When keeping it real goes wrong.

Don't do it, Tantalus! It's not worth it, man...


Conclusion: Graduate school is pointless. But let’s step back a bit.

I went to college for finance and economics. Kicking and screaming. As an angsty nonconformist teen drowning in darkness and pain I was set on studying foreign affairs, looking for a bigger world out there, one that fucking rocked the pants off the insane social vacuousness that was bucolic cowtown NJ. And I did earn admission to a leading undergraduate program for foreign service, my first choice. However, I also got a scholarship to a business program, and as my mother was unwilling to chip in even words of encouragement for my education, to make it easier on my father I swallowed the acrid bile that remained of my dreams and went the scholarship route. But I tasted the bitterness for years afterwards.

You see, if you put a monkey in a cage, with a banana, and tell him he can’t have it, he’ll want it more. He’ll fixate on it. He’ll get fucking pissed. He’ll curse you, your brother, and your brother's donkey, and if you let enough time elapse, and maybe give him a typewriter, he might recreate for you the collected works of Shakespeare, in addition to some pretty wicked verse about how your cock is the size of a bacterium and how your brains are wholly contained in your one misshapen testicle. And all because you didn’t let him have the banana. You get my drift?

In school, I didn’t enjoy finance. I enjoyed economics only marginally more. But what I did enjoy was New York. And vodka tonics. And where might a penchant for vodka tonics land an angry Asian girl in New York?

That’s right. Investment banking.

I was recruited in 2000. Started in 2001. Then 9/11 happened, the market bottomed out, and shit really hit the fan. Lots of firings. Not so much money.

God, life fucking sucked. 10th circle of hell, the one Dante never found. Granted, I would choose banking over NJ any day, but coming home every morning at 3am nursing your most recently acquired asshole really drains the life out of you. Fuck this, I thought. I coulda gone to [insert foreign service school here]. I coulda studied what I really liked. I coulda been happy. I coulda been a contender.

And so the seeds of misguidance were sown. I’d finish my analyst years, then take whatever paltry sum I managed to collect in the post 9/11 fallout and plant it into graduate school. Water it, nurture it, watch it grow. Yeah, I thought. Then all of this will become just a nasty detour, fading into nothing more than a fuzzy, distant nightmare.

So after 3 years of monkey business I leave the Street to wander the World. I quit. I keep it real. So real that I didn’t have a safety net. Regardless, the day I left was honestly the happiest day of my life. The banana was within reach. Fast forward through GMATs/GREs, applications, travel, and contract work, and I get to school. And it’s…so…so…well...just so-so.

What a complete fucking disappointment.

Fuck, dude! This is what I’ve always wanted, right?

Or not.

In Greek mythology, Tantalus, both thirsty and hungry, is condemned to stand in a lake in Hades with fruit dangling above him. When he bends to drink, the water recedes. When he reaches for fruit, the branch pulls away. Well, for a year and a half now I’ve been lapping the water and chewing the fruit, and let me tell you, they both taste like ass.

Did I hype it up too much? Romanticize it beyond realistic recognition? Expectations will screw you every time, you know. Or maybe, over the years, I got used to banking, to walking fast, talking fast, buying short-term happiness, being able to bark orders and have them followed to the tee at least 51% of the time. Ultimately, it is probably all of the above.

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

What a realization. I chose to keep it “real,” and it’s gone horribly wrong. Here I am, dropping my own dime, almost all my dimes, on a five-dollar-sign prestigious university, and I skip classes (when I’m not falling asleep in them). I procrastinate. I bitch and whine. I don’t socialize (no real sense of community anyway, so I’m not sure I’m missing out on much). As a friend of mine said, to have interest in a subject is one thing. To really study it is to elevate it to an infinitely higher plane.

I like reading the news. I like watching the news. But I’m not a huge fan of sitting through hours of six-ways dissection of abstract political and/or economic theory and then trying to fit it all into a graph on an exam or a paper.

