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I got my hair cut SUPER short!! and I love it!  I won't be able to see Sal, my wonderful amazing hair-master until October.  and I figured China's and India's weather may make me want to shave my head - so short hair is better than shaved hair.

This is what it looked like before it became SUPER short:

And before I forgot - I AM IN LOVE WITH SAL!!!!!!!  he is the most amazing and patient hairmaster in the universe!!!!  I wont' reveal why I tested his patience, but let's just say that he should be an uncelibate nun. 

here's some photos of the perm process and our first date together - kinda love at first sight if you ask me!

On another notes, my friend Mia pointed out to me that lately, when I talk I move my left lower lip to the side in a weird way - as if it was detached from the rest of my lips - when she showed me what I looked like I was horrified because it looked like I was talking like I had a stroke!!! she said I only do it when I talk about academic stuff, like migration, citizenship, rights, border policy and etc. So now I thought i would try a test and take a picture of myself pursing my lips and I am HORRIFIED to see that left lower lip really does kinda sag on its own and doesn't purse with the rest of my lips - I look like I had a stroke? Academia is not only turning my teeth yellow, making my hair gray but now it also making me lose muscular control of my lips!!! Well you know that aphorism that it takes more muscles to frown than smile - well scientifically it's true - so maybe I have been frowning too much in grad school!!!! Do people with Phds frown more than non-Phd's - unequivocally YES and I can produce a study to prove it.

Leah says that I'm crazy and it's more a skeptical look, but I still think I look like a half-stroke/half-skeptical victim. 

jinge and I were having lunch at El Cuervo  -my FAVORITE FISH TACOS in the WORLD!!! anyways - he pointed out to me the posters on the wall, which I had never noticed until he said something.  All around us were posters of the  winner of the Miss Makita Drill Competition!  I thought it was the oddest thing to have these women holding the tools, which suggestively are stand ins for phallic imaginations.  When I looked this up, I found out that indeed this was a real competition! and not only was there a MISS Makita but this year there was a Senorita Makita!  Unbelievable!  And why these posters were hung up at El Cuervo and over this beautiful TABLEAU (thank you adriana), was so interesting! Does Makita tools send these posters around to Mexican restaurants every year?   And why is there also a senorita makita? what does that mean? how she different from the miss?  And interestingly in their bios they both love sushi? sushi ? Oh El Cuervo this is why I love you!  you are just like NYC - full of contradictions and surprises just like every block- I can walk into your restaurant every day and find something new.

MISS MAKITA 2006

MISS MAKITA 2007

MISS MAKITA 2008

THE TABLEAU -

OUR WONDERFUL LUNCH!!!

I just watched Epic Fu's great episode, which included a piece on The Face Transfomer.  Beyond thinking that the Face Transfomer is cool, I started thinking about the social meaning behind this exercise.

Here I am pretending to be an “Afro-Carriabean” - wtf?  I mean cool yes, sure,  I want to see what I look like as a manga character and am curious to see what I look like as a black person,  but there was something odd about trying on different races.  Literally. 

What does it mean for race relations and conceptions when we feel that we can freely try on different races?  Have we become so comfortable with race that we can play around with it like shopping for clothing? 

I am always really sensitive when people say that a person acts like a certain race or culture.  It’s almost akin to imaginatively being another race  - kinda like what we are doing with Face Transfomer.   And you know I actually hear this verbal exchange most often among my white and black or latino friends.   I’ve heard a black person say to a white person, “you know so much about black culture that you are black or at least must have been black in a past life.”  Now I find that on one end to be a compliment, that the white person is accepted as part of the black community, but on the other end I find it difficult to swallow as a form of compliment because most often it is white people who have the most latitude to be absorbed into another race or cultural group.   You don’t usually hear the reverse, that a white person will say to a black person, “wow you know so much about black culture that you are actually white!”  It's like you hear in the movies where they say to white people, you can always come into our part of town, but we will never be allowed to come into yours. 

