my father was giving me advice when he was not really talking to me,
just sort of mumbling randomly.
noticing that i was in the room said,
"if you don't swing, you never hit"
i just looked at him.
later he said,
"if you don't hit life will beat your ass".

my favorite tv quote is:
" we just spanked you, and sometimes we spanked you in the face."

i was talking to various gay men in a VH-1 "remember the --" format.
i was talking to ozzy and he told me something along the lines of:
" if you are the kind of person who doesn't know the difference between angela lansbury red and angela basset red... ay ay... el niño que es llorón y la mamá que lo pellizca... pfft"
to hoots and my own hearty laughter as if i were part of some inside joke or knowledgeable about some delicious snobbery.


its the first time that i have ever dreamed anyone speaking spanish.
if only it was appropriate.

i admit that i have been a lazy bitch and have done no new meaningful art work.
i feel like i have been busy fretting about the rent, le child, la escuela, mis amigos, and my dear pancho.

so getting back to art.
so there is this call for art called project masa.
i knew about it and it's deadline for almost 2 months and i blew it.

i tried to stay up tonight to make the work but it looks awful...
ugh i hate myself tonight.

i am technically 7 mins late for work.
i am blah and pretty much unapologetic about it all.
i should be fired but this job will more than likely be pried from either my cold dead fingers or else with my cold dead absence when i leave for graduate school.
oh... yay...ahem.

its been on my elitist mind about  all (and there really isn't that many) the awards and scholarships i have received because of my artwork. you know those "merit" based awards that  everyone (but me) says that they don't want but show up to the announcement ceremonies for the free food and drinks... yeah... but i absolutely care and i crave these things.

maybe its for validation. i wish i could say it was for the babes, sadly its not how these awards roll, instead i like to put my formal awards notifications on the fridge with various monster magnets and sometimes i scrawl little hearts on them just because they feel like they need to be pretty.

so i thought to myself..."self, what if you were not the kind of person who didn't get awards/scholarships/ and or prizes for your drawings and all the other mishmash that you seem to enjoy, would your art be less fun? less valid? less artful?"
would i make up excuses, would i rationalize these things? would i attempt to improve or understand better my own art and its relationship to people? would i give up?

yes and no.
i don't know.
i would like to think that i would try harder be more daring, use my envy (and yes all artist feel envy, anyone who says otherwise is probably an award winning fool such as myself who calls envy 'professional admiration') to distill all the important stuff from someone else's work in order to make mine better. 

now i am 30 mins late for work.
i know, i suck.

there is a woman who i do not much care for in the art program that i am in.
where i once thought her irritating for her myopic opinions and perspectives on art; and found her "gothik" paintings sadly cheesy..
a friend of mine related to me an anecdote that occurred recently:

apparently in one of the painting studios, there was a problem that maintenance  was sent to correct.
a workman entered the studio and seeing her  asked if she knew where or what the problem was.
my friend who was also in the studio said that this woman  answered him in a shitty snarky manner.
perhaps it is because of my working class roots, but really wtf?
my school is a somewhat largish university and probably sends out building engineers (i believe is what they are called) to any number of locations for any number of problems, but this rude shit expected him to be both omnipotent and psychic....
fuck her
fuck her and her snide mouth
fuck her soft, probably never worked an honest day in her life hands
fuck her crummy  paintings
and fuck her cooler than thou attitude.

thank collective forces behind the internet, it is one of the only things that keep me civil.

recent events have me rethinking about what it means to be politically liberal. i won't go into the nitty gritty of what got me going but i will mention that the event in question was in regards to a minutemen speaker named chris simcox.

in the aftermath of this "engagement" words like 'riot' and 'violent' were thrown around to describe the protesters who came out in minimal force to make their (our) dissent known. i assure you that the occasion was hardly riotous or violent, perhaps minorally unruly but not the irrational chaos i believe that those words are meant to convey.

despite the hyperbole, both conservative and liberal minded students declared "victory", when it struck me that both pretty much claimed the same idea: those other guys are both crazy and fucking stupid.

