Month: October 1997

HALLOWEEN

Well, it’s been years since I’ve actively celebrated Halloween, but I did go to a couple parties this year even if I did refuse to dress up. My niece, who’s nearly two, will dress up and help my mother hand out candies. My brother will go out with his friends and try and stay out of trouble. My friends will all try to do something child-like but not childish. Everyone will decorate, buy candies and celebrate a holiday that has never been declared officially but is observed nonetheless. And by this time next week we’ll all be glad it’s over. Oh well, who said fun was easy?

THE X-FILES SEASON PREMIERE

Sunday, November 2, 1997, marks the first episode in the much anticipated and anxiously awaited fifth season of the award-winning science fiction show The X-Files. I will not bore you with specific details about the mythology surrounding and centered in the show. I will not bother to tell you about the plots and mysteries within the show that make me watch it and hooked me from the very first episode. Because the truth is that if you haven’t watched the show, if you don’t know what it’s about, then it’s going to take much more than a few sentences to get you up to speed. It’ll take weeks. But if you want to watch one of the few shows on television where a man and a woman work together but don’t sleep together, then this is your show. If you want to watch a cop show where the woman has a gun, is a better shot than her male partner and saves his butt more times than he saves hers, this is your show. If you want to watch a show that portrays a woman as intelligent and strong, then this is your show. Oh yeah, her partner’s not bad either.

humility

I thought that maybe, just maybe, my site was finally taking shape. I mean my Web site. I was taking pride in it, in the design and the content. For an amateur Web site designer, I thought I was doing pretty well. And then I saw Water. Content aside, Water is one of the most beautiful personal Web sites I’ve seen yet. The graphics are great, the frames work well and the color scheme is cool and elegant. Not a bad accomplishment for a personal site. Visiting this site makes me see that the visual aspect of my site is something I’ve taken for granted. It makes me see that my site could be more than it is. It makes me remember that I had started this site to play around with my creativity and lately I’ve become lazy about that. And yet, reading the history of Water, it gives me hope that my site will be much more in a few years. It gives me hope that I will have more visitors, better aesthetics, and much better content than I do now. I guess with me humility is a short-lived feeling.

congratulate me

Wednesday, Oct. 15, marked the first day of my new job. I was promoted to Marketing Coordinator (this included a small increase in salary). It’s a small promotion, but the job should be something I enjoy a bit more than my previous customer service gig. Not that I didn’t like the customer service thing, it just wasn’t what I studied for — I was a public relations major and a marketing minor.

I’ve always thought it was ironic that I worked myself to the ground to pay my way through college so that I could get out of the university, then I ended up working here. That’s me — queen of contradictions.

It should be interesting to see what this new position has in store for me. One thing’s for sure, it involves a lot more in-person interaction with people. Not just the telephone stuff I did previously, but situations where I have to go to meetings and look the part of a professional marketing person. I won’t mind that part. I’ve been building up my wardrobe and can do the “dress for success” thing without much effort.

The only thing I don’t look forward to is the fact that now I’m no longer at the bottom of the ladder, so I can’t stay out of the office politics game. Thank goodness I have years of experience working in an office environment. Very little about office politics and etiquette surprises me now. I may not like the game, but I’ve observed it long enough to know how it’s played.

The good thing is that now that I’m doing something in my field I can start to think about graduate school. Now all I have to do is decide if I want a Master’s degree in Communication or in Business. I need to give this further thought.

opinions

I support affirmative action.

Do I have your attention yet? No? Well then, let me say that I will not listen to any arguments about how affirmative action discriminates against white males or how it gives jobs and opportunities to people who don’t deserve them because they haven’t earned it or don’t have the credentials for them. I will not pay attention to the stories about qualified candidates who have lost jobs or promotions or something to a woman or person of color who wasn’t as qualified. I will not listen to any of this for one reason and one reason only: THEY ARE NOT TRUE.

For every piece of research that suggests that affirmative action is a dark thing enacted to take away “true” equality, there are at least ten that state that that myth is exactly that — a myth. And no amount of arguments, discussions or statistics are going to convince me of the contrary. (Especially since I’ve taken enough statistics classes to know that numbers can say anything you want them to say.)

I will stop believing that affirmative action is necessary when I, as a woman, can earn one dollar for every dollar my male colleague makes. I will stop believing that I need to defend myself against prejudice and racism when people stop telling me that the color of my skin and my last name indicate a lower intelligence. I will believe that people, society at large, are ready to treat everyone as equals without having the law shove that idea down their throats when they stop trying to take away the laws that protect my rights. I will have confidence in my government to represent me properly when they stop attacking me for everything that has ever gone wrong in this country. (Is that still on topic?) I will trust when my trust has been earned. And let me tell you, America-as-a-whole, you’ve got a long way to go.

living online

I do not own a computer. I never got around to buying one. As a student, I had access to a 24-hour computer lab that had everything I needed. As an office worker, I have always had access to one computer or another. I discovered the Internet when I began doing online research for school projects. At that point, I only visited gopher and Web sites, and strictly for school purposes. Not so anymore. Every day, when I come into work, I check my e-mail (typically I have about 100 messages from 6 different discussion lists), I visit my news Web sites to find out what’s on the headlines today (I no longer read the paper or watch the evening news) and I browse through several newsgroups. And all this before 9 a.m.

I’ll admit that maybe my fascination with the Internet has gone a bit overboard. I blame it on my job. One of the first projects I received when I started working here was to create a Master Calendar Web site. Okay, I’ll confess that I did, sort of, volunteer for the project, but at the time I had no idea it would give birth to such an obsession. At the time I didn’t even know what HTML was. A year later I even have my own personal little site. I have two e-mail applications on my office computer that regularly check three different e-mail accounts, all of them work-related. I have my copy of Netscape working all day because I frequently have to access information about the university that is more readily available on the web than by phone. I have Internet friends I’ve never met but like very much. I have college friends I keep up with but haven’t actually spoken to in months. Isn’t e-mail great? Whenever I have a question or need to find something, I look on the world wide web first. Only as a last resort do I pick up the telephone. Why should I? I’m living online now.