I, Anonymous? May 15, 2008

Lately, I’ve begun questioning if I want my blog to remain anonymous. 
 
I’m not a dis-attached person. I never have been.
 
And I’m lazy, too. Keeping up a secret identity is a lot of work. Look at Batman! He’s so burdened.
  
Some people cry that it’s weak sauce to write anonymously. That it’s shifty to not put your name behind what you write. I’ve read anthems dedicated to the destructive arena anonymous blogging creates. That - gasp! - these anonymous writers can write anything they want and avoid accountability. How dare they.
  
There are some people that abuse their anonymity to spread ill-will. Me, though? I’m too busy spreading it of myself. 
 
Maybe if there weren’t still a part of me that felt some fear talking about my dad or my past or my self-destructive thoughts, I would just plaster my name on this thing, wag it around to everyone I meet, and call it a day.
  
Most likely though, I’d become too busy worrying about who may find this and how they might feel or what they might think. Like my sisters. Or even my parents - albeit they’d first have to understand what a blog is and we’ve only just caught them up with the difference between email and instant chat and I’m still not convinced they completely understand. 
 
No doubt it’d cause all kinds of pain and hurt. Denials. And me feeling far more exposed than I’ve ever allowed myself to be with my family.
  
For all the shit I share about my dad and my upbringing, I try not to just rant. The importance of family - no matter how warped - has always been drilled into my head by him. That we look out for one another. That we protect each other. So when it comes to the difficult stuff, the anonymity allows me to not worry about Who I’m Supposed To Be or Who People Think I Am and just write. Rarely, if ever, have I allowed myself to be this fully honest about how fucked up I am in my “real life”. Hell, a lot of you would find me positively bubbly were you to meet me. 
  
I don’t feel some corrupt liberty to write whatever the hell I want because no one will be able to attach it to me. It’s the opposite, really. I feel pathetically attached to the things I’ve written on here and - as a result - to some really kickass people that I’ve met by doing this. When life gets chaotic, it’d be a thrill to just call some of you up and say: Dude. Where are you. Let’s grab a beer/martini/margaritas/burgers/guacamole immediately.
  
But, you know, there’s this whole anonymous thing. How much of me is this blog and how much of me is who I am in real life and will you be able to see how it all fits inside one person?
 
Maybe it’s just another example of my inability to be anything but an extreme.
  
It’s like you find an indescript bag of money at the mall on your way to buy concert tickets (Ed. note: Because if it happened to Zach Morris and the rest of the gang, it could happen to any one of us). You hesitate on what to do. You consider turning it into the police. But, after a few minutes, you can’t stop fantasizing about those tickets to that 7-night Mexican Riviera cruise with stops in Puerta Vallarta, Mazatlan and Cabo San Lucas and why must Orbitz keep sending you these emails that do nothing but tease you.
  
But - hold on! You notice that the bag filled with money has a person’s name scrawled on it and, sigh, the i’s are dotted with hearts and there happens to be a picture inside the bag and it’s of an elderly woman and then you notice a second picture and it’s of the elderly woman’s puppy and sure, why the hell not, there’s also a journal where the elderly woman has written about how she has spent her entire life saving money so that one day, she could take her puppy to a puppy convention in Australia where it can meet not only other puppies but dingos and koalas. Now, you not only feel more inclined to return the money to this elderly woman but you have a hard time saying no when she asks if you’d like to tag along to this Australian puppy convention as her way of saying thank you.
  
Because you feel a connection.
  
What I’m trying to say, other than inconspicuously introduce the idea into your head to send me bags of money and/or concert tickets and/or puppies, is that I’m starting to feel like this blog is my elderly woman with a puppy.
  
Or maybe I’m the elderly woman with the puppy and you’re the one who found the bag of money? Or are you the elderly woman and I’m the puppy and this blog is the one who found us?
  
In any case, I feel attached.
  
And the more attached I feel to this and the more I interact with other bloggers, the harder it is to just be the ”Damsel.”
  
Well, granted, it was pretty hard before too, since referring to myself as a damsel was always done ironically and irony doesn’t always come across in print so you worry that you’re reduced to adding or to really get across that you’re not entirely serious and, frankly, you’re kind of averse to the overuse of such things. (Ed. note: .)
  
I feel silly wanting to post pictures but then realizing I need to blur out faces. Or worst, cut the faces out entirely. Silly, mostly, because I am reminded of how technologically unsavvy I am by still relying on MS Paint for my photo-editing means in the year 2008.
  
And a confession? I always imagine anonymous bloggers to be attractive. Perhaps Homer was onto something by never describing Helen of Troy to exact detail (Ed. note: What? You don’t throw around references to Ancient Greek literature from time to time?), allowing the reader to conjure their own perception of absolute beauty. Even those bloggers that actively describe themselves as fat or bald lead me to think, “But maybe a sexy fat and bald. Like an overweight Bruce Willis.” (Ed. note: I worship both these blogs and I suspect a measure of self-deprecation as it were since Mr. Mulgrew was once listed as People Magazine’s Hottest Bachelors in 2005. Now I will stop talking about people I don’t know as though I do. I? Creepshow.)
  
What this has to do with anything, I’m not sure. But I do know that rather than setting myself up to be that girl at the bar that gets hit on by the drunk guys already around her, I’m honing in to be the girl that one of those drunk guys calls his friend to tell about and his friend comes to the bar to see this girl his friend couldn’t stop raving about and he has to say to his friend after seeing her that he’s having a hard time figuring out how banging she is because her face is cut off from the chin up.
  
I’m just too forgetful to keep any kind of charade going on for too long. Especially when that charade involves signing out of your actual Gmail account so you can sign into your Damsel account to communicate with someone that you remember only knows you by your blog identity after you’ve already begun composing the email in your actual Gmail account (Ed. Note: Ms. Pink India Ink would have no idea what I am talking about right now) and oh, this tangle of webs of semi-anonymity I’ve spun!
  
