biologists say that we achieve our stature in three spurts: the first in infancy, the second between the ages of six and eight, the last in adolescence. any decent diet can send us sprouting at these ages, but take away any one of forty-five or fifty essential nutrients and the body stops growing. (“iodine deficiency alone can knock off ten centimetres and fifteen i.q. points,” one nutritionist told me.)



.......



if there is an answer to the riddle of american height, it probably lies in holland, where everyone has a theory about stature. when i spoke to hans van wieringen, the pediatrician, he credited his people’s growth to child care: the dutch have the world’s best prenatal and postpartum clinics, free for every citizen. others pointed to the landscape (flatlanders are naturally tall, they said, just as mountain people are naturally short), to the calvinist religion (protestants are taller than catholics because their families have fewer mouths to feed), or to the dutch love of milk (a study in bavaria found a direct correlation between height and the number of cows per capita). the dutch are taller than the italians, one man suggested, because they go to bed at a reasonable hour.

-the height gap-

how the west was won. ok everybody, please sit, i'm about to break it down. here we go with another broad generalization. buckle up, this is obvious and heard often but i feel the need to present it here as an epiphany. more dramatic that way. so, drop your jaws and unhinge your hands, let's rock.



there are two kinds of people in relationships... i know, this sounds like the set up for a bad joke, tell me if you've heard this one. laugh along anyway. there are two kinds of people in relationships... forget this, let me just launch into the specifics before gift wrapping for the obtuse. you've seen the ladder theory, you believe in the ladder theory, now welcome to my theory. let us dub it "the slide rules." catchy isn't it? yes it is.



now, the ladder theory states that for a guy, there is only one ladder for ranking the opposite sex. all female constellations are up for gazing (and much much more) consideration, it's just a matter of how dark it is and how desperate the situation. this is nothing new. the breakthrough of the ladder theory was it's ability to divine that girls themselves had TWO ladders. one for platonic guy friends, one for attractive guy friends they might consider something down and dirty with. between the two ladders there was rarely any inter-mixing or jumping. you were either on the friend ladder or the attractive ladder. even if you were really high on the friend ladder, you were not going to be shifted onto the bottom rung of the attractive ladder. it just doesn't work that way, ugly's gotta count for something. girls are superficial. sorry bub.



the slide rules work in a similar two pronged way. i know, i ape my best shit, but so does evolution, so screw you. anyway, to continue. some people in a relationship have one scale for measuring all of their friends, including but not limited to (assuming you are a guy): guy friends, girl friends, girl-friends. note the hyphen, i would not normally use it but i want to clearly define the difference between girl friend (platonic) and girl-friend (romantic). man, i feel like a lawyer, having to spell out everything. anyway, these one slide rule people use the same scale to measure their friends and girl-friends. let's call them the "gunters" (check glossary below for definition and explanation of name). this is the objective point of view pertaining to relationships. a girl-friend is special and higher up on the scale but still clearly on the one slide rule. what you expect out of your hyphen-friend is similar to what you might expect out of a normal friend, if only intensified.



now, the the other group of people, the "oughtreds," have two different scales from which to judge their friends and girlboyfriends. hyphen-friends are subjected to a whole set of different standards, which may or may not overlap with the platonic friend standards. the one leading indicator that proves you have a two slide rule ideal? when you catch yourself saying "but you're my boygirlfriend!" this is in response to them asking "nobody else does this for you, you don't get mad at them, why should you get upset at me if i don't do it?" relativity plays a prominent role in the life of a two slide ruler. for example, to qualify as a great friend one must satisfy the expectations on the platonic scale, but those same great platonic traits might not qualify you as a great boyfriend according to the hyphen scale. in fact, sometimes the two scales of qualifications are in direct opposition with each other and engaged in civil war. examples abound.



i think most people are oughtreds, the two slider rule folk. in fact, i don't even know another gunter besides me. although i've heard urban legends of such people. i've also heard that they're beautiful and exclusively attracted to skinny ass asian guys who type and fax for a living. but that could just be a rumor. who knows. so, to wrap it all up, there are two kinds of people in the world, the gunters and the oughtreds. get it got it good. now which one are you?





