(It’s actually Friday, but I thought this talk was so inspirational that it has me thinking about hitting the ground running on Monday!)

I was sitting in the shared office space with some of the other folks working there, and one of the guys had a copy of the Diamondback out. There was an article about the retention rate of black students, which prompted him to make some asinine racist remark (that I don’t remember exactly), but which garnered some giggles from some of the other (white) folks working there. Whatever it was, it pissed me off because we had a little exchange…

Me: “I’m black, and I’m in college, so I guess I don’t fit your stereotype.”

*awkward silence*

White Guy: “Yeah, but you’re not really black… You’re mixed aren’t you?”

Me: “But I’m still black. So I guess you thought there were no black people in the room?”

*really awkward silence*

Anyways, MSN.com posted an article about an exchange between Bill O’Reilly and Marc Lamont Hill that reminded me of that moment, and the futility of trying to determine how “black”or how “white” someone is…

O’Reilly criticized Jackson for “incredible selfishness — spending hundreds of million dollars on himself while singing ‘We Are the World,’” and said that it “should make any clear-thinking American nauseous.”

Speaking to guest analyst Marc Lamont Hill, a black FOX commentator, O’Reilly also addressed race as an issue at the memorial service: “Why are Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton making this a racial deal? Jackson bleached his own skin. And then chose white men to provide existence for his in vitro children. Give me a break with all this.”

Hill responded: “You have me baffled in your analysis here, to say this isn’t a racial issue, when this man’s entire career has been marked by the tropes of race… Yes, the black community has embraced him, yes the black community has wrapped its arms around him more in death, but that’s because the media has assaulted him in ways they don’t do with white people of his stature.”

Hill continued: “Now he has passed away. A year or two ago, when Jerry Falwell died, you and I debated this very point. You said, ‘Give him three days to a week and let the people mourn him before you start talking about his racist politics.’ So why are we giving Jerry Falwell something that we won’t give Michael Jackson?”

The two debated for quite some time on whether Jackson had helped in uniting black and White Americans. The debate, however, turned into a shouting match with O’Reilly proclaiming: “If he’s such a black American icon, why did he have his kids with white men!?”

Hill responded: “That’s a personal matter. That doesn’t make him less black — there’s no blackness meter here. You don’t become less black if you have a white kid.”

A quick Google search netted the video…

The funny thing about this is that we could extrapolate from O’Reilly’s logic FAIL to make other horrible extrapolations: For example, if Michael Jackson’s children being sired with a white woman, possibly using a white man’s sperm, make him somehow less black, does that mean Angelina Jolie doesn’t want to be white because she’s adopted Vietnamese and African children? Does it make every white couple that adopted Chinese babies want to be Chinese?

Or maybe we should just stop worrying about race so much and get over it.

No, I was not actually being attacked a giant bioluminescent jellyfish in McCarran International Airport…

1) Always print your boarding pass at the hotel. Sure, it may seem like you’re being robbed when the business center wants to charge you $5 to print your boarding pass, which is free at the airport, but believe me, it’s worth it, because…

2) There will always be a glitch. Just like Tom Hanks said in Apollo 13, there’s always going to be one glitch on every mission. In my case, all of the self-service kiosks for passengers with no bags to check were down, except for one. One that was being used by a couple who were doing international travel. With bags. Who, even when told they’d still have to get in a line to get their bags checked, they insisted on finishing up their check-in at the kiosk because (in their words), “We’re almost done…”

*head slap!*

3) This is going to be a bit controversial, but in my eyes, I enjoy people-watching in this airport more than I did on the Strip. People who are primped up and out and about looking for fun ‘n games in Vegas exude a sort of artificially amped up vibe that just isn’t there in the mundane setting of an airport. Don’t get me wrong — I personally have more fun personally when I’m out and about on the Strip, but it’s kind of cool to see people in a more natural state in an airport.

One bonus: I heard what is probably the best marriage proposal story ever. The short form — proposed on the first date, after a 25 year hiatus apart from each other. Wow!

You’re not paranoid if they are really after you!

August 8, 2008

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In Manhattan.