But how does one jump from anonymity to identity? A big “Here I Am” post that lays out my face, my full name, my life history and Social Security number? That makes me throw up in my mouth. All the fucking fanfare.
 
Although you are all welcome to take on my poor credit history. 
 
In truth, one of the more unsettling parts about having an anonymous blog where you write things that are from the heart, that you try to keep well-written and interesting and creative and original (Ed. note: Emphasis, yes, on try), is handling the dichotomy of an implied lack of ownership of all these very revealing pieces of you because you’re, well, anonymous.
  
And I’ve said before that I wouldn’t be ashamed to stand by what I write. My boyfriend knows about this blog. Some close friends do too. And knowing how secrets and gossip and the world wide webs can behave, I’m sure there are a bevy of people who know who I really am and read this thing that I don’t even know.
  
But like I’ve also said before: Some of the people I reference - my friends, my family, my boyfriend - never really signed up to be a part of my blog. So for their sake - I try to maintain some privacy. Should I ever want to go public or share my stories as Me and not this Damsel in Digress persona, I guess I’d want to tell these people first. It just seems like the solid thing to do.
  
And if that happened, maybe I’d begin to have a hard time writing whatever the fuck I really wanted to write. Because no matter how often we’ve heard to just be ourselves, we’re all actors to some extent in our “real” lives.
  
Ultimately, I guess that’s why this blog remains anonymous.
 
It may be unattached to a “real” person. But it lacks the bullshit posteuring that so much of our everyday lives can get filled with.
 
Which means for the time-being, I will continue to cut off pictures from the neck down, those that display at least a hint of cleavage naturellement, and, if I’m feeling particularly saucy, a tip of my nose to keep you on the tips of your toes.

He Also Gives A Fantastic Graduation Speech May 13, 2008

What about?
 
Well, mainly, America’s shrinking world presence and the prevalence of terrorism and that devil Al-Queda and, also, the hunt for Osama Bin Laden to the gates of hell, people, managing to keep completely in line with the other obvious themes of that hallmark day in a person’s life - optimism, promise, and hope. I was positively inspired afterwards and in no way felt like crawling into a bomb shelter and staying there for the rest of my life, hidden, after hearing such words of encouragement.   
 
He, however, never mentioned he was older than Alaska! http://www.thingsyoungerthanmccain.com/
  
Alas, no matter how effectively an episode of The Hills can make one regress to the mental capabilities of a toddler, it does nothing to turn back our biological clocks. 
 
The site is fucking brilliant.

Injustice Is Blind May 12, 2008

Had we been born a family of Greek humorists, my father - he of one seeing eye - may have appreciated the comedy in being called Cyclops from time to time.
 
But we are Koreans. Who pride ourselves on perfectionism (Ed. note: Uh), discipline (Ed. note: No), the use of metal chopsticks, love procured through immediate acceptances into top universities, and a brand of humor that plays like a macabre game of Hot Potato - the main objective being to pass any focus on you and your faults onto a nearby unsuspecting family member, with extra points awarded for verbal bullets directed at nonexistent weight gain or when you fell off that seesaw you shared with hefty-and-perhaps-appropriately-named Asia (you know, like the continent) because if you couldn’t tell her you were afraid to sit on a seesaw with her, then it’s only fair you were catapulted off.
 
Everyone being fair game, that is, except for the patriarch himself.
 
To his defense, the story of my father’s lost eyesight is one more like Greek tragedy: An immigrant in pursuit of the American dream with a wife and two young daughters, conducting the mundane task of pruning a small tree in the front yard of his first American home when an errant branch poked his healthy eye and he was rushed to a hospital where a doctor of malpractice leanings slipped and slid with a scalpel too freely and injured the eye unfixable.
 
It’s the stuff of injustice and hard yanks at the heartstrings. Of Lifetime made-for-TV movies dowsed in sepia hues. And, as his children came to learn, the stuff that could add an extra oomph of guilt to already lofty expectations.
 
His story intertwined with demands to do well in school. To become doctors one day, but - with a twist from that classic Asian demand! - doctors who could fix their father’s eye and restore his sight. A demand that my sister followed to Johns Hopkins and I followed to my junior year in high school, when I finally confessed to my parents that I had no desire to apply to Pre-Med programs when it came time to apply to colleges. 
 
It led to my parents both not speaking to me for two weeks.
 
A relative period of peace and quiet in my memory.
 
When the speaking resumed, the new commands handed to me were to become CEO of big company, maybe Coca Cola or IBM! Or to pursue politics because, surely, the position of Freshman Class President would look fine on any future senator’s resume. But first, law. Yes, law would have to do.
 
And the story of my father’s eye gained a new spin. While my younger sister pursued a career of medicine to fix the eye that lost a little more of its sight each day, I would become a purveyor of justice and use my father’s eye as my marker for what the injustice I needed to fight in this country looked like.
 
Slightly cloudy, a little withered, and, on its bad days, the provocation of a bad golf game.
 
A part of me could accept this. While the story served useful in well-placed doses to guilt his daughters into hand-picked careers (and to parlay martyrdom in college application essays for said daughters), whiny complaints from my father about his eye were non-existant. So little did he mention it day to day that I often forgot that he could only see well with one. When he explained with regret and frustration how he really hadn’t seen that car that had come up on his left side after a near accident, one couldn’t help but feel sympathy for him. A pang of sadness in ones heart and a re-commitment to offer this man something that could help him justify his pursuit of a Dream that was found to be littered with a small tree and an errant branch.
 
A law degree from Harvard University, after all, only needs one good eye to view.
 
