I don’t watch Project Runway, or Pimp My Pride, or Cribs, but I’m still pretty superficial, and I’m okay with that, since everyone is. It starts at birth with your parents dangling shiny objects in front of you and continues on for the rest of your life. Perhaps you’re not stereotypically superficial (fancy clothes, fancy car) but your superficiality manifests itself in many other ways. There will always be things that are pleasing to your eye, it’s just human nature, and it doesn’t make you any better or any worse than anyone else, even though you probably would like to think otherwise. My friend Mary claims that she “doesn’t see ugly” but we can’t all be like her.
I don’t necessarily try to stand out too much with the clothes I wear, but I like to think that I dress nicely. I used to be a little more lazy about things in college because 1) I didn’t have a lot of money to burn. 2) I felt like people should like me for me, and that me dressing up should make them feel special. I also quickly realized that college is the last time that walking around in public in your pajamas is socially acceptable.
Since I don’t have deep pockets, decking myself in designer clothes is difficult. I don’t have enough clothes to last me for months and I don’t want people to always thing I’m wearing the same thing (like that Simpsons episode with Marge and the Chanel dress). It’s like an epidemic, you get one piece of fancy clothing, and all of a sudden you need to revamp your entire wardrobe. Once you get a nice pair of jeans, you need to get shoes to match and you might as well get some shirts while you’re at it. It’s maddening.
I like to think I dress within my limits, not just financially. I think I wear clothes that fit me, suit me, and make me look fashionable, which I believe is the point. I WILL NOT just buy something because of it’s brand name or because it’s “in”, and I think that is the problem with a lot of the “superficial” people today. They spend money on things that don’t even make them look good, which defeats the purpose. Fashion is supposed to enhance your appearance. This is why you don’t wear just white t-shirts and khakis everyday.
Unfortunately this is where some people go wrong, and I mean ridiculously wrong. I was in Hollywood over the weekend and while at a stop light, my friend had a terrified look on his face. Curious, I wanted to see what triggered the reaction and soon enough, I saw a lady walking away from our view, wearing a shirt that kind of rode up on her, revealing a pale section of back flab. It was disgusting, and I feel terrible that my reaction to seeing this back flab was repeating “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God” for about a minute, until we made our turn and went home. Honestly, if this lady was wearing clothes that didn’t reveal this pasty flab, there wouldn’t have been any reaction. She would’ve been just another pedestrian. It wasn’t her weight or appearance that was garnering our ridicule, it was the lack of foresight on her part. Unfortunately this happens all the time, like at clubs or bars.
I realize people of all sizes and body types look ridiculous in certain clothing. Super short shorts, showing off a really bad farmer’s tan, wearing a fedora when you’re kind of white trash, pig tails while wearing a trucker hat; these are all fashion faux pas that people should realize they should avoid but they don’t. And it really goes beyond clothes, it’s knowing your strengths, weaknesses, and gifts. If you want to be a writer and you think a good beginning for a story is “There was an Aunt Tiny, who was quite large.” and you’re not writing a children’s book or a gross limerick, you should probably look into another profession.
I believe that knowing what looks good on you is more attractive than wearing clothes that just “look good”. It shows that you know what you’re all about. You seem comfortable and you aren’t trying to be something that you’re not. You might not be gracing any fashion magazines or wearing designer clothes, but you’re definitely not playing to your weaknesses. You know how to make yourself look good rather than making other people look good. I can understand the logic behind wanting to wear clothes that make you look more attractive but attractiveness is not based on what clothes you’re wearing, but how you wear the clothes. The cliche is correct. It’s what’s beneath the clothes that count. And that’s even true for the muffin tops.
I don’t remember many Thanksgivings from my childhood. In fact, the earliest Thanksgiving I remember was from freshmen year of college. The plan was to spend Thanksgiving at my sister’s place in LA. I was having a hard time reaching my parents and finally when I did, I was informed that I would have to find a way to get to my sister’s place since they were taking care of my grandmother in LA and wouldn’t be able to swing by to pick me up since they weren’t coming from San Diego. I scrambled to find a ride and was finally able to find one via a dorm mate of mine named Fred.
Fred was a foreign exchange student from France but his English was pretty good despite his accent. Fred was studying music at school, I often would seem him playing the piano in the dorm. He was also a Rastafarian so he, his room, and his car always reeked of weed. There was also the one time where he tried to fit himself into the dorm fridge, but I think that was a result of alcohol, not marijuana. I liked Fred a lot and we got along really well, he and his friend once opened a show I was playing by rapping in French. Having previously established a friendship prevented the following conversation from sounding as hostile as it probably reads:
“So Fred, I know you’re French, but are you going to celebrate Thanksgiving since you’re here in the States?”
“I don’t celebrate cultural genocide, man.”
“So what are you going to do for the time off?”
“Party. I’m going to LA and I’m going to party.”
So, that is the earliest Thanksgiving I remember, and I remember it because of my car ride with Fred, not because of the food or the people I actually spent the day with. Perhaps, that’s why, since then, my parents and I have quickly bypassed the traditional turkey meal for whatever we feel like eating that day. We’ve gone from having Thanksgiving meals with a family of 8 down to a family of 3 since my sisters have married/dispersed throughout the United States.