Moreover, the pretense is so thick it’s fucking asphyxiating. This is academia is it not? I had expected to find intellectual openness in my peers but instead I find that many carry whatever prejudices they nurtured in their home countries (including the US), and just share them here, as if they were valid cultural learnings to make benefit for glorious nation of America. Is making another Bush quip, #7,638 by my count, truly insightful, or just superficial and trendy? Are you trying to be so nonconformist that you end up being conformist? Everyone trying to be something else. Everyone in my program thinking they are better than everyone else, and everyone in the bschool thinking they are better than everyone else, especially everyone in my program. I’ve really fucking had it.

And really, does grad school help you find a better job? So far, my answer would be no…there are too many grad students (including MBAs, okay) who can’t find a paying summer internship (in New York of all places!), let alone gainful full-time employment. And sometimes, sacked with new debt, they can't land any job that pays higher than their pre-grad school position. Pretty fucked up, I’d say.

I think MBA is useful if you are coming from left field and want to get into finance or consulting (just be aware that you are paying up for the letters M-B-A, and are unlikely to learn more than how to kiss ass during a steady descent into alcoholism). I think med school is useful if you want to be a doctor, likewise law school for lawyers and other more specialized fields. Where you absolutely need the degree to practice. But for everything else, it’s experience that counts. If you are going to stay in your job, for fuck’s sake get your degree paid or at least subsidized. If you are going to stay in your field, rely on your connections first. If you are going to career-switch, as in change to a completely unrelated field, make fucking sure you absolutely need this degree to do it. Because let me tell you, it’s not all happiness and sunshine and ivy-scaled walls. The idea that you can come to grad school and totally revolutionize your life, find yourself for the first time or again, or have the undergraduate experience you never had, is a complete and total myth.

These are the things that I did not recognize before I started grad school, or even applied for it. Now, the question becomes, if I had gone to the foreign service school for undergrad, would I have learned this there? Or is this disillusionment just by-product from growing up putting out trials by fire? Did I really need to decimate my savings to figure this out? Who the fuck knows. The only thing I know is I need to graduate ASAP.

I found an associate position back in banking, same group but different bank. And honestly, I like the people. They’re honest. There’s less bullshit to weed through than in other industries I’ve seen. I can curse and be obscene and make jokes about white people. And that’s okay to them. And that’s fantastic to me. Because really, all I’m looking for now is a place where I can work with funny and smart people, where I can make money to buy an apartment (and pay off my fucking school loans), and be my colorful badass self.

In short, my grad school experience to date has been a rather serpentine, arduous, and costly trek through a desert of ivy in search of the grass on the other side. And I found it. It’s not greener. It’s brown. Just like the fucking grass I had before. Another friend of mine said, “I’m happy with my brown grass,” but from the perspective that yes, there must be greener grass somewhere. My lesson learned here is that grass is brown on every fucking side. So I need to just deal with it. That’s how to properly keep it real.

So thanks, but no thanks. Keep your fucking bananas to yourself.

Nothing like the onset of holiday season to remind you what a lonely, pathetic, conformist bitch you really are.

All these fucking tourists and twinkling lights everywhere. Gifts for Him! Gifts for Her! Everybody walking around holding hands with fucking people they love and shit. Some people say the holidays are all about giving and being grateful and spreading joy, and to those people, I say fuck you. Go back to your sunshine fairytale. Leave me and my storm cloud alone.

Oh, bother.

The only time green is bad.

So I wake up this morning...er, afternoon, feeling a little shitty, a little dark, despite the suburban sunshine streaming through the blinds. I look over at the stuffed dog I've had since before my parents' divorce, who's been with me through good times and bad, who's let me cry on his shoulder after the popular kids made fun of me at school, and in return I performed emergency surgery on him when his neck seam burst and his life-stuffing threatened to drain from his body ...and he says, goddamn it you stupid lazy bitch, get your pathetic lard ass up and do something with your life.

Oh, well, okay.

