The Not-So-Secret Diary of a Bad Luck Girl

I was all set to write a post about how I was all TCOB yesterday – canceling my New York tax appointment and scheduling one here, getting my tax stuff together, calling the NY jury duty place to see if I actually had to fly out there (I don’t), posting to The Nervous Breakdown -  but then I saw that the Oscar nominations are out.

I don’t know why, but I get completely insane about the Oscars.  Some years I refrain from following them because I get so insane (I’m the same way about figure skating).  Although the awards show is usually on a Sunday night, I’ll still stay up till two or three in the morning, watching the whole thing and getting completely and utterly wound up.

I think it all started with Stand By Me.  I saw it when I was 14 and fell in love with everything about it.  Gordie the writer (like me!), the boys’ friendship (nothing like gossipy friendships with girls), and of course River Phoenix.

Then I heard that the movie had been nominated for an Oscar, best adapted screenplay.  My parents already asleep, I stayed up and watched the whole show.  When Stand By Me’s category came up and the nominations were read, I got so excited, I started jumping up and down.  An involuntary high-pitched squeal escaped from my lips.

It didn’t win, but it was an honor just to be nominated.

For the 1997 Oscars, another movie-loving friend and I made it our goal to watch every single film that had a nomination, even if just for costume or set design.  I think we came very close.  Glancing at the list now, looks like I missed Gattaca, Kundun, Air Force One, and all the documentaries and foreign films.  Hmm, maybe I didn’t come close at all, but at least we covered all the big categories.

This year there are ten best picture nominations, up from the usual five.  I’m not sure how I feel about this.  I’m a traditionalist, at least where the Oscars are concerned, and plus, if I decide to follow the awards, that’s even more movies to catch up on!

“Avatar”
“The Blind Side”
“District 9”
“An Education”
“The Hurt Locker”
“Inglourious Basterds”
“Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire”
“A Serious Man”
“Up”
“Up in the Air”

I’ve only seen two of these movies! Avatar and District 9. I don’t know if I have time, or the patience to see the others. We’ve been wanting to catch The Hurt Locker, and maybe I’ll go see Precious on my own. However, I’m not sure I can bring myself to see The Blind Side. On that note, The Blind Side??? Really???

Let the insanity begin.

Next memoir post is up.

The hardest parts to reread in my memoir are the ones with my parents after my divorce.  I can deal with reading about my own pain – I lived through it and put it behind me.  But remembering how hurt my mother and father were still gives me a pang.

I wonder what it was like in their house after I told them.  If my mother kept trying to talk about it, and my father kept turning away, kept going to his paintings, his singing, his guitar, to make himself forget.  If they didn’t worry about saving face so much, they could have talked to their friends.  It wasn’t till April, nine months after I told them, that my mother finally let someone else know.

She and my aunt Ping were staying at my grandmother’s house in Berkeley.  It was just the two of them since Puo-puo was living in L.A. by then.  The house needed some repairs, and my mother and aunt were basically watching the repairmen.  Aunt Ping is the least gossipy of my relatives so I can see why my mother told her.  Afterward, my aunt couldn’t sleep the whole night.

The next time I saw her was a month later.  She, my mother, and a cousin were meeting up in the city for lunch.  I didn’t know my aunt knew and so was surprised that she hugged me so tightly when she first saw me.  (Aunt Ping usually does the arms-length hug, grabbing the would-be hugger by the arms and patting them before they can get too close.)

“You could have warned me,” I whispered to my mother.  Actually I was relieved.  I preferred that people knew.

Then again, did I?  I saw my uncle and his family later that year, and they just looked at me like they didn’t know what to say.  I knew they had been upset, but the last thing I wanted was anyone feeling sorry for me.

After my separation, I mostly liked the peace of my solitary routine – a cup of coffee and toast in the early mornings, Friday nights picking up on my way home half-priced breakfast pastries from a cupcake shop on 2nd Avenue, long runs in Central Park.  But sometimes I had a hard time filling my days.  Saturday nights I didn’t have plans, I’d walk down Park Avenue, from my place on 77th Street to Grand Central, where the Sunday Times would already be available, and walk back home.

Then I’d read the front page, the Styles section, and glance through the Book Reviews.  I’d save the magazine for last, relishing the crossword puzzle, which could keep me occupied for days.

Now I occasionally miss that time I spent alone.  I like this quote from author Alice Koller:

Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your own presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement.

I thought I’d take a little time to give an update on my progress on the BBC 100 Books list.  I’m SLOGGING my way through.

The books crossed out are ones I’ve read in the past, and the books crossed out in bold are the ones I’ve read since I started this project in the fall.  (You’ll see I took some liberties with the first one and put all three titles, and that I’m a procrastinating machine.)

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
1a. The Fellowship of the Ring
1b. The Two Towers
1c. The Return of the King
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

So I’ve read a total of five books! WOW! Right now I’m reading Cold Comfort Farm, which shouldn’t take as long as Midnight’s Children, that’s for sure.

