Japanese Finance Minister Shoichi Nakagawa resigned today after accusations of being drunk at a G7 conference. Some say they saw him drinking a glass of wine before the Rome G7 summit. Nakagawa says it was cold medicine and jet lag.
He looks shmammered to me. Why am I not surprised that it was the finance minister?
This is the first in a series of posts about the small things people can do in their lives to change the social climate. If they were done on a large scale, the world would be a much better place.
Here are today’s four:
4.If you’re sick, don’t go to the gym. Coughing all over the lat machine is going to make other people sick and keep the illness alive. Coughing into the hands that you’re going to use to grab onto the heart monitor sensors on the treadmill isn’t an acceptable alternative. I suggest coughing into your elbow. Even better: quarantine and eliminate the spread of infectious diseases by staying home.
3.If you’re having a bad day, isolate yourself. I can’t recall how many times I’ve talked to people who were obviously having horrible day. I will admit that I am guilty of doing it. A bad mood is a highly contagious disease. Just be quiet if you’re having a crappy day. It’s that easy.
2. Don’t park like an asshole.
1. Donate to a public school. Schools in Texas are funded by the property taxes that no one wants to see increased. As a result, children who go to public school get the educational shaft when the district doesn’t have enough money for materials. I know teachers who have used their shrimpy salaries to buy classroom supplies. http://www.donorschoose.org is an easy way to give what you can.
If you have small ways to do things differently which can make a big difference, please share them with me.
People frowned as the black Porsche downshifted into first gear to drive through the line of people. Orange and yellow hot rod flames licked the sides of the door.
The line of people emerged from the front door of the hotel where the job fair was being held and wrapped around the side of the building into the parking lot. So many people were there that I had to park across the street in the Texas Land and Cattle parking lot.
As I walked to the end of the line, it hit home. This is visible evidence of a recession.
The Line
The media isn’t sensationalizing the situation by reporting day after day that companies have just cut thousands of jobs, or intend to do so soon to survive in this economy. At least 50 people stood in the visible portion of the procession to have a shot at a job.
“I’ll do just about anything, any kind of job except sales,” Justin Horn said to me while doing his part to slaughter time in the spot next to mine in line.
Horn had arrived at 11 a.m, the time the job fair officially started, thinking he would stroll in, hand out a few resumes, and be done within 20 minutes.
As we advanced in the line, I noticed that small support networks began to form, causing the line to resemble water drops sliding down a twig one at a time.
People standing next to each other critiqued each others’ resumes and practiced their self-promoting pitches to stay hyped.
In line is where I met Annabella Morelos Chan. The retired documentary producer had the poise of a woman who headed boards and raised funds for charitable causes.
Chan stood no more than five feet tall, her entrepreneurishly short, cocoa-colored hair neatly parted and combed to the right.
She had just divorced her husband to whom she had been married to for 30 years. He had been on the thicker end of the asset division.
The Guy Luce Mystery School alum gave me her card and encouraged me to contact her, so we could work on future projects together.
Perhaps she could teach me how to have a mentally-induced cosmic orgasm. I wonder if I would ever leave my room after attaining that ability.
By this time we had entered the hotel and stood in the misty aura of an over-chlorinated indoor fountain. The place smelled like a vacuum cleaner bag smeared with shoe polish.
I had been in line for an hour and fifteen minutes now to meet with representatives from four slightly interesting companies.
I watched the body language of the people who had already churned through the job fair as they walked past those of us who were still in line.
Many of them had their shoulders straight and heads held high; but there was a hollow disappointment in their eyes implying that this was a walk of shame for them after a jarring tussle with the reality of an unexpectedly crowded job fair.
The white-knuckled grip on their resume folders insinuated a possessive hold on the hope that someone would recognize the value of the person detailed on the paper inside the portfolio.
But not all were uncertain about their success. An obvious salesman, betrayed by the blackberry in his leather belt holster, boasted, “They’re not taking anymore resumes at Shoretel. Y’all can go ahead and go home. I closed the deal.” A few uncomfortable chuckles were heard.
Talkin' Strategy
When I finally got inside the room where the company representatives were, the meager opportunities were hardly action inspiring. Nonetheless, I gave my one-minute elevator pitch to sell myself to two spokesmen and got the same response.
