Must Be Nice...

Or, "Damn, White Lady!"




So, we had someone retire today after 20+ years with the company. We had a small reception for her in one of the rooms upstairs, and the catering company brought small desserts and ice cream to go with her big ass "Happy Retirement" sheetcake.


Cool.


So, we're standing around chit-chat small talking and I notice that there are plenty of people that I don't know in the room. So, I ask, "Olga, did you work in a different department before you were here?" She did, in fact longer than she worked with us. So my guess was that that's where all these folks must be from.


Up walks one of them, "Hi, I'm Mattias, I work in Olga's old department." Aha- I have assumed correctly.

And, then up walks these two white women, each with plates overflowing with food. They walk over and join our chat, and after a few minutes I hear this:

"Hey Olga, I'm Gabriella, and this is my friend Adelle. Nice to meet you."


WHAT?!?!?!? These bitches came down to someone's retirement reception, loaded up plates full of food, and then just in case there was any confusion, and Olga thought she may have just forgotten who they were, they went over and introduced themselves to her! I mean damn white lady! Is that what life looks like outside of racial oppression. You get to be that damned relaxed about shit.


"Hey, Becky I could use some sugar, looks like there's a retirement reception. Let's go get some food."





Plates loaded down!


I just couldn't see anybody I know pulling that shit, and then to have the audacity to throw off mendacity, and walk straight up to the person retiring, and introduce yourself and your sidekick. What?!?


First of all, if I convinced someone Black to come with me to someone's retirement reception that we didn't know, there would be some discussion about any ramification on our career, we would consider when the next performance review is coming up and the strength of our last review. Has anyone we know even crashed a retirement celebration at the company? "How did you find out? Was it a general announcement? If it was a general announcement, then surely it must be okay for anyone to show up." All of this would be necessary to pump ourselves up to crash a part at work. At work, where we pick up our check to keep a roof over our head and food in our bellies.


So, let's say we go. Fuck it, let's go chile.


No one needs to say anything, but here is the plan:

1. Hang Tight. I'm looking out for you, and you're looking out for me.
2. Act Natural. Don't do anything that will draw attention to us or make anyone question whether we should be here.
3. Find out as quickly as possible who the guest of honor, and avoid them like they have the Bird Flu.
4. Make a quick and eventless exit.

Did I mention that their plates were loaded down? And with all this shit in their hands they came over, interrupted the conversation, and introduced themselves. Of course we talked about them after they walked away.

They hung out at the reception for awhile. When I was heading out myself, I passed Gabriella at the table loading up another plate. My face must have communicated what I was thinking, because she said, "Oh, I'm just making a plate to take home to my kids." I smiled and kept walking, but I thought to myself, "Damn, white lady- It must be nice..."

Oral Hygiene and the Septic Tank

so, i brush my teeth a lot. maybe a bit too, much (after every meal) a lot. i floss and brush my tongue, and rinse with mouthwash too. the whole sh'bang, a lot.

it's not a neurotic substitute for hand-washing; i chipped a molar, and after the dentist fixed me up i had an extra space that feels like it just catches any food particles in my mouth and thrusts them into my gums. i'm talking about with ford factory automation, assembly-line singularity of purpose: ram anything i eat into my gums!

so, i started carrying floss. then, after flossing, and loosening up all that plaque- i really would like to brush that crap out of my mouth. and since i've flossed and brushed, i may as well rinse with some mouthwash.

so, folks at work like to joke with me as i carry my handful of travel size oral hygiene products to the bathroom several times a day. when you see someone with this setup on the counter, even if it were for the first time, you know they are going to be there for awhile.

This has happened twice:

Bathroom Entrant: "Hey Argyle, girl are you in here brushing your teeth again? Blah, blah, blah."

Me: "Yeah, gotta keep it tidy. Especially since I'm all cute in the face."

Bathroom Entrant: "Ha ha ha, Blah, blah, blah" (Walks past me to enter the stall.)

[Then there's some paper rustling (seat cover positioning?), followed by extended silence]

Now, let me insert here that somewhere around middle school girls learn that we shouldn't make any noise in the bathroom. I can't tell you how many times I walked into the bathroom in middle school to dead silence, but all the stalls were full. Why? Because it's immodest to have someone hear our pee sound. So, how do we handle that? Pee so that your stream hits the side of the bowl, of course. There are few things as humiliating as being the only one making a pee sound in a bathroom full of other jr. high school girls.