What did I think of these books I read? Just to be snarky, here are my six-word reviews.

The Lord of the Rings
Too long, watch the movies instead.

Little Women
Very Christian, still sucked me in.

Midnight’s Children
Like Heroes on crack in India.

* * *

In other news, I’m sure you’ve heard by now that J.D. Salinger died. He was 91 and since Catcher in the Rye, a total recluse.

I read Catcher in the Rye for the first time in junior year English. Although I was in honors English the year before and always did well in creative writing, I was put in the non-honors class, ie, with the dummies (or so I felt). This was all because I hadn’t done well on the grammar portion of the SATs, which I didn’t try very hard on and didn’t know would be a determinant of my placement the following year. (I smelled bullshit, and still do.)

I was angry because of this and for a shitload of other reasons, and so when I started to read Holden’s sad, angry voice, I thought, That’s me.

One of our assignments was to write the “next chapter” of the book in Holden’s voice. I remember my classmates writing about their own piddly problems. That pissed me off. Did they seriously think Holden would care about a physics project and curfew? Did they get the point of the book at all?

People were phonies. At my school, the teachers and administrators were nice to the smart, well-dressed kids who’d get into ivy league colleges and make the school look good. The poor kids who smoked and took shop were a lost cause. I actually heard one of the teachers say that. “She’s a lost cause,” dismissively of some girl with frosted hair and a Slayer T-shirt.

But I still wanted to succeed. I still wanted to fit in. The next year I got into Advanced Placement English (suck it, Ms. Palmieri!) and Advanced Writing. I got a 5 on the AP test and the school award for creative writing. I had friends and was going to my first choice college. Maybe I was a phony too, but it was definitely easier than being angry and trapped on the outside.

The voice of the book continued to haunt me for years. One of the first great things I wrote was a novella about an angry Asian American girl who more than anything wants to leave her parents and seek her long-lost grandparents. What I liked about the piece was the voice. I could hear it – her cadence, the snap of her voice, reluctant tenderness – and only now I realize that was Holden Caulfield, reborn as Doris Tanabata Lee.

Lately I’ve been thinking about giving Doris another visit. Maybe her voice – watered down Holden’s – is worth it.

I’m getting over a cold so you know what that means: a hacking, choking cough.

I’ve had the cough since I was a kid.  It’s dry and ticklish, and lasts for weeks on end.  Last year I went to the doctor who said it was either asthma or allergies.  Since I can run four miles without losing my breath, I figured it was probably the latter.

Allegra took care of it (along with my hives), but now that I don’t have insurance, I don’t get Allegra.

I have to make do with water, tea, and lozenges, and scaring people into thinking I have H1N1 or bird flu.

* * *

Had my yoga class yesterday and my arms are sore!  But in a good way, not in a I-can’t-even-scratch-my-nose kind of way.  I also ran four miles.  Woohoo!

What keeps me from going crazy without a nine to five job is 1) staying in shape, and 2) being a productive writer.

* * *

Heard the most corp-speaky conversation at Bittersweet the other day.  It was three young women in skirt suits, and one, maybe the manager, said  “spot on” and “stay the course” at least half a dozen times.  (Why do so many corp speak terms ape the military?  “All hands on deck.”  “Round the horn.”  “Stay the course.”  Planning a party is not tantamount to planning an invasion.)

Then the manager type chewed out one of the girls for seeming “disenchanted.”  How much you wanna bet that the girl was doing her job just fine, but because she wasn’t a pollyanna, she’s seen as “disenchanted.”  So not only do you have to do your job, you have to reassure manager types that you’re “thrilled” and “excited.”

WHY?

Is it insecurity on management’s part?  Or is it somehow tricking you into thinking you need them more than they need you?  It’s not enough to do my job, I have to walk around with an asshat grin on my face all day.  Yeah, fuck you.

Gee, Angela, tell us how you really feel.

Next memoir post is up.

In it, I finally leave my ex, going out for the first time without my wedding ring, moving into my own apartment in the city, and finally telling my parents.

Now it’s been almost five years since my ex and I split up.  I remember in October 2005, the day I received my final divorce papers was the same day that Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt’s divorce was finalized.

I really felt a bond with Jen back then (Team Aniston!).  She also got married in year 2000.  Brad was also supposedly unfaithful, and left her for his mistress, who shortly afterward had his child.  I cried along with her in her Vanity Fair interview.

Last week People magazine’s cover story was Jennifer Aniston, 5 Years After Brad.  How ridiculous, right?  I mean, who cares at this point?  There have been a zillion other divorces since then that People isn’t talking about.  Why endlessly Jen and Brad, five years, half a dozen kids, and several bad movies later?

