Tag: white people

U-pick, U-shoot and then U-sleep

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Today’s Fun Family Time included a two-hour drive to an apple orchard up in Michigan; my wife’s side of the family has apparently been doing it as a yearly thing for forever and just decided to invite the out-of-towners this year.

I don’t know if you’ve ever used an apple cannon. I can tell you that after firing $10 worth of apples out of one, I’m going to find a way to build one in our back yard. The apple cannons were absolutely the highlight of the trip; I discovered to my consternation that despite apples generally being among my favorite fruits, when rotting apples is the only thing I can smell in a given location, it’s going to leave me feeling a bit ill, so I was fighting off a shitty mood for most of the afternoon and just mostly trying to keep a smile plastered on my face. The apple cannons totally fixed that problem.

(Also, Christ, there’s nothing that can reduce people to ‘splosion- and cannon-loving Americans faster than seeing someone hit a target with an apple at 50 yards. Wow.)

There was also a large corn maze. Despite having grown up in and spending most of my life living in Indiana, I have never been in a corn maze, and I still haven’t, because the three of us figured we were going to get lost and decided not to make the time investment. I figure you want to do a corn maze when you have time to get hopelessly lost and not when you want to be home before it’s dark.

Then once we got home, in accordance with our most ancient traditions, all three of us retired to separate rooms to recharge and not speak to each other any more, and I fell asleep under a pile of cats, which is why this post is just going up at 9:00 PM.

Tomorrow is not a day off officially, but I took one anyway. I’ve been pretty good about attendance this year and upon realizing that the wife and child would both be home, had a “fuck it” moment and called in a personal day. Hail Columbia, or whatever.

Today’s moment of screaming inside my brain

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

Many years ago– I have told this story before, but in a previous version of this blog, I think– I had a deeply weird conversation with a second-generation Vietnamese student in one of my classes where I had to convince him that he was Asian. This was long enough ago that you still had to fill out a bunch of bubbles with a pencil in order to take a standardized test, and he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to fill out in the Race category. His first guess was that he was white, since he had been born here. And if the kid was younger I’d make an argument that I could see it; he was not born in Asia, which may in and of itself have short-circuited his brain out of choosing “Asian,” particularly if his parents only ever referred to their family as Vietnamese, which of course would not have been an option on the list.

He was an eighth grader at the time.

At any rate, no, son, fill out Asian, please, and then go home and have a conversation with your parents about whether there is anything else about your identity that they have not mentioned in the last fourteen years.

Today, out of nowhere, I had a student (Puerto Rican, I think) walk up to me during passing period and ask me if I was white. The look I gave her must have answered her question, because before I actually said anything she clarified with the following:

“No, I mean like real white. All white. White-white.”

Just in case you’ve forgotten, this is what I look like:

So … yes. Completely white. All the white. Flat White. Damn near pink, really.

I did not press the child for an explanation.

Pretty!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek2 Comments

In lieu of a post with actual content, please enjoy this photograph of my pretty new watch on my somewhat less pretty, keratosis pilaris-riddled wrist.

There’s something weird going on with the angle there, btw. The watch band could stand to be a tiny bit bigger, no more than a centimeter and probably not even that much, but I swear it fits nicely and is not cutting off my circulation in any way. 🙂

Now to see if I can make it through the day without any notifications.

Just wondering

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

Has anyone else, while perusing job listings, seen a listing for a job with what is obviously a tech company, taken one look at the tech company’s name, and decided that regardless of the job, the tech company was going to be out of business in a few years and so there was no good reason to apply? I just got kicked a listing for a company called Optimizely. Optimizely. And … nah. That’s got pets.com written all over it. As soon as the venture capital runs out these folks are gonna be gone. I mean … this is from their website:

Does that not absolutely scream “we are burning through our seed money as fast as we can move it offshore”? These folks are gonna have their pink slips before I can finish the application. I love this picture, too:

I’ll give them this: for a tech company, there do seem to be a fair number of women around, at least in the pictures. But you don’t get to have someone holding up an “embrace inclusion” poster when you only managed to find one black person to stand in the picture, and given how awful the Photoshopping is across the board on this image one wonders if he was actually in the room with everybody else. A couple of those people initially scan Asian or maybe Hispanic but that is still a group of white people with some pepper sprinkled on it, not anything that looks like “inclusion.”

