06.25.10
Posted in Racism tagged race fail, The last Airbender at 11:17 pm by kyrias
I saw a promotional poster for The Last Airbender a while ago with Nora and made some comment about it. Nora came back with something like it wasn’t a big deal because of something regarding how no one complains about how Japanese anime is drawn.
I had some sort of weak reply about how the chillens are sad that Asian actors won’t be chosen for a movie based off of a Asian-themed cartoon series, but I didn’t have all my links at hand to quote, so I’m re-opening the discussion now. I was tempted to just make it a link-dump because I’m really tired of explaining why institutionalized racism is a bad thing to people — but I couldn’t very well ignore the comment about Japanese anime and so on.
Btw - -I think the Japanese really don’t have as much self-hate going on as Westerners would like to think. Really.
Why I’m personally boycotting this movie:
- The original casting race-fail where they asked for “Caucasian or other” for characters who were obviously either Asian or Inuit
- The utter lack of response to the race-fail backlash.
- They killed a lot of the Asian influences of the original show, such as turning the Chinese script into gibberish.
I don’t really watch movies anyways, so I refuse on principle to have this abomination’s movie to be on the short list of movies I’ve paid to watch.
So, about that Japanese anime issue…
According to Matt Thorn — no matter how the characters in the anime or manga are drawn or portrayed, unless they’re “marked” as other, then they’re automatically assumed to be Japanese. The art form, which it is, not withstanding, it’s not about self-hatred or a desire to portray all people as Caucasian.
Also, I find it hysterical to insist that all characters in Japanese drawn anime and manga with light colored hair and eyes are automatically assumed to be Caucasian. As one of the commentators said, in an art form where wacky is the rule and nothing except perhaps clothing is recognizable as being of a particular bent, to insist that all light = Caucasian is just plain weird. This is the world of cat-eared girls and tailed men with fangs, after all.
Personally, I’ve always seen Japanese drawn anime and manga as talking about Japanese people, regardless of hair color or eye color unless indicated otherwise — so I’m really tempted to say it’s Western privilege talking when Caucasians automatically see themselves in anime characters.
As Ampersand says, the stereotypical circle with eyes in it, and a curve for a mouth is seen as Western by Westerners and it must needs have exaggeratedly slanted eyes and dark hair for it to be seen as Asian. I note that in China, that same simple drawing is seen as being Chinese, without the need for the slanted lines for eyes.
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06.24.10
Posted in Renting with friends at 2:03 pm by kyrias
I don’t think I’m being pessimistic when I say that. Note the open letter which people pretty much ignored.
The current kitchen, shared between four people, not including me because I’m not really here for most of the time and I don’t cook anymore even if I were home — is a disaster. The sink is perpetually full, the stove often has pots sitting on top of it filled with putrid, moldering water, and the floor has visible stains from where people dripped stuff and then didn’t bother to mop up after themselves.
Then there’s the clutter. The used baking sheet with aluminum foil sitting on top of the stove. The things left out in random places.
I will admit that part of it may be a legacy from when I was in residence and there’s so much stuff on the shelves already that people just got frustrated with the idea of looking for space to put the new things they bought. Maybe. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.
The new place currently has a dishwasher half the size of our current one and a sink that is both smaller and more shallow than ours. I think this is a recipe for disaster unless we avert it by making smart rules about dishes and who does what. Noting that sometimes when I was in residence, I had to load the dishwasher at least two times a day and I wasn’t keeping up with the dishes.
People are busy, is the problem. All of the people will be working. Some of them will be working and going to school. I get that.
However, I also see things going up in flames because things. won’t. get. done because everyone is busy and everyone won’t have time and things will just accumulate. If everyone in the house runs out of the door, leaving their breakfast plates and glasses in the sink — there’s a load of dishes right there. If lunch and then dinner and the odd snack is factored in, the sink will be overflowing before anyone can say Jack Robinson.
There’s also only so many spoons a person has, and if someone has to choose between going out to socialize or have dinner out or whatever is going on and staying at home to clean up a bit — guess which one they’re going to choose? People in this house work so hard that if they have spare time, there’s no way they’re going to spend that spare time cleaning. Especially if they see it as “not mine, dammit!”. Except, the sink, the floor, and the stove-top kind of are a shared responsibility between everyone who uses it.
Then there’s the problem that people just don’t want to clean up after other people. This is a perfectly human and reasonable response — except it’s not possible to think like that when you live with other people. Heck, I see significant others who have rousing fights because of the tit for tat game.
