http://szhang.tumblr.com/

"quirky"

Wed, 22 May 2013 01:53:00 -0400

Saying you’re “quirky” means “I am well-off enough that I can act weird in this way.” Growing up in a working class environment as a queer person or someone who doesn’t fit in doesn’t make you “quirky”—it makes you bullied, resentful, and oftentimes deeply fucked up. There is nothing “quirky” about being quirky.

Jean Baudrillard wrote that modern people define themselves by the “smallest margin of difference” between their consumption and the consumption of people around them. You are “the guy who wears the top hat” or whatever. “The guy who dresses down on Fridays”. “The guy who is quirky”. There is no difference.

Think about the person who says, “I’m a programmer but I have a lot of sex.” In this case, they made being a programmer their “quirk”—it is a vacuous identification that furthers their own interest. They might justify this by thinking, “I am transforming the view of programmers everywhere to be more positive.” But in reality, this person’s ascent comes at the expense of programmers. Noone thinks, “Now that I know one programmer is sexy, I’ll have sex with this random fellow here…” They are having sex by virtue of some other aspect of their identity (being good-looking, being wealthy), and are using it to subjugate the entire field of “programmer-dom”.

BUT what if they succeed? What if they are so overwhelmingly attractive that other programmers benefit simply by association? Isn’t that the entire premise of being a rock star? “Started from the bottom now the whole team here”.

Okay now that I’ve written like 8 pages of analysis, deleted 7, and quoted Drake, I’m gonna call it a night

Video

Mon, 20 May 2013 21:42:05 -0400

Rilo Kiley - A Better Son/Daughter

Sun, 19 May 2013 19:04:20 -0400

Rilo Kiley - A Better Son/Daughter

scene from a surgery

Mon, 13 May 2013 20:47:00 -0400

I heard them standing over me, the doctors.

“Fuck it.”

“No, be calm. He just looks bad.”

“Bill operated on him didn’t he.”

“Be reasonable George.”

“Mother fucker.”

“Let’s just drain the cyst and go home. Take some time and cool down. Take a day or two. It’s been some week.”

“Fuck! Bill is such a weak sack of shit. Who the fuck hired him?”

“You know we need all the help we can get. He said he had sewing experience.”

“Jesus.”

“Even my hands are sore from all the cutting. Let’s just get this over with.”

“God damn it. Apocalypse medicine wasn’t fucking taught at Harvard!”

“George…”

“Alright,” he took a deep breath, “Harvard is gone. I am the doctor. I am the doctor. Okay. Scalpel.”

Tinkling of metal.

“This knife,” a snort, “Is so fucking dirty.” The doctors laughed.

I opened my eyes, “Wait.”

I sounded hoarse.

“Wait, what?”

“He just said something.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, look. His eyes are open. I saw his lips move. Hey, kid, say something.”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Holy shit.”

The doctor named George flipped through my charts. “Sitting by the Harding Bridge.. five miles from the blast center.. cysts from lungs up to mouth.. He should be dead.”

“I don’t need surgery.”

“How the fuck is he speaking?”

“Give me the fucking scalpel.”

“I don’t need surgery.”

“Yes you do, son, just relax.”

“This shouldn’t be happening. This shouldn’t be happening.”

“George… calm him down.”

“I DON’T NEED SURGERY.”

“Okay, hold him down. I’m going in bare.”

“You can’t. He’s awake. That’s against the protocols.”

“Look at him. He’s a fucking monster.”

“But the rules, George.”

“Fuck the rules, this is code red.”

“…Alright. At least give him some anesthesia.”

“Um, hello?? I’m fine. I’m FINE. Let me go, please!”

“Sorry kid.” George looked sad. “I am going in.”

“No…”

“Hold him down.”

“Got him.”

“More, he keeps thrashing.”

“Ugh.. I’m.. trying..”

“LET ME GO!”

“What’s all the ruckus?”

Everyone turns to look at the door.

“Bill.” The doctor loosens his grip. “You mother fucker.”

“What?”

“Look what you’ve done.”

“Oh. Shit. My bad.”

The third night

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 21:56:00 -0400

By the third night, he had enough of doritos and shemale porn. His heart wasn’t in it anymore, and every vice he added (drinking, smoking, more porn) was accompanied by this ambivalence, this feeling of freedom of choice that made this seem less like a single slump than a continuous sequence of bad decisions.

