Fruit Monster

Here's the fruit monster, fresh from Photoshop. What do you think about her? What does she inspire you to do? Is she you? What is she doing?

Kaytea has a table at Alternative Press Expo!

The Alternative Press Expo (APE) will take place November 1 & 2, 2008, at the Concourse Exhibition Center in San Francisco.

Yours truly will be there, at Booth #102, with books - Looking for a Woman To Marry, Contusion and Confusion, and (you heard it here first, folks!) a new book - tee shirts, posters and more! Please stop by, chat us up and steal our candy!

Kaytea has Joined the 20th Centrury

So here it is guys, I've finally figured out how to imbedd a blog into my website! Which means that I can do this again and again, and whenever I have some inconsequential piece of drivel that I want to snivel about....you will be able to hear me, unedited and unashamed!

So I hope you enjoy. I brought most of the old writing content from KayteaPetro.net over (with a few exceptions, because they're too boring for this new frontier for my website!).
In theory this whole "Blogging" thing will result in maximized efficiency, greater ability to spew forth nonsense!
我中意来参加“二十一世纪”的网络！我发现怎么弄到一个“波咯格”！！就是说，我会随便发表我的意见，能讨论很以外，很无聊的事情等等！

我希望您能享受。我把原来得网站（KayteaPetro.net)的大部分写作内容给带过来。

很多事儿在改变：我快要把可持续发展的MBA给读完。毕业。夏天刚刚结婚了，又搬家。我不知道未来回给我们什么惊讶，但我很欢迎它！

This is me? Confessions of a Punk Ass turned Schoolteacher.

(Origionally published in HTML in 2004).

Maybe it’s the weather, sweltery hot and humid, constantly threatening to break into thundershowers in our normally dry and mild climate that has brought the devil into my kids. Or perhaps it’s that the end of the school year is in sight and they care less and less about these mundane class matters when visions of endless days of freedom lurk in the back of their collective consciousness. Or maybe something, something besides the kindergartners, is underfoot (one of the disadvantages of being tall and teaching elementary school, is that it’s so hard to see the kids before you step on them!). Regardless, the munchkins have been turning into monsters lately, meaning that I, in my role of omniscient teacher with infinite patience must discipline them.
I must discipline other people? Such a bizarre and ironic situation has never occurred to me before. Me, a disciplinarian? Is this some sort of divine sick joke?
To start off, you should know that I was suspended from preschool on multiple occasions. I don’t remember for what, but I think it had something to do with "inappropriate language”, and the unfortunate habit I had of picking up other children who were smaller than me and not listening to my commands, and carrying them to the place I wanted them to be (and really is that such a crime?). In my father’s office all through my youth there was a picture of me in this period, in a clown suit, on Halloween, sitting on a chair, looking longingly at my preschool friends who are playing and having fun. I was stuck there, on the “Thinking Chair”, ostensibly thinking about my actions, and not thinking about how I immediately go and repeat them as soon as I scooted my little butt off the chair. Yep, you can tell from the picture that’s exactly what I am thinking about.
Later, in elementary school, I spent a lot of time in the hall, also “thinking”. Or in my room “thinking”. Maybe all these years of thinking have given me some special skills that have continued to enlighten me until adulthood, or maybe it was just time wasted feeling self-righteous, angry and frustrated with the stupidity of the people meting out punishments on me. Actually, maybe one of the causes of my iconoclassicism and total lack of respect for authority figures, was the number of times in my youth that I “served time” for “crimes” committed by quieter, cleaner, rosier cheeked and bow bedecked classmates. My parents had a particularly persnickerous system for punishing misbehavior: I had to go to my room and think of a punishment appropriate for the crime. Can you imagine sitting in your bedroom debating between whether you’d rather get spanked or go without dessert for a week?
In high school, I got in trouble my first term at school. I got caught sneaking into a boy classmate’s bedroom. It’s not what you think, I just wasn’t thinking that their rule was even worth dealing with, and that their artificial constructions of verboten space and unrestricted space were arbitrary and useless. Of course I hadn’t read theories of architecture at that time, but I knew they were lame and stupid. Then I got caught smoking, and then I took the fall for a friend who couldn’t get caught smoking again. All these things resulted in lectures from teachers, letters to and lectures from my parents. The number of times people told me that I shouldn’t smoke cigarettes made me so much more determined to smoke, that it made it almost impossible to quit, even when I really wanted to. I just couldn’t take their self important attitude that they were right about my life. It took a friend betting me he could quit first, and that it was “Ok” to fuck up and smoke. Suddenly I could quit because there were no rules.
College was no better, I got caught by the cops driving my friends car which happened to have a trunk full of beer. Despite being searched illegally, and having an of age person in the car, I lost my license for a while. Instead of stopping barrowing friends cars, or stopping going on beer runs underage, I got smarter about how I did it, and figured out ways to get the hooch delivered to me.
Now I am ostensibly a responsible adult; the idea being once you’re an adult they can’t hassle you about the small stuff, and you should be too smart and careful to get caught if you’re up to the big stuff. Social pressure instead of punishment is the method of choice to control and modify other people’s behavior. For some reason it has fallen upon me to discipline other people’s children.
It feels so wrong to me to discipline: I of all people know the futility of discipline in terms of changing the feelings that caused the behavior. Receiving punishment just makes me want to not get caught, and doubly determined to try to get away with it again so I can snub my nose at the authority figure. My students must feel the same way. Also, being someone whose lack of respect for authority figures and rules runs so deep that I must mentally prepare before going to file paperwork in city offices, or go to the police to get help, being thrust into the role of an authority figure is the strangest thing ever. Now I am what I disrespect, commanding futile, useless actions from others. In my experience, inspiration and drawing antagonists into discussion are the most effective methodologies for behavioral change; telling people what to do or think, especially after you criticize them, and make them anxious and angry just doesn’t win their hearts and minds.

