Just kidding. (Kind of.)
Lauren Zaser / Jenny Chang / Via BuzzFeed Life
Lauren Zaser / Via BuzzFeed Life
If things are really out of hand you can spritz in some smoothing hairspray first.
Lauren Zaser / Via BuzzFeed Life
*blinks once, eye makeup is ruined*
You had one job.
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When you'll get it: Wednesday and Saturday
Alex (Lucy Liu), Natalie (Cameron Diaz), and Dylan (Drew Barrymore) in Charlie's Angels.
Sony
It was November 2000, and I was in fifth grade. My new pastime was reading through my diary entries from fourth grade and annotating them with disavowals of my love for Dylan DiGerolamo. For Christmas, I wanted a Dixie Chicks CD. And unbeknownst to me, I was about to see the movie that would define my middle school years: Charlie's Angels.
It resonated with me largely because, much like the Angels themselves, from the ages of 10 to 13, I was part of a trio of girl friends: me, Connor Kelly-Eiding, and Melissa Cober. They were and are skinnier and older than I am, so it was extra-cool to me when they wore the three-way friendship necklaces I got them at Claire's. According to an entry from my diary in 2001, Melissa invited us to what I termed a "nocturnal parté" and "we positively had a spectacular blast, and I can't wait to do it again. We talked about all sorts of stuff (including boys)."
They finished eighth grade and went to two different high schools and I went to a third high school a year later. But frankly, even before they left, our trio was breaking up: Melissa started listening to A Fire Inside and got a spiky-haired boyfriend; I didn't have enough torment in my heart to appreciate AFI, and I was scandalized to learn she and her boyfriend had kissed on the mouth. Once Connor went to high school, she also got a boyfriend — one who played guitar and had a smattering of facial hairs. We drifted apart.
I dwelled on this, bitterly and often, probably because I was the youngest and the least cool and I'm always the one who loves more, anyway. I thought we would be friends forever — why else would I have given them those necklaces stating the same? But a necklace isn't a guarantee, and people grow up and get boyfriends, and I got over it.
The unchanging Angels, though — Natalie (Cameron Diaz), Dylan (Drew Barrymore), and Alex (Lucy Liu) — will forever spend an hour and a half kicking exactly the same amount of ass together: three girl best friends who are the second most important thing to one another after justice. They are smart, righteous, and shiny-haired. As a tween, I wanted to be just like them, or rather, just like Dylan, the rule breaker of the group. Actually, when the three of us had sleepovers and watched Charlie's Angels, we all wanted to be Dylan.
So, in honor of the 15th anniversary of the movie, I invited my old friends over to my apartment and we watched it. I had not talked to either of them in years. When Connor came to the door, she wasn't wearing her signature mismatched-socks look, but she did call me "man" and gave me a hug, so I guess some things never change. Melissa has glasses now. I had spent the previous several weeks in undulant panic over this evening, yet they both seemed relaxed.
"When is the last time we were all in the same room?" I asked my two best friends from middle school.
It was at the pier, Connor said. There's a photograph of that day, and "it must have been freshman or sophomore year of high school," she reasoned, because she's wearing a Green Day shirt. Probably, 2003 or 2004. Melissa is wearing a Homestar Runner shirt. It was, apparently, a "middle school reunion," and it seems to be the last time we were all in the same place.
Much of the first hour in my apartment was spent talking about our current lives. Melissa, through a series of post-college accidents, works in marketing. And Connor is an actor, which is what she always wanted to be. I told her I cyber-snooped on her while I was trying to find her phone number and found out she's in a troupe of artsy clowns, and she said she was in the middle of a production of "Hamlet, clown-style." At one point, Melissa took a giant bag of potato chips out of her purse. And after three hours of wine and discussing our adult digestive problems, we started the movie.
It had been a very long time since they had seen it. I had watched it somewhat recently and was relieved to discover that this girlhood-shaping movie wasn't pure sexist trash. By and large, it was pretty much exactly as awesome as I remembered it — as frivolous and exciting as a Bond movie, except the jokes were zanier, the girls were at the center, and as a now-delightful bonus, all the male characters in the movie were pretty incompetent. "It's true — I do love that all the men are fucking inept," Connor said when it was over. "No wonder we all turned out to be staunch feminists," Melissa said.
