The Old School Lunch

My boss’s boss gave the green light/paid time to go see Jackson Katz‘ speaking engagement (!) at Western Washington University sponsored by Western Men Against Violence this coming Tuesday along with a bunch of co-workers. I finagled this by saying that it fit into a forum that a co-worker and I would be working on. So then my boss is not so happy with me because i’m behind in my work and if i’m going to spend half a day going to Bellingham, then i’m just going to be that much more behind. So i’ve been trying to catch up but then last night our national online system crashed. Which means nobody getting any work done. And then I just came down with the illness.

Anyways, if you’re near the area, I hope you can make it.

Wow.

It’s one thing to say that you’re going to go to serve “specific communities of color” and go to the “African American, Hispanic and Native” communities. It’s another to say that you’re going to reach out to the “communities of color” and just name those three which is what our CEO recently did at our big all-staff meeting. Apparantly all the Asian and API folk in Washington who make up more of the population than the Black community doesn’t warrant any attention. She talked all this fluff about how we’re going to work extensively with members and organizations at this and that place while she said nothing and had no plan to work with the Asian or Pacific Islander communities. I guess I was hallucinating when I saw those statistics saying that Asian Pacific Islander teens have the highest rates of suicide out of any ethnic group in America. I guess I might’ve just read wrong when I saw that Filipinos girls ages 14-19 have the highest number of suicide ideations and attempts out of any single group. Keep in mind, again, that just looking at the population reports, Asian and API residents in Washington outnumber Blacks and Latinos. Specifically, Filipinos are the largest Asian subgroup in Washington. And wow, we’re not going to address that issue right there?

Wow. Has anyone ever accidentally (or not) gotten a call or message left from a collection agency? The type of person you have to be to work there, I can’t imagine. You have to be able to completely turn on a switch to become a complete asshole to leave messages like:

“Mr. Marquis Holmes this is Stephanie Holmes from the firm Legal Mediation Practice. Mr. Holmes we’ve got a debt to collect Mr. Holmes and you’ve got until today to call back, we better hear from you TODAY Mr. Holmes, what’re you gonna do now, huh?”

I really, really hate when people say “you better…” or “I better be able to…” Probably the only thing I hate more than that is to see people at restaurants get a food server’s attention by doing the index-finger-curl/point/come-here. This happened the other day. The waitress was so shocked that she stopped right in her tracks when she saw it. The old fart, frustrated that she wasn’t running to him like a golden retriever, sunk his head lower and started curling his finger faster with the “yea, you dumbass, come here” look and the waitress by them slowly started to move over to him and by then I thought she was going to shiv the bastard right in the back. Turns out that he was getting her attention because his wife had a question and she couldn’t bother to do it herself (or he insisted on doing it). They had a big party with them and it was someone’s birthday. By then the waitress had badmouthed them to the rest of the staff so as the family is expecting the restaurant staff to come out singing happy birthday, the waitress ends up plopping down an ugly birthday cake slice with an unlit candle and walks away.

For the past two Saturdays i’ve gone to the same Chinese buffet with a friend. It’s not that bad and it’s 15 bucks. Big fan of the seafood but not of the kids who run around without supervision making a general mess of the place while their parents sit and eat…

My friend works for Cingular and he was telling me that Sprint/Nextel recently reviewed thousands of their customer service records, looked at thousands more of their customers in their database and terminated the contracts of 1000+ customers for basically being shitty, verbally abusive customers and wasting Sprint’s time by constantly calling to complain with issues of little substance. “A first in the customer service industry” my friend calls it…

Heroes is surprisingly good. I was pretty skeptical but i’m hooked probably even more so than Lost. It’s nice to hear an Asian language on TV being spoken at the actual pace the actors would naturally speak it unlike Lost where everyone is speaking Korean 5x slower to make it less obvious that Daniel Dae isn’t a native speaker…

And Weeds is pretty good. Though they really put it on thick the first few episodes with the whole “Oriental whore bitch from Thailand” bit. At least Nancy corrects her…

Saw But I’m A Cheerleader after I heard the writer/director talk about it in This Film Is Not Yet Rated. Both are pretty awesome, the latter moreso than anything i’ve seen in a long time. In my hyperbole I may have called Jack Valenti a “nazi” when talking about the documentary to a friend. His response: (gasp) “I believe the man was there was president Kennedy was shot!”…

The two co-workers I am probably most buddy-buddy with at work both told me recently that when they first saw me, they both thought, “What a nerd, i’m not going to talk to that guy at all” and “that guy doesn’t look cool, i’m not going get to know him.” Oh, it’s like that?…

