Truthing

The truth is difficult to admit. Two months was the flick of a switch, a light bulb's last flash. It's going that quickly.

The truth is that I am not home and I miss my partner with whom I share my life, love, and body.

The truth is that I didn't write as much as I had planned and instead chose to be present in each moment. Every possible open moment, I jumped in.

The truth is that the Philippines is a complex country with truly heartbreaking problems and deep joy.

I am failing at documenting my experience here. I am afraid I will forget the details.

But the evidence is inscribed in a place far deeper than my skin, or even marrow. A changed womyn looks back at me in the mirror these days. How she's smiling more, I don't know. Why she's laughing, I can't understand.

Is it the children sleeping on sidewalks who stare into my brown eyes?

Is it the community of womyn I live with who have loved me like family? It could be the simplistic lifestyle I have adopted that has afforded such clarity, passion, and purpose.

Who is this womyn?

The truth is, I've always wanted to be who I am right at this very moment.

After 500 Pots, I Don't Know What I'm Doing Here

This post is number 501.

I've posted 501 times to the world and it is only appropriate, then, that I find myself here, sitting in the dark, with one question:  What's the purpose of my blog?

Recently, I put up a video on YouTube that honestly, I just did for fun.  Blessed to be in a community with women writers, I thought it would be an amusing poke in our feminist bellies to laugh at the ridiculous things people say on the internet.  I posted and I was surprised - and excited - that so many people have seen it.  I'm more than excited that it has caused some discussion about race and tolerance.  

I've received emails and read comment threads where some debate the intention of my project.  Mostly, "What's the point?"  I don't get it.  You're making fun of people, what's the point? What's the point of your blog?

Well, let's see how I can answer that...

First, I am endlessly thankful that people supported and shared the project.  Ya'll rock!

I'm also thankful that even those who DIDN'T like it care enough about the larger picture to engage in thoughtful debate about it.  That's awesome.

Now, here's my other thoughts on the questions of purpose....

I first began breathing a few decades ago and in that time frame have learned a thing or two about my life.  I'm a creator.  

I paint.  Play with words.  Mix some colors.  Make people laugh.  Twist my face around  in expression.

I write.  Poetry and I arm wrestle.  I walk with feminism and wonder how I can contribute.

What's the point?  What's the point of making a comedy about the deeply embedded racism that exists in the corners of new technology?  What's the point in sending a (comical) warning not to give ourselves too much credit just yet?  What's the point of exercising creativity in new and different ways just for one's pleasure?  Does everything have to be check marked with an agenda?  What's the point of creating something that will be disagreed with, misunderstood, and potentially uncomfortable?

Perhaps my point is that it's not about you.  For once, it's about me.  My blog, my words, my creative thinking.  Perhaps it's because marginalized individuals spend an ungodly amount of their lives fighting to get their voice out that when the sound resonates, I'm less concerned about whether it's pleasing, and more about my own ability to tell my truth.

"What are you trying to prove?"  Uh, nothing.  I think the quotes speak for themselves.  

"A few bad apples don't spoil the whole bunch."   Who's talking spoiling?  Shedding light in a dark corner is not equivalent to torching the room.

"What's the point of the project?"  Maybe it's just for a good laugh. Maybe it's up to you to find your meaning, if any.   My point was to create.  The rest is up to you.

I love that people think I'm calling specific people out on the internet to humiliate them.  I have several thoughts on that:

1. Good Lord - have you forgotten that this is THE INTERNET where PEOPLE BLOG UNDER FALSE NAMES?

2. The project is not targeting 11 people.  The project was intended to throw a few absurdities together to take a look at "the dark corners of the feminist blogosphere."  It's not about you.  Stop thinking it's about you.  It's not.  It looks at trends, patterns, and I choose comments for either originality or because it's appeared in so many forms on other blogs.

3. The project was a call for absurdities, not a call for apologies.  I'm not worried about the individuals who said these things.   I'm not worried about what I'm wearing in the video.  I'm not concerned if this is popular.  I'm interested in truthtelling, my truth.  And if what I see stings, then hit your next link on your blogroll.  There are plenty of tutorials that can help you get over your racism.  Here's the secret, though, that they don't tell you in infomercials:  only you can do that.