It was almost like I remembered it.
But the funny thing is, I was the only one in the group who really remembered it. "I definitely remember watching it a couple times," Melissa had written to me in a Facebook message, also correcting my use of "sleepover" to the term our moms used: "talk-over" (mom-joke alert!). Vindicatingly, in what I think was our second communication since my 16th birthday, Connor wrote, "We absolutely watched that movie a thousand times — that's the way I remember it too." But she later modified this to "multiple times." "Whenever I think of Charlie's Angels, I think of your house," she allowed. Melissa said she associates me with Grease, a musical I have no memory of watching with her.
And of course they didn't really remember it. Isn't that always the way, that something deeply meaningful to you is not the meaningful part to someone else? Melissa remembers discussing people's noses and the island nation we made up and then built using empty boxes and glitter. Connor remembers a first-grade play about recycling we wrote collectively: "Not like I really think about it that often, but I was definitely a rainbow fish from Hawaii," she said.
If I had known in high school that this memory I cherished was so one-sided, my feelings probably would have been hurt. But with more than a decade of distance, it makes sense: I loved the Angel trio because I was invested in our trio in a way that they never were. The necklaces, the telltale sign! I called my mom to ask what she remembered, and she said I watched Charlie's Angels with a different friend entirely, that there were pictures of me in a box somewhere standing in the finger-gun-Angel-pose with Connor and another girl who was not in the trio. To use a neologism, I lost my chill and didn't find it until 2015.
But it's OK! I have never been chill, thus the love for movies portraying inseparable friends. And my middle school friends grew up to be nice! We said obvious and cliché things to one another after the movie ended like "fucking rad" (Connor) and then "15 years" (me) and "we're so old" (Melissa). Then: "I love you guys," Melissa said. "We should legit have a slumber party sometime."
Before they left, we took pictures of ourselves standing in front of the Magic Johnson poster in my kitchen. My face looked bad in most of the photos and we laughed a lot. We look happy, I think.
Courtesy of Melissa Cober
CBC News / Via youtube.com
I mean, what should I have expected when Jon Kay started the segment with, "I think it should be a strict meritocracy"?
On Sunday night, the CBC asked me to join a segment on The National about affirmative action in Justin Trudeau's cabinet—you can watch it below if, for some reason, you get erections watching car crashes. My fellow panelists were Jon Kay, editor of The Walrus, and Tasha Kheiriddin, CBC political commentator and National Post columnist, both of whom disagreed with Trudeau's promise to have a 50% female cabinet. The whole thing was weird, like almost all television spots are, and any gaps in the segment were filled with me looking around the studio for help.
My partner told me I should do the segment. He usually stands behind me, gently coaxing out whatever little inferiority complex slugs are clogging up my ears and eyes. He reminded me how I complain about television panels all the time, how they're often comprised of a bunch of white people—usually white men—seated at a Lucite table discussing something like the Black Lives Matter movement or diversity metrics. I don't love television news and I don't do it often, but I figure if you want mainstream media to start paying attention to a wide variety of voices, you have to try to become one of those voices.
It was nothing I didn't expect: Kay and Kheiriddin agreed with each other, I felt tense, my hair looked great, and after it aired, liberals agreed with me and conservatives didn't. Nothing new.
I'm used to a certain level of online abuse so I was equipped for whatever nonsense was about to come my way. Some lunatic found me on Facebook just to tell me she thinks I'm an "idiot" (upon further inspection, she's currently studying Human Resources Management, so, yikes). By midnight, I had one man make a blowjob joke at me and another call me a cunt and tell me to "get back in the kitchen."
The men in my life got their backs up in my honour, messaging me asking if this was normal and what could they do. Nothing! This is indeed normal. It's not okay, it's not fun, it's not fair, but it's normal. I can handle this, because I've handled it before. Almost all the women I know have, too. (One of many reasons why the world does not currently function as a meritocracy, but we're beyond that now.)
But, by this morning, a sick feeling started to set in when people started to contest my race. More than a few tweets came my way asking why the CBC was airing an all-white panel on the subject of diversity in politics. Good question, in any other context. Here's the rub, if it's still unclear: I am not, nor have I ever been, a white person.