The fact is, nobody is going to be able to be perfect all the time. There will be that morning or afternoon where you just have to run and you leave a dirty pot on the stove and a glass on the coffee table and by the time you get home, you’ll have forgotten all about it and suddenly there’s multiple orphan dishes and everyone is studiously ignoring them because “dammit, it’s not mine” and the house goes to hell in a handbasket.
If people can’t get over themselves and I’m going to bet they won’t be able to — the only answer is a maid service or housekeeper.
I just hope that either people will be amazing at the game and prove me wrong, which is bloody unlikely considering the current state of the kitchen, or they’ll realize that they need a housekeeper before the entire household dissolves in flames.
Knowing people’s potential for drama, I have no real faith in either one happening. May the gods have mercy on us.
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06.21.10
Posted in Big Sister Association tagged Little Sister at 11:58 pm by kyrias
Part of my main problem with my little sister is that I have no idea what to do with her at this point because on some level I don’t even want to do nice things for her anymore.
I tried making cookies with her. She was interested in the first half of it, which involved measuring ingredients, dumping them in the bowl, and mixing it. Then when I was scooping cookie dough onto the cookie sheets, she lost interest and asked to play the Wii. We tried again with cupcakes and banana bread. She would be interested at first, but then she would disengage after things went in the oven. So as to not put all the blame on her, although she didn’t seem interested in helping cleaning up after making an unholy mess, I also didn’t ask her because I thought she’d have difficulty washing the big mixing bowls in the sink due to height issues. I quit the cooking projects after Caesura called me to task for letting her play the Wii whilst I cleaned up the kitchen after a particularly messy baking project.
We tried games. If there’s any sort of learning curve to get to the fun part, she’s not interested. I think she doesn’t like appearing less than competent in front of people, but I don’t know how to get around that. We’ve tried the encouragement route, but it seems like she would rather just give up than anything else. I’ve asked people if we could try playing Settlers of Catan or Munchkin with her, but the universal opinion seems to be that she won’t be able to, either because she can’t or won’t learn how. Again, to be fair, we tried playing a Tetris like game and Scrabble with her and that’s the extent of the sample size. Then again, she’s 9 years old. Maybe we’re expecting a bit much? Google doesn’t seem to agree, with nine year olds competing in Scrabble competitions.
I tried taking her walking around. She tires easily, doesn’t seem to enjoy the walking all that much, and starts passive aggressively lagging further and further behind until I decide to call an end to it. She’s actually mentioned wanting to go to a pool or skating rink, but I’m not convinced it wouldn’t be a complete waste of money from what I’ve seen of her athletic prowess.
Then there’s the eating out. I took her out to eat a couple of times during the winter months when it was really just too cold to do anything outside and I wanted to do something relatively stress-free since I was working at that time in Framingham.
Now she asks to go eat out at Mary Chung’s all the time if we don’t go. Or she mentions that I mentioned that Vietnamese food is tasty. Or she says that she would like to try sushi.
Here’s what happened the last time I listened to her when she said that she would like to try Indian food:
I pick her up. She asks me what we’re doing. In some surprise, I say that we’re going out to Indian food, just like she wanted to the last time we met. She mumbles something about why don’t we go to Mary Chung’s again and I say that we’ve been multiple times already and didn’t she say that she wanted to try Indian food?
We sit down in the restaurant, get our menus, and she looks around surreptitiously before she says: “My cousin told me that Indians hate Haitians and they will give us nasty food.”
Appalled, I say: “Shh! That’s really rude.”
She subsides, but looks very unhappy. I relent and ask for details. She tells me that her cousin told her that the brother of a friend of his went to India and because they hate Chinese people and Haitians, they fed him nasty food that resulted in him having to have part of his brain cut out and he had to be hooked up to life support. Or at least I assume she meant life support by “had tubes stuck into him and down his throat”.
I have to wonder if she mentioned that Indians hate Chinese and Haitians so I would have more immediacy to the horror that is Indian racism?
I tried to explain that her cousins were probably pulling her leg, that the worst that would happen would be if we got food poisoning and that food poisoning never results in brain amputation. I also said that Indians didn’t all hate Chinese people and Haitians and if this particular restaurant had people who would do such things, Azora who ate here last week would have fallen sick and since she was fine, clearly we didn’t need to worry.
She seemed to accept what I was saying — until the food came.
When my soup came and I offered her a taste, she refused. I didn’t think much about it until she also refused a taste of my samosa. My suspicions were confirmed when her chicken biryani came and she just picked at it.
Finally, I asked her if she was afraid to eat the food because she was afraid the Indians would poison her. She gave me a sort of nod-shake of the head. I sighed and decided to finish my meal at least and worry about it later.
