Random Mid-Year Observations

-- Deja Blue bottled water tastes like Deja Butt.

-- I realized what made Addison use ordinary as a derogatory word. Commercials. The next time a commercial comes on for any household product, especially a commercial that shows the split-screen performance comparison shot, pay attention to the use of the word ordinary. The voice-over person always injects abject disdain into the word. "The baking soda formula makes Dry-Skin Wonder Spray go on comfortably, unlike ORDINARY bug spray." Given the deluge of commercials that come on in between Nick Jr. shows, I shouldn't be at all surprised to discover that Addison thinks ordinary is a bad word. Makes total sense.

-- I have loved watching the Cubs play this year. No predictions. No boasting. It has just been a heck of a lot of fun.

-- Colin does not like to sit still. If he's awake, he's on the move. A phrase that has become all too common these days is, "Where's Colin?" It's fun.

-- In South Africa, Asian people are considered Black. It sounds silly, but when you hear the reasoning behind it, it starts to make sense, and then gets silly and then sad . . . and then you might wind up angry. The problem was, Asian people were victims of apartheid. But the post-apartheid compensation laws benefited only Blacks (the label African American never really caught on in South Africa). To correct the oversight that left Asians in the South African cold, the government formally recognized all the descendants of yet another continent as Black, despite overwhelming visual evidence to the contrary. Of course, they could have just, you know, changed the wording of the law. No, relabeling people was definitely the way to go.

It just goes to show how ridiculous and demeaning racial labels really are. My fictitious but nevertheless very close personal friend Wayne Kim (who is a Korean businessman in Johannesburg) used to be considered an Asian American African, but now he's just Black.

Maybe the most overlooked part of White Privilege is the general lack of labels. Sure, it used to be that in America you were set apart because you were Polish, Irish, Italian, whatever. Now white people are just white. And we aren't even that. We only break out the white designation when there are non-white people to differentiate ourselves from. I really don't know what to say about it. Just observing at this point.

-- I haven't blogged in awhile.