in all honesty i was caught up in it as well. i was flaming the boards on facebook (i know.. my adult cred has been completely shot) arguing with various people about immigration, the minutemen, and the local conservative student organization on campus. late in the game i realized, what is the point of all this? was there any? and how did it come to this, being outright mean and undercivilised when talking about these issues?

of course i was flamed back and my first reaction was to give my detractors a piece of my mind, but would i be doing anything besides stroking my own ego? i began thinking about my assumptions about these people and about why i wanted to stereotype them as badly as they me. most of the commentary was fairly unoriginal and by the book: " you liberals are always saying how open-minded you are.." , "if you care about these people so much why don't you go to mexico.." "you democrats are the real nazis" etc... i think you get the gist.

it also occured to me that i was arguing with people almost 10 years younger than me and if there is anything i realize as an older more reflective adult, is that 10 years ago i was obnoxious and a know-it-all. life of course with many servings of humiliations, challenges, and two lucks softened me up a bit as i think it does to most people.

i wish sometimes that i could gather all these people up in one room and just say, "hey let's agree that we all think the other guy is stupid, now what can we do that is smart? how do we find solutions that serve both our interests? where is the middle ground?" it would take dedication on both sides to avoid the acrimony we so seem to enjoy in these 'debates', but being both an optimist and a buddhist i believe it could be achieved. i envision a time when people tired of the friction and the hatefulness, decide to find a common ground, no better yet a common good; where winning is not as important as maintaining civility.

in my heart its the future i hope my child will be a part of...
some days i think it couldn't possibly happen: a child at one at one of the schools i taught had been verbally castigated by his mother because he used pink yarn for a necklace, i believe she said, " what did i tell you about using pink? do you want to be a joto?" (a joto, pronouced "HO-toh" is the equivalent of 'faggot' in spanish). he was 7 years old.

and there was the other day when another boy called my son a nigger.

my heart aches because of such ugliness but i hold onto hope. i grip it and i carry it and when i am lucky i dwell in it.

today my son asked me how i would feel if he were gay, i told him about the same way i felt about him being right-handed but that no matter what the eightfold path and the five precepts were the same for him, period.

i'm glad we had the talk, because i needed the reminder as well, to be kinder and respectful as a way of life, period.

pero yo quiero practicar cada dia o es que 'deseo practicar'?
no se, pero mis oraciones son elementales.
no hago nada en el trabajo.
que triste? no pienso que puedo hacer le.
aspiro mucho o es que chupo mucho.
me olivido a veces.

i think it took me all about 30 mins to write that out.
i have no idea if it is correct, i hope it is.

i am one of those people who prefers the one-eyed baghead jason voorhees over the hockey-mask jason voorhees. don't get me wrong a big guy in a mask carrying big ass knife is always a spooky sight but the baghead mask seems scarier. a part of it i think is that baghead jason makes me think of a cyclops, ancient man eating creatures of the primeval earth while hockey-mask jason makes me think jock.

a cyclops seems eerie and monsterous...a jock is just irritating and human, yet surprisingly tantalizing. jocks that is not jason.

i admit i like jocks.
mostly just to look at.
yeah to "look" at...

they cater to my three weaknesses in men:
virile strength
jerkiesque personalities
and an ability to kill cockroaches without regret

it's stupid i know, but i liken it to the intellectual guy who is mildly mortified at his attraction to pamela anderson. i mean there is nothing wrong with it in a great sense, but it seems so generic to say , 'i like tough, strong guys who will forget my birthday'.

i can stand inconsideration, maybe on some level i find it a bit charming but i have a laundry list of things i can not stand:
excessive profanity
liking pepsi
stupidity
being totally hairy
not liking cartoons or video games
voting republican
liking thomas kinkaide
open porn watching
having long hair
being unhelpful
going to titty bars more than once every 5 years
being a fuddy duddy
being a pussy
owning less than 100 books
having ever been in prison for anything other than being an eco-terrorist

a friend of mine has a habit of dating men who have been to prison. she defends the practice by saying that we have all done things that have meritted prison but have been lucky enough to have not been caught. she dismisses my 'no some people are dumb/unlucky/evil' theory with a wholehearted belief that my bias is somehow preventing me from finding the love of my life.

yeah fucking right.