Life is Beautiful.

(Originally published in HTML in 2004)

I woke up feeling like a piece of fried banana this morning, a new feeling for me. It was my first morning waking up inside my new mosquito tent, and being inside it strongly gives the impression of being a piece of food left out in a tropical place, with one of those fly net umbrellas covering over all the plates. I savored this feeling, imagining what it would feel like to get dipped into some of that Viet Namese sweet hot sauce, or maybe condensed milk and then bitten into. If it would feel significantly different for not having any bones, just being a slice of fried banana? I was unsure if the sogginess that happened as a result of my having been exposed to the air made a significant difference in my experience of getting eaten (even though regardless of freshness I wouldn’t have any bones) or if it all would feel the same to me. I imagined the teeth sliding smoothly into my flesh like oiled machine parts clicking into place. My consciousness slowly faded with each bite, until Pop! no more thought on the last bite. I didn’t imagine getting masticated, when the last bit of me left the toothpick or chopstick or whatever, my consciousness as a piece of fried banana would be done.

The Chinese government propaganda about ethnic minorities is not all wrong, despite the fact that it seems intensely xenophobic. There I was sitting in a park at one thirty in the morning, doing my soup-kitchen for mosquitoes impression, next to this girl from Chang Chun in the Northeast. The Yi boys suddenly jumped up and started singing and dancing in a circle, while the Zhuang boy tried to follow along, with a different Zhuang song and dance. She sighed, “I don’t want to leave Yunnan, and go back North. It’s so boring up North.” I nodded in agreement, while they started trying to tickle each other to make that person stop singing and dancing. Like macho only different. The majority Han Chinese paradigm on ethnic minorities, especially of the Southwest is that all they want to do is drink, sing, dance and screw. But really, is that an unhealthy lifestyle choice? I mean what’s the difference in terms of assigned value between that and sitting in an office stamping things, chewing on large chunks of meat, chain smoking and telling dirty jokes like Beijingese Chinese? Drinking, dancing and singing under the stars seems like the most natural thing, which should naturally be followed up with a nice organic screw, like glace naturally follows fatty meats in French cuisine. So I don’t know why the Hans would look down on this lifestyle choice, except that it doesn’t produce any capital, which is what many Hans are interested in. The boys diverged into two different songs, not really noticing they weren’t a chorus anymore, started to get tired and need more beer, so they slowly came over and squatted down with us more reticent girls. After a few rounds of toasts to the moon, the stars, the fact that they were lucky enough to have two girls to talk to while they drank and sang, and a song or two more, Nekkid Mike jumped up and started to practice his Kung Fu. One of the boys that just came up to the Big City from their village (to be a “comfort assistant” – whatever that means – at a sauna) jumped up and they started going at it. But it wasn’t about macho: it wasn’t about hurting the other person, or embarrassing them, it was about causing the other person to laugh and fall over so that their opponent could catch them. The guy new to town would attempt to do a fancy Kung Fu kick at Mike’s butt and Mike would catch him, pulling him off balance, and he would use his weight to get Mike to fall off balance and catch him and hold him so he could tickle him. I asked the Northeastern girl, “Is this what you’re going to miss?” “Yeah,” she said, “nobody knows how to have fun up North. You pay a lot of money to get bored.” Good point. I realized this was the second time they had talked me into trekking across half the city in the middle of the night to hang out in a park with them, when I lived next to the prettiest park in Kunming, and abhor getting eaten alive by mosquitoes. And I was having a great time.

