An Actual Thread On The Pearl Jam “Message Pit” Message Board: We’re starting the “Yeahs!” in Alive WAY too early.
too asian for words
she had a bob
but not a cool bob
but a boring librarian bob
and he had a polo and khaki cargo shorts
so they didn't get anything for creativity or hipsterness
however, they had the same builds as you and steve
At Berkeley, California's premier public university, "evangelical Christian" and "Asian American" are almost interchangeable descriptions.
"If someone were to ask me what religion is practiced by Chinese immigrants, I would say money," says Steven Chin, pastor of a large Chinese church in Boston that ministers to many college students.
Christians so dominate the Korean American student world that one Stanford student posted a lengthy online lament. As a non-Christian, he said, he stood a much-diminished chance of finding a Korean wife.
2. "Taxman," by The Beatles.
A George Harrison masterpiece with a famous guitar riff (which was actually played by Paul McCartney): "If you drive a car, I'll tax the street / If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat / If you get too cold, I'll tax the heat / If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet." The song closes with a humorous jab at death taxes: "Now my advice for those who die / Declare the pennies on your eyes."
4. "Sweet Home Alabama," by Lynyrd Skynyrd.
A tribute to the region of America that liberals love to loathe, taking a shot at Neil Young's Canadian arrogance along the way: "A Southern man don't need him around anyhow."
5. "Wouldn't It Be Nice," by The Beach Boys.
Pro—abstinence and pro—marriage: "Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray it might come true / Baby then there wouldn't be a single thing we couldn't do / We could be married / And then we'd be happy."
6. "Gloria," by U2.
Just because a rock song is about faith doesn't mean that it's conservative. But what about a rock song that's about faith and whose chorus is in Latin? That's beautifully reactionary: "Gloria / In te domine / Gloria / Exultate."
7. "Revolution," by The Beatles.
"You say you want a revolution / Well you know / We all want to change the world . . . Don't you know you can count me out?" What's more, Communism isn't even cool: "If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao / You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow." (Someone tell the Che Guevara crowd.)
14. "Right Here, Right Now," by Jesus Jones.
The words are vague, but they're also about the fall of Communism and the end of the Cold War: "I was alive and I waited for this. . . . Watching the world wake up from history."
20. "Rock the Casbah," by The Clash.
After 9/11, American radio stations were urged not to play this 1982 song, one of the biggest hits by a seminal punk band, because it was seen as too provocative. Meanwhile, British Forces Broadcasting Service (the radio station for British troops serving in Iraq) has said that this is one of its most requested tunes.
21. "Heroes," by David Bowie.
A Cold War love song about a man and a woman divided by the Berlin Wall. No moral equivalence here: "I can remember / Standing / By the wall / And the guns / Shot above our heads / And we kissed / As though nothing could fall / And the shame / Was on the other side / Oh we can beat them / For ever and ever."
23. "Brick," by Ben Folds Five.
Written from the perspective of a man who takes his young girlfriend to an abortion clinic, this song describes the emotional scars of "reproductive freedom": "Now she's feeling more alone / Than she ever has before. . . . As weeks went by / It showed that she was not fine."
28. "Janie's Got a Gun," by Aerosmith.
How the right to bear arms can protect women from sexual predators: "What did her daddy do? / It's Janie's last I.O.U. / She had to take him down easy / And put a bullet in his brain / She said 'cause nobody believes me / The man was such a sleaze / He ain't never gonna be the same."
48. "Why Don't You Get a Job," by The Offspring.
The lyrics aren't exactly Shakespearean, but they're refreshingly blunt and they capture a motive force behind welfare reform.
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there.
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come.
Op-Ed Columnist
The Model Students
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Why are Asian-Americans so good at school? Or, to put it another way, why is Xuan-Trang Ho so perfect?
Trang came to the United States in 1994 as an 11-year-old Vietnamese girl who spoke no English. Her parents, neither having more than a high school education, settled in Nebraska and found jobs as manual laborers.
The youngest of eight children, Trang learned English well enough that when she graduated from high school, she was valedictorian. Now she is a senior at Nebraska Wesleyan with a 3.99 average, a member of the USA Today All-USA College Academic Team and a new Rhodes Scholar.
