large-scale college game live. Sure, I've been to some of pomona's games, but a college that can only find 30 students to play on its team, no matter how hard they work, isn't going to be the huge community draw a major-conference D-I school is. That Saturday, whichever Saturday it was, we resolved to go downtown to see a USC game. By mid-week, we had picked the USC-Oregon game as our target--both teams were ranked at the time, but it didn't carry the historic rivalry (and thus inflated ticket prices) of USC-Cal or USC-Notre Dame. At the time, the date seemed so distant... and we definitely didn't do anything like buy tickets in advance or even really look up where to park to get to the Coliseum. So the trip had the right blend of lengthy anticipation and lack of planning that makes a trip off campus into an adventure.

I called Dan Friday afternoon to ask if he still wanted to go to the next evening's game (the same last-minute calls that eventually resulted in my having to wait til next spring to see a game at Dodger stadium), and he said he was down. I called again Saturday afternoon to see when we wanted to leave, and then around 5pm to see if we could maybe go a little earlier cause of traffic. And then I looked at google maps to figure out which exit would be most convenient. This was the extent to which we had planned the trip. As it turned out, we left with 90 minutes to spare before kickoff, hit traffic, and got off the highway with a bare 15 left to find parking, tickets, and wherever we ended up sitting.

Parking ended up being kinda scary--though the LA Coliseum website said nearby lots could be found for five to ten dollars on event days, everything within a couple blocks of the entrance was charging $60 - 80. Some driving around the neighborhood later, we found a small business's private lot, with a guy standing out front. He informed us that his lot was full, but that he was parallel parked across the street, and we could have his space for $40. He moved his car into the driveway of the lot, we pulled a quick U-turn to secure the spot, and paid him twenty each to park on the street. We paid for parking in cash, as we planned to pay for the tickets. Since we were expecting to deal with a scalper for high-demand seats, even the bad ones we were prepared to settle for looked to cost upwards of $140, at least based on some eBay I'd been bored and checked in the months before. To cover this and a margin of error above, we'd agree to withdraw about $200 each before heading downtown; it's definitely the most cash I've carried since I was abroad and paying my rent in 10000-forint bills every month. Needless to say, our surprise at the cost of parking gave me a little bit of a bad feeling about things.

We started following the crowd in toward the Coliseum, not really sure what to look for, but knowing we needed to get solicited with the cry of "need tickets?" ubiquitous to sports arenas everywhere. After probably hundreds of trying to avoid these brokers and a few occasions on which we sold them extra Rockies tickets back home, Dan and I were going to attempt to not get ripped off by one of them. As it turned out, a guy was standing not too far from the complex entrance, and he directed his question right at us, picking us out of the crowd of official USC apparel-outfitted fans by our nondescript clothing and possibly anxious expressions. He had only two tickets, and sold them to us for face value ($40) because he said he had to get out of there and head home. This seemed almost too good to be true, and the appearance of the tickets themselves seemed to back up our suspicions--unlike the large and colorful tickets we saw in the hands of passerby, ours were simple dot-matrix text on a generic white field, hardly promising. On the other hand, it was not an offer to be passed up, so we figured we may as well get them and if we were denied entry, return to the parking lot to try to find some last-minute spares.

The two of us made it past several cursory inspections at the door, and they even held up as I nervously stammered my way through asking our section's usher for directions. If nothing else was learned yesterday, I realized that I would be no good at talking my way out of traffic tickets, passport violations, etc. And that I should avoid playing poker. My guilt, even based as it was merely in uncertainty at the possibility that we really did luck out, showed clearly on my face up through when we sat down. I pushed the guilt to the back of my mind, until only the specter of two guys, showing up LA late to the game, tapping us on the shoulders, and telling us "Hey, you're in our seats" remained. By halftime, this too passed, and Dan and I could only marvel at the fortunate coincidence (or string of coincidences) that put us in place to meet the guy who just wanted to sell two more tickets before going home.

