talene.net - "Wonderfully obscure"

MTV is stalking me

talene — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 18:58:12 -0500

First, they Blew up a car on Alki and now they're filming out in front of my office building. They also have a camera in our building on the balcony outside the office of one of the Execs. They have signs up in the park outside to let people know they are filming and what they are filming. The really annoying thing? They put trash in the trees for no reason. What? Our city is too clean for you? MTV GO HOME! *shakes her tiny fist at the camera-people*

Dear Downtown Canvasers:

talene — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 15:46:44 -0500

Dear "Save the Children" canvaser,
I did a stint for Greenpeace when I was your age, so I understand how important this is to you and also how difficult it is to get people to stop and listen (and cough up cash). But, I'm still not going to stop because I'm old and jaded and cynical now and I just can't be bothered.

Love,
Talene

New Year's Resolutions?

talene — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 15:01:08 -0500

In keeping with my current distraction, I have no New Year's resolutions. It's not that I think I have nothing to fix or change; I'm still too caught up in figuring out my current state of being to be able to decide what changes to try to make. It's amazing how weird it is trying to just get an accurate picture of my own self right now. I can easily look back and see how I used to be and it's even relatively easy to look ahead and decide what I want to be, but just sorting out the details of who I really am RIGHT NOW is not as simple. Anyway, until I figure that out, whatever New Year's resolutions I might make will be hard to keep. How can you make plans to change something if you don't know its current state? Or, more accurately, how can you know you've succeeded? "I want to make this water 10 degrees hotter than it is right now." OK. Good plan. What temperature is the water right now? So, how will you know when it's 10 degrees hotter? Gotcha!

I can't even adopt my favorite resolution of all time(To maintain or exceed my current level of awesomeness. -- Kate Bui) because I first have to sort out just what my current level of awesomeness is! What a conundrum.

Baby it's cold outside

talene — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 17:33:54 -0500

We were virtually snowed in for a week here. The city has 16 snow plows and they were all busy keeping downtown spic and span, apparently. Of course we live on the side of a hill. At the first hint of snowflakes, the city sent a guy out to put up the "SNOW CLOSURE" signs. Working from home is fine except that I don't have a separate work space at home. So, now every time I sit down at my computer at home I feel like I'm supposed to be working. I find myself checking my work email and messing around with work stuff in another window while I'm playing video games. I have to stop that because it's very tiring after a while to be at work 24/7.

I have been thinking quite a bit lately about identity. We human beings have a tendency to prefer to be around other people that are "like me." That's an interesting concept though, because how we see ourselves defines what attracts us to others. If our personal defining characteristic is, just for the sake of argument, the color of our skin, then the only people we will think of as "like me" are other people with similarly colored skin. So, theoretically another person could share our interests and hobbies, like the same kinds of foods, have the same favorite color and drive the same kind of car and still be considered "not like me" just because their skin had significantly different amounts of melanin in it.

But what really interests me is figuring out what my defining characteristic(s) is/are. Gaging by the people I find myself attracted to, I think I must see myself as skeptical, cynical with an ironic sense of humor. I guess I don't define myself primarily by the startling lack of pigmentation in my skin.

ramblin' ramblin' ramblin'

talene — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 18:53:20 -0500

I come from a long line of socio-economically challenged Caucasian people. That's the politically correct way to say, "white trash." I am pretty sure my family never owned slaves. There seems to be some evidence that my ancestors might have been slaves. (Before it became economically feasible to get slaves from Africa, they used to get them from Ireland.) So, what does that mean? I don't really know. I just thought I'd throw that out there.

rambling about culture and politics

talene — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 13:00:03 -0500

I worry about our educational system here in the US. So many people grow up without really having a clue about how our government is set up. Sometimes, I'm not sure I know that much about it myself. I'm the product of public schools in Texas after all. Texas, for the one person reading this blog who might not be from Texas, is the home of one of the largest textbook scandals in the history of textbooks. Corruption in Texas is pretty rampant on most levels, but the education system is just plain broken. It's no wonder so many people decide to home school.

But then, when you do decide to home school, what then? How do you know what to teach, which textbooks to trust, who to rely on? To a certain extent, early education is really nothing more than indoctrination. It's important for all citizens to have a reasonable grasp of how our society works so that they can function and be productive. But, we have such a diverse society that deciding how it "works" can be next to impossible. One might reasonably argue that in many ways it does not work.

We also have weird ideas about culture. We think in terms of "black culture" or "white culture" or whatever. The whole concept of culture being tied to the color of one's skin is intrinsically racist. Culture is learned. No matter what color your skin is, you learn your values, your tastes, your place in the world from your environment. It's all about where you grow up, who you grow up around, what you are exposed to.