generally, i do not believe in ghosts or their stories or their houses.
nothing against ghosts.
all those ghost powers seem pretty cool: making a hot room feel like winter, running around with chains and sad faces and tax forms and dire warnings and every so often a bloodlust.

i just don't believe it, none of it... nada and when i tell people this they look at me in a sad way, a sort of "just keep talking your shit and then we'll see."

once my friend angry at my ghost poking, insisted that i put a blank VHS tape in the middle of my living room and then listen to it the next day. she claimed i would hear the voices of the dead and she then wanted to see how i would feel then. i laughed in a haughty way that disbelievers do.

statistically:
one out of 5 people i know has a le chusa story.
one out of 10 people i know, know that you can drive away a le chusa with academic profanity.
one out of every person i know has heard a le chusa story, or of a nearby river with a walking wailing la llorona , or of a bar where a handsome man who dances with wayward women is chased out by an angry fearful mob, because of a poor choice of feet: one chicken and one goat.
but i have seldom heard of a credible haunting except those of the heart and in the cage of memory.

the collapse of the world may of begun when an alternative ending met its doom by a different choice. in this case as in all cases, medical and violin, dust overtakes the most prestigious of planes and what knowledge there was recedes back to the shadows of somiloquence. it is here in that cooler place, if one were to concentrate... a dim outline made of familiar shape begins and ends.

if i go anywhere i'd go to antarctica. i want to go where cold means business and come back to tell my friends every winter to their eternal consternation, "you call this cold? i know cold. triple digit cold, fucker, katabatic winds that pick up snow and sea and render gravity meaningless or more meaningful depending". whenever anyone marvels about the stars in texas, i want to say, "in antarctica, the sky is disturbingly clear. the only thing that separates you and the firmament is the mental image of (and you must believe) glass keeping the earth things in and the empyreal things out if only barely. in the winter the stars never set. they never rest. their ten-thousand year old light comes down like needles in the billows of auroras. the divinity of the sky could crush you like that".

every occasion deserves a bag. it all depends on what i am holding and what i am expecting. some carry paintboxes, others have condoms, and all (and i mean all) have both pens and tampons.

i'm a soldier like that.

my first memory was of korea.
not of living in korea but of leaving it.
in korea i had a nanny, who had grown to love me.
she was heart-broken when we left.
i do not remember her at all, to me she is like a mermaid,who loved so fiercely only to be forgotten... its an old story.

we were leaving.
i was in the plane and i wore white shiny shoes. i think i was in a dress or something that felt like a dress. i was looking out the window. the sky was grey and it looked cold outside. i saw a man on the ground waving a flashlight at us. he wore a dark army coat, dark army boots and had a dark army hat: it was my father. i began to cry. my father was waving good bye to me and i cried because we were leaving him. i pulled at my mother's sleeve. it was red. i threw my hands up and pleaded in korean, "help me".

my mother tried to give me apple juice and someone tried to give me a cookie and someone else jabbed a finger at my head.
i looked up to see my father, telling me "hey dummy, what are you crying about".
(this is correctly a rhetorical question)
he was sitting behind my mother and i.
i looked back outside and saw my 'father' outside.
i looked behind me and saw my father pissed.
i began drinking the apple juice choking on it and confused.
i think i took a nap.

i have too many blogs.
i have my moblog, the myspace blog, and this one.

the livejournal i abandoned for some reason, probably because i didn't think of it as being as friendly as the dreaded myspace...

but i think i will invest back into this one and close out the myspace one.

on another note:

yesterday's ugliness carried over to today.
i couldn't shake the feeling of humiliation off of me.
i also alienated some people with my unnecessarily brutal art critiques and i was feeling a bit of a jerk too.

luckily i found this quote from borges and i didn't feel quite so bad:
A writer -- and, I believe, generally all persons -- must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
--From "Twenty Conversations with Borges, Including a Selection of Poems: Interviews by Roberto Alifano, 1981-1983."

i feel like bitching but there are so many many many things to bitch about, it would be like word bulimia...not a pretty or productive thing.

fuck it.

