The Old School Lunch

Wooster Athletes - Making A Difference.

I knew Rush Hour 3 was going to have the usual stereotypical Asian folks do this, Black folks do that jokes (”You can’t be Black, there’s a height requirement!”) but I didn’t know it was going to have an awful scene where the Chris Tucker “Carter” character goes on to berate and say how he would’ve beat a woman if she really was a man.

Spoiler Alert.

Basically, Carter is making out with this attractive woman with medium length hair (the reason for me including this detail will become relevant later) and they’re about to have sex. A fight breaks out and their party is interrupted. Later, it is revealed that a special clue is tattooed onto the head of the woman and she takes off her wig (which of course reveals that she’s nearly bald). Carter freaks out at the sight of her not having practically any hair and starts ranting about how he “kissed a frenchman.” He goes on in hysterics about he is “Brokeback Carter” even though the woman clearly says that indeed she is a woman. Carter isn’t so sure about this and asks Li (Chan) to “check the equipment” and says that if they do find male genitalia, there they’re going to “beat his ass.”

So what does this tell the young kids watching this? The young girls? Boys? That the “right” sort of gender identity looks like this? That, if you’re a girl, you better not try to shave your head or else you’ll be mistaken for being a boy and if you do ask out that boy in your math class, you might deservedly get your ass beat? That, if you’re a boy, it’s OK to police around gender conformity because girls and women have to look like this in order for you to see them as women? That it’s OK to use physical violence or the threat of physical violence to police people around?

[Last name Lee, btw. I don’t think I ever write that anywhere.]

Wow, what a difference a year or so makes. On more of a whim, I committed “facebookicide” more than a year or so ago and until tonight I haven’t been back on. I sunk into the trashy splendor that is MySpace (if you call periodically visiting and rarely updating “sinking into”) and just left the FB for lots of reasons. My brother’s been on it like a fiend so partially out of holiday boredom I tried to reactivate my deleted account, hoping that some of my stuff (friend lists, basic info) would still be on there. Well, that doesn’t work so well when your school email was deleted upon graduation and your whole facebook identity hinges on you having a legitimate school email address. So now it’s starting from scratch. Which isn’t so bad I guess. So if you’re like the rest of 99.9% of the world and are on facebook, hit me up!

[For once, people thinking that i’m still in high school comes in handy]

Wow. A guy just rang the doorbell and asked if my parents were home. When I said they weren’t and proceeded to close the door, he replied (with the saddest of tones), “Oh, OK, we’re just trying to do a fundraiser, that’s all.” It’s Christmas Eve and you’re trying to doing this for a fundraiser my big fat eye.

[Spoiler Alert]

Into The Blue is a popular movie and I can see why. It’s got solid action, attractive male and female leads (Paul Walker/Jessica Alba), 70% of the film is in a scenic underwater and, for the most part, the story moves along pretty well. After finishing the film, I watched a sort of “making of” in the special features and at one point Jessica Alba (one of the main characters) briefly talks about how during a climatic action fight sequence where she’s hand-cuffed and locked in a room (because the women are always captives in the movies, you know) the original script had one of the male characters coming to save her. After reading this (and the rest of the script), she told the director basically, “I’m really good at action…and you know, you should maybe write something for me to do…because I can do it and I love it.”

Today a few co-workers and I visited a men’s prison and all the inmates at this prison were wearing t-shirts that said “I am a proud dad.”

We were there to kinda tell people in a low-key way about our program and to do arts and crafts with kids and their parents.

I didn’t know really what to expect. I knew it was going to be somewhat involving Christmas since it’s relatively close to the holidays (but not really that close) and it’s going to be families and kids visiting but nothing really hit me until today.

But I guess I should set up the story first.

So after driving for about an hour to the bus-depot with one of co-workers, we check in at a station where we see families being patted down, going through metal detectors, raising their ponytails, emptying their pockets and taking off their shoes before passing through. I suddenly realize when earlier a woman who spoke to us about the emotional toll that children of incarcerated parents go through said “for once I am glad that 9-11 brought such security measures because kids are more and more used to those things at the airports…at the ballgames…” We do none of this and walk straight through. The families have already wrapped their presents for their fathers. All presents must be approved and inspected by the department of corrections staff which obviously puts a severe limit on what sort of gifts can be given. Many families opt on just not giving anything rather than giving socks or a deck of playing cards.

We then get on a bus with the rest of the families, a few other volunteers and prison guards and go to a ferry dock at which point we have to check in with the prison facility staff. Apparently despite signing up for this weeks in advance, i’m nowhere on the list as is another co-worker of mine. Some sort of a mix-up. Their lieutenant gives the go-ahead, however, after doing a run-through of our driver’s licenses. Maybe they checked if i’d committed a felony in the past seven years. We board the ferry and it’s cramped with those chairs that you sit on at always see at any church with a congregation of over 300 people. I get a little seasick. The families look anxious, nervous. One woman next to me says her husband doesn’t deserve anything but a “lump of shit” for Christmas but she’s bringing her daughter so he can see her at least.