some slide rules terms

gunters versus oughtreds - on slide rules. in 1614, john napier discovered the logarithm which made it possible to perform multiplications and divisions by addition and subtraction. this was a great time saver but there was still quite a lot of work required. edmund gunter soon reduced the effort by drawing a number line in which the positions of numbers were proportional to their logs. william oughtred simplified things further by taking two gunter's lines and sliding them relative to each other thus eliminating the dividers.



i am aware of the inconsistency involved in my naming procedure since it seems like the oughtreds should be the gunters and vice versa. this is due to the simplification process of the oughtreds, which might mean that they are the one scale people, but i have decided that it makes more sense for the one scale people to be the gunters since gunter himself drew only one number line, which equates to one scale. thanks for trying to point out the incosistencies in my life. i appreciate the effort but rest assured that i'm so far ahead of you that i'm practically behind you, right buddy?



hyphen-friends - friends to whom you are romantically linked, girl-friend, boy-friend.



platonic scale and hyphen scale - the different scales used by oughtreds in order to differentiate what is expected out of platonic friends and hyphen-friends.



calculators - people who are too advanced for this slide rule stuff, they just want to plug in numbers and roll with whatever answer pops out, never wondering how the mechanics of relationship ideals work. look down on these people, who are not caught up in the rules of the game, but just play for the sheer joy of it. shun them, shun them.



no - still means no.

"it's mercy, compassion, and forgiveness i lack, not rationality." that's what uma says to vivica at the beginning of kill bill. lovely stuff. the more i look at those three things the more i'm appalled at why i was initially impressed with this statement. do i want to lack mercy, compassion and forgiveness? i mean, maybe missing one would still make me an okay person, but all three? i would be a killing monster. that would be cool, heh heh heh heh. beavis and butthead were retards, seriously, why were/are they funny? i must blog at some later point about things that are supposed to be funny but i don't find funny at all (eg. jim carrey, austin powers, ben stiller, potty humor). the list is long and extensive. anyway.



i think maybe i was attracted to the fact that uma's character, the bride, wasn't lacking rationality, i was blinded by the light of rationale while ignoring the equally important human traits of mercy, compassion, and forgiveness. if i had to rank the four traits in order of importance and personal desirability, i would go (1) rationality (2) compassion (3) mercy (4) forgiveness. not that you cared.



hey look, it's a revolutionary human transporter, it's a segue way! incredible.



so assuming we were thinking with our heads and not our hearts (the heart can never think, it's biologically impossible, keep that in mind), a conversation from a few weeks back returns to me. the content of this conversation? "who would you cut from among your circle of friends." if life were survivor/battleofthesexes/thebachelor/theapprentice/americanidol/etc, who would you cut? stop the "i love all my friends" thing. you must choose one friend to jettison. say you have a circle of seven "close" friends, you must get rid of one, which will it be? maybe you guys are only friends for superficial reasons, friends because you are part of the group, maybe she's not a musketeer. would you rather be a fiendster as opposed to a friendster? does the term superfluous describe his/her job function in your life? on this day of fools, do you want to cut the tool or maybe the moltisanti? think about it. and then tell me. off the record, on the qt & very hush hush.



elimi-friend is a fun game isn't it? try it with every different circles of friends, ever decreasing circles of friends, try it with every possible combination of friends. this game is also more commonly known as the "who would i invite to my wedding if i had fifty guests, twenty guests, five guests, two guests." fun for hours, i guarantee it.



i got april fool fucked by the way. and it isn't as fun as it might sound. no details can be disclosed but man, are my sins just coming back a little bit too early or what? eric aquino life rule number two: karma always comes back. messing with people is not funny. well, it is, sometimes. only if you get the chance to pay it forward and go fuck with somebody else. kevin spacey and haley joel were really onto something there.

