A bundle of contradictions

I like to encourage my friends, acquaintances and relative strangers to take classes at the gym like I do. Like Step, Kickboxing, Body Sculpting, Hip Hop, Yoga.

Yet when New Year's rolls around, the inner conflict begins. New people with clichéd resolutions to eat less and exercise more fill the studio to the bursting point. With so many people punching and kicking in such a small space, I often fear taking a Puma to the head. I resent all these fairweather athletes taking up room in my regular classes.

Then one by one, sometimes two at a time, these new people either get bored or frustrated by the complex and demanding combinations. So they leave. And I feel bad. I don't like when people feel discouraged. I want to tell them, "hang in there, kid."

However, once they leave, there is a lot room to move around. So.

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What about the customers?

I'm totally not Abercrombie.

One of my New York buddies reminded me of these sketches this week, so I posted the video. Hello New York buddy!

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Taking it to a whole . . . 'nother . . . level.

Why must you leave me, MADtv?

Take it away, krumping clowns:

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I approve this message.

This one, too!

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We're back!

Hooray! It's been quite a time. There was the blog situation, of course. Then I got sucked into a dialogue on Pajiba about Maggie Gyllenhaal posing for a overpriced lingerie company. I've talked about this concept before: talented, well-known female actors do not need to take off their clothes for money or additional fame. So you can figure out what my response was to the unfortunate announcement about Ms. G. Then today, my car battery finally died. I had to get my car jump started and then haul my tuchis to the nearest repair place, which was in the Valley, i.e. the hottest place in the LA County. There has been other work related stress, too. And, my big TV is still out at the repair shop for possibly two more weeks.

It has indeed been a time.

With all of these emotions wrapped up inside me, I think it's time for the Krump:

Reading is Fun...damental.

Nothing Meek In Her Voice, by namrata, at Sepia Mutiny. I would have titled the post, Another Book about Being Brown?

...I frequently bemoan the fact that minority writers feel the need to their minority’s themes while a white man has the freedom to write a Japanese story and gets the whole canvas to play on. I want the New Yorker to write a two-page review of a great American novel that’s deeply, equally relevant to the whole nation and have the desi name be almost an afterthought, as it is with so many of the other categories of accomplishment we celebrate here. I want my white or Asian or black or Hispanic friends to call me up and say, “You have to read this book,” where the book is by a desi author but that commonality between me and the author has nothing to do with their insistence. Why must we always be meekly constrained to the edges?

But who am I kidding? I want to write that book, and I want all my friends to rave to each other about it. But I can’t even write most of a blogpost in two whole weeks. [Rishi Reddi, author of Karma], on the other hand, is an environmental lawyer, is raising a daughter, and serves on the board of SAALT. Yet somehow she found the time to write story after story, one of which was even chosen by the illustrious Michael Chabon for a Best American Short Stories collection, and then get them published as a book...

It reminded me of that MadTV sketch (that I can't find on YouTube) with Debra Wilson and Aries Spears about how the romantic comedies starring black people are all the same. And it's true. I saw Brown Sugar, so I don't need to see Love and Basketball. I've seen Deliver Us from Eva many times--last time was on ABC Family, strangely enough--and I own the similarly themed Two Can Play that Game. I've seen The Best Man, so do I really need to finish watching The Wood? I also own Booty Call. No comparison there. I just wanted to announce that I have no shame.

Not only are the stories in these movies the same, but so are the characters and the actors who play them. Yes, Gabrielle Union is a talent. I didn't understand why she had to star in a DMX movie, but I'll overlook that. However, I don't understand why she, Morris Chestnut, Taye Diggs, Meagan Good, Vivica A. Fox, Sanaa Lathan and Duane Martin have to be in every one of these movies. It really doesn't help the theory that all black people look alike.

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As "all-American" as apple pie?, by Carmen Van Kerckhove, at her new site, Race in the Workplace.

Claire sounded like the perfect candidate for the position and I trusted my friend’s judgment, so I immediately passed her resume onto my boss, whom we’ll call Pat.

Then the following conversation happened.

Pat: So is Claire Jones also half Chinese?

Me: What? (Couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing.)

Pat: Is Claire also half Chinese, like you and Tommy?

Me: Um… not that I know of.

Pat: Oh she’s not half Chinese?

Me: Like I said, not that I know of.

Pat: Oh so she’s an all-American girl then?

There were so many things wrong with this exchange I couldn’t even wrap my head around it. Did Pat think we were all in on a secret plot to sneak in as many down-low Asians as possible with European last names? And could she have made it any more obvious that to her, “half Chinese” and “all-American” were mutually exclusive categories?

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This Blog is Not For Bigots [UPDATED], by anna at Sepia Mutiny. It's a response to this very recent Newsweek article, Braced for Backlash, which opened with the following paragraph:

The bodies had barely been removed when the racial epithets started pouring in. Cho Seung-Hui, the 23-year-old identified as the killer of 32 on the Virginia Tech campus, may have lived in the state since his elementary school days, but to the bigots in the blogosphere it was his origins in Korea that mattered most. "Koreans are the most hotheaded and macho of East Asians," wrote one unnamed commentator on the Sepia Mutiny blog. "They are also sick and tired of losing their Korean girlfriends to white men with an Asian fetish."

I always enjoy when irresponsible mainstream media outlets pit one persecuted group against another by using one unrepresentative example, then act like they did nothing wrong.

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I hate Unions (but I’m trying to join one), from irwin's blog, From Studio Twelve A. Fight the power, bro. Yet another in a long line of arguments for universal health care in the U.S.