I realized my only real complaint about life for the last two months is that mosquitoes have been driving me insane, preventing me from sleeping well, and making me uncomfortable. But this complaint, it is so minor! Life must be beautiful to have time to obsess about mosquitoes, and think about doing a series of large oil paintings of what they look like smashed onto the wall, after engorging themselves on your blood. One night, I killed a mosquito that couldn’t move it was so full of blood, and the giant red blood stain, and the black mangled mess on the white wall was so beautiful that I keep looking at it, and am loath to chip the corpse off the wall. That which annoys you can be beautiful; I still have so much to learn.

Roses, Rigid Gender Rolses and "You're not in San Francisco Anymyre.." Cinderella

(I wrote and origionally published this to the web on February 15, 2004)

I spent my Valentine’s Day doing what you should do as a single person on Valentine’s Day: getting beauty treatments with my straight girl friends, and then going to a gay bar with a bunch of despondent lesbians, mourning their lack of girlfriends. To be more precise, it was the Tibetan girl, Chu Mu, lamenting the fact that no one bought her a rose that day, for several hours, that set the tone for the evening. Lamenting lesbians are way more entertaining than the loutish, lecherous, and lame lads who lurk at the Rock and Roll bar. And spending Valentine’s Day at home alone with a cup of tea, while it may be the most “liberated feminist” way of spending a single Valentine’s Day, it is not MY cup of tea; I’m just not that old. I also don’t own a cat. Without some warm living being in your apartment, the whole thing gets too myopic, quickly. I’ve heard stories of friends waking up the morning after a single valentine’s day at home in the middle of the living room, covered in a blanket of Eurethmics, Sarah McLaughlin, Bikini Kill and Ella Fitzgerald records, reeking of hair dilapidator, with absolutely no eyebrows, and a stack of emails from various exes confirming that No, in fact, they NEVER want to be back together again in a million years, and recommending my friend should get therapy or they, the exes would get a restraining order. Like I said, not my cup of tea.
So I was at the only gay bar in town with the dyke posse, we had attempted to go to the only dyke bar in town, but it was closed for the holidays. We five girls were the only women in the bar. If you want to know about the decoration, do a wee meditation on how gay men like to be really precise with decoration, sticking to a particular theme, and how Chinese people like shiny things, particularly gold and tinsel, and you will know what it looked like. It was a very Chinese bar, in the sense that you have to order a quantity of one thing for everyone at the table to share, so like a twelve pack of beer, or a bottle of rum and a twelve pack of sodas, and at some point you end up with a fruit plate. Actually, I’m increasingly down with the fruit plate at the bars, the baby tomatoes go so well with beer, and the pear slices are so nice and crunchy when you start feeling a little tipsy.
Being the only table in the room that had women and foreigners at it, of course we got noticed, and dragged up onto stage by the drag queen who was running the entertainment, a.k.a. singing karaoke, and doing slightly naughty contests. There was this other drag queen, dressed up in female ethnic minority outfits who did traditional ethnic minority women’s dances. For those of you who haven’t seen how Chinese television and the Han majority in general co-opt and commodity the fifty five other ethnic minorities, understand that seeing that part of the performance was like an epiphany on Kunming. “Of course there would be a drag queen doing ethnic women’s dances! This is the most ethnically integrated city in China! I’m sitting with a Tibetan lesbian, and a Naxi lesbian! Why wouldn’t there be an ethnic minority drag queen?” Of course it could be a queer representation of the dominant Han cultural consumptivist paradigm, but it was really entertaining. That’s the other special feature of authentically Chinese bars, they always have entertainment, be it a girl in a see through outfit boredly pole dancing every half an hour for five minutes, or a guy wearing an American flag as a do-rag, singing Guns and Roses songs and holding his Zippo in the air, or a fashion show of gold lam? quincenerra dresses, or pulling the audience up onto stage to perform their talents for the rest of the bar.
Which is what happened to me and the French girl. We got put into pairs with other contestants, and informed that we were family units. Then the drag queen asked “Zai nimen jia, shei shi gong de, shei shi mu de?” Roughly translated: “In your family, who’s the butch and who’s the femme?” But it’s a really funny way to express that idea linguistically because gong is the word that you add to an animal name to make it masculine with balls. Like gongniu is bull, gongma is stallion, gongji is cock as opposed to cow, horse, chicken. Likewise, mu is the word you attach to animal words to make them clearly female: like cow, mare, hen. The gender role difference My (male) partner demurred on that question, and then it was announced that we had to perform talents, my partner said we would be doing the supermodel walk. A talent I guess. I mean if you have to have a talent that you can whip out at any time and can be inclusive of any partner, it might as well be the supermodel walk. Right?
