Just wondering

Luther M. Siler2 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

Luther M. Siler

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

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

Luther M. Siler2 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

Luther M. Siler

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

Luther M. Siler

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.