Diversity

While sitting at a Board of Trustees meeting for my Journalism class, I was appalled to hear these trustees discussing diversity in terms of percentages. “Our school is 46% diverse, which is an improvement over the 43% of three years ago,” kind of thing. There were a lot of statistics thrown around. Demographics of the city. Demographics of the school. Demographics of the staff. I couldn’t quite grasp how they were measuring diversity until one of the trustees commented that the progress was too slow for his tastes and that the ultimate goal was to have 25% of each major demographic represented in the staff.

What?

So to clarify, the goal is to have 25% Caucasian, 25% African American, 25% Latino and 25% Asian staff members. A complaint that we lost diversity during the budget cuts further outraged me. “I know, I know, ‘last hired, first hired’ is something we live by and it’s something that will always be there.’” He made it sound like a bad thing.

First of all, you don’t hire someone because they are HIspanic, or white, or for any other superficial reasoning. You hire someone because they are the best candidate for the job. If that means you end up with 70% of your staff being of Asian decent, or any other combination, so be it. This is a school, not an elementary school art project. You don’t pick based on color. Period. That is discrimination, even if your reasoning behind it is completely well meaning. This is never okay.

Secondly, “last hired, first fired” sucks if you’ve got the lowest seniority, but it is one of the most fair ways to handle a massive budget issue. The other option is to remove the least effective teachers and staff members, and with tenure that’s nigh impossible. Perhaps, if the school hadn’t gone hiring only minority teachers in the last few years in an attempt to balance out the diversity, the ones who were laid off because the school couldn’t afford to pay all of their staff.

That’s not fair. I’m pretty sure they weren’t simply hiring minority teachers, but the way the trustees were talking it certainly sounded like that was a major factor.

The fact that pretty much everyone on the board was a older white male didn’t make me feel any better listening to all this. I’m not being intolerant, I’m all for diversity in the workplace, but treating it like a mathematical equation instead of a conceptual goal is a terrible way to try to achieve it.

Characters

A good character has a bit of his author in him (or her, of course). I’m not saying that the person who invented The Joker is an insane supercriminal, or anything dumb like that. But if you’re going to write a dynamic character, one the audience is interested in, it has to have something of you in it or else it will be flat.

So I’ve been thinking about my characters lately. I’m learning about myself as I learn about them. It was a weird epiphany I had in between English classes. Not that anyone’s really familiar with these characters, but I’m still going to write about them.

Phena Kysta
She’s young and pretty and tall, and she doesn’t really register any of this. She is intelligent and loyal, she knows what she wants from the universe and she gets it. She’s great with languages and she went for–and got–a position on a space ship as a communications specialist. She’s personable, flirts a little, and makes friends easily, although her traveling lifestyle keeps her away from many lasting bonds. So I suppose Phena is the lady I’d like to be someday, although the relationship thing is not ideal. She has close friends though, so that’s a good thing.

She’s also an empath. She both broadcasts and receives emotions, similar to the way a telepath is supposed to receive and send thoughts. In the OCT I’ve entered her in, she lost control over the ability. She’s never understood it and it came to her very late, so she’s always had trouble understanding what can be considered either gift or curse. That part of her would be my own emotional mess. I tend to roller-coaster. I’ve been trying to stay stable lately, and it exploded in my face again. Phena’s control came back, but I still have to figure out how to get mine.

Captain Farrell
Captain Farrell would like to be a hero, even though he’s essentially just the same as everyone else. The more he tries to be a hero, the bigger ass he makes of himself. He’s intelligent, well read, a good leader, and a compassionate man, but he keeps letting the concept of who he wants to be, who he thinks he should be, get in the way of who he is. He also hides a lot of himself from the world, most easily seen in the collection of origami models locked in his desk and the fact that nobody knows his first name is Fergus.

He hasn’t realized it yet, but the less he tries to be heroic, the more heroic he becomes. Perhaps I’m trying too hard to be something I’m not. I’m trying to figure out who I am and who I’m supposed to be. I do know I have a hero complex of my own, trying to help everyone around me even when there’s nothing I can do. I think we both need to let things go and be more comfortable with who we are.