But it’s been two and some years after my graduation from college and I’m no closer to holding a Harvard - or any - law degree in my hands. By personal choice.
 
It was only prudent, therefore, that the gods who have always favored fathers over their children (Ed. note: Example? Abraham and Issac) step in during my visit home back in March and propel me from any kind of life I may have carved out for myself in the last few years that didn’t include an omnipresent panic that I’m disappointing everyone.
 
Driving with my sister to meet our parents for dinner, we discussed her upcoming plans to apply to medical schools and her consideration of MD-PhD programs. I jested on her fine job of making sure our father’s eye and the horrors committed by that errant branch and the villainous doctor so many years ago would finally be remedied.
 
A pause far too long and silent passed after my comment. 
 
And this is how, with prods of WHAT ARE YOU HIDING FROM ME, I learned I led to my father’s loss eyesight.  
 
“But I remember the day that Ahp-ba was rushed to the hospital. I was outside while he was pruning that damn tree! And I remember that eyepatch he had to wear for weeks afterwards. He looked like some awful Korean caricature of Zorro with that moustache he used to have,” I stammered.
 
“Yeah, well, one day shortly after that eyepatch was removed, I guess he was holding you up in his arms, and you had some picture you had painted you wanted him to see and he wasn’t looking at it so you kept waving it around until you cut him in his eye,” my sister revealed.
 
“A first-grade picture is why he’s blind in that eye? But what about the doctor? The bad guy doctor?”
 
“I guess there were two doctors. The first one, after the tree incident, did a good job. But Ahp-ba had to go to the hospital again after you paper cut him in the eyeball cuz his eye was still recovering. And that’s the doctor that screwed up his eye.”
 
“So. Basically. Right now. You’re telling me that if I hadn’t waved around some first grade piece of watercolor and poked his eyeball with it, he never would have had to see the doctor that fucked up his eye and caused him to become blind?“
 
“Yeah… Sorry,” she squeaked.
 
When I relayed the story to my friend Pete once I arrived back in Chicago, he seemed unimpressed. “It was still the doctor that fucked up his eye, though,” he observed.
 
But, see, that’s not how this works.
 
When my father’s car was rear-ended my sophomore year in high school on his way to pick me up from a golf match, it wasn’t the other driver or the rain or the bad road conditions that were at fault. It was mine.
 
That’s how this game works.
 
While I find it admirable that my father never used this juicy piece of guilt-trip trigger against me in the eighteen or so odd years his eye has been injured, I have to say that knowing he chose to keep this information from me only makes knowing it worst.
 
Had he told me, I could choose to play Card Bitter. I’d still feel guilty, but hey, I’m a victim too.
 
Because that’s also how this game works.
 
But knowing that he told my sister this a couple months ago as they discussed her thoughts of pursuing surgical in the field of ocular diseases and disorders, him in some mood of confiding and bonding, and that it was unintentionally shared with me  - due to my sister’s inability to lie because she considers staying silent actively lying and yes, we are blood relatives -  is sugar icing on the cake tiered with mishaps committed by this eldest daughter to a set of immigrant parents with all that potential just going to waste!
 
It’s also a reminder that for all ills my father is, he’s a man that’s sacrificed a lot for his family. Who, rather than throw piles of money to fight a doctor’s malpractice that would take tedious amounts of time and maybe end in a settlement no where near what he deserved, chose to save for his daughters’ future college funds. And buy music lessons. And clothing and housing and food and vacations and whatever else our family needed.
 
Who never let me have any idea that I led him to see that doctor who injured his eye unfixable.
  
It’s a hard yank at the heartstrings.
  
I’m reminded of an instance in high school when I caught my mother struggling to keep one eye shut as she drove us all home. She explained she was trying to grasp what it must be like for my dad sometimes.
 
For me, trying to make sense of this tragedy and comedy that is life with my dad? To justify the surges of hate that can all too quickly be followed by remorseful waves of gratefulness?
 
I may as well be seeing all that with only one good eye open, the other one busy turning a blind eye.
 
Just call me Emotional Cyclops.

The Post About Posting May 9, 2008

Let’s see.
 
1, 2, 3 … That’s eight days that have so far passed in May.
 
And, hold please, this will require some concentration on my part, but 1, 2 … two blog posts that I’ve posted during the same.
 
NaBloPoMo, this is not. Unofficial or otherwise.
 
And so, I imagine, led to blogger d’s heed: “under-promise, over-deliver. cardinal rule. “

 
I read what he wrote. And it got me thinking in Carrie Bradshaw’s voice about the over and under balance. In gambling, we learn that the over and under is the measure of return one can expect on a placed bet. But when we’re betting on someone’s promise, what we’re really betting on is the unknown intentions of the promise we’re choosing to bet on. Will it be an over-promise that results in less than we expect and our hearts, broken, again? Or will it be an under-promise that delivers the low expectations we were told to expect from the beginning? Is this just a bad bet? Should we not make promises? Or is it possible to find a promiser who can promise and deliver on that promise he promised? I couldn’t help but wonder … can a promise just be a promise?
 
(Ed. note: Why did I just do that?)
 
In all seriousness, I did stop to think about d’s words. Hell, it inspired a whole blog post. His cardinal rule (Ed. note: I suspect subliminal Stanford University advertising here) is good advice. Great advice, really. And one all should practice.
 
One I would practice. Except that it would involve undermining every innate decision-making instinct that tends to pop into my head.
 
I am excess…ive promises, commitments, intentions, passions, emotions, tequila shots, plates of fried chicken, orgasms. Wait. I’m getting off topic.
 
And I invented good intentions, horrible results.
 
The girl who thought to get plastered the night before her first ever company holiday party so as to not be that girl around the open bar the following night. Although, in hindsight, I’m not sure what points I won by vomitting loudly in the office restroom the following day, all day, before the company holiday party in question.
  
