#for our gentrified apt

[a-story-teller]

Going to test drive a caaaar tomorrow 🚗🚗🚗

[zet-zets-blog]

Spring 2023- one of the darkest periods of my life. Why didn't anyone warn me of how much of a rollercoaster ride entering your 30s would be?! This was also my last semester in grad school. I did a very expensive and not really worth it (tbh) urban planning degree from Columbia- a university that truly sucks the life out of you. I am describing that feeling here as: imagine yourself living in an ongoing gentrified neighborhood that's OVER policed, a food desert with alot of New York transplants that also happen to be very wealthy and have huge egos. YEAH- that was the start of my 2023.

Broke off my engagement because my ex partner had the audacity to ask me for an open relationship BEFORE our wedding this year?! AND HOOKED UP WITH MY BEST FRIEND IN GRAD SCHOOL literally after a couple of days of us being broken up?! Him and this ex bestfriend were there during the funeral I held for my sister. Sooo, Yeah no...

Ended up starting the year with a broken heart, that's still grieving their sister's death WHILE ALSO writing a thesis so I can graduate my grad program! I honestly cannot emphasize how stacked life felt like during the beginning months of this year. I was in a really REALLY dark place, and its interesting too because these were the moments where I learned SO MUCH about myself and just life and love in general.

Grief has a way of asking you your whys. Why are you living here? Why are you in grad school? Why columbia? What are you doing with your life? Are you even happy? Is that prestige really worth it? What ARE your values and are you living by them? Do you like yourself? What do you truly want? What is life? Like seriously, what is life? Its as if, you had to answer every question all at once or else you just fall in an eternal abyss.

And yet, the journey of grief is SO WORTH IT. The amount of peace you find at the end of that dark dark tunnel is euphoric- A NATURAL HIGH.

Hello dear readers (well whoever you may be!)

My name is Zet, I'm a storyteller that's currently living the 3rd decade of her life in this charming neighborhood called Sunset Park. I LOVE IT HERE! After being surrounded by ivy league kids and out of touch professors I have officially got myself out of the hellhole that is Manhattanville. I'm living in a majority immigrant enclave now, where I can wheel my granny cart to TONS of ethnic grocery stores! I live in this prewar apartment building, where I will need to climb three flights of stairs everyday. Finally living a life where I am completely... alone. I've also become that JOMO (joy of missing out) Tita- I just like smoking with friends at my fire escape, I schedule 10-year plan video-call hangouts with friends that live in other cities. At 30, I am WAAY more reflective, chill and genuinely content with how life feels and looks like right now. <3 It's funny how much can change in just a year. How much CAN HAPPEN within a year. How your life can completely turn a 180, be at your lowest point where you truly let the darkness take over you to a period in your life where you're seeing the magic in life's everyday.

If you would've asked me when I was 16 if I see myself living in this CONCRETE JUNGLE new york city, living alone in a 1 bed apt. , and still pursuing my writing? I would laugh so much and might also tell you to pray for me. Yeah, how can this Palayog girl live a life just like in the romcom movies and tv shows that she grew up watching? It's WIILD! I think I really did underestimate myself back then. You see, I've always felt like I was just existing since I was four. Life has always felt so random and too dramatic that I had convinced myself that I am in just a VERY LONG life simulation. Yet, here I am, existing and thriving, surrounded by so much love and genuine friendships. <3 Still living a full life, working for that true post-colonial world that's driven by community care.

[meggannn]

LOL YOUR ROOMMATE?? I can't stop laughing omg

god did i ever share the full story of what happened with my housemate last year? i think i bitched about her a little bit but here’s the full write-up of my six months with that housemate. unedited and probably full of errors and discrepancies sorry cause im going off entirely from memory

i’ve now moved out of this apartment, but i was there for a year with three other girls. two of them i got along with fine, and we introduced ourselves to each other before we moved in because that’s common courtesy to see if we get along right? but basically before any of us could talk or interview candidates for the last spot in the apartment, this girl, i’m making up a name and calling her emily, this random girl named emily basically came in and signed on for the spot on the lease without talking to any of us. uh, okay? so we eventually all get in a group chat and talk and introduce ourselves and plan to move in. day one:  emily moved in before me and i moved in a few hours later. i walk in and see the kitchen and she’s already covered the fridge with magnets and pictures and paper clippings featuring…. herself. like, a few of them had her friends, but most of the pictures were of her. basically. am i crazy or is that fucking weird? so from the get-go she just seemed……. if not privileged (which i also knew she was later), then definitely some sort of weird type of entitled but i couldn’t tell if it was maybe just cultural differences? (she was russian but had grown up in the states. idk)

