Well, you know that you've become kind of pathetic when you spend your evenings cruising through Rate My Boner. *sigh* Poor guy.

Other current obsessions:
1) Bravo's Project Runway TV show. Thank God I get Bravo in New York. My favorite designer is, by far, the hilarious, edgy, and talented Jay McCarroll. His Fashion Week finale runway show was insanely gorgeous. Tim Gunn (Chair of the Parsons Department of Fashion Design) offers terrifically snarky commentary on all the episodes, which makes following the series even more of a treat.

2) Perfumes. I tend to go through phases when it comes to girly shit--for awhile I was obsessed with makeup (when I decided, thanks to Nan Goldin, that I wanted to be a drag queen, even though I'm female). Last year it was mostly clothes (particularly miniskirts and shoes, for some reason). Now it's perfumes. I've acquired samples and decants of dozens, but my favorite is Guerlain's Vol de Nuit -- a perfume from the 1930's, created in honor of Antoine St. Exupery, the French aviator and author of The Little Prince. It was Katherine Hepburn's favorite, and had an amazing bottle. Other current favorites are Patricia de Nicolai's Juste un Reve, Keiko Mecheri's Damascena, and the wacky Comme des Garcons series (which remind me of Bjork for some reason). I'm also intrigued by the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, an e-tailer with a Gothic bent. It has fragrances inspired by demons, Tarot cards, love spells, and literary characters (including many from Shakespeare, Alice in Wonderland, and so on). Unfortunately their shipping time is insanely slow, and it will likely be awhile before I find out what Tennyson's Lady of Shallott smells like. I won't go into much more detail since I've become almost as much of a fragrance geek as my Dad is a wine geek, but this is a great perfume blog.

3) Mochi

Although I was disheartened to read in a recent TimeOut NY article that Loretta Lynn campaigned for Bush I, and strongly supports Bush II, I've been very much digging her Van Lear Rose album. I've been slowly trying to educate myself more about country music, and I knew nothing of her work before, but yes...good stuff. I missed most of the Grammy's, but was happy to hear that she picked up a couple of awards. Weirdly enough, hearing Jack White on that album has now piqued my interest in The White Stripes, although they've been "the next big thing" for years.

I'm glad that Valentine's Day has come and gone. I've never had a significant other on Valentine's Day; it seems that relationships for me always end just before, start right after, or take a convenient break during V-day. Curiously enough, in Japan and Korea, the recently developed Valentine's Day custom dictates that womyn buy chocolates and gifts for men (and this is not reciprocated). When womyn's salaries are about 1/2 of men's, why the hell would you put the burden of buying chocolates on the womyn? And how is that romantic, exactly? Bleh. I remember reading an essay in a college Japanese Studies class which argued that working womyn actually used the chocolate-buying custom to enact a subtle psychological power, by expressing approval or disapproval according to the number of chocolates they bought for their coworkers/bosses. I don't buy it, personally. A momentary humiliation due to receiving a measly number of chocolates from female subordinates doesn't exactly rival the power exerted by the men in the Japanese workforce.

My last trip to Korea was enlightening in so many ways. It is very much an alien culture to me, despite my ancestry and my familiarity with the food. For one thing, people do not say "Excuse me" when they bump into you. They just shove you aside. I kept glaring at people for their rudeness, only to find out that they did not realize that they were "rude according to my cultural standards." Also, it's considered improper for a single wommon to live alone in an apartment, which is why my 30-year-old cousin has to live with her parents and commute across the city to get to work, about 1.5 hours each way. It's also quite strange to be stared at on the subway. Unlike the subway in New York, the subway in Korea (as well as in Japan) has a racially homogenous population, so any non-Asian person is treated like an abnormal curiosity, such as a dwarf or a person with missing limbs. There's also a strange push-pull that occurs inside of me...half of me shares an ancestry, a history, a culture with these people, but they see me as completely alien and unlike them. I kind of want to be recognized as part of their group, as someone who belongs, even though I clearly am not and don't (culturally in addition to ethnically).

I was surprised to find out that Koreans in Korea were as fanatically religious as Koreans in the U.S. I had incorrectly assumed that Koreans in Korea were not nearly as susceptible to Christianity, since they were not dependent on the church to find a community with other Koreans in a foreign country. On one of the amazing business dinners I attended with my father, I asked one of the Korean lawyers why Koreans were so religious. He pointed out that the Japanese tended to be happy-go-lucky and were not religious at all. Koreans, on the other hand, had experienced such suffering and devastation that they needed religion to lift their spirits, to keep their will to live. Certainly, Koreans seem to highly identify with, and celebrate, suffering. Almost all of their soap operas, songs, and stories feature a primary admirable character who suffers greatly (such as the famous Chunhyang). Which explains why Koreans are so drawn to the story of Christ, who suffered for the sins of the world. Curiously enough, I also learned that Koreans are considered "the Latins" of the Asian world--for example, Koreans are considered to be more passionate, more emotional, and less refined than the Japanese. Since Asians as a whole are so much more reserved than European (and most American) people, these nuances between different Asian groups were lost on me before.

With the huge success of Korean dramas, the Koreans' extremely passionate love for music (karaoke is huge, and Koreans are constantly singing), their strong religious faith, and their history of occupation, rape, and slaughter, I think that Koreans are, in some ways, like blacks in the United States. Koreans have similarly been able to transcend a tragic history to produce popular art that is enthusiastically consumed by the rest of Asia. It's a shame that many Koreans are racist against blacks, because I find much in common between both communities.