The one who found herself sitting by Lake Michigan a May evening a few years ago, a few hours before dawn, with a boy who felt positively inspired to stop at the 24-Hour White Hen on Diversey across from Duffy’s to buy some Southern Comfort (Ed. note: What a misleading name) and red wine. Which he then wanted to enjoy by the wonderful body of freshwater we Chicagoans are so lucky to be so near! And, in the midst of all his talking, while sitting with a relative stranger by a large body of water in complete darkness with no one else around and none of my friends aware of where I might be because we had all scattered at the bar earlier that night, I began to feel worried. Yes, at that moment. And I remembered the news piece I had heard just earlier that day about a recent development in the Natalee Holloway disappearance. Which inspired me to quietly creep out my phone from my purse while this boy discussed the possibility of reincarnation and life on other planets (for the third time) and send a text to as many people as my phone would allow at once. It luckily began raining soon after, and I said my goodbyes and ran away to hail a cab to rescue me home. This boy, however, for all I know, may still be sitting by the Lake, rambling about the possibility of ghosts residing in living persons’ bodies.
 
The next morning, there were several text messages and IMs asking where the hell are you and whether you’re alive and are you depressed or something?? And don’t you know you have so many reasons to live and keep fighting? I was confused. Until I saw that the text message I had sent the night before, in mass, read: “i disappearing shores of lake michigao.”
 
Under-promise, over-deliver? But how will people know just how excited I am? That I really do mean well.
 
By follow-through?
 
Hm.
 
By, er, not setting up false expectations?
 
Woof.
 
To not have let my parents believe I would be attending law school come fall after my college graduation. Until one week before my college graduation.
 
To not have told my boss and her boss and their bosses, repeatedly, during the last four months that it will be absolutely no problem to finish that assignment that really requires at least several people (not just one) and at least a few week’s time (not by tomorrow).
 
To not have promised the Rosetta Stone salesman at the Nordstrom mall on Michigan Avenue that I’ll certainly come back to check out the French kit some more when I’m already dismissing the $200+ price tag and plotting to get my boyfriend to find a way to download it illegally online.
 
To try subtlety. Modesty. Moderation.
 
But fuck moderation! That lame balance for excess.
 
I am excess…ive promises, commitments, intentions, passions, emotions, and visits to the office kitchen to vulture some more homemade chocolate-dipped macaroon cookies brought in by someone who should have known that if they wanted the whole office to have some, they should have made more than twelve.
 
And I guess I’m excessive declarations to post on my blog more frequently.
 
Because I want to. I mean to.
  
But flakiness blows. And I too hate bullshitters. Those of air and fluff and no substance.
  
And I’m of good intentions!
 
So this time. With follow-through.
 
I can’t promise no horrible results.
 
(Because I’m of horrible results, too.)
  
But I can promise to add ”less over-promises” to my mixed bag of issues-to-fix extradinaire.
 
And I can promise to have a hella fucking good time seeing M.I.A. at the Aragon tonight. And bopping my little head to the dulcet tones of opener Holy Fuck. Because I say fuck yes to a band that would call themselves that. Either naive or narcisstic, there’s really no way they could have ever expected to become big or hop mainstream with that name. So fuck yes to Holy Fuck.
 
I can promise to take lots of ridiculous pictures and post them on this blog.
 
Of me. Of M.I.A. Of hipsters and jeans too tight, shirts too small, scarves too volumnous.
 
Because I want to. I mean to.
 
I will promise all this. 
 
That is. Kinda promise.

A Recap In Your Ass, Part 1 May 7, 2008

One of the more drastic aspects about visiting your parents aside from the fact that you are doing the complete opposite of living your peaceful existence can be that sense that, while you’ve been away, time has stood eerily still. That it hasn’t flown all that fast or changed all that much.
 
And when you live a flurry-filled life in a quick-paced city (Ed. note: Stop scoffing, New Yorkers), that lack of change can be a welcome comfort.
  
Of course, when your parents are my parents, the emphasis on that last sentence sometimes rests a little too comfortably on can.
  
I made a trip to Michigan to see my family back in March. 
 
It began well. Expecting my father at the train station - him, happy to welcome any opportunity to drill life lessons in me while I am subject to no obvious means of escape (i.e. locked doors, moving car) - it was a fucking thrill to see my mother’s Saab in the parking lot. She, as is custom when having not seen me in many moons, smothered frantic hugs and kisses. And, once I was safely packed away in the car, my younger sisters unveiled a box of Brueggers’ Cinnamon Sugar Bagels (Ed. note: YUM) and a vat of Honey Walnut cream cheese (Ed. note: HOLY FUCKING YUM) while giggling about the milk my father drank earlier that day that may have been a few days past its expiration day, him theorizing that expiration date just way for milk company make you buy more milk and make more money! His hypothesis being proven wrong the reason for his absence.
 
My father’s first sentiment upon seeing me was that it was very nice to have me home. His second? But, Daughter, how you bigger still than last time I see you! What you eat in Chicago? Only deep-dish pizza breakfast, lunch and dinner, huh!
  
I resisted the urge to grab a pen to jot down what he had just said. Or, incidentally, to gouge my ears until they bled.
  
That he told me it was nice to see me before he decided to assess my hypothetical weight gain from how I looked, covered with blanket, as I sat on the couch  (Ed. note: Five yards of fleece swathed around you? Apparently not slimming) is, I think, what the shrink I used to see before I had to make a financial decision between feeding my stomach sustenance and feeding my mind sanity would classify as progress.
  
