When thinking of the impact COVID-19 has left, often the first thoughts to come to mind are lockdowns, quarantining, and having to wear masks. But what about the trickling effects it has left on Asian women at home?

I can’t remember the last time I missed an episode of The Bachelor or The Bachelorette. Even though I hate to admit it, it’s more than just a reality tv show. Over the years, it’s really brought out my hopeless romantic side where I’ve caught myself daydreaming about who I’d potentially give my “final rose” to. But, as I’ve had my fair share of relationships, I’ve quickly realized that they never quite looked like the ones that are portrayed on TV. The dates that I’ve been on haven’t involved a private jet or a zipline experience through an exotic rainforest. Although I’d like to say they’ve been meaningful and special, I can’t help but compare them to the ones on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette.

As much as I love this show and all of the beautiful experiences and dates that the contestants get to have, I have to remind myself that it’s not something that I should be comparing my own personal life to. Although the show may seem harmless because it airs once a week, it has the power to reinforce harmful stereotypes that younger generations are using to set their own expectations for relationships.

The ultimate goal of the lucky Bachelor or Bachelorette is to end up engaged to the “love of their life”. We all secretly want that to happen but in reality, most relationships do not result in a proposal two to three months into seeing one another, so why are we always crossing our fingers for this result on the show? By reinforcing this expectation, we also are giving off the impression that the only way to true happiness is through committed heterosexual relationships. However, in 2020, we are seeing that this is far from the case. There are plenty of people that are happily committed to one another, regardless of sexuality, who do not have rings on their fingers. 

Another harmful stereotype that this show reinforces is that love moves at the speed of light. Oftentimes, if the final rose ceremony doesn’t end in a proposal, America seems to be disappointed and unfulfilled by the show. However, love can’t be forced in 6 weeks…and relationships move at different paces so I’m not quite sure why we are shocked to see couples break-up post-show when they’ve only known each other for a short period of time. We need to be able to separate ourselves from what we see on television because it has the power to dictate not only our thoughts but our relationships and attitudes towards our future decisions. 

Now my critiques are not to say that we have to abandon the show, it’s just to say that we need to become more aware of what we’re watching and be able to distinguish it from the real world. I mean you will still find me cuddled up on my couch at 8 pm every Tuesday, waiting to see how Clare approaches the rest of the season. But, I’m able to rest my head on the pillow each night knowing that my personal life and future relationships should not mirror the experiences on the shows. 

I started coming out as bisexual when I was a sophomore in high school but I was apprehensive about my identity until college. I feel more comfortable now talking about it with friends and most relatives. I am even starting to play with my style more by finally confidently shopping in the men’s section at stores. I am finally trying outfits that I have always admired others wearing such as button downs tucked into jeans or sweaters that have a more masculine aesthetic. I still have not been in a serious relationship with a man or woman (or even successfully flirt). Yet, with a growing confidence in my sexuality (and extreme loneliness) I would love to put myself out there with someone. Even if I am alone forever, I am really happy that I am growing so much. I am becoming more happy with who I am even though I still am not 100% sure who that person is. I am still unsure of what I want to do with my professional career in the long term. I have no clue where I want to live and create a life. I don’t know if I want to own a cat or a dog. I can’t tell if I like people platonically or romantically. I have gender dysmorphia and am constantly confused on my pronouns. I also don’t put in the effort to figure any of it out. I get scared and just want to stay in my bed far away from it all. This has caused so many issues but that is not why I wanted to write this post. 

I hope you are doing well and are healthy during this pandemic. No seriously, I do. Considering you are still coming into stores with your mask below your nose or even only covering your chin, I truly truly hope you are healthy. Not for your sake, for mine. Now before you take offense, let me offer this: I already know you don’t care about My well being, seeing as you are still coming into my store or into my restaurant. I promise, Sunday brunch with the girls is Not socially distancing, even if it Is outside.

Cases are climbing, and whether you realize this or not, I Need to work to live. I’m sorry you “need to get out of the house”, but go to the goddamn park instead. While I was here slaving away at work, You were here in my personal space and standing Way too close for me to feel safe.

On July 4th? I could tell you were ordering for your BBQ party. Why didn’t your family members call you out and decide not to show up? Because you are part of a toxic and Very selfish community. Please do your part and stay home. You can complain about being tired of being in quarantine, but it is only going to last That much longer if you keep putting more and more people at risk. Just because the people around you are acting as everything is normal doesn’t make it true. Dig deep. Find some empathy for others and try to protect yourself as well as all of us that are forced to work during this time.

