Tina's ProcrastiNation Palace

I asked someone in Accounts Payable how’s life and she said “I’m alive, so life is good” (which is almost redundant. heh heh, i’m so petty) but I instantly wished to have a similarly, no-nonsense attitude. Why not? I go to the gym, I have a job, I have a home, I have a husband, I have access to a multitude of Yuppie services. Yo, I’m like loaded, people! I’ve got nothing to complain about.

And yet…I’m so good at it…

I’ve had Mom Friends for a while. I don’t mean like my junior high school teacher whom I still talk to and who is 82 or 1,000 or something, but the Mom Friends my age. It’s slightly freaky when your pals start reproducing. It’s a sign of what–adulthood? Yet another hallmark that seems to happen so easily in the movies but in real life seems unacceptable or unbelieveable or just I don’t know, not what you think it would be. Friendships change. I don’t know what it’s like from the Mom Friend perspective (and I suppose I will some day) but from the perspective of the friend-with-inactive-womb, it’s a shift that sometimes puts a bump or a permanent stop to the friendship.

Keeping up with Mom Friends requires you traveling to them (understandable) and spending the much of the time fretting over the baby rather than talking to each other (also understandable). Having a baby is consuming stuff, and kids require a LOT of attention. And they’re so tiny. (Oh god, what if you drop one.) That part doesn’t bug me. I get that part. (I actually am a fan of kids — some of them. With some, there’s an insta-bond; others seem like blank-faced pigs in a blanket.) But sometimes there’s a faint whiff of “Some day you’ll understand” from your Mom Friend. She has advanced beyond your realm and is only able to fully connect to other Mom Friends, and sometimes, that makes me sad. It’s sort of like the pals you lose when they fall in love. When single, they’re reliable and like steel-rod-loyal, but once coupled, they disappear like, I don’t know, alka seltzer dissolving in water (i’m really low on similes right now. sorry). Or it’d be like if all your friends move to Philly and started talking about cheese steaks all the time. What would you do then? Mom Friends like other Mom Friends because they have much in common. Like one of my Mom Friends, who is still quite dear to me, is a Mom to two kids and sees ghosts in her house. And now, she’s completely enamored with another Mom Friend who happens to be a Psychic and can cleanse her house of spirits as well as discuss the merits of Timeouts. How do you beat that, people?

It’s a long life (knock on wood). People come and go, and sometimes come back again. I mean, we all kind of take turns leaving each other, right? I’m just getting used to it and I’m not always so dang melancholy. Maybe I’ll just go give myself a timeout.

My mom is going to Korea for a few weeks and wants to borrow some clothes.

“That fine, Mom, but sometimes, I don’t really wash them.”

“Just do a sniff test.”

I gotta say I actually like living in Brooklyn. I’ve lived there for almost two years, and I think I’ve finally gotten over Manhattan.

It was bad at first. I had moved out of tiny, two-bedroom (360 square feet, no closets; shower in the living room, etc.), six-floor walk-up, rent-stablized West Village apartment begrudgingly. Even though the paint was peeling, the mice ran rampant inside the walls, and the entire building felt like it was sinking, I still loved it. It was the West Village, man! You can see celebs there! You can pay $2.50 for a Magnolia cup cake! You can walk along the gentrifed West Side Highway park and ignore the mild sewage odor and pretend you were in San Francisco! I guess it was time. At some point, I might be pregnant, and unless my husband is willing to piggyback me up six flights, I just can’t pull it off.

Once ensconced in Brooklyn, we were in a new world of space and quiet and it creeped me out. It reminded me of the suburbs, and I felt hopelessly stuck. Somehow, though I had spent so much energy to get away from my suburban roots, I came smack back to it. What is thing, these quiet streets, with these trees all over the place? I missed Manhattan terribly. I imagined all my friends having raucous good times, creating exciting memories from nightlife pursuits I was too far away to experience (I live like 20 minutes from Manhattan). The subway commute to work was longer. I couldn’t visit my old neighborhood–too painful, it was like going through a breakup, and I didn’t want to be reminded of the good old days..

But suddenly, in year two, I have fallen in love with my neighborhood. I mean, I can jog on the sidewalk and not have to dodge bodies. It’s nice to wake up and not hear sirens. There are a lot of cool volunteer organizations in Brooklyn, tons of writing groups and theater people. People are friendlier in Brooklyn. Isn’t that weird? But it’s true–folks are less guarded and actually look at each other when passing. And these trees are like growing on me.

I still can’t wander in the West Village without feeling pangs of melancholy, but…it’s okay. At least, I’m healing. Ha ha haha.