Thanks for the resume; here’s my card. E-mail me a soft copy of it to get it in the system. I looked around and saw how exhausted all the company reps looked. Three fourths of them were ready to dip out. After that train of people, I would be too.
They weren’t putting stars on the resumes of people. The people were coming at them too fast. The stacks of resumes were too high.
Why bother wasting my breath? I could achieve comparable results in the comfort of my Sponge Bob pajamas with a laptop and an internet connection.
I began to walk past the people who were in line waiting to talk to the reps straight to the table on which papers with the job descriptions rested aside business cards. I had was reading one when another job seeker named Milan said hello.
Neither of us were interested in the Border Patrol Agent job, so we decided to mess with the guy at the table. We made up this ridiculous story that we were brother and sister who just happened to go to the same job fair.
We arrived at the table and I flipped the interview around to ask the uniformed, gun-toting agent about the realities of his job.
Milan asked him if he rode around in a Humvee all day. This was when I was supposed to chime in and ask him about whether he used his gun to shoot beer cans and illegal immigrants. But because the agent turned out to be such a nice guy, I didn’t want to harass him.
I posited whether electronic surveillance posed a threat to his job security. The encounter was far more educational than I anticipated.
We all had a few laughs; and I walked away with a completely inappropriate party favor. I don’t think the marketing department thought about the message that a promotional item like that would send.
It was a border patrol bottle opener keyring. It wasn’t a job. Or even the promise of a job.
But I left place feeling happy about my life. Invigorated by the human spirit. To hear where people come from, where they are, and where they want to go never ceases to fascinate me.
Within a daunting scenario in which landing a job seemed as hopeless as lighting a cigarette in a hurricane, I found people whose optimism was as out of place as a tulip sprouting from a crack in the concrete sidewalk, un nurtured and in constant danger of being trampled, but blossoming petals of imagination that refuse to wilt.
I know my niche is out there. I just have to find it.
In 2006, Kiri Davis documented how things haven’t changed much since Jane Elliot conducted a social experiment in her classroom in 1970.
Jane Elliot
Elliot, a third-grade teacher, segregated her class by eye color. She told the kids with blue eyes that they were better than the brown-eyed children. She even made them wear collars.
The children began to treat each other differently when Elliot told them that the brown-eyed kids were stupid, or lazy, or other negative behaviors that were flat-out lies.
The brown-eyed third graders began to believe that they were inferior, because their classmates were treating them like they were second class.
When Elliot flipped it around and enacted a classroom policy that made the brown-eyed children higher in the social hierarchy, it became even more disturbing.
The kids engaged in violent acts. Self esteem plummeted. Solely because the person in a position of authority told them that was how things were-and they accepted it, internalizing atrocities of inequality. That was 1970.
More than 30 years later, Kiri Davis made this film called A Girl Like Me which astonished me by capturing the present-day psychological repercussions of historic oppression of young women of color. The doll experiment is particularly disturbing. “Which doll is nicer?” Davis asks the girl. Her response makes my eyes water and my stomach churn.
This acceptance of a relationship between a skin color and a behavior trait or ability isn’t confined to African-Americans.
Mexicans, Native Americans, Persians, Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Pacific Islanders, all people whose skin colors aren’t white observe that light skin and straight hair equates to preferential treatment in so many situations in these United States of America. I know I did when I was young. That is another blog post.
I hope that tomorrow at noon things really do begin to change.
Houston (VC) – A death row inmate gouged out his last remaining eyeball with his fingers. And ate it.
Inmate Andre Thomas had plucked out his first eyeball before going to trial in 2004 for the murder of his 13-month-old step daughter, wife, and their four-year-old son. He stabbed them all to death and then ripped out their hearts.
“Thomas said he pulled out his eye and subsequently ingested it,” TX Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Jason Clark said.
Thomas’ trial attorney, Bobbie Peterson-Cate, will now be able to put the man in a mental care unit. Peterson-Cate was unable to get a judge to declare Thomas unfit to stand trial in 2004.
Andre Thomas is in psychiatric care with no execution date…and two recently vacated orifices for deranged cellmates to violate. Unfortunately for him, he will not be able to see them coming.
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