"Thank you very much, American people, for 'Love me Tender' "

Never has a news article left me so utterly speechless:

"Looove mee tenderrrrr," the [Japanese] prime minister crooned, as Mr. Bush, not one for letting loose in public, cracked up. When Lisa Marie Presley showed the prime minister her father's trademark sunglasses, he promptly donned them and thrust his hips and arms forward, an earnest imitation of a classic Elvis stage move.

Read this ridiculous article, and more importantly, check out the audio slideshow, on Koizumi and Bush's road trip to Graceland.

The Zarqawi Debates

I haven't been paying as close attention to the news / blogosphere lately--hanging out with family and playing tennis has been occupying my time here in Tokyo--but a recent visit to Baghdad Burning yielded this outlook on Zarqawi's death:

How do I feel? To hell with Zarqawi (or Zayrkawi as Bush calls him). He was an American creation- he came along with them- they don't need him anymore, apparently. His influence was greatly exaggerated but he was the justification for every single family they killed through military strikes and troops. It was WMD at first, then it was Saddam, then it was Zarqawi. Who will it be now? Who will be the new excuse for killing and detaining Iraqis? Or is it that an excuse is no longer needed- they have freedom to do what they want. The slaughter in Haditha months ago proved that. "They don't need him anymore," our elderly neighbor waved the news away like he was shooing flies, "They have fifty Zarqawis in government."

Such a stark contrast to the buoyant optimism shown by the mainstream media. On the New York Times blog Day to Day in Iraq, an Iraqi also in Baghdad writes the following:

Iraqis have been congratulating each other ever since the news of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi’s death was announced. My mother spoke with her two brothers in Baghdad right after a friend called her with the news. A couple of days later, I called another uncle in Baghdad to congratulate him. He was happy, and said that people were celebrating even more than when Saddam was captured. The reason for that, explained Huda, a cousin’s wife in Cleveland, was Zarqawi’s overt appeals to Sunnis to kill Shias. My take on that is that through Zarqawi’s open incitement to kill Shias and the bid for a civil war, Iraqis had to look their racism in the eye – and what they’ve seen, they haven’t liked. The bearer of that message, had to be destroyed.

I guess the point is no one perspective can capture everyone's opinion and outlook. I appreciate the multifaceted coverage offered by blogs and the media, I really do. But sometimes don't you wish things could just be black, white, and simple? (I know, I know, I better be careful, lest I start to sound like the President: "You're either with us or against us...")

i <3 tennis

I love tennis. But you know that saying about how if you love someone but things aren't working out, you have to let them go and they'll come back if it's meant to be? Well, tennis and I have been on a "break" for the past four years. It wasn't just that the tennis courts at Yale were inconvenietly located and I didn't have a hitting partner. By the end of high school, I was quite simply burned out. I started playing in elementary school for fun, but the fun became playing everyday in middle school, and then in high school I was on ASIJ's team in addition to playing constantly over the summer. So in eight very short years, I played a shitton of tennis. Unfortunately, by the end of it I felt like I'd never want to play again. I had OD-ed on a ball sport, if such a thing is possible.

But perhaps it was something about graduation that rekindled the old flame, I am in love with tennis again. I wish I could play every day. This week I'm playing three times, twice with Reina and once with my dad. I got two horrible blisters on my hands last week, and my toes are bruised, but it doesn't matter. I just want to play. Even if my backhand and serve aren't back yet. Even if my back is sore the next day, and it's frustrating to know I was so much better before. Who cares? What matters is I'm happy on the court again, and that emotion is something I hadn't dared to hope would ever come back.
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Babe, if you're reading this, don't worry. I won't leave you for tennis ;)

You have got to be kidding.

IRS:

"Due to technical difficulties, we cannot answer your call at this time. Please try again later."

Jesus.

Flag day my ass

I tried the IRS office, but apparently today is a federal holiday. Flag Day. Very few people get Flag Day off, but you can always count on the federal government to be taking time off when the citizenry needs 'em.

The IRS is after me!

I got a package in the mail from the lovely IRS today. I send them a letter back in March in response to an inquiry about my (unfiled) tax return for 2004. Which is interesting, because back in early 2005, I read the miniscule font of their 2004-1040 Instructions manual until my eyes hurt to make sure I didn't have to file. But they're saying that I am mistaken, and they even included a slim two-pager titled, "Information About Your Notice, Penalty, and Interest."

Hmm.

I'm posting this to clear my thoughts and also to get advice, if any of you folks out there read it and want to clue me in as to where my logic went wrong... by all means, email me or leave a comment!

