So, I decided this summer that I wasn’t going to post everyday, mainly because really my life is not that exciting, but this is too good to pass up. And well, I didn’t take my sanity pills this morning so everything is a little slanted and still seemsok. So I had a meeting this mornign and a number of interesting things happened.

1. It’s casual fridays, but I dressed up because I had a meeting. The guy I met had sneakers and black jeans on. duuuuuuude so not cool.

2. So I work for the OCA. Which stands for Organization of Chinese Americans. ALright, it has chinese in the title but it’s main point is advocacy work for all AAPI. So yes, it is partly the organizations fault for having only one ethnicity in the line of the name. But through out the meeting, the person kept referring to Chinese americans as an example. Dorthy, our executive director, through out the whole meeting kept saying AAPI. He didn’t get the hint. I think this is an issue. The guy we met also brought up blacks, latinos, jews, etc. So the crux of the issue is that: AAPIs want to create power through their connection and similar expreiences but at the sametime, people want to be recognized for specific ethnicities because they all have different issues and statistics, and there’s the issue of ethnic pride. But why do we all have to be one or the other? Is it mutually exclusive? I’m chinese, taiwanese, schuxchenese (or however the west has butchered that ethnicity), Northern Mountain, APIA…everything. Not one, not two, but many. sigh….I’m always puzzeled by how much how narrow the view can be view.

3. This is partly related to point 2, but it’s interesting how many people meet with OCA and don’t know anything about it. It’s ok but at least do your reserach about it and realize that it might have chinese but not really focused on chinese. But really if you have the word in your organization title how much could you focus on the whole AAPI Community? sigh.

4. To go into the office that I had the meeting in was interesting. It was a door with the title of the office on it and it was locked. So a lot of places are pretty small, if you come and seetheOCA office it’s not that big you know. And so we push the button and after about 30 sec they buzz in. And then we walk in and walk into a hallway which at the other end is another door and there is a glass panel on the right where a person is sitting. Oh scary. She buzzed us through the next door but I wonder if it was really necessary for all that security. It was an interesting office.

5. Organizing at this level has very many similarities to college organizing. It’s a lot about useless but usually shorter meetings where it’s mostly about talk.ANd you get more reading material than you would ever hope to get. But it’s different in that this is your only job and it’s not trying to balance between two jobs and the efforts of the people and organizations can often have greater upper level effect. It’s…..interesting. Final judgement yet to be decided.

6. Can we please talk about how many michigan people are out here in DC? not only people I know from campus but also just random alumn. The guy I met this morning is I found out a michgan alumn too. Go blue. yes all that jazz, ra ra ra. ok I’m done. It’s crazy actually. Madhu was saying that DC has like the largest alumni base. It’s actually really scary. And just thinking about the number of michigan interns at OCA o.O Boggles the mind doesn’t it.

Argentiana lost…..man. Not as depressing as South Korea. I’m holding out for tomorrows games: Portugal vs England and France vs Brazil. I’m pretty bitter about france for South Korea. We’ll see how it goes. Denny and I are getting our hair cuts tomorrow. We’ll see how it goes.