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May 11, 2000 |
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No e-mail. None. Actually, that's not entirely true. I have
e-mail at home. That account is working just fine. I just don't have
e-mail at work… for five days! I don't want you to get the
idea that I haven't had anything to do at work, because obviously that's
not true. There are any number of ways that people can track me down…
phone, voice-mail, and in person (of course). It does make it a bit of a
pain when I've been dealing with work in e-mail for almost nine years now.
[Sigh]
I went to dinner at Hooters, I normally go there after my kickboxing class. I almost always get the chicken wings and curly fries. While waiting for my food, I normally do one two things, I would either watch the baseball scores cycle through any of the many television screens or I would pick up the free Seattle Weekly and browse through it. Tonight, I did the later.
There was an interesting review of Sherman Alexie's latest book, in the Seattle Weekly. I was first introduced to Alexie while reading a Seattle magazine article. In fact, I quoted him on my Seattle page. Ironically, I have never read his work. I just heard about him in passing a number of times. The article outlines how Alexie's prose and style allow the reader to tolerate his obvious contempt towards Caucasian folk.
Yes… admittedly, I have certain opinions about ethnicity, and diversity in general. I'm a minority in any number of ways. I don't think that it really contributes to defining who I am.
Okay, it is like the folks who have a number of visible tattoos and/or piercings. If they're obviously visible, you can't expect people not to notice them and thus notice that you're different from them. I'm not thinking along the lines of stop being who you are because of the way that people would react. I suppose that I'm thinking more along the lines of celebrate who you are simply for you, not to spite those who you hold in contempt. Anger is a two way street and most of the time is easier to walk away.
Oh, and for the record… no, I don't object or judge people who have tattoos or piercings. I have one of each myself.
In my experience, it has been much easier for me to gain acceptance when people realize that I'm not that different. It is like finding out something new about a friend of yours, like a divorce, a child, or an illness. It only serves to add dimension to their character, not to take it away. It allows people to work through their biases about those issues. It lets people fall into the trap of their own prejudice. That's how people learn, by questioning their own value system… not by having each of us flaunt our uniqueness and force-feeding to them. That only instills more hate. Let people learn at their own pace; that's how they learn best.
I went for a drive after dinner. I like driving. I drive to relax. Tonight I would eventually have to go back to work, and often times I do this to unwind. I get paged twice while I'm on the road. I got on my cell phone and check my voice-mail. It's Pam. I called her on the phone and chat for a bit. After a while, she notices that it is taking me an unusually long time for me to get back to work. That's because I was heading back the long way. I drove across the 520 bridge, up on Interstate 5 and back down on Interstate 405. It's probably about thirty miles. I've never measured it; I just drive it to relax.
Naturally, she finds this incomprehensible, since she has such a distaste for driving. I suppose that we're just wired differently.
As I'm driving around, the signal gets pretty weak. After getting cut off a number of times, we just elect to chat on the phone tomorrow. We'd be seeing each other tomorrow evening.
The drive helped; it helps get me in the mindset to deal with work.
Once I got back to work, my e-mail had come back. Finally! I had over six hundred messages over that time. Wonderful. It wasn't quite as simple as that either. I still needed to sort much of this mail, and it seems as though the e-mail filters that I had put together didn't seem to be working. [Sigh]
It was going to be a long night…
May 11, 2000