Good day, sunshine!

I have two more weeks of school. Three more presentations to make. Three more final papers to write. One evaluation to complete. At the moment I should be completing a peer review. But the end is in sight and I can't resist a taste of freedom. Today, the sun finally showed its face and evaporated the damper of a winter of rain. One of my friends had a birthday party, a bar-b-que with tofurkey sausages and a chocolate fountain. We ate. We talked. We laughed. We played ping-pong (you know you are having a good day when you get to play ping pong). And it was good, this taste of summer.

This is what my summer will be: a casting off of responsibility, if only for a shortwhile. I've decided not to continue working at my current researcher position. I'm not going to take Chinese class as I had intended. I am going to do 3 things:
- Take a camping trip to Glacier National Park in Montana;
- Go home to Houston, buy a car, and do a half-national road trip back to California;
- And...go to Peru, Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico!

It is heedless of professional responsibilities, fiscally impractical, but one taste of summer is not enough. I want to eat the whole pie! I will learn to be responsible again in August. Promise.

Berkeley: a paralysis of good intentions?

I attend a conference on the future of Asian American studies--yes, another conference!--yesterday, and my mind and heart ate well on workshops speeches that enaged the experience and future of Asian and Pacific Islanders. The conference itself was about the bleak outlook of Asian American Studies at Berkeley, where enrollment is flagging, despite its origins in the 70s during hard-fought-for struggles among students for Ethnic Studies programs. I got to attend workshops about Pacific Islanders and the conflict around their inclusion and exclusion from the label "API." Another workshop was about the domestic violence: its expression in Asian famililies and the services provided for them. (As a testament to the degree that API don't want to deal with DV, I was the only attendee at this workshop aside from conference volunteers.) The final workshop I attended was a panel of Korean adoptees talking about experiences growing up and the bumpy roads along their development of their racial identities. I can hardly imagine my own conflict over what it means to be Chinese/Asian American had it been overlayed with no understanding or connection to the culture for which I was ridiculed by classmates. These syposiums and conferences, that expose me to the conversations and revolutions happening outside the School of Social Welfare, give me the social and cultural consciousness to continue as a social worker.
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A glimpse of Berkeley! I walking with a friend down Shattuck when a well-dressed, middle-aged man racing down the street past us. Behind, we heard a homeless man yelling at the top of his lungs, "HEY!" We thought, maybe someone had offended someone, but the homeless man kept yelling, saying, "HEY! YOU DROPPED YOUR CELL PHONE!" And the well-dressed man kept sprinting away, not paying any mind to the calls for his attention. The homeless guy was getting understandably frustrated, saying, "Well, I guess you don't want it that bad. Maybe I should throw it in the street." I was finally able to flag the well-dressed man and ask him if he was missing his cell phone. Only then did he acknowledge the homeless gentleman waving a phone in the air, who chided the upper middle class for "not taking the time to f*ching listen." I have to say that I agree. This is Berkeley: the upper class streamlining the streets, the locals maintaining the town's integrity not without a chip on its shoulder. Our local, celebrity writer Michael Chabon says it well in his blog essay. I don't know if I agree with the enraptured abandon he has for B-town, but his descriptions of the setting, the people, and the atmosphere are dead on.

Yummy yummy yummy, I've got love in my tummy!

Tonght I saw two documentaries by filmmaker Kim Longinotto: Dream Girls and The Good Wife of Tokyo, brief glimpses in the lives of Japanese women. Dream Girls follows performers of the Takarazuka Revue and students at the Takarazuka school where girls learn to dance and sing to become temporary performance stars. The dances choose between playing women or men, the male performers being allowed freedom and authority for their brief time in Takarazuka. But most women eventually give up their careers and education to follow their cultural calling to be married by age 25.

The Good Wife of Tokyo was a look at a Japanese performance artist's mother, who find exigency and purpose as a woman through her role as a spiritual leader for a religion called the House of Development. Begun as a melding of Shintoism, Buddhism, and Christianity, the House of Development has come to serve mostly middle-aged women as a support group for them. The have face conflict over their societal obligations to their husbands and mothers-in-law and their desires to have freedom and be independent. It made a nice follow-up to the previous film, to see the result of women’s following the ideals of Japanese society and finding methods for coping. I feel so sorry for the women, living their lives always in the shadow of their potential, but in the context of their culture they are successful. Ai.

But the daughter, the performing artist, is in a band called Frank Chicken, which is composed of 3 women total. They sing and dance in early 90s fashion, in costumes to match. They sang Yummy, Yummy, Yummy, I Got Love in My Tummy with huge fanny-pack sized lips pasted on their stomachs. They also sang a song about the Rockefeller building, where the ghost of Rockefeller visits his building and sees that it is owned by Japanese business men. He mistakes them for Native Americans and wonders how they came to own his building when they were conquered.

Conferences: Motivating versus Discouraging Crossroads of Information

Last Thursday I attended a symposium on overturning Proposition 209, a proposition that eliminated affirmative action in California, and was stirred with the boldface calls to action. I heard lawyers, professors, and community activists explain litigative and theoretical approaches for taking down a racist initiative that has had real detrimental effects for minority businesses and educational opportunities. They spoke of the problems that disrupted unity among the ACLU when Prop 209 first passed and the lessons they have since learned. For 2008! During the next presidential election there is hope for change! We can win it – panelists and speakers spoke with passion and fervor for social justice and did not shy away from decrying racist policies and practices.

My feelings of energy and activism were not soon after doused by a conference for Title IV-E students, future CPS workers. I sat through a series of monotone speeches about the problems that plagued a failed system we were soon to join as child welfare workers. The disruptive life that we would soon be compelled to offer to foster children. The disregard for siblings and families that we would soon be powerless to prevent. We heard from foster kids who recounted their experiences, prompted by a moderator who asked them to tell their life stories to a room full of future social workers, the sometimes bad guys of those stories. Our future is cast in insensitivity, futility, and exhaustion. Great. Am I in the wrong line of work? But if anything, it got me thinking about foster kids and the possibility of being a foster parent sometime in the future. Not easy by any means, but made me wonder if to help one kid or a sibling group with real care was the way the make a difference in child welfare.

Feeling torn from the reason I entered this profession. Better when out of the classroom and into the field?

what circle of hades are we in anyway?

I was just doing some gardening to get some House Improvement hours in for my coop (I have to do 4 over the whole semester). So I did some weeding, some hedge pruning, and--this is rich--cutting grass with hedge clippers. There is a reason humans invented lawn mowers, but having none, our coop must improvise. It was like I was giving our sidewalk patch of grass a bad haircut. First I snipped at it, then I used a rake to comb out the clippings, leaving mangled looking clumps of grass. When the garden manager asked me to cut the grass with the sheers I wasn't sure if he was joking. But, imagining myself in some absurdist performance piece, I cut the grass with big scissors. What offense did I commit to warrant this? Some bad karma there.

So not surprisingly, I've decided to not live in the coops next year. Not just funky hierarchy, but I want my own space, my own kitchen, the freedom to socialize when I feel like it and to be a guilt-free hermit when I want to be. Looking for a place to live though...no easy task. Updates on the horizon.