I earned $1,018 in wages in 2004. Then, I won a Light Fellowship and was running around China for six months. The fellowship awarded me $17,570. Certainly, if all of this were taxable, I owe the IRS a big fat check. However, all of it isn't taxable! On page 19 of the Instructions manual it clearly states:

Scholarship and fellowship grants are not reported on Form W-2. Also, enter "SCH" and the amount on the dotted line next to line 7. However, if you were a degree candidate, include on line 7 only the amounts you used for expenses other than tuition and course-related expenses. For example, amounts used for room, board, and travel must be reported on line 7.

Cool. I think I get it. Now as I turn back to my handy-dandy LightFellowshipBudget.xls, it tells me that of the total, $13,380 was used for tuition, paid to Princeton-in-Beijing and Associated Colleges in China. That leaves $4,190 as taxable. Add in the wages I earned and that brings me to a total of $5,208 in taxable income for 2004.

Turn to "Chart A - For Most People" on page 12 of the Instructions booklet. There it states, if my filing status is single, and my gross income is less than $7,950, then I need not file a tax return. Ah-ha! Clearly, it must be that "gross income" includes all sources of income, and that's where the catch is, right? Wrong! I read the fine print under the two asterisks and it says, "Gross income means all income you received inthe form of money, goods, property, and services that is not exempt from tax, including any income from sources outside the United States." (Emphasis is mine.) But the tuition portion of my fellowship is not taxable, so it's not included in my gross income for the year.

Or is it? I'm not arrogant or confident enough to think I must be right, but I'm also irritated because the tax code is so complicated. There is definitely a chance I've missed something, and I consider myself a careful and attentive reader. This whole ordeal is proof that they need to revamp the whole thing and make it easier for everybody.

Anyway, there it is, the scary envelope from the Internal Revenue Service staring up at me from next to my laptop. I'll call them later and hopefully speak to someone who knows what they're talking about, and clear up this mess so I don't have horrifying nightmares about being grouped together with the likes of Martha Stewart.

feeding my pho addiction

So the seven months or so leading up to my graduation from college, I was a waitress at Pot-au-Pho, the only Vietnamese restaurant in New Haven. Their pho is to die for, and I miss it already! You can guess how thrilled I was to learn from my trusty Seattle guidebook (Thanks McKinsey) that there is not only a sizeable Chinatown in the Emerald City, but also a (albeit tiny) Little Saigon. I've been crossing my fingers that this area, which apparently comprises the eatern edge of the I-district, has some scrumptuous Vietnamese comfort food up one of its alleys. Now, thanks to the food dude Robotic Gourmand, I know there is.
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Goi cuon photo credit: Robotic Gourmand. Don't they look yummy?

Surprise, surprise

Global Image of U.S. Is Worsening, Survey Finds:

Although strong majorities in several countries expressed worries about Iran's nuclear intentions, in 13 of 15 countries polled, most people said the war in Iraq posed more of a danger to world peace...

"Obviously, when you get many more people saying that the U.S. presence in Iraq is a threat to world peace as say that about Iran, it's a measure of how much Iraq is sapping good will to the United States," said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center.

So much for making the world a safer place, eh, Georgie?

And if that weren't enough:

Only 75 percent of Americans had heard reports of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at the American naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, while 90 percent of Western Europeans and Japanese had heard about them.

Where exactly is that last 1/4 of the American population getting its news?! It's shameful, both the abuses and the ignorance.

Advice from the Times

Advice for us recent grads from the New York Times:

1) That daily latte will cost you. Calculate just how much you'll save brewing your own over a decade by using this calculator: www.hughchou.org/calc/coffee.cgi
2) Learn to cook.
3) Live frugally and save. And by save, we're talking retirement.
4) Ignore your raises.
5) Don't borrow to buy depreciating assets.
6) Protect your credit.

Simple as pie. Good luck to us!

Fake Priestess

If this McKinsey thing doesn't work out, it's good to know I can always become a fake priestess and marry Japanese people at fake churches to fulfill their fake, Western, white-wedding fantasies:

The most sought-after is the Western “priest”. These are supplied by an ecclesiastical talent agency complete with fake ordination papers, should anyone bother to ask. For impoverished actors, models and English-language teachers, the work is manna: the pay is ¥10,000-15,000 a service, and you can do eight a day. One young Westerner, who earns ¥10m a year for a three-day week, says the work is not easy: unlike acting, where at least you get a break, you have to be a priest all day, and speak flawless Japanese to boot.

