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The Mesopotamian Cartel managed to track me down outside The Scut Factory so they could bestow a handsome remuneration upon me free of The Scut Factory’s cut.
I was hoping they would.
More money – always good. Since RTT didn’t graduate, I am honor-bound to keep on paying support to Ben. Which is a drag. The support I pay is not a huge amount of money, but it would have paid for more interesting road trips. For example: I want to go to Albuquerque in July, hang out with Max, see Jeanna, meet up with Mizz Kimmie. And I want to go to Chicago in September.
And these things cost money.
Plus the project is fairly interesting: The Mesopotamian Cartel is maneuvering to get first mover advantage in the sport drink market in Iran. You laugh, but, in fact, the market is potentially very lucrative: Sixty percent of Iran’s population is under 30, and the men are all fanatic sports nuts. Easy enough to create brand traction by differentiating the product from carbonated sodas (empty calories – bad) and energy drinks (the poor man’s Captagon – bad.) The long-term strategy calls for bottling plants in Tehran.
You wouldn’t necessarily know it from reading this LJ, but I happen to be a first-class business analyst.
So it was great fun exercising that portion of my brain.
###
In other news, in the wake of Orlando, the signal to noise ratio on Facebook has dropped to practically zero. Particularly off-putting: The number of posts that begin, If you are a sympathetic hetero person, you still don't understand: This is our tragedy…
Like expressing your own sympathy and outrage at the event somehow dilutes their ownership of the event.
Fine, I think. Fuck you, then.
Which is not the politically correct response!
No. The politically correct response is to embark upon an internal Maoist-inspired self-criticism session in which I examine and berate my own privilege…
Again, I say: Fuck you.
You don't know anything about my life. You think anything I've accomplished was somehow given to me by some invisible patron saint of heterosexuality.
This whole My Weltanschauung is more tragic and oppressed than your Weltanschauung dealie is the reason why people vote for Donald Trump.
At Max’s urging, I listened to a This American Life episode while I was running yesterday in which a Berkeley resident described an incident in which he got checked out by a server at the Elmwood Café. She’d mistaken him for a homeless guy, which he attributed to the fact he was black.
Maybe he was right.
But maybe he wasn’t. Maybe the servers, inundated with complaints from their upscale Elmwood patrons, had identified the guy's clothing choices – beanie, grubby hoodie, ratty jeans – and had made their mistaken identification from that.
Anyway, the guy decided to orchestrate his outrage into a teachable moment in front of a middle school auditorium. Since this was Berkeley, the middle school auditorium was packed. The panel on stage included the guy himself – an inspiring media-ista (and all publicity is good publicity on that front – look! He got a whole This American Life segment out of it!) and the owner of the Elmwood Café.
Not the server from the Elmwood Café.
No. She got fired.
I can’t help thinking that she was the real victim in this story.
Note that she didn’t ask him to leave. She merely looked at him.
I imagine her own uneasiness looking at him. Her own unsureness. “Five tables complained yesterday,” the manager tells her. “Five.” Before he pushes her out on to the floor.
I’m telling you, it’s the workers who always get screwed.
I was hoping they would.
More money – always good. Since RTT didn’t graduate, I am honor-bound to keep on paying support to Ben. Which is a drag. The support I pay is not a huge amount of money, but it would have paid for more interesting road trips. For example: I want to go to Albuquerque in July, hang out with Max, see Jeanna, meet up with Mizz Kimmie. And I want to go to Chicago in September.
And these things cost money.
Plus the project is fairly interesting: The Mesopotamian Cartel is maneuvering to get first mover advantage in the sport drink market in Iran. You laugh, but, in fact, the market is potentially very lucrative: Sixty percent of Iran’s population is under 30, and the men are all fanatic sports nuts. Easy enough to create brand traction by differentiating the product from carbonated sodas (empty calories – bad) and energy drinks (the poor man’s Captagon – bad.) The long-term strategy calls for bottling plants in Tehran.
You wouldn’t necessarily know it from reading this LJ, but I happen to be a first-class business analyst.
So it was great fun exercising that portion of my brain.
###
In other news, in the wake of Orlando, the signal to noise ratio on Facebook has dropped to practically zero. Particularly off-putting: The number of posts that begin, If you are a sympathetic hetero person, you still don't understand: This is our tragedy…
Like expressing your own sympathy and outrage at the event somehow dilutes their ownership of the event.
Fine, I think. Fuck you, then.
Which is not the politically correct response!
No. The politically correct response is to embark upon an internal Maoist-inspired self-criticism session in which I examine and berate my own privilege…
Again, I say: Fuck you.
You don't know anything about my life. You think anything I've accomplished was somehow given to me by some invisible patron saint of heterosexuality.
This whole My Weltanschauung is more tragic and oppressed than your Weltanschauung dealie is the reason why people vote for Donald Trump.
At Max’s urging, I listened to a This American Life episode while I was running yesterday in which a Berkeley resident described an incident in which he got checked out by a server at the Elmwood Café. She’d mistaken him for a homeless guy, which he attributed to the fact he was black.
Maybe he was right.
But maybe he wasn’t. Maybe the servers, inundated with complaints from their upscale Elmwood patrons, had identified the guy's clothing choices – beanie, grubby hoodie, ratty jeans – and had made their mistaken identification from that.
Anyway, the guy decided to orchestrate his outrage into a teachable moment in front of a middle school auditorium. Since this was Berkeley, the middle school auditorium was packed. The panel on stage included the guy himself – an inspiring media-ista (and all publicity is good publicity on that front – look! He got a whole This American Life segment out of it!) and the owner of the Elmwood Café.
Not the server from the Elmwood Café.
No. She got fired.
I can’t help thinking that she was the real victim in this story.
Note that she didn’t ask him to leave. She merely looked at him.
I imagine her own uneasiness looking at him. Her own unsureness. “Five tables complained yesterday,” the manager tells her. “Five.” Before he pushes her out on to the floor.
I’m telling you, it’s the workers who always get screwed.