While some things we normally associate with "culture" may have a genetic basis, over all culture is not biological. Thus, I don't see why some people tend to super glue the concept of "culture" to the color of a person's skin.

I know a woman who is of African heritage who was adopted as a very small child by a family of Caucasian heritage. She grew up in Minnesota surrounded by white people with white bread values. At some point, however, she decided that she was missing out on something so she went to Oakland, CA to pursue her "black culture." I haven't heard from her since then, but I can't help wonder how that went. Do you really have to eat certain types of food and listen to certain types of music depending on the color of your skin? Really? If a white person said that all Blacks do "blah" would that be considered a racist statement? Why is it OK from the other side? This issue confuses the heck out of me.

Also, the whole concept of whether people should be called "black" or "African American" or "people of color" or whatever also confuses me. The woman who did our sensitivity training was pretty hostile on the issue (she was, er African American I think). My question was, "Why is it bad to call out a person's skin color when describing them? You wouldn't think anything of saying, 'The blonde-haired woman by the water cooler.' But, somehow it's not ok to say, 'The black/African American/whatever the politically correct term is these days woman next to the blonde'"

Admittedly, that may have sounded like a confrontational question, but after all the woman was the sensitivity TRAINER. So, like, she should know how to be sensitive too? Maybe? And for goodness sake, who could you ask that question if you couldn't ask someone TRAINED to teach people how to get along? Anyway, she was pretty hostile about it. She said it was "because of slavery." I was inexplicably reminded of Terry Pratchett novels in which things that are weird are frequently explained as being "on account of quantum."

I have successfully written seven paragraphs of nothing. I'll stop now.

broken

talene — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:55:31 -0400

The last few weeks, I've been in a fog. I know Sarah's birthday is coming up on Monday, but I wasn't expecting it to be having such an effect on me this time. Silly me. It's only the second birthday since she died. I may never get used to this.

I'm doing stupid things left and right. I swear to God I never used to be this much of a retard. I'm taking Monday off. I'll try to do something life-affirming or something. I don't know what I'm talking about. Maybe after I get past this hump I'll go back to being marginally competent again. I hope I don't break something important before then.

deconstructing political ads in the YouTube age

talene — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 21:14:08 -0400

I can not stop thinking about these ads:

I'm voting Republican

I'm voting Democrat

While they both are -- quite obviously -- intended for a friendly audience or "preaching to the choir" as my Mom would say, it's inevitable in this YouTube world that people not of like minds would come across them. The way they caricature other people's views and shrink them down to sometimes barely true aphorisms only serves to further distance those with opposing viewpoints. There is no room for debate, no evidence, no facts, no choice really. I think these videos, while funny to those who agree with them perhaps, are detrimental to the process.

Unless someone actually takes the time to deconstruct them and examine what they have to say . . .

Pray if you must

talene — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 16:11:55 -0400

This one goes out to all the AOGers who may occasionally read this blog:

By all means, pray for God's guidance in the upcoming election. Just be aware that ultimately, it's up to you to vote responsibly. God is not going to come down and press the voting lever for you, nor is he going to appear in a burning bush to tell you who you should vote for. You need to use your brain.
Most people believe that brains are God's greatest invention. They are useful for many things, such as examining facts and processing information. Just because someone goes to your church, that does not qualify them to be Vice President, even if they were in the PTA

ouch

talene — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:17:54 -0400

I came home from work on Monday and found a stupid walmart mass-mail in my mailbox. Normally, this would be an insignificant event that I'd forget about ten seconds after the recycle bin lid dropped. This time, however, the mail was all about getting ready to go off to college and it was addressed to my dead child.

It still went in the recycle bin, but it also ripped a chunk out of my soul on its way. I've been doing pretty well lately, but underneath the "pretty well"ness, there's a deep, slowly-healing wound that can be reopened by junk mail, apparently.

I cried most of the evening. After I stopped crying, it still hurt like someone had stabbed me with a rusty railroad spike right in the gut. That feeling pretty much continued the rest of the week. Why don't I get to sit down with Sarah and plan out her college dormitory acquisitions? Why isn't she getting ready to go off on her own and drop me emails asking for money like all good college kids do?

I've managed to avoid getting bogged down in the why-me's so far, but this really hurts. It's not fair. Well, this kind fo feels like deja vu, so maybe I haven't *completely* avoided the why-me's, but mostly I have. Really.

Life's not fair, blah blah. But, I think I have to recognize and deal with the pain of this particular bit of not-fairness before it eats me up.