After relieving himself again, his conscience struck him with the disappointing truth that he could be having fun doing something else.

I wish this were fun, he catches himself thinking. Like if it were fun, then life would be perfect. What’s missing? There’s the beer, the chips, the girls, the night, and this beautiful, expansive feeling of being alone. I can go to that lesbian site again, he thinks, only to be struck with this agonizing feeling of inanity, of purposelessness. It isn’t that he felt disempowered, but rather, the opposite!— he felt massive over-control of his surroundings, that he could just close the lid of his computer if he wanted to, get up and walk around.

He put his arm on the back of his couch. He felt more expansive that way. He thirsted for company, all of a sudden, and thought about going downtown and putting on a song on the jukebox in Old Harry’s. Maybe next week, he thought; his slacks were still in the wash. The girls looked less inviting now than they did before.

His windows were barred, but the sound of birds (it was four AM) came in. He hoisted himself up, snapped his laptop shut, and grabbed his jacket, and made his way to his kitchen. The stove light was on, casting shadows around all the pots and pans. There he grabbed all the empty condiments on the shelves, careful not to get any of the sticky remains on himself, and left the house. It was cold outside, and the wind was dead. But he knew the trash can would be there. He knew where it was. He made it there, threw the condiments away, and while hitching his pants up in triumph, felt the feeling of freedom evaporate.

"Three experiments supported the hypothesis that people are more willing to express attitudes that..."

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 01:52:08 -0400

“Three experiments supported the hypothesis that people are more willing to express attitudes that could be viewed as prejudiced when their past behavior has established their credentials as nonprejudiced persons. In Study 1, participants given the opportunity to disagree with blatantly sexist statements were later more willing to favor a man for a stereotypically male job. In Study 2, participants who first had the opportunity to select a member of a stereotyped group (a woman or an African American) for a category-neutral job were more likely to reject a member of that group for a job stereotypically suited for majority members. In Study 3, participants who had established credentials as nonprejudiced persons revealed a greater willingness to express a politically incorrect opinion even when the audience was unaware of their credentials. The general conditions under which people feel licensed to act on illicit motives are discussed.”

- Moral credentials and the expression of prejudice (Monin & Miller, 2001)

Haiku

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 01:16:00 -0400

You get tired of fools,

Likewise of shoes, thoughts, countries—

One by one, you leave them.

puzzle #2

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 01:51:56 -0400

I thought of another puzzle. Decipher the following code:

]/h’m9a;9mh.9ocl.]we

a study of how relationships are shaped by the existence of Wawa

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 00:21:00 -0400

“Don’t look back here yet!” the girl says, snapping her brown towel in front of her creation. I feign like I didn’t see it and put my hands over my eyes. We’re sitting on her couch, her dog and I, and her dog whimpers and rests her (his?) head on my lap.

I cry out in surprise. “The dog is drooling on me, Sue,” I say. She doesn’t acknowledge me. “This is serious! It’s like a typhoon!” I push the dog’s head away, laughing, and keep my hand on its ears. Sue’s eyebrows are arched in concentration as she dabs her pot with paint.

“What?” she says, “Oh,” and grunts.

It’s really a stupid project. She has to make up an art project for her pottery class because the professor didn’t think her “Madonna in Cubist Fashion” qualified as a serious attempt at pottery. Arguably, it didn’t, but who’s to say with Sue? She’s a higher order being, though it might be hard to believe as a teacher, when parades of self-proclaimed higher order beings march through your doors year after year. All I know is that she takes her pottery very seriously, even if the professors can’t or don’t want to.

The sofa is green and leather and worn, and a big reason why I keep coming back even after we broke up is that this is the most comfortable sofa I have ever found. The dog jumps off, so I kick my feet up, and I look up at the ceiling.

“It’s summer,” I say, “We should be out there planting grass.”

She dabs at the pot. Her lips are pursed with concentration. I don’t think she heard me.

“Or maybe riding roller coasters. Let’s go to six flags, Sue. It’d be a good break from all this shit.” I gesture at her sneakers, strewn about the carpet, which is zebra-striped by neglect.

