Big Fat Hairy Living

Sometimes I wonder if I’m too sensitive. The women across the cubicle from me are cackling up a storm about gay bars. I can’t quite make out all of it, but apparently one of them went into a gay bar and it was hilariously funny.

I don’t joke about going into dried-up-white-trash-hag bars. Why should they joke about gay bars? I never know whether I should say something or not.

Camille Paglia on that Mark Foley thing:

I was especially repulsed by the manipulative use of a gay issue for political purposes by my own party. I think it was not only poor judgment but positively evil. Whatever short-term political gain there is, it can only have a negative impact on gay men. When a moralistic, buttoned-up Republican like Foley is revealed to have a secret, seamy gay life, it simply casts all gay men under a shadow and makes people distrust them. Why don’t the Democratic strategists see this? These tactics are extremely foolish.

Good news: The federal government recently released its plan to improve air quality.

Bad news: We’ll probably all be dead from asthma attacks and lung cancer by the time the air is suppposed to get any better.

My problem, if it can be said that I have a problem rather than a whole bunch of them, is that I lose interest in things when they don’t get me the results I want right away. I wasn’t always like that — university is one example — but I am now. I’ve started dozens of things that I’ve never finished.

A few weeks ago I was worried that I’d fall into that pattern with the nighttime courses that I hope will lead me to freedom from my day job. Luckily, the people here do their best to keep me motivated to get out.

Imagine people asking you for help with anything even peripherally related to your field of expertise every day. And imagine that you can’t say no because there’s nobody else who can do it. And now imagine that every single time you ask them when they need it completed, they tell you that they need it done “as soon as possible.” On what plane of reality can “as soon as possible” possibly be considered a meaningful answer?

So when a sales droid asked me this morning to do something that would take at least a month and told me it had to be done “ASAP,” I finally let the meek, bitchless mask I’ve been wearing for almost a year slip a tiny bit. “ASAP isn’t a useful answer,” I snapped in my e-mail. “Please be more specific.”

The sales droid obliged me. “We need this done by next Wednesday,” as if there’s some universe in which, even if I didn’t already have a dozen other things to do, it would be possible to design, order, manufacture, and test a complete product in three days.

On the bright side, my motivation to get out of engineering is renewed.

If I see one more badly edited, talent-free, unoriginal Avenue Q copyright violation on Youtube, I swear I’ll kill.

We don’t like fags, but we’ll take their money.

Wow, those wacky Muslims! They hate Apple because it has a store shaped like a cube:

According to a report on The Middle East Media Research Institute, Apple’s NY Fifth Avenue store has been slammed by “an Islamic website” as a “new insult to Islam”. The reason? Well, it resembles the Muslims’ sacred Ka’ba, situated in the Masjid al-Haram mosque in Mecca … The “Islamic website” claims that since the offending structure is known as the “Apple Mecca”, and “contains bars selling alcoholic beverages”, it constitutes “a blatant insult to Islam”. The site accordingly calls on Muslims to spread the word in the hope that “Muslims will be able to stop the project”.

Those muslims are so crazy!

But wait a second. Let’s check the original report:

On October 10, 2006, an Islamic website posted a message alerting Muslims to what it claims is a new insult to Islam. According to the message, the cube-shaped building which is being constructed in New York City, on Fifth Avenue between 58th and 59th Streets in midtown Manhattan, is clearly meant to provoke Muslims. The fact that the building resembles the Ka’ba (see picture below), is called “Apple Mecca,” is intended to be open 24 hours a day like the Ka’ba, and moreover, contains bars selling alcoholic beverages, constitutes a blatant insult to Islam. The message urges Muslims to spread this alert, in hope that “Muslims will be able to stop the project.”

In other words, some organization (that we’re told nothing about) says that some website (that we’re not given a link to) has a message on it (that we’re not given a translation of) from someone (who isn’t identified) about Apple’s store in New York. Boy, that sounds reliable.

What does a little internet research turn up about MEMRI turn up? Just that they’re a secretive pro-Israel organization with a record of suspicious methodology and selective quoting. So it’s pretty much a safe bet that this is an example of nutpicking: scouring message boards until one finds a single comment from a single nutjob and blowing it out of all proportion.

So next time I hear people say that we should stay out of leather and drag at Pride parades so that we don’t give anti-gay bigots any “ammunition,” I’ll remind them of this story and ask them what their reaction was. Did they accept the report unquestioningly because it fit nicely into their preconceptions?

Would pretending to be what we’re not do anything to stop anti-gay bigots from making up stories about us? And would it prevent gullible anti-gay bigots from unquestioningly believing what they want to believe? Don’t bother answering that question. The answer is “no.”

Mark says I’ve got an old soul. I’m not sure exactly what that means.

Someone else once told me that he thought I was born in the wrong era. He didn’t say what era he thought I should have been born in and I didn’t think to ask. Even though I’m not entirely sure what he meant, I sometimes I think my friend was right. The only problem is that when I try to imagine what other era I might like to live in, I can’t think of one. Even if I ignore the horror that would be living without indoor plumbing and artificial light, I still can’t think of one.

I can imagine someone in the midst of the Great Depression wanting to live in the 1920s again. I can imagine someone from Ancient Rome wanting to stay in the era they’re in. I can even remember my high school Chemistry teacher who loved to talk about how great the 50s were and it probably would have returned to them if he could. But I can’t imagine an era I’d like. Postmodernism has ruined pretty much everything for me.

I’d want to live in a nice, simple, easy place where every problem has a solution, where the future is hopeful, and where there are good guys and bad guys and the good guys always win. But there is no such era.

Maybe my era is 1950s comic books.

Sure, he’s Republican and Catholic. But damnit, is he ever cute. Anyone up for some facefucking?