He looked at me very seriously backstage: “I’m going first”. I shrugged and smiled. He minced and sashayed all the way down the runway (oh yeah, the stage had a runway sticking out into the audience) and then came back, I decided the only thing to do was to butch it up. I walked out their doing the slow swagger, halfway between the cholo swagger and the cowboy swagger, on the apex of the runway, I did the boy supermodel head side to side thing (like in Zoolander) and the cool boy finger point and walked back stage, to hold hands with him and come back out and do the “pair modeling”. For this display of a complete lack of talent we won. We beat the French girl and the other Chinese boy who modeled but were way less professional than us, a couple where one boy did ballet and the other was the barre, and a really cute couple that sang a love duet together, but I think they were dating cause they had the same hair and the same outfit on. It might have helped our case that when they had us line up for the winner selection, I pulled out my Leatherman and cleaned my nails with the knife (if you have to stick to one dimensional gender roles, you might as well have some fun with it-right?). We won a photograph of a painting of a bowl of pink roses in a shiny gold frame. He let me have it, although I chivalrously offered to use my saw to cut it in half. I gave it to Chu Mu so that at least she could get her roses on for Valentine’s Day and I wouldn’t have to think up something to do with something that tacky.
According to Chu Mu, her problem is that all the dykes in Kunming are “T’s”, and she can’t date a “T” because she is a “T”. “T” means Tomboy, or butch. I think the other is called “G” for Girl, but I could be wrong, because she was way more interested in lamenting the excessive number of T’s rather than focusing on strategies for finding more G’s. Why can’t a T and a T get together? “Oh no, maybe in Beijing or Shanghai, but never in Kunming.” Why can’t you just get together with whoever you like, what does this butch/femme stuff have to do with it? “Because all the T’s are my brothers, you can’t fall in love with your brother.” That’s right, queer language in China uses a partial inversion of gender. Like if you are a lesbian, and you have a good friend who is a “T” and younger than you, instead of calling her your meimei, younger sister, you call her your didi, little brother. However, since they have decided that I’m femme (which is amusing, Gerald suggested they have to all be so butch in their own minds because they are a subaltern group in a fairly repressive culture, like queers in Texas), so I’m jiejie, big sister. And to discuss your social group if it’s a dyke group (regardless of the numbers of butches or femmes) you use gemenr, homeboys, and the gay boys use jiemenr, homegirls. Other interesting language things: coming out of the closet is called chugui, literally to come out of the closet (chu yigui).
So last night when I hung out with them again (it was the Naxi girl’s last night in town, she’s going back to school in Beijing) I found out some things about queer cultural aspects. The girl who’s studying in Guilin, in Guangxi is not out to anyone except for her Kunming posse of homeboys because Guilin is to Kunming what Kunming is to Beijing in terms of socially progressive notions. She’s studying computer engineering, 70% of her classmates are boys, and all the girls have boyfriends. Her dream is to get a good job when she graduates in Beijing, so that she can go to Beijing and have a girlfriend far away from the prying eyes of her parents who are high party officials in Yunnan. When I asked her how she’s going to deal with their social pressure to get married, she said she’s never going to come out to them, and always pretend she can’t find a boyfriend because she’s a computer nerd. Welcome to being queer in China. The Tibetan girl, who was the first one of their posse I met, plans with her girlfriend to find a pair of life partner gay boys, and get apartments near each other and get married to the boys, so that when the relatives come for a visit they can partner swap to have two couples of one boy and one girl. And she insists that she has to have a baby to look after her in the old age, a very Chinese notion, but when I asked her how this would jive with her wife swapping scheme, she got confused. She says that arrangement is pretty common in the queer community, because a lot of benefits only get assigned to people who are married, like housing, and certain types of promotions. Andy, another girl in the posse said that she plans to marry an impotent man, because she’s going to have to get married at some point, so she’s going to find herself an impotent man, or a gay man to marry. When I asked her if she plans to have a child, she said she wants to adopt, which is unfortunate, because the quality of adoptable babies have been going down, because all the “good ones” are getting adopted by foreigners. “Not only do you have to adopt a girl, but she’ll probably be crippled too.” I asked her, would you prefer to have a boy? “Of course.” Does any of this seem crazy? Because it all seems really crazy to me.
Sometimes travel is mindblowing for those of us fortunate to be born and raised in San Francisco. I mentioned to Gerald that I thought it was so weird that none of them ever plan to tell their families, and he said, “You know, it’s hard enough for people to come out to their families in the States, imagine doing that in China.” And I said, that people just come out and that’s that. He smiled in his football player from Texas way and said, “The rest of the US isn’t like San Francisco, Kaytea.” He should know, his best friend on his high school football team said to him once, “You’re Oriental, I thought you was Chinese?”

