Crystal Long

This is an original composition that my favorite girl Nicole O’Shea wrote, set along to Salvador Dali and Walt Disney’s short film “Destino.”

On Friday, I made my weekly trip to the local library, but rather than to pick up another round of French New Wave DVDs, I went instead for the poetry section in search of female writers. Boring story short, my Lit teacher held a review session for the AP exam before school, during which he advised his students to immerse themselves in diverse types of literature – culturally, stylistically, etc. Two problems: a) we probably have the least diverse reading list for this course – essentially Holden Caulfield in a million different situations – and b) the only ten students who showed up for the review session was a handful of ten feminists. So that didn’t go over too well.

The same teacher announced the next class that our final assignment this term would be a poetry research paper. So back to the first sentence of this post: I checked out these books:

Selected Poems, Margaret Atwood
Modern American Women Writers: Profiles of Their Lives and Works – From the 1870s to the Present
The Complete Selected Poems of Maya Angelou
The Continual Condition, Charles Bukowski (Okay, I know this doesn’t fit the subject matter, but I was just really interested in checking out Bukowski anyway.)

And I really wanted something by Diane Wakoski, but couldn’t find anything in that day.

Also, I feel like a webcam photo of these works is obligatory, but my webcam isn’t working. So here’s a photo of Maya Rudolph playing Maya Angelou.

I have no pictures, but last night, my good friend, and co-editor, Dani Shapiro and I hosted an open mic night in our school’s “coffee shop,” The Nest, to promote our school’s lit mag. This will sound so trite, but I continue to be completely blown away by the talent at my school. Last year, this event was dubbed Unfold, and was more poetry-centric. But the current bunch of students seems to be more musically driven, so we changed the name.

My baby Shane played some of his personal songs as well as covers of songs by his band Meraki. Namely “Capricorn Punishment,” which you can check out here. Dani read a beautiful poem about a boy about to enter the Israeli army, there were writings about feminism, Rick Santorum, and elementary school crushes. Also, a beatnik parody. Just to name a few.

I myself read two poems, which was nerve-wracking due to their risque-for-high-school content, but I’m glad I did it. Hopefully my teachers didn’t judge me too much for my age of consent, marijuana, and blatant sex references. They were a piece called “Half” and a facetious ode to a barista read in a slight valley girl intonation called “S. of the C.B. Variety.”

This is the one song everyone
would like to learn: the song
that is irresistible:

the song that forces men
to leap overboard in squadrons
even though they see beached skulls

the song nobody knows
because anyone who had heard it
is dead, and the others can’t remember.
Shall I tell you the secret
and if I do, will you get me
out of this bird suit?
I don’t enjoy it here
squatting on this island
looking picturesque and mythical
with these two feathery maniacs,
I don’t enjoy singing
this trio, fatal and valuable.

I will tell the secret to you,
to you, only to you.
Come closer. This song

is a cry for help: Help me!
Only you, only you can,
you are unique

at last. Alas
it is a boring song
but it works every time. 

So I tried reading a Jack Kerouac novel this week because I’ve always had a sort of love/hate affair with the Beat Generation. I started with The Dharma Bums after stumbling upon it at the local library. I’m now on chapter nine and I absolutely can’t stand it at all.

Most of the book consists of two college graduates one-upping each other with random facts about obscure sects of Asian religions – grouping them all into one, no less – and demeaning women to sex objects using said sects as scapegoats. Personally, I find it an eye-roller and am not sure if I want to finish skimming it.

I’ll probably just skip it and move on to The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera next. I’m so proud of myself for reading so many novels lately!

Recently, I’ve finished Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, and Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. Definitely, definitely loved Lolita, more so for Nabokov’s writing style and for the tragic antihero than the idea of a sexually precocious pre-teen girl. But that’s a story for a later time. Also, I maybe cried at the end. Maybe.

Super Sad True Love Story is really good and really addictive, but could have better a lot better. A lot better. The flow of many heartwrenching passages was ruined by random injections of “magic pussy penetration time,” “that porno we used to watch when we were five,” and “stay safe, my little cumslut.” Nope, not kidding.

And I thought that Franny and Zooey bordered on unbearably neurotic and paranoid, but hey, that’s Salinger for you.

As of this morning, I can now finally start to de-stress from this shitastic year. Come fall 2012, I will be a pre-communication student at UCSB. Starting to remember how happy I was about UCSB before getting rejected from UCLA. I’ve got the partly-bleached hair and red plimsolls and newly-acquired nickname to a select few (“beach bunny”).

Anyway, because I wanted to write this blog to keep track of my projects, I’m currently planning an open mic night with my friend and Litmag co-editor Dani. Nothing else new; the last month has only been college decisions anxiety, honestly.

Last night, finally, was the school magazine’s fundraiser I’d been scrambling to put together. I have to say it went much better than expected. Definitely worth those bouts of anxiety. This is about all I can really write about the event, as I was stuck outside running the ticket booth, but from what I could hear from outside, the bands sounded amazing.

The space was an on-campus “coffee shop”/lounge area, and – somehow – managed to fit 90 people throughout the night.

Xebra started the night off, then Proud Moon, then Meraki.

I can’t say there are any photos of the first two online, but here are some of Meraki, by Mariana Zenteno (one of my favorite photographers):

UPDATE: And here’s a video of the event:

Apparently, I wrote this Saturday night on Word, in Adobe Carlson Pro, aka J.D. Salinger font.

