There is a scene in Spider-Man 3 that pisses me off every time I see it.  The scene shows Mary Jane (played by Kirsten Dunst) and Harry (played by that one dude in Pineapple Express) on a date, except they’re not really on a date.  They’re at home (I think at Harry’s high-rise apartment), and they’re in the kitchen cooking omelets.  And they’re not just cooking omelets; they’re also listening to The Twist by Chubby Checker, which inexplicably causes Mary Jane to totally lose her inhibition and dance in the middle of the kitchen.  Harry becomes possessed by Chubby Checker, too, and begins to shake his hips as if he has no control over them.  The two of them are having much more fun cooking omelets than common sense would dictate.  They dance for several seconds and no words are exchanged until it is realized that the butter is burning.  This scene struck me as being utterly corny.  Is this what some people do on dates?  Is cooking omelets really that much fun?  Is Chubby Checker’s music really subliminal hypnosis?  At the end of the scene, I immediately said out loud in the theater, “I don’t understand white people."

I know what you might be thinking.  You’re probably thinking that it’s wrong, ignorant, and small-minded of me to racialize this seemingly innocuous scene from a comic book movie.   I suppose it is kind of unfair of me to assume that all white people are guilty of cheesiness like this.  It’s more likely that this contrived scene was simply depicting an isolated incident of two smitten dorks trying to convince themselves that they can dance.  But, this scene really annoys me and it would be unfair (and cowardly) to attribute this emotive response to an explanation that is simple, boring, and unambitious.  Someone needs to be blamed for my overreaction, and blaming white people always seems to be a good decision.

Just to be clear, I don’t hate white people, but I think I’m sincere when I say that I don’t understand them.  I grew up in a town where the majority of its residents were Asian American, and most of my friends throughout my life have been either Filipino, Korean, Mexican, or African.  I’m fairly certain that my current understanding of white people comes exclusively from the media, particularly from watching Friends and listening to (unfortunately) Limp Bizkit.  It’s not necessarily right or wrong and it’s not anyone fault, but I think it’s a fair and honest assessment that I don’t know anything about white people.

Generally as a species, human beings tend to fear things that they don’t understand.  This is probably the root of all major conflicts and struggle in the history of the world.  This is why we fear things like wild animals, manual transmission, the SAT test, and Mormons.  But despite my ignorance, I don’t fear white people, and Spider-Man 3’s portrayal of them didn’t change that sentiment.  It did, however, make me conscious to the peculiar phase that I am going through in my life right now.   As someone who has dated exclusively Asian women throughout his entire life, I’ve become conspicuously interested in white girls lately, despite the fact that they want nothing to do with me.  I suppose my ignorance about them has piqued my interest instead of causing me to fear them (which was probably the case earlier in my life).  Do white people cook omelets when they go on dates?  Do white people really have fun every time they make omelets?  Do white people really turn into morons when they hear Chubby Checker?  Are white people really this corny when they’re in love?  I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I kind of want to find out. The only other explanation I have for my new fetish is that Asian girls don’t like me anymore and someone has to bear (or suffer) the brunt of my affection.  In my world, someone always has to lose.

The butter’s burning.  Somebody stop me.

Yesterday on my way to work I experienced an incident involving a phenomenon known as “road rage.”  In a nutshell, I changed lanes, another driver felt that I cut him off, he honked at me, I raised my hand up apologetically, he continued to honk and made hand gestures that mocked my raised hand, I flipped him off with my middle finger for a good half-block, he pulled alongside me and tried to sideswipe me, I stopped at the subsequent red light, he stopped his car in front of and perpendicular to mine, he stepped out of his pickup truck and approached my car, I realized that he was really a 6’5”, 250 lbs. woman who looked like Da Brat, I flipped “her” off with both middle fingers, which prompted “her” to unleash a verbal tirade aimed at my general direction.   I won’t go into detail regarding what sexual expletives she called me, where she told me I should go, or what body part she told me I should kiss because all of those words are somewhat unpleasant.  Needless to say, this maniac frightened me.  I generally think that people who pull their vehicles over to harm others over traffic non-incidents likely have the same mental stability of murderers (read:  they’re crazy).  Strangely, watching this brute yell at me also made me sad, because I kind of like Da Brat.

I don’t understand road rage.

In this age of free wi-fi, Twitter, and 3G telecommunications, we live in an era where communication is easy and information is abundant and accessible.  Consequently, we live in a time where people are more apt to have an opinion about everything.  This is generally good, but sometimes it’s kind of weird.  For example, I don’t know why I know so much about a guy named “Jon” and his wife named “Kate.”  I don’t know why I know so much about a girl named Lauren Conrad or something named “Speidi.”  All I know is that I hate both Jon and Kate, but I kind of like LC, even though I’ve never seen one goddamn episode of either Jon and Kate Plus Eight or The Hills.  The barrage of information that is readily available to us has seemingly been absorbed by my brain through simple osmosis, and I’m forced to have an opinion about things I normally don’t care about.  Active thinking seems to be a thing of the past, or something that only philosophy majors or socialists can do.

One day I decided to actively formulate opinions on current events, so I tuned in to a news channel that I’ve never watched before.  I turned on the Fox News Channel, and the program that was on was The O’Reilly Factor with Bill O’Reilly.  At the moment I tuned in, Mr. O’Reilly was in the middle of an editorial in which he was talking about the differences between FNC and the other cable news channels.  He claimed that FNC differed from other news channels in that they had a fair and balanced approach to journalism.  While other networks claimed that FNC had a politically conservative bias, he countered by saying that FNC had no bias at all.  Rather, he said that other networks had a liberal outlook on their news stories, but that FNC reported news how Americans want it to be reported.  To justify his claim, he said that Fox News was ahead of all the other news channels in television ratings, thus illustrating that more Americans prefer FNC as their news source than any other channel. 

O’Reilly’s statements about the ratings intrigued me, so I looked on the internet to verify what he said. I discovered that FNC was, in fact, the number one cable news channel.  Its closest competitor was CNN, which still had only a third of FNC’s total viewership.  Other channels such as MSNBC, CNBC, and CNN Headline News don’t even come close to FNC’s ratings.   IT turns out that Bill O’Reilly was right in that regard; more people watch FNC than any other cable news channel.  This would lead you to believe that more Americans prefer FNC’s brand of reporting, which O’Reilly asserted was strikingly different from the other networks.

However, a different story will be told if you look more closely at the ratings.  While FNC can boast that they are the most watched cable news channel, it only enjoys somewhere between 40-45% of cable news’ total viewership.  This means that 55-60% of cable news viewers prefer to watch their news from somewhere else.  And if there is such a stark difference in the type of reporting between FNC and all the other channels, as O’Reilly himself asserted, then it seems as if majority of Americans choose not to watch FNC’s brand of journalism or political outlook.  FNC is the news channel that is out-of-touch with mainstream America.

Today, it’s easy to get information, which sadly means that we have more chances to be gullible.