Caroline Reads...

And I don’t mind. I mean, they wake up and five in the morning and turn on the generator in the garage to make sure it still works, but it’s hell of a lot cheaper to live at home.

Rent is $500 a month. If I wanted to pay rent for that cheap, I’d have to live a good hour away from Washington, D.C., the commute twice or even three times as long during traffic hour. I have a fear that if I drive that far into the city, I’ll die. In traffic. I read an article from The Week about millenials living at home past 20, and how spoiled and rotten they are for staying. Everything done for them, meals cooked, laundry cleaned, room vaccumed. The millenials I know are working eight and a half hours a day, eating their lunch at their desks, and getting carpal tunnel.

What the article doesn’t bother to think about is context. Right now, there are too many college graduates for the number of jobs in cities. Companies lowball us hard, assuming we’ll work for $35,000 a year before taxes. Anyone who has a job knows that $35k is nothing if you live near a city. And as a neophyte in the art of negotiation, how much can you push this bar before they move on to someone else? You’ll need six to ten roommates and eat Top Ramen for breakfast, lunch and dinner to survive. If you don’t wanna live like that, you might as well stay home.

I’m saving up for a place of my own. My dream is a house in Bethesda, Maryland, but I’ll have to keep dreaming. Shit’s expensive, and unless I become a CEO overnight or start some shady dealings, it’s not in the cards. I know if I buy a decent place closer to D.C., the cost of my mortgage and condo fees will force me to get a roommate. Most of the people I know who still live with their folks say the same thing, “I’m saving up for a house.” I wonder when we’ll stop saying it and start attending open houses.

My parents assume I’ll be here until I get married. They ask me to read ads from Craigslist, to send emails to their lawyers. The past 20 years became so much easier with English-speaking children, but their knowledge of English has rapidly deteriorated. They’ve become lazy. Could you read this letter for me? I can’t read it, Mom regularly says. The TV’s broken, it’s not working. The computer is acting weird. I don’t know how to fix it.

What I mean isn’t male-and-female relationships, but the relationships between women. Which I am absolutely lost on. Also, this contains a shit ton of spoilers, but if you’re like me and read Wikipedia synopses before watching films, go ahead.

1Q84 has two main characters, Tengo and Aomame, who are somehow inextricably combined and dragged into a parallel universe with two moons. As Aomame descends into this universe, she, for some reason, recalls the time she and her best friend from high school had a sexual experience. With each other.

Having an intimate experience with someone you trust, I get that. But in the context of the novel, I don’t get it. Here’s this great image of Aomame running down a flight of stairs, Janacek’s Sinfonietta blaring in her ears, and Haruki Murakami just decides now would be the perfect time to talk about sex. Of course, Aomame acknowledges that this is a weird time to remember that one time she had a sexual experience with her best friend and brushes it off.

Until later, when she almost has another sexual experience with another friend. This time, this friend is a lady cop Aomame meets while trying to pick up a guy for casual sex. They become somewhat close, and the friend makes a move to try and feel Aomame up. Aomame, weirded out, tells her no.

This friend is later murdered in a love motel, handcuffed naked to the bed. Not the fuzzy kind from the sex shop, but the friend’s real, police-issue cuffs. And do you know what one of Aomame’s first thoughts are?

Something along the lines of: if only I had let her touch me that night, then maybe this wouldn’t have happened.

Uhm, excuse me?

I would like to point out that Sputnik Sweetheart also has an element of this, when the manic pixie dream girl, Sumire, has her first sexual encounter with Miu, her older boss. Also a lady. Miu later tells our narrator, K, that she only allowed Sumire, who clearly had strong feelings for her, to touch and kiss her body, because Sumire was her friend.

In Norweigan Wood, Naoko’s roomie at the asylum, Reiko, had a sexual encounter with her 13-year-old piano student, in which Reiko is horrified and aroused at the same time.

Sound familiar?

The way in which these encounters are written make them seem prevalent in female friendships. Which they’re not. It feels like the literary equivalent of guys thinking all-girl sleepovers are just pillow fight montages with a dash of lesbian sex. None of these scenes are particularly written with love, but definitely with care, the size of the women’s breasts, the curl and thickness of their pubic hair. Had it been written in a way that I could understand why this could be important to these female relationships, I would given them a pass. But this? Might as well watch some softcore porn.

