not good enough

Fuck it. Not good enough. Again.

I didn’t get the job I applied for. I thought I’d done well in the interview, but apparently, even toning it down I babble too much.

Punished in life for not talking, punished for talking too much.

Seriously. Just fuck it.

Considering

With all the negativity in the world right now, I think I should start a Tumblr dedicated to awesome heroes in the news. It would be nice to see some positive stuff, and let people know that there are still heroes out there, even if they’re hard to find behind the screaming raging douches…

Waxing

I got my arms waxed last night.

Not used to this much breeze on my arms. Maybe this’ll help me feel cooler at work! Since the A/C is broken and all.

I kind of like waxing, to be honest. Shaving hurts my skin and no matter what I do I end up with irritation that hurts for days, so having a little more pain temporarily and having the solution last longer beats out shaving in my book.

If only it weren’t expensive to have it professionally done. My friend is a beautician, and she can do it, but it feels like taking advantage to have her do it all the time…

My Relationship with the term “Gypsy”

Note: This is only my story. I was ignorant to an extreme degree, and I’m working to make myself less so.

I was a sheltered kid, mostly because I live outside of town and didn’t talk to people because people didn’t like me. So I spent my time reading, mostly fantasy and mystery books. The first time I remember encountering anything like “gypsies” was in Mercedes Lackey’s The Free Bards. They were most definitely stereotypes, but they were the heroes of the stories.

My understanding of the “gypsies” in The Free Bards (it’s been a while since I read them, so this is subject to my crappy memory) was that they were constantly hounded by The Church, took in people who needed help, were generally kind and generous people, performed music and magic, and traveled around doing so, often because it was dangerous for them to stay in one place. They were often reviled as immoral and thieves, but they were absolutely the Good Guys in these books.

For a long time after that, I took the same attitude that many take out of ignorance: that “gypsy” meant just a traveling, nomadic life, unrestrained by materialistic concerns. With a hint of the pagan about it, because that’s where my spiritual leanings lie, and I wanted to see it.

In other words, I thought of “gypsies” as mythical archetypes, not real people. I did not know that real life “gypsies” existed for the longest time. I cannot remember specifically the first time I heard of real Roma. Possibly as minor subjects in my anthropology text books, possibly in some footnotes in history, but it was sometime during late junior high/high school. I knew they had suffered persecution, and their history was long, and their language was unique in modern terms.

But the first time I ever heard any of the horrible stereotypes about Romani in our world was when an episode of Criminal Minds had a family that killed the parents of young girls and kidnapped the girls to be wives for their sons. There’s a line in the show about “perverting Romani culture” but it was only mentioned twice, and not as heavily emphasized as it should have been. I didn’t know it was a pervasive attitude until I saw some discussion of the episode online and realized it was part of a larger problem.

I did learn that most of the things Mercedes Lackey used in her books were real attitudes faced by the Roma/Romani*, and I resolved to never use the G-word again, unless I had to, in order to make myself understood.

I thought for a time that because *I* only saw that word in a positive light, that it was somehow okay for me to use it. I learned I was wrong, because erasing the negative aspects of a people’s existence is trying to whitewash the suffering and persecution away. Similarly, just because I saw the word in a positive light, didn’t mean that my meaning or intent would be clear if I used it.

So, to everyone who is bleating, “I didn’t know!” when called out about a word people have told you is hurtful, it’s actually okay to have not known if you then stop using it and should add, “I’m sorry my words caused you pain”. Having never been exposed to something is just limited scope, not a personal failure of epic proportions. Ignoring or justifying when someone has been hurt by your attitude and let you know about it is Epic Fail. Stop it.

Privilege! You can take it with you!

So I have this co-worker who can’t seem to shut up about how “over” the U.S. she is. She just wants to go somewhere else. She lived in Japan for a few months and someplace in Europe for a year and thinks she is some major world traveler.

But what she and others don’t understand is that in the vast majority of places in the world, especially those colonized by Britain and other White European countries, and subjected to American and British entertainment, is:

YOU CARRY YOUR PRIVILEGE WITH YOU!

You can leave the country, you can think you leave attitudes behind, but you don’t. You carry the privilege of being American, of being white, of being middle-class, of having disposable income, disposable attitudes with you everywhere you go. You act differently, you think differently, and you are from a position of power and privilege.

Being a world traveler doesn’t make you a good person. It doesn’t make you enlightened about the plight of every single minority or oppressed people in the world. Most likely, being a world traveler just makes you an asshole who doesn’t realize they have privilege. It makes you think that because you could choose to live an “alternative” life (rather than having it forced on you by race, class, heritage, sexual orientation, economics, etc.) that it makes you “one of them”.

It doesn’t.

Social Creatures

The reason we are social creatures is because we can’t reach our own backs.

Thank goodness for other people to apply lotion and salve to sunburns.

I really hate being as white as I am when I have to be out in the sun.