And so that leads me to the question that I asked myself 500 posts ago:  What's the purpose of my blog?

My purpose of this blog is not very dissimilar from my purpose in life.

To find different mediums of communication to find bits of hope, confidence, and Truth in the world.
To communicate ideas, receive inspiration, witness great writing, memorable events.
To be a part of something larger, something more complex and mysterious than I can imagine.
To give a part of myself to the world in hopes of making it better.
To vent.
To find similar hearts thumping in their chests with a yearning for justice; so loud that they, too, turn to the written word to exhale their activism.
To create, try, offer ideas that could potentially touch another feminist.
To be touched by somone else's work that I can't find in mainstream bookstores or magazines.

To find a community of womyn I could not find offline.
To support independent thought, exercise freedom of expression, question the norm.
To build my own perspective through the careful practice of writing and poetry.
To educate people about (among many things) feminism, the Pinay experience, Filipino diaspora, Asian American attitude, and the beauty of writing for the sake of writing.

Does blogging always do this?

Hells no it doesn't and neither does life guarantee it either.

But, both life and blogging, in their small crashing and receding waves, bring those opportunities in moments.

And that makes it all worth it.

I'm Not a Slacker, Just Extremely Transient

As you can tell, I am going through what most would call a transition.

I would call it a neck breaking rollercoaster of deep seeded life changes. Everything hurts.

I am leaving for more travels for the next 12 days and my blogging likely will reflect that.

Foolishly, I have underestimated the fatigue associated with travel and newness.

Moving, healing, and resting. That is my current cycle. The last one is difficult to find time.

I'm doing my best.

Quiet before the Move

Shake Shake Shake

Shake

Shake

Shake

Shake your Booty

Shake your Booty

Done and Done at m'job.
Headin' to m'new home
Ready to rip up the east coast

I'll throw crumbs, but am busy busy with packing up toilet paper and Christmas crap.

Will be back in full blown beastly blogging form for

BLOG NAKED DAY on July 31st.

Transition's Velocity

Tomorrow is my last day of work and I am unprepared for it. For as keen as I am to move on, that doesn't mean I want to leave it a mess for my successor.

While my travels and exhaustive job 'n moving process continue, art delivers much therapeautic relief lately. My new photoproject, "Transition's Velocity," will explore the driving forces of my emotional psyche these days.

We Are the Daughters

I wrote this poem for myself, and for all the transforming women of color I met this weekend in Detroit. Mabuhay.

