After my dinner with Bryce last night, I had to drive home in the rain. I'm between glasses prescriptions and don't see as well as I should which is another story. Anyway, since my vision is a little off, I missed my turn and had to go home the long way, but due to the fact that part of it was limited access highway it was actually faster. Who cares? This is just fill to make this blog longer. After I got home, the rains really came. We had some bodacious thunder boomers. The nice thing about a really good rain is it cleans up the air of all the smog crud.
This morning dawned bright and clear, I mean crystal clear with temperatures in the lower seventies. What a day to drive the Z3 to work. Right after I got on 285 I ran it up to 80 and cranked up Guns 'n' Roses' Welcome to the Jungle on the Harmen Karden sound system. Yeah, I'm 55 and I listen to Guns 'n, Roses. What's it to ya? It doesn't get much better than this: a fast car, top down, stereo blaring. Why couldn't I have afforded this when I was in my 20's? If I could have, I would have probably wrecked the car and killed myself.
I got to work and in the parking lot, met one of my fellow workers and asked him how he was. 'Still here', he replied. This seems to be the standard answer lately. TCIDNN (The Company I Dare Not Name) was visited by the dreaded Dark Angel of Layoffs last week. Excuse me, the current euphemism is 'skills rebalancing' as in we're skill rebalancing your ass right out the door. (Knock. Knock. Who's there? Not you anymore.) So it's not the optimum work environment. My fellow worker told me to make sure to look at the poster on the bulletin board by the restrooms. He said I'd get a kick out of it.
So on my way to get my first cup of coffee I made sure to pass by said bulletin board. And there was a poster informing me that June is Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Pride Month. (To save space let's just call it GLBTPM) Now if that isn't a mouthful (ooops...no pun intended), I sure don't know what is. Stop the presses! Fire our vice-president in charge of diversity (VPICOD)! Here it is June 5 and this is the first I've heard of this? Where the heck is the company wide memo? But didn't they leave some people out? How about monosexuals? They're the ones who have sex with themselves. How about hermaphrodites? How about cross dressers? Do they fall under transgenders?
So now I'm thinking. This is always a dangerous activity. We have a Black History Month, right? It's February and it only has twenty-eight days and GLBTPM has thirty days. I detect some racism here. Wait a minute! There is Martin Luther King's birthday which is a holiday and since it replaced Washington's birthday and Washington's birthday has been combined with Lincoln's birthday to become Presidents Day, that makes MLK's birthday equal to two days so I guess it all works out. Right?
At the end of the day, I got a call from my friend Gwen. She is a liberal but I don't hold it against her. She has been reading some of my rantings and told me I'm not as bad as Rush Limbaugh and some of the other conservatives. That's because I'm a libertarian. And Gwen has actually been the victim of some political correctness. I keep saying there is hope for her yet. I told her about GLBTPM and she said 'Oh yeah, there are Asian-American and Native-American months.' Once again, our VPICOD is falling down on the job. No one has told me about this. How can I do a good job of Valuing Diversity, if no one tells me what I'm supposed to be valuing that particular month? Why don't they print up Diversity Calendars so we know whose month it is so we can value that particular group?
I had already decided that I was gonna write sumpin' about GLBTPM when I got home, but now I'm thinking some more. Remember that's dangerous for me. I fire up Google and first I start with the hyphens. Let's see what I get when I plug in Asian-American awareness month. Holy fried rice! 394 hits. Their month is May. Didn't get a memo from our VPICOD so I missed it. I apologize to all our fellow citizens with epicanthic folds. (That's for those of you who read) And I really feel bad since my friend Cindy's best friend Carol has adopted a little Chinese girl and I didn't wish Carol Happy Asian-American Awareness Month.
So let's Google our way down the hyphens:
Let's do diseases:
How about disabilities? I'm throwing deaf and blind in here even though miltant deaf folks don't consider that a disability. Maybe the blind don't either. And I don't know about the mutes because they won't talk about it. (Sorry that just slipped out).
I tried hits on paraplegic awareness month, spinal cord injury awareness month, and even cripple awareness month with no success. I need to get Mark Johnson, the professional disablility advocate at Shepherd Center in Atlanta, to work on this and maybe he can chain himself to some buildings until we can get a month. I didn't find any awareness assigned to January, July, August, and December so he can try for those months.
So to summarize:
There is no Grouchy Old Cripple Awareness Month. I want my own month!
Let's start the year off right and make it January.
Posted by denny at June 5, 2002 03:38 PM