gchat

"The needs of society determines its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only crumbs from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast." -Maya Angelou

How true does her classic 1969 book still ring today?

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In my sleepless misery the night after Seattle's Superbowl loss, I figured out the common link among some intriguing things:

1.) Pageants
2.) Google Chat
3.) Dating

Being a wise ass, while my parents were watching young Vietnamese women parade in a line in dresses and swimsuits, I promptly informed my mother that I don't fuck with pageants because they are archaic forms of female objectification for mass consumption. Feeling empowered in my wiseassness, I also informed her that I would NEVER let my child join any kind of brainless Miss Anything because we need to focus on women's brains. My folks, as always, were quite amused by my over-the-top liberal stance about EVERYTHING and continued with their entertainment interspersed with dainty women on ads for lightening creams, diet pills, and plastic surgery. A yellow fever middle-aged man's wonderland. (I go on these rants often.) The Vietnamese are certainly catching up the Americans when it comes the capitalistic mindless manipulation of insecure people. I won't get started on their blooming film industry...

I digress. 

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I must've saw the hypocrisy between that stance and having Google Chat with the sound on ON next to me while I sleep. Attempting to salvage my female dignity, I rid myself of gchat and skype and put it in the dungeon where the facebook app already has been for 1/2 a year, and with it my constant availability for superficial relationships that enable laziness in others. As female, I have those things out of the constant internal necessity to compromise but I am a traditionalist in terms of relationship building, and in my rebellious stages I like to shoot those forms of "communication" dead. In my "rebellious" stages, if people send me an instant message when they have a damn phone, I would rather them not me send ANYTHING because it shows a lack of character (in heart and in the number of letters they type), a lack of guts. We are not teenagers. We know how to express ourselves.

And this, of course, is one of the numerous reasons I remain perpetually single and perpetually annoying to any friends I may have (ha!). We live in an age where people role out the red carpet at every single corner so people they care about can walk on them... and people don't analyze it because we're so interdependent. We do things to please others more than we do to better ourselves. The diet pills, the plastic surgery, the lightening creams, the instant reply on gchat at 4 in the morning are hardly ever for the person doing it but for society's pleasure and friends'/lovers' consumption. We want people to judge us positively. I'm no different. And so there's this constant pressure to be lax and to let things go and honestly, I think that breeds superficiality because people don't have to work for anything. Again, in my "rebellious" or... practical phases, I hold the philosophy that people should get back what they put in and a lot of people don't put in a lot these days so nothing is what they deserve back.