Then, whilst I was eating and she kept picking at her food, she suddenly started to make the strangest expressions. She would contort her face and then when I asked her what that was about, shake her head furiously. Then, every single time the waiter walked past, even if he was paying no attention to us, she would announce in a very loud voice and a clownishly large grin that everything was delicious. Of course, then the waiter would glance over and see that she hadn’t had any of her food and be confronted with her “everything is wrong and I’m pretending the ship isn’t sinking” smile. She must have done this at least five times.
At this point I was pretty much speechless. It was one thing for her to refuse to eat after she ordered the food and after she asked to go out and try Indian food — but it was quite another for her to behave that strangely. I tried to keep the conversation going, but my consternation must have showed, because she started complaining about how it was a bad idea to come out to Indian food because I wasn’t smiling as much as when we went out to Chinese food. Then she started making strange expressions again. I tried explaining that it was because she wasn’t eating her food, but she would have none of my logic.
When we left, the manager said something sympathetic about her not eating her food and I could just smile sheepishly and say that it was her first time.
Very. Embarrassing.
Aside from that particular incident, I really hate how she constantly asks to go out for food. I’ve explained to her, numerous times, that we can’t go out to eat that often because I’m broke and I really don’t have the money for it. This is not a lie, because I’d be willing to go out to eat once a week if I only had the cash. Of course, at this point I don’t want to take her because I really don’t like how she ignores what I say about not having the money and just keeps asking. I actually started telling her that we could go eat if she would pay for it just so she’d quit asking after I told her that I was broke for the umpteenth time. There was one incident where I called her in the morning, told her we were going to be walking around Davis Square and that she had to eat lunch. In the middle of the outing, she started whining about how she was starving with a capital S. I asked her if she had something to eat, and she said that she hadn’t because there was nothing in the house to eat. She also said that her father, who was home, didn’t make anything for her to eat. At that point, exasperated, I told her that then she should probably learn how to make food for herself, or tell her father that she needs to eat before she goes out. What’s really odd is her habit of asking to bring home all the leftovers of lunch if I bring her back to the apartment and feed her lunch. And I mean, all the rest of the leftovers as in the entire pan of lasagna. I don’t know if that’s just her hoggish habits of if she likes something, she’ll take it all, or if her family actually doesn’t feed her enough. Considering that she’s rather chubby, I can’t imagine it’s the latter. Could be wrong though.
Two weeks before, she mentioned wanting to go to the Science museum. I told her that since tickets were around 28 dollars a person, we couldn’t go unless we had free tickets. Azora’s boss offered her three free tickets, but the kicker of the situation is that neither of us really want to take her with the free tickets. I think that she’s going to get bored with the museum halfway through and want to leave because it’s too much walking around and so I don’t want to ask Azora for the tickets when she might have a better use for it. Azora doesn’t want to hand them over because she doesn’t want the LS to keep thinking that all she needs to do is ask and someone will come up with whatever she wants.
I don’t think this a good mindset of ours at all, but I can’t help it. Just don’t want to do anything nice for her anymore. After the knitting incident, I’m doubly disinclined to believe her when she says that she wants to do something and it’s a terrible response to a child, but I just can’t help the gut reaction.
Blegh.
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06.20.10
Posted in Big Sister Association tagged Little Sister at 11:22 pm by kyrias
I hung out with my Little Sister this past Saturday and man, was it a doozy.
I had planned a nice, soothing, not-too-strenuous afternoon of dim sum, yarn shopping, and then teaching her how to knit. It was supposed to be fun and drama-free.
Right.
It all started in the morning when I was walking out the door at 12:05. I was leaving early so I could go to the farmer’s market, pick up some strawberries whilst they were still in season, and then pick her up. This was when I noticed that my phone was flashing at me.
LS’s mother had left me a voice mail at 11:30AM, telling me that she was taking LS to the Saturday program she goes to sometimes and I could pick her up there. Or I could pick her up somewhere else. Then she said if I had any questions to call xxx-xxx-xxxx.
Main problem wrong with this scenario: I couldn’t make out either of the street names or house numbers.
I started freaking out right then and there.
First of all, she really shouldn’t have changed pick-up places on such short notice without actually getting ahold of me. She didn’t give me the option of telling her that I couldn’t do it if it had turned out that the place was going to be really hard to get to via the T. Then, when I tried calling the phone number she provided to figure out the address, it went straight to voice mail and her voice mail box was so stuffed I couldn’t leave a message. When I called LS’s grandmother’s, some woman answered the phone and said “blah blah blah blah Creole” and then hung up. I took that to mean “I don’t speak nothing but Creole, bai”. I tried calling my social worker, but since I was calling her office phone, that also went to voice mail.
