Incidents in the Life of a Blogger

Hello, Internet!

Please take a moment to locate the exit nearest your seat, keeping in mind the nearest exit may be behind you, and take note of your emotions as you read the following two quibs. (Quib: noun a short vignette intended to convey a fact or lesson)

A hypothetical situation: A made up man named Henson V. Benson is hatching chickens for his science class. While Mr. Benson is getting ice cream out of the refridgerator, the chickens escape, and he has to run all over his appartment to find them. He hears a peeping coming out of the sink, but he can't see anything, so he hits the switch for the light above the sink. Except he hits the wrong switch, and activates the garbage disposal. Chicken smoothie, anyone?

Pretty sad, huh? OK, here's another one. This one really happened to me, though.

I was in fourth grade, and we had "class hamsters". There were two of them, Susie and Buckster. Each weekend, one student would have the responsibility of taking the two hamsters home and taking care of them. I was so excited, as any fourth-grader would be, when my turn came around. That weekend, a big storm blew through. I
used to
still love big storms, and this one was a monster. So I'm laying in bed, 9:30-ish, and I hear this completely helpless squealing coming from the cage laying at the foot of the bed. Thunder claps, and I hear some more desperate squeals. So, of course, I get out of bed, and find the two hamsters huddling together in the corner of the cage, scared out of their wits. What did I do? I took them out of their cage, and cuddled them until they both fell asleep in my lap.

So now you've heard both stories. Which one affected you more? The second one? How come?

If you're at a loss for words, I'll tell you why. Because it actually happened. No matter how good of a writer I am, something that actually happened will always sound more realistic and touching if it's something I can write from memory. The reader knowing that it actually happened makes it that much better.

When you watch a science-fiction movie, you're looking for flaws. Imperfections. Implausibilities (it's a real word-- look it up!). You've been raised (hopefully) to take nothing at face value, and question everything you see and hear. So knowing that what you are seeing was really a bunch of press-board on a sound stage in Century City takes away the impact of the movie. The same goes for written literature. Knowing that a book was written by some British woman sitting in a coffee shop pounding away on MS Word removes some of the emotional energy from the reader. Because it didn't actually happen, and no one is trying to convince you of anything otherwise. When a book/movie/photograph/whathaveyou is something real-- it actually happened-- you stop looking for the inconsistencies and simply believe. Therefore, when something stupendous happens, like, say, a main character dies, you feel sadder if it's non-fiction, because someone, somewhere, actually died. And that was eight commas in one sentence. Boo-ya!

The question for this evening was why is it important that the book we're reading, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, is non-fiction. Each and every event in this book really happened, exactly as it is written. There's no room for debate about details. It happened that way. The fact that it wasn't cleaned up or heavily edited drives that point home. Nothing was passed through a filter.

I'm out of time again. Thank you for reading "The Words of Magic". Please collect your personal belongings and exit to your left.

Gobama!

Wahoo! Obama won!

OK, enough of that. Let’s get down to some analytical stuff.

I watched the election results on CNN. No particular reason why, apart from the fact that when I turned the TV on, it was already tuned to CNN, and I was too lazy to change the channel.

In general, I thought CNN did a fairly good job being neutral. They weren’t overtly conservative nor were they overtly liberal. They did always list the republicans before the democrats, but may have just been coincidence.

They had a new toy, too. Twice durning the coverage they had a “holographic host”, someone on the other side of the country that was being “projected” on the set. Now, I know enough about video and broadcast to know that they weren’t actually holograms, nor were they actually being projected. The news anchor was just talking to an empty space on stage, and the person was being added in after the fact. Gratuitous use of “holographic interference” was used as well (ie, they were slightly blue, slightly transparent, flickered a lot, and had a strange glowey halo around them). Nonetheless, it was a very interesting effect, and means that news casters no longer have to be standing on the CNN set in their studio. Also, CNN had a nifty little CGI model of the white house that they used in the same manor. I’m not sure what the benefit of the 3D model is, but it was cool eye candy.

Back to the election. The “mug shot” of McCain that they used wasn’t the most becoming, compared to the equivalent shot of Obama. They also seemed to digitally lighten Obama’s skin tone in the picture, making him seem more white. I’m not sure what the purpose of that was, or if it was simply an artifact of the giant display they were using, but it drew my attention.

