a little incidental

A snippet from Maggie Q's biography on Yahoo:

"Born in Hawaii to an American father and a Vietnamese mother, Q moved to Hong Kong at the age of 18 to pursue a career in modeling...."

From IMDB's biography:

"Maggie Denise Quigley was born to a Polish-Irish American father (originally based in New York) and a Vietnamese mother...."

Three points if you can point out the part that bothers me.

It's quite likely that Yahoo means it quite literally: that Maggie Q's father was of American nationality. It may be racial paranoia that makes me think that if he'd been American but, say, black, they would have actually said African-American. Which would mean that the default value of American is white.

What annoys me even more is that I read American and assumed 'white.'

Bother.

braces and life lessons

"I thought life would be like college, but it isn't. Life is like high school." - Meryl Streep

It's 5:07 on the first day back. I've been productive all day. And now I am not.

So I am going to blither instead.

My sister called this past weekend to report that my mother had gotten braces. "Just for the top teeth," she said. "Metal ones. She said she always felt like a scarecrow, so now she's going to get them fixed. She's doing the bottom teeth later."

"Wow," I said.

"I know," said my sister. "Isn't it adorable?"

At 67 years old, my mother has decided to go in for orthodontia. I wandered downstairs to tell my husband the news. "What you have to be asking yourself is, who did she meet?" he said.

"What?"

"She's probably found a man," he prophesied darkly. "She's probably going out cruising, meeting up with guys, going swinging--"

"Um," I said. "It's cute, right?"

"Your mom's dating," he said, because in a man's mind, it's a short step from 'fixing your teeth' to 'doing the horizontal mambo.' Of course, in a man's mind, it's also short step from 'waking up in the morning' to 'playing P Diddy on your Wee Piddy.'

I left the room.

Meryl Streep is right. I keep telling people that the real world isn't like college (and it isn't!) and it isn't like the misery of high school (and it isn't!) but part of that is, I think, because in the former case, the real responsibility doesn't really weigh you down in college life -- well, most college lives, assuming you're not doing med school, say -- in the same way that it does when getting someplace on time can mean the difference between being able to pay for food and ... not. As for high school, the kind of trauma you can get there seems unique, to say the least. High school is a mess, and for a lot of the same reasons that high schoolers are a mess. Take one high schooler's neuroses and multiply them by a thousand, and eventually you have a resonance effect where one feeds off the other until a giant bubble forms and explodes messily all over everyone.

Think of high school as a dress rehearsal for the real thing, and you can kind of see where the dysfunction of adolescence works its way out of our systems. I remember high school as being a tight, constrained, limited experience in which there was pressure and failure all around: popular cliques you weren't in; tests you bombed; friends you didn't make; social events you weren't invited to; pimples you couldn't hide. The world was small, and so every mistake was magnified by comparison. In a senior class population of 200, 1 person fucking up was .5% of the student body. It's hard to argue with that kind of exposure. There is just not all that much happening in a high schooler's life that can distract him from concentrating on the enormity of that mistake. It's a piddling pond, and you just pissed in it. Life is over. Might as well just die.

I was fortunate in that regards; by the time I hit high school, I was already a professional musician, which meant I knew that there was a big world out there: I'd actually been in it. My pond was comparatively large, which meant that my mistakes were diluted by the sheer amount of noise going on in the background. That isn't to say that I didn't dwell morbidly on them, but I had experience performing for a large audience, and experience taught me that the mistakes I thought were huge, 99% of my audience didn't even notice.

In between touring, practicing, and performing, high school more or less sort of skipped me by. The things that bothered my classmates barely registered in my world view. That isn't to say I didn't have my own share of embarrassments.

Here is what I learned in high school.

1. You will never be one of the cool kids.
   
2. If there is a way to put your foot in it, you will put your foot in it.
   
3. The reason people don't like you isn't because they're jealous of your smarts. That's just something that mothers say to their incredibly unpleasant kids because, "Of course they don't like you. You have the social skills of a hostile skunk," is not supportive.
   
4. Denial is your best friend.
   
5. If you can't be liked, at least you can be feared.
   
6. If you do not try, you will never be rejected and humiliated.

Coming back around again, I find that the workplace has the same people that were there in high school. There are the jocks, the nerds, the beautifully turned out cheerleaders, the alternative crowd and the geeks. There are no stoners, because those people never made it to the workplace, being mostly stalled at the 'whoa' stage of adolescence, but barring them (and maybe Angry Guy, voted in middle school as most likely to have a rap sheet before age 16) all the groups that were there in high school are here again.

Except, and that's with a capital E, they know better. And so do I.

The big fish in the little pond became a little fish in a big pond once most of them hit college. The popular guys discovered that there were other, more popular guys out there, and that actions eventually have consequences. The cheerleaders found out that there were more interesting things than being popular. The geeks and nerds discovered that they weren't alone, and that smarts really can be sexy. The alternative crowd found out that just rebelling against the mainstream was being reactionary rather than independent.

It took some time. Maybe it took a couple of jobs where people's heads had to be forcibly extricated from their asses. But eventually they got there, most of them, and now I'm working with my peers and my classmates and my fellows, and we're doing just fine.

Second time around, the lines have blurred. Guy down the hall is a jock, but he can talk geek with the best of them, and is married to an alternative girl. Popular chick is in Marketing, but she goes to lunch with the nerds. The President of the Chess Club is our boss, and he regularly does triathlons.

Here are the things I learned about high school, now that I'm here in real life.

1. Cool kids are cool because they don't care about being cool.
   
2. Everybody is too involved in their own damage to pay attention to yours. If you don't point it, they'll never notice.
   
3. You control how people perceive you. Self-confident people are popular people, and popular people are the ones who are better at faking self-confidence. If you want it, fake it. Eventually, you'll make it.
   
4. Denial won't take you anywhere. With a little self-knowledge, at least you have a chance of changing things.
   
5. Everyone wants to be liked. Everyone. Especially the ones who say they don't.
   
6. Refusal is not rejection. Humiliation is a matter of perception. People only see you as humiliated if you make them think you're humiliated.

This is what I know now. Imagine what I'll know 10 years from now. Or 20. Or 30.

Every so often I talk to someone who tells me that they don't know what they want to do with their life. "Which is stupid," they usually say to me, in one form or another. "Because shouldn't I know by age 30?" Or age 40? Or age 45? Or in one instance, 52?

Here's a fact. There is no manual. There is no magic memo on your 30th birthday (or your 40th, or your 45th, or your 52nd) that says, "Here's what you've been doing wrong. Here's how you're supposed to do it." All life is is the same people with different faces, the same possibilities for screw ups and successes, the same opportunities for taking risks and seizing rewards, around and around again.

Except, and here's another capital E, this time, the next time, you might get it right.

I blither a lot. And now it's time to go home. So I think I will do that.