I drag myself out of bed and downstairs to the kitchen. Coffee always calms me, lifts my spirits, brightens my mood. But because this is bucolic cowtown NJ, instant coffee will have to do. My mother has already put a ginormous mug of milk in the fridge... the mug that I painstakingly chose for her on my trip to Disneyworld during spring break of my senior year in college, the mug that has Mickey Mouse standing confidently with his mitts on his hips, with the words "Big Cheese" printed jauntily under him, as if he were the conquering emperor of the morning, casting off rays of happy sunshine fairytales which keep shitty feelings and ungrateful stuffed dogs at bay. I take it out, put it in the microwave, and look for the coffee. Cabinet 1 - just canned soup. Cabinet 2 - seven boxes of Swiss Miss hot chocolate and the familiar green canister...

Wait why is it green. It should be red. Green means...IT'S FUCKING DECAFFEINATED.

This is the type of bullshit that makes me want to kick pigeons. Let me revise the adage - You can't be a nonconformist if you don't drink caffeinated coffee. You hear me? CAFFEINATED!!

There really is no god.

Fuck.

A Very Conformist Thanksgiving

After my strange little awakening last week, I found myself oddly looking forward to spending Thanksgiving with the family, something which hasn't happened since, well...ever. You know, typical suburban Asian-family woes, the Thanksgiving from a box - cousins indentured to stir the flakes until they're mashed, cranberry sauce still shaped like the can, the aunt making turkey smacking of dry with an extra side of dry. Then add on the special sauce of last year, which was the attendance of the hybrid cousins of my cousins, one of whom brought her mentally-challenged pseudo boyfriend (white, of course - she probably should have sent him to cultural bootcamp first, if only to comfort me by preventing him from sharing things I assume were meant to be humorous). They all mean well though, and I like them. And the wine helps.

So despite the mild anxiety that again, I'd only be one foot off New Jersey Transit when my mom starts bitching about my aunt's culinary and neural processing skills, I actually thought it would be nice to see everyone - including my mom, okay - this time around.

4:23 - Debark.
4:25 - I get into the car.
4:26 - My mother announces she has opted us out of Thanksgiving dinner this year.

Oh, yeah, hey, I'm gonna go ahead and file that under SHIT I WOULD LIKE TO HAVE KNOWN YESTERDAY.

Dude, what? After all that mental psych-up? Fuck this.

But then I think, well, how bad could this be. Two weeks ago I was part of the ensemble cast that was my friend's pre-Thanksgiving potluck, meaning I made 10 pounds of mashed potatoes from scratch (I don't ever cook, I leave that to my mother and boyfriends), despite being utterly unequipped (both mentally and physically) to do so...but they turned out fine, and played nice with the mac & cheese and fried chicken and green bean casserole and corn bread on my dixie plate... So actually, I've already had a proper feast. Well then, maybe I can just talk to my mom. I mean, not about pain and darkness and that kind of stuff, but maybe about how my grandparents are doing, considering she just spent three weeks with them and got back from Taiwan yesterday.

So my grandparents, who live in an assisted-living community in Taipei, have been through something like four or five nursing aides in five months. It's my grandfather who needs the assistance, his mind still works but the body...eh, not so good. And grandma, god bless her heart, can't handle it all by herself. So they need the help. Well, the problem is, they don't think they need the help, and they must be sending out deathrays of negative vibes - the last one arrived during breakfast, took one look at them, left, and didn't come back. She was supposed to be the replacement for the one who just quit out of protest.

MOM: Why would she stay and help them out if he keeps beating her?
CB: Um, how does a 90-year old man beat someone?
MOM: (impatiently) With a stick!
CB: Ah, yes, okay...

Apparently my grandfather has been playing hockey with his walking cane and using these poor womens' shins as pucks. Aside from yelling at them. And glaring at them. And my grandpa has quite a glare okay, he's got bug-eyes and when they glare they threaten to launch themselves straight out of the sockets and right at you. Not like grandma is any better, she demands the aides clean the kitchen and do housework. Apparently grandma had first considered hiring housekeepers or servants, but my uncle, in his wonderfully colorful way, talked her out of it.