So, her silence? Maybe just middle school vestiges. I learned that in a department with lots of older women, they prefer to pull down the paper seat cover, rather than hoover slightly. Weak quadriceps?

But, then it started...

Bathroom Entrant: [grunt]

Me: (thought bubble, "Whatthe fuck?!?)

-pause-

Bathroom Entrant: [grunt]

Me: This bitch knows I'm in here, talked to me on the way in, remarked about my brushing my teeth, and proceeds to pick a stall to take a shit?!?!? Where the fuck were you raised, Azerbaijan??? What the hell kinda shit is that? I don't even make a pee sound, and you are taking a grunting shit with me right around the corner brushing my teeth. A grunting shit?

Maybe feminism, and women's lib is fucking us up. Back to patriarchy, and repeal the advances of the women's suffragist movement. This bitch is getting too comfortable with me. Stop her from being able to go to school and pursue employment on the muthafuckin floor that I work on.

Shit, shackle my ass to a damn cotton-gin! This bitch just talked to me and then proceeded to take a grunting shit knowing that I'm still in here brushing my teeth!

Uhm- there are about 40 bathrooms in this building. Have some decency, lady! Go take a shit on the 12th floor. That's what I do.

She is really Brilliant!

So, have you ever had someone in your life that you liked and enjoyed spending time with, and then suddenly, who knows why, maybe because they enjoy spending time with you too, they decide to open up and share a piece of themselves that reveals exponential layers of depth, complexity, and profound beauty?

Maybe it's the kind of experience the Bible, or at least some guy, was referring to when he described scales falling from your eyes? It's like the transition from radio to television, or B&W to Technicolor, or color to HDTV; each move quickens your imagination and breaks down boundaries of what seems possible in the world.

This is what I loved about theological spaces. People regularly unzip and share their vulnerabilities, pain, discouragements, and triumphs with you. Certainly, it's not all that you get to see, but people are more able to interact with you from the fullness of their humanity; limitations included. They bring with them the scary/hard places that people try to ignore or cover up, resulting in their feeling isolated and confused.

I remember that the metaphor I used to use for myself was deciding to take the terrifying step of taking my arm from behind my back to show someone that I was maimed and horribly disfigured. So much so that I couldn't simply cover it with a glove, but needed to hide that piece of me to convince people that I was acceptable, desirable, and that it was safe to be close to me; because whether they wanted to be close to me or not, I desperately needed to be close to them. Isolation in your soul is a slow death.

There is always the fear of watching someone flinch, or move away, or involuntarily non-verbally communicate some form of disgust. So, I learned to walk and move with that hand obscured. I stuck it in my back pocket, or put it under my coat- resting squarely on my back.

And, when you hide your vulnerabilities and the disfigured parts of your soul, there are ways that you can learn to move and navigate your way through the world so that what people see is mysterious and intriguing, or looks like hyper competence, or, believe it or not, incredibly attractive.

People will try to emulate your gangsta-stroll with that hand resting on your back. Little do they know that they are emulating your response to pain. It's strange to see it play out, but anyone who has ever heard, "You are so damn cool!" on a regular basis can attest to the fact that unbeknownst to them, it's your pain that people are so enamored with. You're telling me that I have beautiful scars, because that's what they are.

So, in theological spaces I get to bring that arm out and people contend with the whole of me.

(Which I'm just deciding right now is actually more miraculous than having full function and total restoration to my being- although it certainly remains what every person strives for, learning to live in a community where my participation and acceptance aren't contingent upon presenting perfection is attainable. Being embraced as a full human being even while my flaws and limitations are visible is the miracle that I've experienced and offered here on earth.)

Time after time I would pull out my arm, trembling inside with uncertainty and terror, only to have it caressed by someone who would eventually roll up their pant leg, or push up their sleeve, to show me where they hurt and how they covered it up. They would tell me where they had given up on themselves, because they had given up on the possibility of being fully loved and accepted by anyone else.

So, it happened today with someone who showed me herself in a way that enabled me to catch a glimpse of the way that she radiates beauty.

Although I had seen her regularly for years, I had never seen the brilliance of her beauty like I did today.

My brain, deciding to shut itself down to the possibilities of humanity, wants to pin it on the fact that she is theological. But, the reality beyond my hopelessness is that it is because she decided that it was safe to be vulnerable.

We are all that beautiful.

