I don't know why this is, but I have never managed to feel like an adult human being doing a job. I always feel like a little kid who has somehow stumbled into an office in a suit way too big for me, faking it as much as possible in hopes that I can pass for a grown-up. Kind of like Tom Hanks's character in Big (and what do you mean, you've never seen Big? Go rent it right now). The only time I ever feel like an adult is when I'm in some kind of trouble, and--no, actually not even then. This is a big switch from when I was a kid and I couldn't for the life of me figure out why I was stuck in a room with other kids all day, I mean, I was at least thirty. Okay, past life thing, whatever. But there it is. I got older but somehow I never grew up.
Anyway, regardless of my actual age, there are plenty of times when I wonder what in the hell I'm doing in an office. Any office. Somebody like me should be wrestling polar bears in the Great Northwest or hand firing swords or looking through a microscope at dangerous virii or something. And sometimes technology is not my friend. Okay, sometimes technology isn't anybody's friend, but sometimes I feel like I have more trouble doing what should be very simple things than other people do.
Take, for example, Tuesday. At this law firm, we have these very punctual Monday morning calendar meetings, where we get together and go over the calendar and make sure everything's covered and that nobody is scheduled to be in, say, Boston and Houston on the same day. Very punctual, except on this particular Monday, the litigation section had a big meeting of its own. So the calendar meeting got moved to Tuesday.
Tuesday morning came and I forgot all about the calendar meeting. I was still running triage after the litigation meeting, making lists of stuff to do and trying to decide what I could handle myself and what I could foist off on other people. Suddenly my phone rang and the receptionist told me they were all waiting for me at the calendar meeting. And a mad scramble ensued.
Part of my gig, you see, involves printing the big calendar for these meetings. We need 18 copies. What's more, it's long, running to ten or twelve pages sometimes. So I jump up. Then I sit back down and tell my computer to print out the calendar, 18 copies, collated and stapled please, and would it kindly step on it because I'm late for a meeting. The printer obligingly whirs to life, starts printing the first copy and then promptly jams.
Well, of course it does. Copiers and printers only work when you aren't busy and there's nothing due in the next 5 minutes. I don't have time to figure out which tab has stopped fitting into which slot, so I do the next best thing, which is sending the whole print job to a different printer.
I hear the printer fire up across the hall and I run over there with my notepad and pen, ready to grab the pages off the printer and run like a maniac to the other end of the office (because the meeting is at one end of the office and I'm at the desk it's the farthest from). I grab the pages and start flipping through them while I'm waiting (impatiently) for the last few copies to roll off. I've only looked at two or three pages when I realize I have another problem. The top of the page says February 3. This isn't February 3, it's March 27. I've just printed 18 copies of the wrong calendar.
Back to my office I go. At great speed. I pull up the calendar again. I set it for the right dates. I decide to send it to the high-speed printer, which is in the mail room, which is at least sort of on the way to the meeting. It is also, as the name suggests, high speed. I grab my notebook and pen and take off out of my office as the phone starts to ring again. And I burst into the copy room, ready to grab my calendars and take off.
But no. I don't know why or how, but I've somehow sent this print job to the only printer in the entire American legal system that doesn't collate automatically. Which means I now have a nice, stapled set of 18 copies of Page One, 18 copies of Page Two... you get the idea.
I grab a staple remover and start ripping out staples. Then I sweep everything off this big long table and lay down my 18 copies of Page One, face down. Then my 18 copies of Page Two. And Three. And so on, and so forth, one fricking page at a time, until I finally have 18 copies of the right calendar.
I still have to staple them all. Then I have to clean up the mess from where I swept everything onto the floor. Then, pretty out of breath by this time , I have to run the rest of the way down the hall to the other end of the office, burst in on the group of people who've been waiting for me for the past 20 minutes, apologize all over the place and (finally) sit down.
After which, things went pretty smoothly. At least until I got to the part of the meeting where I said, "Please turn to paage 5 in the calendar," and all these little voices at once started saying, "I don't have a page 5."
Turned out nobody had a page 5. How could they? Page 5 was still on the frick'n sorting table. Next to the bin full of metal clamps and the heavy duty stapler.
Seriously, maybe I should open a cheese store. Or become a professional wrestler. Or manage a heavy metal band. As long as there are no copy machines. If there are any copy machines, I'm going to send my assistant over there. Right after he finishes separating out all the green M&Ms for Eddie Van Halen.
Wednesday, March 28, 2018
Saturday, March 10, 2018
Rohingya
So I guess the way I've been feeling lately is kind of how you ordinary Christians probably feel when somebody like the alleged Reverend Robert Jeffries gets on TV with some Fox News pundit and says it's totally irrelevant if Donald Trump cheated on his wife with a porn actress but that all gay people need to die. There's sort of a collective cognitive dissonance, a wanting to jump up and down and yell, "But we're not really like that! The church isn't really like that!" to anyone who will listen and at the same time wanting to hide under a rock rather than attract any more attention. Or to use another example, maybe the way you might feel when you see the Westboro Babtist folks picketing some soldier's funeral with signs that say "God Loves Dead Soldiers." You want to throw rocks at them, and at the same time you notice they're wearing the same t-shirt as you are and so when the TV reporters show up you want to deny that you're wearing a shirt at all. Three times. Before the cock crows for the dawn.
