FINAL POST!

I was looking through my roomates fashion magazine and i noticed that damnn there aren't really any asian women in it. What is up with that? Now that makes me a little pissed that asian women aren't really represented because i deal with that a lot in my line of career. It's been a known fact asian women aren't well represented in the media and no lucy liu does not represent 100 million asians worldwide. I looked through some other magazines and asian women are really shown as delicate china dolls or fierce "dragon ladies" as discussed in "Images of Asian/American Women in Multicultural Advertising" and "Race and Beauty: a Comparison of Asian and Western Models in Women's Magazine Advertisements". Caucasians really like depicting us at the two opposite ends of the spectrum. We're either seen as really submissive or as dominatrixes which is ridiculous because most asian women in america are nothing like that.
SO i think i have not done a complete 180 in my life in consumer practices just because I'm really broke so I haven't been able to fully see if i can hang when it comes to shopping with a conscience, but i WILL say that what I have been doing lately has been wayyyyy more globally friendly and I'm pretty happy with myself. Its definitely a far cry from when I just really appreciate the prices of things and just splurge because I can and my mom would appreciate me saving money. Now i know that me saving something comes at the price of costing someone else their rights and the eradication of shady factories in other countries. Its really easy to dismiss someone else's suffering when its not in front of your face although you've always known about the conditions. I guess this blogging in itself is realllllly green. This was a pretty good way to spread the message and a good reminder of what it is thats really important and not just brand names and appearance.

chinatowwwwwn

My friend just came back from Korea and she brought with her a friend that has never really been to California so i decided to take him to San Francisco to get a taste of one of the best parts of this state. Now of course after sightseeing and window shopping at the block where Abercrombie, Gucci, and all the other high end designer stores reside, i HAD to show him chinatown. I've grown up visiting chinatown every year and its always been my favorite place to go in SF because everything is dirt cheap and the food is bomb! This time however I decided that instead of going to buy things because i'm really broke i decided to just observe the items being sold since I'm blogging anyway. All the items insanely cheap probably because they utilize labor from china. Everything is mass produced and dealt out to many more places than just chinatown. Now that i think about it, it kind of means that all these years that i've asked my mom to buy me stuff from chinatown that some child half the world away was losing their childhood because of my consumption like we read in "Transnational Commodity Flows and the Global Phenomenon of the brand". I don't really know they're suffering because of my actions and i'm glad that i don't just think "oooo Cheap!" anymore. Now I am a little more considerate of my choices in products and that's definitely good because as child growing up and even now my goal eventually is to be humans right activist (and an animal activist as well). I'm also very fond of buying those asian themed purses from chinatown because no one really carries them so brands don't really matter. I just get them for really cheap and they look cute because like in the article It's "Hip to be Asian", asian themed items are starting to really catch on and i love it because i'm proud of my heritage and its great that people think its cool now. BTW i didn't buy it because as before stated i'm broke and a little more conscious of my decisions.