1=buch yao (T, for "tomboy")
0=femme ling (P, for "po婆"

12 Steps to Getting Over a Relationship

1. Buy/make yourself a new outfit/shoes that make you feel HOT.
2. Go dancing a lot. It gets out the pent up sexual energy, without the STD risk.
3. Quit/cut back on smoking and/or whatever alcohol or drugs you were abusing at the end of your relationship as a way of asserting your power over your ex-.
4. Do NOT lie around the house and mope. Force yourself to go out and fill your head with interesting and exciting experiences. (Take up a new hobby-there never was a better time to learn how to underwater basket weave or weld than RIGHT NOW!)
5. Learn/Start again doing something creative with your buddies, like start a band, or learn to knit.
6. Get a haircut. (Nothing says “Fuck you!” to the ex like them a hot new ‘do)
7. Change your mode of transportation. This enables you to change your patterns of rumination.
8. Set some professional goals. Improve your economic standards! Focus on work for a while!
9. Flirt with people of the type you don’t normally date. This enables you to get your flirting skills back up to date, feel attractive, and improve your self esteem in a risk-free way.
10. Generally dress in a way that makes you feel good. At the end of relationships, people tend to dress like slobs.
11. Buy a vibrator or self-love toy.
12. Start pursuing that dream that you put off.
13. Try to avoid bouncing into a new relationship. Rebounds are bad, you WILL make the same mistakes, until you learn the lessons.

Eulogy for Frank A. Petro, Jr

Given by Kaytea Petro Saints Peter and Paul Church San Francisco, California February 2, 2007
See the Sphynx with my family. Cook faboulous meals with wine pairings for Cindy Sheenan to protest the war in Iraq until we managed to invite President Bush for a good Italian shakedown. Drive the Silk Road in the Jeep (and somehow find out how to use the snorkel function). Make life for illegal migrants slightly easier and make bank by using technology to envio dinero. Walk one of my daughters down the stairs of 624 Euclid in a white dress. Be a stand-up dad to all the kids whose own dads had fucked up or fucked off. Open a small four table restaurant with a twenty page wine list. Run away with Helen Turley/Hillary Clinton. Take cooking classes in Mexico. Learn to speak Spanish . Shoot George Bush. This is just a list of things that Frank Petro didn't quite get around to in his rich and abundant life. Looking at the list, we get a sense of how big he could think, and how big we can think, if we allow ourselves. Last winter, when it seemed sure he was a goner, he often took stock of his life, and spoke of the things he still wanted to do. Maybe because of this, he stuck around for another year, sharing his love, ceviche, and opinions on where we should be going with us. How many of us have heard these exhortations from Frank? "Treat it like a woman," "Why can't you cook, are you a candy ass?", "Roll up your sleeves", "Close the deal," "Nail that guy", "If I see that guy again I'll break his knees". (And for those of you who visited him in Arkansas) "Get me out of here I need my black shirt". Why is my dad so quoatable? Because he had wisdom? Or because he had the cajones to say what we were all thinking? I think the latter. What my dad was sometimes, what we all want to be�.the loudmouth who shoots it off in the right way�. The stand up guy that you could always call for a beach walk and a shakedown. My dad had this ability to make people think beyond themselves. I think it was because he always though big, he thought beyond and above what he was now. He shook us up and kept us on our toes. He kept us looking forward and kept us moving. I think he would want that to continue. But how? By telling each other to roll up our sleeves, by making the pizza, by driving to Panama, or by doing something more exciting? When you wandered off track, he brought you back by talking to you, by keeping the conection going, by listening. His strong arm act was just an act, it covered an understanding heart. A loving heart, and a keen mind. He didn't want to know just what you had done, but also what you were going to do, and how. Sometimes why. He wanted to have fun, and help people. His whole deal was about how to have an influence on you, not by force or even coercing you, but by convincing you. With fun or by logic or by tequila. Sometimes all at once.