Culture in the Blender

Part of my efforts to graduate involves finding a job. People ask from time to time where I’d like to live, and I say “New York.”
There seem to be two general responses to this: Americans often say “New York is too expensive/busy/crowded” and non-American often say “Oh, I’d love to live in New York too!” [...]

I was walking down a hallway in my university’s analysis center with a Chinese staff scientist, whom I spoke English with. (I don’t even know what ‘electron’, let alone ‘transmission’ or ‘microscope’ are in Chinese.) Another Chinese student came along, and they started speaking Chinese. The second the staff member opened his mouth, it was [...]

While getting my iTunes library in order and exploring some new music suggested by a friend, I started looking up old Europop on YouTube. Following a trail of “Oh, it’s this song!”, I found Dr. Alban’s Look Who’s Talking. I do not feel that that listening to that song says anything about the race of [...]

Latoya Peterson at Racialicious has written a post about American hip-hop politics. The post and the comments revolve around weighing the poor quality of music on American radio channels in general (there are few non-commercial channels that focus on bringing quality or novelty to American radio, meaning that radio channels mostly cater to mass markets [...]

When I was a college freshman (first-year university student in the US), I wrote a paper arguing that CNN delivers objective news, because their market niche is just that. The professor gave us an assignment to write about bias in the media, or something like that. The only thesis I could come up with was [...]

A few days back, I found out in my cultural psychology class that it is true that those expats who believe in essentialism (with respect to either culture or race) have more problems integrating. A study was done at Bei Da of foreigners in Beijing (by sending out researchers to talk to foreigners at Sanlitun, [...]

All day today, I’ve been listening to a song by S. H. E. (Taiwanese band) called Ni kuai le wo shui yi.

It has some clear r&b influences in both singing and the music, and the play with the words is fun. (On a more third culture analysis level, I think the American influences are easy [...]

A while back, my boyfriend’s (sambo/avomies) sister told him, after him mentioning that the dollar was falling, that the dollar falling was some kind of lie or conspiracy or misrepresentation. I’m not sure how the wording was put, I wasn’t there. But she clearly hadn’t heard of it in the probably 2+ years that it’s [...]

You know you’re not American when the first thing that pops into your head as a defense when people accuse you of being classist, even as a joke, is to confess your bourgeoise background (because you know you’re not talking your way out of that one) and proclaim the insignificance of your suffering compared to [...]

America and the consequence of her foreign policy is an insitution of things to talk about, even when something else is the main point.
Ultra Bra – Kahdeksanvuotiaana
Kahdeksanvuotiaana tiesin
että maailma tuhoutuu
kaksintaistelussa suurvaltojen
kahdeksanvuotiaana tiesin
että ihminen murskautuu
silmänräpäyksessä
historiaan
Kävikin niin, että sodat ovat
monimutkaisia kansallisia konflikteja
joissa ammutaan
ja joissa kuolee
aina vähän ihmisiä kerrallaan
joissa kuolee
aina vähän ihmisiä kerrallaan
Kahdeksanvuotiaana tiesin
että maailma tuhoutuu
kaksintaistelussa suurvaltojen
kahdeksanvuotiaana etsin
kartalta [...]