We Are the Daughters

We are the daughters of the forgotten, the skinned, the given-up in the trenches
by the roadside
We are the daughters once covered in blankets, helpless heaps
without shields
We are the beaten with sticks, paddles, belts, and bricks
We are the daughters of violence
And the violated
Our mothers knew the pain of childbirth without anesthesia
contractions throbbing with wariness
We are the daughters of doubters, the relentlessly uncertain
We are the first documented, freshly counted
The ones who know community by faith, street, and fringe living
Not by gathering, similarity, or food
Our mothers and fathers are the immigrants – the forced travelers – thrown
We are the daughters with honor, without legacy
With riches, without inheritance
Our traditions are storytelling, sharing, remembering
Branding it in our minds because it will not be texted, printed, distributed, categorized, considered
We are the daughters of gates
Passing through with filthy, but functioning feet
We are the ones sacrificed, priced, shamed
We are all of these
We are all of these
Our troubles are less jagged than our mothers
Our survival less in question
Our thriving dependant upon more our will, not chance
We are the daughters of the umpteenth strokes of window washers
And poor wages
We are the daughters of cruel legislature, temporary amnesty, refugee camps, and collision
We are the daughters of grain, cotton, las floras, and sugar cane
We are the divergent behaviors, red with depression, pale with negligence
We are the mules of silence, withholding, and secrecy
Our tongues speak our history, hyphens
Bridging the borders of land and sea
We are speakeasies, the back alley ways
We know the gravel and dirt roads
The railroads sound in our dreams and whistles goodbye
We are the daughters of stopped clocks, crossovers, irreverence, heat
We flip paradoxes on the tips of our lashes, especially within ourselves
We look for madness, familiar
We know the smell of grass cut by machetes
We are the daughters of failed government, tastes of sovereignty, uprising
We are the daughters of broken tsinelas, broken hearts, broken bones
We are the daughters of the vanished, the unforgiven, the debted, the disappeared, the murdered
The long funerals, the lonely guitar, the rambling corner, the panic rooms
We are the daughters of slurs and political graffiti
We are the walkers through fresh basil gardens with our fathers
The orphaned sparrow
We are the sought prize of many, those waiting to kidnap us
To lure us with scholarships and jimmies
To convince us we deserve better, we are better
Than our ancestors who couldn’t read a coke bottle
Forget them, they say
They want us
They want us badly
To be human erasure for a war waged against our blood, our families
To slowly abolish the mass graves,
glossing over them with petals and dowry
Our deliverance eradicates the atrocities, the scratched signatures allowing the rapes
their misnomers, their wide eyed pretense
they want us to bow to the ivory tower, the one granting us degrees
they want us to forget the hours, lives, humanity that was stolen from our people
they want to shave us clean from any bandages, scars, proof of their imperialistic sodomy
they want us to forsake our memories and accept their offertory
our privilege circles our feet, hopscotching our destinies, leading us away
they want us to be grateful, but not mirror our mothers
or drink from the same clay cups, or splinter from the same broom
they want us to be fed, but hungry for more, and therefore compliant
they do not know that we are the daughters of hair, Brown, restless, and fight
they want to brainwash, inculcate us
but they do not remember our mother’s blood is not a drying stain, but a free flowing wound from which we still suckle and warm ourselves
we feed ourselves
we are the daughters of vision
and we are the thieves
stealing, taking, claiming, owning the
land, fish, air we righteously and already own
we take and give back to our foremothers, we kneel before our scrolls of imprisonment
We breathe easier
But we live with memorials and pledges
Mourning
We invoke what we did not live through
We remember our reasons
Our mothers were never bought
And we cannot be sold
We are the daughters of a thousand dreams
we are both the fruition and bearers of completion
We are the daughters of swallowing caves
Erupting ground
cracking trees
and mulberry scents

We are the daughters the world hoped would die in the bellies of our mothers

We are the unlost, thrice self-found
And rejoicing

Interview, Interview

Phone interview with uber important job in 48 minutes.

Scared.

Pacing.

Stop pacing.

Pacing.

Father's Day

When I was a little girl and exhausted, my father used to pick me up and let me sleep on his shoulder. In grocery stores or boring adult gatherings, he'd hold me while I drifted off into my own world. Just to be close, I'd sometimes lift my arms just so he'd let me rest my head. My dad would always lovingly oblige. Knowing sometimes that I was feigning sleep, he'd pretend to scold my siblings and all who could hear, "Everybody, don't you know ****'s trying to sleep? Everybody quiet! SHH!" It didn't matter who was around, he'd tell the world to be quiet for me.

It always made me feel that I was the most important thing to my Dad.

He does this now with his grandchildren and I remember it with such tenderness, I often want to cry.

My conservative father doesn't know that I blog, he'll likely never read this. But I hope he knows despite our many differences, both big and small, I hope he knows his feminist daughter still loves him, deeply.

Happy Father's Day.

Love, Shaoloo

Imploding or Exploding, not sure...

Job hunting is a full-time job and doing it out of state is even more gut wrenching.

The stress is building and I need to give myself permission to un-intensify my life, which may or may not affect my posts.

As I remain blood committed to exploring woc feminism, I may also be either taking breaks or posting my insanity about moving, jobbing, headaches, and plummeting professional esteem.

We'll see.

If you've got experience on staying sane throughout a job hunt, especially out of state hunts, pass on the wisdom.

I tried...

not to read things that piss me off but then I saw this and all I thought was

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

H/T to Racialicious.

Motionless

I just got an email from my senior highschool prom date who I haven't seen or spoken to in ten years.

*eyes shifting from side to side*

I need time to get myself back together.

Entirely too bizarre,

even for me.

The proverbial update question, "SO! What've ya been up to?"

Oh I don't know. It's been a while since I was the loudest cheerleader who denied her racial and ethnic feminist voice and puppy-loved locker boy with such shrill adolescence that I can still hear the echoes today. But, other than a true transformation and emergence of self, I'm pretty fab. What about you?