They were good seats, too, 60 rows up and right behind the goalpost. A lot of the key plays in the game, as it would turn out, took place on our end of the field; it was a lot better game than the final score would suggest, at least until USC cemented its lead in the 4th and people started to skip out early. I was warmed throughout the game by the satisfaction of hasty plans made good, and also by the realization I had near the beginning of the second quarter that the Coliseum's 92,000 sellout crowd is the largest group of people I've ever seen in one place. Overall, the game was a lot of fun, the experience holding up to the nebulous expectations I'd had for "big college football," I definitely enjoyed the spicy famous Louisiana sausage I got at halftime, a bargain for stadium food, the car made it through the night intact, and we even made it to In-n-Out on the way back to school before it closed. All in all, I think any karma I'd been accumulating this semester has been put to use, and good use to be sure.

The rest of the weekend was good, as well, but this definitely stands out against "I got some grading done" and "I sent a couple important emails I needed to send." Next week is Michigan - Ohio State, and you can bet it will be an event, but I will be watching it with a new appreciation for the meaning of "home field advantage." Spending a summer in the shadow of Beaver Stadium in PA didn't prepare me for the experience of an actual game, and watching USC in person gave me a chance to put a face on all that media hype and content I read each week as part of my internet-surfing study break routine.

a little politics

I don't typically consider myself a very political person, compared to a lot of people I know. I vote, I care about issues, and I know who represents me, but I'm not crazy about the process or how "the game" is played in DC. That said, I was at breakfast this morning, eating eggs and sipping coffee with my NY Times, when I saw this article. I can't find the words to describe completely how angry it made me, but I'd like to try.

Basically, my problem is this: unless I was lied to throughout civics class in high school, you're a citizen once born in the United States, regardless of circumstances. Furthermore, once a citizen, you get the exact same rights as every single other citizen, according to my favorite Amendment (14), regardless of circumstances. We're supposed to be past the second-class citizen bullshit, right?

Well, obviously not, according to Congress. What this change says is that based solely on your parents' immigrant status, something over which you clearly have no control, you can get screwed out of health care that the government has (or ought to have) an affirmative duty to provide. I don't want to make this an argument about universal care--that's a little too heavy for me, and I don't feel comfortable enough with the economics of healthcare either under our present or a potential nationalized system to say either way which is better. However, this policy change basically says, "We, the United States, feel more comfortable assuming that you travelled here illegally with your less-than-one-year-old infant in tow and thus denying the potentially also-illegal child important preventative health services that could have long-term health consequences." In other words, it's better to deny real and substantial health benefits to an infant because we can't be *positive* the child is a citizen. As far as establishing two tiers of citizenship goes, this measure definitely helps further deprive some Americans (those whose parents are undocumented) of basic preventative care in early childhood, which can clearly have serious health consequences later in life.

Advocates of the measure claim that the proof of citizenship they require is easy to obtain, and that emergency services will not be affected. However, the pressures on undocumented immigrants (and, indeed, sometimes even on legal permanent residents) make any contact with the government, however brief, threatening. INS is fully willing to deport immigrants at any time regardless of how many times they've been let off the hook in the past, making the most routine traffic stops into pressure situations. Requiring undocumented immigrants to obtain legal proof of citizenship for their children will, in the end, strongly deter them from getting sufficient care. It is fundamentally unfair to the American citizens in question to enact this measure with full knowledge of its likely effect.

I'm so torn in my feelings about my country. Last night, I started reading Barack Obama's book (his first one), and I fell asleep with an abiding feeling of optimism, that the principles that have always stood behind the laws of this country will in the end lead us ever forward. Unfortunately, I woke up to this discriminatory Medicaid bullshit. It's hard carrying so much love and so much hate for a place at the same time, but America does so more consistently than any other person or institution I've ever come across. That said, I know that there's nowhere else in the world I would rather be--nowhere else that I would fit in visually, let alone anywhere that can tell a national story as compelling and hopeful as our own. Although I'm willing to write off most politics (like the Real Men of Genius campaign ads, also in today's NY Times) as stupid and not worth arguing over, there are some issues that represent fundamental attacks on the principles that I think more than anything else are America, and this is one of them.

another week, another famous author

So I went with a friend to see Amy Tan speak tonight over at Scripps (last week, David Sedaris did a little reading here). I finally read The Joy Luck Club this fall, right around the time of AAMP training, and I think the juxtaposition of the two events was what I needed. The writing felt so personal, and the lives she describes match up in interesting ways with my mom's life. At the time, I was feeling really isolated and alone in a profound way--not as close to a lot of my white friends, out of touch with all these 1.5 / second-generation API mentors (most of whom are sophomores), and so forth. Reading a work, one often used as a synecdoche for Asian American experiences, and knowing that it includes a family kinda like mine made and makes me feel so much better. Especially in light of the disdain at least some people I know have for Amy Tan's work, criticisms rooted in perceptions of her work describing "The Asian American Experience" when it isn't their experience, I felt like it would be good to go.

