Lizard kitten

There is a wee baby gecko that has taken up residence on my window sill. He's been there for days now. At first I thought it was awesome because I thought he was eating the tiny flies that come in my window at night sometimes but after more observation he seems to just like stalking them. He acts like a cat and will crouch close to the ground and creeep up on one super slow but then just stare at it. If one walks near him he'll step away from it like he's all surprised and offended. I'm not sure what he's eating, but anyway we named him Little Dude and he's my new pet. One of these days I'll try to get some photos of the hilarious bugger as he stares incredulously at his dinner.

That game was bad and you should feel bad

Goddddd we got MURDERED 54-9 by Boise State today. Seriously, shouldn't they have been too jet lagged to ream us like that? Cripes.

Luckily I have found out that none of my extended family reads this so now it may be the blog of KINGS! Damn hell ass kings!

Also, please to not be adding me on Facebook family members and friends of family members. I feel like a jerk not adding you back but I like to be able to say/link to whatever on my Facebook and with you guys being around I would have to censor my stuff. What would I do in my spare time if I couldn't post links to penis-shaped cake pans? :(

Fun fact: I originally typed "penis-shaped cake pants" which is actually way funnier than my joke.

It was just ghastly

So Isaac and I broke up earlier this week. I guess he finally realized I didn't have any intention of changing my plans again to move to somewhere he wanted to live and then I realized he had no intention of ever living anywhere other than NYC. So yeah. I imagine he will tell his Ivy League friends about it kinda like this.

In similarly lame news, I am getting the worst breakout I have ever had in my entire life on my cheeks right now and as it's healing it's leaving behind little marks. The kind of little marks that do not go away for a good year and even then require extensive chemical peels to remove. This is an unhappy blossom. Sad face :(

In happier news I'm going to see Where The Wild Things Are tomorrow (yaaaaay) followed by yakiniku for dinner (yaaaaay) with Ikemen buddy (yaaaaay) and two people I don't know, one of which is visiting from Japan. He's begun trying to convince me to do an ethnography of some kind of intense nerdy subculture like LARPers or furries with an emphasis on participant observation. He says, and this is a direct quote, "it really speaks to the tension between the nature/culture divide and the problems people have when other people transgress it." He says I should be a mongoose. THIS IS HOW WE ROLL IN ANTHROPOLOGY.

We've also spent the last week staying up most of the night and commiserating each other on our various midterm projects and his thesis. We have two classes together so a lot of that is "Man, can you believe this class? Man. This class. Geeze." Before our History of Anthropology midterm this morning we pledged psychic unity of study guide information. ANTHRO HUMOR.

He's been working on his thesis outline for like two months solid now. At some point tonight he realized that he was actually putting like five times as much detail as was necessary into the outline and could have had it finished a few weeks ago. He found this out as I was doing the third draft of my study guide for my History of Japan to 1700 midterm. And the road to perfection is strewn with our bodies.

Fantastic morning

Imagine, if you will, that you have been working on a very important presentation that makes up about a third of your grade for a class you really like. It starts on Monday at 11:30am and you are the only person presenting that day.

You wake up and the clock says 11:28am.

This is not a good start to the day.

Suddenly, bananas! Thousands of them!

I have an upcoming presentation on Monday for Anthropology of the Body and, as of this morning, I am officially tired of reading about FGC. If I have to read one more value judgment about how psychologically damaging it must be for women to be circumcised without any accompanying condemnation of male circumcision I am going to have kittens.

Anyway, went to see Zombieland. It has by far the BEST cameo I have ever seen in a movie ever and I am including Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder when I say that. If you are afraid of clowns, though, I would not recommend it. There are zombie clowns. They jump out and go BOO and it's not funny at all. :| What was funny, however, was the guy I went with making very concerned noises in his throat every time Jesse Eisenberg did something awkward and creepy.

Unhappiness is deciding to finally wash all your dirty clothes late Saturday night only to realize that you don't have any money left on your laundry card and the machine to recharge it does not take credit cards or $1 bills, meaning that you have to wait until Sunday to go to the grocery store to get cash back in $5 or $10 dollar bills so you can recharge the card so you can do laundry.

Also: "You are being shagged by a rare parrot."

Alright gang, let's split up

I think Hawai'i is officially the most haunted place in the freaking world. Apparently no one here has ever seen a horror movie because they just will not stop building stuff over ancient burial sites. They don't even excavate and re-bury the remains, they just screw it all up. They were gonna put the new Whole Foods in one place but people got mad because there was a burial ground there so they moved it to Kahala where they moved a cemetery so they could put it in that spot. THAT'S NOT ANY BETTER, GUYS. Seriously I looked at a list of haunted places on this island and all but like three of them were build on burial grounds. Whyyyyy.