I was worried that LS would be stuck somewhere waiting for me, without knowing my phone number and without a way to get in contact with her mother when I didn’t show. I was hoping that she would call me by 1:00PM, when I was supposed to show up, but she didn’t.
Finally, her mother called me at 1:44PM and asked me if I was showing up. I really had to sit on myself not to unload on her, and told her that I would head straight out the door — if she would only tell me where she was. She then said that she would bring LS back to her grandmother’s place, which is my usual pick-up spot.
The 91 bus was running 15-20 minutes late according to the MBTA site, so I decided to take a taxi because I really didn’t feel like wasting any more time. Also, I was on the verge of nervous collapse after a full two hours of happy-fun times. I ended up tipping 7 dollars for a 10 dollar fare because my brain was just. that. fried and I didn’t realize my math was wonky.
Picked up LS and went to lunch.
Side note: LS has pretty poor table manners. If she likes something, she’ll keep taking more of it without considering that other people might want some. She’ll fill her plate to near overflowing and still reach out for more. She also has the bad habit of not just taking a little bit of something to try when she’s never had it before and if she doesn’t like it, she won’t make an effort to finish it. I’ve been trying to teach her better table manners, and actually Azora has poked her twice about it the last time we went out.
LS had a full plate of food that she had tasted and given up on. Then she started eating the custard out of an egg tart and was about to give up on the pastry shell part. I told her that she should finish it. She asked why. I told her because wasting food was bad. She seemed on the verge of asking why again and I just decided to slam her with “Children are starving in Africa” except I was tired of kids dismissing that, so I decided to hit closer to home and presented her with “Children are starving in Haiti”.
Yes. She’s from Haiti.
Azora reprimanded me for it. I had forgotten that LS had family caught in the earthquake and I stewed over that insensitive and tactless statement for the rest of the afternoon until I got a chance to apologize to LS about it.
Then we went yarn shopping and Azora tried to teach her how to knit. She watched Azora knit a couple of stitches and when it was her turn, she just looked at the needles without picking them up and refused because it was too complicated. Azora and I tried to encourage her to just try and see, but she still wouldn’t.
Right.
Let me clarify here that she had been asking for knitting lessons for the last two sessions now.
So we packed up and took her home.
I have to be honest. At this point, I have little to no interest in hanging out with her. She isn’t inquisitive or curious, doesn’t like reading, doesn’t like learning things, even learning how to play board games, and what she wants to do (nail salons, Six Flags) is utterly at odds with what I want to do. What’s worse is that she doesn’t seem particularly out-doorsy either. When I tried taking her walking around Quincy Market to look at street performers and such, she would complain that it was hot, that it was too tiring, and that she wanted to sit down.
I don’t think I actually even like her. She’s not a bad kid, but she’s spoiled in ways I can’t stand, I’m not clicking with her, and the entire situation is absolutely frustrating.
My social worker finally got back to me today, told me she was sorry but she didn’t work weekends, and asked me how things panned out. I tried to talk to her about not being LS’s Big Sister next year because I didn’t think that we were interested in the same things and if I tried to get her to do something she wasn’t particularly interested in, she would sit there and be apathetic about it.
Social worker told me she understood, but that we should try compromising and trade off on things that we wanted to do.
I tried explaining that it didn’t seem like LS wanted to do anything except eat out, go to Six Flags, or to a nail salon.
Social worker repeated herself. We should compromise, because that’s key, and surely we could find a list of things that we both wanted to do if we tried.
I gave up, thanked her, and hung up.
I swear, everyone in this mess is driving me crazy. Including myself.
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06.08.10
Posted in Renting with friends tagged money woes, omg moving at 11:28 pm by kyrias
Or rather, we’re renting a new house this year.
It’s in Malden, is a 5 bedroom house with a decent attic and basement that appears to have potential, and we’re really hoping that we can make this work for the next few years at least.
Of course, nothing is ever that easy.
This new place is 2.4k/month, not including utilities, and Zach’s commute goes from about an hour to almost an hour and 45 minutes. This was almost a deal-breaker, but then we managed to decide that four of us were going to buy a car so he could commute so we could take the house.
This decision isn’t as rash as it might seem, even though I have to admit that we also have to buy a dishwasher, washer, and dryer. Even so!
