It's just a word (no it isn't)

So I went for an impromptu drink tonight with a couple of people from
work. One girl is leaving to go back to england after a few months
here on a project, and another guy who I met a few years back is
over for a week to go on a stag-do for a guy who I used to study
Spanish with in the UK.




Anyway a good time was had by all and after 4 beers I decided to call it an evening and head back
and me and the leaving girl left at the same time. So anyway we were having a nice little chat about
nothing much on the way to the train station and I hear a voice:

" I really hate niggers though, I just can't stand black people."

So I'm a mild mannered enough person, and I decided to let it go but then I hear this voice following
us down the street. Well you can piss me off once and I might let it go, but this drunk pathetic
motherfucker piece of shit kept saying it. So I turned around, walked up to him and looked him in the
eyes. "Listen you piece of shit. If I wasn't with this girl you'd be lying on the floor right now. Turn
around and walk away before I kick the shit out of you"

It's amazing how quickly this bastard changed his tune, but he still wasn't playing anything I wanted
to hear. "Oh I didn't mean anything, personal. It's nothing against you, I just don't like black people."

Me: "it's everything to to with me you fucking arsehole." So I pushed him - it was the most I could do
not to punch and keep punching until he would be bleeding and crying so much that he wouldn't be
able to say another word for months.

There's no point to this, other than I need to vent, and it's amazing to me how just one word, that I
can hear in a rap song or in passing from 2 brothers on the street and not think twice about can
conjure up so many playground fights where me and my brother would unite and fight against stupid
kids repeating what their parents had said the night before; can send me into a blind rage, where I
just want to kill someone, but that's the way it is.

I calmed down pretty quickly, and the girl said "The funny thing is, my middle name's nigger (sic)"

Haha, every cloud.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7wiuG7uego

Healthcare

Ok so here's my take. 90% of the country has been paying 9% of their free time focusing on this, despite the fact that it's worth 25% of their income.

Yeah there was all the republican scare tactics about death panels, pulling the plug on grandma, socialism / fascism / anyism you'd like to pick this week, but at the end of the year and a bit - long debate, they lost. Full fucking stop. Barack Obama is getting some sort of socially beneficial policy through. And while I will strenuously protest the fact that there was no public option, a weak-sauce version of getting any kind of real health care reform which works for rich and poor alike through, he has defeated a republican congress which has not, does not, and will not for the time-being, vote for anything he tries to get through. These people lack any principles.

This man is one of the most intelligent, charismatic presidents for a looong time in this country, and although there are right wing militia groups getting arrested for assassination plots as we speak, at the end of the day, this man is making this country a better place, and somewhere I'd like my kids to grow up, rather than somewhere I'm just visiting for a while.

Do it Obama. You promised change. You're only delivering small change so far, but if you turn this ocean liner around, then your presidency will be truly monumental.

http://www.youtube.com/theyoungturks#p/search/0/sO6JXVBeBgs

The Trouble with Being English

I was at the Irish pub for quiz night (trivia they call it), and I got into a bit of a discussion with this bloke and I think I managed to offend him while being entirely friendly. He had been hitting on my friend for about 20 minutes - she was pretty drunk, but her boyfriend works behind the bar and he's also built like a brick shithouse, so I figured it wasn't my responsibility. Anyway, he didn't know that, so he came over to me and my other friend to smooth the waters and check he wasn't treading on anyone's toes.

As soon as I opened my mouth, I got the usual "Hey, where are you from?", and I readied myself for one of the three standard responses:

1) "But where are you from, originally?" (translation: but you are black and this does not compute with my notion of Englishness)
2) "Oh that's so cool - I'd love to go there / went on vacation in Europe once etc."
3) "Where in London?"

Now when you get answer no. 3 you know you are probably dealing with someone who has lived in London, or spent enough time in one or two areas to think they know their way around (a bit like living in Manhattan lol). Anyway I'm always interested to find out an informed American's opinion on English culture and this guy wasn't shy about volunteering his:

"Oh the damn class system there, it's so messed up etc. We don't have that here"

I 95% agree and I told him so, but I also said that there are some posh americans, that money was the governing class factor here because America was founded by rich men, and that the racial divide is just as bad as the class divide in England.

Now he didn't agree. Obviously he said he did - liberal white americans are generally really scared to confront race or say something which could make them seem racist, but I could tell there was something eating away at him which made him not really agree with me. It turned out, after much beating around the bush, that he had been tried to join an English gentleman's club when in London - he had the money so he thought, as an American does, that this was all he needed to buy his way in to 'class'.

Oh no no no no.

Oh no no no.

No.

That's the thing about the gentry - they hate new money. They associate it with cheeky upstarts trying to gain favour with them. You really can't break into those sorts of places unless you, and about four generations before you, went to the right school (Eton or Harrow), the right university (Oxford or Cambridge), and you talk like the Queen of England (not the King, he's just a racist Greek).