today i realized that i really need to learn to shut the fuck up.
i wanted to do a nice thing for a stranger today and waited for an opportunity to present itself.
i saw this guy on the bus with a sketchbook and i asked to look at it.
it was mostly comic book art drawn with a disposable pen.
i decided to give him my prized faber castell pitt drawing pens but he told me no, that he had better pens at home.

ouch dissed.

i was walking home today when i saw that this new family had moved into this apartment down the street. i saw two small children playing out front. their mother was talking to them when i thought it a good idea to tell her about her neighbor:

First Name: WILLIAM
Middle Name: LLOYD
Last Name: SUTTON
11990002 Sexual Assault Child

and she looked at me like i just told her republicans lived next door.
i felt like an asshole.

dissed 2!

i went 75 cents over in my bank account and it is now going to cost me $45.
i'm closing that fucking acct....assholes.

dissed 3

blah blah

i have finally decided that LJ will be my writing bullshit when i should be working journal.

is it really that american to want to find a way to waste time at work?

i'm bored and i keep thinking that today should be important.
something about the date...hmm...

at any rate i need and want to improve my improv writing skills.
oooooh perhaps a moblog?

like anyone besides me finds me interesting...
except of course anthony martinez my faceless stalker...no no no i hate that word "stalker" at least for him. i never felt threatened by him so i would rather call him an "ardent admirer". he was interested in me for at least 9 years. i bet he thinks about me. i wonder if i will ever know what he looks like. i wonder if he is still hanging around me without me being aware of it?

hmm if only...

06.20.06

i pity the fool who don't stay in school

if there be a reader's digest laying about i usually hit 1 of 3 sections first:

humor in uniform
word power
and
all in a day's work

the new job requires me to wear three crummy shirts of three varying crummy colors, so the uniform thing is out....all the words i could think about for this job wouldn't be fit for print...so it leaves me only the last option.

my highlights:
kids are in an eternal struggle vying for my favor so that i may weild my adult authority in their favor. they will compliment me, hug me, even rationalize the 'whys' of their respective cases.
there is one boy in particular who obsessively draws 'pokemon' characters on every little bit of paper he can find. it is to the untrained eye that these look like the scribblings of a mad bird, only because he clutches them all day long into little wads of various sizes and colors. every once in awhile however, he wants to add another person's drawing to his 'portfolio'.
there is of course nothing wrong with this, it happens all the time, however one day this boy became upset because the drawing he wanted was already promised to someone else. in his defense, it was a pretty cool drawing: writhing dragons breathing flames with scales and talons.

the upset boy came to me teary and wanting some kind of justice.

me: "look billy, i know you are upset that you didn't get the drawing, but gilberto already promised the drawing to david, because david asked first. maybe you can ask gilberto nicely, he might draw another one for you.."

billy: "but MISSSSSS... i deserve THAT drawing, because i'm special..."

me: "billy, we are all special..."

billy: "no miss, i'm REALLY special... i have the longest tongue in class."

---

06.21.06

the details of my job are something like this:
6 schools
4 classes a day (occasionally 5)
6-27 students at a time
in a given week i average about 500 kids give or take 100

the vast majority are ok. when they are otherwise not whining or complaing, fighting or throwing the supplies, screaming or else just being kids.
there are a small number who have made it their personal mission to hate me they are usually my 'tweens 11-14. most of them i honestly believe are really just kids who have strong personalities with possible leadership potential who need just better more effective direction and then there are others like this one "punk rock" kid who i would like nothing better than to see at a show get bitch slapped for being both an asshole and a poseur.

my biggest problems have actually been with the staff.
kids at their very heart are the same. while it is true i teach at inner city schools (westside) i still believe that my problems i.e. the general unruliness of the students have been a lack of leadership or organization on part of the adults who are responsible for watching them. when the schools who have the kids organized with both clear expectations and rules, everyone seems happier.
the problem of unclear rules is fairly prevalent and is shared by my other co-workers to varying degrees, the worst of which came about last week with one actually walking out of a school, but not before she told the kids and the staff off.

i felt her pain.

apparently because of that incident and the other complaints, including my own every site had to sign a letter promising to keep a staff member at all times any time the teachers were there. while i felt some minor resentment at one of my sites, there was a huge difference for the better.