The problem being, of course, that 5 bedroom places just aren’t growing off trees. There’s not a great supply of them to begin with and when you factor in that we have a pretty limited budget, suddenly the pool of choices shrinks drastically. This place has new floors, new insulation and windows, and the kitchen has been re-done recently. Frankly, it’s gorgeous. I can easily see us living there three years from now, assuming that the current collection of people haven’t exploded in drama-fire. I could not see us living in our current apartment for too long, so that thought was what finally prompted me to suggest that we could buy a second-hand car.
That said, there’s still a bit of rough sailing ahead.
The finder’s fee of 1.2k, a month’s rent as deposit, buying the new appliances, and paying for July when we’re still paying for July in our current place is going to be a killer. This isn’t even including what we will have to spend on the car, insurance, and gas when we get the car.
What I’m currently conflicted about is that Ren and Dochola are asking for help with paying for the first portion of July’s rent. They will be moving in July 1st, whereas the rest of us anticipated moving in after the 15th. As such, they two will be responsible for 1.2k.
Usually I would have no problem about helping out. After all, it’s not only a friendly thing to do, it also opens up the possibility of more leisurely moving — which considering that I’m living in Framingham and Caesura works until 11pm every night, is a good thing.
Right now, however, I’m struggling with the idea that Azora, Zach, Caesura and I are already sort of taking one for the team in the form of buying a car so that we could live there. Even if I accepted the argument that we might not have gotten the house if we weren’t willing to pay for the entire month of July, part of me thinks that with our intending to buy a 5k car (at least) and paying for insurance, we’ve more than evened the scales in that regard. Assuming that they’re paying 600 more once so that we could have the house, whereas C and I would be paying 2.5k and insurance — I’m not too inclined to be made to feel like I’m upsetting the scales here. I’m not going to accept the idea that Ren and Doch were sacrificing their own financial security to allow us to live in that house because frankly, much as I liked the idea of living in that house, no one was going to force them to live beyond their means.
I have to admit that I was already a bit miffed that no one else offered to help with the car issue, or anything else in order to help us out, even when it was clear knowledge that we would be struggling with coming up with that money. Especially since C wants to go back to college, we really would have appreciated even a token offer of a hundred or two hundred dollars towards buying the car. Token of intent is always good, people.
Even so, I was going to sit on myself because after all, we did want that house. Ultimately, this will not break us although it might make us very, very unhappy financially for a while. I was thinking about opening a ROTH IRA for C and had been saving up my paychecks for the 3k that one needed to open an account with Vanguard, but not only has that entirely gone down the drain, that won’t even cover all of what we need. Credit card debt repayment will probably also have to go on hold with only minimum payments made until we sort out what is happening with the car and how much money we need to haul out. In fact, I can see the need of having a bread and water month, or months.
Ultimately, I suppose that C and I will give over a token $100, perhaps even $200 between the two of us, and call that acting in good faith. In all seriousness, if Doch and Ren are fine with us sitting on that helping out until later, that’d be great because frankly we have no spare cash at the moment. All I have in my checking and savings account is that 3k and I think I’ll need all of it in the two months ahead.
So — faithful friends, what would you do in our situation? Keeping in mind, of course, the CC debt, the student loans, the going back to college costs, the start-up costs of at least 2k for just the house, moving costs, new appliances, and the purchase of a car.
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05.19.10
Posted in Big Sister Association tagged communication failure drama ilamas, Sprint, Sprint sucks at 2:47 pm by kyrias
So my cell phone carrier is crap. I knew this. We all knew this. But I had no idea it would be this much of a problem.
For the last two years, sometimes I wouldn’t get calls when people were calling me, and frequently voice mails wouldn’t pop up until well after they were relevant. Their use-by date, so to speak.
This wasn’t a terrible problem, mostly because I’m not in a profession or in a position where it really matters that much when people can’t get ahold of me. Also, most people know to call either my parents or Caesura if it’s really, really urgent.
Which reminds me that I should perhaps give my Little Sister (LS) and her family my family’s phone numbers and perhaps Caesura’s as well.
Today is the 19th. My cell phone was blinking red to tell me that I had missed a phone call, so I activated the voice mail and found to my horror that there were 13+ new voice mails.
…at least 10 of them were from my Little Sister’s mother, distraught over her missing child.
This past Saturday, I had picked up the LS to hang out with her. When we dropped her off at her grandmother’s apartment, she saw her “uncles” parked by the curb about to take off and called out to them. They said that there was no one at home at the LS’s place and there was no one at home at the grandmother’s place too. I thought that I would have to take her back with me until I could figure out where the adults were, but then she asked to tag along with them for their graduation party and I happily let her go off with them.
