22 October 1999

So, um... Does it mean something when you're driving down the interstate at pretty much the speed limit and a hearse passes you?

Just wondering.
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Dream snippets from last night: At one point, all of my toes had been removed and were being replaced with new ones, and someone was telling me, "Once the swelling goes down, you'll hardly be able to tell..." At another, I was walking down this twisting, turning, windy row of cereal boxes, looking for something, or maybe someone.

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There wasn't a MeadeHall session last night, but we had a very interesting conversation. It started because we'd all read K.T.'s journal entry on racism and sexism. It's rather long, so if you don't feel like reading it, her point in a nutshell was that it seems absurd that if one group forms a segregated gathering of some sort, it's a good thing ("empowering") yet another group doing the same thing is bad ("racist" or "sexist").

Discussion ensued when Matt disagreed. His point (in a nutshell - I feel like I should be selecting an animal of some sort) was that if minorities for a group, it's for two primary reasons: 1) that members of a minority feel more at ease with each other than surrounded by members of the majority, and 2) that as a group, minorities have a bigger, better voice, so grouping is the best way to make their minority opinions heard. For a majority group to form an exclusive club would be absurd under these two reasons.

This general discussion morphed into a specific discussion of the Boy Scouts, and the relative merits of the Boy Scouts vs. the Girl Scouts and whether either group should be cross-gendered.

I'm suffering the curse of the moderate. I can see both sides. In an ideal world, everyone would just get along. People would be given jobs or promoted based on their demonstrated abilities and past performances, friends would be made solely on the basis of personality compatibility, and a person's skin color or gender would have meaning only if you were trying to describe them for someone else: "You're picking up the lawyers at the airport. Look for a black woman, fairly tall, and a really tall white man - he usually wears bow ties." In an ideal world, if a club was formed, it would be formed around experiences the members have had, or experiences they want to have, and those would be the only criteria for joining. If that meant that a club formed to discuss cultural heritage, then it would probably lead to a common racial theme - so be it, because in an ideal world, the rest of us would understand that this isn't something we "get" - and we'd ask the club's president to come and speak and help us understand.

But it's not an ideal world, and I don't know what the solution is to make it that way.

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I think I'm really going to enjoy my new project. I had a meeting yesterday with the guy I'll be taking over from, and we get along quite well - we both have the same complaints and demands for the project. I'm going to get about six weeks to come up to speed on this before his new project begins, so I'll get to ease into it, which is a luxury I don't often get in this business. I'll get to learn something new while still using the knowledge I already have, and I'll actually feel useful to the company again.

I'm extremely relieved. I had been beginning to wonder if I was ever going to like my job again.