anyway. she had this boyfriend who would come over occasionally, it was no problem since we didn’t talk and just waved hi to each other occasionally. but from the first week she and another housemate who lived on the far end of the apartment were both having trouble sleeping because someone else on the floor was blaring their tv loudly all hours of the night in the room next door. after several weeks of not being able to sleep through the night, they’d pretty much had enough and managed to track down whose apartment it was, and it turned out to be this elderly black woman’s apartment. i don’t really know if the woman understood why they were so upset because i think she might have been going slightly senile as well, so i think maybe the tv, or the volume, was something she wasn’t entirely aware she was doing? but the other housemate, i’ll call her veronica (who is more chill but was still upset) understood that this was probably not a fight they wanted to pick. veronica noticed that the elderly woman had a middle-aged male visitor, who looked like family, come visit the woman a few times a week and take care of her/take out the trash etc, so veronica decided to wait until she saw the visitor again to talk to him about lowering the volume or turning the tv off, or maybe getting his relative headphones or something. but emily, like….. kept pushing it every single night. every single night for the first month or so she’d stomp across the floor and rap on the door loud enough to wake up the entire floor (the walls were thin and it wasn’t a big building). and most of the time the woman didn’t respond, but there was one notable time someone else got fed up enough to wake up at 2am and yell at emily (deservedly so) for waking up the whole hall. all of which i heard very clearly because my room was next to the main door to out apt.

things escalated when i overheard emily talking to her friend on the phone about the situation and then she mentioned that in retaliation, she went over in the middle of the night and put vaseline on the woman’s door handle. i was kind of stunned and disgusted that a grown ass adult (she’s at least a few years older than me, i’d guess late 20′s/early 30′s?) would do something like that???? but anyway a few nights later iirc, once again in the middle of the night, i was woken up by a shouting match down the hall because apparently the male relative had come back to check in on who he said was his mother, and HE WAS PISSED, UNDERSTANDABLY SO, AT FINDING MY ROOMMATE IN THE MIDDLE OF PUTTING VASELINE ON THE FLOOR CREVICE UNDER THE DOOR. LIKE. THAT’S NOT JUST PETTY BUT REAL FUCKING DANGEROUS TO DO TO AN ELDERLY WOMAN. he basically shouted at her and she kept talking about how she can’t sleep for months because of the noise, and whatever, but she stomped back to our apartment and they had this argument loudly at the door (remember, my room was right next to the front door). i listened to it for a couple minutes wondering if she would like, acknowledge what she did was wrong? and it became clear that she was so focused on the noise she wasn’t listening to this dude, so i came out and i tried to be a voice of reason. the guy was understandably really pissed that she would do something like that and i apologized for her and said she was wrong to do that (she had stomped off back to her room meanwhile) and he seemed grateful to talk to someone who wasn’t batshit crazy in the meantime so he mentioned that he had grown up in this building all his life before moving out so it hurt to see someone treat his mother this way who had lived here for 50 years or something. and after that i was just thinking like, jesus, this is so not the kind of fight you want to have with a family like this as a white woman in a gentrified apartment complex. like at some point you need to realize this is not your fucking place and if you must settle things, do it civilly or just dip out entirely.

i think emily eventually apologized and he accepted and they found out that the tv wasn’t even coming from the woman’s room at all, but from someone on the floor above who THEY also had had problems with for months.

veronica was away on a trip i think during this climax, but before, while it was still escalating, i was talking with veronica and veronica mentioned she and emily had bitched about the noise to each other often, but veronica said she drew the line when emily basically started making her complaints race-themed ever since she found out the elderly woman was black. etc the complaints turned from “it’s too loud” to “this neighborhood is so ghetto” and “that’s what black ppl are like” and stuff like that. veronica wasn’t cool with that, so she planned on handling any other complaints herself directly so she could resolve things like a normal person, but ever since veronica mentioned that i knew emily was a pos

emily also complained about people partying/drinking on the street outside till ~11pm, which imo isn’t too unreasonable, like normal people do, and basically being too loud or whatever. on some level i get it cause she had to go to sleep early to go to work early, but also at some point i was just wondering how she functioned as a human being in the real world

ANYWAY THE STORY I TELL AT PARTIES IS THIS ONE, THE ONE IN WHICH SHE LEAVES (i will try to keep this as short as possible while still giving you all the details you need to understand just how fucking weird it was):

in early november, emily group messaged everyone asking if her boyfriend could come live with us. to her credit she said she wouldn’t do it unless everyone was ok, and she waited to hear back from all of us. i was out of town at the time but i remember being really put off by this idea and i was going to say no, when i noticed that my two other housemates had ALREADY said yes in the chat. just like that. i was stunned. what? like, no follow-up questions or “we dont even really know him” or “how is this gonna work”? were they fucking insane?

i messaged her privately saying i really wasn’t comfortable with it, for xyz reasons. among those being 1) rent, because nowhere did she offer to split the rent five ways instead of four (they were basically going to split her room between them, which, no). 2) fridge/living space, which was small enough with four people to one apartment as it is, and 3) just overall “i dont fucking know him” atmosphere. she messaged back saying she understood, and i got to asking why this was so important to her to do now, because she mentioned she wanted to do it “asap” if we’d said yes.