So anyway he had paid his dues to one such club, and was in attendance at one of their parties. He was not having a good time and was about to leave, I think because he found out they were all right wing toffs who didn't share his lily-livered liberal philosophies, when one of the toffs stopped him in his tracks.

"You are not a real gentleman, and therefore you may only take the ladies exit."
How humiliating. It's no wonder he has a problem with losing an argument with an English person - there is clearly an inferiority complex going on there.

So anyway - what's the trouble with being English? It's that everyone has their preconceptions of who you are and how you view them, and they're usually wrong. So this guy now dislikes me (I heard him telling my friend), I think because I'm not posh but I still owned him in a disagreement about the House of Lords vs. the Senate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk91m3WxR0c

Apple - the final rant

Ok, if you are reading this it's either because:
(a) you are a fan of my blog - unlikely based on the current subscriber count, or
(b) I have directed you here because I don't want to waste my energy having the same argument over and over again, and I have definitely heard your point of view before, sorry.

So first thing's first. I'm not trying to turn you against Apple - really I'm not. For some reason, you have fallen in love with your iPhone/Pod/Book etc. and I don't wanna break you guys up. But I'm also not interested in joining the relationship.

There are 3 main reasons I hear people love their Apple products so much and I am about to give you my reasons for disagreeing with all of them, and politely ask you to stop shoving your iOpinion down my throat
.
(1) "Apple is cool" (compared to microsoft / pc / blackberry etc.)
You are an advertiser's wet dream. You appear to be caught up in the notion that you are somehow "taking on the system" by using an Apple product. This is not true. Apple also make money by selling products to people. The history of Apple being perceived as "cool" has 2 origins:
a) when pc's were not powerful enough to handle desktop publishing, music production and 3d rendering, and other legitimately "cool" applications, apple was the only real choice. You don't actually need a power book to put your holiday photos on facebook.
b) when apple's market-share was small enough to actually be considered part of a counter-culture. This underdog notion has pervaded into the present, even though Apple now provides a Windows emulator as standard on new machines. Face it, the world would not function properly without Microsoft Office. You would be out of a job.
Apple is not cool, and neither are you for using their products.

(2) "It's so easy to use"
Congratulations, you are a retard. The reason iPod caught on so quickly was because of the way it was marketed to twenty something's with a very basic grasp of technology at a time when the future of digital media was very uncertain, and the music industry was desperate to impose restrictions on how people could access music and thereby safeguard their corporate profits. By creating a device that synchronises seamlessly with a free music playing and ripping application, iTunes, Apple have succeeded in doing the music industry's bidding by ensuring any music you download for your iPod cannot be shared with anyone, or listened to on another non-Apple device. So much for your counter-culture. Because you were too busy, or unable to get a basic grasp on encoding formats and you loved those little silhouette adverts, I had to start paying for music again. Thanks.

(3) "The apps are awesome"
Yeah it's amazing how you can get your phone to make fart sounds for a dollar - Alexander Graham Bell must be filling his pants in his grave right now. Or that cool app you can hold up and find the name of that tune playing at Starbucks so you can download it directly to your iTouch/Phone. Ever heard of Deep Capture? It's not an app.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hv5e464aztc

The Competition

So I finally worked it out, with a little help from my friends. The reason people in this city are the way they are. Put simply, this city is one big competition.

I went to the wedding of a good friend of mine last weekend - a great guy who took me under his wing when I was new to the city, through whom I have made other good friends. On the bus I was sitting next to a guy I've met a few times before and we were talking about London and NY, and how long we thought we would end up staying here.
"The trouble with New York is, there are too many alpha people here. I don't want to end up in a club at 40, and wonder if it was worth caning my liver for the last 10 years just to shag some beautiful women"
Wow I thought, this guy is pretty alpha - a banker, works too hard, plays a lot of sport, and generally comes across as one of life's achievers - and here he is explaining how he is sick of the competition and longs to be back somewhere where you're not constantly competing with other people. So what's the deal?

Well then at the reception I was talking with an American guy who's been here for a long time, and he put it like this:
"Everything in this city is a competition. Every bodega owner, every gym, every taxi driver knows that if they can't offer you the best you can get for the least expenditure, then you're gonna go somewhere else. And it's exactly the same with women. When you're sick of playing the field, you'll realise that all the girls you thought were fighting over you weren't actually competing for you at all - they were competing with each other"

Now on the face of it that seems like the same thing, but the difference is, it's not about you it's about them.
He came to the apparently cynical conclusion that people here only settle down when they're ready to settle. When they think they've done as good as they can do. That reminded me of an answer my boss gave me a couple of years ago when I asked him why there were so many single people here.
"You know, if you look around on the subway enough, you'll realise that it's full of people who thought they could do one better"
And a conversation I had with a colleague at lunch the other day, where she talked about her friend's boss, a 40 year old guy with an amazing apartment, no close friends, and a book on how to fall in love.