And that he told me to eat at least three plates because three is good number you find many times in science and math, nature too of the Korean delicacies my mother had cooked just for me and my arrival right after inquiring whether I routinely eat deep-dish pizza for breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Well, I’m sure that’s just his way of making sure that I always feel like my presumed bipolar disorder has a friend in his.
  
There really is no place like home, yes?
 
Home consistent home.
 
Meaning the same two-story house. In the same gated community. With the same first grade picture of me - dressed in dark denim overalls and a hot pink and navy blue plaid blouse with my hair divided into twelve different braids because my mother loves me - framed, resting on the same Steinway whose keys I covered with peanut butter before a lesson one Sunday when I was eight because I knew my piano teacher had yup, just the worst allergy to peanuts and those peanut butter cookies sure do smell wonderful but NOPE! Can’t have a lick - not one! Darn allergy to those peanut nuts - gotta avoid ’em at all costs! and I? Wanted to avoid him at all costs.
  
Sure, the behemoth Sony I remember is now a flat-screen Samsung and my parents have figured out that the Internet holds more than just the keys to driving directions and I even hear myself telling my 17-year-old sister that I remember when I had to surf the Internet with a 52K modem and does she realize how lucky she is to have all this wireless Wi-Fi (Ed. note: Is wireless Wi-Fi redundant?) at home. But - when it comes down to it - the deck door off the kitchen still creaks when you try to sneak out of it at night.
 
And my family’s ability to drop mind fucking jarring news to me with the kind of casualness that most people would employ to let someone know that it’s just begun raining outside or that the bathroom has just run out of its toilet paper? Hasn’t changed either.
   
Coming Soon:
 
A Recap In Your Ass, Part 2: And Then I Learned My Father’s Blindness In One Eye Is All My Fault

A Recap In Your Ass, Part 3: And Then I Learned My Big Boobs May In Fact Be Large Tumors
 
Yes, indeed, all this lack of change? Can be welcome.
 
To this blog anyway. That can always use more to file under Family, Dysfunctional.

April Shitstorms Bring May Blogging May 1, 2008

Peg me O.C.D., anal, nutjob or - if you’re the type that likes the truth even when it’s inconvenient - all of the above, but it bothers me that in the grand scheme of things, there will be no archived month of April 2008 posts on this blog.
 
Or perhaps this gap will provide an accurate summary of the month when life decided to momentarily behave like a temperamental elephant on a rampage in Sri Lanka, I its white conversion van.
 
That summary going something like this: (Watch video).
 
Who could blog under such conditions!
 
I’ve missed blogging though. A lot. And you guys. Of course you guys. Because people like me - the ones who too often exploit the inappropriate sarcasm and play the fierce independent and wave around the snarkiness - we’re the people who tend to really need others the most.
 
To say the emails and comments I received during my unannounced and unplanned hiatus last month were nice wouldn’t nearly be sufficient. Fucking nice wouldn’t even cut it, really.
 
Because - catching up on my emails and comments today - I kind of scared myself with how moved I felt. And, see, I’m the girl who once looked a black bear in the face and told it to scram; I don’t frighten easily. True story: My boyfriend’s TV? Is very big. Sixty inches across or something. And our couch is very near this very big TV. So sometimes its moving pictures can feel like they’re right in our faces. And I tend to yell things at the very big TV. A lot. Like the time I saw a  big black bear on Bear Gyles’ Discovery Channel show and told it to scram. Or when I see Nikki of this season’s Top Chef: Chicago (Chicago!) and yell I HATE YOU - ANYONE CAN BUY SAUSAGES AND THROW ON SOME PEPPERS AND SERVE THEM AT A TAILGATE AND HOW ARE YOU STILL AROUND.
 
In any case, all of this obscure truth telling is my way of saying thank you for not forgetting about me.
 
I’m dubbing May my unofficial NaBloPoMo month. Which, in sum, will see me trying very hard to post an entry everyday in some hope of re-establishing a pattern of behavior, and, if I do this right, you trying not too hard to avoid this blog everyday in some hope of avoiding my pattern of behavior. Kind of like this guy I dated near the end of my senior year in college who suggested we take a break once he realized that my friends and I went out 6 of 7 nights a week (Ed. note: Even God rested on the 7th day, yes?), every week, not simply as a relish of our senior year in college, but as a way of escaping life. And sometimes, a funny sounding portmanteau is all the inspiration one needs to get right back into the swing of things. 
 
If one’s swing of things must include masochistic tasks and tired jokes about how hard Blo-ing can be.
 
And apparently, mine does.
  
In all truth, the stories, the thoughts, the ideas are ample. The time, maybe not as much. However. This damsel may be in distress, but fuck it if she lets another month go by without - uh - being a damsel in digress.
 
I’m proving to be a slow start. It took me a good five minutes to find the “Save” button on this new WordPress layout.
 
And fresh off the unbalanced sanity I was calling mine last month (Ed. note: All together now: Just last month?), this desperate scramble was almost enough trigger to spark a shutdown of WordPress, quit my job, steal a car, and drive to a small town in Mexico with the plan to live the rest of my life scorning cell phones, computers, and change.
 
But after a few minutes of WHAT THE FUCK WORDPRESS, the ability to observe the blatantly obvious blessed me for a moment and I found the button. The one right next to this text box in which I currently type. (See illustration below.) I don’t know how to explain why it took me five minutes to find the damn thing but I’m sure the damaging effects of second-hand smoke had something to do with it. That, or the damaging effects of having George W. Bush hold public office for so many years.
 
 

 
 
The important thing is that I found it before I was reduced to emailing WordPress Support with my question in the subject line, as per their request: “WHERE IS THE SAVE BUTTON LOCATED?”
 
So no clicking out of WordPress. No quitting of job. And I guess the small town in Mexico will have to wait a while longer for the girl who will run it dry of its tequila supplies.
 
