Art/Crafts Meetup Log #6
The meeting today was from 10am-1pm but like I hate getting up early so I initially said I would be there at 11 but ended up getting there at like 11:50. One hour was unfortunately not enough to get my letter done that I need to send my friend. I even initially thought of bringing the package with me to go to the post office after but the post office is closed on Sundays and I didn't even finish it anyway.
Prepping the stuff I wanted to bring kind of had me running around after eating brunch and washing the dishes. I wanted to like scan stickers in before I was going to use them because they were really cute. In all my flurry, I forgot to bring the puzzle to give back to Teacher Lady AGAIN so at this point I'm gonna have to drag it around with me so it doesn't get fumigated (not that fumigation would harm it but I feel bad in a paranoid way that if something goes wrong I might be handing poison gas to someone).
I brought peaches to the meeting again (like 35) and thankfully got rid of them. There were even two random people who popped in to see what the art meetup was about who took a few. Good. No more peaches it's too much out here.
The first thing I said when I walked through the door was exclaim I forgot Teacher Lady's puzzle again. It was in the midde of Old Guy greeting me too, so that was a bit rude, but I just had to exclaim my woe at forgettin things at least 3 times now!! Brain only has space to remember to bring one (1) cumbersome item (the peaches).
Anyway, I worked on my letter and listened to people but it was a bit hard since I can't hold multiple streams of words in my head so I had to write very slow. One of the new people who showed up to the book club last time, Old Lady, said she'd been reading the books but not showing up for a while. She had an interesting story about her name and how she went from being referred to by her first name to her middle name back to her first name, all changes that she stubbornly insisted on and corrected people on all the time. I found it interesting to hear about this in an entirely cis context. People really do feel all sorts of ways about their names. Chill Lady also had an interesting story about hers. She goes with the shortened version of her name because when she went with the longer version people kept shortening it in a way she didn't like. There's like two other people with her chosen short name in book club tho, so it's interesting that she would choose to go with it regardless. There's possibly a new member with my (uncommon) first name and I'm already debating about whether I should tell people to call me a short version I've never used in my life just to avoid the overlap.
Old Lady and Old Man both have military family backgrounds. I guess that's what happens more when you're white. Sometimes when white people talk about their family generations I feel mildly shocked bc I don't think of anything past 2 generations due to my relatives sucking and the language barrier. And whenever white people talk about it I immediately start wondering about the power dynamics their families have lived through. Like I get curious about to what degree their families have benefitted from institutional racism. I don't really think this when I hear non-Asian POC talk about their long family ties. Guess it's some sort of radar that exists for whom I assume to be part of a more privileged class than me, while for other Asians I mostly think about our heritage countries. Insert Asian American theory 101 about the perpetual foreigner.
At some point they started talking about R.F. Kuang's book Yellowface, which I haven't read (and to be honest, I'm not sure I would personally gain much from reading this -- not because of the writing quality but just the topic isn't really something I feel compelled to learn about or sit through. I mean, a white woman going through her racist olympics isn't really what I need to learn about; I need to focus on unlearning my own internal racism). I wanted to say something about it, suddenly feeling emboldened by talking with a friend in depth about an unrelated book last night (I guess it made me feel like my opinions mattered), and because I have listened to RF Kuang talk about this book, but in the end I didn't say anything since the people who had read the book commented more on it and I figured I should just leave it to them even though they were both white.
At the end of the meeting, Teacher Lady invited me to hang out at a park sometime. When exactly, not yet set since she has a busy schedule. After my house gets fumigated, though. I wish I had remembered to bring her puzzle.
Oh yeah, I actually managed to correct Old Guy today for using the wrong pronouns. Going to have to keep doing that proactively for people in the future.
I need to finish attempting to draw my friend's cat for this letter. Cats are very hard to get right. The train was 25 mins late.