Cubicle Etiquette:

Okay: Let's get this out in the open. I work in a cubicle. I've heard people refer to them with various terminologies, like "cubicle jungle." I kinda like "cube farm." But, when I'm talking about my workspace in our department, I call our area, "The Cube." In my mind, it's reminiscent of Trech, "If you've never been to the ghetto, don't ever come to the ghetto, cuz you wouldn't understand the ghetto, so stay the fuck out the ghetto!"

Now, I know that no one else makes that association, but I do, so I like to call our area "The Cube."

"What are you doing down here in The Cube? Don't you have an office with a window?"

I will admit that I was a little bit embarrassed about not having an office, and being relegated to The Cube. I mean, as a graduate assistant sure- cubicle. But, as a professional lesbian? Then I realized- cubicles today don't necessarily signify what they did when I was growing up. Today, you can earn $73,500 a year while sitting in a cubicle; you just have a nicer desk, and real wood cabinets, and a pretty cool computer. So, [deep breath] I work in a cubicle.

It's actually not that bad, except for a few things:

1.) Personal Calls:
If you're taking a personal call, keep it down. Quite honestly, I don't care that much about your husband's prostate, your grandchild's "acting up" in school, or what kind of hi-jinx you and the girls got into last night. Take your calls, I'm cool with it, just keep it down. I'm trying to play Tetris over here, and your loud ass conversation is fucking up my rhythm.

2.) Scents:
Please, please, puh-lease put away the Bath and Body Works lotions. No, no one wants to be ashy. I certainly don't want the files to be all bloody because your crocodile hands are ripping open all over the place. BUT! Let's keep it real, you are sitting 2.7 feet away from me "separated" by a 1 inch felt partition that doesn't even go all the way up to the ceiling. Have some consideration, lady!

3.) Don't Come Around Here Asking All Loud If I Want To Contribute To Shit!
I don't appreciate you utilizing peer pressure and normative expectations to get me to give you money. Just like everyone else, I got the e-mail telling me to come by if I wanted to contribute and that you were the contact person. You didn't see me.

I don't appreciate you trying to peer pressure/shame me into changing my mind by being all loud and shit.

"Hey! Today's the last day to contribute, I just wanted to give you an opportunity to give something!" (Loud)

"Oh sorry! I don't have any cash" (Now, keep it moving!) "Thanks for asking though!" (Loud)

4.) Don't Knock:
In The Cube, there are several lego-locked cubicles, and I can't tell if you are knocking on my entrance-way, the adjacent cubicle, whether someone has bumped into the wall, or if someone is just walking by and tapping on the wall as they move through. So, I've become conditioned to turn around and check with every bump and creek. Do you have any idea how many bumps and creeks there are through the day? A lot.

5.) Don't Sneak Up On Me:
My back is turned to the entrance of my cube, and countless times I've turned around to find someone right up on me(like so close that I should feel their body heat), and I have no idea how long they've been standing there. Luckily, I work fairly hard, so I've never been caught fucking around, but sneaking up on me is still inappropriate.

(Actually, that's probably why I reflexively turn around with every bump or creek.) Just say my name. I can hear you. Think of it as someone with their office door open and respect my cubicle space bitchez!

6.) Walk Around:
Yes, we are all within earshot of each other; especially those of us with loud voices. But, don't holler out to me from 3 cubicles away. Get up off your ass and walk around. I'm not going to answer you. If you really are walk-averse, that's cool. Pick up your phone and call my extension, and then speak in a reasonable tone; by "reasonable tone" I mean use your inside voice.

6.) Don't Call People Out, Damn!:
"Birget is that you?!? I was just going to call you to make sure that you were okay!" Yes, Heike, now we all know that Birget was late. Thank you for putting her business on blast like that. Cuh-rist! How petty can you be? We all know that you don't like Birget. Stop tripping.

7.) Turn Down Your Radio
Sure, we can all use some inspiration to get through the day, but Honeychile... I do NOT need to listen to you hum-singing "His Eye is on the Sparrow" never never again.

A Hummer. Really? A Hummer?

So, I went out to lunch with some co-workers the other day, and we invited the new administrative assistant temp. She's just filling in while someone's out on maternity leave.

So, she's an older woman; in her 50's maybe?And she complains a lot about her husband being forced to retire before they were ready, and the financial woes that has caused. Every time there is a holiday she mentions 6 or 7 times that she is grateful for the time off, but it's an unpaid holiday for her. And, she's over 50 and she's working as a temp. I get it, money's tight.

