Me, In Real Life

In an effort to make the most use out of my library card, even when I don’t really have time to go to the library, I’ve been using the Libby app to check out e-books and read them on my Kindle. Or at least I’ve been trying to. Work has been difficult lately. 5 coworkers out on leave at basically the same time meant that I’ve been doing 6 day work weeks for the past month or so. The extra money on every paycheck is kind of nice but the tiredness I’ve felt is astronomical. Anyway, my brain is gravitating back towards a mindset of “well you’re not enjoying a lot of the other things that usually make you happy so why not read more?”. And at least with reading I can sit down and read a chapter in about 10 or 15 minutes (according to my Kindle reading rate anyway) and I can budget my time very easily. My first dive into borrowing an e-book is Jo Koy’s memoir, Mixed Plate.

I think, as a first gen Filipino-American, I’m predisposed to like Jo Koy. It’s in our cultural DNA to celebrate any Filipino who becomes successful. I first heard of Jo Koy when he said how much he loved Zippy’s when he was on tour and doing a gig in Hawai’i. Ahaha, I thought, a plate lunch expert. I like it. The more I looked into his career, the more I responded. Here was a man, half-Filipino, who took the cultural specificity of growing up Filipino in America and turned it into relatable comedy. 

also this video where he jokes about the ubiquity of Toyota Tacomas in Hawai’i.

What I didn’t realize was how much of a hustle trying to become a POC comedian became. Begging his mom to get HBO so he could study the greats. Making his own way in the comedy world because no one could figure out how to market him so he had to do it all himself. Doing open mics and gaining a reputation in Vegas. His Comedy Central breakout special and all that came afterward. It’s a Filipino story. It’s an American story. And I sort of love him for recording his own life in such a frank, candid, and laugh-out-loud funny way. For, as much as his mom and the rest of his family are a part of his act, he’s kept a large part of his personal life hidden from public scrutiny. His brother Robert, diagnosed with schizophrenia and always drifting in and out of the family view. Jo Koy idolized his cool older brother until mental illness took everything he ever loved about him and replaced it with a violent stranger. The nightly fights to try to calm Robert down took a toll on the family. Jo Koy’s biological father left the house one night after a particularly bad fight and never came back. It’s harrowing to read the passages about Robert, and it got me to thinking about the stuff all families try to hide from the world. It was relatable, everything was relatable. His relationship with his hard-working Filipino mom, who had to raise 3 kids (plus the one who bumped in and out of mental institutions and jail for decades) on her own and the toll it took. Resiliency is an immigrant trait, and I see shades of my own mom in Jo Koy’s mom, which, I guess goes for all Filipino moms.

And to imagine that if this one person could make it, achieve his dream, and try to make his family’s life better as a result, we then, I think there’s a lot of hope for the rest of us. 

I heard through the Twitter grapevine that syfy.com has deleted all of its journalistic content prior to 2019, which means that all of the articles I wrote for Syfy Fangrrls have disappeared from that site. Thankfully I previously backed everything up on another website, so they haven’t gone from the Internet entirely. But yes, no more me on syfy.com.

I have very mixed feelings. I mean, I hadn’t written for them in a while, partly because of burn-out and partly because I really needed to hunker down and get a job that paid more. And then after a while, I learned that the vertical itself was going to go away, all the editors and writers scattered into the winds. Maybe it became too much to keep the site active while web standards were changing. Maybe it was getting harder to format the site to work with mobile phones. Maybe it was something else. Maybe the syfy bosses are petty. I have no idea. I still think it’s hilarious that some naysayers believe that Fangrrls was dropped because it was too woke.

