Amy Adoyzie Enjoys Life and Junk

My kids' lives are state-mandated. They're in class six days a week. Six full days, from dawn to beyond dusk when the final bell rings after 10 PM. Much of that time is spent inside the stark walls of their classrooms memorizing exercises that they'd rather forget, cramming to pass a single exam. My goal, amidst all of this anti-learning pro-robot-making system, is to give them choice and an outlet.
I asked my students to contribute to their very own zine as an outlet for self-expression and an exploration in independent publishing. I was their age when I first discovered zines and how intoxicatingly empowering they were. It's been ten years and I'm still putting out my own stories.
I gave them a choice, all 1,350 of 'em, to submit something or not. The exact numbers aren't in yet, but I think less than 10% contributed. It's disappointing that they didn't jump at the opportunity to do something in the classroom that wasn't geared towards studying for examinations, but secretly I'm glad that the number of submissions is manageable because I'm the one who's going to put it together.
What were the kids doing, if they weren't zine-ing? Here's a list of the activities that I observed in lieu of self-expression:
- Clip fingernails
- Work on math and physics problems
- Sleep
- Read Chinese magazines and newspapers
- Stare at inanimate objects
- Listen to MP3 player
- Tell me that they have "no inspiration"
- Play Tetris on electronic dictionary
- Countdown minutes left in class out loud
- Scrape gunk off fingernails

In between eating pounds of green raisins and trying to keep from catching on fire, I manage to get my design-senses tingling for Razorcake.
I'm way proud of this Art Junk! Here are some of my faves (including the two covers!):





You can check out everything that's been fit to print here, in its entirety!

Tommorow will be the last day of our teaching practicum, and my lesson today I taught them slang like:
hella
tight
sweet
yo
dude
peace out (with the fist to the heart and peace sign!)
Please take a moment and imagine a class of 30 chinese 10th graders saying the following in unison
"Yo dude, that girl is hella sweet."

Thank you. My job is done!

***

Two boys, Blues and Heaven, asked Natalie and I about an English word. They kept referring to sweat and pointing at our arms. There was a mention of black stuff. We were able to extrapolate that they were asking about what we call that gunky junk that ends up on our fingernails from the layer of sweat on our skin. I said the word in Cantonese, something like maan (sounds like slow), and the kids understood it and said it in Mandarin. They were disappointed to find out that there was no English equivalent.
Or is there?

***

Two days ago I did a lesson on independent publishing and one of my teaching partners gave me the finger-across-the-neck gesture as to kill the lesson because he thought I was going to speak of revolution or some shit. Instead, I had each of the students draw a comic about a superhero that they create and write a story about how their hero can make China a better country.
It was heartbreaking at first, when they all just looked at me and stared blankly at their pieces of paper. Many of my students were having difficulty with being creative and writing a story of their own. As an example, I introduced Funzilla in a story about how she went to the moon to lure some panda bears to China in order to make it a great country. Eventually, everybody caught on and submitted amazing stories, but it was still odd to see all these 16-year-olds struggle with creative writing.
I laid them out together and made a small zine of their comics. Sixty-four yuan later, each kid in my class had their own copy of their comic zine! It was such a fantastic feeling to seem them excitedly flip through their independent publication. I know I won't be able to do anything like this when I get to my host school because I'll have about a thousand students, so it felt nice to be able to do it for someone. Once a zinester, always a zinester.

***

Some of our students invited a group of teachers out to dinner. They asked what I liked and I said that I don't eat meat.
"So, you are a virgin," one of the girls said.
I looked at her and tried not to laugh my guts out and said, "No (I'm not a virgin). The word is vegetarian."
Then I held her arm firmly and looked her in the eyes and asked, "Do you know the word you said?"
She was confused for a moment before blushing and giggling nervously. Later, I saw her in the hall about to fall on the floor laughing with her friend.



In ZieZie news: ZieZie pooped out again a couple days ago when I brought her to school. I think it may have been too hot and it just went to take a nap. It's back in working order, but the shut-downs spook me. Anybody think it's a bigger problem?

In weather news: Apparently Changsha is one of four "ovens" in China (the others being Wuhan, Nanjing and Chong Qing). It was more than 100 degrees fahrenheit yesterday, and it felt even worse with it's thick as peanut butter humidity. Everyone is melting.

Summer's schizophrenic here.
Three days ago, I wore my black hooded wool coat on a bike ride to pick up a craigslist purchase. The sky had been grey all day, threatening rain. The day before that, on Thursday, it had sprinkled dark water spots on my pants as I rode from work.
It's muggy and hot now, leaving me with a thin layer stickiness. Today, as I rode close-in to the river, the air had a stagnant poopy stench. But it could just be that I'm so goddamned hungover too.

