"From Charlie Chan to [the] owner of a corner store, our understanding of Asians - all Asians - has been reduced to a series of simple images. They are inscrutable, hard-working, ambitious, intelligent but unintelligible people, and they make us uncomfortable."
- Rosina Lippi-Green, English with an Accent - Language, ideology and discrimination in the US. Required reading for an anthropology class ('Language and Cinema')

Something very weird happened to me yesterday. I was changing, and when I had taken my jeans off I looked down and realized that I had done so without unbuttoning or unzipping them. Have I lost that much weight? Or have I always been able to do that, but was never actually crazy enough to try?
Perhaps there's nothing crazy about that, but it felt that way for a while.
I am in the computer lab and it is nearly 1am but I am not the only one; my Taiwanese friend Kevin is nearby trying to do his Math Webwork, which is the worst online invention ever and serves to further the argument that the Internet is more of a hindrance than a help.
Displacement. I was in my room trying to remember if humor is spelt as humour at home or whether it is always without the u (like apparently behavior is never with the u and I thought it was for most of my life), and I couldn't ask Bernice or anyone on my floor for that matter because for them humor has always been humor and humour does not exist. Since there is no dictionary lying about the best solution would be to go downstairs to the lab and look up Dictionary.com, which is ridiculous, so! We never know the answer.
There have been some new faces in Hereford recently - students from Tulane University in New Orleans who have had to transfer because their school is currently inaccessible. They amaze me, you know, their toughness in gathering themselves up and just leaving, changing, because this will have to be part of their lives. One girl from Tulane I saw struggling up the stairs with her groceries, but so beautiful and in it wearing this gorgeous green sundress Han would have died for (seriously). There are so many things I want to capture here but haven't yet.
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Just returned from watching Voices of the Class, a skit based on our batch's college application essays. Or something. I did not understand about 1/6 about what was being said because of the accent (the Virginia accent is REALLY STRANGE, because it's all wispy and goes to pieces when at high speed) and the humo(u)r, but what I did get was excellent. In one sketch, an Indian international student goes through the Americanization process during customs, having to walk through a Machine every time she says something un-American, emerging each time with an additional little Stars-and-Stripes flag and modified opinion. New Delhi, India becomes Indiana and eventually New Jersey; final product is the scalp-scratching slacker who doesn't have a favourite president because hello, he doesn't vote! The officer shakes his hand: "Welcome to America."