Note also that in all of those posters there’s not a hint of what this company actually does, which I suspect boils down to nothing at all anyway. I bet half the employees at this place couldn’t nutshell what their jobs actually are for.

Anyway, I’m still job hunting. Just not with these guys.

That time of year again

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

…It’s Dear God White People Shut Up day!

https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1351218058094915585

I talk about this every year, and I do it to remind my fellow white people: Martin Luther King would have been to the left of every major politician you can name, and next year I need to mute his name on MLK Day because I get so unbelievably tired of (mostly) conservative politicians deliberately erasing everything about what the man thought in favor of a toddler’s conception of Jesus; ie, the Nicest Man Who Ever Lived, who never made anyone uncomfortable in any way and how dare you suggest any such thing. White people hated him when he was killed (by, uh, a white guy; not an accident) and the simple fact is if he were still alive and kicking most of us– most of the white men, at least– would hate him today too. There are politicians who praised him today who this month have voted to disenfranchise Black voters. It is proof of the nonexistence of life after death that this man, having spent most of said afterlife talking to Malcolm X and watching white people continue the Same Exact Shit, has not risen from his grave to slap his name out of the mouths of all sorts of people.

This is another one of those days where it is made perfectly clear to me (not that I ever doubted it) that I cannot possibly understand the Black experience in this country, because I am driven to snarling incoherent rage several times a week by white nonsense and I do not understand why Black people aren’t killing us all the time. I would understand it.

One minor little detail about that tweet that at least entertained me if not generating a minor amount of actual pride, much like a puppy that has received a single pat on the head: the head of the Afro-American Studies department at Howard University retweeted it. I’m not sure I should be as geeked by that as I am, but whatever. I’ll take my joys where I can get them this year.

(Also, the rest of the speech quoted in the tweet is here; I hadn’t read it before today and it’s well worth reading.)

I got a lot done today, and one of the things on that list was putting together lesson plans for tomorrow and the day after. My plans for Inauguation Day? Nothing. I expect to be a jittery wreck for most of the day even if it goes smoothly, and while none of my students really seem especially into politics or The News I suspect a handful of them are worried about it as well. So fuck it. I gave them a day off on Wednesday, which is typically a day with no in-person instruction anyway, because of “district training” that somehow never involves middle school math teachers. I also cancelled the 8th grade team meeting, and flat-out admitted in the email that I was doing it because I didn’t expect to be in any shape to take it seriously.

So far, nobody’s come after me. I don’t expect that to change, but we’ll see what happens.

Quick question

On By Luther M. SilerIn life2 Comments

Has the number of white people losing their shit in public over trivial and sometimes imaginary violations of either their “rights” or the sort of behavior they expect from other people actually skyrocketed in the last six months, or is it just that, much like police brutality, it’s always been there and the difference is now as soon as someone starts showing their ass in public six people whip out cameras?

I’m not even necessarily talking about covid-related stuff. I’ve seen so many videos over the last couple of week of people just purple-faced and incoherent with rage over absolutely nothing that it’s genuinely shocking, and it’s not like I’m going to look for this kind of stuff. And there have been a number where it’s clearly crossed a line from misplaced rage and landed straight on mental illness. I mean, sure, sometimes it’s funny to watch somebody lose their damn mind at a cashier who clearly doesn’t give a shit because their burger had too many pickles on it or whatever but I’m starting to see a subgenre where by the time they’re done they’re not funny anymore and I just want someone to put the poor person in a place where they can get help.

Theories?

In which I’ve got stuff to do and getting started would be cool

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, lifeLeave a comment

We have reached a major milestone in adulting: my wife and I are about to become Garage Refrigerator people, because I need a place to store my many beverages, and our current House Refrigerator is being cruelly used for food. In theory, our new Garage Refrigerator is being delivered today (“between 8:00 AM and 8:00 PM”) but there has been sketch all over this process from the beginning, and I have placed a bet with my wife for the princely sum of $1 USD that at 8:00 PM tonight we will not only not be Garage Refrigerator people but we will not have received any phone calls or other forms of contact about why we received no delivery or where our Garage Refrigerator actually is.

Funny thing is, when that happens, I’m not even gonna be mad about it. I’m so convinced it’s gonna go sideways that it’s not even a big deal.