I think my biggest claim to fame from my time at Syfy was when I made a bunch of weebs mad by claiming that there is just way too much Nazi imagery in anime to be just a coincidence. I was accused of being racist (by pointing out Japan’s xenophobia and weird blind spot when it comes to the country’s role as an Axis power) and of hating anime (even when I mentioned that most of the titles in that article are among my favorites). Apparently the article’s been shared on FB over 20,000 times. I never got into any fracas with anyone personally. I locked up my Twitter account for a few days as a precaution but never saw much of a dustup. I suppose I was lucky, or perhaps the people I offended were just too toothless to confront me. Or maybe Twitter’s filter function worked well enough so that I didn’t have to argue with bots? Who knows?

So, yes, my Syfy articles are still here.

Goodbye, Evangelion.

I finished watching the final Evangelion movie: Evangelion 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time last night, and I’m still in the middle of processing my reaction to it. Neon Genesis Evangelion was one of the first true “anime” series I remember watching. I spent late summers in the ’90s in California, and one summer the local PBS station KTEH began airing this show. I’d only watched a few episodes of it, but dammit I was hooked. The weirdness. The giant robot battles. The angst. I loved it. When I returned to Hawaii, I decided that I should watch the entire thing. And thanks to a very geeky video rental service run by a local comic book shop, I eventually finished the anime.

The story, on the surface about a last ditch effort to protect the Earth from rampaging giant monsters called Angels, but actually about very real, very human trauma, rang true with me. I saw bits of myself in every character. All of them strugging to prove themselves worthy of life. Shinji, the reluctant pilot who only “gets in the robot” because he wants his father’s approval. Rei, the mysterious soft-spoken girl who’s questioning her entire existence. Asuka, a forceful personality hiding a fragile heart. Misato, wanting to prove humanity is still worth protecting. And so on and so on and so on. The series is widely known as the work of one man, Hideaki Anno, who decided to use the show as therapy for his own struggles with depression and self-worth. It’s a deeply personal work that resonates with so many people, including me. 

So what do I think of the new Rebuild movies and the Ultimate ending? Let’s keep going. Spoilers abound.

Overall I’m glad the story ended how it did. There’s a timeskip, we see all the kids as adults, and they seem to exist in a world with no Evas or no Angels. They’ve earned it after all the shit they’ve gone through. Shinji seems to have broken the loop of suffering. I wonder if this is because Mari, the only Eva pilot who seems to have no hang-ups about piloting them, exists in this world. Or because this is the only iteration of the story where Shinji’s father finally opens up about his feelings for his dead wife and the true reasons behind the Human Instrumentality Project. Transforming humans into an all-knowing entity and breaking down the painful barriers that keep us separated would mean that Gendo could reunite with Yui. It turns out that Gendo isn’t that different from his son after all. Surprise surprise, breakthrough. 

I’m also fascinated with how the final movie portrayed Asuka. She’s much more confident in this version, less hung up about her past and her own trauma. She seems to have gotten over her mother’s suicide. But I have to wonder about some of Asuka’s final moments, where a slew of Asuka “series” pictures is shown on a wall. Also when Asuka comes in contact with someone who calls herself her “mother”, she looks exactly like her. Is Asuka here a clone of the original? Just like Rei? It would mean that both these girls are clones in search of identity. The Asuka of NGE hated Rei because she saw in her the perfect girl that she could never be.

And speaking of Rei, how great is her ending? The clone who finds purpose and learns emotions like love and joy and regret. I’m quite satisfied with her growth and in her “death”, Shinji starts to realize that letting go is okay. His father also learns that learning to let go is okay. One doesn’t need to suffer if you lose someone. One has to move on.

I loved that the final movie ends hopefully, versus the terrifyingly lonely world that Shinji found himself in during the ENd of Evangelion movie. Yes relationships hurt, but so does being alone, and the relationships are definitely worth the pain. That is human and I think that is the final message of Evangelion. 

Still not sure what was up with Mari though. She doesn’t seem to have any backstory other than what we see in the movies. Was she neccessary? In a way, she was. Her presence meant the story could go in a new direction because she’s an unknown quanitity. The fly in the ointment. Otherwise, she’s just a cute girl with glasses and a pink plug suit and pink Evangelion and that’s…different. I guess.