A couple of years ago, Bruce’s mom had a brain aneurysm in the Spring. I remember getting the news from Bruce and then relaying it, first to my mom, and then to all my sisters. The relationship between Bruce’s family and my family doesn’t end and begin with the boys (Bruce, his brothers and me). Bruce’s mom and my mom are very close, my mom says they are “like sisters”. On my first trip back to Minnesota in 2004, Bruce’s mom welcomed me back by saying that “one of my sons has finally come home” (NOT in reference to the prodigal song story). We’re as close to family as can be without actually being related by blood.
Every year, without fail, I’ll get obsessed with the NBA, NFL, and NHL drafts. I’ll scour mock drafts on websites, talk it about it with friends, and read whatever I can get my hands on. This is definitely a huge time waster at work so I try my best to avoid the temptation, since now with the internet, following a draft starts the day after the draft. These drafts are an odd process. These multimillion dollar (soon to be billion dollar) sports teams congregate in some auditorium, they force kids (between the ages of 17-24) to sit in said auditorium in a suit, and then select them like they were selecting a kick ball team by giving each kid a baseball cap. But unlike a kickball team, these kids are getting multimillion-dollar contracts. Sweet deal.
I’m not complaining about the fact that these kids are getting paid millions of dollars. If you’re really good at something, you’re going to get paid for it. That’s how I’ve been taught life works, unless you’re an artist. Plus, these kids get put under the microscope and aren’t allowed to be kids anymore. Caught smoking weed in college? You have “character” issues. Got in a fight outside of a club because someone spilled Bud Light on your new Italian loafers? You’re a head case. Every kid gets dissected. “He seems to have a low basketball IQ”, “he doesn’t have a high enough vertical”, “his wingspan is surprisingly short”. See, these kids have expectations to perform, and short of dying or being paralyzed, these kids will be judged no matter what life throws at them. “Tore up your knee? Great! You will be booed on the street because you’ve set our franchise back three years!” “Your Mom died? You need to get over it because Game 7 is tomorrow.” Sympathy is dead. 20-year-old kids are getting labeled as failures. It’s truly a great world we live in.
It actually really is if you’re Mark Madsen, who somehow managed to escape having any expectations bestowed on him even though he was a 1st round pick. 1st round picks are supposed to be useful, maybe not necessarily great, but regular contributors. Mark was picked by the Lakers with the last pick of the first round, and immediately the joke was “he’s getting picked to guard Shaq during practice”. Madsen is perhaps the worst player in the NBA. It’s almost unanimous but he seems to find work and isn’t considered a failure. If he were a walk-on, I’d understand because he’d be the modern day Rudy. But would you still enjoy the movie if Rudy came from a ridiculously wealthy family? Nope, but here we are, shrugging at Mark Madsen’s lack of skills, instead of looking back at the draft and wondering who the Lakers could’ve had that would’ve been a better choice of a pick.
Not to personally hate on the guy. I mean, I hear he’s a great teammate, and an even better person. Maybe the NBA is just trying to teach us about morals. Or maybe we see a little bit of Madsen in ourselves. I mean, isn’t most of America incompetent at what they but enjoy getting paid for it anyways? Mark Madsen is a symbol of America, except he’s got great character.
There is something special about a TV or movie character that grew up/lives in the same area as you. I’m not talking about the actor playing the character (while that is nice as well), but the actual character on screen. There’s a strange kind of validation and this is not specific to the small town folk. At a screening of Anchorman in San Diego, I saw the audience erupt in laughter as Will Farrell tried to convince Christina Applegate that San Diego meant whale’s vagina in German.
I saw Anchorman twice in the theaters (once in San Diego, once in Irvine), and while the joke got laughs both times, I could tell that the San Diego crowd appreciated the joke a lot more. It was almost as if the audience was laughing harder because Ron Burgendy was “talking about us!” I think sitting with the hometown audience actually made the experience more enjoyable. To see a movie taking place in San Diego with the local folk (even though San Diego is a population of 1 million plus) is pretty surreal.
Unfortunately movies often perpetuate stereotypes, which kind of kills that enjoyable hometown experience. Anchorman takes place in San Diego but doesn’t make fun of San Diego. Fargo, on the other hand, takes place in Minnesota and gives their characters the Minnesota “accent”. It’s ironic that Fargo makes Minnesotans look ridiculous since Joel and Ethan Coen, the writers and directors of the film (whom I love dearly), are both from Minnesota. I don’t believe that their intent was to ridicule Minnesota or show how all Minnesotans talk, but as a result of the film, this is one of the first misconceptions about Minnesota that I need to fix whenever I meet someone who wants to know where I’m from. Don’t get me wrong, I love the movie, and I blame this annoyance on the viewers not being able to discern fact from fiction, not on the Coens.
This leads me to The Mighty Ducks, a film that I have a strange connection with. It was aimed at me in so many different ways. I was a kid, I was from Minnesota (where the movie takes place), and I loved hockey. So on paper this movie should’ve been heaven on earth for me, but actually things get kind of complicated (Flying V’s and triple deeks aside).