MOM: Your uncle said, well, you know, once you hire these girls from abroad, sponsor them for work permits, you're responsible for them...they live in your house. And when they get sick, you have to pay their medical bills. And when they're sick you know...they can't cook, but they need to eat too...And he also told her that there were stories of people sponsoring foreign girls for work permits, and then they come and they beat you to death. (Pauses, then laughs hysterically)

Ummm....why is this funny? Guess I will save a six-ways dissection of this for another day.

Anyway, I didn't know this about my grandparents. Grandma was always shoving food down my throat and running around and serving us, as if she were the servant. Grandpa watched his news and Korean soap operas and occasionally spat some foreign phrases at me (his former job made him fortunate enough to become very well-traveled). However, ultimately this revelation that darkness surrounds my grandparents is strangely (or not strangely) not terribly surprising...

Then the kicker - my mother is so incensed at how they've been treating their aides, that she full-on scolds them, as if they were unruly kids who had just tracked dogshit over a freshly steamed carpet. Now, this type of shit used to drive me to the darkest reaches of my being, but, when directed at anyone other than me, it becomes really fucking funny. My uncle says to her, hey, remember your purpose here okay? You purpose is to have a nice visit with your parents. You bring up stuff like this, you defeat your purpose...and the way my mother illustrates this to me is, she crosses her forearms in front of her like an X. Like crossing yourself in front of a demon. I start to giggle...

But my mom can't keep shit like this inside, she's not good at building walls like I am. It all has to come out. So she lets it out. She berates her parents. You can't treat people like this. They are hired help. They are here to help you because you need it. They are not your servants or cooks or maids. They are trained professionals.

Grandpa, being born in the year of the fire dragon, takes shit from no one, let alone his oldest daughter. He pounds the table, saying it's none of her business.

CB: With a stick?
MOM: No, with his hand.

Mom continues yelling at him, saying their business is her business and her brothers' and sisters' business too (given that my uncle is funding this whole assisted-living and nursing aides experience). And then I assume she repeated what she had already said a few times, as she always does in arguments, and though it does not bring any new information to the table it really is a very effective method of eroding your opponent's resolve. And then, in frustration, my grandfather gets up, leaves the table, goes to his room, and cranks up the music.

CB: What kind of music?
MOM: Classical.

How very nonconformist of him.

We’re all taught to believe in happy fairytale endings.

That’s probably why those of us who are just a little fucked up become more fucked up. Twentysomething years ago I was born, a product of a marriage which probably never should have been, and twentysomething years later, after ricocheting between I-don’t-need-anyone and I’m-so-lonely and go-fuck-yourself, after voluntarily leaping twice into the abyss only to be saved by a combination of random chance and an unwittingly rebellious gastric system…

I nearly joined a cult.

Well, they say they’re not a cult. They promise you a life of possibilities through some lingo and other shit, most notably a three-day bootcamp and a steep price tag. It was a friend of mine who introduced me to it, who went through it herself, who said it helped her, who invited me to an introductory session led by alum of the bootcamp, who created the atmosphere of trust, trust being something I wanted to do badly but never could.

Inherently introspective I am, being an only child and fucked up and all, and since leaving the cuckoo’s nest for college/life I’ve spent most of my days in vicious cycles of self-analysis. Why am I different. Why does my mother treat me so. What is my purpose. Is there a god. Is consciousness meaningful. Or even important.

You get the picture.

Anyway, yada yada yada, I hit my late twenties. I’ve worked and hated working and quit and worked again and went back to school and didn’t see the purpose in that and am now going back to the work I thought I hated. But at least it distracts me from the messiness of life, right? Avoidance is art. If you can make money at it, then you’re nearly genius.

But it’s never so easy when emotions are involved. I tried to wall that shit off long ago, but let’s chalk it up to being a girl, having ovaries and estrogen, that reverts me back to the same mean. Why can’t I have the relationship with my mother that all movies say I should. How come my problems can’t be resolved in 30 minutes with 2 commercial breaks. I mean, really. Why doesn’t my life conform? This is bullshit.

