Hyphenated Canadian, awake!

It's about time I made myself a political blog.

Sure, I had an ordinary blog. You know, one of those semi-Friends-locked chain of ramblings created with the intention of sharing every detail of my sophomore life, complete with grainy cam pictures of new clothes from Pacific Mall to less-than-mainstream explorations in the sci-fi/Anime RPG universe. But then my blog became political on its own anyway.

When I was a kid, my mother used to joke that if I swallowed watermelon seeds in my haste to quench my thirst, it wouldn't be long before shoots begin to worm out the crown of my head and sprout a pert organism or two. I suppose it's the same with politics for me. I don't thirst for politics. I thirst for life. I'd rather be out backpacking abroad or playing co-ed volleyball than catching the next episode of Oppression Olympics between an exasperated race relations educator and a clueless n00b on the Internet. But when I witness patterns of globe-trotting expats acting irresponsibly to marginalized populations, or when male setters on the co-ed team go out of their collective way to set the ball all the way to the back row because they think I'm too female and too Asian to jump a few feet in my rotated net-rubbing spiking position, I come back to my blog-- and what do my Mssy fits inevitably yield? Politics. It's unavoidable. I step out the door, touch the world, and before I know it, the zerglings have incubated and hatched.

That's part of the backstory, at least.

What also really made this happen were the comments made toward this post, A Disincentive to the Female Voice Online by Jenn @ Reappropriate, as well, of course, as the post itself that started them. Sometimes all you need is a rallying cry. We really do need more women of colour bloggers, and blogs focusing exclusively on women of colour politics. As a member of a marginalized group, my voice simply doesn't leave as big an impact on someone else's forum floating in the great white ocean of cyberspace. Heck, if you've clicked through the Rants and Raves section of Craigslist, I'm sure you'd know what I'm talking about. If you've read comments left by posers pretending to be people of colour, you'd know what I'm talking about. If you've ever participated on a forum for months under the same screen name and still felt like your words evaporated after you've typed them, you'd know what I'm talking about. And if you felt that your views and the views of other marginalized groups lacked weight and density for some inexplicable reason until you wrapped them in a separate political blog, you'd know what I'm talking about.

So yes, I'm acting on the catalyst. I'm here, I'm listening, and this sort of writing certainly isn't new to me. It's time to consolidate my politically-related thoughts into this medium when they were previously scattered across APIA forums and appearing sporadically in all-too-ordinary blogs mostly about wet laundry and tenacious sardine thieves.

Let the dust unsettle.