A Holiday Poole

Because Christmas means something different to everyone...

Pink Please

Apparently, a group of neuroscientists at Newcastle University have completed a study confirming that boys like blue and girls like pink. And this is because during human evolution, pink represented the color of ripe fruit that as gatherers women generally did while the men were away hunting. I thought about writing a rebuttal. I thought about writing how flawed a study is for attempting to prove the existence of a biological basis for color preferences between sexes when only adults between the age of 20 and 26 were used. I thought about pointing out how these evolutionary psychology studies get away with such circular logic that says, “Our behavior today is innate because it was our behavior before; and it was our behavior before because we say it is today.” I considered writing about the 3 year old boy I knew who loved pink to the dismay of his father and thus had to (re)learn how to love blue. I considered all these things, but thought that it would be a waste of time. Instead, I think I'll post an excerpt to a book I have been working on for nearly 7 years...now that I proudly call myself a pink.marigold:

...When I was a girl my favorite color was pink. I don’t know why or how, but everything I owned had to be covered with the stuff. My bedspread was pink, my clothes, my school supplies. My pink markers, frayed at the tip, always ran out first. Oh, I was proud of that color. I was proud of being a girl. All the other girls in my class liked blue or purple. But not me. I stood by pink. Pink was girly, the most wonderful thing to be.

Then one year suddenly I hated it, detested it with every inch of my being. If I saw the color I made gagging noises. All pastels, relatives to the pink monster, became abhorrent taboos as well. I even hid my pink bedspread and replaced it with navy blue, wondered what on earth possessed me to buy pink bed covering in the first place. Pink was girly. Pink was for losers.

I carried this with me all the way through college.

Then I came to Japan for my junior year abroad. And everything was in pastels. I went about gagging at everything I saw. Everything looked like my bedroom at age ten. Everything was pink. Japanese folk don’t have this American aversion to cuteness. So it wasn’t unusual to find young men wearing pink clothing. Buildings were pink. Bulldozers were pastels. Men and women lugged pink suitcases while talking on pink cell phones and passing by stores selling pink comic books. I can’t describe the emotions I went through as I cursed my surroundings. I can’t explain the anxiety that fell over me when I entered department stores filled with pastel electronics, an oxymoron for certain. I left Japan still not fully understanding it, thinking Japanese people were somehow lacking in maturity. They were too girly to be adults.

Well the second time I came to Japan, the instant the plane landed and I felt myself transformed into that childhood bedroom, the sense of peace I felt as a girlchild came back. Not like before when the onset of those ungrasped girlhood feelings became anxiety provoking. This time I understood them. I understood how my man-member monolatry buried the girl in me.

I could even bring myself to buy pastels and to look at them with a sense of calm, that is, all accept pink. For months I would sit and stare at pink in fear, trying to remember what it was like to adore the shade. But I could not remember. I saw a pink chair and I looked desperately for a blue one before I reluctantly sat down. It was as if by sitting on the chair, all of the attributes associated with pink, weakness, vulnerability, naivety, would attach itself to me and be naked for all others to see. I would buy cleaning supplies and notice myself using the box’s color, not the price as the discerning factor. A weak-colored bottle of detergent couldn’t possibly be strong enough to get the stains out. No pink supplies enter my shopping basket. From hangers to notebooks, while all around me, pink seemed to elude me.

How could a color I once loved so dearly, wore so pridefully impress upon me as an adult something to detest and fear? The question is not one of those mysteries in life that we commonly shrug off as inexplicable. The answer is in the phrases, “You da man!” and its complimentary “You go! Girl,” whose nuances bespeak the valued condition by just being in one and the command that one catch up imbedded in the other. The answer is while I could embrace the pastels and soft hues that embodied the safe world of formative years, years of phallocentric inculcation personified in the single aversion to the color pink was harder to overcome than with just one’s sheer will to resist...

Anecdotes aside, I understand that these studies like the one done at Newcastle are more about getting continued funding for further research than anything else. But if nothing else, haven't we evolved enough yet to know that not everything is black or white or in this case pink or blue?

Streams of Consciousness: A Postmodern Tirade on “This Woman’s Work”

Well now I know why I like the song “This Woman’s Work” so much. It’s a remake of an 80’s tune from a British singer named Kate Bush. I heard it while reluctantly watching the John Hughes film “She’s Having a Baby”. As soon as I heard and recognized the opening lines, I rushed to my computer to find its author. After downloading it, I listened a number of times and then suddenly it became clear, as I will attempt to elucidate, that this song hauntingly laments about the longing to be one, while tacitly revealing that we already are.