She doesn’t look up.

“So what if you’ll fail your class. We’ll get married. Let’s move to Long Island, and raise white kids who play lacrosse.”

“That’s the stupidest fucking idea I’ve ever heard. Shut the fuck up, I’m trying to work.”

I keep looking at the ceiling. I’ve come to enjoy her outbursts, but I can’t tell her without ruining it. So I say, “All you do is work, you workaholic. You’re going to end up like Jonathan Franzen.”

I can feel her arching her eyes in my periphery. “No—you’re the one who’s going to end up like Jonathan Franzen. You’re a fucking louse. All you do is creep around and bother me. I dumped you three weeks ago. Get out of my fucking hair.”

“Oh—” I say. I hit a nerve. “Alright. I’m off. I’m going to Wawa. Do you want anything?”

She doesn’t respond. Her hating Franzen was an inside joke while we were dating, but it’s less funny now. She looks like a furious Medusa, with her unkempt, curly hair. She is staring at her art, refusing to make eye contact with me.

I’m unlatching the door when she says, “God damn it, Peter.”

I let myself freeze.

She sighs. “I don’t know what I want.”

I turn around, and she is standing there, shoulders slumped, hunched over a spiky porcelain ball. It looks like a land mine.

“I don’t either, Sue,” and I let that note resolve. It’s to her credit that she did too.

Oops, the previous version I posted of this didn’t work

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 01:47:00 -0400

Oops, the previous version I posted of this didn’t work

Lyrics for an upbeat, alternative rock song

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 21:26:00 -0400

Photographed at the DMV with shades
They took ‘em off me, Sadie
Sold my matchbox for a Camaro
The breeze was kickin so I hitched it down the road

Nobody knows that basketball is dead
Except the kids who keep the party in their head
Salute the pirates for living close
But watch their eyes close around your throat

It’s gone by like Ash Wednesday for a Jew
The sundial’s caked at half past two.
The summer keeps stickin to my mouth.
So celebrate the armageddon with a stout

This track spinnin records around the sun
Keeps on playin even though the battle’s won

love poem

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 01:39:00 -0400

suffering at a barbeque

you sit on a step, and say,

smokey, can’t you

make love to her with words?

tell her, she looks like

taylor swift, or neil young.

summertime, you’ll say, suavely,

is for bitches, in heat. and she’ll laugh

at your sweater and sweatpants.

and your dick, which is so hard,

like a cocoon,

like a cock, at a cocktail party,

and you’ll lay down and rot

like Georgian peaches,

just a low, long rot.

yeah, that’s what making love in the summer feels like:

voting for dick cheney

sociology paper

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 18:18:23 -0400

Latest sociology assignment:

Write a 6-8 page paper exploring how economic activity can involve a difference between what people assume, believe, perceive, explicitly say, formally allow etc., and what is actually going on.

—

In other words, explore fakeness, authenticity, selling out, being yourself, realness, honesty, truth. Explore everything you ever wanted to explore, using sources written by people who have spent their entire lives exploring that same thing, in a discipline dedicated to exploring.

I want to switch into a sociology major but it’s way too late. My professor said he switched into it his last year of college from natural sciences, so he is all out supportive, but he was in England and they do it differently there. I can’t legit major unless I spend an extra year, so I might just do a special major or something, or just apply to graduate school directly without doing any undergrad sociology work. I want to write a senior thesis anyway, which would be 80-120 pages (!!!!!!), but I would have to boil down this raging cloud of ideas into a single unifying idea. What is it? Some sociological exploration of talk therapy, confession, romantic love, and how those things intersect at the level of culture or political orientation. Or maybe something about multiculturalism, civility, politeness, etiquette, self-help, and picking up women. How do all those relate to therapy? To capitalism? Maybe, if I had to do something specific, I can do a field study on pick-up artists, or on cultural politics on reddit. I think reddit hasn’t been studied much, and it’s now like one of the top whatever websites in the world, so it is seriously not outside of reason. I’ll just have to read and read and wait and see.

puzzle solution

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 17:50:26 -0400

He likes to post clippings from newspapers on the wall. He gets the second paper because sometimes two interesting articles are printed back-to-back.

puzzle

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 22:28:00 -0400

I came up with a lateral thinking puzzle. It’s basically a riddle with an impossibly hard answer, but when you hear it, there’s really no other solution. If you can come up with a solution that’s more plausible/clever than mine, then you “beat” me. Here goes:

A man lives alone. He has two subscriptions to the New York Times. In other words, every morning, two copies of the newspaper get delivered to his front door at the same time. They are identical in every way. He never gives or sells his newspapers to anybody else, and nobody but himself reads it. Why does he do this?