Of course, you’ll only have to wait till tomorrow Monday WEDNESDAY (Ed. note: There’s no time! There’s never any time! There’s no time to study. No time to blog. NO TIME TO SING WITH THE HOT FUDGE SUNDAES) for me to Blo some more.

Home Dysfunctional Home March 27, 2008

Getting me to agree to visit my family in Michigan isn’t an exact science but well-proven methods are often involved.
 
Phone calls which increase in both frequency and urgency as mere weeks pass begin the whole process. Inquiries of but it been since Christmas! Why you not come home every weekend? It take birth of Christ make you come home to family that love you? 
 
And I not even remember how my oldest daughter look like! It be that long! How about butt, Daughter, it get smaller?
 
Inquires that allow me to appreciate my decision to approach all of this with a good sense of humor and fast typing fingers. Because you can damn well bet that I’m at least getting this shit down for blog fodder.
 
Like some mutated process of adaptation that never evolves completely, their phone calls incorporate a rationale that only achieves convincing a person - namely me - to want and do the exact opposite of whatever it is that rationale is intended to convince one to do.
 
Okay, maybe not make sense you come home every weekend. But at least once a month! Mr. Chang daughter come home once a month - you tell me Mr. Chang daughter love her father more than you?
 
Rational reasoning that’s always delivered with a healthy dose of guilt because they’re Asian immigrants and that’s the way Asian immigrants love their children. If your father from China or your mama from Vietnam never gave you or doesn’t continue to give you the kind of emotional shit that keeps you consistently trapped in a padded room of mental self-doubt, then I’m sorry to break the news to you but your parents don’t really love you.
 
When the compromises and the pleas and even the guilt fails to move me, my parents resort to bribery. But we cook you anything you want, they promise, and we not even make fun of you that you eat too much! We take you shopping - don’t you say you need new clothes for the work? How about Ipod or new laptop? We don’t give you car because remember when you have Jeep and you crash in high school parking lot? For you no car never! But Ipod maybe okay. 
 
Because it is, after all, my father. The same man who still likes to remind me of that time in first grade when I received a 4.5 on a scale of 5 in “School Spirit” on my end-of-the-year report card. When grades weren’t even bothered with because you were being measured on things like school spirit.
 
I know that once my father - that no-frills immigrant! - is verbalizing purchases of playful items like an Ipod, rather than, say, Madeline Albright’s latest book or a large and obtrusive piece of exercise equipment to go along with the treadmill he bought for me my freshman year to keep in my 12×15 dorm room, then we’re only moments away from my father dumping our entire family into the car and driving to Chicago.
 
And the only thing that would be more inopportune than me making the trip to Small Town, Michigan and finding myself in an arm-length radius from my father is for him and my entire family to come to Chicago, unwarned, and barge my apartment. That houses booze. And mess. And still shows boxes left semi-unpacked from when we moved in once upon a time ago in September.
 
The last time my father arrived in Chicago with little warning was two Octobers ago. Him, and the rest of my family, around 11p.m. on a Saturday night, at my apartment - that gorgeous Wicker Park 4-bedroom loft with stainless steel appliances and hardwood floors and a fire place and granite countertops with a place for bar stools. He sniffed a few times disapprovingly and made a comment about the pile of clothes in one corner of my bedroom. Reminded me that a clean room means a clean mind. Then, as my mother, two younger sisters and I giggled together and threw a bag of popcorn into the microwave as we got ready to watch Law and Order: SVU together, my father laid down on a couch and said, with a contemplative and calm smile, that he was ready to drive back to Michigan.
 
At one in the morning.
 
Rather than spend the night and drive back the next day.
 
Once I’m really ready to accept that I will be spending a string of days shaking like someone on their 14th day of a 21-day methadone rehab program, I give my parents the Yes, this weekend, I’ll come home, but you better deliver on that new laptop, knowing full well there will be no laptop. And I prepare myself to be pretty damn happy to be at home - fed, pampered, with access to a car and PARKING LOTS and MEIJER (it doesn’t take this city girl much to get excited) - all with the bated breath of someone who knows that the ball of gloom and doom that always drops will drop once more.
 
I make my trek today after work and I return on Monday. You? Can anticipate some great fucking stories. Hell, I’ll probably blog while I am at home, unable to suppress all! the! inspiration!
 
Just last night, right as my boyfriend and I were ready to fall asleep, I sat up with a start and yelled Shit! And when my boyfriend asked if everything was all right, I told him that I had just remembered that I would have to attend church on Sunday with my mother and sisters. And when he asked if that was really that bad, I shuddered. I thought of the swarms of mothers who have known me since I was little. Pinches of my cheeks between perfectly manicured fingernails and the exclamations that I get more and more beautiful whenever they see me but wait - is this some extra face fat for them to pinch on to? The shrill questions of when I plan to marry and mirthful comments that I’m not getting any younger.
 
No. Perhaps it’s not really that bad. However, while I don’t consider myself a very materialistic person, perhaps a new laptop and Ipod aren’t bad ideas. They’ll give something to preoccupy my hands when I feel the mood to gauge the eyeballs in my head with the metal chopsticks that can be found in any self-respecting Korean’s kitchen.
 
 
 
[You can find me and more of my literary abuses at Indie Blogger today. It's a site run by the fantastic, brilliant, and worthy-of-(intense)-idolatry Anastacia. If you haven't checked out IB yet, you must. And if you haven't submitted something, fucking do. Give Stacey the chance to spread your good word. In her name I demand. Amen. And look at that. Maybe I'm ready for church after all.]

This Post Is About My Chest March 19, 2008

Namely, some things I’d like to get off of it.
 