But the fact that the end of 1Q84, where Aomame pleads for help from her two dead best friends, and then recalls what a shame it is that the world lost two sets of really great tits. Some really nice, full cleavage. Apparently that was the only characteristic that Aomame could remember about her friends, not what their friendships meant to her, or how they taught her how to care for other people. Nope, just the breasts.

Had Murakami had more scenes that developed the relationships with these characters, instead of telling the audience a lot of unnecessary background, I think the sexual experiences could have worked.

Plenty of Korean women use Shiseido, don’t get me wrong. In some Korean makeup stores, the draw is the Shiseido ad, scotch-taped to the window, labeled with those wispy S’s, drawn like smoke. A lot of Korean women used Shiseido, because Korea hadn’t been able to create its stable government, let alone a skincare brand a girl could trust. And so women begrudgingly bought the skincare and makeup of their enemies, the same group of people who raped their country linguistically, physically, mentally, instead of purchasing the crude, expensive equivalents made by their own people.

Sephora, if you knew the history between Korea and Japan, you wouldn’t have lumped us with them. Even a simple search on Wikipedia leads you to some pretty horrific shit. Yeah, we never discussed this in history class, not even when I took AP World History. But with the internet, you have no excuse. The Japanese exploited Korea for years, blanketing the slavery and prostitution as the culturing of savage people. Sound familiar? If not, I suggest you read “The White Man’s Burden”.

So now you probably wonder why Korean women used Shiseido in the first place, if it left such a bitter taste their mouths. Let me tell you, American makeup lacks range, and it’ll make your girl so orange it would rival Donald Trump’s spray tan. It would make me as pink as Porky Pig. It would make me whiter than I already am, paler than Casper the Friendly Goddamn Ghost. You would look at my face with your mouth half open, eyebrows knitted together, because you know something’s off, but you’re not quite sure. However, with Shiseido, it understands the tonality of East Asian skin.

It is safe.

But now, with the proliferation of Korean beauty products, anyone can buy good Korean skincare, and for pretty cheap. For the longest time, my mom would avoid the skincare section at the international market. “It’s expensive, and it’s bad,” she would tell me. Now she’s picking up Laneige from Target. Why? Because it’s so much cheaper than it used to be, and it’s Korean, not Japanese.

Ultimately, to add Shiseido under the umbrella of Korean Skin Care is to accept Shiseido as Korean. It is to assume that Japan and Korea are one of the same, Part of Asia. Sephora, this shit is ignorant and unacceptable. There are octogenarians still protesting in Japan for being forced into sexual slavery. Japan still believed it did that tiny peninsula a favor; it will never apologize.

The Modern Lois Lane is a hardened reporter, the kind who has slept in her car for weeks to get a story. She jams her foot in the door to continue asking questions and does not understand the word no. Modern Lois is the kind of woman who stares down a man and says “can I help you?”, voice like a switchblade. She is the woman who never cries, or at least doesn’t in public. And her male counterparts, they look at her and mutter “bitch” under their breaths.

Lois is the one who gets orientation pushed on her. She writes the best, with strength and composure, and her colleagues use this against her. “You’ll bring out the best in the newbies,” they say. One of them is Clark Kent, more optimistic than Mary Fucking Poppins, doe-eyed and sweet and country as all hell. He opens doors for her and genuinely asks for feedback on his work, small, fragile articles that need to be cultivated.

Lois is honest, brutal, even, and Clark accepts her words gratefully. Just like you and me, Lois feels surprised when Clark’s pieces become beautiful works out of her criticism, still naive, but full of potential. He is endearing and thoughtful and genuine. Well, would you look at that? she thinks.

But there are some things that even Lois can’t shake. A little girl, murdered and raped and abandoned on the side of the road, Lois flips the photos over and buries her face in her hands. The girl was so young, not even three, her hands not even the size of Lois’s palm. Lois feels it well up inside her, disgust, fear, sadness. This isn’t new, she thinks. This isn’t me. I’ve covered these stories before.

Clark pulls up a chair and holds her hand. He smiles, and Lois shakes her head. “You’re the last thing I need,” she says.

“We’ll find him,” Clark declares. “We’ll find the bastard.”

He blushes.