and this is where my “no” turned into “hell fucking no.” she told me this:

in response to my question of if she’d want to put him on the lease, she said no, she wouldn’t want her boyfriend on the lease in case “something happens so she could just tell him to leave” (raising my question: what, exactly, do you expect to happen? maybe the landlord, who lives in the building, finding out someone’s living here illegally? bc THAT WOULD DO IT FOR ME)

she was marrying him in december which is why she wanted it to happen “soon” so they wouldnt be living apart. i asked why she couldnt just wait until the lease was up to do all this, to which she said:

her boyfriend’s green card (he was russian) had expired so he was now paying month to month and that’s when i realized, oh. bitch he’s using you for a green card marriage and you’re trying to inconvenience all of us instead of owning your life like an adult, or something

at some point during the conversation she like tried to bribe me with a couple hundred extra dollars per month “to cover the cost of the extra utlities/wifi/inconvenience,” which i politely declined. this was when i said basically “look i never got the sense you particularly liked living here (massive understatement) and i think that it’d work out best if you moved out, which you’re clearly already planning to do”

and she did start looking immediately. at some point while she was looking i overheard her talking to veronica mentioning that he was a huge fan of putin and she’d asked him to like, politely, stop?, lmao because she didn’t like his entire yknow politics, and he basically said “i’m sorry, i can’t betray my personal/national identity, i just really believe in putin” or whatever the fuck and i thought to myself, this bitch is marrying him anyway for some godforsaken reason

i don’t know why i hoped that she would be any more considerate moving out than when she moved in, but somehow i was still surprised when the sublet she picked out was someone she never introduced us to or mentioned before, she literally just said “hey here’s your new housemate and when she’s moving in” and dropped us a phone number and facebook page.

one last thing: while emily was moving out, veronica mentioned to me that she was really pleased i stood up to her because she felt massively uncomfortable with the situation too. i asked why she didn’t say something, and she said she talked to emily privately airing out her problems, and emily had managed to talk her into accepting that sort-of bribe privately off message, and emily told her ‘just say yes’ in the chat, so she did and was kind of kicking herself for it after. (our other housemate was off doing fuck knows what at this point; she was gone for weeks on end leaving us to take care of her guinea pigs for her with little to no warning.)

but then, veronica says, the big thing that astounds her is that this wasn’t even the same boyfriend who she’d had when she’d moved in. six months had passed by this point. SHE HAD BEEN DATING GREEN CARD GUY FOR LIKE, THREE MONTHS WHEN SHE DROPPED THIS ON US

and then she moved to fucking harlem, one of the yknow most diverse neighborhoods in the city known particularly for its black heritage, so i guess have fun honey

(her replacement somehow turned out to be just as bad as she was, so you can imagine why i was eager for my lease to end in may)

[news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog]

Gayborhoods aren't dead. In fact, there are more of them than you think.

Open up a travel guide and you're likely to see multiple passages about where to find the local "gayborhood," a neighborhood disproportionately populated by LGBTQ people. In San Francisco, there's the Castro. In Chicago, you have Boystown. And in Mexico City, there's Zona Rosa.

Walk through any of these neighborhoods, and you'll discover blocks of rainbow flags and queer clubs pulsing with extremely corny but good '90s house music. Yet for over a decade, critics have been lamenting the alleged "death" and "demise" of these gayborhoods, accusing them of being "passé" or surrendering to gentrification. 

"There goes the gayborhood," The New York Times proclaimed in one 2017 headline.

But Amin Ghaziani, assistant professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, isn't exactly grieving. In his recently published piece, "Cultural Archipelagos: New Directions in the Study of Sexuality and Space," Ghaziani analyzes new research to make a bold hypothesis: The gayborhood hasn't died, and it isn't being diluted out of existence. Instead, gayborhoods are multiplying and diversifying. 

Gayborhoods, Ghaziani argues, aren't singular sites but have instead become cultural archipelagos: a series of queer islands, connected by sexuality and gender. And cities will often have more than one of them.

What's a gayborhood, anyway?

The Castro district, historically the center of the queer community in San Francisco, is now one of multiple gayborhoods.

Image: smith collection/gabo/Getty Images

If you're queer and live in an urban area, chances are decent that you've at least travelled to a "gayborhood" — maybe to stand among a crowd of sweaty bears in thongs during a pride parade or to puke your guts out outside the local queer karaoke bar. 

Ghaziani defines as gayborhood as having four defining features: It's a geographical center of LGBTQ people (including queer tourists), it has a high density of LGBTQ residents, it's a commercial center of businesses catering to the queer and trans community, and it's a cultural concentration of power. It's the neighborhood where you'll see pride parades begin, dyke marches take off, and street parties go into the night. 