I promise you, every time a waiter says “thank you for coming in tonight” they do not mean a word. Not saying they did before the quarantine, but especially now, I promise we are planning your death and cursing at you under our breath. I do not enjoy your presence here and wish you just got take out and stayed at home. If you Really want to support those of us literally risking our lives to Serve you, tip us. And tip us well! I don’t mean 15 or 20%. More. Help your fellow person, its the least you can do considering you probably only wore your mask to get in the door and never after when you are ordering.

Please do better. I am tired and exhausted of worrying about my health because Your head is up your own ass.

Love,

A person working 3 jobs during the pandemic

On October 9th 2020, Netflix released an 8 episode documentary about deaf college students who attended the most prominent deaf college, Gallaudet University in Washington DC. When the documentary was announced earlier in the year, a lot of the deaf community withheld their praise, as the show was being run by Nyle DiMarco, a famous model, actor, insert other things here, who is also deaf. He has a reputation in the deaf community for being… unable to read the room, so to speak. Most people who had heard about the show and who were not deaf or connected to the deaf community in any way were excited to see a show that gives them insight into the lives of deaf people and gives them an opportunity to learn more about deaf culture. I was curious to see what this documentary would be teaching hearing people about “the deaf way.” 

Success is something that can’t happen within a day. It takes weeks, months, years even to get where you want to be. But once you hit that accomplishment, then what? Success is something that only you can accomplish, no one’s else can do it for you. It could mean doing things you love or setting a big goal for yourself. My success could be so different from your success. Success can often feel like having a particular time to accomplish something, but in life that’s not always the case. Sometimes life has its own way of showing us that time doesn’t stop for anyone. So, take that jump and let things slowly fall into place.

Mental and physical health are looked at very differently in western societies. Mental health is difficult because asking for it means you’re unstable. Physical health is much easier for the ideal person, because for some reason your body is more important than your mind. Insurance also plays a key role in healthcare. The difference between these two types of healing and asking for help is astounding. Insurance can make asking for help harder and more confusing.

Getting help with mental illness makes people think you’re unstable because of the stigma behind it. Going to a therapist is like walking into a mental hospital in some areas. Western ideals of medicine think of hard sciences as the only legitimate types of science, which is unfortunate because it leaves out more than half of the human experience. The mind-body split shows heavily when speaking about mental health. People think that when your body is healthy your mind must be as well, but that is untrue and someone’s mental health can affect their physical health greatly.

For example, my coworker told me that he was “crazy too,” when I told him I had a psychiatrist appointment that day. This sounds like a joke, but when you look at it, he’s saying that we have to be mentally unstable to see a professional about it. When your body is ailing, do people tell you that you’re crazy to go see a medical doctor? Then why is mental health any different?

Physical health has its own challenges, but can be much easier with ideal people. When you mix other identities and factors into the person in question, physical health help can become much harder to attain and maintain. For example, a cis white man can get through a doctor’s appointment very easily, yet a trans woman has to answer many more questions and the doctor can create much more commotion because someone doesn’t fit the “proper type” of person.

Health is such an important part of living, yet many people that need mental help cannot find it, and those who are not binary can get discriminated against for existing. The key piece to healthcare in America is private insurance. Insurance is a leech on resources and does NOT help people get better healthcare. Insurance itself is EVIL!

The fact that we have to pay for a life-saving service out of pocket because someone we pay to pay our bills doesn’t cover a particular surgery or time in a rehabilitation center is absolutely atrocious.

This conversation can be linked to so many things, whether it’s free healthcare, racial justice, LGBT rights, or even basic human needs/rights. These are just a few of the things that physical and mental health can lead to, especially when combined with insurance. People have a right to take care of their bodies and thrive instead of survive, but insurance, mental, and physical health are all factors in someone’s quality of life.

NOTE: Before I dig into the topic at hand, I would like to preface my blog post by asserting that in no way am I a celebrity sympathizer. I am very much critical of the concept of celebrity within itself; the vicious cult-like idol worship, the hoarding of disgusting amounts of wealth, and the arrogance and lack of self-awareness it breeds (see: the absolutely tone deaf – both literally and figuratively – COVID-19 Imagine cover) is truly no joke. However, celebrities are still People Like Us™ at the end of the day (some of which, depending on their identities, are more vulnerable to and disproportionately impacted by the ills of celebrity than others) and the ways in which we Average Joes engage with them should be critiqued because it says a lot about how we engage with each other as actors in society as a whole. So now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, without further ado…