Rua
Rua is brand new, not being used for anything yet. It is a cyborg unicorn. It doesn’t know who it is or where it came from, but it wants to know. It tries to interface with anyone it meets in an attempt to find that information. Usually it results in mimicking what that other person thinks Rua should be, not what it truly is.

I do that too. I’d love to know who I am, why I’m here. I end up social-butterflying a bit though.

This ended up being quite a bit more depressing than I intended. Perhaps I need to find some more upbeat comparisons between myself and my characters. But in my defense, a lot of people who do know them tell me they are good characters. So I guess, in a sense, that helps me feel like I’m a good person. After all, part of me is in them.

Replaced?

About a month ago, I started noticing that people who I’ve been very close to for a long time were suddenly quite distant with me. Some people are just too busy to interact with me regularly, and I can understand that. I’ve got a ridiculously full schedule, with school and work and the comic contest I entered. (Well, technically it’s an Original Character Tournament, but that’s neither here nor there.) It’s hard to find some time to see someone. But that doesn’t mean that texts should go unanswered completely. A lot of the trouble is I feel as though I’ve been replaced, something better has come along in other people’s lives.

Let’s be fair, for some of my friends, better things have come along. And I’ve been pushing some people away as well. We all grow out of people sometimes. It seems that it happens around me at an accelerated rate, is all.

There’s one particular change in friendship that I don’t really know what I want to do about. I’ve known this guy for years, and for some reason we clicked even though we’re pretty much complete opposites. He can be difficult to get along with, but we’ve stood with each other through some difficult stuff. Except, like I said, I started to notice I’d been replaced. He’s done this before, he found a surrogate for his male best friend almost immediately after the guy left work, so I probably should have expected this. Except I’m still here. I was here when this happened. There are two girls who filled in what I considered my niche. Only they fill it better, it seems, because I’m not so good at going out and partying and all that, and they apparently are. Either way, I don’t know how to behave around any of them, because I’m not sure where I stand. I used to be friends with all of them, but I feel like there’s this distance between us I can’t bridge anymore. And the girls are starting to act a lot more like the guy. As I mentioned, he’s a jerk. Very judgmental, finds humor in what he thinks is jokingly bigoted comments, a real sarcastic bastard. He’s also got trouble sticking to one girl, it seems.

I don’t think he knows that he pushed me really far with his jackass-ery yesterday. I’ve been tetchy and emotional for the past week, but he wouldn’t shut up. I started snapping back at him, and I think his best-friend surrogate realized I was seriously upset, but didn’t do much to stop the conversation. Whatever, that’s not really the point of this. Although the whole separation might be a blessing in disguise. It may be time for yet another round of growing up.

My point is, I’m feeling lost. I don’t feel like I can turn to the people I used to be able to turn to when things started getting out of hand. That, in turn, is making things get out of hand. I’m feeling a little bit….

Well, I can say this. While I’ve been replaced, I’m not going to knock anyone down a crevice or out the window with a remote-controlled car in order to regain my old position. Neither do I intend to be stuck on the people who have pushed me aside to the point where I’m willing to simply watch the world go by. I will not be put in the attic or the dump or the fender of a truck. I’ll also stop making Toy Story references.

….

Maybe.

I keep thinking about Rex through all of this.

Rejected Again

Oh dear, yet another NO. NO we don’t want you as a trainer. NO we don’t want you at our school. NO I’m not interested in you as anything other than a friend. NO you can’t join our program. I’m tired of it.

I know this isn’t how I’m supposed to view things, but it feels like “NO you’re not good enough.” And I’m really starting to believe it. Actually, I kind of already knew that I believed it somewhere deep down.

In case you’re wondering, I got a NO from the YES Facilitator program at work, which I’ve had my heart set on for months. I didn’t even make it past the first round of auditions. Surprise, everyone who said they were in entertainment seemed to go on. The audition took place in a rehearsal hall, which was covered in mirrors. So I also saw myself. Not terribly happy with the girl I was seeing in that mirror, especially next to most of the others in the room.