So, motivated by class-guilt, pity, or genuine concern about another human being and their predicament (I really don't know), I said, "Hey, let me buy you lunch." Rationalized by the fact that she doesn't know where we're going, and just doesn't want to turn down an invitation to hang out with the crew.

So, we take her car, which is a new SUV, and I get railroaded into driving because I "know where we're going." (That's bullshit! I want to be able to relax on a full belly for the ride back to work too.) But, I drive.

So, we lunch, and the whole time I'm thinking about her wallet and and all of the times that I ended up spending more on a meal than I was comfortable with, but too embarrassed or humiliated to do anything other than pretend I was cool with it, because I was with a group of people that I liked.

So, I said, "Hey Gertrude, can I buy you lunch?" She said yes, and I said, "Welcome to the department."

So, on the way back to her suv after lunch I have the keys, and I'm trying to hit the button to unlock the doors as we walk up to the car. She looks at me and says, "No, that's for the Hummer, this is for my car."

"Hummer?"

"Yeah, my other car is a Hummer, but we bought this one because the commute is so long, and it just didn't make sense with such terrible gas mileage."

"Are you serious? Yeah? What kind of gas mileage are you talking about."

"The Hummer only gets about 15 mpg, so we bought this one for my commute."

"Huh." is what I said, "Bitch! Give me my $16 dollars back!!" Is what I thought.

No more presumptuous care-taking for me. But, I'm not being hard on myself; just two weeks ago I was raised poor. So, more gaffes to come from the middle-class black woman who recently decided that it was okay to be upwardly mobile.

I don't know how it looks from the outside, but from the inside of my face now it feels like I'm glaring at her every time she complains about unpaid time off.

"My car desperately needs an oil change, lady! Howbout that!! Show some fucking consideration!!"

Even though I'm new to this middle-class thing, I can still tell that that would be inappropriate to say.

Fuck you Prince! And you too Madonna!! But, mostly Boy George.

So, I grew up in the 80's. And, lots of fashion mistakes were made back then, but that's the era that formed my sense of what constituted fashion staples. Right? In the 80's I learned that you can wear anything as long as you have on black pants. (I also learned that it was okay to wear a jheri curl with bangs and lines cut into the side of my head. I think my parents would have been ashamed to be seen with me if it weren't for the pegged acid-washed jeans I lived in. You know the drill: fold and roll.)

So, there I was minding my own business, learning how to pick out my own clothes, just coming off of the wave of, "just get a big ass belt and put it over your t-shit" during elementary school .

And, I could tell that I was done with that. But, as I started to develop a more mature sense of fashion, I had no idea that I was doing so in the middle of an androgysexy fashion movement.

You sexy muthafuckuhaaa!!!

So, today as a professional lesbian (lesbian professional?) I get incredibly frustrated looking for clothes that I like, whereas when I was younger I had no problem finding clothes that I loved, whether I shopped in the men's or women's section. I enjoyed wearing nice clothes, and was voted "Best Dressed" for a couple of years in school, so I had some sense of what I was doing. But today, I get really frustrated in the women's section looking for clothes that I like, and the men's clothes aren't cut to accentuate my sexy eyebrows, so I'm in a bit of a quandary.

I've always liked Diane Keaton's sense of fashion. (Just a non-sequitur.)

So, I've been looking for dress shoes for about 2 years now. I have a pair that I wear, but it's not exactly what I want.

And after my last trip to the mall, opening up a full day of fruitless shoe shopping, it finally hit me. Men's fashion is distinct from women's fashion today in a way that it wasn't when I was growing up. So, when I had an easy time finding androgyclothes in 1989 and thought that the middle-ground of fashion was just where I would wallow for the rest of my days, I had no idea that this space was ephemeral and a mere 10 years later I would be left in the chasm created by the rigid separation of dichotomous gender binaries.

I'm a big fan of deconstructionist postmodernism for a variety of reasons, AND I recognize the challenges that are created for gender non-conforming people of any stripe when we become recalcitrant about examining the limitations of rigid gender roles. Patriarchy, blah, blah, blah.

But, if I may be honest for just a moment here: I'm a lesbian with some fairly sexy eyebrows, and our society's inability to think well about the expanse of what "girl" (and I guess "boy" for that matter) gets to include has cost me some damn good looking clothes. And, when I do manage to put together some nice pieces, believe me, I have had to work hard to get them.

I was duped. Bamboozled. Hoodwinked. Run amok. Railroaded? That wasn't fashion reality, it was the 1980's. So, listen to me America, or at least the 3 people who read my blog, please work through your gender shit, because I would like to have my clothing options back.

