OMG. Best phone interview ever. I said (Coles Notes Version), “I’m 55, if you’re looking for a soignée young thing with career aspirations, don’t even call me in; if you want somebody who can be den mom to a bunch of engineers at a start up, deal with four things at once and stay cool on the phone, do at least bring me in.” Nothing may come of it, I don’t care, it was very positive and I did enjoy speaking with her; she sounded warm and intelligent on the phone, as I judge these things.
Day: January 16, 2014
A blessing upon learning a grandmother has died.
May her faults be a lesson, her virtues an inspiration and her love ever part of your blood and bones.
I hope Polly rests easy; she worked with great energy up until her 80’s, and treated retirement as an invasion of her dignity. I never had the privilege of meeting her, except through the reminiscences and travel diaries of her descendants.
They warned me
They told me what would happen. I started following racism eradication activists on twitter, and they told me, down to the last squeak of privilege and bleat of illogic and roar of cognitive bias and growl of hatred and whine of misdirection and concussive threat of personal violence and siren of tone policing, exactly what would happen to me when I started confronting racist speech in others, in public. In a three round conversation, I got it all but the threat of violence, including how the other person’s spelling and grammar devolved as (I assume from the name) he completely lost his shit.
I’ve spent a lifetime avoiding conflict and trying to talk pretty; this is going to make the friendships I have with people who want to help me with the work even more important. It already IS ugly. Up until this point I’ve had no skin in the game. That’s what privilege does. Now I want to have skin in the game without getting my feelings hurt, and that’s just not going to happen, and I have to get over it, and I’m scared.
One of the things that is helping is learning about the Japanese-American and African-American troops as they served their country fighting in the Second World War. They wanted to prove two things, their patriotism and their worth. Many made the ultimate sacrifice to demonstrate both. As they fought in their campaigns, they encountered the worst of what human beings can do to each other, and helped destroy the engines of fascism and racism, although they could not eradicate those ideologies. With their sacrifice in mind, I will get off my ass; I will quit whining; I will do the work.
Eddie
Eddie was my best friend. He and Gizmo helped me through a difficult time in my life, and having lived (and slept) with them almost every day for so many years it’s difficult for me to comprehend that they’re both gone. Allegra’s cat Miss Margot is sleeping with me now, which is a comfort. She snores like a banshee, but so did the boys, so I sleep right through it.
Eddie’s proper name was Edgar, after Edgar Allen Poe. We got him with his tiny sister, Penguin, in 1997. We had to give Penguin away, for reasons I won’t get into here. After that, Eddie wandered the house howling softly, presumably looking for her. So we got Gizmo to keep him company.
Eddie had a deep bass purr. He loved to have his fur rubbed the wrong way. When we first got him, he had one white whisker, which we decided was his Indian name. That whisker was replaced by a black one for most of his life, until quite recently, when the white one grew back and he became One White Whisker again. Eddie was a tubby cat most of his life, which made his skinniness toward the end particularly sad. I miss you, buddy.