Increasingly in America, stellar academic achievement has an Asian face. In 2005, Asian-Americans averaged a combined math-verbal SAT of 1091, compared with 1068 for whites, 982 for American Indians, 922 for Hispanics and 864 for blacks. Forty-four percent of Asian-American students take calculus in high school, compared with 28 percent of all students.
Among whites, 2 percent score 750 or better in either the math or verbal SAT. Among Asian-Americans, 3 percent beat 750 in verbal, and 8 percent in math. Frankly, you sometimes feel at an intellectual disadvantage if your great-grandparents weren't peasants in an Asian village.
So I asked Trang why Asian-Americans do so well in school.
"I can't speak for all Asian-Americans," Trang told me, "but for me and my friends, it was because of the sacrifices that our parents made. ... It's so difficult to see my parents get up at 5 each morning to go to factories to earn $6.30 an hour. I see that there is so much that I can do in America that my parents couldn't."
Of course, not all Asian-Americans are so painfully perfect — Filipinos are among the largest groups of Asian-Americans and they do very well without being stellar. Success goes particularly to those whose ancestors came from the Confucian belt from Japan through Korea and China to Vietnam.
It's not just the immigrant mentality, for Japanese-American students are mostly fourth- and fifth-generation now, and they're still excelling. Nor is it just about family background, for Chinese-Americans who trace their origins to peasant villages also graduate summa.
One theory percolating among some geneticists is that in societies that were among the first with occupations that depended on brains, genetic selection may have raised I.Q.'s slightly — a theory suggesting that maybe Asians are just smarter. But I'm skeptical, partly because so much depends on context.
In the U.S., for example, ethnic Koreans are academic stars. But in Japan, ethnic Koreans languish in an underclass, often doing poorly in schools and becoming involved in the yakuza mafia. One lesson may be that if you discriminate against a minority and repeatedly shove its members off the social escalator, then you create pathologies of self-doubt that can become self-sustaining.
So then why do Asian-Americans really succeed in school? Aside from immigrant optimism, I see two and a half reasons:
First, as Trang suggests, is the filial piety nurtured by Confucianism for 2,500 years. Teenagers rebel all over the world, but somehow Asian-American kids often manage both to exasperate and to finish their homework. And Asian-American families may not always be warm and fuzzy, but they tend to be intact and focused on their children's getting ahead.
Second, Confucianism encourages a reverence for education. In Chinese villages, you still sometimes see a monument to a young man who centuries ago passed the jinshi exam — the Ming dynasty equivalent of getting a perfect SAT. In a Confucian culture, it is intuitive that the way to achieve glory and success is by working hard and getting A's.
Then there's the half-reason: American kids typically say in polls that the students who succeed in school are the "brains." Asian kids typically say that the A students are those who work hard. That means no Asian-American ever has an excuse for not becoming valedictorian.
"Anybody can be smart, can do great on standardized tests," Trang explains. "But unless you work hard, you're not going to do well."
If I'm right, the success of Asian-Americans is mostly about culture, and there's no way to transplant a culture. But there are lessons we can absorb, and maybe the easiest is that respect for education pays dividends. That can come, for example, in the form of higher teacher salaries, or greater public efforts to honor star students. While there are no magic bullets, we would be fools not to try to learn some Asian lessons.
Talking Like A Native
By CARL NOLTE
If you have spent any time in bookstores lately, you must have noticed that there are books on San Francisco's past, present and future; books that tell you where to eat, where to drink, where to drive, where to take a bus, where to stay, what to look at and even how to cook in the San Francisco style, whatever that is. But no book tells you how to act like a native San Franciscan, because it is widely assumed that the breed, if it ever existed, is extinct. One book, "San Francisco Free and Easy," subtitled "The native's Guide Book," says on the first page, "San Franciscans are notorious newcomers. You'll find few people here with the sort of roots common to East Coast cities."
Another, written by a carpetbagger named John K. Bailey, is called "The San Francisco Insider's Guide." It begins, "On my first visit to San Francisco, 15 years ago..." Fifteen years ago? I know a cat who's Lived here longer than that!
A terrible thing has happened to native San Franciscans. They have become strangers in their own city. Their whole culture is in danger of being swallowed up by foreigners from New York, Ohio, New Hampshire, Denver, and other places Back East. These newcomers all assume everyone else is a newcomer.
The first thing to go is the language. Despite everything you've ever heard, there is a distinctive San Francisco way of talking and it is important to make note of it, for the record, before it becomes as dead as Latin. Here's how to talk like a San Franciscan.