this morning i woke up

feelin brand new and i, i jumped up

feelin my highs and my lows

in my soul, and my goals

just to stop smoking and stop drinkin

but i been thinkin i got my reasons

just to get by, just to get by

-talib kweli, get by-

what's a nubian? in a radio interview, paul hornung -- 60s white star from notre dame and the green bay packers -- had this to say. "we can't stay as strict as we are as far as the academic structure is concerned because we've got to get the black athlete. we must get the black athlete if we're going to compete. we open up with michigan, then go to michigan state and purdue - those are the first three games, you know, and you can't play a schedule like this unless you have the black athlete today. you just can't do it."



wow.



quite a bold thing to say. quite a wrong thing to say. he's basically telling us that black athletes are less academically proficient but more athletically capable. i heard him on the mighty 690 this morning and he didn't back off his statements or retract them due to misinterpretation either. he meant what he said. notre dame needs to get more black athletes into its program to win and one of the ways to do that was to lower academic standards.



now, the implications behind what he says is all terribly terribly wrong and totally un-PC. but there is something to what hornung is saying. nobody else says it publicly because any time people even hint at what hornung said, they get lambasted first off, for the record, there are probably a million reasons notre dame football doesn't win. and it isn't because they don't have enough black athletes. the simplest reason for notre dame being unsuccessful is because they suck. period. the golden dome no longer holds as much appeal to the high school athlete of today. it's still a prestige school but no longer a premiere football institution. so they don't get enough blue chip recruits of any color, brown, black, white, yellow, purple, green.



but look at the major sports today. the nba and the nfl are predominantly black. serena and venus are black. tiger is black (at least according to the media). barry bonds is black. aren't these guys dominating american sports? isn't it pointedly obvious to anybody who's played basketball at the local courts that black is better? it may have nothing to do with genetics or anything scientific but i'm willing to say that in a random lottery of guys at the courts, i would put my money on the team of five black guys winning over the five asian guys. same height, same weight, same physical characteristics. but my money would be on the black guys because they are probably more skilled and/or more athletic. just as a general assumption. many factors could go into why but i'm not gonna go into all of those, although they are all very valid. i would also, in the same sort of scenario, take the team of eleven korean guys over eleven chinese guys in a tackle football game. but that may be a more size related bias. although in my opinion, koreans, for some infuriating reason, tend to be more generally athletic. wow, how un-PC am i being right now? screw PC.



anyway the point being, there wasn't a "black court, white court, asian court" at the michigan gym for no reason. it was based on skill level of course, you could go play on the black court if you were asian and good enough but for the most part the middle court was the "black court." i mean, i will admit, even with my superior basketball talent (is there a tongue in cheek symbol on this keyboard?), when i step on the court against a black guy, i feel like i'll probably be slower and jump much less higher without even having seen him play. then again, i'm slow and can barely jump so this isn't much of a comparison. but what i'm talking about here is the general fear and perception of "whoa, they're black, can we hang with them?" hey, it's not just athletically, it's the same with dancing. the societal and colloquial assumption is that if you are black, you probably have rhythm. and dancing is most assuredly not genetic. although i wish it were so that i could explain my lack of ability in it.



i must say that of course there are many exceptions to this athletic rule. yao ming is an excellent asian basketball player. also only valued because he happens to be a seven six giant. european white athletes are beginning to dominant in the nba by way of superior athletic prowess. in fact, many white pro athletes are just as athletic, if not more than, their black teammates. but it's more rare and when a white guy can dunk like vince or dribble like skip we say "you must be black." not because we're serious but because it's the perception. that's what it all is, perception. like an oasis in the desert. a mirage.



so my point is, to bring it all back, is that i can see what hornung is saying. he's being possibly supremely bigoted in equating lower academic standards with blacks but in a way, he's speaking about what he perceives. he sees black athletes dominanting, he says "we need black athletes." he sees black college applicants scoring lower on their admissions tests (due to possible reasons too complex to get into here) and says "we need to lower our standards." what he says ain't right but the perceptions themselves aren't wrong either. it's what we do with those perceptions, such as using them to deny opportunity or equality, that matter.



