Stereotypes are rude; I know this. Unfortunately, a lot of them are hard to argue away when you’re faced with examples on a regular basis. I *can* argue them, though, as I am the antithesis of Asian stereotypes – I defy them left and right with a spring in my step and a jiggle of my mighty bosom (itself a violation of my genes and family history):

The Worst Asian: Stereotype Edition

1. I have an excellent sense of direction. Like, eerily good. My mother is a traditional Asian woman driver in every bad sense possible (plus some I think she invented just to piss me off), but I got away without absorbing any of the bad habits associated with my people. I drive well, never get lost, and I know how to merge. Take that, stupid cliches about women drivers/Asian drivers! I defy you!
2. It could be a perfect balmy sunny day in the middle of August, but you’ll always see little old Asian ladies bundled up like it’s 15 below. Being cold seems to be a year-round thing, but not me – in fact, I’m only every freezing ass cold inside the house. I don’t really care what it’s doing outside; I usually go without a jacket. Sometimes this will bite me in the ass, but most of the time, I’m fine. I hate being bulky (in my case, more bulky) – so it there’s a chance of being warm at any point in the day, I’d rather not have a coat with me. This is likely more me being stupid than an actual counterstereotype, but I’m counting it. Coats are dumb, even when they’re super cool.
3. I hate noodles, and I don’t eat organ meat. Pho? Gross. You can have my share.
4. I am terrible at advanced math – I had to take Algebra for Dummies, and barely passed it. I’m great at table math – the math you do when figuring out how much of the bill you owe, or the sale price of the discount underwear I buy by the pound – but throw a letter in the mix, and I’m useless.
5. My brand lust only extends as far as Doc Martens (uhh and Apple gadgets I guess) – I think Coach, Gucci and LV things are hideous, and wouldn’t be caught dead paying hundreds of dollars to act as free advertising.
6. I’m about as submissive as a punch to the junk.

I’m a complete embarrassment to my ambiguous Eastern heritage!

I’ll keep the jugs, though. Those are pretty cool.

With the furniture gone from the living room, we’re ready to start painting the wall. Yesterday we went out to get some paint samples, which I put onto some 8×10 boards so we’d get a better idea of what the paint would look like on the wall:

they double as protest signs

The darker green is for the living room, and the brighter green – if I decide to paint – is for my lady cave. After we agreed the living room green would be smashing, I wanted to do something with my board .. so I made a sign:

hello!

.. and stuck it in the bottom corner of my window, facing the street. Hi, people at the bus stop! Hope your day is lovely!

And yes – the only reason I went with a simple greeting is because I didn’t have the right letters for anything filthy.

...

okay, yes, but ...

this does look a little sketchy, but i don't know if ....

OH COME ON

Worth every damn penny.

Okay, not liking sushi was pretty weak – lots of people don’t like sushi. If you’re looking to be shocked and appalled, try this on for size!

The Worst Asian: Part Two

.. I can’t use chopsticks.

Seriously. At a table full of the whitest white people in the world, I’ll be the only person reaching for a fork. If a fork isn’t available (I’m generally too embarrassed to have to ask for one), I’ll either eat with my hands (I am a classy dame) or use one chopstick as a spear and stab my food for eating. This has the additional perk of turning all foods into Food on a Stick; making everything taste better – but it doesn’t work for eating rice. In fact, I don’t understand how people eat rice with chopsticks AT ALL, yet the vast majority of the world seems to get by just fine.

My inability to use chopsticks goes way, way back to my formative years. I used to get in trouble a lot at school because 1) my teacher was a horrible woman and 2) I didn’t hold my pens properly. She would call up my mother and tell her I was having all sorts of problems in school, and my mom would react in a typical way – by forcing me to spend hours and hours writing out the text from my books until my hands cramped, all under her watchful eye and constant threats of beatings with a rattan switch. Helpful! While my writing did eventually improve, the way I held my pens never did – in fact, the main reason I was having “trouble” to begin with was because I was forced to hold things “properly”, instead of what felt right in my tiny tiny hands.

I don’t hold pens or cutlery properly in my hands. This isn’t a big deal – I can (mostly) eat and write without covering myself in food – but everything falls apart when it comes to chopsticks. The finger meant to open and close the stick on your food is the digit I use to anchor things in my hand, and it just .. doesn’t work. I end up eating my food three grains of rice at a time, and it’s time consuming and enraging when I’m very hungry. So, I use a fork and bask in my shame in a city where more than 50% of the population is some sort of chopstick-using Asian. I am embarrassed for myself on a regular basis, and Ed delights in pointing out the fact that his Asian wife can’t use chopsticks while he can and does.