(WARNING: Proceed with caution, as contents may cause confusion.)

Here is a song about a woman imitating a man trying to empathize with the woman who is giving birth to their child. And Maxwell, covering the song, is imitating a woman imitating a man trying to empathize with the woman who is giving birth to their child. And I, a woman, am identifying with this man imitating a woman imitating a man empathizing with the woman giving birth to their child. Still there?

Of course, conveyed in the film, there is an even deeper meaning, or superficial one as it would be, almost mystical in its ability to capture that indescribable moment when, at the birth of a child, everything, it all makes sense. Childless, I can only romanticize what that might be like. But this much seemed to epitomize my place in the whole mess, what we, so awkwardly term “this generation”, finds itself doing again and again—unable to either eliminate or stop trying to eliminate its boundaries through an enigmatic process of unending self-imitation.

It does nothing to less complicate matters that Maxwell is a black man imitating a white woman. It fits quite nicely in what black-and-white has always been, especially in this country, a two-sided truth that can neither be fused nor separated. No matter how hard black tries to imitate white, or white black, the essence of difference is never eliminated, while, at the same time, also never stripped from one another as it uses itself symbiotically to devise meaning. That is, no one can ever know what white is without knowing what black is, and vice versa. So the pain of difference can never be eliminated even as this pain motivates us to desire its elimination.

The closest any modern cultural icon has ever come to eliminating the cleave between black men and white women without clearly representing one or the other has been Michael Jackson. And we all know the wrath this attempt has ensued. What other ostensibly benign figure has been the subject of such contempt outside of Jesus? I can hear the offended gasps now.

Truthfully, something bothers us about dissolving difference; it’s interpreted as dissolving oneself, ethereally of course, even as attempting to do so seduces us. Who would deny that they all had a crush on RuPaul, who bell hooks once described as a big black man trying to become a little white woman. It was an exciting show, an intercourse that climaxed and pulled out back into this reactionary Dubbya period.

So I give up. I fold. Pushing against the residual manifestations of our desires, in this case the desire to erase otherness necessitating the existence of others, has left me both frustrated and weary, especially now that I realize that an idea can never be demanifested or destroyed, only a withdrawal of our attention to it. Moreover, I digress. In the simplest terms and without the guilt, I like the song “This Woman’s Work” because, another example of life imitating art, imitating art, imitating life, imitating art until we forget where it all began, it reminds us that we are all one…thought. The rest has already been said. I’m satisfied, for now…

Good Manifestations II: Mom’s Manifestation

As usual, I was watching a film—this time it was Something New—and I had one of those a-ha moments, this time, with respect to my mother.

As a side note: it has taken me most of my life to realize that I was born to my mother, not out of some cosmic joke, but in large part because of the questions she was asking the universe to answer. For some reason or another, she was not in the place to receive the answers directly. Nonetheless, she kept asking, desiring. Hence, I was born. I grew up answering those questions, quite easily it seems, because I didn't desire them as much as she did. So in the spirit of tradition, I offer this piece…

Metaphysicists say that through living our lives, which naturally cultivate desires in us, we create and cause universal expansion. In other words, just the desires themselves manifest expansion and change. The catch is that we ourselves have to catch up with that expansion in order to personally take advantage of it; otherwise, while it most definitely will serve humanity potentially and the universe immediately, it will not necessarily be enjoyed by you individually, that is, within the lifetime of your focused ego. But if you catch up with the expansion, the equivalent of believing and knowing that, as an extension of the expanding universe, you already have what you want, then within your lifetime, immediately as you believe, as soon as you come to speed with the desire, you will experience it—its essence will manifest.

What does it mean to know and believe you have something that is not in that very moment present in your reality? It means being excited, happy, anticipatory—it's going to sleep Christmas Eve, knowing that Santa's coming with your presents.

Incidentally, there's a reason why we have this Christmas ritual in our culture. It reminds adults of the reason for our existence—getting stuff we want. Even though children are eventually told that Santa Claus is really just their parents—a traumatic rite-of-passage which serves only to foster permanent dependence on our parents for the things we desire—in actuality, the only real lie we are told is that Santa Claus doesn't exist. The same as saying God, source, the universe—whatever name one chooses for the infinite intelligence of which we are all a part and which creates all things—doesn't exist, so doing is the reason why hearing the lie, or more accurately, believing it hurts so much as children who are so much closer to their god-self to begin with. Along that line of reasoning, any attempt to disprove the existence of “God” is an attempt to perform suicide. The good news is neither is really possible.