thanks for listening. see you on the courts. don't dunk on me. i'm frail and break easily. plus, girls might be watching.

passing me by. in a ucsd class that i took, we read a book called quicksand. the protagonist, helga crane, struggles with her racial identity and moves back and forth from the "black" world to the "white" world and never quite fits in. the term "passing" was introduced to me in this book and in this class. helga was racially mixed (white/black) and could pass for white due to the lightness of her skin. during this class we read many books that had passing as a central theme and many examples were shown us of writers, artists, people, who used their lighter hue to gain passage into the white world. quicksand, set in the 1920s and a semi-autobiographical version of nella larsen's experiences, was a revelation to me.



in the process of re-reading la confidential, i noticed that a periphery character was mentioned as "passing" and it made me think about the whole passing thing again. what an america we live in. what a world we live in. are the people who choose to pass not proud of their heritage? are they using their lighter hue to bypass the very real barriers that confront them due to their racial and/or ethnic makeup? i know of a girl who likes to pass for korean because of a certain status (arguably) that it provides. even say, being atheist and fronting like a christian at church can be similar to passing. i heard recently of a white man who, in order to appease his soon-to-be bride's asian parents, chose to surgically slant and diminish his eyes for that so in vogue "chinky" look. it didn't work but the parents were impressed by his dedication and so permitted them to marry. what the hell.



i read in da capo best music writing 2002 about a musican (i regret that his exact name escapes me right now) who put on a turban and pushed his "mystic" indian background in order to build a career. he was quite successful too; even got his own tv variety show. it turns out that this musician was not indian at all but black. he never told anybody, including his wife and children. this was "success." but it's hard to place blame on somebody using what they can to advance themselves in the world.



passing even works in reverse. in chasing amy, hooper, a comic book author, has to role-play a militant black man in order to move units. in reality, he is a black gay man who harbors no comparable militant views. when caught by an autograph seeking black kid as he's seen hanging out with ben affleck, hooper lies quickly and exonerates himself by saying "see that (white) man over there? he the devil! never take your eye off the man." is hooper trying to pass as militant black? i'd say so.



don't we all pass though? i attempt to pass as a responsible white collar worker each and every day i sit here at my desk. i take off my earrings, jewelry and cover up my tattoos in order to not offend the presumably strict office culture code. one might even say that the use of language is a common method of passing. i speak differently at work -- the hilarious "work voice" -- than i do at home. i use complete sentences and try to cut out the "dudes" and "cools" in order to come off as "professional." somebody might try to use certain words or ways of speaking to be included in a cultural niche. pass as "hip hop" or "californian" for example. sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, depends on how good and natural you are at it i suppose.



but back to passing as a way of racial integration. another book from that ucsd class had a light skinned black man so effective at passing that he becomes the leader of a white supremacist group. now that's a huge assist. he worries that he will be exposed when he has children because what if his white wife gives birth to an obvious mulatto? how "tragic." i think in some ways, we in america (and maybe other places) are raised to listen to the message that "white is right." i mean, even michael jackson supports it. the ethnic models and celebrities who make it are generally lighter skinned or have "white" features. some of us are told to marry white because kids with paler skin wiill lead a better life. this ain't just scrimp and bullshit, people i've talked to actually hear this from their parents. entire racial groups sometimes culturally value lighter skin as more beautiful, desirable, successful or of a higher social standing. it's not only true, but obvious, the push for white versus dark.



i'm trying to gain some insight into the mindset that comes with the pressures of wanting to pass. what if by lying about your racial background you had access to a better neighborhood and better schools (a huge generalization, so excuse me). what if by marking "caucasian" on your census form you could get more tax deductions (fictional as far as i know, so excuse me). what if by fitting in you avoided being booted out, or even worse, beat up? would you pass? would you collect two hundred dollars?

