A Shot in the Dark

Now that I've written that title, I want to rent the movie and stay in.

This is one of those random things I write when at my desk at work and can't be arsed getting up yet. Could just as well be in an email, or a journal, or muttered to the walls in the men's room. 'Bout time to go home anyway.

My employer is racially diverse, and as someone who grew up without any particular influence towards being racially conscious, it has taken me awhile to realize that the racial makeup of work groups often reflect the racial makeup of the manager thereof. I did a count in Staff the other day of my current work group: three black guys, seven white guys, and six Vietnamese guys. Not a one from China or India or who is Hispanic. The manager is Vietnamese. (No gals either. Fairly rare in this biz. Lots of women engineers are successfully working to fix that, however.)

I don't mind the racial clumping. It's probably a natural thing, especially amongst managers who have immigrated and aren't as steeped in the culture of actively rejecting one's own cultural biases.

I don't have a point right now, either. I did flash on some clarity today as to why a certain British expat offends me so easily when he recasts my political opinions as having a racist basis, but I won't go into it now except to say my intuition is strengthened that he is in fact working out his own much stronger issues of personal racism.

The world is full of weirdly fun-looking events. I just discovered a steampunk dance party called The Ball of Cthulhu (the name alone is worth some points) that will be in San Fran next week. I won't go, just sayin'. Features Unwoman. She's pretty much awesome.

Steampunk / Electro Swing / Goth Swing ... The world's a whole lot more fun in terms of music and dancing than it was in our day. Not to dis EW&F, who I was dancing to just a couple weeks ago. But we had no notion of dieselpunk swing dance, did we?

Frickin' Decom parties. Seems I'll be going to our local one after all. Didn't want to for awhile, was feeling kind of unsocial, overwhelmed by the inescapable drama of learning a new female plus the growing need my father has for me to take over his affairs plus the pressure I put on myself to quickly upgrade my machine plus the fact NaNo starts five days beforehand plus the aforementioned drama slash demands which really make me question sometimes why I still have hormones. But we wheel this way but once in this crazy life and really need to experience what we can.

Saw Khartoum on TV the other day, one of the great classics of British Empire cinema, in which Charlton Heston describes how he's never feared death, but that he does fear failure. I think many of us can relate to that. Surely there are circumstances in which we would risk our lives to avoid certain kinds of perceived failure. He also says he has been introduced to a hundred women but never married. I thought that an interestingly Victorian use of the word "introduced". Great movie, I remember seeing it in the theater when I was eight. It also shares an actor, Nigel Green, with one of the greatest such films, Zulu, which also happened to be Michael Caine's feature debut.

Tomorrow I have to go down to the Bay and go through a stack of papers and pay my father's bills and try to divine why he can't / won't get vertical; and then hang out with my mother, who has turned out to be quite the enjoyable little old lady. We wanted to go to San Francisco and take a Family Sites tour (not sure what's on it besides her grandmother's house and her mother's stepfather's grave, but whatever), but there won't be time as my son is up from So Cal and has given me the Sunday morning visiting slot, effectively killing any chance at lengthy sojourns in the Bay. Maybe we'll do it in a few weeks when I go back down there to see how badly my other son has succumbed to fraternity life, depression, alcohol, and engineering classes. Not the greatest combination, there.

All this reminds me my Jeep must be 20,000 miles late on its oil change by now and I keep forgetting to make time for it. Maybe Sunday.

I gather the World Series is on. In that case, Go Cards! Love to see Texas lose twice, and anyway, I always preferred the NL.

Interesting meeting today with the boss' boss' boss in which I learned a little more about which of the mighty cell phone manufacturers are developing new products based upon our architecture, but of course even if you cared I couldn't tell you. Well, I could, and I would, but generally speaking I should not. So there. Suffice it to say things look good in the near term but after that, after computing machines have become commodified into every nook and cranny of human life, only the gods know what fields will remain for us to profit in. Thank goodness I'll likely be in an under-funded retirement by the time the bottom finally falls out. Kind of looking forward, actually, to living in communes of old people who dance and sing and make arty little doo-dads for their grandchildren and get led out into the desert when they can no longer contribute (icebergs being rather rare in these parts). Who's with me on that? We can write pithy short stories and critique them and compete over whose colostomy bag grows darkest from all the coffee.