When I was younger, there was never any doubt in my mind that I wasn't a white person. It was clear. Racism was vibrant in my city and my school. I started junior high in Calgary just after 9/11 which, despite the fact that I wasn't raised in America, seemed to have a scurrilous effect on how my classmates approached me. This, certainly, takes nothing away from people of other races, or those who are darker than me. (I get stopped at airports, sure, but I know people with darker skin than me get it worse. There's a spectrum to these things.) Still, I'm not sure where the assumption came that I'm white.
I have a white sister-in-law, and a half-white niece, but the rest of my family (and they will tell you this for hours if you ask) is from India. Fun fact: my parents are from an Indian Brahmin community called—you're not going to fucking believe this—Kashmiri Pandits. And the word pandit—you're just going to die—is where the term political pundit comes from. How's that for cultural appropriation?
After the panel, I got a lot of criticism from women of colour about how I handled the issue of racial diversity in Trudeau's cabinet. Indeed, I hardly addressed it, which may have been why so many thought I was a white person. My only defense for not discussing race more is because I was perplexed by having to explain to two people the most basic tenants of a 50/50 gender split in government.
I could have done more. I know that. I left the studio on Sunday night feeling like I hadn't done my best, my stomach percolating with the food poisoning I got on Friday evening. I threw up outside the CBC, and went home blubbering. I called my dad and he answered the phone with, "So did you kill anyone?" Then he recommended I have some consommé, mostly because I think he likes saying the word consommé.
The criticisms, though some were unhinged and related solely to the fact that I was not dark enough, have a valid point: showing up and being the face of women of colour is not enough. The intersection of feminism and race doesn't mean just finding the right voices, but using the platform you're given to actually have a full conversation.
It leaves me feeling more despairing than before: how much are women of colour expected to do and be?
There's a Nicki Minaj clip where she talks about how women have to be multi-talented to get by. "When you're a girl," she says, "you have to be everything. You have to be dope at what you do but you have to be super-sweet. And you have to be sexy and you have to be this and you have to be that and you have to be nice. It's like, I can't be all those things at once."
It's true for all women, but it's doubly true of women of colour: they have to be everything. Any failure to any particular group is tantamount to a failure on all fronts.
I could have done a better job on the panel. I am, at every point in my life, in a position where I can do better. But the more I'm put in positions where I have to defend my existence, the more I wonder why it's on me to defend my existence. Why it's on the shoulders of women of colour who get those few, coveted public slots to actually have their voices heard. Why is this our job and not also the responsibility of the countless white voices in the public sphere?
Even men of colour don't get the criticism that WOC do. When Desmond Cole issued his mea culpa about not actually asking any women about Justin Trudeau's campaign comments about misogyny, he didn't get a fraction of the fury that WOC do when they're perceived as not advancing the cause in the right way.
Of course I can do better. My intersectionality is not at its best, because I live in a white world dominated by white people and I lose sight of the world sometimes. I have fair skin as well, so that comes with its own set of privileges, in an out of my race. I fail, all the time. And we get upset when we see other WOC handle these few opportunities in a way we disagree with, precisely because there are so few of them to begin with. We have to fight for every one we get.
I don't cry a lot, and I can count on one hand the number of times I've cried in public (drunk, drunk, drunk, hungry, drunk) but this morning I ducked into the bathroom at my office to weep quietly in a stall. I spent too much of the morning looking at Twitter, watching my feed fill with people trying to guess my race, whether I represented WOC appropriately, whether I had been crushed by the other two panelists. Not just the question of whether I did an okay job, or if I made valid points — rather, was I everything?
The need is insatiable but the options are limited. I want to do the panel and try to be the voice, but it so frequently results in coming home to attacks on my character, my race, my looks, my existence. If I don't do the panel, my existence is merely entirely ignored by the public consciousness. You suffer consequences either way.
Mamas, don't let your Pandits grow up to be pundits.
These ARE the shoes you're looking for.
You know you are.
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed / Via 20th Century Fox; Walt Disney Pictures; Lucasfilm
Irregular Choice just released a line of Star Wars-inspired heels, flats, and platforms TO MAKE YOU DROOL.
Please remain calm.
Why? Because these lightsaber heels LIGHT UP and PLAY SOUNDS FROM THE MOVIE when you walk. You can get them here ($323).