I don’t want to be told to try again, or that I’m almost there, or that I’ll get it right eventually. I just want to feel like I did something right, something that validates me.

I’m off to go sulk in my room for a while.

School Enrollment issues.

So today, my last day of summer, I discovered that not only did I accomplish virtually nothing I wanted to do before school starts again, but that I don’t have any classes. Somehow I was under the impression that I had paid, at least in part, for my fall semester. This was not the case, and all my classes were dropped. So now I’ve gone from having all the classes I (didn’t really) want and having been one of the first to enroll to the kid frantically scrambling to find room in classes at the last second. I put myself on the waitlist for all the classes I was in originally, but that’s probably not going to help much. I emailed the teachers, and now I’m trying to find my way into similar classes without completely screwing up my entire schedule.

The woman at the cashier’s desk wasn’t really very kind about it either. To add insult to my injury, she told me to just re-enroll in the classes as if there would be room in them. Last semester nobody got into classes. Waitlisted or petitioning, everyone got screwed. I’m terrified. My health insurance depends upon me taking twelve units in school. And if I screw up my schedule too much, I’ll collide with work or with something else I have to do and I’ll be screwed.

Super stressed over this.

In related news, I don’t recommend driving while crying. It’s not safe.

Tumblr account

I’ve been reading a comic by a gentleman on deviantArt.com by name of Seph Hunter. (You can check it out here.) Essentially it’s a journal. He updates with a very short comic, usually only one or two panels, in which he recounts something that happened that day. So, after following him for a month or so, I decided that might not be a bad place to take my work. It’s not the only time I’ve seen that kind of thing. A while ago, my friend Leif started up a Comic-A-Day project which was very similar. So now, I’ve decided to do my own version of the comic journal.

Behold, my tumblr.com account! Here I will be hosting a comic that updates every day or so relating something that happened to me. So far, I’ve got two entries. I’ll post them here too, but I’d like to get a few people following that account on their own. Enjoy!

http://anapplescruff.tumblr.com

I couldn’t get away from this guy for a good five minutes.

Justine turned 20, and I slept through quite a lot of it. Felt like such a jerk.

Complaining

I’m sorry, this week is not going my way and I’m tired of it.

I just logged into deviantArt, thinking I would work on the original character tournament entry I had and forget all the stupidity I’ve had lately, and I got a rude message from the guy I’m competing against. So to you, username simongreve, word of advice: If you want to know what happens in the story I’m in the middle of drawing, ask me for the plot politely. Writing a note with so-called advice that has typos and sarcasm will make me completely unwilling to work with you. Oh, and your advice to start an in-between piece between rounds is duly noted. Especially because I did, but I have other things to do with my life and I’m getting to the actual inking and posting of said comic at a slower pace than you wanted. Also, I needed the results of Round one to know how to continue. Round two of this contest opened yesterday, douchebag. Deal with the fact that we have until the end of July and back the fuck off. Oh, my bad, two days ago. I have no idea what day it is because I’ve been working with morons all night for two nights. DAMN.

Also, username simongreve, from your profile picture I have a strong suspicion that you are in high school. In fact, if you aren’t graduating this year you will be soon. So, thanks to the past two nights and the nightmarish behavior of the thousands of graduates I’ve seen, I no longer consider you to be a human. You are a lesser organism and I can and will treat you as inferior until you prove to me that you deserve it. That goes for all the rest of those idiots from last night. I’m terrified that the creatures I was supposed to be entertaining last night are supposed to be the future of this country. Wow.

As for you, Sovereign Parks Board of Directors and Paragon Management, y’all can go die. Disband the parking nazis, or at least take responsibility for putting the group together. You set neighbors to spy on other neighbors and then won’t admit that this is ultimately your fault when we get angry. Also, because you posted signs all over the place making it clear that those who do not have a complex parking hang tag cannot be parked between the hours of 10pm and 6am. I parked my car in the complex at 5:59 this morning. Yes, I broke the rule by one minute. No, you do not need to leave me a nasty notification telling me I will be towed for a rule infraction that I didn’t actually make. There are people in this complex who never move their cars at all. That’s abuse of the parking spots. There are other people who park without stickers, including the woman I strongly suspect of reporting my car. She’s one of the bitches who does this kind of thing on a regular basis, so it really won’t surprise me. Especially after she saw me come home at 6:01 yesterday morning and spent five minutes staring at my car while her shitty little designer dog barked its head off, per usual. Trust me, you’re not perfect, and next time you make a “rule infraction” (i.e. breaking the law) I’m going to be reporting you to the proper authorities. Have fun with that.