Unfortunately, it does mean that I’ve spent the day in Receiving a Delivery and Using Extraneous Capital Letters mode, which means that I’ve so far not been able to complete a single other damn thing that I had planned to do today. I have a video to finish putting together that is probably at least a couple of hours’ work (and for which I’m waiting on a lot of other people to send me stuff who are clearly also procrastinating,) I have some editing to do for a former student’s fiction project, I have more PD to do (maybe) and I can probably go ahead and get started on final grading and attendance for the semester, since the kids are supposed to have everything done today. That is mostly a tomorrow project, but I can get started. I also have a fiction project that I got a bit of work done on yesterday that I would like to make more progress on today.

But hey! I’m blogging. That’s something, right?

I can see my driveway from my office, if I turn my chair around a bit, and I’m doing that every couple of minutes, for no good reason. Again, I’m not mad– and there are still several hours during which technically the refrigerator can be delivered, so it’s not like it’s late yet– I just wish I was less dumb, because my brain has clearly decided that since I spent a chunk of time this morning cleaning and organizing the garage in preparation for the Refrigerator that nothing else can be completed until that task is definitively crossed off my list. That’s my fault, not the delivery people.

I will, of course, post a picture once my new toy has arrived. You should hold your breath.

2:26 PM, Wednesday May 27: 1,685,149 confirmed cases and 99,674 Americans dead.

In which white people make terrible decisions

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, PoliticsLeave a comment

I seriously thought Ralph Northam’s stupid lying racist ass was the dumbest thing I was going to encounter this week, I really did. He issued what I thought was a pretty decent apology the night that the blackface/Klan picture broke, and I almost– almost– thought that maybe he shouldn’t have to immediately resign.

Well, fuck me for giving a racist a second’s benefit of the doubt, because the very next morning this asshole is not only trying to take back his admission that it was him in the picture, he “defends himself” by saying he wasn’t in blackface that time but there was this other time that he did it and man, isn’t shoe polish hard to get off your face?

So fuck that guy. He can go. Ain’t nobody gonna miss him.

(I won’t be entertaining a lot of debate on this point, for the record. We can lose everybody who ever wore blackface, period. I don’t give a fuck who you are or when you did it. I can’t believe that not only am I still having this fucking conversation, but it’s like the third time in a few weeks.)

And then I log onto Twitter for a moment during my lunch break and I get to play the Dead or an Asshole? game, since Liam Neeson is trending for some fucking reason. A wise man once said that the Internet plays a game where every day a new person is chosen as the Main Character of the Internet, and you win the game if that person is never you.  So, Liam lost the game today.

And Liam’s story kinda had me fucked up for a minute, you know? Because– and stay with me, here, because I’m phrasing this carefully– I very much do get the feeling that something terrible has happened to someone you care about, and you weren’t able to do anything about it. I very much do get the idea that in response to that trauma he went a little crazy for a little while. That’s not the problem.

No, the problem for Neeson is that he phrases this whole thing in terms of revenge, which … uh, randomly walking around with a club in your pocket and hoping that somebody black starts shit with you isn’t actually revenge, Liam. That’s racism. It’s not revenge when somebody does something to you or someone you care about and you beat the hell out of somebody who maybe sorta looks like the person who did it. That’s not what that word means. And from what I’ve read, he didn’t seem to recognize that distinction at all during his deeply weird interview for a movie that I already wasn’t going to see because I can’t tell if it’s a revenge fantasy or some sort of weird, fucked-up Fargo-level black comedy shit. Nothing about Cold Pursuit was worth this shit. Nothing.

I mean, ultimately I think Neeson’s gonna skate on this, because the story basically just boils down to I had some terrible racist thoughts for a while that didn’t lead to any actual actions, and that’s not enough to have a serious effect on his career unless it turns out he’s got some stories in his past where he did do some shady shit. I’ll call it 50-50 that that happens, we’ll see. But … dude? Why the hell did you decide to tell this story in the first place? This is shit for your shrink, not a goddamned junket interview!

We also watched the first half of the Netflix Fyre Festival documentary last night, a process so horrifying that my wife legitimately looked over at me and asked if I was okay a couple of times. It’s not even Tuesday, y’all, and I have had enough stories of stupid white people to last me until next Black History Month, thanks. We can be done now.