Want to buy an anal plug from a queer-affirming sex shop? Go to the gayborhood. Need advice from a trans-friendly psychic? The gayborhood awaits. Looking for support as you get prepare to come out to your family? Attend a group therapy session held at your local LGBT center in ... the gayborhood, of course.

"The gayborhood is home to large amounts of organizations, businesses, and nonprofits that cater to the LGBTQ individuals," Ghaziani told Mashable in a phone interview. "Not everyone who lives in a gayborhood self-identifies as LGBTQ, though a statistically sizable portion does."

Gayborhoods formed as gay culture itself emerged in the postwar period and began to flourish: think New York City's West Village in the Stonewall era or San Francisco's Castro District in the 1950s. These were radical communities, home to intergenerational bath houses, butch femme bars, and sites of protest.

In the early 2000s, critics began to lament the supposed loss of these neighborhoods, citing "late-stage gentrification, the global circulation of capital, changes in the flow of migration, liberalizing attitudes toward homosexuality, social acceptance and assimilation, and the normalization of geo-coded mobile apps (which have altered how places facilitate social and sexual connections)," Ghaziani writes.

The critics weren't entirely wrong. Many traditional gayborhoods have indeed gentrified, and queer people have dispersed to other neighborhoods. But even as they've changed, gayborhoods have yet to disappear. Actually, they continue to bloom — you just won't see them if you're looking in the same singular places. That's partly because it's a "misconception" that "cities have only one gayborhood," Ghaziani told Mashable. 

Historically, some cities have had more than one gayborhood, but not all of them have made it to the map. And even as queer people disperse from recognized gayborhoods, they cluster and form new gayborhoods in areas not traditionally mapped as queer. 

The country has emerging queer neighborhoods that act "as cultural archipelagoes. The imagery of an archipelago suggests a chain or a cluster of islands. That's a more apt way of thinking about sexuality in a city," Ghaziani says. "LGBTQ Americans are diverse people. Why wouldn't they express that diversity in the places they call home?"

There are more gayborhoods than you'll ever find in a travel guide.

The Gayborpelago

Northampton, Massachusetts, may not be known as a traditional gayborhood, but it's home to a number of women in same-sex relationships.

Image: flickr Editorial/Getty Images

Ghaziani cites multiple pieces of research to back his claim that gayborhoods function more like archipelagoes than they do singular sites within a city. 

First, he uses US Census data to examine the geographic distribution of lesbians, noting that census data only captures information from same-sex couples, not individuals. 

What the data reveals is clear: Lesbian couples do exhibit geographical clustering behavior. They just appear to be less visible because they often exist outside traditional gayborhoods in less urban areas. Same-sex lesbian couples reside in both traditional gayborhoods like Provincetown  — where they make up 5.1 percent of all households — as well as outside of them, in areas not traditionally recognized as gayborhoods. 

While gay men make up 14.2 percent of all households in the Castro, the well-known San Francisco gayborhood, for example, lesbian couples make up 3.3 percent of all residents in Northampton, Massachusetts. Yet in the popular imagination, San Francisco, not Northampton, is the epicenter of queer culture.

In Wellfleet, Massachusetts 2.2 percent of all households are same-sex households led by women, making it the 7th most concentrated lesbian area in the country. But Wellfleet is a town of 3,171 people — not exactly a standard gayborhood you could identify on a map.

Wellfleet, Massachusetts, isn't exactly a dense metropolis.

Image: UIG via Getty Images

Ghaziani attributes this unique clustering to multiple factors: Lesbians may feel more accepted in rural areas, where female masculinity isn't as tightly policed as male femininity; lesbians have less capital than gay men (women, including queer women, continue to make less than men) and therefore may not be able to afford urban neighborhoods; lesbians are statistically more likely to have children (and therefore different housing requirements).

"Only 12 percent of LGBTQ Americans aged 18 and above currently live in a gayborhood," Ghaziani says. "We're limiting our understanding if we focus on singular parts of the city."

Like lesbians, queer people of color often reside outside popularly known gayborhoods. Black same-sex couples, for example, are more likely to live in areas where other black people concentrate than where other specifically LGBTQ people live. Cases in point: Same-sex black couples are disproportionately concentrated in Baltimore City, Maryland (where they make up 4.15 percent per 1,000 households), and Lee County, South Carolina (where that number stands at 3.69 percent).

Lee County, South Carolina, isn't exactly a well-known gayborhood. Parts of that county nonetheless exhibit a key element of the gayborhood: residential concentration.

"Zip codes associated with traditional gayborhoods are largely white," Ghaziani writes. "The assumption of spatial singularity is epistemologically harmful because it ignores the 'spatial capital' and creative placemaking efforts of queer people of color. This includes youth of color, many of whom respond to the racial exclusions of the gayborhood by building separate communities."

By focusing solely on historically celebrated gayborhoods, sociologists run the risk of ignoring both old and new gayborhoods of color.