Turns out that no one informed the LS’s mother where she was. From about 7pm onwards to 9:30, the LS’s mother left increasingly distressed voice mails begging me to pick up, to call her back and tell her where her daughter was. I assume that the phone calls stopped at 9:30 because she got back home.
Let me be very, very clear on this: I wasn’t aware that she was calling me and I didn’t get my voice mails until this afternoon.
Ugh. I can’t even begin to say how guilty I feel over allowing her to be that worried over her child. I can’t imagine that horrors that she probably had to endure because she probably thought that something terrible had happened to the both of us and that was why I wasn’t responding to my cell phone.
Also, I realize now that I was lucky that those men were her uncles. Not that I could have known for sure, but I’m not entirely certain that I should just let the LS run off with men I don’t know without getting an ok from either her grandmother or her mother. Not that confirming their identity was really an option at that point and it really wasn’t feasible to bring her back with us because often her mother works until late, but still…
Again, ugh.
I called my social worker just now to ask if she had heard from the mother recently since I called the mother and she didn’t pick up, presumably because she’s at work. According to my social worker, that was exactly what I should have done because there were no adults at either residence, but somehow that doesn’t make me feel that much better.
Blast Sprint!
Unfortunately, my father says he has similar issues with Verizon or I’d change in a heartbeat.
Double blast!
On another related note, there probably needs to be words about how there needs to be people at home so I can drop the LS off with people I know are family.
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04.20.10
Posted in life tagged military at 11:38 pm by kyrias
Almost two years ago, I had thoughts about joining the military.
At the time, I ultimately gave up the idea for several reasons:
Considering the war on two fronts, I thought that it was a pretty good bet that I would be deployed to Iraq. After all, they were recruiting like mad with little effect and supposedly they desperately needed people on the front. I thought it silly to assume that just because I intended to either become a linguist or a mental health counselor, they wouldn’t put their needs above mine.
I heard that no matter what the recruiters promise you, nothing is guaranteed. If the military deems that there is a bigger need for you elsewhere, it is no matter what they verbally promised you. Dick Cheney himself said: “The military is not a social welfare agency; it is not a job’s program.”
Furthermore, to enlist is to commit to at least 8 years of my life. This is not even accounting for the stop-loss measures that might be put in place if the wars keep going on. I have no particular desire to be caught in the military with no way to get out.
Also — 20 years to get retirement money? Sheesh. I think the civilian sector is quite a bit friendlier than that. It would be fine if I were working in the capacity I wanted to work in for 20 years, but if not?
Right now, it seems like there’s quite a bit more to think about on top of all that.
I heard from a current Airman that the AF has too many officers and so they’re going to be giving some early retirement this year and cutting some others from active duty since there’s 1,7000 waiting to get in.
This means a lot of things:
It is going to be doubly hard to get into the field that I want unless I am absolutely top of the grade across all counts. Since this is not the case, I’m not going to even dream about turning officer and getting commissioned. I’ve been trawling the AFForums and from what I can see, a lot of people are being Delay Enlistment Program-ed and are waiting for up to 14 months to even go to boot camp. In the interim, they could decide they didn’t want you after all. Without a technical degree, I don’t think there’s a good chance of anything right now.
With all those people waiting to get in, in part because of the economy, they are only accepting people who are willing to be PJ/SERE/TACP/SOWT and such. Another term I heard was “open general” where you’re pretty much telling them you’re good to go where ever they want you. In fact, I heard that if you’re too picky about what jobs you want, they simply won’t want you. Service before self and all that being one of the three core values.
Housing is supposedly a bitch to obtain at this point because of the deluge of applicants. Not going to count on being able to share a house with the significant other.
Something else that came up is that because the army is short of people, sometimes the military “shuffles” people around so AF people end up going on joint deployments with the army doing patrols and convoy escorts. The AF may suffer from an excess of people, but the army doesn’t. The math doesn’t look too pretty in that case.
Speaking of deployments — from what I heard, every person will get their chance at being deployed overseas to the sandbox. Although AF deployments are shorter than army deployments, it’s not unusual for the people in AF intel to be sent out at least once a year.
In all — military might still be a bad idea. Oh well.
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04.16.10
Posted in I.T, Racism tagged apple at 10:11 am by kyrias
Or is it just a response to racism? I’m not sure.
I was watching an interview of 田朔宁, the guy who the Chinese government hired to set up the Internet in China when Clinton was to visit years ago.
He was talking about how he used to idolize Steve Jobs for his visionary work within the computer industry, especially as pertaining to how he perceived Jobs’ goal with regards his products: not mass market commercialization, but actually creating cutting edge technology to further digitalization.