I’ll post the answer in a few days.

Watching other people to watch myself

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 18:46:00 -0500

So my friend is subtly but surely a little handsoffish about technology. Since I installed ubuntu, she’s been calling it “Ubontu” in this funny way, like “your cute geeky pet” or something. I mean it’s harmless and cute, but I get the impression that if she went home and started spouting technical talk about operating systems, her extended family would almost certainly make fun of her. If she said, “Mom, I’m taking computer science, and I installed Ubuntu on my computer,” there’s more spoken between the cracks about what she has chosen to do with her identity and orientation to her family than just taking CS. It’s a break from an old way of life, almost. I sense that she feels an obligation to break down and unpack everything related to technology, to make it clear and not frightening, and her hesitance to embrace technology is somewhat of a bridging gesture between the super-fast modern world and her family. Also if you actually happen to be reading this blog, person-who-i-am-speculating-about, sorry for speculating about you. Let me know if any of this sounds bad or wrong.

It’s just interesting how much that applies to my attitude on far-left cultural studies, and my hesitance to embrace the cutting edge lingo of diversity. It’s like… my parents wouldn’t understand this, or they’d think it was a bad idea. My parents are conservative in a very subtle way. They’re pretty liberal as far as most things go, especially compared to other Asian parents, but they have a sense of steadiness and reluctance to embrace cultural change that is too explicit and self-aware. Maybe it’s a legacy of surviving far-left super-linguistically-focused communist reforms in China. To them, cultural change should occur gradually, vetted through the experience of families and lifetimes. “Would I want my kid to do this?” is the million dollar question.

But we’ve had to embrace technology in this hardcore way, partly out of survival, partly because why not? Though I’ve deleted my facebook and resisted getting a smart phone until last year, I think the fact that technology is in my blood is really undeniable now that I have other people to compare myself to.

My parents can almost certainly handle it if I decided to go “full liberal”. But the big question is whether their experience in China is somehow applicable to my experience at Swarthmore, and whether their reluctance should be mine too.

Workshop: An educational seminar or series of meetings emphasizing interaction and exchange of information among a usually small number of participants (Merriam-Webster)

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 14:58:00 -0500

I attended two sexual misconduct team workshops this week, on 1) consent and dating life, and 2) disrupting damaging gender stereotypes in classrooms.

When the gender stereotypes workshop began, the facilitator let us know that it was “workshop time” right off the bat by saying, “Please go around and share any aspects of your identity that are important to you. My name is ____ and I identify as a cis-gender female, and I prefer the pronouns she/her.” If you’re not used to the language, which you very well may not be, then you’re suddenly taken aback with how you’re expected to have to append a prefix to your gender for the first time in your life. The facilitator made it clear through her attitude that this wasn’t a convention that was to be challenged, and if you asked about it, it was going to be at the expense of you looking like a noob. (but if you’re really good at being respectfully inquisitive, then ask all the questions you can). The important point is that things that aren’t required—you don’t have to say your gender with a prefix, or even say your gender at all—often feel ambiguously so, because you attend these things to learn something, not to disrespect anybody, and you don’t want to do something offensive in the process.

As far as this specific examples go, labeling your gender with “cis” means that you aren’t “trans”, or trans-gendered, so basically you are biologically of the same sex as your gender. It’s fairly harmless once you understand it, and using it is a sign of respect for the other participants, since it puts being transgendered on the same plane as being cisgendered.

A corollary to this in “real life” might be that the first time I went to therapy, my doctor asked, deadly seriously, “Do you have parents?” I was surprised, because I had never been asked that before. But it’s important, or at least respectful, in a therapeutic context to assume as little as possible. Likewise with the cis/trans thing. You don’t want to make someone have to venture information outside of the flow of the workshop, because then you make them feel like they don’t belong there.