thriftin

So I was looking at my closet and I realized that I don’t really purchase expensive brand name clothing anyway. I always thought I overspent money on superficial things on clothes. I mean I definitely do sometimes but I’m not a compulsive shopper or anything. I probably go shopping once every 3 months. I spend most of my money on food if anything. I’m not a person to do a complete 180 turnaround or anything and find that small steps are the best for me if I am to actually change myself. So I figured that it wouldn’t actually be too hard to just switch from shopping at stores like Abercrombie and H&M (albeit this store was a hard one to give up) to getting things I needed from a thrift store. I have a costume party coming up for a fraternity that I’m really fond of and I needed accessories so I stopped by the local thrift store in davis to get them hoping that I might at least find something because I’ve never really had good experiences with thrift stores. I tried to find a tie-dyed shirt and some 70’s themed gym shorts but only successfully found blue gym shorts that were in surprisingly good condition. That boosted my morale as I was getting a little unnerved not being able to find the shirt. I found a lot of other things in the thrift store that actually caught my eye and thought I actually might just want to purchase in the near future when I actually have money. I think that we put too much effort into getting brand new things from department stores and not really thinking that we could spend a lot less just looking at someone else’s junk and making it our treasure for wayyyyyy cheaper. I mean some things weren’t exactly brand spankin’ new or anything but there are a lot of things that people wouldn’t notice were second hand. I mean does it matter anyway? My closet tells me that I keep a lot of things that I should have thrown away already anyway. So I spent 3 bucks on the shorts and I had the tye-dyed shirt left to find. I didn’t want to make one because that would require me to buy a shirt and obviously that doesn’t work for this experiment. I called up a few friends and found nothing. Luckily my best friend’s boyfriend had a party recently for another fraternity that held a tye-dyed themed party so I had my pick from many shirts that they tye-dyed themselves. I guess you could say that my attempt to be green wasn’t amazing but it was my small step towards helping out third world country exploits to be put to an end. So I figure if I do this, maybe over the course of a year I’ll probably save a lot of money and be one more customer that discourages big corporations from taking advantage of those working in factories that have horrible working conditions like in China. By the way I recycled too this weekend. I NEVER recycle.

blood diamond

So i haven't really had time to go buy anything lately because I've been pretty busy with school and OTHER things i can't mention because they're private. I've had a really down and out week on top of getting yelled at by my mother who says I don't pick up my phone but really i just don't have service and she doesn't leave voicemails so i don't know. But usually she calls me to yell at me anyway so i'm glad i don't have service sometimes. Anyway since I'm doing this project and I didn't have the time, energy, or money (btw my credit card got stolen recently and there were many charges incurred that weren't mine)(*sigh) to go out and figure out what I was going to write, I decided to talk to my mom about a movie we watched awhile ago together. The conversation with my Mom only dampened my day on top of the fact that we have the research paper due tomorrow. I asked her how she felt about the movie Blood Diamond starring Leonardo dicaprio. Now if you've seen it you know that the movie is pretty much a depiction of the atrocities performed upon the locals in Sierra Leone in the 1990's for that very shiny rock on your hand. We can go to De Beers and ask for rock that costs thousands of dollars to grace our hand just so we can feel better about ourselves but now knowing how it actually got to jewelry stores as the end product. This may sound ignorant to you but before i watched that movie I had no idea that this was the process involved in getting that ridiculous status symbol. In the movie a south african by the name of Solomon Vandy searches for his family that he is separated from when he is kidnapped by rebels who force him to pan for diamonds. The synopsis is a bit long so you can look it up online or really take time to watch the movie because its really good. So anyway my mother tells me that she thinks that movie is really tragic. Now the great part is that my mother LOVES and i mean LOOOOOVES diamonds so you can imagine how she responded when I asked her if she would still buy diamonds from questionable sources that don't state they don't purchase conflict diamonds(diamonds that come from places like sierra leone). She of course told me I was being silly and that she would definitely still want diamonds no matter how they were acquired. I think my mother is getting remarried soon so i'm pretty sure she's getting an engagement ring from her douchie fiance (pardon my language) so I asked her if she could request a conflict free diamond from him and she said no because diamonds that come those places usually cost more and she wasn't willing to have him spend a few hundred dollars more for the same size rock or in other words with those few hundred dollars the diamond would be bigger. I asked her "EVEN after seeing that movie and all those violent crimes committed you still don't care??" She explained she couldn't do anything about it anyway so she wasn't about to change her mind. All i have to say is that i'm disappointed at my mother. I don't understand how people could be so insensitive just because it doesn't affect them or that they could deal with it because they gain something out of it. Honestly, its just a rock that's really shiny or as my Dad used to say a piece of carbon that was super pressurized and heated for a gajillion years. That's all people. BTW for those of you that REALLLY reallllly like diamonds but have a conscience, on facebook there is a site called brilliant earth http://www.facebook.com/pages/Brilliant-Earth/13698310553 that sells fine jewelry with conflict free diamonds. They also donate 5% of their profits to underdeveloped countries that were ravaged by the diamond industry. I encourage you to watch the movie and feel sympathy for those who aren't as fortunate as we and i pray that one day my mom stops being so selfish.

