Belated apologies

I apologize for cluttering up folks' friends page with the 10 copies of my last post yesterday afternoon. I feel compelled to explain, not only to make myself feel like less of a moron, but also as a warning to others.

I'm quite familiar with people who post things, go to their recent events and don't see it, then post it again. I didn't do that. I'm also familiar with hitting "update journal", the browser thinks for a few minutes, you get a message saying "server not available", so you hit okay then hit update again, thereby posting it a second, third, or fourth time. I didn't do this either. Instead I hit update journal and the browser thought and thought thought and thought and thought and thought and thought and thought, and apparently during this time it posted it everytime it thought. I think my browser was "connecting" for 40 minutes straight. Normally I would notice this and hit stop, but unfortunately I was in a meeting the whole time. I came out of the meeting and the page with my post was still sitting there as if I'd never hit the "update" button.

Of course, then I realize the problem, attempt to delete the 10 posts, and the server is being slow and difficult, especially considering we have a T1 connection at work. Anyway, I accidentally deleted ALL of them, had to repost, and it did it again -- the browser just thought and thought and after 60 seconds I hit stop and gave up. I feared my brain would explode from the frustration. Then I came home and found it posted it twice anyway.

So let this be a warning to you all. Don't be raybear. Don't be a punk. Don't believe your browser when it says it's merely connecting and it's taking an inordinate amount of time.

I'm a ghetto white trash fat faggot cross-dresser.

I'm so over the phrase "white trash". On the annoyance scale, I rate it slightly below "ghetto" and "fat" (as a general pejorative or as an adjective for anything annoying or ugly), but above "cross-dresser".

I mean, sure, plenty of people use this phrase who come from working class white backgrounds and might be using it in a reclamatory way. But I'm not sure it's really working at all, especially since I think many of the times when people are supposedly reclaiming, they are more likely admitting or confessing they are white trash, thereby supporting the idea that it's something of which to be accused or ashamed.

I'm not denying cultural or regional differences between rural and urban, suburban and trailer park, southern and midwestern, etc. etc. That would be ignorant and reductionist of me. I'm also not saying one can never point out or illuminate or discuss these differences. I just wish at some point in our culture we were taught how to do this with respect and honesty and sans judgment.

I wish that along with the quadratic equation and dissecting frogs and the names of the thirteen colonies and other things taught nearly every year throughout school, there would be some mandatory classes on communication and ways of speaking and people would actually maybe realize that language has power, and class and race and sex and other categories have power and combining the two (or three or four) has real manifested effects on individuals as well as society. I wish people would be able to stand outside of themselves more often and say "hey, that probably came out badly to someone who's not inside my head." I wish that for thirty goddamned seconds people would imagine how they might feel if they were living in someone else's shoes and shape all of their speech around the realizations that would come from that.

It all sounds so simple and hunky dory when written out in this fashion. Or I just realize how everyone suffers from debilitating forms of tunnel vision when it comes to life. Half the world are intentional bastards and the other half seem to be unwitting assholes.

I feel very sad for people.

Steal This Product

I had two people on my friends page writing about boycotts. They were not talking about the boycotting the same product, nor are they on each others' friends list (as far as I know). Maybe there's something astrologically speaking that causes this phenomenon. It always amuses and entertains me when something like this happens, and I feel compelled to unite by mentioning something as well.

( I take my coffee with the blood and sweat of migrant workers, please! )