I don’t want to hear my mother sniping at me about not having a boyfriend or not buying milk, both of which she’s doing as I type because she is watching “Say Yes to the Dress” and drinking tea. I don’t want to wait endlessly for my new phone to come in, which should have been here by now because it has been five business days, which was the latest it was promised to be delivered. I don’t want to feel the insane paranoia and all the rest of the insanity my body put me through the past two nights from sleep deprivation and caffeine overdose. I don’t want the hundreds of little things that are going wrong lately to keep happening.

The worst part is, although I’m ranting and raving here and in my head, I’m emotionally not reacting. That kind of worries me, because of how I usually react. I’m prone to emotional overraction, not Vulcan pissy pseudo-stoicism.

Someone please make things better.

Summer Glau

I think signing into WordPress and finding something like this in my comments would be the most glorious thing ever.

It would actually be nice to know that more than three people read this. But I don’t want to make a mockery of the internet by spamming my blog all about when I have little to nothing to say.

Water Dragon

I was up late last night working on this nice thing. It’s a little messy, but I’m happy with it.

It's a water dragon! With bioluminesence and barely visible rainbow cilia. Yay!

Things that make me happy

The past few entries have been about me complaining. That’s dumb, who wants to read what upsets other people when they’ve got enough bothering them on their own? So once I read something from Scott Adams’ blog (actually, the book he made by compiling a year’s worth of those blog entries) and there was one really great entry about the little things that made his life wonderful. So I’ll share some of the little things that make me thrilled. You really should appreciate all those things, even if life feels pointless and you’re not sure why you’re bothering with anything. It might actually help. Maybe.

The sleeping kid
I think kids who spent all of their energy running about and enjoying life and just pass out in the stroller, be they at Disneyland or anywhere else, are really cute.

That Friendly Hug
If I’m comfortable enough with someone to give a hug as a means of salutation, I love it.

Fancy designer drinks
Despite having the doctor tell me I need to back off on the caffeine, I do love getting fancy drinks at coffee shops. Especially when they’re made well and taste so good. There’s a cherry-chocolate-vanilla-coffee thing my school’s coffee shop sells, love that to death. And the holiday peppermint hot chocolate at Christmas time from It’s A Grind. Ooh, hot chocolate in general is amazing.

Stupid jokes
Stupid, not dirty. Stupid as in, “what’s red and goes up and down? A cranberry in an elevator!” Also, rick-rolling people in my car is funny, and pretty much anything done by the Muppets. Or any of those things that make me laugh uncontrollably without warning as they pop up in my head again throughout the day.

Stupid/nerdy
Actually, I’m really happy with anything stupid or nerdy. I just bought a mini donut maker off thinkgeek.com. I’m thrilled. And Robot Unicorn Attack makes me happy. Also talking about Star Trek and discovering I’m not the only person who saw TOS and knows there are errors in the reboot but still loves it. (Don’t touch Vulcans! Uhura can’t speak Klingon in her 40s, so how does she know it in her 20s? Nobody knew what Romulans looked like until ten years after that film took place! Where are all the other Federation races, like the Andorians and the Tellarites and the Caitians? Why the hell is Chekov there at all? And so on…)

Falling asleep next to the pool
So long as I don’t get burned, it’s amazing.

Cleaning my room and finding a ton of money I never knew I had
I leave change everywhere. When it gets back together it’s wonderful. I can go use it for the next thing on the list.

Buying myself treasures
Ice cream on a whim. A new book for no reason. I’m an impulse buyer, but I hardly ever get buyer’s remorse. It’s great.

What makes you happy? Share with me, we’ll make a huge list of happiness!