I neeeeeed new flip flops

ok maybe this is a cry for help or something because I really need new flip flops. I usually get my flip flops from old navy because i'm broke and they come in a variety of colors and fit well and comfortably. I obviously cannot buy them considering the agenda at hand but i really need flip flops. I guess what this blog is more about is the consideration of ebaying it. I have never bought anything from ebay not because i don't want to but because i don't know how to work it. SOOOOO since my friend has an account i'm going to ask him to order it for me. I realize although its hard on me not to get them right away although i desperately need them i'll save money and a trip to the mall. So like a good humanitarian that i'm trying to be, i went home and looked up where they were made just to be a little more conscious. They are made in China, not good. This project is realllllly harder than I thought because i've had these flip flops for a year and a half now. For those of you that just wear tennis shoes...that's a LONG life for flip flops that you wear often. So i pull out an old pair of vans although they match with nothing that i'm wearing and i walk outside, get ridiculed by my friend who's a fashion guru and suck it up. So i go back in and change my whole outfit and I look like a punk rock kid. I look at my clothes that i put great effort into matching my shoes with and decide to go out with that. So when i got home and decided to write this blog i realized that what i'm currently wearing relates to the article "A Crowded Street as Streetwear is Disseminated into the Mainstream, What will Become of an Underground Movement". I don't actually know what i'm wearing. I think i'm pretty sure i know how to put together an outfit that looks good that's so called "underground" looking but until that article i didn't know that those clothes even meant anything or that some people get offended that the people wearing those clothes don't know the "story" behind it. Does that make me a poser? i just like them because they
look good but what do i know. It also reminded me of the article "Japanese schoolgirl Inferno" where their looks actually mean certain things or who or what they actually represent. I don't know if i should care or if i'm being ignorant and just wearing something because i like it, like when Caucasians sport bindis not knowing what i really represents or how much the people of that culture resent them wearing it. Anyone wanna answer this one?

hello kitty....blog 2

I always liked hello kitty as a child. I was never really that feminine or so called girly at all but one thing I did realllllly like was hello kitty because they had yummy gum and cool stationary. I already have a few things like necklaces and alarm clocks that are of hello kitty characters(btw I bought these recently). I went to vacaville today to help my shopaholic friend feel better from her breakup with her bf of two years and for the 50th time ran across the official Sanrio store(home of hello kitty and friends). I walked inside feeling giddy and then realized that I'm not actually supposed to purchase anything due to the assignment and I was....ummm pretty sad..... However i thought about it and realized that I probably shouldn't promote this kind of production as i am unaware of where it comes from and who actually made this product. In the article "Forever in Trouble" it discusses how the garment industry employees are mistreated and how poor their working conditions are. This hello kitty store also mass produces clothing and bags other than trinkets. I was holding a pink rhinestone necklace with the iconic hello kitty face on it and was so eager to take it home but I took a second glance at it and was really torn because it was so pretty and yet it was representative of mistreatment of disadvantaged individuals. I noticed that 50% of the consumers in the store were Caucasian and that struck me because I noticed how much asian culture has influenced the American society as discussed in the article "Asian Fashion Entrepreneurs in London". The author talks about how traditional Indian suits have greatly influenced the London fashion industry, how it is in now even though it was ridiculed before. I remember when it wasn't cool to be asian and even other minorities made fun of "chinky" eyes and our "ridiculous" customs. I remember having to go up against so much discrimination which probably explains why I grew up with so much aggression and pride in my culture from constantly defending it. Anywhoooo, i put the darn necklace down and walked away partially because i was irritated that so many Caucasians were sporting it and I didn't want to promote indifference the world's culminating problems of human expendability. This project is kind of hard for a day to day thing I'll admit. However, I do want to stop human trafficking one day so this is one step towards the betterment of humanity so I guess every little thing helps.