Of course, even though I am the worst I am still Asian – I own around two dozen pairs of chopsticks in fanciful designs. Some are even made for beginners, with notches on them to help with food grabbing. Doesn’t matter – can’t use them.

I’ll turn in my Asian card now.

jerks.

The Lady Cave? Has window sills.

It looks awesome/hilarious from the outside, too. More pictures on my Flickrs! I have excellent toys.

I’ve had an awful lot of time on my hands lately, which has led me to do a lot of thinking. On most people that’s nothing to be concerned about, but when I have a lot of thinking time I tend to go in one of two directions: extreme flights of fancy that I itch to make reality (“I want a bacon maple bar. You know, I’ve never actually hitchhiked before in my life – how long do you think it would take to get to Portland?”), or extreme depression (“I’m never going to get a job, no one loves me, I hate my haircut, I am a worthless puddle of goo …… hey, I want a donut”). My fits of fancy and sad come and go in waves, and right now I’m at a seriously low point – but I keep soldering on (all our forks are now spoons!).

One of the things I’ve been thinking on a lot lately has to do with heritage – who I am as a Canadian, and how I fit into the ever-changing category of “Asian-Canadian”. After a lot of soul searching, I’ve come to the conclusion that I really don’t fit in at all – and in fact, I may just be the Worst Asian Around.

I’ve decided to stretch this topic out over several blog posts for a number of reasons, most of which have to do with keeping me from whining about my unemployment. Thus begins a startling (likely in my mind only) exposé on what it means to be a halfbreed (I’m allowed to say it) struggling (not really) to fit in (again, not really) across two very different cultures, neither of which come in half sizes.

The Worst Asian: Part One

Truthfully, this is more to do with my being a terrible Vancouverite as opposed to a bad Asian, but I still feel the shock and alienation every time I confess to it: I hate sushi.

I can’t do it. I tried, too – sushi is awesome, everyone who isn’t me says. Try it! You’ll love it! I tried sushi so many times that I actually managed to fool myself into thinking that I liked it – sure, I’d never be tucking in to a huge plate of sashimi, but I could fake sushi love with dynamite rolls and things with crab in them. I also filled up on things like gyoza, tempura prawns, and other non-sushi things that are usually served at restaurants to appease those who hang out with sushi lovers on a regular basis. It wasn’t my favourite, but I could make it work.

After a particularly disastrous night out, I realized I hit the wall: not only did I not like sushi, I was pretty damn sick of the genre as a whole. I was tired of faking it; tired of thinking “well, maybe this time will be different”. It’s never different. I don’t like ice cold food. I don’t like gobs of mayonaise. I don’t like the texture of raw fish, and I LOATHE wasabi. I’m not even a big fan of soy sauce, so dipping the sushi in something doesn’t work. I can’t eat sushi gracefully – I have a small mouth, and shoving the whole piece in there is fantastically unappealing to me (and also makes me choke). Biting through seaweed is not an option. Taking it apart and eating it piece by piece gets you horrified looks. There is not a damn redeeming quality in sushi for me, and there’s a thousand things wrong with most of the non-sushi options presented to me that I just can’t get over. I don’t even like sushi for hipsters – the last three times I’ve gone to the Eatery, I’ve felt moderately to drastically horrible afterward.

Sushi killed my mother favourite restaurant.

I’m tired of pretending. It’s time to make a stand: I don’t like sushi, and you can’t make me change my mind. I don’t begrudge you your own squishy cold fish love, but I’ll be over here while you gorge yourself – text me when you’re done, and we’ll go get some frozen yogurt.

I am Kimli, the Worst Asian Around!

The tooth I chipped last week was fixed on Thursday, but this morning it chipped again. I’ve decided I don’t want to deal with it – I am going to leave the damn tooth chipped, and hope the sharp edge will eventually smooth itself out. Sure, I look like a deranged hobo – but whaddya gonna do. The repaired section was the piece that broke, so my mouth rejected the fix like my body rejected the baboon heart – I could probably get the dentist to do it again, but a) it was a pain in the ass and b) they didn’t charge me (which, all things considered, is a good thing). If I was downtown on a daily basis, I’d go in and prop my mouth open for a couple hours .. but that requires getting dressed and putting pants on, and I’m just not that committed to not looking like a crazy old woman. It is much more relaxing to be nude and fancy-free – why all the worrying?

