Everybody find confusions in conclusion he concluded long ago--

My dreams lately have been of the dead. Earlier this week, I was accompanied by the pet dog with whom I spent most of my formative years as I settled into a dorm room (renovated to the state of something I wouldn't mind having as a studio apartment) at my undergraduate alma mater. Last night, I went on a very strange mountain hiking trip through varying light and dark, eventually meeting my father at a stop along the way.

In an unsurprising trajectory, the funk into which I'd been slowly slipping over the past week or so culminated in a neurotic existential panic a few days ago, at which point I took a few days off from life (excepting my employment obligations), avoided whatever social interaction I could and indulged my menu-reading habit. It's a thing that I do, reading online restaurant menus in the same way that you picture a drugged-up fifty-something housewife in bunny slippers with pink rollers in her hair compulsively watching QVC. It's worse than porn. Porn, at least, wants to give its viewer a good end. My menu-reading habit is just torturing myself with food that I'm not actually going to eat and from which I really can't get any vicarious enjoyment. There is zero satisfaction involved. It's a problem.

So anyways, it was a few days of not accomplishing much of anything. Until, that is, I started cleaning out the apartment. I find that cleaning -- going through everything, throwing out what I can, reorganizing what remains -- helps to set my mind straight when things get stuck in a rut. And I figure that as I will inevitably be moving when I graduate in less than a year and will also inevitably be extremely busy with school and work, why not start the process now?

In other news, the Chick-fil-A cluck-up continues to be frustrating. Another sum-up essay that I found is probably the last that I'm going to use someone else's words to say on the subject, but no guarantees:

"The narrative was framed as, Dan Cathy is asked how he feels about gay marriage and gives his honest response. When he expressed his opinion, gay rights activists got angry and decided to boycott his business. [. . .] It’s not about Dan Cathy’s opinion - which I do not give a flying fuck about - it’s about the fact that Chick-Fil-A donated over $5 million to anti-gay hate groups. Hate groups which have been listed next to the KKK, hate groups which try to cure gay people like it’s a disease, and hate groups that have disseminated information claiming that gay people are pedophiles. [. . .] But no, the national media went with the "freedom of speech vs. mean gay people trying to silence them" narrative because it was shiny and pretty."

It's also reached the point where people are sick of hearing about it, which is the dangerous time. "Ugh, I can't believe that we still have a problem. Clearly, what we should do is proceed to ignore the problem because we don't want to deal with it anymore and we also have the attention spans of fleas." Which isn't to say that I don't understand issue fatigue -- the picture of a woman holding a sign reading "I can't believe I still have to protest this shit" comes to mind. It really is wearing. But there are different sides of being tired of an issue. There are those who can get tired of an issue and just let it drop. Then there are those who can get tired of an issue and still have it impact their lives whether they want it to or not. Going back to the previously linked essay:

"Which brings us to the last kind of people who decided to wade into the Chick-Fil-A debate for no other reason than the fact that they own a computer and can read. [. . .] These are the righteous people who take it upon themselves to be the peacekeepers and try to reconcile what they see as simply two sides who can’t seem to come to an agreement.

And I’d like to thank them.

Thank you, straight person who is completely unaffected by anything Exodus International, Focus on the Family, or the National Organization for Marriage will ever do. Thank you for reminding me that gay rights and LGBT acceptance is, for most of America, just a “hot-button” issue that causes controversy and is better to be avoided all together. I don’t think that’s a privilege enjoyed solely by non-LGBT people at all!

Except that it is."

Making less of a splash than Chick-fil-A, Amway has also been making some minor headlines, with news that "Doug DeVos the owner and CEO of Amway had given $500,000 to a known hate group, the National Organization for Marriage (NOM)". The linked article also includes a list of Amway's subsidiary businesses, for those interested in no longer sending any of their money that way.

Something disturbing that had caught my attention a few days ago through a Science Daily article has also been getting more mainstream press, as there has been a report released that details dangerous experimentation on pregnant women and their fetuses that has been aimed as decreasing "behavioral masculinization" in the resulting babies -- i.e., reducing the propensity toward lesbianism, bisexuality, intersexuality and just females with general masculine tendencies. While there is an actual harmful condition (congenital adrenal hyperplasia) for which the off-label synthetic steroid is supposedly aiming to treat, the drug must be administered before the doctors even know if the fetus is of the target type for the condition -- only one in eight of those exposed is even in the at-risk group. And that's not even touching the horrifying, are-you-sure-this-is-right-now-in-the-United-States-and-not-some-dystopian-sci-fi-story aspect of shooting drugs into a fetus to attempt to "normalize" it into mainstream social acceptance.

In more retreading of topics past, I had some great further conversation with a friend about our respective experiences with theatrical productions dealing with race in casting. Her anecdotes spurred me to think further on the subject.

I know that, particularly with local amateur efforts, demographics can be a major factor in casting. But I think that companies need to look reality straight in the face and say "Oh, hey, guess what -- we're limited in what we can do. Because of this factor, it might not be possible." (Whiteness being a barrier to doing something? Say it ain't so!) And if it is decided that colorblindness can be used with artistic integrity, then it actually has to be full colorblindness -- i.e., no racial make-up.

(Mentioning stereotypical racial indicators makes me think back to an incident when I was an intern a few years ago. My supervisor had just seen Ponyo, an animated Miyazaki film, with their young child, and part of their reaction to the film when they were telling me about it was their surprise and confusion at why all of the characters were designed with such big eyes and not "Asian" eyes. I had no response at the time. I could have a response now, but it probably still wouldn't be something to be given to my supervisor while at work, so it all evens out in the end.)

While all POC experiences are not created equal and therefore not perfectly comparable, it still does make me wonder about the perception of the black body in performance in comparison to the Asian body. The King and I is actually even more racially specific than Ragtime, if we're working on a level of ethnic origin, with all of the non-whites of King and I originating from the same country, where that country's national identity and politics are an issue in the plot, but I've seen multiple school and community productions where the race issue apparently isn't even given a second thought. Blackness seems to be a real thing in many cases, at least. But "Asian-ness" seems to live in a much more abstract land as just a marker for "exotic" and "foreign."

Of course, it's been a good decade since I've been active in the local high school musical circuit, so I actually have no idea what the current trends are. Is it something of which schools are more cognizant these days?

In any case, I've been continuing my bastardization of Asian things in the kitchen, this time with Korean pork chop with stir-fried summer squash on brown rice.

Continuing my great sauce laziness, the star here is CJ Korean BBQ Kalbi Marinade. I actually just about never use it to actually make kalbi; instead, I use it to make anything delicious.

I marinated four small boneless pork chops in the sauce overnight, with a bunch of chopped green onion. The next day, I set the brown rice cooking. About a half-hour into that, I turned on the broiler and started on the summer squash. Sliced up a whole zucchini and whole yellow squash, then chopped up three big cloves of garlic. At that point, I put the pork in the broiler to cook for about 10 minutes, since the chops were boneless and so small. I tossed the garlic in the wok with some sesame oil and started that heating. I also poured the excess marinade into a small pan and started that boiling so that it could be used as a sauce.

When the garlic was just on the verge of starting to brown, I added the squash, stir-frying it. About 5 minutes into cooking it, I added some more chopped green onion. A few minutes later, I tossed a spoonful of low-sodium soy sauce in.

The result: straightforward and delicious.

Have another haka. But with, like. 11-year olds.