Can I introduce you to a really bad show? October Road. It’s about a kid who’s facing a mid-life crisis–or a quarter-century crisis–at age 28. He wrote about all his hometown friends in a bestselling novel and never spoke with them again, and now he’s come back to them and his ex girlfriend and his family and his ex’s kid who might his. It’s soooooo hard to watch without imitating. There’s one scene where Laura Pepron, who plays the ex, confesses to her best friend in a close-up: “The whole time I was yelling at him I just wanted to kiss him.”

When scenes like that happen, David and I have face-offs at home as to who can do a better imitation. That line has stuck around. May I also recommend the show Medium for inspiration. There was one episode where Patricia Arquette attacks a man who she thinks hurts her daughter. It’s worthy b/c her face doesn’t move and she emits a high-pitched like animal sound. (She’s pretty, I like she’s more plumb than the average TV starlet, but even with the Emmy, she cannot act, people.) The way they staged it, it just looks like she’s punching the pillow. Very fun to re-enact at home.

I read People.com at work when I’m aggravated and Drew Barrymore is the number one most beautiful person alive! In response, she said something like “it makes my peacock feathers stretch out to heavens and burst into little truly beautiful heavenly star.” That is just so out there, I kind of love it. Does she not have a publicist? Thank you for my second laugh of the day.

I told my mom today I wish I were a millionaire so I could quit my job (who doesn’t.)

“You can marry a millionaire,” says mom, “you don’t have to make it yourself.”

“Too late for that.” (I married an actor.) “Maybe one of my kids will make millions, but of course by that time, I’ll probably be dead.”

“That’s not necessarily true,” she says. “Treat them well, and maybe some of it will trickle down to me.”

Then we talked about the colossal, hyped real estate prices in New York.

“Maybe,” she says. “You’ll have to move to a house with a backyard. By the time I retire, you’ll have two kids.”

“Sure, you can live in a tent in the backyard. And when it rains, you can come inside. Like on the porch.”

Ha ha ha ha. Thank god my mom is funny. It was my first big laugh of the day. It helps!!!

After watching this flick, I realize every immigrant story is bitter sweet–the ones from Asia and Southeast Asia anyway. It’s too far between the U.S. and Asia to feel some sort of loss and all these stories seem to be about lives marked with loss and some joy, and an absolute disconnect with the new adopted country and the kids you have here shaped by it. That’s why this story makes me so darn weepy (the book, I loved; the flick, not so much. It went all over the place and never really accumulated, and it’s odd that Kal Penn, the lead, looks the same age as the actors who play his parents.) I saw it with my mom, which only added to the weight I felt, watching the scenes of the new immigrants feeling lonely in the U.S., receiving some negative attention because of what they looked like, etc., etc., etc.

Mom found the flick “boring” and decided the filmmaker wasn’t that talented. (She has no idea what goes into moviemaking, though I think, as I said…she was right). When I asked her if she still regretting immigrating to the U.S., she looked as serious as she always does and says yes.

“Really? Even after more than thirty years in this country?”

“Yes, I wish I never left Korea.”

From which point, I was completely released for any feelings of guilty or immigrant-related melancholy. I mean, seriously, if you still regret something after thirty years, don’t you think that’s a little retarded? Don’t you think at some point you don’t really think about it b/c the point is so moot? My friend’s husband’s folks immigrated from Germany–his dad from East Germany, and he ran without a look back! (Granted, East Germany isn’t like a resort country or something). But you’re here! There’s really nothing you can do about what happened so long ago. Plus, the Korea you remember from whence you came no longer exists. Even the language my folks speak from the 1970s is different than what’s currently spoken. When they go visit on occasion, think of Austin Powers coming back to the present time asking whether to shag now or later (though…another sentence might be more fitting for my parents.) All I mean is the world they miss no longer exists — the streets they grew up on are different, the people, the culture — and so, I feel sorry for them all over again.

It’s awful what happened, let’s just say that up front, lest you think I’m completely heartless. I can’t imagine what it’s like to lose someone like that, in the middle of their lives, for absolutely no reason, for preventable circumstances, in such an insane, violent manner.

After the shooting, a co-worker came up to me and said that she thought the actions resulted from an individual who was pushed to the breaking point of an environment filled with the haves and the have-nots, someone dealing with being a minority. She had gone to Vassar for one semester — and the class, values, and ethnic differences were more than she wanted to bear — so she transferred and flourished at a NYC institution.