Suicides at Guantanamo = Acts of War

You've probably read that three prisoners in Guatanamo committed suicide recently. A diary entry over at DailyKos discussed it and the many previous suicide attempts in detail. From one detainee who attempted suicide twelve times:

There was no other alternative to make our voice heard by the world from the depths of the detention centers except this way in order for the world to re-examine its standing and for the fair people of America to look again at the situation and try to have a moment of truth with themselves... why was no conclusion reached with regard to the detainees in Guantanamo, Cuba until now?
Till when this tragedy will continue? When will it end after all these years, and when will the detainees go back to their homelands, families, wives and children? When will this tragedy cease to continue... till when? The detainees are suffering from the bitterness of despair, the detention humiliation and the vanquish of slavery and suppression...
[...]
When you remember me in my last gasps of life before dying, while my soul is leaving my body to rise to its creator, remember that the world let us and let our case down... Remember that our governments let us down... Remember the unreasonable delay of the courts in looking into our case and to side with the victims of injustice... Remember that if there were people who are actually fair and who defend justice and defend the victims of injustice and if there are judges who are fair, I wouldn't have been wrapped in death shrouds now and my family -my father, my mother, my brothers and sisters, and my little daughter - would not have to lose their son... forever... but what else can I do?

But I shouldn't be feeling any emotions for these terrorists. After all, they didn't kill themselves out of desperation but because:

They are smart. They are creative, they are committed. They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.

The camp commander down in Cuba would know best about these evil, despicable men's motivations. These suicides were an act of war against America. Not a final plea, called out from the dark depths of utter and complete despair, for "the fair people of America" to pay attention to the hell on earth that has been created in their name.

And I thought I had it bad...

Ah, the mixed blessings of graduating from college. Now I can start paying off all of those student loans I took on. Reap the consequences of all those signatures, the many minutes taken reading the very fine print and trying to understand all the legal jargon and having nightmares about being chased down by a demonic Uncle Sam because I couldn't pay them off... Anyway, I thought I had it pretty bad--about $17,000 owed to the federal government, plus about the same amount to my dad who helped me out. But that was because I hadn't come across a horror story to give me any perspective. A story that could shock me into realizing how lucky I was to have so little debt (comparatively speaking, of course) and more importantly, to know that I took it on myself.

As always, the Times has given me some perspective on mylife. From this week's magazine, written by a poor guy who graduated seven years ago:

I am currently $64,707 dollars in debt, none of which I actually borrowed. As best as I can figure, my mom first starting signing my name when I was 18. She took on at least five credit cards as well as about $50,000 in student loans. I thought my parents were paying for my college, but it turns out my mom would take out the loans every three months, under my name, for a couple thousand dollars each. Which was fine, except that once I graduated, my mom seemed to forget about the loans entirely. She never paid them back or alerted me of their existence so that I might have. They now amount to $58,607 because of the interest that accumulated during the seven years that they weren't being dealt with.

Damn. I'll shut up and quit complaining now.

You go, girl.

Why can't more people like Tammy run for Congress?

Conquering the guilt of non-daily posting

From Skor Grimm:

Here at Skor Studios we value quality over quantity. Skor is not the type of blogger to make a post every single day just for the sake of making a post. Skor only posts when he has something to say.

Phew. Now that I've seen someone else say it, the guilt is gone. Hehe.
...
What I'll be up to this weekend: Short Shorts Film Festival.

limbo & the perfection of minor details

Ronni over at Times Goes By--one of the blogs I frequent most, despite the fact that she writes for and about the elderly--is moving from New York to Maine after 37 years, 1 month, and 29 days. Like us recent college grads, she's on her way to a new chapter of her life. But there's a strange space in-between the old chapter and the new, and it's a time that

does feel like a period of limbo; being poised on the edge of a dramatic change in, fully aware of its approach and having the time, between dimensions, to take a deep breath and live neither life for a few days before stepping into the unknown.

That's exactly how I feel right now. It's the deep breath before the plunge; the quiet before the storm. I'm taking this month in Tokyo to prepare myself as much as I can for the onset of something completely new and different.

It's exciting, but I'm getting a bit antsy too. I want to know where I'm living. Where my first engagement will be. Whether I'll love my job. Those are the bigger questions, and then there are the smaller ones that have been occupying my time lately, because there's really nothing to be done about the others. What sort of dishes do I want in my kitchen? What about furniture? Clothing for work? Where can I learn how to drive? Do I really need a TV? Is it inappropriate to wear patterned stockings (black or natural) to work? And most importantly, will I be able to afford it all?