I love the underdog story, I love the fact that they make allusions that the good team (or bad guys0 are from Edina (one of the richest cities in America, people say Edina stands for Every Day I Need Allowance), and I love the fact that they make pee-wee hockey seem like it’s broadcast TV worthy (not a huge stretch, high school hockey is amazing in Minnesota), but there are two things that stick out like a sore thumb to me. There’s the Minnesota North Stars game in that the kids attend, and the fact that one of the kids, Les Averman, is from Brooklyn Park, Minnesota.
I was a huge Minnesota North Stars fan and I believe this was the last game of theirs I saw before their movie to Dallas. It was a game against the Hartford Whalers (now The Phoenix Coyotes). This was the game the kids attended in the movie, and we were told at the time, they were filming a movie called Bombay (glad they changed it). The North Stars ended up losing the game in the waning moments after Adam Burt flipped a shot over Jon Casey off of a face off with about 4 seconds left. It left a bad taste in my mouth and I have to relive that every time I watch the movie. They conveniently left out the heartbreaking end of that game.
Les Averman is probably the only kid in the movie that I don’t like. At then end of the film the kids all say where they’re from. I was hoping to hear Brooklyn Park, but I was hoping to hear it from someone else, not Averman. A lot of the kids improve in the film or start to stick up for themselves, but not this kid. He’s just dead weight who tells bad jokes. I wasn’t expecting Charlie Conway (Joshua Jackson) to be from Brooklyn Park, but I was hoping we’d get represented by someone who I didn’t think was completely lame. Fortunately I haven’t received any criticism from anyone comparing me to him since we’re from “the same place”.
Currently I reside in a weird place, Southern Orange County. It’s become a hot spot for TV shows, fictional and reality and movies about this specific location, and I could probably complain that they don’t represent this place very well at all, but I don’t. With Brooklyn Park and San Diego, I actually called those places home so there was a sense of pride hearing those places mentioned in movies, but with Irvine, I call this city just “a temporary place to live”.
I once had a dream where I was a child and all I could speak was Korean. It wasn’t a scary or an unsettling dream. but for some reason it’s one of the few dreams that I remember (one of the others had to do with our house in Minnesota having an ice cream parlor built downstairs – both these dreams I’ve had as an adult).
I had kind of forgotten about this dream until recently where I was asked to count to ten out loud in Korean during band practice. The request triggered the recollection of my dream and I immediately declined. It’s not that I didn’t know how to do it, the request, simple as it was, made me really self-conscious. It made me wonder on a larger scale, if my lack of Korean speaking prowess was based merely on some sort of mental block. I mean, if I could dream in Korean, I must know something, right?
My typical excuse for why I don’t speak Korean fluently is because I grew up in Minnesota. This excuse actually has a huge whole in it since I went to a Korean church and my best friend (Mr. Jang-Soo Bruce Lee) is also Korean (even though he is far better at speaking Mandarin – go private schooling?). While I might not have had kids to speak Korean with at school, I most definitely had the opportunity to speak Korean at church. Alas, for some reason, I didn’t, and things have been this way ever since, even though I took Korean for two years during college. My dad attributes my ineptitude to the fact that my grandmother moved away when I was 5, taking away the only person I was required to speak to in Korean. I attribute it to bratty kids from Korea who would make fun of my accent when I tried to teach them in Sunday School (they didn’t realize that my comprehension is much better than my speaking).
I was visiting the aforementioned Bruce for his birthday in New York (I was able to see my sister for her birthday, as well – two birds with one stone). As I hailed a cab at the end of the night, I tried to explain to the cab driver I needed to get to 12th street. I wasn’t sure if he understood me (English, not his first language, Spanish his first, and I was pretty plastered), as I heard him ask “Welch?” He might’ve been saying “12th” but I wasn’t going to take any chances, I wasn’t going to get lost in Brooklyn in the middle of the night. So I started to think about how to say 12th in Spanish (took it for 3 years in high school) and I found myself starting to count to twelve in Korean (both forms of counting, mind you). I eventually was able to change my train of thought to Spanish and got to my sister’s place safely without a hitch.
I’ve been asked if I would actually speak in Korean if someone held a gun to my head. I would, but my accent would still be terrible. One would think my encounter with the cabbie would be some sort of epiphany, that there is hope for me to learn my native language, that it’s just buried somewhere deep in my subconscious, and that I just need to get over the fact that I’ve been scarred by a bunch of bratty kids. This would probably be true if my life was an after school special, but it’s not. I know that confidence can do a lot for a person and that would probably the moral of my story. Once I’m able to cast aside my demons and be confident in my speaking, life will become a bowl of cherries. Unfortunately that’s why after school specials don’t work (and that is why kids aren’t scared to smoke pot). My confidence could be higher, for sure, and that would definitely benefit me in the long run, but what confidence can’t cure is a bad accent. Gradually over time, my accent could get better, with enough practice, but I don’t think I’ll ever be mistaken as a native speaker, which is fine. I’ve accepted my shortcoming and I’m not looking to trick anyone. I just hope I know what language I’m thinking in the next time I need to tell someone where I need to go.