After which you eventually what? Go home, watch TV? Or maybe pray over it. Maybe hold focus groups, meetings at which a lot of church ladies with clipboards twist their pearls into a knot and look concerned. But how do you DO anything about it? You can't, right? I mean, you can make sure everybody at church and in your community knows that cheating on your wife with a porn star is verboten and you're totally cool with gays and lesbians, but it's not like Fox News is going to come over there and film you because people being nice to each other don't get any air time. Basically, to attract any media attention at all, you have to be an asshole. And people wonder why my doc has repeatedly told me to stop watching the news.
Anyway, that's sort of how I'm feeling about this whole Rohingya refugee crisis. What? You haven't heard of the Rohingya refugee crisis? Well, I can't hardly blame you. Even with our blood-hungry news media, the Rohingya are getting like two inches under Dear Abby. Time Magazine ran a pretty decent article about it this week, but it didn't even run on Page One; in fact, the only time Time ever covered this story as a lead article, it ran in the international edition, so we U.S.ians didn't even get to see it. Maybe the wire services have had a few stories about it, so you might vaguely know that there's something going on in Myanmar that involves Buddhists and Muslims. Well, there is, Blanche. There is.
Most Rohingya are Muslim, though some are Hindu. Unfortunately, Muslims and Buddhists have a very uneasy history over many hundreds of years, and usually the Muslims won. Well, yeah; if your religion tells you not to touch weapons and to run away rather than fight, you will probably lose most geopolitical confrontations. That's just the way it is. This time around, though, the Buddhists are winning. And by "winning," I mean they've managed to chase at least 700,000 Rohingya out of Myanmar and into Bangladesh. And kill about 300,000. And burn the villages of many of the survivors, and rape them and torture them and cut off their sources of food. Meanwhile, the rest of us Buddhists are wanting to jump up and down and yell, "But we're not really like that!" and...yeah.
(It reminds me a little of when a cult of otherwise ordinary Japanese citizens declared their willingness to die for Buddhism by launching a sarin gas attack on the Toyko subway during rush hour, killing 13 and injuring hundreds. Die for Buddhism? I mean, that's so--so unBuddhist-y.)
Let's back up a little here. Who are the Rohingya, anyway, and how did all this get started? Well; they are a group of people who speak their own distinct language, and they're an ethnic minority that has lived in Myanmar since at least the 1800s (documented) and possibly as much as a thousand years before that (myth, legend, family stories). For much of that time, their presence in Myanmar has been a thorn in the side of certain "ultranationalist Buddhists" (and that's another contradiction in terms; I've never even met a nationalist Buddhist, much more an ultranationalist one). The Myanmar government's official position is that the Rohingya are invaders from the Bengali region of India that crossed into Myanmar from Bangladesh; illegal immigrants, in other words, who shouldn't be there. They cannot be citizens or hold civil service jobs, and their kids are legally kept out of state-run schools. Tensions between the Rohingya and the Buddhist majority rose up in 1978, 1991-ish, 2012, 2015 and of course just recently (interesting observation; two of those dates coincide pretty neatly with global recessions. Hmm.) This time around, though, it's not just arguments over whose land is whose and who married whose daughter; this time it's out and out ethnic cleansing.
The Myanmar govermnent looks like it's ready to kill, chase out or forcibly remove every single Rohingya in Myamnar. The military is leading these attacks on Rohingya villages, and stirring up anti-Rohingya sentiment though officially, the government denies involvement (where have we heard that before?). Aung San Suu Kyi, who's sort of the leader of Myanmar and who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her nonviolent struggle for peace and democracy, hasn't done a thing to stop the violence or even spoken up against it. The government of Bangladesh's official position is that Myanmar has to take the Rohingya back, because it can't handle an influx of so many refugees. Nobody else has spoken up to say, "Send them over here, we have plenty of room," so the crisis continues.
As a bad Buddhist myself (I eat meat, I meditate with music, I'm pro-abortion, I make mala beads out of pricey gemstones), I dunno why I'm so surprised that this is happening, but I am, Blanche, I am. You would think (or anyway, I would think) that the Buddhists would be the first ones to hold up their hands and say, "Can't we all just get along?" Certainly, burning out your neighbors, or killing them, is about as un-Buddhist-y as you can get. And over here I'm crawling under a rock, waiting for the first person to say "Oh, you're a Buddhist, right? Isn't that you guys killing all those people in Myanmar?"