Lois laughs, because Clark Kent doesn’t say “bastard”. She looks at his hopeful blue eyes behind those dorky hipster glasses. She realizes it’s not the kind of hope she sees in other men, not that glaring sexual desire. It’s respect, for her writing, for her.

Kavalier and Clay is Michael Chabon’s magnum opus, a story about a Jew who escapes the Third Reich in Prague and his gay Brooklyn cousin creating a best-selling comic book series called The Escapist, and many others. Chabon intertwines the lives of two young men, Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, who are foils for each other--one who wears his heart on his sleeve, who gets in fist fights with Germans on purpose, while the other is incredibly careful with his emotions, hiding them close to his chest--through their careers as comic book men and as young men growing up in the late 30s.

For those of you who don’t know what We3 is, it’s a graphic novel written by Grant Morrison, which is also deemed a New York Times Best-Selling Classic. Essentially, three house pets are stolen from their homes and forced to become cyborg soldiers that are ordered to kill the government’s most wanted. But now, their technology is outdated, and they’re about to be put down and replaced by bigger, meaner animals that are completely controlled by remotes, instead of having (at least) some autonomy.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s a pretty good read, if you’re into the dark and gritty, as well as lost your hope for humanity. However, there are some (if not many) plot holes, or questions, I want answered.

Why Do Tinker, Bandit, and Pirate Trust Roseanne?

It doesn’t seem right that Tinker, Bandit, and Pirate would trust the woman who fused them into robotic suits. What exactly makes Roseanne so special? We can see that she has compassion for them--she even ends up sacrificing her life for them, but why don’t we get an instance in time that solidifies their trust?

Why Does Roseanne Care?

i get it. She’s a woman who likes animals. She has a pet parrot named Charlie, who’s kind of a douche, but ultimately, why does she care for Tinker, Bandit, and Pirate? They’re her creations, but she could have just seen them as her products. However, she doesn’t; she sees them as pets, even though they’ve been created to kill people. What makes her view them as gentle? Shouldn’t she have distance between her creations and herself, just like all scientists? Is it because she’s a woman? (And it better not be, because that’s such lazy writing!)

Why Does Tinker Hate People?

Tinker, Bandit, and Pirate have a reason to hate humanity--I mean, look at them. They’ve been made into killing machines. But it’s only Tinker that absolutely hates humans, whereas Bandit is always looking for approval from them. Did something happen to Tinker for it to feel that sort of hatred, or is it simply because Tinker is a cat (which is also lazy writing; all domesticated cats want affection at some point, don’t they?)? Does Bandit only look for approval because it’s a dog (even though there are plenty of dogs that absolutely hate people?)?

How Are They Taught to Work Together?

Tinker, Bandit, and Pirate have “learned” to work together as a team, but how? Were they tortured into doing so? Why do they trust each other? It doesn’t seem natural for these three different animals, a dog, a cat, and a rabbit, to pair up and band together.

How the Hell Does that Hobo Know Anything about Bio-Engineering?

white girl who has taught me everything I know at my job. She grew up in Woodbridge, Virginia with her mother and her cheating father, and has not spoken to him since her parents’ separation. She is rough around the edges but sweet, a smoker who quit for two whole days before she was back to smoking Newports. Kara also happens to have a tramp stamp with her former boyfriend’s name written in cursive font, a velvet English crown studded with jewels above it. I discovered the pictures in the computer when I accidentally clicked “burn” on some documents, only to be slapped in the face with dozens of tramp stamp photos, with three videos of her getting the tattoo. I took out the disk and read the label: Me and Boo-Face.

“Pierre Jean-Baptiste” it reads. A forty-something year old man that she dated on and off. “It’s a long story,” she tells me. “I met him when I was a manager at Massage Envy.” A brief phone call with him, and she will be reduced to tears after she attempts to steel herself, to prove to him that she is tough and hard and doesn’t take shit, the sassy “what are you trying to say?”, but minutes after Pierre says I don’t want you in my life, I hear the tears in her voice and the trembling “but why? I...I don’t understand.”

Her new boyfriend is in his mid to late thirties, and she is mothering him, calling the court to say he can’t show up, starting a business with him, and laying down her credit for him. Unlike her, I already know that she will again be reduced to tears in months from the same conversation, and he will leave her just like her father and just like Pierre, and she will still ask the same question.