Meanwhile, trans people are often excluded from conversations about the gayborhood entirely. Disproportionately low-income, they often lack the capital needed to live in traditional gayborhoods. They report discrimination from both straight people and cis gays in gayborhoods. Even then, trans people can form their own cultural islands simply by sharing residential space together — an apartment, a building, wherever it may be.

The existence of other gayborhoods out there also provides a source of comfort. Ghaziani cites a recent study that found that "if you know your city has a gayborhood and you self-identify as trans, you're more likely to think your city is safer for trans people — even if you don't necessarily feel all that safe in the gayborhood."

When the gayborhoods of queer people of color, women, and trans folks are included, the gayborhood no longer looks passé. It looks vibrant. It's more diffuse than traditionally conceptualized. 

Throw in digital queer neighborhoods, and the number of islands on the LGBTQ archipelago multiplies. 

The Digital Queerborhood

It's a beautiful day in the digital queerborhood.

Image: leon neal/Getty Images

Critics have long blamed the rise of digital queer culture for the supposed demise of the gayborhood. Because many queer people have access to mobile technology and no longer need to find one another in bars, the argument goes, the need for gayborhoods diminishes.

The thesis isn't without merit: New York, once an oasis of lesbian bars, now only has three. Los Angeles has zero lesbian bars. San Francisco, also zero. Seriously.

But instead of looking at digital culture from a deficit-based perspective, consider reframing: Digital gayborhoods continue to thrive. Between Grindr and Scruff and Her, there are now dozens of location-based dating apps that bring people in neighboring zip codes together. Unlike historical gayborhoods, which tend to be white, digital gayborhoods are often more open to diversity, giving room for trans and POC queers to connect.

If users are connecting in a neighborhood without traditional gay establishments, they can nonetheless create a "gayborhood" online or create "pop-up" physical gayborhoods. Using Facebook's events planner, they can plan a trans-centered party at a local straight bar or hold a LGBTQ health fair at a nearby field, thereby temporarily transforming these spaces into "gayborhood" spaces.

Here's how Ghaziani describes it:

"You can queer any given space by logging on to see see any queers near you. It undermines the [traditional] gayborhood as the sole locus ... Many more areas of the city can now function as queer spaces [because of digital culture]."

These digital queer neighborhoods may lack the charms of more traditional physical ones. Pop-up parties planned on Facebook don't quite lend the same sense of stability as your local gay bar. And it probably feels different to connect to your lesbian neighbor on an app than it does to share a beer with them at a local queer restaurant (though participating in the former can lead to the latter).

These neighborhoods matter nonetheless. Their existence should be registered.

If there are so many gaybhorhoods, why doesn't it feel that way?

Let's say you agree with Ghaziani's central thesis that gayborhoods aren't dying, they simply exist in an archipelago. If you've grown up in or around a traditional gayborhood, you might still experience the transformation of some of these neighborhoods as loss.

The West Village, home to the infamous Stonewall Inn, is now also home to some of the city's wealthiest residents. The neighborhood remains  queer, but queer parties also happen throughout the city's outer boroughs. The Village still serves as a point of culture, it's just no longer the only point.

That can feel like a death.

These centralized gayborhoods once provided "very powerful political functions," Ghaziani says. "Having a residential concentration of queer people in particular parts of the city means we can exert political influence. The election of Harvey Milk is one of the most visible ones. So when you see and hear reports that show [some] residential integration, [it can feel like] dissolution."

With dissolution comes a feeling of invisibility:

"Sexuality is unlike other major demographic characteristics," Ghaziani adds. "It's not visible on the body in the same way. So the visibility functions of queer spaces is still very important [for queer people to feel like they exist]."

Reframing is critical. By de-centering the idea of a singular gayborhood, and traveling to other gayborhoods within a city — maybe even spending some time in a digital ones — people can transform their feelings of loss into strength and multiply their cultural power.

The gayborhood isn't dead. It isn't even dying. It's just ready to thrive in a different way.

WATCH: Meet the 10-year-old drag kid shaping the future of drag youth

The DIYborhood

[cartoonessays]

Ralph Wiggum 2020

Back in 2008, there was a Simpsons episode called “E Pluribus Wiggum” that poked fun at the presidential primaries.  In the episode, Springfield pushed up its primaries before New Hampshire so the candidates in both parties and the press descended onto the town.  Disillusioned by the phoniness and cynicism of the presidential candidates, the citizens of Springfield elected a write-in candidate, Chief Wiggum’s eight-year-old son Ralph, as a mass protest vote.  In response, both the Democratic and Republican parties badgered Ralph in order to convince him to run for president in their party.

The absurdity of the situation is obvious, right?  Both of America’s major political parties seeking to pick not just a second grader, but this second grader as their presidential candidate is obviously ridiculous to everyone, right?