Something interesting that I thought about during the race:

I watched the election with Elmo, from Elmo’s World, and I cheered when the Democrats took control of the senate. Elmo didn’t look to happy about it, and when I asked, she pointed out that it’s good to have a president from one party and a congressional majority from the other. Interesting. In the movie “Meet The Robinsons”, the Robinsons all cheer when Lewis fails at his invention. They say that the only way to improve something is to keep running into conflicts, because conflicts allow for improvement. You don’t learn anything from succeeding all the time. By the same token, I agree with Elmo in that the US can only be drastically improved when the improvement comes about through a discussion from TWO parties.

Oops, I went over my word limit again. Flackle.

Dermis Chroma Quandary

So my assignment tonight is to write about an encounter I’ve witnessed that had to do with race. First, I need to say that I really really really liked this article, despite the fact that it was kinda long. So, an encounter...?

I have an idea, but it’s actually two different events, totally unrelated. First one follows. The names have been changed, BTW.

So I’m in Underwater Basket Weaving 101, and I’m sitting between Gary, a tall, gangly WASP-ish guy, and Lawrence, a stocky African-American. Gary is wearing stone-washed Calvin Klein jeans and a golf shirt with the collar “popped”. Lawrence is wearing torn-up jeans with some sort of design on the left butt-pocket, and a brown tee shirt with something written on the front-- I don’t remember what, though. Gary is sitting on my left, and Lawrence is on my right.

Lawrence is listening to rap on his iPod, through headphones, although everyone at the table can hear it.

“Lawrence, dude, turn that down. No one wants to listen to your trash,” Gary says, reaching across me and yanking one of Lawrence’s earbuds out.

“Whatchya doin’, bro? My ‘buds are broken, they sound like that no matter how loud I have it set to. And it’s not trash, y’know what I’m sayin’, Aladdin?” Lawrence asks me.

“Umm... I don’t really care for..." I say, getting cut off.

“Lawrence, you’re only living up to your stereotype. Stop acting black, and turn that $%#@ down.” Gary gets up and walks to a different table to learn how to weave patterns.

OK, second story.

So I’m in down-town LA with my mom. We’re walking from our hotel to dinner, about a five mile walk. We come to an intersection that we have to cross, and there’s a man standing by the crosswalk, swaying back and forth. It’s not obvious what color he is, because he’s covered with all grime and filth imaginable. He has about a dozen shopping bags sitting at his feet, and he is wearing three or four different coats and jackets.

My mom sees him, and immediately turns around, so she’s not facing him.

“Aladdin! We’ve got to find a different way to get there. Don’t look, but there’s a homeless man at the light, and he looks dangerous.”

“Mom, he’s just an old man. Why would he hurt us? It’s not like we have anything valuable on us, we’re just tourists.”

The man begins to pick up his bags, one by one, look through them briefly, then move them about ten feet down the sidewalk.

“Common, mom, he’s not going to do anything.”

We end up crossing at a different intersection just to avoid the man, but as we pass him on the other side of the street, it becomes apparent that he was moving his bags so we could pass by him and his stuff without getting too close to him. I felt really bad, since he had spent maybe ten or fifteen minutes moving his bags, and now he had to move them all back, but when your mom is paying for dinner, you do what she says.

Sorry, y’all, this is turning out to be a long post. I guess what I’ve realized, after reading this article, is that discrimination is blind. It doesn’t matter who the person is, so long as they fit into some sort of pre-concieved notion of what they are. Racism is a glutton of a word, but it’s also a very specific word. Racism implies discrimination against someone or a group of people because they’re black. What about Asians? What about people who are Muslim, or look like they haven’t had a bath in two weeks? What about people who are the exact same race as me, but have somehow ended up at the sewer of the social system? We discriminate blindly, and this isn’t something that people like to face. But no matter what we call it, racism, stereotyping, etc., it’s all the same, and needs to be addressed.

The end. Hammer Time!

Like Putty In My Hands!

I went out and bought some clay last night from Michaels. It’s green clay. I wasn’t really sure what to make it into, so I just played with it to get some inspiration. I ended up making it into a little blob-man with big eyebrows. I set him out on the porch, and went to bed. This morning, I got up, and realized that I really didn’t like his eyebrows. They need to be much smaller. Oh, and I think I’m going to give him some sort of hat. But when I went out to the porch to pick him up, I found that he’d become rock solid. Oh well, no hat for Mr. Blobman.

