Try something maybe a bit ridiculous, and, racially, questionable. Asian daze -- for science!

...that should do it...

Tapping the white-out brush against the rim of its respective receptacle, Lenny stuck it in and twisted it closed. His eyes returned to the open page before him. While the other lines he had written were still scrawled across its surface, there was a clear streak of white in place of where the first, top one would have been.

Ie,

"Staff at Type&Co pick their noses regularly while serving customers as typical etiquette."

"I'll have to check back tomorrow to see if this does anything," Lenny mumbled to himself. He noted he'd been doing a lot of mumbling lately. Side effects of being alone in the house, he guessed.

After cooking some pasta and watching a rerun of In Living Color, Lenny dropped onto his sofa a full, potentially reflux-triggering man.

Except he wasn't done yet.

As the clock hand on the wall slipped over the ninth numeral, Lenny brought the book before him once more, dropping it on the coffee table in his and his wife's upstairs bedroom. Pen in hand, Lenny drew his philtrum deeper into his intertwined knuckles. His eyes scanned this way. That. To the flower vase, which he hadn't watered in a few days. The fireplace, which needed wood. The photo of him and his wife and their two children, situated in between the two sofas in the sitting room.

Then, on an advertisement glowing across his still open computer screen. The article being sold this time was outerwear, displayed on a very cute-looking Asian woman as she walked up a mountainside against a sunnily lit sky, and he remembered something a work associate of his had drunkenly confessed to him at a bar after a long day of school board meetings. The subject being that of the social perception of 'stereotypes' -- in this case, the central target being the presumed sexual connotations of women of a particular race.

"You know it's not true! Asian chicks can be just as ROUND and THICK as black sisters. Back when I was in the Orient, my friend, I was sharing this trashy hostel space with a fellow globetrotter, and apparently, next door was a BEEHIVE of hot Asian specimens, all of them curvy in the right places, but each with their own little flavor! You know, some had breasts that could tip a scale, others had those hunter-gatherer hips, some had meaty thighs you could chew, others a perfectly curved back -- and you know, I'm not talking FAT, these girls weren't fat -- they were just blessed with proportions that were practically criminal, you know! It's not something I'd have expected in such a perfect, plural package, yet there it was. Juicy Asian chicks, on the double, in me and my tenant friend's undeserving presence."

Lenny set down his glass. Head tilted. One lopsided finger held in mid-air. "But... Will..."

"Yes, your magnanimousness?"

"YOU'RE black."

"And the sky is blue. Whatchyu trying to say, Lenny? 'Cause I'm just trying to be honest." Shifty eyes. "And my honest opinion, is that I think Asian chicks are just as raunchy in the bed and just as much of an eyecandy show as the archetypal, ghetto booty homegirl. Back in Hong Kong, I saw plenty of ladies you could clap. I'm telling you, boy. Not everything's a black and white thing, but the yellow's ain't a joke, either. Hell, we may just have it backwards. It's all construct, right? Everybody be expecting a girl with a little darker shade on them to put out, or to be hiding one hell of a caboose underneath that dress, and for Asian chicks to be these frail, demure ladies that keep their head bowed at a ninety-degree angle or some shit. You know -- wife material, where the fairer sex of our kind is relegated, not all the time, but relatively speaking, comparatively more with respect to not just chinos but everyone in general, to booty call whore."

Shrugging, Lenny didn't really have the sense to stop Will's new, obviously alcohol-laden tirade. Instead, he gestured to the bartender for another refill.

"But you know, my fine feathered friend. Asian ladies... they can get up to some wild stuff."

He grinned.

"Wild!"

Lenny was suspicious before, but quite convinced of Will having a serious case of yellow fever after that night of incoherent back and forths. It was a good time. At the time, he still didn't know what Will was doing on the board of the superintendents or how he still had a chair at the table, (he used to be a dialect instructor in film... erotic films), but the times had were good. They were.

So, in honor of his friend, Lenny decided to base his next experiment on his blatant Asian obsession.

Stereotypes were believed because they had some basis in reality. Not in a perfectly transliterated manner -- often, the truth was a much duller, or tragic, reality that became obfuscated by fabrications and pop media.

But as there was some truth to them, there was a variety of ways to approach 'twisting' them.

Lenny looked back to the advertisement on his computer screen. Then onto the page of the Book.

How about not just changing the stereotype... but exaggerating it? Exaggerating reality directly to accommodate it, so it would be a near-accurate transliteration?

Lenny glanced to a wall, but really, was thinking of the Yamamoto's three houses down. They were a nice family, who were well off thanks to the father's car dealership business. He and his wife had one daughter and a son together, but it was the women of the family that attracted his interest at the moment.

Mainly, because they were pretty. Their Asian features were clear but cute, perfect cheekbones on their porcelain faces, with bodies that were bestowed with creamy, toned legs, as their regular exercise routines could attest to. They were also not quite white-washed, as they had all, barring the youngest son, been born and raised in the Land of the Rising Sun before moving here. Lenny tried not to pigeonhole entire groups of people based on the small, insular experiences he had with partial instances of them. But the women of the Yamamoto family were quite fittingly modest and kind, almost to a faulty degree. One time, he nearly bumped into the daughter, Keiko, while walking the dog, and she apologized for fifteen seconds. He counted.

The mother, meanwhile, was a busty lady, and one that you could easily see encouraging such considerate social cues; she was friendly, despite her often broken English, and did that thing some girls did, regardless of nationality, where they always laughed a bit everytime you exchanged greetings, smiling, eyes that seemed unsure of where to go all the time. And she never quite wore clothes that pronounced her very alluring endowments. Lenny wondered how much of this whole shindig had to do with the father, who, while also genial on the surface, seemed to clearly harbor a possessive, serious eagle eye below.

Alright. He had a hook. He had test subjects that could easily be observed. There was a spark here and he decided to pounce on it. Lenny clicked on the pen and pushed it onto the Book of Reality's open pages.

"Asian women are known for being flirty, sexual deviants, even in spite of the demure demeanors they may display on the surface. Below is a dirty, vulgarity-spewing girl who knows how to have sex and how to please a man, as they are naturally very interested in the subject, and it can't be helped, as it is their nature."

"No Asian woman is flat chested -- they are all at least moderately sized. They also are known for having big asses; the first thing that people think of amid mentions of said body part or sexual actions involving it are Asian women, who are the epitome of curvy, sensual, dominating physicality."

"Whereas Asian women are often considered to be perfect booty call whores, black women are often considered perfect wife material, as they tend to be demure, softspoken, and subservient, the epitome of a slender, sensitive feminine figure."

"All Asian women get up to wild stuff in bed. Wild."

There. That was terrible, and would go terribly if his collegial professor of Ethnic Studies ever saw it.

But, if everything he'd seen so far with this Book of Reality was to be believed, now, there was nothing terrible about it.

Only true.

After washing up and brushing his teeth minty, Lenny curled up under the sheets and shut off the lamplight. As he fell out of consciousness, images of the back of that green-haired girl faded into his mind. A dense fog overtook the vacuum of space as she walked straight into it, and he blacked out.