As with so many personal appearances by famous people I've seen in the last few years, this one raised some serious questions for me. I appreciated the way she described her writing and her ideas as being so deeply personal (many of the elements of Joy Luck Club were drawn from her family history), but that specter of Perceptions by the Dominant reared its ugly head, as well. The very first comment during the Q and A after the talk amounted to (I paraphrase), "I love your work so much. I hadn't read it before I was in China, and it helped me understand the culture so much better. I started getting along better with my Chinese American friends, then with my Chinese friends, and it was so great. Thank you!" This, I thought, is exactly the sort of thing people hate about how Amy Tan is accepted and read by Americans who fervently want one book to make clear everything it means to be Asian American.

Even though her talk had tried to combat this image to some extent--she poked fun at the Cliff's Notes on Joy Luck, and really tried to personalize her ideas and experiences--she didn't bother to try and address the assumptions implicit, the screamingly loud assumptions packed tight into that praise. She just sort of nodded a bit and said a little "Thank you," validating that sort of projecting her work onto every Chinese American the girl who just spoke is clearly guilty of. I tried to mention it as she was signing my mom's copy of her book, and she said something nice about "Not even really feeling ok speaking for my family, let alone all Asian Americans," but it's hard to feel better after the comment that made me actively uncomfortable got swept under the rug.

In the meantime, I feel like generation has become the most salient part of my identity (I'm 3rd); I find myself straddling a gap between my 2nd generation friends and some yonsei (4th gen) Japanese American kids I've met this semester, not quite on either side. It's just so fun how America makes everything about negotiating these little compromises--I'm finally starting to feel ok about multiraciality, and all of a sudden I realize that it's subsumed by this even less physically tangible but culturally significant generation gap. Maybe I have a pathological need to fixate on difference to distinguish myself from my peer groups, but if that's the case, I blame the influence of an American culture which does the same thing to everybody in this country who isn't part of the dominant; after all, I have to say, for good or for ill, I'm pretty consummately American. (I mean, where else would be from?)

Love song for my car

If we're friends, and have talked about my car recently, I may have expressed the following theory to you: "My car is on it's last legs; every time I bring it in to get work done, they always do about $1000 worth of work and then remind me to have a whole bunch of other things looked at. What's happening is that the car is only worth maybe $1200, so they're trying to prevent me from totalling it by doing the repairs piecemeal. This way, they get to keep a constant cashflow via my repeat business, and I get to keep the car."

Well, throw that one out the window. Since picking a friend of a friend up from the airport at the end of fall break, I've been noticing engine noise on-and-off, particularly when there's some engine stress (big downshift, keeping it at highway speeds for a length of time), so I figured it was time to replace the timing belt--a repair that's honestly way overdue and follows the ~$1000 theory.

So yesterday, I didn't have to go into LA for my internship, so I figured it would be a good day to bring it in. Well, the estimate today started at $1300, then it jumped to $1800, and now it's sitting at $1900; they found a loose engine bearing along with the belt noise. Yeah. The Kelly Blue Book says that I can't get that much for it trade-in from a dealer, and I'm getting dangerously close to "private resale" value, especially given the paint damage...

Just as long as it holds up through the end of the internship this semester, I can manage... beyond that, my driving would honestly all be elective. Much as I love my car, it's old, and I have to be realistic. We've put god only knows how many miles on her since the end of last spring (in fact, this whole calendar year has been the most intense for the Subie since we bought her junior year of high school), and to some extent I associate the car very strongly with a kind of phase of my life. We've had some great times, and the car often sits in the background of good memories I still carry around. I haven't really started to think about what I'd get for a next car, and part of the teaching abroad next year plan involves being able to postpone that decision just a little longer.