We get off the ferry and we walk about 3/4 a mile to the prison. They do a strict head count on our way out and in to make sure that everyone is always accounted for. Once we get inside what looks like a cafeteria gymnasium, we see that it’s decorated in Christmas colors. There is food waiting to be served. The fathers meet with their families and there is a lot of emotion. I stare at one family in particular. The father is crying and he takes off his glasses. His son isn’t reacting too much and I can’t see his wife’s face. I wonder if they’re taking it as hard as he is.

Lunch is served and Christmas carols are sung by a volunteer. Christmas presents, which are brought by the families are opened and to my surprise, it turns out that almost all of them are for the children. And I guess as it should be, it’s their own Christmas that they’re celebrating there. I wonder how the presents are paid for, whether the toys are donations that the inmates select from a toy-tree and then get to wrap for their kids or what not but the kids seem happy.

Several of the kids run to our table to inquire about the crafts we have going on (many of them come with their fathers) and we help them try and work on building it. Some of the father daughter, father son pairs that come to the table are thrilled trying to make the best of the time they have together. They are comfortable with each other and having a good time. It is obvious that others are not. One girl I remember seeing on the ferry who looked particularly withdrawn is in the latter.

Towards the end, one of the volunteers leads the room and specifically the children in a pledge saying something to the effect of “I’m a kid who has dreams and I can do anything to reach those goals because I work hard and nothing is going to stand in my way. Nothing is impossible!” He means well.

###

One of the most powerful things that the woman who presented to us regarding children of incarcerated parents and society’s treatment of incarcerated individuals was that routinely she could chart a father who was in prison X and his son who is in prison A while his wife was in local prison Z for women. And then their young son is in a juvenile detention center.

Seeing this today struck a chord because when you have a loved one, particularly a family member who is incarcerated…the chances of children from that family in turn being incarcerated (among other things like violent behavior, not graduating high school, etc) skyrocket.

More on this later.

Today I got a chance to speak with Dan Savage. Dan kindly gave me a chance to potentially (I say “potentially” because at the time of this writing it is unknown whether i’ll appear on the final cut of his podcast) talk about something that came up on one of his podcasts. Namely, it was in one episode that he and a “Science expert” started to talk about pheromones which somehow led to how “Euroasian guys are so fucking hot” and how “race mixing” and such is so great for the world (”because mutts are healthier than regular dogs we know that…”). Dan used all of this as backup to defend those people who say that they naturally like Black guys or Asian women. That these people shouldn’t get shit for their what is in actuality a racial fetish (assuming they aren’t of that race) but instead they should be somewhat applauded as they’re going to, you know, date their racial “polar opposite” and push the world into the (hold hands) brown and beige future. I had a few issues with this. Namely:

-Racially fetishizing mixed folks (mixed people are beautiful!). Because they certainly don’t get that enough already.
-The tired idea that mixed folks are biologically superior and are going to save the world and by suggestion get rid of racism.
-People aren’t fucked up about race.

One of my favorite all time things about Dan is that during an old column of his awhile ago, he said (in response to the popularity of Black-On-White porn, “people are all fucked up about race.” I agree with this. I don’t think there’s a person in the world who isn’t fucked in the head about racial stereotypes to some degree. To argue that folks are somehow naturally…biologically predetermined to marry someone of a different race is absolutely ridiculous. That’s what’s fucked up.

So to varying degrees of success, I tried to convey this to Dan in my “interview” with him when he called today. I think it was a bad sign when he opened with “So what did I do wrong” or something like “What did I say that was so bad.” OK.

I made the mistake of getting into mixed race health issues like blood diseases. I tried to use that to point out that stereotypes of mixed folks as inherently healthy are bad but he hit me with “what does that have to do with dating?”

Dan was cordial throughout the entire conversation (and by cordial I mean basically letting me know that I was being too sensitive) but it was obvious that neither of us were comfortable and he wanted to end it. He smacked me at the end with something to the effect of, “well I guess folks are more sensitive to race issues than originally thought.”

[Bit of a Northwest windstorm]

Our nextdoor neighbors have some elaborate Christmas decorations. That’s fine. They have the lights that they don’t turn off at night, the lawn ornaments and an inflatable snow-man with a music-box that plays this hideously annoying music jingle. It’s 11:22pm and i’m pretty sure they went to sleep and the goddamn thing is still playing. Just for that, now I don’t feel bad that our unhealthy, moss-ridden crabgrass is likely going to infect and ruin their new perfectly healthy installed kentucky bluegrass that they’ve got. Yes, the music is that annoying.