This came up in the debate over whether or not to go see Paranormal Activity with my buddy Ikemen (names changed to protect the innocent whatever and to also make him incredibly awesome) when he also suggested we go to Morgan's Corner. This, I think, is the worst idea in the history of all bad ideas. For those of you not in the know (i.e. everyone) that's a now closed-off road, at the end of which a girl hung herself some years back. It's popularly known as being Super Crazy Haunted and if you go there you will see her and then she will freaking kill you. If you're in a car, supposedly it will stall at a certain point in the road and everything. You know what I don't want, guys? I don't want to invoke a goddam Ju-on style haunting that will kill me in the same manner as my nightmares, thereby manifesting my darkest fears into flesh. That does not sound like a fun weekend.

What I DO want to do, however, is walk over the bridges in the Manoa Valley hiking trail. It's a long trail with a dead end and apparently when you walk down it there are seven bridges to cross but when you walk back there are only six. I have GOT to see if this is for real. Some of Ikemen's friends did and it and swore there were only six coming back but I'm not buying that. I gotta actually go and get to the end with one bridge missing before I'll believe it, but this is such a common story (and it's so easily verifiable) that it just has to be true. The case is probably that, when you walk back, the lay of the land is such that when you walk over one of the bridges you don't notice it. But I want to find out now!

Luckily one of the biggest hauntings here, the night marchers, cannot be seen by haole so at least I'm off the hook for that one. I don't know if they're supposed to still be able to take your soul but as long as I don't see them I think I'm good.


Anyone wondering what "ikemen" is, basically it's someone who would fit in this photo.

Which one of you preppies put gold dust in my fencing mask

If you don't laugh at this you have no soul.

Women hold up half the sky

I've been reading Half the Sky for a couple of days now and it's hard to put down. I'm actually going to be pretty mad when I finish it.

The piece I like to use to summarize the subject of the book is this: 107 million females are missing.

"[In] normal circumstances women live longer than men, and so there are more females than males in much of the world. Even poor regions like most of Latin America and much of Africa have more females than males. Yet in places where girls have a deeply unequal status, they vanish. ... This has nothing to do with biology ... Every year, at least another 2 million girls worldwide disappear because of gender discrimination. In the wealthy countries of the West, discrimination is usually a matter of unequal pay or underfunded sports teams or unwanted touching from a boss. In contrast, in much of the world discrimination is lethal."

What I love about this book is that it's not preachy. It's not a sermon, it's not trying to tell you what you should do or tell you what the solutions are. It acknowledges that this is a multifaceted issue and that there is no obvious fix. Kristof and WuDunn (New York Times reporters who famously witnessed and reported on the Tienanmen Square massacre) are not interested in making us feel guilt or sympathy, nor do they attempt to fabricate some kind of idyllic future that's only a bit of volunteer work or a small donation away. They give you the stories objectively, explaining proposed courses of action and weighing the pros and cons of each. Ultimately the fact that weighs on you is not the atrocities suffered by the women they interview but the knowledge that, even with everything done right, this will continue for a long while before it can even possibly be resolved.

The stories are not usually tragedies. Despite the kinds of horrors some of these women have been through, they are not ruined. For the most part they do not break and they are not afraid. They are constantly fighting back and, sometimes, they triumph against those who would force them to suffer in silence. I don't finish a chapter feeling upset or angry but rather hopeful and inspired. If Mukhtar Mai can outlast the government that tried to lock her away, if Usha Narayane and the women in her town can take down a brutal gangster when their government would not, if Meena Hasina can lead a raid on a gangster's home to get her children back, these are not tragedies. They are a window of the kind of justice that will continue to develop if we support it.

The key is not just humanitarian aid; It is also political pressure. No society will change of its own volition without pressure, both internal and external. With increasing internal support for women from aid organizations the remaining piece is for us in the West to demand certain changes. Action will only be taken if we insist on results, not just legislation. Policy change is largely irrelevant because there is little influence of the law in the rural areas in which most of the brutality takes place. No government wants to be shamed on a global scale.

I guess the important thing is that change is already happening, and hopefully with the support of people like you and I it can continue to happen. There are girls out there right now that are fierce and resilient but they can't do it alone. Not all issues will be resolved, of course, but for every small step there is at least one more woman who will be safe. And if that seems insignificant, remember-- you are just one person, too.