I think we exhausted most of the good puns last year, but this year, My ITLAPD is a plea for fairness and bi-partisanship.
If we’re going to have International Talk Like A Pirate Day, in the spirit of the great Pirates Vs. Ninja divide, we need to have International Talk Like A Ninja Day.
So please, on International Talk Like A Ninja Day, try to be as silent as possible.
Sometimes, you come across a photo that, due to an oddity of perspective, makes it look like something much different than it really is. Such as this photo I came across while randomly blogsurfing today:
You like monkeys, you like kittens…. 🙂
After the gaming group went home (and a report on that will be coming later for the three of you who are actively reading the exploits of our merry band), I dug our Playstation2 out of the closet and hooked it up to the TV. I’m pleased to report that it was able to play the movies that the JVC was unable to recognize.
I’ll be searching to see if there’s a firmware upgrade for the JVC, but in the meantime, I have a workaround. I really should use the Playstation more, anyway. We originally only bought it because rslatkin and vatavian introduced us first hand to the aerobic joy that is DDR, but we had stopped for a while, and when we moved I didn’t bother hooking it back up, though I’m glad I took the time to carefully pack the various parts of it into a box.
Maybe I’ll play some of the other games I picked up for the thing but never played. In my copious spare time.
The only person who showed up to watch a movie was Alice. This is fine, since Alice is always good company, and I always enjoy having her around. Next week we plan to move the weekly movie night to Wednesday, since at least one person suggested that they had a permanent conflict on Monday, and the day was pretty arbitrary from our point of view.
We originally intended to watch Hot Fuzz, which I had seen on the airplane heading out to California, but ran into a technical snag. My very spiffy JVC multi-region DVD player won’t play the disc. Apparently, the makers of DVDs are upset that some of us found a way to watch our overseas purchases on our own televisions, and are now including logic on their discs that my player completely fails to recognize them as valid media at all. (This is my speculation, at least. I should pull out the PS2, which I think can also play DVDs, and see what it does with them. If not, I’ll have to go buy a cheap DVD player for these oddities, because, dammit, I want to watch my own movies in my own living room!)
At any event, we ended up showing Alice the other half of the first season of Coupling, since she had seen the first half while visiting kitanzi last week. We had a lot of good laughs, and some good conversation, and everyone had an enjoyable time.
Our plane tickets for OVFF have been purchased. Here’s our itinerary, in case anyone’s interested:
Bkng Meals/ Seat/
Day Date Flight Status Class City Time Other Cabin
--- ----- --------------- ------ ----- ---------------- ------ ------ -------
Thu 25OCT DELTA 958 OK T LV ATLANTA 244P 24D
AR COLUMBUS OH 415P COACH
Mon 29OCT DELTA 6441* OK T LV COLUMBUS OH 1149A 8C
AR ATLANTA 128P COACH
Looking forward to seeing everyone who will be there? Who’s coming? 🙂
We really hadn’t intended this weekend to be a shopping weekend.
The rest of my trip was both fun and relaxing. Here’s the highlights.
Whenever you discuss issues of relevance to a minority community, eventually the notion of privilege comes up. There are certain status that, through accident of birth, simply make it easier for you to get by in our society. Two things I’ve observed about this in the past are that 1) telling someone they have some sort of privilege often makes them defensive, and 2) it’s really hard to realize it when you have it.
I know that I’m extremely fortunate in many ways to have been dealt the cards I have. I’m a married white guy from a comfortably middle-class family with country squire roots. Double Income No Kids and good jobs means that I have a fair amount of disposable income at hand — not enough to do whatever I want whenever I want, but enough to live comfortably in a nice neighborhood with two cars and a fair number of gadgets and toys — not to mention traveling across the country just to see someone I love because I can. While there are certainly parts of my life that are well outside the mainstream, they’re easy enough to hide if I was inclined to. (I’m not, but I’ve found — and have sometimes been gently chided for – simply not mentioning things makes it pretty easy to avoid scrutiny.
Do I have privilege? I have privilege in spades. Good lord, I’m only short being rich and good-looking for a full hand of trumps. And it’s not my fault, and I can say that none of the things should matter, but they do, and when you were born able to breathe the water, it rarely occurs to you that other people are drowning.
Part of the problem is that it’s really hard to put yourself in another persons shoes. No matter how much you empathize, no matter how much you care, no matter how much you show solidarity, its hard to really grok what it means to be black, or poor, or gay, or a woman, because you just don’t have the context. You don’t have the invisible framework that exists around those things that lets you see the world the way they do. You can see the picture, but don’t notice all the colours, or the little details that are just out of your frame, but the painter was quite aware of.
Every now and then, someone will come along and tear a jagged wound in their soul so that you can see inside, and while total understanding still eludes you, something strikes you deep in the heart, and you get it just a little more. Yesterday, shadesong pointed to just such an essay, a reaction to the Jena 6 incident that is continuing to play out in Louisiana and the continuing presence of racism in our society.
A few minutes later, I was helping my then terminally-ill father to the bathroom. He had been down south for a few weeks with my mom. Back “home” was where he wanted to die. I stayed there with him, as he stood at the urinal.“You know” he said, “I came back here to let go, right son?”
“Yes sir.”
“I wanted it to happen here…where I was born. With Mama and Daddy, and everything I knew. I wanted to go…home.”
“Yes sir.”
“And I’ll be”—he looked around to see if there was anyone there to hear him curse—“I’ll be Goddamned, if the shit I ran away from in 1948 ain’t still here.” He sighed heavily. “The same shit.”
He looked at me. His eyes wet with tears. “I swear to God son, I tried to make this a better world for ya’ll. I tried. And look at it. Coming home to this shit…I know I’m not gonna be here much longer…but coming home to this shit…it just takes it outta me that much more. I feel like I could die today.”
Read the whole thing. Walk a mile in those shoes, and see the world through another’s eyes. Understand where you are, how far we have come, and how far we have yet to go.