I was up bright and early this morning (the last time I saw 7am, I was just going to bed) for the first of two job interviews today. It went well, and could be a good opportunity. The interview I have this afternoon is a second interview, so the process is a little further along. On the dream job front, I’m holding steady with two applications marked “Under Review” (as opposed to the dreary “submitted” or flat-out-terrible “reviewed, not selected”). I hope something happens soon, because there’s very little else out there for me – I’m utterly awesome, but 99.9% of companies don’t seem to realize they need me and that makes me sad (and broke).

Off to prepare. Wish me luck!

I am going to rain on a parade.

It’s trendy at the moment to perform a random act of kindness at a Starbucks drive through, and pay for the drink(s) of the car behind you. That’s really nice and all, and a good way to give someone a bit of a sunshine happy boost with their caffeine.

But .. I can’t help but thinking it would be so much nicer if people performed random acts of kindness on people who truly need the help. Chances are, if you’re in a Starbucks drive through, you can afford the car you’re in and the drink you’re buying. Wouldn’t that kindness go so much further if you helped someone who didn’t have the means to fuel a vehicle or designer coffee habit?

I know that it’s the thought that counts, but I really wish people would think outside their own tax bracket once in a while.

It’s one thing for me to acknowledge that my time is basically worthless right now – but for other people to randomly decide the same is putting me over the edge of ennui into white hot rage.

I finally decided to freecycle the desk and bookshelves, and someone asked for my bag of random yarn. I’m happy to donate all three – Ed sees donations in terms of wasted dollars and cents, but I look at it as a chance to help someone else. The bookshelves were mad popular on Freecycle, and one person responded for the desk. In the interest of maybe Doing Something with my Sunday, I arranged for all three items to be picked up today between noon and 1pm. Ed taped everything up for easy transport, and we waited.

The yarn was picked up, but it was the least of my worries – my random stash wasn’t taking up most of my living room. The furniture, though, is giving me ass marbles of increasing density with every passing day – I want them out of here. If we’re ever going to paint this place, it has to be done while I’m still unemployed or it’ll never happen. As I waffle by the minute between hopeful anticipation and amber waves of despair, my entire life is in my least favourite of all possible stages: limbo. I hate limbo. I don’t even like the limbo dance; I hate limbo so much. And yet here I am, day after day, as I feel like any marketable skills I may have had slip away like grains of melodramatic sand. If I had a wall to paint, at least I’d have a temporary purpose: green. Green is an excellent purpose.

This rant isn’t about my increasing depression and hopelessness, though: it’s about people who arrange to meet you at a certain time and place then fucking bail without a word.

I know I have literally fuck shit all going on in my life, but that doesn’t mean I wanted to spend my Sunday afternoon sitting around the house getting angry. I’m offering you free furniture, and blowing me off after I agreed to give things to you and removed the freecycle posting is just all kinds of rude and mean. I kind of hate people right now, and wish I lived in an apartment again where I could just dump random things out back knowing they’d be gone half an hour later.

Fuck you guys. This scenario is exactly why I was hesitant to use freecycle again – pushy, entitled people make me kind of sick.

I am in an angry place at the moment. It is a nice change from my usual sad place .. I think. Maybe not. Yeah, this sucks too. 2012 can start being awesome any day now, please.

Ears are weird!

My ear hurts, and I wanted to take a look at it to see if there was something lodged in there like an elephant or a totem pole. Unfortunately, it’s really difficult to look inside your own ear, and Ed’s cursory glance and non-committal grunt told me nothing about the festering diseases lurking in my swollen canal. Not content to wait until he got home and demand he take a closer look, I thought of a brilliant solution: use my iPhone to take pictures of my ear!

So, I did. With some success, even – I was able to see why my ear hurt (ear syphilis). But then I got sucked into comparing my sore right ear with my normal left one, and now all I can think about is ears and how WEIRD they look close up (and how much my ear syphilis hurts). Seriously, try it for yourself and see. I used Camera+ with the flash and was able to get some great (disturbing) pictures of my ear holes.

Ears! Ears ears ears ears ears. They’re funny looking. And mine hurts. EARS!