I have to pose this as a question because it feels like a lot of what would have been considered over-the-top absurd sitcommy scenarios back when The Simpsons was at its peak are now within the realm of reality if not already reality.

Who remembers The Boondocks episode “Return of the King”?  Remember the way that episode ended?

This was supposed to be a joke.

So why the fuck am I seeing headlines like these from credible news sites?

Let’s go back to the 2008 election.  The United States witnessed the election of the first black president, Barack Obama.  Through all the subtle and unsubtle racist and xenophobic digs taken at Barack Obama throughout his campaign, he endured it all to secure a decisive victory over his Republican opponent John McCain.

The Republican Party was quite shaken by the loss they suffered that year.  After spending the next couple of months recollecting themselves one of their first responses to Obama’s victory was to elect this man as the head of the Republican National Committee.

Remember Michael Steele?  Obama’s ascendancy to president signaled to Republicans what Americans really wanted.  An end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?  The closing of Guantanamo Bay?  A more fair and less costly healthcare system?  Punishment towards the banks and Wall Street speculators that destroyed the economy to line their own pockets?  Nope, a “jive” talking black man in a high position of power!

Surprisingly, this decision soon blew up in their face.

The Democratic Party similarly came away from the 2016 election shaken and distraught, so sure that their presidential candidate was a shoo-in into office and horrified that she lost to a crass carnival barker of a reality TV star with no political experience.  And after months of supposed introspection of what went wrong for them, they think the answer to Donald Trump is their own billionaire TV star?  If not Oprah Winfrey, they think rallying behind Mark Zuckerberg, Bob Iger, Mark Cuban, or Tom Hanks as Trump’s opponent in 2020 is any less moronic?   Even if none of them actually go for this, the fact that this is being floated out there is damning enough.

Shenanigans like this are not actual responses to the legitimate antipathy millions of American citizens have towards the Democratic Party.  Electing Michael Steele as head of the RNC was not an actual response to the legitimate antipathy millions of American citizens had towards the Republican Party.  This is nothing more than marketing at its most tawdry and cynical.  As cynical as a billionaire elitist from Manhattan successfully marketing himself as the champion of the common man.  And as cynical as this #Resistance marketing itself as this elitist’s opponent.

I have little reason to believe that this so-called “Resistance” against Trump in Democratic party circles is just a way to take advantage of Trump’s unpopularity to rally support for the same ineffectual politics that left so many voters and non-voters angry and disillusioned at the end Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s second terms.  They’re already making this clear in their praise of monsters like John McCain and George W. Bush just because they’ve been critical of some of Trump’s policies.  This economically privileged top-down “Resistance” just wants to put back in power the same Democratic elites that will continue to prioritize high-stakes standardized testing, the closure of public schools, perpetual war, offer little more than lip service to black, Latino, and Native American victims of police brutality, and ignore all of the impoverished working class neighborhoods they’re not interested in gentrifying.  I don’t even believe that they’re an equal counterbalance to the white nationalist faction of Trump’s administration because a lot of them will turn into that dog from Up if you speak eloquently enough.

By the way, your favorite liberal comedic talk show hosts aren’t going to save us either.  The economic interests of those comedians and the major corporations they work for more aligned with the people in Trump’s administration than with the majority of their fans.  They’ll be comfortable doing nothing more than writing jokes for eight years about how stupid and backwards everybody who doesn’t vote Democrat is.  The companies they work for didn’t hire them for anything more than that.  If they do use their platform for a bigger statement, they’ll either go the Bill Maher route i.e. devolve into someone who, to quote a hilarious comment I saw on YouTube, will start voting Republican once weed gets legalized or go the Jon Stewart route i.e. gather millions of your fans for a big Kid Rock concert that champions a centrist apathy because the discourse is much more peaceful that way.

Speaking of Kid Rock, people want him to run for office now too, don’t they?

Fucking hell…

Plenty of people have compared our political culture to the Mike Judge film Idiocracy.  As of late, I think this movie is more of an apt comparison.

For anybody that hasn’t seen it, Natural Born Killers is a film about how a serial killer couple played by Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis is elevated and glamorized in the media.  This film was director Oliver Stone’s angry satire admonishing the sensationalism, vapidity, and willful amorality of American culture in the 1990s.  I watched it several years ago and I really liked it.  I thought it was brilliant and hit the nail on the head (by the end of the film, I was more disturbed by Robert Downey Jr.’s character than I was by the literal serial killers).  With that said, this film was extremely uncomfortable to stomach and by the time I finished it I never wanted to sit through something like this again.

But what has been going on with our politics as of late has made me want to rewatch this movie.  A film like this seems more cathartic to me these days than disturbing.  Hell, our mass media isn’t glamorizing serial killers but they are currently glamorizing neo-Nazis.  The dog-and-pony show our major political parties are trying to sell us may not get innocent people shot in the head (unless you’re a soldier or innocent civilian caught in the crossfire of one of our perpetual wars), but it’s going to lead to scores of dead bodies in the wake nonetheless.