For dominant groups, like Caucasians in the US,  race can be an after thought so it’s almost like a novelty to pretend for a moment that one is another race or ethnicity.  For people who look anything other than white in Western countries, there isn’t as much freedom to forget one’s skin color because they are reminded of it (usually negatively) in their daily interactions with institutions and people. 

In particular, for non-whites, being a certain race or ethnicity can be a complicated process of accepting ones skin color and coming to terms with the popular (mis)conceptions of one’s race or ethnic group.  A lot of times, this entails the imagination of being white before a full embracement of one’s race or heritage.   For a time period when I was a teenager raised in an all white upper-class  community, I wished I was white so badly so that I wouldn't  have to deal with the racist jaunts by my classmates.  And so here I am, trying on a "West-Indian" face.  Kinda surreal.  Now do I really want to imagine what it is like to look like an Indian female, let's say in the US? or in India? and from what class? what is my migration history? or was I born here?  My point is that being another race is more than just trying it on for a few seconds digitally, but some how we've reduced it down to just that and I wonder if this novelty is an indicator of that we're comfortable with race or that we're just dealing with race in a more post-modern removed and techno-mediated way. 

And you know it's  usually people who are more affluent who have the opportunity become the "other,"  to learn about another culture and to transplant themselves into another ethnic group’s cultural world.  So jokes made to white people like “wow you know so much about my culture, you must be Mexican” just make me uncomfortable because there’s a certain level of privilege that comes with learning about another “culture.”  The fact that I make time and spend money to learn Spanish because I find the language beautiful and useful for my academic interests in Mexican migration is a  privilege.  Now it is a privilege that I embrace and am not embarrassed of and make no apologies for, but at the same time I am quite aware of my social position to even be able to learn another language more out of interest and less out of need.

So back to Face Transformer - does this mean America is comfortable with race (and manga, chimps and euro painters j/k) if we can freely try on different races?  And what does this say about race when we can collapse large groups of people together into general categories?  In Face Transformers all the blacks, Caribbeans and Africans are grouped into the afro-caribbean category, and all Asians are collapsed into the East-Asian category and I think the West Indian group is not referring to people from the West Indies but Indians and Middle-Easterners.   This is an odd form of racial reductionism.  And where are the Latinos – where do they fit in this? And Inuits? 

I’ve always kept a tab on these Face Transformer-like sites  and I  think the fun in trying these online sites out is an expression of an underlying desire to temporarily imagine another physical body without fully committing to that body/face.  And the kinds of changes  rendered by these online sites point to a greater cultural obsession or let’s say anxiety with that rendering.  So for Face Transfomers we could say this is an obsession with race and euro paintings:)   Oh and with age also – you can chose to be a young adult, baby, teenager and old person.

One of the predecessors to Face Transformers was My Heritage and I wrote about the social meaning behind that too 2 years ago when it launched.  So instead of transforming into a race or chimp, like Face Transformer, you can transform yourself into a celebrity and see which one you most closely resemble.  So this points to an obsession with celebrities.

Well after my social diagnosis I think I will upload another picture on Face Transformer and see what I look like as a Male. Hmmm perhaps I have an underlying anxiety with switching genders?  Well did anyone have these thoughts when they uploaded a face on Face Transfomer? 

oh and one thing that I definitely learned is that I don't like good as a Caucasian! Good thing that I embrace my Chinese face!  

I'm off to India for several projects.  I'm first heading to Bangalore as part of a 14-person US delegation to participate in the 2008 China-India-US Workshop on Science, Technology and Innovation Policy. This is part of George Mason University’s Science and Trade Policy Program and the conference this year will be held at the Bangalore Institute of Science.  Well I am sitting on the Information Technology panel so I feel competent in that topic area. But I have 2 weeks to quickly learn about the other two topics, coal and pharamceuticals!

Then I'm working with California Institute of Technology on super-star researcher Shannon Spanhake's mobile water symptom reporting project. I am really excited about this project because Shannon is an amazing tech developer and my goal of going to grad school was to team up with socially minded tech developers from stage one - so that the tools they develop actually take into account existing practices in a holistic way.  Too many of times great technologies are developed with just one user in mind, while larger issues of gender relationships, political economy, policy and community level practices are totally ignored.  So in the end, these technologies only work for one user and create more social problems or they just stop working once the developers leave the test site.