I once opened a fortune cookie which told me, "Great things are accomplished only by the perfection of minor details." I'm not sure if this move to Seattle qualifies as a "great thing" but it certainly is a momentous change. And since I can't do much about the big questions, I better listen to the fortune cookie and start with the devilish details for now, before stepping into the unknown.

"Hope is a thing with feathers"

The situation in Iraq, according to river at Baghdad Burning:

There’s an ethnic cleansing in progress and it’s impossible to deny. People are being killed according to their ID card. Extremists on both sides are making life impossible. Some of them work for ‘Zarqawi’, and the others work for the Iraqi Ministry of Interior. We hear about Shia being killed in the ‘Sunni triangle’ and corpses of Sunnis named ‘Omar’ (a Sunni name) arriving by the dozen at the Baghdad morgue. I never thought I’d actually miss the car bombs. At least a car bomb is indiscriminate. It doesn’t seek you out because you’re Sunni or Shia.
...
Where does one go to avoid the death and destruction? Are the Americans happy with this progress? Does Bush still insist we’re progressing?

Emily Dickinson wrote, “hope is a thing with feathers”. If what she wrote is true, then hope has flown far- very far- from Iraq...

stressed.

Man. This whole being-a-real-person thing is stressful. The Boyfriend visited an apartment for me in Capitol Hill (I was there over Memorial Day weekend and didn't get to see the interiors of many buildings) and I'm all set to do an application and get things rolling. But it's the weekend, and clearly the managers have a life and aren't going to reply to my voicemail or email until Monday. I just have to be patient... but it's so hard! And doing this all from overseas makes everything that much more stressful.

Not only that, but I wonder what the hell is going on with my credit report. I only got my American Express credit card (yay Starwood points!) two months ago and have so far made two timely payments... but other than that, I'm not quite sure what's going on with it. Do managers of apartment buildings actually go and look at these reports? Will they hold it against me that I've been using a debit card since getting to the U.S.? What about the utilities bills we forgot to pay earlier this spring? Does paying rent on the 2nd when it's due on the 1st of each month constitute a "late payment"? Man. All the reasons for why I won't get this apartment swirl through my head and all I can think is--but I'd love to live there! I'll have a steady source of income and pay rent and utilities on time! I won't have a dog that barks through the night or a cat that pees everywhere and I certainly won't have sketchy people over! I play music softly and take short showers! I'm super neat, obsessively clean and don't smoke, do drugs, or drink heavily! I am, in summary, an ideal tenant! Please! Just let me sign the lease!!! *Beats head against wall in frustration*

Priceless

A close girlfriend of mine has started a blog, and one of the posts puts into words all those conflicting emotions of a person who doesn't really have a home. Whether it's because you're an Army brat, or a dual- or triple-citizen, or like myself and so many of my friends, chance and choice have sent you dotting across the world, "living globally" sounds wonderfully exotic but has a lot of undesirable consequences.

You have no idea what groundlessness does to you. You're always losing, most literally. Meeting people and saying goodbye--story of my life! Creating something great and then having to leave it--even if it were a life's work. Add to that a myriad of identity crises. You almost have to build up a level of impermeable superficiality to deal with it, so that you can maintain somewhat of a core to what you think is who you are. Could you really imagine yourself in constant flux. I mean, your entire self. Your values always in question, your personality always trying to adjust, your life style always altering. Do you even know what it's like? And excitement! Excitement in my life is the least of my concerns. Go ahead and enjoy that, but I'm truly tired of it. I really am.

Like Sohko, I'm ready to stop moving around and have a real home. A place that I can depend on, where I can stay for longer than 9 months. Because when you have a home, as she so beautifully puts it, "accidents are great changes that awaken your senses to a swirling world of excitement. It allows you to appreciate all that is stable and all that is changing."

I'm "home" in Tokyo now, but it's my mom's studio. I miss my room, the one I called home for eight years growing up, but someone else is living there now. All of my things are in boxes, scattered between Tokyo and Texas, and I choose what to wear out of a suitcase that gets messier by the day. Few of my high school friends have made it back this summer. What stretches before me are five weeks of trying to recapture the sense that I belong here, acutely and desperately missing the absence of many people who made me feel that way before.