It’s a gift I decided to give a friend of mine for her birthday a few months back, and a bunch of us decided to secretly gather and take her to a movie. And by “bunch” I mean four of us, because this drive-in is really an old Ford convertible parked indoors at 139 Norfolk.

But now… the drive-in is no more.

Well, to be more precise, it’s being moved, and 139 Norfolk, a.k.a. Grand Opening is now a gallery showing “Goth-Loli” photographs. I am officially feeling old because I had no friggin’ clue what that was until I went to their website.

But what really cemented the notion that I’m experiencing a severe case of pop-culture disconnect is that I read a webcomic about this whole Japanese Goth-Lolita phenomenon.

Because we all know that once a trend appears in webcomics, it’s clearly entrenched in to our society. To paraphrase my friend Heather, I now feel like “I am more square than Doris Day at a beaver-eating contest!”

Got photos of you drunk at a party posted to MySpace? Every prospective employer probably has done a search for you on there and seen you shit-faced.

I have no doubt that one day, we’ll have a Presidential campaign where one candidate digs up a whiny emo posting by another candidate to demonstrate they are unfit to lead the country.

Perhaps we’ll even see a Supreme Court justice being hounded about the photos they posted on Facebook of their spring break partying when they were much much younger.

Now, this issue affects a lot of people, but it especially affects people who work in the public sector because they are often held to higher standards.

One group this may affect profoundly: Teachers. From washingtonpost.com:

And yet, hardcore fans are always able to find something transcendent in the mercenary world of professional sports.

That said, this article on ESPN.com shows that one fan, who happens to be a sports writer, has definitely gleaned some positives from his team during his lifetime. Sad but true, he’ll be losing his team when the Supersonics relocate from Seattle to Oklahoma City.

…

I just keep thinking of all the Sonics gave me through the years:

•The Sonics taught me basic English. It was pretty simple, really. I just listened to how my dad and uncle talked about Denver’s Dan Issel during the ‘78 playoffs. If the word in front of Issel’s name ended in “ing,” it was a profane adjective. If it didn’t, it was a profane noun.

•They taught me how to deal with pain. When this happened in May 1994, I was in the midst of a painful divorce. My soon-to-be ex-wife called me the next day to make sure I was OK after the worst loss in Sonics’ history. She didn’t call to make sure I was OK when she left me, but she worried Dikembe Mutombo might push me over the edge.

•They taught me that sometimes being a bit rebellious can be very good. I still remember the spring night in 1992 when the Supes came out wearing black socks and all-black shoes for a playoff game at Golden State. That was the symbolic beginning of the in-your-face era of Payton and Kemp. Combine that with the height of the grunge music scene, and there was never a cooler time to live in the Great Northwest.

•The Sonics taught me that sometimes life is fixed against you, sometimes you catch a lucky break and very often good things come to those who wait.

•They taught me that loyalty is much more important than currency — no matter what Mr. Coffee would tell you.

•And they taught me that joy knows no limits. I won’t forget the Wizard, DJ, JJ, Downtown Freddie, Sikma, X Man, 3-D, the Reign Man, Det or the Glove. And I’ll always remember Eddie’s half-courter vs. the Rockets, Shawn slamming the door on the Warriors (No. 8 here), Big Smooth’s triple in Phoenix and Gus throwing the ball skyward at the Cap Center.

I’ll remember all the time I invested with my family and friends in “our team.” Maybe the basketball was just a backdrop — but I can’t imagine another backdrop that would bring us together more. My wife, Melanie, and I had our first date at a Sonics game (considering it was a game against the pre-LeBron Cavaliers, it’s amazing I got a second date). One of my fondest memories was watching the championship parade with my grandpa and having him buy me this T-shirt, which I then wore for 113 consecutive days.

Nothing — no saber-rattling commissioner, no sinister owner, no greedy coffee magnate, no misguided city council, no cowardly state legislature — can take any of that away from me.

At the end of Sunday’s game, as “Celebration” blared from the loud speakers, my daughter turned to me and asked, “Do we get to keep the Sonics now that they won?”

The more I think about it, there’s no price on any of it — the good times or the Mutombo times. In fact, the more I think about it, the only real question is what would I pay to have them stay.

We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 – and half the things he knows at 40 hadn’t been discovered when he was 20?

– Arthur C. Clarke