Regression?

(click on the graph to see it more clearly.)

I came across this article from the Economic Policy Institute the other day, and immediately I said, "Damn! I had no idea that health care disparities were so much more pronounced in Hispanic communities than Black communities." Then, immediately I thought, "Really? I wonder if they are lying with numbers." Or perhaps more appropriately, I realized that I didn't understand what these numbers meant.

It has been an enlivening experience to learn how to conduct quantitative analysis, manipulate data, and take weeks or months of research and condense it into a couple of graphs. Obviously, I've learned that some things necessarily have to be left out, but the more powerful lesson (the unspoken lesson) is that the researcher gets to decide what is left out. And, what I tell you or don't tell you about my numbers will lead you to different conclusions.

Since we are so programmed in our society to see and relate to numbers as objective, absolute, and irrefutable, they stand as proof that something must be true. We've all heard that 94% of statical citations are made up on the spot, and that makes intuitive sense because we've all had to best guess percentages throughout our lives.

- "About 30% of the folks there were women."

- "How come I'm taking out the garbage 70% of the time, but I'm only responsible for 30% of the trash that we throw away? Huh? Tell me that!!!"

- "I don't feel like this relationship is 50-50. At best, and I mean at best, it's 65-35, with a 3% margin of error."

We've all said each of these things many times in the last month, so we know that someone throwing out a statistic may not actually mean that much. But, what about a graph? A graph must be reliable, right? Graphs are bullshit too? Ah- but what about a graph based on research and a data set? Yeah, what about that!?!

Can't trust it. (Thanks, Chuck D.)
Don't believe the hype! (Calm down, flav.)

From this graph, it's clear what these numbers are communicating, but I have no idea what these numbers actually mean. I would like to see the regression that was done to determine whether the researchers accounted for factors beyond race in this study.

Hispanic is distinct from White and African-American in that Hispanic communities include a significant number of undocumented immigrant laborers. So, if these folks are included in the study, certainly that will skew the results. Are Blacks "not going to a doctor because of the cost" more often than Whites because Blacks as a group earn less than Whites, or are there other factors at play such that a Black person, a White person, and a Hispanic person each earning $35,000 a year would be just as likely to see a doctor? Are Black women (as a group) earning $40,000 a year more likely to look for home remedies than White women (as a group) earning $30,000 a year? If so, then this graph may be indicating something about racial disparities, otherwise it may just be communicating class-based disparities.

Are there differences in health status between racial categories? (Research has pointed to "yes" for a long time.) And, if these disparities exist, are the health problems common to Blacks more expensive than Whites' and less expensive than Hispanics', such that a Black person earning $40,000 a year would expect to pay $137 for a visit to the doctor, pharmacist, etc. while a White person earning the same wage would expect to pay $50 for seeking medical treatment? So, in addition to class-based differences, we may also be looking at the effects health status differences between groups. So, there's a second dimension.

Are folks across racial lines who earn the same wage, and have equivalent health status, showing differences in their willingness to carry health insurance? People without insurance go to the doctor less often because of cost than people who are insured. So, are we seeing that in these numbers?

If none of that has been accounted for, then the graph, although it's pretty, isn't really helpful. It's telling you that Blacks and Hispanics have greater health care insecurities than Whites, but that may not be "true". From a policy perspective, the response would be to target Black and Hispanics with health policy initiatives, when what is required would be a policy that addresses disparities in health status, and insured status, and income as an obstacle to obtaining health care.

In essence, I'm asking for a multiple regression analysis. I was going to post a link to some site that has a really tight cogent explanation of what regression analysis is, but all I could find was stuff like this or this. So, I figure that anyone who has read this far can take it upon themselves to google it, because honestly- no one is going to learn multiple regression from a blog site anyway. I mean, I had to take Stats II to get it, and I have sexy eyebrows!

So, that's what I want to know. What do these numbers mean? I looked up the original study from the Rockefeller Foundation to see if I could find my answers there. No haps.

The intention of the graph is to support universal health care coverage, which I'm fully behind. Socialized medicine my black ass all the way to fully insured with no co-pay while you're at it. But, the graph reads as propaganda to me. Even though I support its ultimate aim, it's an example of lying with facts. And, propaganda, even in service to objectives that I support, turns my stomach; not in a condemnatory way that's fueled by disdain, but in a, "I just stopped breathing for a second and didn't even realize it"-Orwellian kinda way.