It has finally happened. I am joining the youthful masses, those who are clad in low-riding jeans with fingers poised on the dial of their iPods -- yes, I, too, am joining the blogging community! My anachronistic presence here reminds of a similar venture many unspeakable years ago when I started my first (and last) webpage. It was a pitiful thing, at first grey and bleak with default fonts and a some kind of message akin to that of an answering machine, until it later careened out of control - was it something like javascript that allowed it to slowly and painfully change bright colors while loading, to the dismay of my few visitors who no doubt never returned?
Who could blame them.
In great hopes that a similar mutation will not happen here, I will keep this personal archive private for now, if blogs can be private. If no one looks under this rock, who knows what species of moss might grow here!
I chose today to start this blog because I think one needs to vent something when one is blogging, and recently, I've been rather dormant in this department. But yesterday, a small minor twitch in the cosmos happened. I received a piece of mail addressed to Mr. ___________.
This would be of no significance if it were not for the fact that I am a MISS _________. While generally reasonable about most matters of the earth, for some reason, when people wrongly assume that my name is a man's name and then proceed to send me bills, junk mail, or the worse yet, attempts to hire me in the name of Mr. ____, I have a fit. Granted, I have a Chinese name that I've never encountered elsewhere, but why assume?
Any of us who have made it through grade school knows that it only makes an Ass out of U and Me.
I can handle mispronunciations; in fact some are endearing, but the error of gender is simply unforgivable. Some might ask, but how are anybody supposed to know by your weird Chinese name that you're a woman? Point taken, but this does not excuse the failure to use simply my full name when in doubt. You can't take anyone seriously if they can't even get your gender straight. And aren't prefixes supposed to be honorific and polite? "Mister" is not likely to be taken politely when you're talking to a woman.
So I HATE it when people call me mister, even if just on paper. There it is. That piece of Mister Mail provided me with the requisite critical mass of Outrage to start this blog. So everybody write to the San Francisco Bar Association and give them a piece of your mind.
And I share the Outrage because I care. I care that others know this about me so that I give the world a chance to cease offending me, and I care that others understand this reaction so that other ambiguously named individuals will similarly be free of this offense. And hence, the title of my first blog entry. My college friend BJ would often utter this phrase after listening to one of my rants and vents or a bit of useless but mild-mannered commentary. He also used to say it after making an unsolicited observation, like when he found me in the dining hall after a rough night -- "Gee, you don't look too good. Sharing is caring."
Since then, I've taken BJ's words to heart. "Sharing is caring" disseminates the good in life and better packages the bad. If a sentiment is not shared, how is it to proliferate? I guess this is how I'm justifying this blog.
It's certainly not a one-way street, though. I appreciated BJ's advice that I didn't look too good because maybe it made me go back to my dorm room and brush my hair. And I appreciated it when a friend told me that I had a giant pizza stain on my sweatshirt when I showed up to fifth period biology unknowingly wearing a slice. And I appreciated it when someone told me that there was something wrong with the peach cobbler I made when I accidentally used salt instead of sugar. This is all useful information, so keep it coming! The eternal work in progress can't get better without feedback.
So onward with sharing and caring....