Last night we crowded into Nat and Rene's house for Nick and Joni's going-away party. It was hilariously drunken and fun and complete non-stop nonsense. It was also filled with weird dynamics and small dramas that make you rethink putting so many drunken young people together in such a small space. I recall two missions I had: 1) to poke all dude's right nipples and 2) to poke all girl's left boobies. I succeeded mostly on mission #1, but got distracted by mission #2 when Elizabeth repeatedly rubbed her booty on me.
I also ate lots of tasty salmon.
Earlier that day, we had a yard sale where Nick and Joni gave away lots of their clutter and I sold Holy Shit! cookies for a dollar. I sold 8 and they're going into my Tampon Fund!

This weekend had been filled with a weird air permeating my pores. Maybe it's summer finally arriving.
As I left my shift at Green Noise on Friday, Ken told me about how a very young teenage girl bought The Post-It Diaries. He and I laughed at how I just destroyed her prospects of imagining anything but a lackluster adulthood amidst cubicles. I can't accurately describe how it feels to destroy hope and optimism, but it made me laugh nonetheless.
Then later that day, I stopped by Safeway to pick up some butterscotch chips for my cookies. The grandmotherly woman who was ringing me up asked how I was doing.
"I'm fine. How're you?" I automatically replied.
"Well, I'm good. But not as good as someone with such miraculous freckles! Look at em! There's just something so wholesome about freckles!"
"Oh, well, thank you," I said, slightly shocked by her declaration of my miraculous freckles. I really had to bite my tongue from telling her that I am about as un-wholesome as a the fast food industry and that lots of Asians don't dig freckles and they're almost considered blemishes.
It's bizarre to go from future-ruiner to miraculously wholesome in the span of a half hour, but I guess there's not other way of doing it.

It's nearly 1 AM and my armpits are sweaty. Welcome summer.

Late last month, on the one-year anniversary of me quitting the real world, I finished The Post-It Diaries.



The Post-It Diaries is a chronicle of my time served as an adult, working 40+ hours a week and generally feeling like a schmuck. It's about 50 pages long and two years of my life. If any of ya'll want one, it's only $2 and you can PayPal me at amyadoyzie@gmail.com.

Sanks!

I'll confess. Adoyzie was not the last name given to me at birth.
I was 16-years-old and had no real concerns in my life except for being the average angry teenage girl who obsessed over the Lookout! Records catalogue. My life was filled Joey Ramones, Ben Weasels and Joe Queers, all names with self-declared last names. Punk names.
Before I renounced punk rock for all its hypocrisy, white dudes and inevitable mirror of the mainstream society that it proclaims to challenge (hello Punk Rock Confidential! A tabloid magazine with the tagline, "It's not about the music" for Chrissakes!); before all of that I was a naive young thing who actually believed that a scene of kids with wildly colored hair and tattered Chuck Taylors could change the world.
My memory is very clear, I was sitting on my bedroom floor with my beige phone securely cinched between my ear and shoulder talking to Gus.
"I need a punk name," I declared. "Amy something."
Gus muttered something that I couldn't quite make out.
"Did you say 'Adoyzie'?" I asked.
"What?! No. What the hell is that?" I recall Gus saying.
"I dunno, but I like it. Amy Adoyzie."
I'm a sucker for alliterations and gibberish. Adoyzie meant nothing, and at a time in my young life where nihilism made lots of sense, it worked.
I've been writing, designing and prancing around with Adoyzie as my pseudonym for almost ten years now and today I finally semi-officially acknowledged it as an AKA.

Late last summer I did an interview with one-man-band extraordinaire Almighty Do Me a Favor for Punk Planet. It was nothing huge, 800 words max. They were gonna pay me $30 for it and I wasn't going to argue. I finally received the check last month and smirked as I read that the check was made out to Amy Adoyzie, which made me realize something profoundly lame: I've never been paid to write.
There I was, a proper paid writer and junk, and with no bank account to deposit the greenery into.
I braced against the funked-up Portland weather today (shifting between pleasant spring sunshine to sheets of rain with pellet sized hail), and rode to the bank to figure out how I can get my ass paid. Cuz I gotsa get paid! Armed with the Punk Planet issue that had the interview, a Razorcake issue with my column that featured a goofy photo of me aside my pseudonym and picture ID.
An eager Vice President/Manager greeted me as soon as I stepped into the bank. I told him of my predicament and with all my evidence in hand, he believed that I wasn't trying to rip off someone else's check.
"Do you think you'll be getting more checks with this name?"
"Uh..." I thought for a moment. "I doubt it. I don't get paid to write very often."
But you see, this Vice President/Manager, who greets his valuable banking public at the door, believed in me, in my success as someone who may one day receive yet another check for making use of the English language. He added a note to my account "Profile," to state that I do officially have an alias, wherein it recognized my existence as a person who writes things and every now and then someone may send her a piece of paper that can be redeemed for cash.
Now that's customer service.