one of the first things i was warned about from my co-workers was not to trust the site facilitators. they are basically the people who actually watch the kids and organize their activities. the site facilitators can and will turn on you apparently on whim. luckily i haven't brunt any of their open ill will, but i have reported some of them in for various things such as:

*abondoning me with their classes, while they went to make phone calls
*seeing a 14 year old boy "flirting" with two 8 year old girls
*over-hearing them tell kids things like " johnny you're drawing that all wrong. that doesn't even look like _ _ _ _"
*watching a facilitator openly humiliate a child for pissing on himself in front of all the other kids and staff.
*general apathy
*screaming at the kids
*etc.

yeah and i have only been working for 3 weeks.

---

06.06

thursday is a mixture of both elation and dread for me.
it is the day when i visit my favorite of site schools and also my most hateful.
my thursday morning is spent with best kids in the world. they are enthusiastic (or at least are polite enough to pretend to be), creative, loving and cheeky enough to be entertaining. these kids practically fight to see who will be my 'helpers'...a loose clean up crew with no reward other than my charming company. the staff at this site are especially gracious. they are paragon of what i hope every site is: warm, friendly and above it all professional. i love this school. i have often worked through half my lunch just to extend their art time...for free.

then comes my lunch and i have approximately about 45 mins of think-time to convince myself why i should not quit this fucking job. my afternoon school is the universal opposite of my morning school. the kids there act like 24-karat assholes: rude, profane, disrespectful and destructive. there are a good portion of them who i classify as being 'unconsciously malevolent', and an even smaller portion that i dare call 'prison-bound', because the mindset that they operate on... the world they live in is devoid of charity, gratitude and a general sense of civility.
those things are after all the 'gayest' qualities in the world.

everyday with them gets progressively worse but for as appalled as i have been with them, i completely and utterly blame the adult workers at the site. it is the staff's duty to underscore and enforce the expectations of a decent society on these kids.

whenever i have told people about this particular site, it is always met with a wince and a "oooh damn", but the most disturbing response i have gotten have been the people whose only solution to anything that i have told them is "that is what happens when you take the paddle out of the schools".
ok...wait...
do you honestly believe that these kids are completely unfamiliar with the concept of physical violence?

schools are a representative of society's intellectual ideals. Insomuch as families are representatives of societys emotional values and friendships of the extent of a societys civility; however, it seems too apparent that both family life and social life are tenuous experiences for many of these children and the only solution people can tell me is that these kids deserve a beating? I can see why these kids have no respect for adults. Why would they? As an adults working in concert our level of thinking is suppose to be higher, more sophisticated, further-reaching but we act worse. We act like them only to call our misguided behaviors better or reasonable or necessary. This is the kind of thinking I would like to believe is going on with adults who promote changla-modification. They have an all good intentions, just a short sightedness to a bigger picture, especially when such an immediate answer like spanking is available.


so the kids they think i'm a jerk and that is ok.
i gig them on everything.
every profane word. every half profanity. ojo. mala cabesas. any and all fuck ups.

i wish i could tell them a story.
it involves my father when he went to fox tech in the 50's.
my father graduated last in his graduating class, but given the circumstances i am surprised that he finished.
he was in an english class and needed help with an essay.
when he approached his teacher about it, she turned to him and said,
"i don't give a shit what you mexicans do".

i think of that story when i see people laugh off the bad behavior of children.

Especially poor kids, especially kids who people write off anyhow because those kids are somehow compromised since birth by class, race, creed, etc.

Fuck that.

apparently it weighed on my mind too heavily and rather than allowing me to see the world in good guy/bad guy terms karma moved in mysterious ways.

Normally I avoid the other staff with a cold professional distance, but today one of them injured herself and as such I was conscripted to do some of her tasks. I was also sick and in no mood for fighting so I resolved to be as pleasant as possible without being utterly superficial. Eventually the staff warmed up to me and began talking to me about the kids. Their frustrations with the kids actions and also with the parents attitudes. The site leader told me about how the current group of 6, 7, and 8 year olds were very sexual verbally. She told me about a 7 year old boy who was expelled out of the program early because of this language, when after several warnings suggested to a 6 year old girl that she should

suck his dick. I listen to them and thought about how perhaps I had been too harsh in my assessment, perhaps I was too damning about this job as well.