Then he mentioned how, when he managed to score a meeting with Jobs, he was completely and utterly disillusioned. Supposedly, according to Jobs, he has never been to China and has no interest in ever visiting China. Furthermore, the “Chinese can’t write big software”.
I’ve never been particularly enamored of Apple products — partially because I have a pretty solid mental block with regarding learning new software when it is unnecessary and partially because Macs really don’t run enough of the programs that I would want to use.
That sentence, however, pretty much solidifies my intent to boycott Apple’s products. Pity, since I thought that the Ipad looked pretty interesting. I guess I’ll just have to wait until the Chinks come up with something comparable.
We’ll see about them not being able to write big software, shall we?
I don’t think its improbable, especially since the Chinese are really getting hard at work developing alternative to American tech: operating systems, the 3G network, etc. I couldn’t really understand why they needed their own version before, but now I guess I have some idea.
At first I almost found my indignation funny, thinking that it was just nationalistic pride stepping in. Then I thought about it, and I really feel that it’s a pretty racist thing to say, especially without any qualifiers. I’m not even sure that you can fix that sentence with any qualifier, actually. To generalize across that many people and to say that the Chinese as a whole are incapable of anything is just a bad statement to make.
Sorry Jobs, you might be visionary and your products might be all sleek and pretty and all — but so far as I can tell, you’re a racist asshole and I’m not supporting anything of yours with my money.
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04.02.10
Posted in Drama Ilamas, life at 11:46 pm by kyrias
Dear all:
I am honestly very confused by the situation I find myself in, to the extent where I was originally contemplating not writing this open letter for fear of it being construed as passive aggressiveness at work. In the end, I decided that since all following items have been brought up repeatedly by yours truly to all of you, the accusation does not stand. In any event where you still feel this is passive aggressiveness elevated to a whole new level of the art of airing dirty laundry, do please submit it to passiveaggressivenotes.com so that I may enjoy some notoriety for my pain.
To begin with, I do not understand why people constantly labor under the delusion that they are cleaner than anyone else in our circle of friends. I have had people tell me that either they’re cleaner than I am or they would keep a cleaner house if they were in charge, or that they are cleaner than this other person in the group. I hate to break it to you, but I have ample evidence to the contrary. I’m sure you would all like to think that you are cleaner, but I assure you that you really aren’t. Before people get all fired up about how I’m also not a paragon of cleanliness, I will submit that at least I admit to it and that I do not harangue other people by stating that I would do better if only I were in charge. Hypocrisy is the last thing anyone can charge me of.
Following these delusions of cleanliness, I’m not quite certain what compels people to not clean up after themselves. Those who are guests to our household, I’m not sure why you think it is alright to leave your dirty plates and cups scattered about for other people to clean up. Perhaps you see it as your right as a guest to have someone else pick up after you. Fair enough. For those who live with me and have lived with me in the past — is it because you still have fantasies of your mother coming in and cleaning up, or is it that you simply have no attachment to this household and don’t see it as yours? If you see it as your household, then why the reluctance to pick up after yourself? I do not understand this lack of pride or shame in your surroundings. I am not even talking about clutter — which I am guilty of myself — but the failure to mop up red sauce that has dripped onto the floors, the failure to keep the stove from being an encrusted, blistering, peeling mass of blackened, cooked on food matter when the stove is so rarely in use now that there is no one cooking more than one meal there a day per person, if that. Why do you think it is alright to leave sticky remains of your food everywhere on the kitchen floor? What makes you not care?
Then there’s that little bit about added hypocrisy. It seems that every single person I know has a problem with clutter — except when it is theirs. Every. Single. Person. It’s amazing, how suddenly a person who professes a love of clean surfaces is perfectly alright with things being scattered across said surfaces when it’s their stuff. Amazing!
Further along those lines, for those of you who have any illusions about wanting or being able to live with people: no. Just no.
First off, if you can’t stand any other person’s clutter but your own, you’re in trouble with wanting to live with people. There’s the stinking hypocrisy and then there’s the fact that you’re not going to get along with another person with that kind of attitude.
Also if you are incapable of cleaning after yourself, which apparently you are — and you don’t want to clean up anything that might belong to someone else, then I have a news flash for you. If you’re going to be immature about cleaning up after yourself and others, then you are in no position to want to live with anyone except for yourself or perhaps with your beloved fuck-buddies who you will presumably be fine with cleaning up after. Or maybe you can terrorize them into cleaning up after you and themselves. Or perhaps, you will simply continue living in filth as you are doing right now.