More of this Stuff

I have no idea what is up with me today. These are ridiculous, but addicting.

Random sets of 3’s:

3 things you WILL do in this lifetime:

1. Finish a book
2. Become a parent
3. Ride in a hot air balloon

3 songs with lyrics that have made you cry:

1. Christmas Shoes (SO stupid, but that children's choir in the background....)
2. You Were Mine by the Dixie Chicks
3. Separate Lives (love-sick 80s song...buckets of tears)

3 TV shows you enjoy watching (old or new):

1. My So-Called Life
2. Grey's Anatomy
3. Ugly Betty

Dreams you once upon a time had, but that haven’t come true and you’re okay with that:

1. Go to Fiji
2. Becoming an actress
3. Running a marathon

3 places you go/have been where you found a sense of peace:

1. Nicaragua
2. Ohio
3. Shoreline

3 minor regrets in life:

1. Cheerleading
2. Making out with **** in college
3. Quitting voice lessons

3 clichés or common phrases that you tend to believe are true:

1. God is everywhere.
2. All you need is love.
3. Good enough isn't.

One Word Answers

Cuz I don't have much to say today

Answer all questions using only 1 word


1. Where is your cell phone? here
2. Relationship? Beautifabulous
3. Your hair? black
4. Work? Tedious
5. Your sister? Cleveland
6. Your favorite thing? Writing
7. Your dream last night? Weird
8. Your favorite drink? Milk
9. Your dream car? Electric
10. The room you’re in? Office
11. Your shoes? Flip-flops
12. Your fears? unfulfillment
13. What do you want to be in 10 years? Laughing
14. Who did you hang out with this weekend? Adonis
15. What you’re not good at? dishes
16. Muffin? corn
17. One of your wish list items? laptop
18. Where you grew up? east
19. The last thing you did? kissed
20. What are you wearing? tank top
21. What aren’t you wearing? watch
22. Your pet. none
23. Your computer? fast
24. Your life? blessed
25. Your mood? restless
26. Missing? friends
27. What are you thinking about right now? blogging
28. Your car? RAV4
29. Your kitchen? Smile
30. Your summer? Moving
31. Your favorite colour? purple
32. When is the last time you laughed? yesterday
33. Last time you cried? Tuesday
34. School? masters
35. Tag? whoever

Let Me Dismiss the Stereotype

Interesting image on Postsecret this week, where this postcard originates.
I'll be honest, I never really understood the whole Asian exotic thing. It wasn't until I began performing mental biopsies on stereotypes did I begin to understand that Asian women are stereotyped as sexual toys, to be dominated, played with, and understood in those contexts.

What could be understood as a trivial stereotype fuels much of the oppression of women and young girls in this world.

The power of stereotype is frightening. I understand it now, in the context of human sex slave trafficking, mail brides, prostitution, and pornography. Asian women, combined with the assumed docile and quiet chacteristic, are viewed as ultimate sexual enjoyment: do whatever you want and they'll never say a word.

I have two words for whomever this postcard was intended: WAKE UP.

What I'm Reading

To answer some questions, here is what I've been multi-reading:

For Inspiration
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
Wounds of Passion by bell hooks
Colonize This! edited by Daisy Hernandez

For Debate Purposes
Full, Frontal Feminism by Jessica Valenti
Manifesta by Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards

On Deck
Essential Neruda edited by Mark Eisner

Freak Out Fridays

Fridays are really just invisible partitions, a long line at your favorite rollercoaster, extra John Handcocks on forms before you receive cash. Fridays are fillers that make you wait before you get what you really want: time, freedom, and doing whatever you want.

I will spend Fridays very deliberately from now on. I will be choosing one significant issue and exploring it into the ground. Perhaps it will be trivial or something of the dead-serious variety. We shall see.

I'll check back soon. I need time to select.

Immigration

From New America Media

A trend of targeted violence is erupting.

When you hear "immigration," most people think of Mexico, or the Latino population. I can't disagree that even I tend to focus on the plight of our Latina/o sisters and brothers when I see their peaceful protests raided by police, or racist signs about immigrants needing to "go home," or when I witness billboards like the one I pass everyday that has a picture of a White man, arms folded staring into the camera, wearing a sheriff's outfit that reads, "NO ALIENS ALLOWED HERE. We do not support illegal immigration."