adventures in newlywedding. reporting in from the frontlines of yet another wedding. this makes, i think, eight in the span of one calender year. i'm too young to be going to so many weddings. but that's what everybody says. this wedding was for another family friend, the usual assortment of chinese aunts and uncles attended, with a few young kids, namely us and the bridal party. i'm not sure why anyone would want to have their wedding guests to be culled from the list of parental friends but it's a social pecking order thing i guess. i would want my wedding to be filled with friends and relatives, not necessarily friends of my mom. but that's how these things work.



if you've been to any family friend adult gatherings i'm sure you've heard the "wow, you're so big now!" the girls get the "how pretty you've become" line. slightly older yet still young adult people you knew from way back when comment on how "you used to be this tall." imagine in your mind the placement of hands right around the three foot mark. it's glorious.



even though you've known all these uncles and aunties for so long, you don't really recall their last names or even their first names, since you are trained to just say "aiyi, hsuhsu" everytime you see them. when you are responsible for checking them in -- as we were -- you have to ask them for their last names and then you are shocked to discover that they have english names like tom and patty and bob.



the funnest part of these weddings is watching the adults dance, since any dance move done by anyone over the age of fifty is immediately "cute." they may be the most terrible dancers in the world but once a fifty year old shakes their booty everyone laughs and says "haha, so funny!" and then at our family friends' weddings there is always this one couple who likes to show everybody up by busting out their classically trained ballroom moves. i can see the other couples wishing that they could dance like that. at this particular wedding the couple started dancing before the food was served and even before the newlyweds hit the dance floor. i thought that was kind of wrong.



i think snide comments at weddings should be outlawed since it's such a joyous occassion but sometimes people's outfits just need to be commented upon. how about the girl wearing the short short salsa dress with her cleavage line down to her ribcage? that was a nice wedding outfit. the bride changed into a green queen amidala-like dress at one point. fashion forward i must say, if a bit strange. the groom was radiant in his white tux, and his new bofo super fob hairdo. something about white on white just screams "superstar." i would never want to wear a screaming outfit at my wedding though. i mean, isn't it enough to be screaming inside as you say "i do?"



and can we talk about the boringness that is ten random people sitting at a table? with the foreknowledge that you'll likely never ever see these people again? superficial talk abounds. food gets stuffed into mouth rather quickly. on top of this, i was seated between a guy and a girl who were trying to flirt with each other. so pretty much i was flirted across over and through. which is not an experience i'm unaccustomed to, i do go clubbing with hong and babbs after all, but it's still a bit uncomfortable. the food was excellent though, which is always cause for eternal celebration.



something about weddings strike me as so unglamorous. weddings are usually one of those events that are much prettier in pictures. much like celebrities. once you are actually at the wedding, it's hard to ignore the wind, the chill, the dead times, the groom running around trying to make everything go according to plan (where was j-lo when you needed her?). it just seems like another day in the life of. maybe this is because i'm not the one getting married but weddings tend to come off as more of a nice event as opposed to an EVENT. i guess the wedding scenes in movies have corrupted me. i expect blazing trumpets, throngs of admirers, a few elephants and lots of confetti. but our confetti was blown away by the wind and never really made it onto the happy couple. sad but true. and that rush into the waiting limo? very choreographed and staged. not spontaneous at all.



i equate going to a wedding like being on the set of a movie. it takes away from the whole glamour of the entire experience. the movie may turn out beautiful and the pictures from a wedding may be unforgettable but the experience itself is usually somewhat underwhelming.



i still await my first wedding where everybody gets trashed and people are bouncing off the walls in craziness. actually, the agustin wedding was kind of like that but i knew it was going to be spectacular fun since eric and anna are fun people. so does this mean that boring newlyweds correspond directly to boring weddings? i hope not. otherwise i may have alot more boring weddings in my future.



just kidding. more champagne please...



oh one more thing, i might have mentioned this before. the clinking on glasses trying to make them kiss thing? some traditions need to die. seriously.