[bernardschweizer1]

Science Day in Xitang

I recently had the pleasure of joining another company event of the pharmaceutical start-up that my wife co-founded. This one took place in Xitang, a water town in Zhejiang province, about two hours west of Shanghai. It was the first time that all employees of both the American and the Chinese divisions of the company were brought together, and they did so to celebrate the company’s “Science First” philosophy.

Since Liang had been in charge of programming this “Science Day,” she could provide me with a front-seat ticket to the morning session. For two hours, I sat there listening to scientific presentations about drug discovery, human antibodies, and immunotherapy. One thing I took away from this experience is a renewed respect for what those on the “other side of the aisle” from me, i.e. the natural scientists, do. The complexity of the drug-discovery process, the length and cost involved in finding new therapies, and the high level of integrity of those involved in this search made quite an impression on this humanities scholar. In fact, the obstacles to new treatments seemed so high, I was wondering at times why anybody even bothered. But these people assured me that success, though hard-fought-for and expensive, was possible.

Rodents play an important part in all this because the scientists have found a way to induce these animals to generate antibodies that are identical to human ones. The science behind this production of “fully human antibodies” is beyond my grasp. All I know is that these antibodies can be injected into humans to boost their immune response to cancerous invasions. In fact, many cancers could be eliminated at an early stage if the immune system recognized them as harmful. The problem is that cancer cells are skillful impostors, duping the immune system into believing that they are harmless, thus deflecting the immune response away from them. Since the new therapeutic approach utilizes rodents to generate human antibodies, there was a lot of talk about mice and rats at the retreat. This must have made some impression on my subconscious mind because when I strolled with this group through the picturesque alleys of the water town later on, I could not help imagining that we were ourselves rats in a maze. It was as if somebody on high--a sort of supernatural behaviorist--was conducting an experiment with us, observing our collective behavior and taking careful note of our choices and preferences. The specific maze experiment that we participated in was designed to investigate two different aspects: memory and preferences.

In typical rat-maze experiments, a hungry rodent is placed at the entrance of a labyrinth with a food treat located at its end. How many times does the rat need to go through the labyrinth until it runs to the treat without getting lost along the way? In our case, the answer was: two attempts. At lunch time, we had a hard time finding the place of the food reward, unsure of directions and even having to ask locals for directions to the end of the labyrinth. Learning quickly from this experience, we had no problem proceeding to the source of food at the second attempt, going straight from our hotel to the dinner restaurant in the evening. Rats are smart. But we were smarter yet: we even remembered how to retrace our steps all the way back to the beginning of the labyrinth, i.e. our hotel, although there was no food reward waiting at the end.

Figure 1: The “classic maze experiment” (left) and the “T-maze” experiment (right)

The second experiment we were participating in was the T-maze experiment, testing for preferences. In the classical version of this experiment, the observer places different treats at the branches (A, B) of the T in order to study the rats’ preferences and decision-making in repeated runs through the T-maze. Our group tackled the T-maze by walking down a long straight alley from our hotel until it intersected perpendicularly with the main thoroughfare along the canal.

Figure 2: The T-maze experiment of Xitang

Our group first branched off to the right because the dinner restaurant lay that way. After concluding dinner, we continued going town the right arm of the T, strolling aimlessly along the lantern-lit alley, checking out the sights, which included tasty presentations of skewered scorpions, centipedes, and some kind of thick ringworm.

Exhibit 1: Delicacies on display in Xitang’s food stalls

At this point, one rat (aka company employee) could be heard daring another one to eat one of those roasted vermin for 50 bucks down, but no money changed hands and nobody was choking in the alley afterward, indicating that the offer had not been accepted.

As we neared the end of the T, we began to hear thumping noises that grew louder with every step, and soon flashing spotlights, pulsating lasers, and sheets of neon greeted us with the sheer power of a physical force. The epicenter of this manic activity was an alley bordered on both sides by discos that gave the alarming impression of a natural disaster. It seemed as if a volcano had blown its top here, an effect that was reinforced by the earth-shaking bass drums, the clouds of smoke, and the lava-like flickerings that enveloped us there. But on looking more closely, one could spy some gyrating females in tight clothing animating the crowd, and this instantly changed the analogy from Vesuvius to Babylon.

Exhibit 2: Reward at the B end of the T-maze (”Babylon”).

Adding to this the flow of great quantities of liquor, and the Babylonian impression seemed even more apt, except that in this version of Babylon, everybody was hunched over their smart phones, paying hardly any attention to the gyrating females or to anything else for that matter, including each other. The rats sniffed at this presentation of a reward and hesitated.

