Tomorrow I get to go to a mandatory day-long diversity training. Joy. I don’t object to the concept of diversity training. I’ve been in enough situations to know that some people are absolutely clueless about how to interact with people of diverse backgrounds. But I don’t think you can teach diversity in a classroom setting. It needs to be an integral part of the workplace; part of everyday life. And if you insist on teaching it as a class, at least teach it in the context of the experiences of the audience. I work with people of different ethnicities, religions, disabilities, and sexual preferences. So my starting point is a little different than another person’s.
Looks like I’ll be in Miami March 24-30. I honestly can’t wait. I’ll be curious to check out some of the clubs in South Beach. I don’t often go clubbing because it’s impossible for me to make myself heard above the music, but it could be fun just to sit at a table and observe everyone else. And you never know what will happen. A couple years ago, I took a couple of out-of-town friends to a club in the Warehouse District called the Gay 90’s. It’s a gay nightclub that has been completely co-opted by us heteros. My friends are dancing and I’m sitting off to the side, minding my own business, when this very petite, very attractive woman starts dancing in front of me. Dancing may not be the most appropriate word. More like gyrating against me. It was so loud on the dancefoor that I couldn’t even ask for her name. I just bobbed my head to the music and smiled like an idiot. I so wanted to get her number, but I lost her in the crowd. Ah well, c’est la vie.

I was in a bookstore earlier tonight because I wanted to get a couple more copies of the L&P magazine. I couldn’t find it and went to the information desk to ask for assistance in locating it. Now, I’ve read about some of customers-from-hell that employees in chain bookstores have to put up with, but the exchange I witnessed was truly appalling. This woman approaches the information desk and tells the clerk that she is looking for an anatomy coloring book for her daughter who is a nursing student. The clerk explains that there are many such books in the Medicine section downstairs. Then the woman, in a haughty tone, says “I don’t want to go looking for it myself. You need to show me. That’s your job, isn’t it?” The poor clerk tells the woman she can’t leave the information desk, but the woman insisted on being led to the exact shelf to find her precious book. Eventually, the clerk agreed to have another employee meet Ms. Bee-otch downstairs. When it was my turn, I told the clerk she didn’t deserve that treatment. The clerk was a real cutie, too. I wanted to tell her that I liked her dreadlocks and that she looked like Ani DiFranco, but I didn’t want to sound like a jerk. I was hoping to impress her by having her find the magazine and then casually point out my name on the cover. But no such luck. They were sold out.
Also saw Lost in Translation tonight. Bill Murray is brilliant in that film. Watching it, I also had the sense that the Japanese are more American than Americans. If that makes sense.

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Sorry about the website being down last night. I, uh, forgot to renew registration for my domain name. Hard to believe it’s already been a year since the19thfloor.net came into existence. Everything should be back to normal now. Carry on.

I was listening to NPR a little while ago when I heard the term ‘quirkyalone’ for the first time. Writer Sasha Cagen defines someone who is a quirkyalone:
For the quirkyalone, there is no patience for dating just for the sake of not being alone. On a fine but by no means transcendent date we dream of going home to watch television. We would prefer to be alone with our own thoughts than with a less than perfect fit. We are almost constitutionally incapable of casual relationships.
Cagen seems to use the term to describe a certain subgroup of women, but I see a bit of me in that definition. I do derive a kind of melancholy satisfaction from being alone. I like the little rituals of my solitary life and the simplicity of not having to worry about anyone but myself. My last girlfriend accused me of being a selfish person, and in a way, she’s probably right. I live in my head so much of the time and it’s not easy for me to let anyone else in to my zone of privacy.
That isn’t to say I don’t keep exploring romantic possibilities. I obsessively check Match.com every day to see how many people have looked at my profile (668 and counting). But a deeper part of me knows that it will take a minor miracle for me to meet someone as weird as me.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden has written a wonderful piece about why writers receive rejection slips and how writers react to them. She profiles a website where visitors enter the content of their rejection slips and how they felt after reading them. Most of the responses reveal fragile egos and distorted perceptions of one’s own talent. There’s a certain sense of entitlement in some of these reactions that is mystifying. You see the same thing on a show like American Idol. They’re stunned when the judges bluntly tell them they can’t carry a tune. The saying goes that everyone’s a critic, but the same high standards we apply to other people seem to dissolve when we look at our own works of art. Maybe it has something to do with the Warhol-ization of American culture, especially the American publishing scene. All you have to do is go into any major bookstore to see that everyone and their accountant is publishing a book. So how hard can it be, right?
I’ve collected a few rejection slips over the past year. I keep them in an envelope in my desk. And I’ll probably get more once I finish my book. I guess I see each rejection slip as a challenge to be a better writer. I like to think I’m slowly improving, but someone else will have to be the judge of that.