A female co-worker was talking to us at the lunchroom about how she couldn’t decide what to wear at the upcoming auction that she is basically running. She has an outfit that is she looks better in but she doesn’t want old farts who are donating money to hit on her or to stare at her all night. As she was talking about this dress conflict, she stopped herself and apologized to me saying that she felt bad that I as the only man in the room at the time had to endure this conversation because, of course, I just naturally wouldn’t be able to understand any of it. “No, I get what you’re saying. There’s a different between what you’d wear as a guest coming to donate money and socialize and there’s what you’d wear if you’re board member or something and then there’s what you’d wear if you’re working at the function up on stage, etc.”…

The 10th issue (and the 3rd Anniversary Issue!) of Shameless was released and it has a column by your 3rd favorite blogger who abruptly quit blogging then came back to blog but doesn’t really blog that much. Big shoutout to Editor Megan for giving me this tremendous opportunity, for all of her thoughtful advice and words of encouragement, big shoutout to Founder Nicole for putting my name in the running to even be a columnist, big shoutout to Renée because I wouldn’t have known about Shameless otherwise, and a big shoutout to the Shameless community for just simply getting it.

It’s another fall season and yet again i’m sitting here wondering what to do with my life. There’s little as frustrating as not being able to decide (or is it just not knowing?) if you want to go one of several directions. I was so hell-bent on going the grad school route and teaching but then yet again the research scares the shit out of me. Is that something I really want to do? Law school almost made a strong case for a while and then it just sort of sputtered out because I got caught up in work. Then I thought, “hey, why not just get that domestic violence focused MPA in Colorado and work for a bunch of cool non-profits…you know, climb the ladder?” Then it became, well, if you’re not going to go for the full Ph.D then should I just go for the M.A.? But won’t I only be able to teach at “really, really small community colleges” as someone once told me? Will that leave me with enough room to go for the eventual Ph.D later on? What the hell do I want to know about public administration? I want to write and teach, not crunch numbers and work on policy and committees. Then, I realized that I basically want to do what Jackson Katz does for a living: talk to men and young men in particular about sexism, homophobia, racism, etc and be able to “coach boys into men” as the Family Violence Prevention Fund saying goes. I think he went Masters in Education and now he’s getting his Ph.D in something but obviously he had a pretty unique experience in the movement. I think I have an opportunity to do my own very, very small scale sort of “coaching” men against sexism at my workplace because I work closely with men who act as mentors for young men and boys but that’d mean i’d have to stick around for a bit which isn’t something I originally planned on doing because the pay isn’t so great. But maybe I should.

When I shelled out for a premium flickr account, I decided to make the most of it and really put a bunch of stuff on there. One idea that popped into my head was to put online the stuff that I had saved up on my computer, namely, scans of magazine ads which had really sexist advertisements. This became a series of a few dozen different advertisements and i’ve gotten a bit of view here and there. However, I start to wonder when the pictures that get the most views are the ones that are more revealing/crude…

So 3 months of “training” are done and over which means that I am now covered with the job’s insurance. Which is good. This was made effective September 1st and I had all my paperwork in order and on the insurace provider’s website (where I was a member with my old job) it gives me my member ID and new group number so I went down to the local drug store to pick up a prescription of some stuff that i’m running low on, really need and, of course, is ridiculously expensive. I tell the pharmacist my info and say that I don’t have a card yet. He says “i’ll give it a try” and 5 minutes later while waiting in the magazine aisle, he calls my name and he says that nothing came up, “sorry.” I somewhat knew this was going to happen with the weekend and especially the long weekend but was still cautiously optimistic given that my information was already on their own website and it seemed like everything was in order.

I’m tired of getting glares/odd looks/rude questions when I take pictures of food that i’m personally eating and that i’ve personally paid for. But I never thought that I would be asked to put my camera away.

Today, I was not allowed to take pictures of the conveyor belt at a sushi joint. This isn’t a high class sushi place we’re talking about here. This is a college kids walk in in their sweats and parents bring kids in their strollers sushi place. There’s little shwanky about it yet I was abruptly denied. Has anyone ever been told not to take pictures of food and or anything inside of an eating establishment before? And no, I wasn’t being obnoxious with my camera.

I guess the honeymoon phase of “I like/don’t mind my new job” was bound to come to an end at some point and this week was it…

This has proven yet again why I wanted to go to grad school in the first place. Sometimes I’m sitting at my desk thinking “what am I doing?” I don’t regret the work and life experience, but I miss school and i’m afraid the longer i’m out of the game the harder it’ll be to go back…

It’s funny who you think you’ll get along with at the office after first impressions then after first week, first month impressions…

I probably take things too personally for my own good. I don’t like confrontation (because anyone does?) so I won’t really say things when I should when it comes to certain issues…