So after the conference in Bangalore, shannon and sukumar will meet me in Bangalore. We will spend some time there meeting with NGO's and while they talk with them about all the complicated tech stuff, I will get to do what I love doing the most - PEOPLE WATCHING!  I will visit city slum and a urban area and just observe daily life.  I love that I get paid to do this.  Of course it is just slightly more complicated as there is a lot of research design that goes into this "watching" but I love to work on these ethnographic methodologies.  then we will travel to a rural area of Tamil Nadu and stay in the Tanjavur region.  And I get to observe everyday life in a rural area.  It will be interesting to see how gender and social relationships with water, policy and infrastructures shift from region to region.  What I will find in a slum will be totally diff from what I see in a rural area. 

If you are interested in water, I highly suggest that you read Vivienne Bennett's edited book on water policy in Latin America.  Her and the other editors locate water policy in gender relationships.  They start with the premise that women are integral to water in marginalized countries.  Women are central to water even if they are ackowledged as such in water policy.  Her book is called Opposing Currents: The politics of water and gender in Latin America. Vivienne is also a wonderful person, we had the opportunity to have lunch with other. as we shared our research with each other we also found out that we had a lot in common - which is ALWAYS a pleasure to find out when you meet other academics. 

I forgot to upload some of my favorite photos from my work in oaxaca with leah.  Before we went into the mountains, we stopped in oaxaca for 2 days and did some exploring.  From my set of oaxaca photos, here are some of my favorite ones. 

I really do love this city  - certain cities seem to wrap me up into their arms and I feel as if I can truly touch the the rhythm in the streets.  This intimacy crept into my skin the minute I stepped onto the van from the airport.  And it's not an idealizing kind of love with oaxaca -this kind of love with a city is one that considers all the bloodshed and triumphs,  a kind of honest love that believe that the collective energy of the people is more powerful than the elite systems that govern them. 

In  single step on a preserved cobbled street I wonder what history has unfolded on this one step? on this one rock? where did this rock come from?  How many hands did it pass through?  From this micro moment to the macro I wonder how do infrastructures come together in oaxaca to make daily life work?   and how do clouds come to be the umbrella that wraps Oaxaca up in fluffy beauty every single day?  I will never forget the cloud formations here - I think its geographical positioning in the unique mountain ranges turns oaxaca into this cloud making city.   where ever I walked outside, the clouds framed my view.  They were always there, guiding my eyes, saying let me be a part of your photo  - let me take you into the city.  Sometimes I swore that each person walked around with their own special cloud just dedicated to them - and when I saw large cloud formations it reflected lots of people in one place - lots of colliding personal cloud angels.  Isn't that a beautiful idea - if we each had our own little cloud guiding us through life.

I wish I had another few months here just to travel to other parts of the city and talk to more people.  All i can do is attempt to capture my curiosity and the rhythm I felt in my photos.   Enjoy!

I saw this at Ralph's in SD - I HATE when they do this! people should only pay for specialty condoms. Damn it having plain rubber condoms should be a SOCIAL RIGHT, not a market-base good. 

Raquel originally posted this article from Tim wise. thanks mama!

"Your whiteness is showing.

When I say your whiteness is showing this is what I mean: You claim that your opposition to Obama is an act of gender solidarity, in that women (and their male allies) need to stand up for women in the face of the sexist mistreatment of Clinton by the press. On this latter point--the one about the importance of standing up to the media for its often venal misogyny--you couldn't be more correct. As the father of two young girls who will have to contend with the poison of patriarchy all their lives, or at least until such time as that system of oppression is eradicated, I will be the first to join the boycott of, or demonstration on, whatever media outlet you choose to make that point. But on the first part of the above equation--the part where you insist voting against Obama is about gender solidarity--you are, for lack of a better way to put it, completely full of crap. And what's worse is that at some level I suspect you know it. Voting against Senator Obama is not about gender solidarity. It is an act of white racial bonding, and it is grotesque."