And not, say, my actual chest or the cyclist who nearly caused an accident near LaSalle and Monroe the other day when he decided to abruptly U-Turn amongst a stream of cars so to follow me as I walked the other direction — all while yodeling about my whoo-weee titty city.
 
(Ed. note: I was, for the record, wearing a winter jacket. And was not, say, topless. Which might warrant such yodels.)
 
Vermin like him - who at some point in their miserable existence have concluded that a hanging sack of testicles validate careless objectification of women - give me some idea of why Lorena did what she had to do.
 
And there. I’ve already started.
 
Getting things off my chest that is.
 
Because it’s been exactly ten days since my last post. Ten days. While one voice in my head tries to demand I take a chill pill, please, because ten days is not that long, another voice yells (by way of typing loudly) that there are things I WANT AND NEED TO WRITE DAMNIT.
 
My chest has been feeling mighty heavy lately. And it ain’t just due to the 34-D sweater cows whoo-weee my titty city.
 
So why not just shut up and put up? Write what I want to write and stop writing that I want to write?
 
Well.
 
After more than a week of having ideas buzz around my mind - of things I’d like to share and rant and coo - and not having a second to myself to write them down, the mess that already calls that space in between my ears home has quickly turned into one wild clusterfuck of ataxia.
 
Yes. It just may be more irritating to actually have things one would like to write and being completely unable to find the time to do so than having all the time in the world to write but not having a single thing to write about. (Note to the Gods: Feel free to have a laugh and declare Well, we’ll show her.)
 
The fun little tale explaining how my boyfriend’s and my one-bedroom apartment came to have our mattress on its living room floor and its bathroom door unhinged and hanging against a wall? Is sharing brain space with anecdotes about my mother and her recent barrage of phone calls that have covered every topic from whether I remembered to switch my microwave clock an hour forward to Mrs. Cho bragging for one full hour about daughter that student at U-M Dentist School who I know not smart as you but she get scholarship and Mrs. Cho not stop showing it during their last brunch.
 
And debaucherous accounts of my Leap Day activities - when I followed my own advice to practice hell on earth come February 29th because it’s a day that doesn’t technically exist 75% of Time which technically means you can do whatever you want and it doesn’t count and I’m sure if I had taken math classes in college, I’d have no trouble backing this theory with a very complicated math formula but since I did not, you’ll simply have to take my word? Those are confused with stories from a night a couple weekends ago that involved a private VIP room at Victor Hotel and me again proving that I am all time wing-woman able to amass the attention and phone numbers of hot girls everywhere.
 
Or at least those at Victor Hotel that night a couple weekends ago.
 
In my odd little way, I am a perfectionist. The girl who lets her apartment become a fucking sty but - when finally deciding to clean it up - starts by alphabetizing her books by author and organizing her magazines by chronology. The one who then makes sure all her hanging clothes face the same direction in the closet, preferably grouped by color. And scrubs every inch of the bathroom floor and tub and shower before moving on to the kitchen sink and the dishes and the oven.
 
On second thought, perhaps this has less to do with perfectionism and more to do with some kind of errant O.C.D. combined with my tendency to veer towards extremes.
 
In any case. The same (lack of) logic applies to this blog. There is that need to deconstruct from the foundations up and to do it all right in the face of so! many! thoughts! To clear the air - and my head - before starting afresh with stories of this and that. To give a home to the muddled thoughts clogging my fucked up cerebrum other than my fucked up cerebrum.
 
So one deep breath. And begin. About a friend. Who is causing enormous amounts of headaches, heartaches and outrages right now.
 
Of all the hundreds of faults I have, one of my very worst may be my inability to know when to no longer give someone just one more chance. It’s incredibly fucking difficult for me to walk away from someone that I’ve come to love and care about. I like to believe I know how much it hurts to feel like you can never be imperfect because the only love you know is based on conditions. My childhood drills made me run the other direction. To become far too non-judgmental. Yes, far too much. To give second, third, fourth, nth chances. To forgive and to forget. To not hold grudges. I may be all kinds of fucked up, but I have an idea of what it means to be a good person and a good friend. It doesn’t mean that I always am. But when I’m not, I own up. 
 
This friend has been less than that. Forgotten what it means to be honest and trustworthy. Or loyal. Forgotten how to place priorites. Or to take a much needed check of their actions. Not even destructive in some inspired trainwreck sort of way where the focus on oneself rather than hurting others. Were that the case, I’d have no right to preach. I’m not so hypocritical that I’d call out one of my own. 
 
No. This friend has mainly become one big reason I’m more a damsel in distress these days.
 
And my head is a mess - has been a mess - trying to figure out what to do about this friendship.
  
This friend gets away with a lot of the shit that they pull. We all let this friend get away with a lot of the shit that they pull - either victim to a genius who’s learned how to fool everyone into thinking they’re a saint when they’re actually a very corrupt, hateful and hurtful person. Or victim to a friend who is just that fucking delusional.
 
Once I trust you, I really trust you. Me and moderation aren’t words synonymous. And me and caution? Are for hell of fucking sure not either. If I love you, I love you fiercely. If I’m excited, I jump up, down, and sideways. And if I think you’re my friend, I give you no walls.
 
Because to me, the notion of soulmates is an idea best intended for friendships.
 
I protect myself when it comes to relationships with men. I like to play strong. It takes me long to let barriers break and come forward. Guys get to know me - really know me - only after they’ve passed some subconscious test of are you worth this and can you hold my interest for more than tonight, this week, this month? My shtick is that I’ll love you - just please don’t expect me to settle. 
 
But in friendships I play that role of ‘girl trapped in abusive relationship’ all too well. I create excuses for poor behavior. I open the door over and over again at the first apology or sign that things might be all right. I don’t listen to the advice everyone else sheds. Questions of How can you still friends with that person? They’re caustic! are met with my quick rushes to their defenses. I put up with a lot of shit I’d never take from any guy.
 