So what the Secret and the whole LOA gang are getting at with all this "get happy" nonsense that seems to irritate the permanently pessimistic is really self-empowerment. In order to enjoy in this dimension, in this lifetime all of the goodies we have subconsciously been creating all this time, we need to wake up out of this self-loathing trance we have been under and get happy because, simply put, happiness is the key to self-empowerment…and not, as the time-old misconception teaches, the other way around.

Which brings me back to the first teacher of time-old misconceptions—mother. Mine has been writing, imagining a story for the last 30 years. It’s the story of a black woman and a white man. It’s the story of interracial love. As I mentioned earlier, I was watching this film “Something New” the other day, and something dawned on me. It dawned on me that this is the story my mother envisioned! So you think, “Yeah, well, so what? That’s not hard to imagine.” But even bolder than that, I assert that she created the story. She may not have been in the place to receive it into her own reality (i.e. get credit for it), but there it was. And aspects of the film so closely mirrored my mother’s life that I am sure the universe were putting up neon signs to prove it. The amusing little coincidence that the place the main character took her daily walk is the exact same place my mother takes her daily walks, for instance. It just goes to show how, like a baby discovering its own hand for the first time, discovering our ability to manifest, a higher level of the same self-realization process, is meant to be amusing.

“Time to bring the runway to the beach”: Bathroom Modeling Gone Reality TV

Since I don't shop and do bathroom modeling here (the clothes in Korea just aren't doing it for me) I have somehow attracted this program called Project Runway from Bravo, a reality show something like America's Top Model but intelligent focusing on fashion designers.

When I watched Uli’s collection an image unfolded of a woman, ultimately the dream of every hard-working woman I know, lounging on a tropical beach daydreaming. She looked out at her surroundings and wondered what it would be like to be on an African jungle safari. She gazed at the vast sand around her, whose color and texture is embodied in these nude color garments.


Glimpses of tiger teeth or claw-like shells peered out of the sand.She studied the ridges of the palm trees and saw the stripes of a white tiger. She looked out at the sea and sky and imagined it were an African sky. (Notice this is the first African American model she uses.) Then comes the sun and like a woman proudly radiating her beauty we see the first swimsuit whose rays vibrate into animal stripes. The sun begins to set and there is a violet sky as smooth and dark as a cougar. (Again, her model chose is perfect.) Back to a tiger-like bark dress (It is this erratic color jump that most annoyed the judges)
for a final transition to the green leaves of a palm tree where the woman dives into the lush jungle, swallowing both her and our imagination. It was a dream within a dream within a dream, the metaphor of our existence.

And the winner is…

I have watched the entire 3^rd season now and though my heart feels heavy, I understand why the judges chose Jeffery instead of Uli, for the same reason that co-host Tim Gunn and Harvard professors use SAT words, because the rest of "us" don't. What makes the elite of any community, art, intellectual or otherwise is their ability to separate themselves from the masses. When the message seems too clear, too commercial the elite apparently feel less special and potentially obsolete—the masses themselves trusting their own opinion, not the elite’s means someone’s out of a job or at least perceives themselves to be.

This is an intellectual attitude that I do not really agree with, especially when the message the masses are embracing is that of such beauty and positive uplift. The peace movement and the record-breaking numbers of people choosing peace over war despite its rejection by government regimes is an emblem for which I speak.

Jeffery had a perspective that only he really understood. I know a thing or two about the Japanese esthetic from which Jeffery was inspired. It has lot to do with pathology (perfect for his roller-coaster drug past). In literature they even have a special word for it, 物の哀れ mono no aware or "the pathos of things." But based on PR’s judge comments, Jeffery could have talked about the aesthetic of concrete for all they knew.

It was this that the judges respected; it was this—dark, complicated, perplexing—that qualified him for elite fashion design status. It’s the emperor has no clothes meets high fashion.

Uli, on the other hand, appeared too humble for the judges, too transparently easy. Her simple but evocative message was so obvious that it irritated the judges who constantly mocked her. They mocked her for being inspired by nature. She lived in Miami and designed what she saw, a story far too juvenile, and for her to be an uneducated immigrant from East Germany, also a story that had already been told. Certainly the New York bias, where the fashion industry is based, influenced the judges’ decision. Attitude over ease; conflict over carefree(dom). Why be inspired by trees and sand when there are sky scrapers and other people’s art to model your stuff after.