The first lesson - learned at birth - is never to call it Frisco or San FRANcisco. Most resident tourists have settled on something that sounds like an Anglicized version of the Spanish San Francisco, but natives run the two words together and add a couple of extra sounds, and it comes out "Sampencisco." It may also be called "Thecity", which is one word. It is never called The City, which is two words and tacky.
One way to tell native San Franciscans is the way they run words together. Another way is that all native San Franciscans know something about other native San Franciscans. This cannot be faked. The first test comes when a native San Franciscan is introduced to someone he does not know at a party. Sooner or later, one will ask the other where he or she is from. The correct dialogue goes like this:
Q: Whereya from?
A: Here.
Q: Oh yeah? Whereja go to school?
A: Poly.
Q: Oh yeah? Doya know (fill in name of acquaintance)?
At once, the two people realize they are both natives and doubtless have friends, experiences, and a whole subculture in common. There are several keys to this small bit of conversation.
First, the true native runs all the words together. He never says, "Where are you from?" because that is the way they talk Back East. When he asks where you went to school, he means high school - not college, not Trade school, and certainly not P.S. 178.
The correct answer is one of several San Francisco high schools. "Poly," of course, means Polytechnic High School, which not only reveals your high school but what district of the city you came from, and other details. If, for example, the answer is "S.I." you know the man went to St. Ignatius High and was probably raised a Catholic and is from an upper-middle-class family. "S.H." people were from North Beach and the Mission, better known as Sacred Heart.
If the person says "Mission" or "Bal" (for Balboa High) you know he is from the Mission District, and his father was probably a member of the working class, called "a workin' man" in the San Francisco dialect.
If he went to Lowell, he may well be Jewish; if he went to Galileo, he is probably a North Beach Italian, and not a Mission District Italian.
One has to be careful, though. Some women, asked where they went to school, will respond that they "went to the madams." A tourist will immediately leap to the conclusion that the poor woman was raised in a whorehouse, but natives understand immediately what this woman means: She attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart, conducted by a ritzy order of nuns, and is doubtless from a wealthy family. She is not necessarily a Catholic, however. Diane Feinstein went to the madams.
The next thing to note about this conversation is that the proper response to a remark is "Yeah?" not "You don't say so?" or "Is that right?" San Franciscans say "yeah" a lot, but it doesn't always mean yes.
Now you are ready for your geography lesson. Oakland, Berkeley, and all those other places are "across the Bay." The largest city in Santa Clara County is "Sannazay," not "San Jose." Sannazay is near Sannacruise. To get there, you have to go Down the Peninsula, past South City, Sammateo, Rewoodcity and a whole buncha other towns.
"The River" is the Russian River, and no other, but "the Lake" is Lake Tahoe only if your family was wealthy; otherwise, "the lake" is Clear Lake. "The Mountain" is Tamalpais; Mount Diablo is "Dyeaablo," and it has no first name.
The town on the river is called "Gurneyville", even though the correct pronunciation is Guerenville. San Franciscans know the correct pronunciation but choose not to use it. If corrected on this, a native will likely say, "If those guys up there are so smart, what'er they doin' livin' there? People who live in Gurneyville all year are a buncha Okies anyway." It should be noted that being called an Okie - as in persons from Oklahoma or anywhere south is among the worst insults a San Franciscan can offer; it means a person lacks taste or sophistication.
Natives are often asked for directions, sometimes by tourists and often by pseudo-natives. A San Franciscan of course, has no idea where anything across the Bay is, but he knows all about San Francisco.
To start with, unless a street is tiny, like Saturn Street or Macrondray Lane, it is never called by its full name. You never say "Taraval Street," for example, only "Taraval." When you direct someone to go "out Geary," by which is meant you go west. You know, toward the beach. One never goes "in Mission," or "in Geary." To head in the general direction of downtown, one goes "down Mission" or "down Geary."
It is "the beach," too, not the seashore or the coast. The coast is Down the Peninsula, near Sharp Park. There are no beaches on the Bay, despite evidence to the contrary - only on the ocean.
San Franciscans know there are 30 numbered streets and 48 avenues; they know Arguello is First Avenue and Funston is 13th Avenue. They know that First Street is not the first street, and that Main is not the main street.