For as long as I can remember, there has been an odd fixation with seeing the naked bodies of celebrities that I could never wrap my head around to this day. One of my earliest recollections of this is the mass hysteria around the ever infamous Y2K pop culture event that was the “leak” of Ray J and Kim Kardashian’s sex tape, which catapulted the latter out of Paris Hilton’s (who also had a leaked sex tape) shoe closet and into stardom – and we unfortunately haven’t been able to rid ourselves of her and her Klan since. Succeeding 2007’s Kim Kardashian, Superstar we’ve experienced rapid technological advancements like the invention of easily hackable iCloud storage and real time social media like Twitter and Instagram. Now it’s become even easier to obtain, leak, and circulate celebrity sex media at neck break speeds to the point that it happens so often and to so many people that I can’t keep up with who has been a victim! Vanessa Hudgens, Rihanna, Justin Bieber, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, “The Fappening”/”Celebgate”…seriously, look up the many lists of celebrities this has happened to and I guarantee at some point you’ll think, “Them? When?!“

My main question is: Why are we so Mariah Carey – Obsessed.mp3 with seeing the nude bodies of celebrities in sexual contexts, and even more alarmingly, without their consent?

We could look at this from a few lenses, like how generally speaking since celebrities are individuals who are (for whatever reason *eyeroll*) positioned higher in society and perceived as more exclusive than the rest of us, we’re thirsty to see them in a vulnerable, subordinate state and have access to their bodies in the most dehumanizing manner possible when we want. This goes even more so for celebrities who are of marginalized identities, particularly women. It’s not enough to just simply consume Cardi B’s music and videos that she has sexed up at her own volition, we have to take advantage of her mistaken leak of nipples and bully her about how laaaaarge her areolas are for it to mean something. We have to think about how this obsession with leaks often makes us abandon our morals – that is, if we ever had them to begin with. Like how people actively sought out Lil Nas X’s nudes upon his rise to fame knowing that he was a minor in those pictures, thus, definitely making it child pornography. Or how when women who typically rally on the timeline against sexual objectification culture conveniently and expeditiously abandoned this energy when a video came out that was purported to be DaBaby, when in actuality it was that of a porn star (might I add, it’s quite ironic that people immediately lost interest in the video upon this discovery despite the fact that the porn star willingly filmed this video – as that is his job – and most likely did not receive any type of compensation in the form of money or notoriety for the mass reproduction of his work. The disrespect of sex workers and their labor is a whole ‘nother conversation.)

So, before we stampede to Twitter like the wildebeest colony from Lion King to ogle at the latest penis or set of nipples attached to a famous person, pick it apart and create a spectacle only to unceremoniously discard it, and moan then about which leak we’re looking forward to next, I’d like for people to think about these things first and reflect upon why we do it and why we think it’s okay. This is especially important with the rise of deepfake technology, which allows people’s likenesses to be fabricated in…less than desirable situations. Just sit in it. Marinade if you will.

About a few weeks ago, I came across an informative Twitter post. This Twitter post was informing the general public on incarcerated firefighters in California and how these same firefighters are paid little to nothing AND are not allowed to acquire firefighter jobs upon release. My first thought was, “how can this make any sense? And why are we still promoting slavery of people in the name of incarceration?”. So, I’m going to start by being completely honest… I’m a HUGE advocate for prison reform. This is for two reasons: although incarcerated people are deemed criminals, they still deserve basic humans right and the way in which incarceration completely ruins people’s lives, it’s not morally right… at all and no matter what.

Honestly, incarcerated people deserve their basic rights. To me, it doesn’t really matter who a person is or what they have done, everyone deserves basic decency, such as being paid/compensated a sufficient enough amount to sustain themselves. In one article, (link listed below) by a non-profit news source “High Country News”, author Maanvi Singh writes, “in exchange for extremely dangerous work, prisoners earn time off their sentences and are paid between $2 and $5 a day, plus $1 per hour when they are on a fire. Because incarcerated firefighters are paid so little, the program saves the state of California $90 million to $100 million a year”. What I took away from this data is that my argument was further supported. Let’s put this into context. The average minimum wage for firefighters in California is $21/hour, but prisoner firefighters can only receive, at most, $5 a day… Now, I know incarcerated people are housed, fed and not having to worry about bills, but how in the world is this fair? These prisoners literally risk their lives for $5 a day? Then, on top of that, they save the state of California $90 to $100 BILLION dollars a year, through their labor, it’s not morally right, any way you look at it. I don’t even want to go down a rabbit hole with the taking off time from their sentences. I’ll just leave it at that’s not right.

Second, incarcerated firefighters aren’t allowed to apply or acquire firefighter jobs once they have completed their sentences. Of all things, I find this the most absurd. I say this because these incarcerated firefighters literally took on the role of non-incarcerated firefighters. Also, with how prison completely ruins a person’s record; I think the least society can do is allow them to pursue a career after they have served their time. I feel incarceration completely disables people from allowing them to move on and better their lives. Instead, prison only sets its victims up to fail again. #PRISONREFORM!