Also? You don’t actually really want to live with people in a real household. That would involve caring, compromise, and oh gasp, real work towards making the household tick. I see it now and I’ve seen it before — people simply don’t care enough about their living situation to raise a hand towards making it a better place. If everyone simply had the mindset that this was their home and that they really had to work towards making it a cleaner place — then things would be much more different, and much better than they are now.
For those of you who don’t intend on living with other people because of their perceived faults in your eyes — I really hate to burst your little bubble of self-delusion, but you really aren’t much better than those you are denouncing. You really, really aren’t that much cleaner or neater or anything.
Me? I didn’t keep the house in the best of conditions when I was in residence. In fact, it was often cluttered and downright filthy. However, I will state that I spent an average of at least an hour a day doing household chores whilst I was in residence, if not more. Can any one of you claim that? If I didn’t succeed, at least I was trying to do my part.
As a general public service announcement:
It is very helpful to learn how to load the dishwasher. The fact that people still don’t know how to do it properly boggles my brain. It’s really not hard. You put the dishes in so that they will get the chance to have water get at their surfaces. Sometimes, when you’re clearing out the sink, you may even need to run two loads in a row. Gasp! The horror! For the record, it is very hard to get things clean when they are all stacked on top of each other so that the dishes are overlapping. Physics, people, is your friend.
When unloading the dishwasher, it is helpful to see if the dishes are actually clean. In fact, this is often imperative when you have not learned how to load the dishwasher properly. When a white bowl is speckled all over with pesto sauce, then this is a hint that the dishes are probably less than clean. The correct thing to do is to either re-do the load or scrub at the bowl a bit and then check the other dishes to see if they are clean. The wrong thing to do would be to unload the entire dishwasher, including the dirty bowl, and put it all into the cupboards.
When you have pots boiling over, it is often much easier to wipe it down with a wet sponge rather than let it cook dry and then turn a lovely shade of teak.
Lastly, can we please stop with the delusions? It’s really unattractive in people of our age. Really, really unattractive.
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03.08.10
Posted in Conventions, Ethics and morality, Feminism, Future, Gender, culture, life tagged China, life in China, one-child policy at 7:21 pm by kyrias
A friend emailed me an article from the Economist.
He asked me my thoughts on the article, and one thing really stood out to me: the author says that “most obviously, China should scrap the one-child policy”.
I think that’s just rank stupidity talking.
The authors says in the article that other countries without the one-child policy also suffer from a skewed sex ratio. This, to me, says that the one-child policy may be a significant cause in causing the numbers to be as ludicrous as 200 boys to 1 female, but it’s not fixing anything to scrap that policy.
There’s a couple of problems with the entire situation:
For those couples who can afford multiple children, they’ll simply keep having children until they get their desired boy. If there is enough affluence, then this would just cause a population surge at worst and at best there would be more girls brought into this world to live in a world of passive abuse and neglect with names like “bringing brother” and “summoning brother” or “might as well keep feeding”. Yes, that last was actually a common name.
For those who cannot afford to feed, clothe and school multiple children, then abortion is still the answer. As standards of living rise in China, more and more couples are realizing the immense amounts of money, time, and energy required to raise a child to be successful. With this in thought, it is more than likely that under those circumstances those people who would prefer sons would abort girls anyways to keep the best for their sons.
In rural areas, I can all but see rag-tag armies of girls doing the chores, working in the fields, toiling whilst their brothers go to school. For a family who has to scrimp and save for tuition, the only person in the family who will go to school is, of course, the son.
As a Chinese female, I would rather die than live in the above scenarios. It would be kinder to strangle me at birth or even much more humane to kill me in the womb. To live and be denied education, to be seen as lesser simply because of my gender, and to be seen as a breeder on legs? No thanks.
Of course, others may not share my view. Others will probably think that life as a slave is better than death. That’s alright. We’re all entitled to our own opinions.
Speaking as a Chinese woman living in today’s times seeing the gender inequality and the crimes that rise from it: bride-napping, sharing stolen wives between brothers, gang rape by villages of men who just want to breed their next generation of rapist sons — at this point I’m not even particularly keen on living in China. Sounds like a rather dangerous proposition to me, actually.
It speaks rather eloquently to me that when the demand for women rises, violence against them also rises in proportion to said demand instead of more respect. Instead of having more choices, our lives are put in more danger.
Nothing is going to change, not the sex ratio, not women’s rights, not anything unless some fundamental views are changed. Before that, perhaps scientists can comfort themselves that at least the numbers aren’t looking quite so horrible at the expense of having more people on the face of this earth — but nothing is fixed.
It’s stupid, stupid, stupid to even think so.
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