I am a child of immigrants. My parents came to this country from the Philippines over thirty years ago and have endured more stories of racism, shame, and forced assimilation than I can possible communicate or fathom. Their stories are real yet unbelievable. Most people wouldn't believe that my father lost his front tooth because a stranger threw a glass bottle at his face while he crossed the street. Most people wouldn't believe that my mother received a failing grade in her nursing clinical courses, not because of academic performance in which she was receiving good scores, but because her instructor wrote, "Language Difficulties" in the side margin and she was asked to leave the program after years of academic slaving. Never mind the lawyers who told her she'd never win a case in Ohio about racial and ethnic discrimination, "the jury would think exactly like the instructor," they advised. And they were right. My mother is perfectly bi-lingual and speaks English more frequently than Tagalog. Whose story would you believe?

When I think of immigration I think of my father's frequent fights he had with strangers who demanded he return to his own country. I think of my parents strength and how often even I have overlooked their stories of survival and bitterness. When I read stories like the one above, I think of my father's angry retort to that racist demand to go back to one's own country.

He replied, "I'll go back to mine if you go back to yours. This isn't your country. It was founded on stealing it from Native Americans. This is their country. So I'll go back, if you go back, that is, if you know your history. Do you?"

Mabuhay ang Pilipinas!

On Interracial Marriage

A great resource for those whose interest peak interracial marriage.

Yet Another Hiatus

Still grading. Almost there.

Ecdysis FAQs

Don't you just LOVE my new header? Actually, it's kinda big for my taste, but it definitely gets the point across: HEY, THIS IS THE BLOG OF A WOMYN'S ECDYSIS. Just in case you forgot your spectacles or you think this is some site where Asian womyn will be taking off their clothes. OHHHHH NOOOO, you are sorely mistaken. You can see clearly at the celestial top. Even my mama would be able to read it.

I feel it's time to shed a bit of my personal stuff, this being MY ecdysis and all, and answer some basic questions that have surfaced.

So, what exactly is an "ecdysis?"
Ah yes, the ever popular question of origin. In college I was a retreat guru (and still am) and I ended up in a long conversation with a mentor. He listened deeply to my questions, my restless, and my impatience for NEWness. Back then, I felt emotionally brittle and in constant need for open ears. Anyway, this priest leaned back in his chair after listening to me drone on about my identity and he said, "I have an image that you are trying to shed something, like how a snake sheds its skin and in its place is a new identity, more vibrant, more alive than before." I thought about that. I liked that even if I didn't really understand it. Yet.

I began wondering if there was a term for someone who constantly shed their skin into newness.

A few months later I moved to the pacific northwest. I was playing my first game of Scrabble with friends (yes, the first time ever). Due to my ultra-competitive nature and lust for words, I pulled a dictionary rather violently to check the validity of someone's word. I can't remember if I dropped it or if the page settled and my eyes saw an unique-spelled word with a picture of a snake and other animals. Attracted to the 'y' in the middle (there just aren't many words spelled as such) and the hard consanents. I stopped to read it. I found an explanation of the cycle of shedding. I read the words but saw symbolism: cycle, rebirth, life, and skin. And it continues, there is never one identity, you keep shedding into more brilliance and more life. The word was and will always be ECDYSIS.

So, why do you spell wom/y/a/e/n with a 'y'?
In case you haven't realized, our world can be a cruel place to exist. In addition to cruelty, we love to stuff people into boxes and torture them if they don't conform to what "norms" indicate is acceptable. This happens everday in every part of the world in large scale bombing war ways and in small snide comment in elevator ways. Spelling Womyn with a 'y' is one of my more passive avenues of activism. It represents my knowledge that gender is one of the most socialized and ridiculously important facets of behavior. If a womyn or man acts different, smells different, speaks in bizarre ways, we distance ourselves from what is unfamiliar. Spelling with a 'y' is one form of my dissent, one more way to express that I am different; and see the world in color, not gray, and certainly not black and white. I see spectrum, variations, interpretation, metaphor, and wideness. If you back away because of a 'y,' that's fine with me. We probably would not get along anyway.