Because I’ve always liked people who have a taste for debauchery. Those that are of complex personalities but more or less good hearts. People, I suppose, that I consider similar to me.
 
And with debauchery can come chaos.
 
I guess in some ways it can be easy for me to come to the conclusion that it’s time to end a friendship once I reason that if I’m fed up - in light of all the fucking chances I give, all the shit I let slide - then this must be a pretty fucking bad situation. But breakups - particularly friendship breakups - can’t be that clean. Can’t be that mature. Can’t be a common agreement to move on and leave the other party at peace. People are hard to escape. Facebook, Gchat, gossip among mutual friends all make it impossible to cut people off entirely. You can go about blocking and you can ask those mutual friends to not mention the people in question to you any longer but all that tedious work just seems that. Tedious. And petty. Even dramatic.
 
It’s unneeded. Life throws you enough fucked up historonics without having to get them from your friendships. 
  
And now I have this current friend. Who is neither debaucherous or delightful or complex but pathetic. Weak sauce. I could go into details. A macabre list of all the wrongs. And it would turn into a very, very long list. There’s a part of me that wants to do it. To be hateful. To vent. To bitch. To point fingers. To scream and yell and have the whole world see the laundry list of shit I’ve dealt with for them and because of them.
 
But I know there’s no real good that can come from that. Not right now. When the hurt is this current. Maybe someday else. When I’ve gained enough distance so that there can at least be some kind of message with the tale - at least some humor or insight - rather than raw rage.
 
For now, just writing this much has helped my chest feel like it can return to just carrying its physical weight around.
 
Whoo-weee that titty city.

In My Fridge March 7, 2008

Is a chilled bottle of champagne sharing a shelf with 24 cans of Miller Lite and some retired milk.

It came “highly recommended”. Like almost every bottle of wine always seems to.

This champagne? It’s made with the same grapes used to produce Cristal, the wine guy at Pastoral sluiced. A French producer who only releases limited batches from this particular vineyard. A must try. It accompanies everything from goat cheese to fried chicken!

The shit about Cristal? Could mean less to me. I’m sure it’ll impress most. But the bit concerning fried chicken? Is what sold me.

Because Hi. I’m Damsel, and I’m a Fried Chickenoholic.

(You: Hi, Damsel.)

We bought the bottle last week. And we remembered to pick up the KFC before we got home. But then we passed out asleep after we attacked the bucket.

So now this bottle of bubbles has been sitting in the fridge - intact - for far too long. As have its shelfmates.

(Not that I’m too concerned about the milk.)

That busy my short term life has been.

But all that changes this weekend. The instant I escape this office and arrive home.

I’m fucking ready to play.

She Ain’t Heavy, She’s My Friend (A Guest Post) March 3, 2008

For some time now, I’d secretly been hoping the Damsel’s boyfriend would sweep her away on another spur of the moment vacation, leaving her to frantically figure out how she’d get out of work and what she would pack and what she would tell her parents when they called and heard surf/fiesta music/other festive background sounds that are clearly out of place in a Chicago winter.
 
My plan was to sit around on gchat, help brainstorm plausible excuses to tell her boss and use my expensive engineering degree to figure out the maximum number of shoes she could pack in a carry-on suitcase (advice that clearly would be ignored come packing time). Then, in the middle of the excitement… I’d say wait! I just thought of something! What about your blog, Damsel? What about your readers?? I’m just going to throw this out, but I’dbewillingtowriteforyouwhatdoyouthink???
  
Luckily for me, I didn’t have to wait until their next spontaneous voyage; the Damsel has asked me to write a reoccuring guest column. And just who am I, you ask? Why, I am Bess, to the Damsel’s Nancy Drew. I am the Dr. Phil to her Oprah, the pink wig to her Britney, the “hell yeah” to her “anyone need a second rum runner?”
  
However, due to illness (maybe it’s not a good idea to run outside of the bar for a cigarette without a coat? especially when it’s only eight degrees? even when it’s your birthday and you get to do whatever you want?), I have no cohesive plan for this. Nor do I really have a cohesive plan for this post, but I digress (sorry, I couldn’t resist). I figure I’ll just breeze in each month or so, rant about something, maybe answer some non-identity revealing questions you have about the Damsel, and then sneak back out until I get bored or something.
  
So in an attempt to both get to know each other a little better and exercise my self-indulgent tendencies (this is a blog after all), here are a few fun facts about me:
  
-I hate snakes more than anything but am FASCINATED by stories about snakes eating things when hilarity does not ensue (see http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23364108/).

-In high school, I received a medal for being the smartest girl in the county.

-In college, two girls and I drank an entire bottle of Everclear before going out for the night. This is my greatest/stupidest drinking achievement (I say achievement because none of us went to the hospital) and I’m pretty sure that killed whatever part of my brain made me the smartest girl in the county.

-I have an arch enemy.  He uses the same Red Line stop that I do. I’ve seen him eat an entire block of cheese in the morning for breakfast.  Sometimes the only thing that keeps me from pushing him onto the tracks is thinking about how late the subsequent train delay would make me for work.

-Sometimes I say hi and wave to dogs on the street.
  
The end!*

___________________________

*Remember in middle school and high school when teachers would force you to write a different kind of essay everyday? Because ”you’ll need to know the difference between expository and demonstrative writing when you get to college?” And your teacher would hand you back your essay with little notes in red ink saying “work on transitions?” Well, I don’t want to accuse them of lying (which, for the record, they were), but I didn’t need any of that once I got to college, and as such, I’m not so good at “conclusions” and the like.  So until I come up with a post summarizing my lab results or detailing my risk assessment, you’re probably going to have to put up with some awkward phrases.  Thanks in advance for your patience.