With that said, a basic pre-workshop introduction of these different conventions should be standard. As it is, you are thrown into this bizarre alter-world where people are both spontaneous and scripted, and identities are both political and personal, and you have to figure out the rules yourself. The reason why it isn’t done, I think, is that facilitators want to try to make their workshop interrupt reality as much as possible, and to form a bridge between the two is kowtowing to the sexist and transphobic forces that be.

It’s a matter of discretion and context, I think. Not every workshop has to be balls-to-the-wall. In fact, if it’s open to the public, it probably shouldn’t be, because many participants might not understand the intensity or depth of what they were getting into. You can still get into extremely sensitive and therapeutic territory even if you preface your workshop with a little breakdown of why things are the way they are.

My hunch is that nobody’s really hiding anything, and that the facilitators would prefer to make things as accessible as possible, there is just a genuine cultural gap. So I thought about how I would explain it, and I came up with the following (wordy) explanation:

Business culture can be really different than real life. I took a class called Sociology of the Economy that had readings on corporate culture, and some of these sociologists described in excoriating detail the ways that middle managers would “shmooze”, how everybody knew that networking was “fake” but did it anyway, and how this sort of double-speak permeated the entire structure of the corporation. But if I walked into Goldman-Sachs and approached a random manager in the lobby and asked, “Hey, middle managers form factions and always watch out for their team above all else, right?” they would likely say, “No, of course not, we have the corporation’s interests at heart. Who are you?” Or if I asked them, “So when you say streamline your production, you really mean fire a bunch of people, especially among the overlook/regulation staff, right?” They would say, “No, who let you in here?”. They might even be offended. You might be able to get some truth from a GS employee who is also your friend, when you’re at a bar together, but you’re definitely not getting anything out of a manager who is on the job, sitting at his desk, with his boss standing behind him.

With gender issues, it’s the same way, except there is no escaping the dominant culture. You can’t just walk out of sexist culture the way you can out of Goldman-Sachs. The entire world is Goldman Sachs. It’s incredibly hard to start a dialogue from within a system about the system, since 1) systems naturally embrace language that protects its weaknesses, and 2) systems use cultural forces to enforce its own language as standard and required.

That’s why when you walk into this workshop, you might hear some things that sound weird if you’re not used to them, and feel like this entire experience is useless and sad.

Video

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 01:13:15 -0500

Photo

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 20:02:06 -0500

Click on it twice. These are your two super powers.

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 19:52:00 -0500

Click on it twice. These are your two super powers. :

I don’t usually do these but I just had a conversation with you about “what superpowers would you want” and I gave a cop-out answer, so here goes:

One: Clown Physiology — “Ability to use the abilities of all types of clowns.” For example, card manipulation, fear/insanity/laughter inducement, and miming.

Two: Eye Color Manipulation — “The power to change eye colors of oneself or others.” An interesting application is I may be able to change the eye color of others.

Combining these two, it seems like I am destined to wander the world, changing peoples’ eye colors in secret for no reason other than to sow mischief. I mean, that’s fucking hilarious. I would totally do it. Professor is lecturing, suddenly her eyes are changing colors like she’s fucking hypnotoad. I can easily destroy the shit out of epileptics, but then again, so can anyone. If I were interested in being chaotic good, I could go to the local Neo-Nazi club and make their eyes all brown. Suck it, Aryans.

The clown thing seems the best because I can squirt acid out of lapel flowers and make balloon animal bombs and do all sorts of Joker-y stuff.

This didn’t come up randomly but this is the worst superpower I have ever seen: http://powerlisting.wikia.com/wiki/Unlovability%C2%AD

“I’m going to kill you now.”

“Yeah, well you can’t love me.”

“Okay. /punches you to death”

Hahaha.

Sale at the used bookstore today. 35% off for their 35th anniversary— cute, but I didn’t notice the connection until late coming home. I saw Keryl for the first time in years, and I nearly missed her out of forgetfulness. We said 1 PM and I remembered at 1:40 and fucked myself to the town center in record time. Drove the manual for the first time in a while too, which roared nicely in accompaniment to my swearing and speeding. She was waiting a good hour before I arrived, which was when Jesus descended from heaven and gave me the Douchebag of the Year award.