I don’t know that I completely buy that explanation — class stress and misfit status contributed shaping this kid, for sure, but from everything he’s quoted as saying? He was just clearly nuts. Anyone saying that they have an imaginary supermodel girlfriend named Jelly from the planet Neptune is suffering from — I don’t know, I’m not a psychiatrist — but how about schizophrenia? Delusion? Narcissism? He was just plain crazy. Lots of kids contend with being a misfit in a severe way — being the only middle class among the wealthy, being the only non-Christian and Christian world, or non-white in a white campus, and they do not flip out and shoot 30 some-odd people. So that rationale alone does not make sense to me, and yet…

Another friend told me that she feels those social/financial circumstances are not enough to compel a student to behave that way, that we all have certain challenges to overcome, and that your attitude and perspective dictates how you survive and handle such stress — and we both kind of got annoyed by each other in the moment. Maybe she was annoyed with me b/c I wasn’t getting what she was saying, and I was getting annoyed b/c I didn’t feel like she was giving sufficient recognition to how much these kinds of circumstances can break you. You might be a confident kid with a healthy set of adaptability tools, but I also think some kids are subject to such intense racism or classism or what-have-you that breaks their spirit and they never fully recover. I think it’s much harder for a nonwhite boy than a nonwhite girl to fit in into mainstream American society. I think kids sense weakness/insecurity and attack like like wolves on the lone sick moose member. I’m lucky — whatever racism, etc. that has crossed my path has not been so overwhelming that I haven’t been able to recuperate, but I still remember freshman year, taking an Asian American lit class — there were kids who grew up in North Dakota and other parts of the country where they were a minority living in communities that were not all that educated and enlightened, and the barrage of prejudice was so relentless and cruel that the result is that they just plain out hate white people. Racism can drive people crazy, and though ultimately, that’s not why I think this kid went ballistic at Virginia Tech, aspects of his personal story make me think about this.

At the same time, I have a handful of Asian American friends who identify with the shooter, feeling the pain of his social ostracization due to his race. And I’m just like dude, he was crazy. I know you went through racism but you could not shoot 30 people and feel detached from that! That kid was totally CRAZY.

I hope this incentivizes people to pay attention to people who are clearly in trouble. There were signs this kid was mental, people seemed to sense it — his very presence disturbed other students to the point where they dropped out of class. It makes me think of every kid I’ve ever observed who fits this bill. When I toured with a feminist theater group, one kid in Iowa threatened to kill us. There was one kid I went to high school with who never talked and was caught punching his locker. In college, there was one freshman football recruit who didn’t seem to have the same regard for fellow students the way the rest of did — he threw a tray of food at the cafeteria employees, he actually went to the bathroom in a sink when two stalls on his floor was occupied (sorry to be gross, but it just demonstrated how whack he was), never mind the freshman who walked around in a hairshirt and no shoes during the winter semester.

I guess it’s hard to imagine someone like that will ever snap, you kind of expect them to stay in their own quirky bubble or something. They don’t become this way over night, and though it’s easier to assume someone else will deal with their problem, it’s not okay to let this go, especially on a school campus where there are presumably safety nets, to observe a kid who has no friends, who talks to themselves, who is clearly unstable. I don’t want this kind of violence to ever erupt again, but I’m worried that we’re in for more freakouts. And I hope when I encounter someone like this again that I try to get them help. Who knows. I hope I do.

I know I’m a little late posting this, since every newspaper has gone on to ruminate on other topics (my cousin Ed was graciously transfering the home of my site to his server.)

I actually don’t enjoy Kurt Vonnegut’s writing. I can see he’s quirky and talented, but so is Joan Didion, and I can’t stand her writing either — apologies to both sets of fans.

There have only been two big loves in my life — I married the second one (I know, just like Gwen Stefani). Anyway, the first named Vonnegut as a favorite, so I was obliged to read the first edition Slaughter House Five he loaned me.

He got mad when I returned it with a hamburger stain. I can still hear him ask me with complete disgust how this could’ve possibly happened, it wasn’t really a possibility in his universe, but so routine in mine (Maybe that’s one of the whys of the breakdown). Those days, I was using a brown suede pocket book I loved. I got it for 50 cents (thus the big love for the bag) from a New Haven thrift store, and carried the Vonnegut in it to read on the subway and stuff. And you know, at lunch, I couldn’t finish my hamburger so I threw it in my pocket book with everything else.

Of course, the girl I am today wouldn’t borrow first edition books, or treat it like a lunch pail, or stick a burger in her bag…at least without throwing some napkins in after it.

Aside from writing a kabillion books that gave people pleasure, Vonnegut also wasn’t afraid to speak on behalf of other people, on behalf of what he thought was right and wrong. He had like three biological kids and adopted four more, so all those little facts make me believe that he was one of those folks who made the world a better place. They are out there! That’s really all I wanted to say. He seemed cool.