So when will I get out of the competition? Not for a couple of years yet. As damning as the above all sounds on the prospects of meeting a nice girl here, not so jaded by experiences with alpha guys that she can't trust anyone, or so determined to succeed that her life passes her by, there's plenty of new blood around to keep things interesting for a while. And the wedding showed me that as the song goes:
If I can make it here, I'll make it anywhere

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx1Fg0Fmazo

Guns

So apparently there was a shooting in my hood tonight. I've been working way too many late nights recently and I decided to go out and blow off some steam with some workmates in SoHo. Then when I got back to my road I saw that there was a cop car parked around the corner from my house, and some flourescent tape blocking off the end of the block.

I assumed there'd been a car accident or something and I stopped off to get a soda from the deli on the corner. From what I could tell from the upset girl in the shop, it seemed that someone had done a drive-by and had hit a fast-food delivery driver and another guy in the arm.
So anyway, while this is pretty freaky and definitely doesn't occur very often back at home, at the end of the day it doesn't make me scared. It was definitely a score-settling. Why would you do a drive-by unless the guy owed you money? I feel really bad for the delivery driver though - I hope he wasn't from my local!

Anyway I digress - what's with this x amendment right to own a gun? Wasn't that written during the times of the Minutemen, when there was the need to defend the newly born Republic from remonarchisation by the oppresive British? Not to mention the Native Americans, or the imported African and Chinese plantation and railroad workers. There's really no need for civilian guns anymore.

Okay so I'm not anti-hunting or anything. I don't get buzzed by the idea of hunting for the sake of killing an animal, but it's not something I've ever done either so I'm pretty laissez-faire about it. So let all the hunters in states where you can go out shooting animals keep their shotguns. But seriously, who really needs a handgun to defend themselves unless it's from someone else with another handgun? And don't even get me started on assault rifles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkuOAY-S6OY

Ignorance is Bliss (aka what you don't know can't hurt you)

So I was in the bar a couple of Fridays ago, and talking with 2 of my colleagues, who shall remain nameless. We were discussing current events and one of them said "I don't really watch the news". I kind of didn't believe him - thought he was trying to give off an air of cynicism ("maybe he only reads blogs, or maybe he is addicted to NPR"). But no, I found out today he was being absolutely truthful, as he asked me what was going on in Iran that he'd seen something about while passing by a news stand.

I proceeded to give him a 5-minute summary of the events of the last weeks events, skilfully (or so I thought, smugly) relating them to US foreign policy and the overthrow of the government by the CIA in the 1950s, and pointing out that because of Twitter and YouTube, both American inventions, that the revolution was not televised, but digitised. He seemed to appreciate that I was so keen to share my knowledge of the situation with him, but I also got the impression that he really didn't care, that he couldn't even see the dots that could be joined between this distant land and his own life working as a consulting engineer in the big city.

For him, hailing from the MidWest and working in the Big Apple, life is probably daunting enough without worrying about some innocent protestors being murdered on the street by their own police for protesting at an obviously rigged election in a pseudo-democratic dictatorship, with legitimate grievances against his nation. This is the same guy who didn't vote for Obama, not because he didn't think he was the better candidate, but because Obama was a shoo-in in both NY and Michigan, and he didn't think that adding his vote to the many others to bestow as great a mandate as possible was worth taking 4 hours out of his day.

But I'm not here to condemn, only to diagnose. We Europeans have a sterotypical view of the US as insular self-obsessed people, who too often fail to see or care about the consequences of their actions on others, or come to terms with the possibility that American exceptionalism is not just born of entrepreneurial initiative and their blessed constitution (written by rich, slave-holding male land owners, and so perfect it has been amended umpteen times), but due to the fact this resource rich land was stolen from its native population, and worked by unpaid slaves for hundreds of years to gain its wealth.

So of course, the truth is somewhere inbetween what we think of them, and what they think of themselves. This is a country where a mixed-race man can become president, but also a country where a supreme court justice nominee with more judicial experience than anyone else can be labelled a racist for expressing the opinion that her poor upbringing and experience as a Latina woman could give her a different (better?) perspective than an old white male born into money.

I don't think you can blame people for not wanting to know about other countries if their upbringing and education has never related their own nation's history to other places on the globe. This is simultaneously a strength and a weakness.

So what is my point here? If you don't bother to investigate someone else's motives for doing something, then you will never understand why they act the way they do, or why they think what they do about you. If this works for you then cool, carry on your own way, my dear cousins. But you'll be missing out on something special.

Ah that was cheesy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6IQxhkVIEw