The Richmond district is always called "The Richmond," and the Sunset District is always called "The Sunset," but Noe Valley has no article in front of its name; neither does downtown or North Beach. No one knows why.
Natives do know it is always 24th (pronounced twenny fourth) and Mission, not Mission and 24th. It's Second and Clement, not Clement and Second. The Street is not pronounced "CLEment" but "CleMent."
There is no need to make a distinction between Second Street and Second Avenue in this case, since San Franciscans know that Second Street and Clement do not intersect. They know several other things, too: that Alcatraz is not called The Rock, that Yerba Buena Island is called "Goat Island" or "YBI", that French bread is not called sourdough bread and never was. The name sourdough" for honest bread was invented by advertising guys from Chicago or someplace.
They know that Italians do not eat pizza. They eat spaghetti, tagliarini, or some other stuff, mostly in North Beach, but sometimes in small places in the Mission or Daly City. Daly City is near the county line. San Francisco has no city limit.
San Franciscans call the movie theater "the show," as in "I went to the show last week, and jeez, the guy behind me was coffin all through the pitcher. I couln'n' hardly stant it." "The theater" (pronounced "thee-ater") refers to the legitimate stage.
There are San Francisco threats, too. One of the worst is to act so irresponsibly that you will be put away, as is "if you keep actin' like that, you'll end up in Napa," which, of course, is the local mental hospital. This threat has lost some of its power lately, since these days half the people at Powell & Market appear to be deranged.
Another threat is the danger of being forsaken by your family and friends in your old age and sent to Laguna Honda, the city's old folks' home.
When San Franciscans read papers, they read the Ex (the Examiner) or The Chronicle (never called the Chron). Old guys usta read the Call (as the Call-Bulletin was called) or the Noos (The San Francisco News, which Very old residents called the Dailynoos). San Franciscans never, ever read the San Francisco Magazine, which is written, edited, and produced for tourists.
Television is pretty much a wasteland of standard spoken English, though there are a few bright spots. Joe DiMaggio, a native of Martinez who was raised in North Beach, sometimes appears on behalf of a product he Calls "Mista CAWfee," and it is possible to watch the news on KPIX, because anchorman Dave McElhatton is suspected of being a native, or, on KGO, where Van Amburg holds forth. He went to State, ya know.
With any luck, you might catch Russ Coughlin, also on KGO-TV. He is a graduate of Mission High, and has the last pure San Francisco accent on the local airwaves.
As for the rest, it's pretty hard to hear all these radio and TV types mispronounce the names we all grew up with ("I'm standing here at the Persiddio" or "at Mare Island, up by Valley-jo." Or, as I heard last week, "He was buried on Colima."
Most of us grew up under the delusion that everybody was a native San Franciscan. It was the largest small town in the world, and we thought it the only city that counted. Occasional tourists complimented us on the city, but we never dreamed they'd move here and take over. Everywhere else was far away, and the jet plane hadn't been invented.
I went to high school with a guy who was a direct descendant of Francisco De Haro, the first alcalde of Yerba Buena, and I have a friend whose great-great-grandfather walked to California from Rabbit Hash, Ky., in 1844. No big deal.
Once, after a woman bought a house in the Richmond, one of her new neighbors asked her where she was from. "I moved out here six months ago," she said. "Oh, from the East or Midwest?" the neighbor asked. "No," She said, "from California and Buchanan."
Perhaps you are now thinking of fooling your friends by pretending to be a native. Don't try. There is only one way to be a native San Franciscan. You gotta be born here.
"Anybody," my grandfather used to say, "can be born in Oakland, or Back East. It's an honor to be born in Sampencisco."
What gets us through life, evidently, is just the right amount of delusion — enough to fool us into feeling relatively good about ourselves ... but not so much as to exceed our own credulity.
Imagination (or projecting ourselves into the future) ought to be the key to predicting what will make us happy, but we're incapable of imagining accurately.
Hello friends§ warm sticky greetings from tangiers, morroco: to begin some logistical orientation.
1. this keyboard is primarily in arabic. typing has become a challenge: § will mean exclamation pt. sometimes q will mean a. other times z will mean w:
2. you must write to me and tell me if you wish not to be accosted zith my tales; no offense will be taken; much email clutter will be spared;
spain
in sevilla, there is very good coffee, tapas, and people who kill bulls while wearing sequins at 400 600 and 800 pm showings.
algericas is a southern porttown of andalucia, where there is a ferry from Christiandom to the Arab World every half hour: The city is full of docks, cranes and disgruntled longshoreman in neon. It is indistinguable from Oakland and Harbor City, but much better looking than Cleveland.
the ferry
the ferry travels west through the strait of gibralter. from the deck, one can awe at the Great Rock of Gibralter, one of the Pillars of Hercules, now encrusted with british resort housing.
