I have been a negligent blogger. I am sorry, but I've been working a lot lately. It's been a rather abrupt transition to go from an utterly unfettered state of unemployment to working lots of hours at random times doing three different jobs. Still no health insurance, but a girl can dream.
In job related news, I was not selected for the job entailing boar semen. Some of you may be dying to know what boar semen had to do with the job, and now I can tell you without fear of impunity. It's not as glamorous as it sounds. I wasn't interviewing to be a nipple tweaker in the animal porn industry (or would it be a teat tweaker?). I wasn't interviewing to be the person who gathers the semen for artificial insemination, or the person who does the inseminating. I wasn't volunteering for a medical study in which I would be inseminated with boar batter to study the gestation of a pig-human hybrid. I was just interviewing to be an administrative assistant in a university's Animal Science department. Pretty boaring stuff. Boring. Sorry. I like puns, and you don't.
I'm still not entirely sure why boar semen was brought up twice by two different groups of people during separate segments of my interview. The women who brought it up both intended to warn me that I may have eventually received phone calls about farmers wanting to order a particular type of boar semen. I don't know if that was a test, but I laughed, so maybe I failed. Oh well. If you can't laugh about a catalog of swine semen, what good is your life?
I see strange enough things at my current jobs without throwing animal 'nads into the mix. Case in point: veiled racism?
As many of you might assume about Idaho, it is a very white place. As in, a whole lot of whiteys and not much diversity at all. At least, not to any extent that I'm used to. It's weird. But, being the case, I guess it's easy to understand why a person would be overly conscious of not being racist, to the point of creating unnecessarily awkward situations, because she has no real experience interacting with anyone even remotely different from herself.
This evening, I'm checking out an African woman when a white woman gets in line behind her. The first woman, let's call her Jane, turns around and warmly greets the second woman by name. We'll call her Betty. Betty smiles an exaggerated smile and loudly and slowly tells Jane that she doesn't remember her name. In perfect English with a noticeable but completely understandable accent, Jane (whose real name is quite common and not at all exotic or challenging) reintroduces herself even though it's obvious from her initial greeting and their later conversation that the women are part of some club together and have totally interacted several times before.
Betty, still speaking at an awkwardly loud volume and slow pace, says to Jane, "I forget everyone's name. I am so horrible with names. I am not treating you any differently than I would treat anyone else." I swear on a stack of David Sedaris books that I transcribed at least that last sentence verbatim. She seriously said that.
So let's recap. In an effort to not be (or at least not outwardly appear) insensitive or not-PC, this woman spoke to an intelligent adult the way one would speak to a two year old, presumably just because she had an accent. And then she assured her that she was treating her like she would treat anyone else.
And I watched all this in mute horror. It was so very Seinfeld. It took a great deal of willpower not to ask Betty if she was serious. In a loud, slow voice.
But I just stared at her, judged her, and made a mental note to blog about it later. I treated her just like I would treat anyone else.
That reminds me of something that happened at my last job in NJ. I moved from New Brunswick to a very white part of NJ, and one time, while at my desk, I overheard a group of women (who were all white) talking as they walked through our hallway. One of them said loudly, "Just because I won't go on a date with a black man doesn't mean I'm *racist.*" The other women were giving their assent, "Mm hmm" and "Oh, I *knoooow.*" I think I got up and shut my door, because otherwise I was going to yell into the hallway, "Actually, yes it does! That is pretty much the definition of racist!"
ReplyDeleteI found it interesting to move from a small town in the Midwest, to Atlanta, to upstate New York. Three different cities, three different cultures, three entirely different forms of awkward.
ReplyDeleteSarah,
ReplyDelete"Racist" is an ugly word to use in that context. Except for the very rare exceptions, I am almost exclusively sexually attracted to white women. This is not due to public perception of what people would think of me dating a woman who wasn't white, etc, as anyone who perused my internet porn viewing history would immediately realize when they found that it was 98% white and 2% half-asian/half-caucasian women. I think I have watched one porno in my entire life that had an african american female in it.
I don't consider myself racist in the "bad" way at all. Maybe you do.
addendum: additionally, less than 2% of the white women are redheads
ReplyDeleteand
correction: that should have been 2% mix of half-asian/half-caucasian women and pacific islander women (half or full-blooded)
Yep, it's certainly strange (and sad) that racists are everywhere. Seems like every area has different ways of expressing it (or pretending not to express it).
ReplyDeleteAnonymous, I think there's a big difference between sexual fantasies realized through porn and real-life relationships. I don't think anyone would accuse you of being racist for having a certain sexual ideal. What would be racist is if you would refuse to explore a relationship with someone just because they were a certain race. Plenty of people end up in good relationships with people who weren't their 'physical type', but grew to love because their personality made them appealing.
I don't see how fantasizing about blondes but dating a brunette is any different from fantasizing about blondes but dating a black person. If you're basing your relationship prospects solely on looks, you're ultimately going to be disappointed.