Which, I guess, may never happen, since hardly anybody seems to know about Myanmar anyway. But it could. And when it's all over and all the Rohingya are dead, I really don't wanna be the one answering the questions. Especially if I have to follow it up with, "But we're not really like that." Because if one of you is, then all of you is, especially if the one of you is the only one who can get any attention from Fox News.
After which you eventually what? Go home, watch TV? Or maybe pray over it. Maybe hold focus groups, meetings at which a lot of church ladies with clipboards twist their pearls into a knot and look concerned. But how do you DO anything about it? You can't, right? I mean, you can make sure everybody at church and in your community knows that cheating on your wife with a porn star is verboten and you're totally cool with gays and lesbians, but it's not like Fox News is going to come over there and film you because people being nice to each other don't get any air time. Basically, to attract any media attention at all, you have to be an asshole. And people wonder why my doc has repeatedly told me to stop watching the news.
Anyway, that's sort of how I'm feeling about this whole Rohingya refugee crisis. What? You haven't heard of the Rohingya refugee crisis? Well, I can't hardly blame you. Even with our blood-hungry news media, the Rohingya are getting like two inches under Dear Abby. Time Magazine ran a pretty decent article about it this week, but it didn't even run on Page One; in fact, the only time Time ever covered this story as a lead article, it ran in the international edition, so we U.S.ians didn't even get to see it. Maybe the wire services have had a few stories about it, so you might vaguely know that there's something going on in Myanmar that involves Buddhists and Muslims. Well, there is, Blanche. There is.
Most Rohingya are Muslim, though some are Hindu. Unfortunately, Muslims and Buddhists have a very uneasy history over many hundreds of years, and usually the Muslims won. Well, yeah; if your religion tells you not to touch weapons and to run away rather than fight, you will probably lose most geopolitical confrontations. That's just the way it is. This time around, though, the Buddhists are winning. And by "winning," I mean they've managed to chase at least 700,000 Rohingya out of Myanmar and into Bangladesh. And kill about 300,000. And burn the villages of many of the survivors, and rape them and torture them and cut off their sources of food. Meanwhile, the rest of us Buddhists are wanting to jump up and down and yell, "But we're not really like that!" and...yeah.
(It reminds me a little of when a cult of otherwise ordinary Japanese citizens declared their willingness to die for Buddhism by launching a sarin gas attack on the Toyko subway during rush hour, killing 13 and injuring hundreds. Die for Buddhism? I mean, that's so--so unBuddhist-y.)
Let's back up a little here. Who are the Rohingya, anyway, and how did all this get started? Well; they are a group of people who speak their own distinct language, and they're an ethnic minority that has lived in Myanmar since at least the 1800s (documented) and possibly as much as a thousand years before that (myth, legend, family stories). For much of that time, their presence in Myanmar has been a thorn in the side of certain "ultranationalist Buddhists" (and that's another contradiction in terms; I've never even met a nationalist Buddhist, much more an ultranationalist one). The Myanmar government's official position is that the Rohingya are invaders from the Bengali region of India that crossed into Myanmar from Bangladesh; illegal immigrants, in other words, who shouldn't be there. They cannot be citizens or hold civil service jobs, and their kids are legally kept out of state-run schools. Tensions between the Rohingya and the Buddhist majority rose up in 1978, 1991-ish, 2012, 2015 and of course just recently (interesting observation; two of those dates coincide pretty neatly with global recessions. Hmm.) This time around, though, it's not just arguments over whose land is whose and who married whose daughter; this time it's out and out ethnic cleansing.
The Myanmar govermnent looks like it's ready to kill, chase out or forcibly remove every single Rohingya in Myamnar. The military is leading these attacks on Rohingya villages, and stirring up anti-Rohingya sentiment though officially, the government denies involvement (where have we heard that before?). Aung San Suu Kyi, who's sort of the leader of Myanmar and who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her nonviolent struggle for peace and democracy, hasn't done a thing to stop the violence or even spoken up against it. The government of Bangladesh's official position is that Myanmar has to take the Rohingya back, because it can't handle an influx of so many refugees. Nobody else has spoken up to say, "Send them over here, we have plenty of room," so the crisis continues.
As a bad Buddhist myself (I eat meat, I meditate with music, I'm pro-abortion, I make mala beads out of pricey gemstones), I dunno why I'm so surprised that this is happening, but I am, Blanche, I am. You would think (or anyway, I would think) that the Buddhists would be the first ones to hold up their hands and say, "Can't we all just get along?" Certainly, burning out your neighbors, or killing them, is about as un-Buddhist-y as you can get. And over here I'm crawling under a rock, waiting for the first person to say "Oh, you're a Buddhist, right? Isn't that you guys killing all those people in Myanmar?"
Which, I guess, may never happen, since hardly anybody seems to know about Myanmar anyway. But it could. And when it's all over and all the Rohingya are dead, I really don't wanna be the one answering the questions. Especially if I have to follow it up with, "But we're not really like that." Because if one of you is, then all of you is, especially if the one of you is the only one who can get any attention from Fox News.
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