2003-07-09 - 8:14 p.m.
I am reading this cool book called The Plague Tales by Ann Benson. It's a historical/thriller/mystery that I got on a whim. I had it on my desk at work today and several people commented that it looked interesting. This one woman who is a full time employee there stopped by and she said, "Oh, this looks cool." I said, "Yeah, I'm a sucker for anything about diseases." Then she got excited and we started swapping titles --- have you read ___, loved it, what about ___, etc. Geeks.
I was about to type "Nobody said anything stupid today" but I suddenly realized that someone DID. Let me try to remember it. We were in a training/meeting with some of the new permanent employees and the facilitator said something about a particular type of test question returning data that said that Hispanic students scored lower than other demographic groups. I can't remember how she phrased it, but she said it in a non-ugly way, just quoting the statistics. This woman chimed in and said, "Is that because they can't do the higher level questions?" (something like that).
Verona told me that this company was like that. When she first went to work there she said it was a real eye-opener, because we are rather sheltered from that sort of thing in the school system. There seems to be a lot of racial diversity there, yet I keep hearing people make dumb ass comments. People may think that way in the school system (witness the person who wrote the Chinese comment in the previous entry), but they don't usually SAY IT. In my notes section Malraux pointed out that making a seemingly positive comment (Chinese people are good at math) may not seem like racism to an idiot ... but it is. He is so right.
In other news, I finished issue 4 of the zine. I think I'll just do trades. In fact, I'm thinking about sending it to a distro and letting them handle most of the distribution (except to my friends!). If you'd like to trade, let me know.
Opal