You are a lump of clay. I don’t mean that you’re unshapely; I mean that your mind acts like clay. Stick with me, and I’ll explain my metaphor.

When you are really young, you are very impressionable. As a kid, hopefully, you had a fair bit of interaction with the outside world, and the way you think today is shaped by your interactions when you were much younger. Now, that’s not to say that you’re totally rock solid (in your mind, once again, I’m not describing your physique), but you are probably a bit less impressionable than you were when you were five.

The question that I’m trying to answer here is... what? Oh, yeah, it’s about the socialization process, and whether or not I agree with it. Well, what I just described to you above is part of the socialization process. The process is when the society you live in—say, Carmel¬—instills in you certain beliefs—say, houses or buildings made out of brick mean that the inhabitants are higher class than people who live or work in wood or metal buildings.

This process is a big factor in our prejudices against certain people or groups. I was raised in California, so I probably have more of a prejudice against Mexicans than someone who was raised in Indiana, who probably has more of a prejudice against African-Americans. I remember quite distinctly certain events of discrimination from my childhood, such as the teacher kicking the Chinese girl out of the class more often, much better than I remember something that happened a year or so ago.

That raises the question that I’ll leave you with as I go to eat a waffle: When you have kids, or nieces or nephews, and they’re still in their goey clay form, what are you going to shape them into?

Waffle Time!

It's Payback Time!

The United States is a young country. Compared to the rest of the world, especially Europe, the US is infantile. So it’s not surprising that we are still working out the kinks in our government and society. This is exactly why Cose suggests that we have reparations for slavery.

The Constitution was written with the idea that it would be improved, in the hopes of refining this nation’s government. Much like Open-Source software (yes, I know I’m a geek), our government was to be continuously updating and re-evaluating itself. This process happens when a group of people get together, figure out if something is wrong, what is wrong with it, then how to fix it. Then the adjustments are made, and everyone is hunky-dory.

Here’s why Cose wants Reparations: Because it admits that we have faults, and tries to correct for them in a constructive way. The reason that people are against it is because it reveals a deep fissure in the “Perfect America” people kid themselves into believing we live in. America is not perfect. The reason that I (occasionally) am proud OK living here is that the system is built for those kinds of imperfections. That’s why the Supreme Court exists. It’s the idiots that are afraid of change and the difficulties that come with it that oppose the reparations.

Case Closed.

The Society Computing Machine

Cora Tucker and Willy Loman couldn’t be more different. They both are “heroes” in some respect, they both strive for “success,” but they’re different types of heroes and they work for different types of success.

In the way that many say middle schoolers are “plugged in” to the internet, Willy is “plugged in” to society, at least society as it used to be. He created himself to fit nicely into the little niche that society led him to believe he belonged in. He was the perfect sales man. He was “well-liked,” as he said, he was a smooth talker, and, at least in his mind, he was rather good as a salesman. I kind of visualize him as a number, specially picked, that is to be fed into a giant computer, and hopefully a wad of cash will pop out the other end. You see, for Willy Loman, success is having what society told him to have. Success is having moolah, having a nice house, a nice set of clothes, and, most of all, being well liked.

Now let’s look at Cora Tucker.

Cora Tucker is the exact opposite. Cora’s goal isn’t to be a number that gets plugged into the giant machine of society. She is trying to take that machine apart and re-build it to suite  the needs of the have-nots. For her, success isn’t having, it’s being. Being noticed, being employed, being treated like everyone else. That’s the big difference between Willy and Cora. Willy is lying to the world to find something that is worthless. Cora is challenging the world’s lies to make something worthwhile. It may not be tangible, like the diamond Willy thinks he needs to make his mark on the world, but it is something that will influence each and every person in Halifax County. Success for Cora is making a difference. And by that definition, she’s succeeded beyond anything she could have dreamed of, and she doesn’t seem to be stopping any time soon. 

Question of the Day

Why is it that Willy is the only "proactive" person in the family? The wife, Linda, seems to support him, but not really do anything to help him when he starts to slip off the rocker. The kids, while Happy is having some success, never really seem to be able to pull themselves off of their feet. I know that they are imprinted with this notion that your success rides on a smile and a polished pair of shoes, but at the end they seem to realize that this is wrong, and they still don't do anything about it. Why is this?