A comment from another time

SB and I were having our usual bedtime chat and last night we were tackling racism- not the overt form but the more subtle racism that we possess and don't really have self awareness to identify. Like when during one class in undergrad, a black student told me that he could walk across campus all day and no one would look him in the eye. Even though he was one of my friends, I quickly realized that I probably also did not make eye contact with black people who weren't my friends. The same statement was repeated to me from a Korean student that I was working with the next semester. My undergrad university had a long military tradition and was overwhelmingly white. The school tried to attract minority students and was only mildly successful because our isolated location in rural Texas, combined with strong military tradition and lack of closeness to urban society was a deterrent for a lot of minority students who came from much more diverse and less conservative city settings.

I felt that a lot of students who never made eye contact with the minority students were not so much prejudiced as they were ignorant. They were less comfortable with things that were not typical, such as non-white students and just subconsciously ignored the outliers. I grew up within diverse groups of Asians and westerners but had not seen a lot of black people until I moved to the United States as a teenager. One of my first friends was a black girl named Stephanie, who I am still friends with today. But when my college buddy told me that other students did not make eye contact, I recognized that I was guilty.

SB related to me a story he heard from family friends. A long time ago, before he was born, the friends threw a blackface party. Back in that time, it was not considered offensive for a white person to put on blackface and pretend to be black in the entertainment industry. Nowadays it seems so obvious that that is a pretty poor idea for most of us who come from places where our awareness has been raised. Anyway, this party got underway with all the white guests in blackface when a group of partygoers arrived who thought it would be funny to arrive dressed as the Ku Klux Klan. The hosts of this unfortunate party told SB that even though they were only fake black, they felt really, really uncomfortable with the fake Klansmen. And a lesson was learned.

It always comes back around

Last night SB and I joined a group of our rugby mates after dinner for a few drinks. We joined a bit after the rest of them and they were firmly ensconced in a game of "I Never." In case you have never heard of it, the game is a drinking game played by people going around the table and making statements beginning with "I never.." If you had ever done what the statement indicated, you had to drink. I had not played this game since undergrad with my women's rugby team and the things we found out about each other still traumatizes me. Dirty girls.

Here was the strange dilemma: SB and I don't know everything about each other. He knows I had a past that did not include him and I know the same about him. We inform each other about things that matter or things that are funny/meaningful/sorrowful but there has not been interest on either of our parts to drill the other about who else or what else lay in the past.

I have had more than a sneaking suspicion that I have had a rowdier past than my beloved. I have asked him if he wanted to know anything but he assured me that he could care less.

So last night I asked SB if he really wanted to play this silly game. "Sure," he said. "Are you really sure?" I asked. "Whatever," he replied nonchalantly.

I guess if I really wanted to, I could have lied but I reasoned that we loved each other and so I should have nothing to hide, right? For the next half hour SB and I both looked at each other in shock and amusement as we continued to have to take a drink at some of the outrageous statements being made. And we discovered that nothing really changes how much we love each other. Even if he did have more girlfriends in his past than he admitted to. "I thought you told me that you only dated four women in the two years that you lived here previously," I accused as I swatted him. "Well, Y was barely a girlfriend," he offered pathetically. "So let's talk about you kissing some girl with tongue." Gulp. I blamed everything on a really wild truth or dare game with the same women's rugby team.

So here is a warning: everything you do will come back around. Count on it. Even if you are the only one to know, you still have the burden of knowing. The true blessing is to be okay with yourself. The other lesson I learned from my past was that when I was not sure about myself, I met men who were equally insecure. But when I matured and realized that I was happy with myself I met others who were drawn to my confidence and happiness and could give back. It always comes back around.

men

"If only women could understand that men, they're here to screw, their minds never leave screwing. Men have to do it with hookers because their wives wear curlers and won't tickle them with a turkey feather."

-Phyllis Diller

my thoughts, exactly

Excerpt from The Velveteen Rabbit

EXCERPT FROM THE VELVETEEN RABBIT
~ By Margery Williams ~

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but Really loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get all loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

the visitor

This holiday season has been quite exciting despite having only Christmas and New Year Day free from the office. My sister appeared and disappeared, SB and I began an active housing search, I roasted a 10 kilo turkey, and brought fire to someone's home.

I will start with the sister. A few days before the holiday season I received a phone call from her. She had been laid off from her job as a nurse practitioner at a university in California, the latest victim of the state's enormous budget cuts. This was in July, around her birthday. She took it in stride and decided to pack her belongings into storage and take an extended vacation. She left in late August to visit Morocco, Spain, and then several parts of SE Asia. And then she would visit SB and me and stay with us for a bit while she figured out her next plan.

Well, months went by and there was no word from her aside from the occasional email answering my queries of "are you alive?" with "Oh, sorry, I won't be in HK next week as I planned because I am in Laos/Cambodia/Vietnam/Thailand/Indonesia. I gave up on waiting as she appeared to be having a great time.

Then a few weeks ago I answered the phone to hear her chirpily telling me that she was going to be in HK in two days so that we could spend Christmas together. I looked down at the red and white fake fur/dental floss, fluffy nothing I had just purchased and realized that SB would not be getting his Christmas ho ho ho this year. It was going to be a family holiday.

She arrived late at night with her large backpack of dirty laundry and dark tan. It was wonderful to see her. She stayed to spend Christmas on the beach with 30 of my favorite expat loners and as quickly as she appeared, she disappeared. As I was in the office on Wednesday I received a text message from her. She was flying out to Vietnam for New Year's eve with a Russian man she had been traveling with for the past month and then she was off to go see some Gibbons.

I remember when she was the responsible one. Now I work all day and night, wake up early on most weekends, and bake cookies for my teammates. I fold SB's t-shirts and socks lovingly and make plans in advance. And meanwhile the good sister is chasing monkeys with some Cossack. At least now I can chase SB around in my Christmas ho ho ho costume.

Double Trouble

So I had this friend in uni who wasn't the nicest guy but somehow we got along fine. He was just an ogre and all the girls on my rugby team despised him for good reason. He even made a few of them cry at training when we had combined drills. But I liked him, even though I was well aware that he kinda sucked. He was always honest with me, even saying unflattering things to me about how I wasn't very feminine but he also admitted that he was not nice to girls and probably only liked me because I wasn't very feminine. I somehow managed to balance not girly with not trying to be a boy either. He liked that I could talk about things that interested him instead of whatever he imagined women talked about. And I could tell him that he sucked and he agreed. He grew up in a very tough neighborhood and had gunshot scars to prove it. I had never met anyone like him. He eventually got his degree in civil engineering and went to work on an oil rig where no one cared that he had been to prison because they had all been also. And I said prison, not jail.

Anyway, a few years later I was shocked speechless when I heard that he got married. And his wife is certainly no tomboy. She is a sharp witted beauty queen who isn't afraid to stand up to him and tell him if he's being a donkey. And he practically kneels before her, which is more than I ever could have hoped for. But this doesn't mean that he's become nice to other women.

This year I found out that they were expecting. She has two rowdy boys from previous relationships and I know he was very excited to have another boy to add to the small football team he was assembling. Tell me if you can guess where I'm going with this.

If you guessed that she gave birth to a girl, you are partially correct. If you guessed that they now have twin redheaded princesses then pat yourself on the back. I have spent the past week looking at their pictures on facebook and giggling. As it turns out, he is quite smitten with his daughters but he also is aware that there are a lot of women having a good laugh over this.