Because for a while, Jen and Brad were Hollywood’s golden couple.  Not only was Brad HOT, he could act but didn’t take himself too seriously.  Jen was girl next door-gorgeous, goofy and cute on Friends, and by God, she could act too.  They seemed fun and down to earth, a couple you could drink and get high with.

Then along came Angelina.  (Cue scary music.)  Pale, dark-haired, and kinda creepy (vial of Billy Bob’s blood, anyone?).  She was the weird, beautiful girl you made fun of but secretly wanted to be friends with, if only because she couldn’t give two shits about being friends with you.  How could Brad resist?

How could anyone resist?

Of course I perked up when I saw the headline.  Me too, Jen, five years later!  But unlike Aniston, I haven’t had every break up and bloat-mistaken-for-baby-bump splashed across the tabloids (just on my blog).  While I willingly look back on the past five years, maybe she doesn’t want to.  But, unless she holes up in a cave, she won’t have much a choice.

My memoir, like the tabloids, make a story out of the events of my life.  Joe and I were the nice and unassuming couple you made small talk with at the train station.  We were hard working and good to our parents.  I was the dutiful daughter-in-law, taking care of my sick mother-in-law and basically giving up a lot for the good of the family.  The dutiful wife betrayed by her unfeeling husband.

But there was a lot going on underneath.  Built-up resentment, withholding of affection, my feeling maybe that I had settled, Joe having an inkling of that.  I’m not saying it was my own fault, only that it was complicated.  Who knows what was going on between Brad and Jen before Angelina came along?  Only they know.  Only ever do the husband and wife know in a marriage.

Now that I’ve been writing beauty articles for eHow, I’ve learned a lot about what is and isn’t effective, especially for hyperpigmentation (ie, freckles and age spots) and aging.

I’ve blogged about beauty products before.  I LOVE beauty products, especially skincare.  At its height, my utilization consisted of:

AM:

• Wash with Philosophy’ Purity face wash
• Moisturize with with anything with at least SPF 15

PM:

• Wash with whitening wash (Shiseido, Pola, or Kose Sekisho)
• Use serum with hydroquinone
• Use whitening moisturizer

Once a week or so:

• Use exfoliating mask
• Use whitening mask

Did the whitening products actually do anything?  Maybe at first, but I think I soon built up a tolerance.

Now I’ve streamlined my routine.  I use the same face wash morning or night, a moisturizer with SPF during the day, and a heavier cream at night.  I still do the exfoliating mask and occasionally a “brightening” mask.  I’m not sure what the brightening mask does except that it feels and smells nice.

(Please note that this is the right routine for me, someone with oily/dry combination skin.  If you have very dry, sensitive, or extra oily skin, you’d want a different routine.)

There have been some claims that using hydroquinone is bad for you, thought it’s still FDA-approved.  Whether or not the claims are true, I’ve decided to stop using it since it doesn’t seem to do anything for me anymore.

Supposedly some botanical treatments have a similar effect, but you have to be careful about which ones you choose.  Just because something contains “anti-oxidants” doesn’t mean it’ll do shit for your skin.

You have to look out for clinically proven effective ingredients, such as “retinoids (also known as retinol, retiny, or retinoic acid), alpha hydroxy acids, azelaic acid, growth factors, hydroquinone, kojic acid, peptides and salicylic acid” (quoting my own article, by the way).

Yesterday I was tempted to get this “all natural” serum to combat the freckles.  While it boasted vitamin C and green tea, I wondered if those ingredients have actually been proven effective.  I couldn’t remember so I decided against plopping down $50 for something I wasn’t even sure would work.

I’m quite proud of myself.  In the past, I’d have been suckered in by the packaging and wording.

Another thing I read was that you really don’t need so many products.  All you need is a gentle cleanser, a moisturizer with at least 15 SPF (some say at least 30), a good moisturizer for evenings, and a gentle exfoliating mask.  (It’s good to regularly get rid of dead skin cells to avoid pimples.)

Anything else is pretty much snake oil.

My next Nervous Breakdown post is up.

Before I moved to the Princeton area, I live in a town that was mostly Jewish and Italian, ie, not too many Asians, which messed with my head in terms of standards of beauty.  Despite all the stereotypes of Asian women being trophy wives are whatever, my experience growing up was that Asian girls were not pretty.  Or at least that’s how I felt.

In other news, I have my first cold of the year.  It came on all of a sudden.  On Friday I was perfectly fine.  Then that evening I had a tickle in my throat.  By Saturday my throat hurt, and by yesterday I was sneezing and stuffed up.  Usually colds creep up on me very slowly.  Hopefully this one will disappear as quickly as it started.

Trying to get my butt to the gym today.  Will attempt a short run and then yoga.  I usually feel better after a light workout when I have a cold.

In other other news, we saw The Lovely Bones this weekend.  Two words: it sucked.  Very boring and lame.  So much of the book was glossed over or left out entirely.  The only good thing was the acting.