Conclusions: if the strait was quite a bit narrower, one could conceivably carry out this activity: look, i am in africa. now i am in europe. now i am in africa again, etc.
tangiers
zephyr and i decide to take the overnight train to marakech. we arrive in early afternoon. the train station has no lockers for our packs. we cannot conceive how to walk the 2+ miles to the medina, then lumber about with our alleywide luggage. zephyr brightly suggests i wander off, have a good time and she will stay at the station and teach herself arabic. She assures me if i do not return by sunset she will duly avenge my death. i brightly agree with her.
This is of course a terrible terrible idea.
I confidently strode towards the tallest minaret in the horizon. The view there of was quickly engulfed in a series of high rises. after meandering and avoiding stares and catcalls, i asked a woman about my age for directions. that is, i pointed to my map and flailed my arms; she smiled politely and pointed in a direction. this quickly led me to what appeared to be the most elaborate and extensive car repair strip in all of north africa.
luckily i found this internet cafe. right next to the welders, with a jovial mix of spanish and arabic pop music that plays in 13 min loops.
now that im lost forever in the seething port city of my dreams, im going to get a fanta. and cry. unless they have ribena.
i hope you are all well
Spare us the self-involved moaning over the agonies of your art. Writing is no harder than anything else, and the complainers should can it.
By Garrison Keillor
May. 03, 2006 | OK, let me say this once and get it off my chest and never mention it again. I have had it with writers who talk about how painful and harrowing and exhausting and almost impossible it is for them to put words on paper and how they pace a hole in the carpet, anguish writ large on their marshmallow faces, and feel lucky to have written an entire sentence or two by the end of the day.
It's the purest form of arrogance: Lest you don't notice what a brilliant artist I am, let me tell you how I agonize over my work. To which I say: Get a job. Try teaching eighth-grade English, five classes a day, 35 kids in a class, from September to June, and then tell us about suffering.
The fact of the matter is that the people who struggle most with writing are drunks. They get hammered at night and in the morning their heads are full of pain and adverbs. Writing is hard for them, but so would golf be, or planting alfalfa, or assembling parts in a factory.
The biggest whiners are the writers who get prizes and fellowships for writing stuff that's painful to read, and so they accumulate long résumés and few readers and wind up teaching in universities where they inflict their gloomy pretensions on the young. Writers who write for a living don't complain about the difficulty of it. It does nothing for the reader to know you went through 14 drafts of a book, so why mention it?
The truth, young people, is that writing is no more difficult than building a house, and the only good reason to complain is to discourage younger and more talented writers from climbing on the gravy train and pushing you off.
Young people are pessimistic enough these days without their elders complaining about things. Shut up. Life is pretty good when you grow up. You own your own car, you go where you like, and you sing along with the radio or talk to yourself or chat on your cellphone. You pull into the drive-up window and order the Oreo Blizzard. What's not to like?
One day you get lucky and find someone who's willing to pay you to do something you do well or can fake, and on this you can build a life. You marry someone loving and sensible who makes you laugh, and you beget children, and go through the poop and puke and snot years, and somewhere around the age of 5 or 6, your kids start to fascinate you. There is nobody like them, except perhaps you. You would run into a burning building for them, and at the same time they're the cause of exquisite worry and consternation. At the age of 12, they look at you as if to say, Your replacement has arrived.
Meanwhile, you march forward and sample the pleasures of life. You read history and learn to grill fish in beer batter and find comfortable shoes. You go to Rome. You go to Montana. You come to love baseball and old jazz and the art of conversation. You admit to yourself that you don't care for Walt Whitman or Proust or Henry James, and you forgive yourself for that and pick up Elmore Leonard and J.F. Powers. You discover the pleasure of discarding stuff. You find a hairstyle that suits you. You go back to Montana.