Ultimately, what I have learned from Project Runway is that high fashion feels as much for a woman as an artist feels for a canvas—she is nothing more than a tool for expressing his perspective, or more crudely, his existentialist angst (Jeffery ’s collection). Because I appreciate art I can understand these clothes as illustrations of the extent to which we “humans” fool ourselves into believing we are disjointed and broken. It makes my choice, the celebration of creation’s connective cord through a woman, for a woman, by a woman (Uli’s collection), all the more clear.

Good Manifestations I: The "Height" of Awareness

We manifest what we think about. And what we think about most regularly involves what we see. So all the television watching, and Americans watch an average of 28 hours of it, is molding our manifestations in ways we are thoroughly unaware. This, in a nutshell, describes my reality, until fairly recently when the "unawareness" became no longer part of the equation.

In my post-adolescent years, Ally McBeal was the show. It’s what I watched most regularly after college. Even when homeless, every Monday night I laughed hysterically in the library media center where I watched Ally and gang under enclosed headsets. While working in Japan, not only had I the latest episodes sent to me, I taped and studied the older episodes being broadcast in Japanese. Then, when studying in Korea, after four years of hardly any television watching at all, I downloaded the entire third and fourth season, this time out of curiosity. There was something going on and I was going to get to the bottom of it.

The meaning, the intention?--The lightning bolts would not flash until viewing these photos I snapped yesterday.


















From the tall heights of a family friend’s hotel bedroom window, I had finally manifested the aerial sequence shots of Boston that characterize every episode of Ally McBeal! Was it not enough that I lived in Boston (more like Cambridge) and was surrounded every day by lawyers (more like law students)? Was I recreating the show visually, too? This Ally McBeal/law theme was getting out of hand, now starting to look like a giant billboard for the theatrical release of "The Law of Attraction" soon to be played at a human consciousness near you. But more to the tangible point, I was becoming more and more aware of the power to intentionally manifest my reality. See, I had asked "the gods" for the experience of seeing these aerial views of Boston (which are quite beautiful) and that I had no idea how I was going on to see. A. I do not have a helicopter and, B. hot air balloon riding still seems unrealistic. Naturally, I had forgotten about this desire until looking at these pictures. Presto-changeo. Wish granted. I’m satisfied, for now…

Bathroom Etiquette 101: Ch. 1 Sané Steps

It may have become evident by now that I enjoy bathrooms. Besides being a great place to do bathroom modeling, it is also a fine spot to do some meditating. Just pick a note and harmonize with the electric noise buzzing from the walls. However, what I do not like is trying to put the sanitary seats on toilets while doing the pee-pee dance. I clumsily rip the upside-down head from the tissue and place it carefully on the seat. The head falls into the bowl and by the time I get my bloomers down the entire sani* has sunk into the bowl. Hopefully I have caught myself before my bare cheeks reach the cold porcelain. But you can never be too sure while doing the pee-pee dance. One day I decided to rip only the top piece from the sani. And it worked perfectly. Why haven't I been told this before? Of all my years of existence, never was I taught the appropriate way to cover my seat! So today I will give a step-by-step instruction on how to cover a public toilet.

1. Locate the sanitary seats usually affixed to the adjacent wall.














2. Grasp one sani.














3. Gently pull the tissue upwards. CAUTION: Excessively eager pulling (generally done during the pee-dance) may cause tissue paper to tear.














4. Locate the bottom of the upside-down-head cut-out.



















5. Carefully tear the connecting tissue ONLY at the bottom.














6. Place the sani on top of the toilet seat.














7. Repeat steps 1 through 6 until the desired level of seat protection is reached.
8. Sit on the seat and proceed as normal.

Lessons for future blogs: "alternative bathrooms" and "stocking up on supplies".

*Sani hygienic toilet seat cover made of tissue; also called sanitary seat or sani-seat

Sac o' Potatoes

How conflicted I am. I have wanted this dress from Victoria Secrets for over a year. It was originally $88. And I got it for far less than that. But I think that I look like a potato sack.

Bathroom Modeling

Now that I have a digital camera, taking pictures just 'cause I got the urge is a little too easy. So I took up a new hobby called "bathroom modeling". There are no full length mirrors in my dormroom, so I have to scurry into the bathroom, check to see if there is anyone in the shower or stalls, and snap some pictures in the mirror. It's actually harder than it looks. The combination of balancing the camera at the right angle, lighting and posing takes coordination and patience. This should become a recognized art form years to come.

Christmas 2006 (Before going out to see Dreamgirls)

Returning from Dreamgirls

I was quite proud of the level of focus the morning after

December 28, 2006 Balancing my MEIZU MP3 PLAYER. (Unfortunately it broke and I had to take that bad boy back.)