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“I made this for you,” he’d say. “It’s nothing much. Bring it back next time so I can see the solution.”
The simulation was incomplete because it didn’t have a call to action.
There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.
Other people’s parents are often a delight.
It was 1996, and the word “appropriation” never occurred to either of them. They were drawn to these references because they loved them, and they found them inspiring. They weren’t trying to steal from another culture, though that is probably what they did.
The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don’t you? I’m terrified of that world, and I don’t want to live in that world, and as a mixed-race person, I literally don’t exist in it. My dad, who I barely knew, was Jewish. My mom was an American-born Korean. I was raised by Korean immigrant grandparents
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She stood over the other Anna Lee’s body and began to feel giddily, vertiginously untethered from her own body.
the fifty-year-old, handlebar mustachioed, cowboy-hat-boots-bolo-tie-silver-bullhorn-buckle-Canadian-tuxedo-wearing head of the company,
made her feel like she was being shackled and blindfolded and gagged and locked into a duffel bag and tossed into the bottom of the sea.
He’s an emotional harlot.
“Sure there is. It’s that ginormous polyhedral die that you throw when you’re playing Dungeons & Dragons.”
And as much as a person might try to shield herself from it, the possibility for the other outcome was always there. We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living. Sometimes, it felt as if you might be walking down Brattle Street, and without warning, you could slip into this other life,
You would end up a different version of yourself, in some other town. But it wouldn’t be strange like Wonderland, not at all. Because you would have expected all along that it could have turned out that way. You would feel relief, because you had always wondered what that other life would have looked like. And there you were.