The experimenter found the rats’ lack of interest in the Babylonian reward worth noticing. He (she?) watched with interest as the rats turned back and retraced their steps, going past the intersection of the T that led to their hotel (see Figure 2), keeping going until they reached the other end of the T-bar. There, they entered a different kind of establishment offering different rewards. The rats saw Belgian beer, and they perked up their ears when gently strumming guitar sounds accompanied by Chinese soft pop emitted from a small stage. The rats settled down here, thereby indicating their approval of this reward.

On www.ratbehavior.org, it is explained that

T-mazes are used to ask rats to choose between two options. A different reward is placed in each arm of the maze. Rewards can be anything: different foods, another rat in a small cage, shelter, an odor. The rat is allowed to explore the whole maze.

Clearly, we had found different foods, drinks, and odors at the two ends of the T. But what about “another member of the species in a small cage”? Well, remember the gyrating women? They were actually confined in some sort of inverted gemstone cone, and their facial expression made one wonder if they felt trapped in their career. So….

Anyway, the maze experiment I fancied being a part of involved a group rather than just an individual rat, so the scientist who designed it must have had a social purpose in mind. Maybe the experimenter wanted to find out how the company would behave collectively when hungry and disoriented—would they lose their temper and turn on each other? Would they pool their resources to solve the problem? Would they learn quickly to orient themselves better the next time? Well, the rats proved to be collaborative, patient, and intelligent, mastering the maze on the second try. Well done!

As for the preference test in the T-maze, the scientists and pharma executives turned their backs on the flashy, wasteful, high-intensity/low quality decadence at the Babylonian end of the maze, choosing instead the calmer, more communicative, and gentrified entertainment at the—shall we say—“Notting Hill” end of the spectrum.

Exhibit 3: Reward at the A end of the T-maze (”Notting Hill”)

The experimenter noted dutifully in his (her?) log that the rats showed a proper appreciation for sustainable, socially meaningful experiences, preferring them to quick thrills in an alienating environment. And while the experimenter on high packed up his things and headed for the exit, marveling at the creatures’ wisdom, the rats settled down at the Notting Hill end of the T, sipping Belgian beer, snacking on the tasty nut confections that are on offer everywhere in this town, chatting, and celebrating the historical victory of the Chinese soccer team over the South Koreans (1:0—go China!). Occasionally, though, talk returned to the theme of the scientific retreat: science, drug discovery, and ….. rats.

[a-story-teller]

I need to be trepanned

[zet-zets-blog]

Welcoming 31 hits different. :') This year feels VERY VERY different. I LOVE MY FRIENDS :')

I started my birthday week with week knees from the lack of stretching... and the intense walking up and down the stairs at work. Like bruh, I was a sub art teacher, sub dance teacher AND sub homeroom teacher... IT WAS AN INTEEENSE WEEK. I never thought having a teacher job can be THIS physically taxing and also truly feel like my own real life tv sitcom... Lowkey when I'm in our teacher's lounge, I check for cameras coz sometimes I truly feel like I'm being punked (Ashton Kutcher? are you there?)

And the week ended with a super tiring BUT fun multicultural potluck where I got to meet my students' parents. OMG! :') I found out I AM THE FUN TEACHER at my job. No wonder the kids don'tn take me seriously. ALSO the food??! the parents brought? UGH chef's kiss! ALOT OF Caribbean food. It was also nice being able to interact with my kids (OMG! I call my students "my kids" now!) in a non "we're doing math workshop" setting. It was pure joy :') And then on Friday, this extra Filipina brought her signature Adobo! And IT WAS A HIT! Like, ugh, now everyone is like obsessed with my cooking skills, lol looks like my cookbook project is still a YES LET'S DO IT! since I'm starting to expand my fanbase from outside academia to the halls of my flatbush elementary school lol.

Saturday I had my birthday celebration. And my new york friiiends came :') Wild to see the community I was able to build around me in just 6 years of living in this side of this country (3 years in DC, 3 years in NY) Liiiike, I was so overwhelmed with joy at the sight of everyone getting to know each other and truly loving each other's vibe. :') Also, also-- SUNSET PARK IS STILL THE BEST NEIGHBORHOOD IN BROOKLYN (fight me!) liike if you want to be surrounded by community oriented neighbors, then this is the place! Unless ofcourse you're a gentrifier then PLEASE DON'T COME, YOU ARE NOT WELCOME HERE.

After the potluck at my apt. we went for karaoke! :') Everyone sang! and then we ended the night with tacos from Tia Rosa! it truly was a magical fun night that even my friends continue to rave about up to this day ( I mean its only been a week lol BUT HEY now we're celebrating friendsgiving haha)

ANYWAAAAAYS! I am proud to say, Rozette at 31 has finally entered her healing era! :') that 6 year relationship breakup may have put me in a VERY MANIC episode(s) but I am very much proud to say that I am finishing the year strong and looking forward to 2024! <3

CHEERS TO ALL THE FRIEND DINNERS I WILL BE HAVING IN MY LIL APT. :') this is my FRIENDS tv show (POC edition) lol