Starter husbands
People get upset because they would like to pretend that they're relationships are based purely and solely on love. That's right, Mr. Paunchy Middle-aged Selfish Man who has heretofore been a repellent to women and many respectable men and looks like a waterlogged carcass, that hot 20-year-old Chinese chick totally digs how you have no butt and your nose hair is getting kinda bushy. She was totally not sold when you bought her that designer handbag. Nope, she fell in love for the first time when your drunk ass pushed her onto the bed and passed out on top of her.
The point is that if some people want to run their game likes it an economic transaction -- and it's at least partly an economic transaction in every case that one partner doesn't have or doesn't exercise his or her ability to generate a personal income -- then let them. And...
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HKUP's Queer Asia Series
Imagine my surprise the other day, having only recently committed myself to exclusively researching and writing on gender and culture in Greater China, when I came across a couple of discounted books on Queer Asia in the Charter House bookstore in the basement on Times Square. Obsession: Male Same-Sex Relations in China, 1900-1950, Philippine Gay Culture: Binabae to Bakla, Silahis to MSM (winner of National Book Award, Manila Critics Circle), and Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong.They were RMB20 each, which is about US$3. I grabbed them up -- what a score.
Imagine how my surprise was compounded when only a few days later a co-worker forwarded me an e-mail from Hong Kong University Press about the latest book in their Queer Asia series, As Normal as Possible: Negotiating Sexuality and Gender in Mainland China and Hong Kong, "one of the first sustained collections on Chinese non-normative sexual subjectivities and contemporary sexual politics published in English."
The purpose of the series is to "[open] a space for monographs and anthologies in all disciplines focused on non-normative sexuality and gender cultures, identities and practices in Asia. Queer Studies and Queer Theory originated in and remain dominated by North American and European...
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The Second Sex, new but not really improved
I mentioned in passing that I had read an article on slate.com about the new edition of Simone de Beauvoir's pivotal tome, The Second Sex. After reading the article, I was inspired to delve into my own copy, which I did with great joy. I had tried reading a few pages here and there as I lay in bed, but once I gave the book the attention it deserved -- I love being stuck on airplanes and buses for the opportunity it provides to do just that -- I found it captivating and in many ways still relevant (and adorably French). And then I nosed around online and found out that the American translation by H.M. Parshely is shit, but it's all we've had since 1953. Imagining La Deuxieme Sexe to be a manual or a textbook on getting down, the wife of publisher Alfred A. Knopf had her husband hire a retired biologist with a couple of years of undergrad French under his belt to translate it. He knew nothing about existentialism, didn't have a firm grasp on the language, and was under strict orders to cut out unnecessary bits to accommodate the short attention span of American readers....Read More!
What do you want to do with your life?
Final questions from a 2009 interview with Sheryl Wudunn, New York Times reporter, wife of Nicholas D. Kristoff, and co-author of Half the Sky.[If] you could ask women around the world one question, what would it be?
What do you want to be, what do you want to do with your life? Most in the developing world don't think about that or think about what they want to do. So really, it comes down to: what do you want accomplish in life?
What Should I Do With My Life?
I stole the book What Should I Do With My Life? from the Harvest Time sub shop the other day. Well, "stole" is a little strong--I'm going to return it and a couple of other books that are overburdening my shelves at the moment within the next few days.Anyway.
It apparently got rave reviews, hit the top of the New York Times' Best Seller list, and was sold out around the world for a spell when it was initially released. I'll admit that I grabbed it up right away just because the title was promising. But to be honest, I'm not loving it.
Po Bronson has apparently written a couple of novels and books, but his style irritates me a little, like he is being pedantic but trying not to be, which makes him pretentious and then just annoying. But beyond that, I am 2/3 of the way through the damn thing and I haven't come across one tale that convinces me the protagonist really has found their true life's calling, if such a thing can be said to exist. The most that I think can be said of any of them is they are happy where they are right now and glad not to be where they were, which is admittedly no small thing and definitely for many of the reasons that Bronson lays out. For instance, he reminds us that "Failure's hard, but success is far more dangerous. If you're successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and money and opportunity can lock you in forever. It is so, so much harder to leave a good thing." There are quite a few stories of people who had achieved every standard measure of success, only to exchange their brilliant, lucrative careers for more honest, meaningful work with a smaller paycheck, but it was never until they had hit the wall.
This is what gets me: it's the same thing when it comes to couples giving other people relationship advice. For example, there was this one newly-married, overly-enthusiastic, born-again Christian couple who came to my university to lecture everyone else in the audience about how to find the perfect partner and enjoy the perfect marriage. Even at 22 I couldn't understand how a pair of 20-somethings who'd known each for only a couple of years had anything to say to the rest of us about the lifelong commitment of marriage, and how they could be so brash to assume that they had already figured out the key to making a lifelong relationship work. The stories I am reading in What Should I Do With My Life? strike the same nerve. A lot of the subjects admitting to being happy at one point in their previous careers; if Bronson had interview them at that point, would they have been as confident about having found their lifelong calling? Many of them admitted to always having felt some discomfort, even as they were earning a lot of cash and having the times of their lives; is this a sensation they discovered in hindsight or was it genuinely present the whole time they were fulfilling what they thought was their life’s purpose?
To me, a lot of these accounts are just variations on "The Fox and the Grapes:" if you can't get what you want, want something else, and turn up your nose at your previous goal. And even if we do end up finding a vocation that really, deeply, and sincerely satisfies us, what about every moment of our life up until then? This is the question for me, because while I enjoy teaching and I believe I am doing beneficial work, and I am good at it and it’s fun to be around the kids, this isn’t what I want to be doing forever and ever. But it’s what I am doing right now, and I would rather do it with my whole self, commit myself to doing well, embrace the experience and absorb every positive lesson I can about teaching, such as being professional, managing deadlines, interacting positively with others, utilizing my creativity, and caring for children and meeting their needs. If you want to read a book about doing this, check out Fish!. It can’t just be the destination that’s important, right? It’s the journey, too, and while I am on it, I don’t want to disregard a thing.
A final quote from an interview in my new favorite blog, The Happiness Project: “I think that many people, including myself sometimes, look for happiness in the future. They think they will be happy once they have a certain level of financial success, or their blog traffic doubles, or they get lots of clients, or they find a man (or woman) and get married. In reality, wherever you go, there you are. So by finding joy in the present, in its beautiful imperfection, any future goal that you accomplish will just be a cherry on top.”
Continuing to Chew on Friedman
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If The World Is Flat, We're Fucked
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