Eventually you cross the line into your 40s, the mortgage years. And the 50s, when you stand weeping at graduations and weddings, and then, in the blink of an eye, come your 60s, and now you're on Easy Street. People who used to ignore you now treat you with reverence. There is great silence when you natter and pontificate, and people ask the secret of your success. You have become eminent. Inside you feel mischievous and jokey, but other people see you as a laureate, so you learn to harrumph.
Clarity is hard. Honesty can be hard. Comedy is always chancy, but then so is profundity. Sometimes one winds up as the other. Illness is, of course, to be avoided, and also megamalls and meetings involving vice presidents. But writing is not painful, no more so than a round of golf. Nobody was harmed in the course of writing this column. That is all I have to say at this time. Thank you.
Go ahead, call me a snob. I’ll accept this label. But I am more interested in reading and supporting new Asian American authors who are pushing past the model minority stereotypes and writing about class struggle, passion and politics in a way that doesn’t have to include discussions of brand-names and, in this case, super-elitist academic institutions. I think my critique of Viswanathan goes beyond her chick-lit genre, because this critique applies to authors like Jumpha Lahiri as well, and is more about my frustration with the lack of fiction out there about the working class South Asian community. Can we only write about first generation immigration experiences, living in the suburbs or the homeland? I don’t mean to favor subject-matter over writing quality but I think if South Asian writers continue to write about the same subjects and place their stories in the same settings, we are just limiting ourselves.
Does anyone want to have a celebration for April 20th, 2006?
Emily, will you be our ganja blossom queen?
But it's one thing for a bunch of glorified ad vehicles--or even the rampantly capitalist Wall Street Journal--to be hawking designer duffel bags and skin cream priced higher than Jack Abramoff's legal team. After all, these publications unabashedly promote--and generally cater to readers who share--a Trump-esque mine-is-bigger-than-yours attitude toward wealth and consumption. It's quite another matter, however, for the venerable Times to lend its imprimatur to a genre so awkwardly at odds with its own high-minded liberal sensibility and intellectual pretensions. This, after all, is the same paper that, last year, ran an eleven-part series on class in America, in which it described economic mobility as "the promise that lies at the heart of the American dream" and exhaustively pondered its apparent decline. Social consciousness for The Wall Street Journal may mean crushing the welfare state, but, for the Times, it means earnest editorials packed with noblesse oblige. (Classic snippet from last Thanksgiving: "There is no shame in the poverty Americans suffer today. The shame adheres to those who do nothing to change it.") Wretched consumer excess may be the American way, but is it really the paper of record's business to lend it respectability?
"Thursday Styles," by contrast, is seeking new converts, reassuring its more skeptical readers that there's really nothing wrong with showing off their good fortune. This is delicate work considering that even many ultra-affluent Times readers belong to the ambivalently wealthy ranks of the "Bourgeois Bohemians" profiled so piquantly in now-Timesman David Brooks's 2000 classic, Bobos in Paradise. A new breed of elites deeply conflicted about their material success, Bobos are morally appalled by any gaudy display that could make them look like "the vulgar Yuppies they despise." Writes Brooks: "Maybe off in Vegas there are still some rich peasants trying to conspicuously consume, buying big limousines, powerboats, and sports franchises and piling up possessions to demonstrate their net worth. But the Bobo renounces accumulation and embraces cultivation. He must show, in the way he spends his money, that he is conscientious and not crass." Unlike the typical in-your-face luxury porn, "Thursday Styles" grasps the conflicted code of the Bobo.
Similarly, complaining about the drive out to a mall well north of the city, she once quipped, "On my deathbed, I would like to be able to say I read Pushkin in the original Russian, not that I spent 12,458 hours in the pursuit of shopping." It's fine to spend absurd amounts of time and money acquiring absurd stuff, Kuczynski is assuring us, so long as you recognize the absurdity. Because the real vulgarity isn't greed, but rather a lack of self-awareness.
i've been in california for about 8 months now. i haven't really danced since i left michigan. sometimes i worry whether or not i am still capable of doing everything i used to do, all those things i was known for. the thing with personas is that they aren't fictional representations, false identities that one might play on television, then shed like dead skin when the cameras stopped rolling. they're more like different sides of the same die, numbers that turn up when the conditions are just right; they are the shards of our ideal selves, made real and public if only for a moment. when they are gone, it is as if a portion of our soul has disappeared beneath the currents of time, leaving us with the bittersweet taste of nostalgia on our tongues. not even the wine of california's napa valley can mask its flavor.