I dream of running where no one can find me. It was once of citied landscapes, of lights and liberation, of some innocent things with tinged connotations. The dream lives on, but lately, I find myself harboring as well another species of dream: that Romanticist.

My dreamer’s eye lives inside photographs of filmy, spectacular blue skies and bluer oceans – of soft natural light and overwhelming adoration of mundane, over-looked slices of life.

The pictures of homes, typically Modern confections of wooden panels and white sleekness or urban apartments of wall-to-wall bookcases, I spend hours poring over reveal, as I try to peek at the intimate contents of its inhabitants’ made-up lives, broad glass expanses of window panes that point to lush, green forestry and sparkling seas.

I long for seclusion.

But oh, I also am human and also am greedy.

I long as well for companionship.

But isn’t that that irony of Romantics?

As in, the two Asian stereotypes that I seem to come across most often and therefore, the two that piss me off the most. I bring this up now because tonight was another one of those nights when my parents proceeded to pigeonhole themselves and their peers into Asian stereotypes, I proceeded to explain to them why that’s not okay, and my father mocks me as I speak. Only tonight is a week or two after the famous Jeremy Lin headline on ESPN Mobile: “Chink in the Armor.”

I sent a letter to ESPN media relations, the editor-in-chief, some people at SportsCenter, and the writer of the apology. If you have some free time, it’s here.

My father is the one who encouraged and pushed me to send the complaint, as it was a dated ethnic slur that was beyond inappropriate. Which is why it disappoints me that so soon after – let alone at all – he laughs at comments made both by an Asian woman, and subsequently by a white man, on FM 94.9 this morning on the topic of dating Asian women.

So in honor of my feistiness that gets me in a lot of trouble and stressful situations for being vocally outraged when so few others are, here are the top two Asian stereotypes that piss me off the most:

1. “Maybe he has an Asian fetish.”

In eighth grade, my friend would tell me that my crush wouldn’t date me because I’m Asian, and that he’d go out with a white girl instead. Now that we’re older, people can’t be quite so blunt. So they say this instead.

Listen, I’m not the equivalent to licking feet. Nor is simply thinking I’m attractive the equivalent to being handcuffed to a bedpost and whipped. Smiling at me when I walk into a room is not included on Cosmo‘s “69 Kinky New Moves to Try on Your Man” list. So don’t call me a fetish.

I could be kinky. I could put on a black latex suit and re-enact some perverse Freudian fantasy. But the simple act of being me, of possessing an Asian heritage, of having the skin tone or bone structure that I do, is not sexually deviant. Everyone has a type. If your type includes a preference for girls who may or may not possess certain common Asian physical features, you are not a sexual deviant or a pervert.

Woman freaking out on the morning show on FM 94.1, your boyfriend is not dating you solely because you’re Asian. So what if all of his exes are Asian women. Calm the fuck down. You’re treating yourself as an object – a souvenir. Your ethnicity is not your only attribute. Everyone has a fucking type.

2. Anything that refers to the stigma that Asians are asexual, docile, mouse-like creatures who are incompetent outside of a library or lab.

I mean come on. Even to say that “Asians are smart” is a dangerous statement. Because it’s the kind of mentality that reinforces jokes about say, the size of Asian men’s penises. Not cool. That is a total play on how Asian men must be bookish, and so therefore couldn’t be “masculine.” It was a big deal that Jeremy Lin was on a winning streak earlier this month because Asian-Americans are incompetent in athletics. My goodness, why don’t we just stick to textbooks? Lin’s prominence in the media is a proud fucking big deal to the Asian-American community; even to those like me, who don’t follow sports in the slightest. It is a common joke to say that Asians can’t drive because, well, the roads are a public affair. Just ask the girl in my journalism class who used to shout everyday: “Crystal, I hate your race! You guys suck at driving!” I mean, come on, what are we doing out of the science lab? Please, save yourselves, before we get the ideas in our heads that we can handle being out in public!

And so there’s my rant on racist stereotypes. I’m exhausted now.

(P.S. I, personally, prefer none of those fetishes, so please don’t email about that. Thanks.)

If he ever finds this poem, my caffeine habits will be devastatingly screwed over.

Oh! Blessed is the unchanced encounter!
Thoughtness drops as you casually drop
my name. And I intercept it
before it falls into the hellish flames
roughly seven years between us.
(while it still tastes like honey-soaked nervous sweat;
thin layer; on my sensory nose-nerves)

I lean against the counter, ever-nonchalant,
as you fashion my life-thread nectar -
you flip the levers – noon-after-noon.
It’s cute when you pretend to take down my name, and
two shots – click, click -
like I haven’t yet branded it on your register screen.

Then! Shot of sunshine:
The image of your half shy-grin, faux-chagrin,
incinerates a quick-burning imprint in my detached eye.
But like the flame licks the fraying cloth,
it only consolidates after melting
my head – and heart’s – workings.
Your sly affection snapshot-stops
the unraveling of my affected.

Solipsis, mmm,
you release a laughter normal with the bath-of-glow,
and you ask if we’ve already spoken of your band
and your new demos.
Ha! Even if we did, I’d bring it up again
if only to see your smokes-green eyes droop
in coincidence with your alternating softspoken/confident,
casually succinct diction.

I avert my smoke-screen eyes as best I can
as I leave. In case you realize my age.
So at the table outside, I sit,
replaying in my blushing pride,
that charitable time of day,
as you eye me through glass encasing.

Whatever! I am the flea on a starving dog,
itching to be
your left hand’s one resilient freckle.
(If I may assume you have one.)