In all honesty I have never worked the same day twice in this job. In between the whining, the knife threats, the fire alarms, the racism, the chaos and the confusion I met some extraordinary kids which makes me wonder how so many people become so ordinary?

i was sitting in the McDonalds party room trying to remain inconspicuous.
my friend's sister was having her daughter's 2nd birthday there and needed people to come hence i was invited with le kid. le kid was complete uninterested in hanging out with 2 year old girl and found some other boys to play swords with on the sea of pinkeye they call ronald's playground.

i was sitting there minding my own business when a youngish woman came in with a car seat. she set it down next to me and quickly became the center of attention as that her baby was only 5 days old. normally i am a fan enough of babies to at least fake a curiousity about them, but with newborns i feel a hazy aversion. she was yakking away talking about the birth and all the little details that make that day unforgettable, when i heard something about "toes".

the baby was about 20 inches from my line of sight when her mother pulled the sock off and a little part of me turned gooey inside.
the baby had 6 toes on her left foot.

my eyes had widen in horror just seeing the toe but they practically fell out when the baby's mother began to fondle said extra toe,
"oh the doctors said that it was quite common and that she would have it removed when she turned 6 months. i think its sort of cute. look its all there..its a totally other toe with nail, but it has no bones..."

gross.
what is wrong with you that you would bring something like that up in front of strangers? i wanted to crawl the walls to get away from this polydactylyed child. i excused myself for a cigarette and did a 'yuck yuck oh my god yuck' shiver and tongue stick-out when i got outside.

i suppose a tail could of been worse.

when i was a kid my mother use to tell stories about tigers. she told my sister and i when she was our age, she had gone to the mountains with some other friends. an older girl motioned for them to be quiet and when they looked up a tiger was staring at them. the older girl instructed all of them to walk away slowly, but one girl too terrified to listen ran away and the others followed.
my mother said the tiger wouldn't have hurt them, he was after all smiling at them.

a friend told me about how his father hunted tigers as a young man in Pakistan. tigers were feared and contemptible man-eaters who needed to be hunted out of existence.

i thought this was funny how divergent these ideas of the same animal were. my mother thought of tigers as powerful benevolent supernatural beings of the mountains while his father thought of them as murderous cruel monsters.

maybe both we were right.

the kids at my 'bad' school seem to have an uncanny knack for courting my ire.

lately they have been singing 'chinky'-songs when i am around.
now, granted the westside mexicano is not known as the most cultured individual in san antonio, but rude is rude. the amount of open asian bashing is always a shock to me. it would be one thing if asians were a large enough minority to compete with them economically or socially, but i have serious doubts that before myself the only other asians they had ever met or seen was at the local chinese buffet or maybe that sikh family on guadalupe.

many times before i had already warned the kids about the use of racist or bigoted language, songs, and or comments. most however do not get it.
why would they?

apparently its only racism if it is overtly harmful or intolerant.
i found this out the other day when talking to a friend about my distaste with the san antonio roller girls team: the dragon divas. it is my firm belief that the dragon divas are caricatures of asian women. most of their imagery is drawn heavily from two stereotypes of asian women: the dragon lady and the china doll, and as such are no different from yellow-faced minstrels on wheels. Any cartoon of people only serves to dehumanize, humiliate and degrade those people as people.

My friend listened to me and said, "but Im sure they dont mean to be harmful. In fact I am sure they do it out of admiration."

Yeah

A groups of boys were pulling their eyelids back and taunting one another with ching chong ding dong as we walked from one building to another.

I fixed them with my skanty-slitty eye and I stopped them all to ask,

"okay are you all doing this because I'm asian? You have been doing this practically everyday that I have come here and I don't appreciate it. Its mean, ugly and rude."

Everyone had gone quiet until one boy asked, YOU'RE asian, miss?

i hate lj.
i'm so boring.

i hate the summer by the way it drags. i no longer remember what day it is or what time i should be asleep, only because it all seems so pointless.

great.
its just great.