A real home is priceless. In the emotional stability it provides, the sense of security it gives. And to a person like me who loves to travel and spend time in other countries, there is a bitter irony in this one simple truth: I cannot love the excitement and stimulation of travel and life abroad without a place to call home. And it is so much more than a mere physical container to store one's belongings--a home is the densest locus of a web of relationships where one not only feels loved, but also feels needed. What groundlessness does is stretch that web to the breaking point. In the age of IM and Skype and webcams, it can be stretched farther and wider than ever; but these things, however convenient they may be, cannot replicate a relationship blessed by proximity. This is the curse of the globetrotting age; a life cursed by "constant flux" and excitement without security.

Give me a home, a real one with family and friends constantly nearby, with "that same scent of clean laundry" filling the air. I would give a lifetime of flight and frequent flyer miles away to have a real home again.

Women's health under siege

"As a physician, I can no longer trust government sources...I no longer trust FDA decisions or materials generated [by the government]. Ten years ago, I would not have had to scrutinize government information. Now I don't feel comfortable giving it to my patients."
Dr. Ruth Shaber, M.D. of Kaiser Permanente

I found this article on Liz Rizzo's blog, and it is a truly disturbing read. So many of the healthcare options women take for granted in the U.S. are being threatened by the moral agenda of Christian conservatives, including:

Access to emergency contraception
Rape treatment
Accurate health information
Accurate sexual-health programs, especially for teens

Even if you "can't imagine how these lies could possibility have an impact' on your life; even if you "can't believe there would be a time when these things would be outlawed"; read it.

Congrats, stranger

Congratulations, Casey Parks. I've never met you, and I probably never will--but I love the way you write, and wish you all the success in the world.

From her winning essay:

What moves me to be a journalist? It's been a career goal so obvious to me for such a long time that the question had ceased to be asked. This semester, almost muted by theory studies, I have returned to it often. I keep a binder of stories that remind me, though: Anne Hull's portrait of gay America, Andrea Elliott's story about an imam in Brooklyn saddling two worlds, Rick Bragg's Pulitzer-winning tale of Alabama inmates plagued by old age who still find beauty in flowers, Jacqui Banaszynski's Pulitzer-winning delve into the lives of two gay men, farmers who fell in love and physically fell apart because of it. I have a distinct want (it's a thirst and a flame, all at once) to create these stories myself--not for the Pulitzers, but for the reaching outside of myself, to break people's hearts so adeptly that they move into action.

The electricity that comes from crafting seeing the way journalists do--cataloguing every movement, sound, feeling, inference--is what continues to spark me. And by no means have I exhausted the stories that are to be done in America (or even Columbia, MO, in all its quaintness). But I so desperately want to leave this country and know more. I've never thought of myself as provincial, but this year, reading on the tension between the two Koreas, swallowing Rushdie's Pakistan and India, inhaling the French riots, I realize how insular my life has been. My tour of the Southern states has left me unable to fully discern what lies beyond.

But I want to.

Border Patrol & Discrimination

My recent trip revealed the gross inadequacies and injustices embedded in America's so-called "border patrol." When crossing the Canadian border, the entire bus was held up because the border officials decided they needed to carefully question the one non-American, non-Canadian riding with us. She was Mexican--and I wonder if they would have made such a fuss if she were British or Japanese. At every airport, it was "recommended" that I take my completely metal-free sneakers off. And by "recommend," I mean rudely ordered by some 40-something jackass that hasn't been doing their job. The 9/11 commission concluded that airport security is a joke, and the U.S. got an "F" in airline passenger screening.

An article in the Times shows that I'm not the only one making observations of such incompetence and feeling pissed off. Since 9/11, many Muslim-Americans have come to fear travel so much that many choose not to leave home at all. They are filled with the same sense of frustration that I feel when I go through airport security and know that it's nearly meaningless, a mere gesture towards the thought of actual security. Lucky for me, I don't "look like a terrorist"--all I have to do is take my shoes off. I have yet to be hand-cuffed and roughed up for having the wrong name or growing a beard:

Most of those wrongly placed on the watch list seethe with frustration and anger, finding it unbelievable that a technologically advanced country like the United States has been unable to develop a list that can distinguish between a lurking terrorist and a harmless citizen with a Muslim name.

This is just another example of how words and rhetoric ("We have made America a safer place.") have eclipsed effective policy.

I don't want to feel safer. I want to be safer. In the real world, proven by real studies and real tests and real statistics. (You know, all of those things with a well-known liberal bias.) But apparently that is just too much to ask of our government, which is as usual living in a fantasy world where all Muslims are potential terrorists and metal detectors actually protect us from suicide bombers.