The state of my relationship with my mother is truly indescribable. Single mothers and the only daughters they raise are supposed to be tight. We’re not. She looked at me and saw my father, hit back, told me I’d turn out just like him, you look like him, you’re passive, you’re stupid, “I only help people who are worth helping”… At some point she stopped badmouthing him so much, after I snapped and slammed the issue up against the wall, but it didn’t matter. I knew how she felt. When your family is fucked up and no one talks to you, you learn how to read minds. Maybe not with 100% accuracy, but pretty goddamn close.

Now I’m not saying my mother is the worst. She can’t be. I’ve taken my fair share of statistics classes, I understand the concept of normal distribution, and therefore I can logically assume that there are mothers both better and worse than mine. But the fact remains that I am completely fucked up, pessimistic, uber-insecure…statistically different from normal, using a 99% confidence interval...

And so when something comes along that promises you the world, you listen. I must be one of the greatest skeptics in the world, but I listened, and almost believed. I wanted the life of possibilities, the transformational experience, the emotional balance, every fucking last bit. I couldn’t see clearly for all the hope welling up in my eyes. I wanted the happiness.

But something about it didn’t feel right. The look in the people’s eyes. The relentless sales push. The revision of personal history. Thankfully I am trigger-slow, and after sending out a distress call to the tribal council, an email returned with links. Cult, they called it. Brainwashing. There were accounts of rape and sexual abuse victims who were told on stage that they were the perpetrators of their own crimes, that they are to blame…there were people who suffered psychotic episodes during the “training”…

Fuck! I didn’t even google it myself. Didn’t take my own fucking medicine. How could I be so fucking stupid…

But thank god that I have a tribal council. Some people fucking suck. But some completely and totally rock. That’s something I learned in college, if not much else. And it was only after my second flight into darkness that I realized that blaming myself for everything wrong in my life, as I had been doing for the past twentysomething years, was neither healthy nor accurate. Blaming other people is justified. Sometimes, shit happens. You can’t control it. Moreover, those people you blame are not necessarily bad people. People make mistakes. I make mistakes. My mother makes mistakes. Such is life, if you choose to live it.

And so after a weekend of rifling through all my baggage, tearing down some walls, building drawbridges in others, slaying some dragons and taming others, I concluded that I can never again weigh myself down and sink to such a depth that I become so vulnerable to a grinch in white knight’s clothing…I decided to let the Mongolians in…and I realized they weren’t Monglians at all… Yes, my relationship with my mother is fucked up. But it is what it is. I can’t change it. What I can do is accept it. I do not doubt my friend when she said this thing helped her. But it can't help me. I owe it to myself to be my own best help.

So you know what? Joining a cult is the best thing I never did. Only two weeks earlier, I was swimming in depression and sobbing every day, like I've always done on and off, since college. But after a few dramatic turns (other than the cult episode, which involve other people, that I will not detail here) and a glimpse into the temple of doom (“kali-maaa….”), I woke up today feeling lighter than ever. Less luggage. Less dread. Kundera suggests that weight is positive. But it’s nice to be light for a change.

And so borne from the loins of my anti-cult transformational experience is this blog. I’ll try to keep the seriousness to a minimum, just tell the true hollywood stories of my life that my friends seem to so side-splittingly enjoy… the ones about family, religion, third world countries, all the weighty shit that people take too seriously. But you know what? Fuck seriousness. Fuck maturity. Just fuck it. I said fuck it. Life is short. Weight is inevitable. But for my sanity, let there be light.

So to parrot Butters, “Thanks for offerin' to let me in your clique, guys, uh but, to be honest, I'd rather be a cryin' little pussy than a faggy Goth kid.”

And remember, you can’t be a nonconformist if you don’t drink coffee.

For background, the episode that inspired it all:
http://www.imsdb.com/transcripts/South-Park-Raisins.html