The Truth About the Backlash Against Rachel Dolezal

Rachel Dolezal, for those who have avoided the internet over the last week or so, is the head of Spokane chapter of the NAACP. Rather, she was. She just resigned. She resigned because rumor has it she was born a white woman but has been living her life as a black woman for the last 10 years. I say rumor has it because what we have to go on right now is:

1. Silence from Rachel Dolezal herself
2. Statements from her parents regarding her heritage
3. Countless blogs, articles, and random people who've purchased tickets for the Indictment Train

The silence from Dolezal herself is telling. I mean, let's be honest here: if there was no truth to this, she'd out in front fighting. That's what I believe. So, her silence is damning in and of itself and seems to hold up the contention that yes, she is indeed a woman who was born white and passed as black for years. Her parents? While I don't really believe they're lying (see my previous assertion) the fact that their relationship with their daughter is "strained" at best makes me wonder why they've chosen to come forth now to unmask her. What's their motivation? It's certainly not to mend any fences with her because this act is sure to alienate her further. There's some legal action happening between them; maybe they hope to discredit her for some sort of advantage in whatever legal proceedings are happening. Parents who would go out of their way to "expose" and embarrass their child though? They get a huge question mark in both the motivation and character categories from me. 

And lastly there are the people with pitchforks, ready to call down hellfire and damnation upon Dolezal's head. Let's get this straight, right here and right now: I have no problem with what Rachel Dolezal did. Not a one. The only things I have questions/concerns about are a) did she use "being black" as a leg up in some way (for example, let's get more info about her Howard scholarship), and b) did she do good works for the community in her role as NCAAP President? That's all that matters as far as I'm concerned. 

There are some in the community (and by some I mean the majority it seems) who are eager to throw around words like "appropriation" and "exploitation", etc. Any word that ends in "ation". I fail to see it. You know what I do see? I see the real reason black folk are upset about this. If anyone actually read this blog I'd get a ton of shit about what I'm about to say, but since no one does, I'mma have a cup of Feel Free and tell you why I think black people are really pissed off about Rachel Dolezal.

Traditionally marginalized groups say that we're fighting for equality and inclusion. At the same time though we take a certain pride in our otherness. We like the fact that there are certain qualities attributed to us that seem out of reach of "outsiders". We make these comparisons jokingly, but there's an underlying pride and truth in it. Dolezal knocked on the "Black Door" and gained entrance, and that pisses some of us off. She managed to become "one of us" and stepped right into so many things that we think of as intrinsically "Black". That's what has people tripping so hard. 

Go to Twitter. The #AskRachel hashtag was focused solely on her ability to fake "black knowledge". Do you know the theme song from "A Different World"? Can you tell us how many 'leven times the Yin Yang Twins been to the club (that one made me laugh)? Stupid shit like that. Testing her cultural literacy–her "black" cultural literacy. Never mind that the woman teaches Africana Studies; can you tell us what you do after you stop and drop*? On Facebook people are all aflutter about the fact that she had a small business doing black hair. How could she do black hair?! She's white! 

She knocked on the secret black door, got let in, and did "black" things—well enough to fit in! But—gasp—black things are for black people! If everyone is able to do them, well...we lose what makes us black. Y'know, because we define blackness by stuff like sitcoms and lyrics instead of ideology and roots. So when a white woman is able to mimic, replicate the things that we think make us inherently black (she rocked the shit out of those braids) it's threatening. It's the same reason people give so much shit to rappers like Iggy Azalea. It's not necessarily that she sucks–although I'm not particularly a fan—but it's more that this white, Australian woman has the audacity to try and take part in something that belongs to black people. 

Two weeks ago folks were falling all over themselves to congratulate Caitlyn Jenner on having the courage to be herself, to let her outside reflect who she is on the outside. People were also quick to attack anyone who thought differently about that. Now, work with me here for a moment. If we live in a time and society where we're attempting to understand and accept that people can be born into bodies that don't match who they are on the inside in regards to sex...is it not possible that people may also feel they weren't born into their proper bodies on a racial spectrum? I know, it sounds crazy, but if you had said to me 5 years ago that there were people who thought they were really the opposite sex I'd have said the same thing. Obviously I have no idea what Racel Dolezal's internal working are, or what her motivation for the last 10 years has been. I like to give her the benefit of the doubt and think that she felt no connection to her parents but a great affinity to black people and our community and simply wanted to be a part of it; in essence, that she felt "black inside". I don't understand why a journey to match your sex up with how you feel is more lauded and acceptable than a journey to match your race up with how you feel inside. It's all about finding ourselves, right, you hypocrites? 

So, an argument I've read as to why this is so "harmful" and "disingenuous" is that because she's white she has the ability to shake her black persona and reclaim the privilege of being white whenever she wants, and black people can't do that. I object to that simply because it's a gross oversimplification. We have historical accounts of light-skinned black people who could and did pass as white as the need arose, and could therefore move between cultures just as Dolezal can. Just because I, as a chocolate-skinned black woman, could never be mistaken for a white woman, doesn't mean there are not black people who can and are. So let's not pretend that that doesn't exist and that she has cornered the market on being able to pass. 

I finally got all of that off my chest. Y'all need to let Rachel Dolezal be. You have no idea what she's done, why she's done it...nothing. You've already tried and convicted her in the court of public opinion and it's stupid. Some of you are just mad because she's done more in her 10 years as a "black woman" to help/give back to the community than you have in your life. Others of you are, again, just mad because she gained entrance into a club that you thought had special requirements, but she can watch The Cookout with the best of us. 

Rachel, I ain't mad at you. 

*Shut 'em down, open up shop - Ruff Ryder's Anthem

Teflon Man

He's everywhere. Everyone who's had a job has probably run into this guy, and maybe been as frustrated as I am with his amazing abilities to deflect all responsibility.

Let me tell you of my latest run in with this Super Non-Hero.

I work in tech. We have a platform on which we process log lines from a web server. They go through a product called syslog, which in turn writes those logs to a central storage unit. All of our environments (Development, Staging, Production) go through this syslog server and writes to our storage. Teflon Man decided that this was affecting our production environment, slowing things down because accessing the storage was getting slow, so he had a plan to change the syslog service to send all environment log lines —except production — to another storage server.

During the work day he changed the configuration file for the syslog server, essentially stopping it from processing anything except the production log lines. He did not however turn off the services writing those log lines from the other environments, so they were still writing log lines to syslog; syslog just wasn't processing them. This meant that the syslog server was creating a queue of those files.

That evening he went in and created new storage areas for the other environments. He then turned syslog back on with a configuration change pointing those log lines to the new storage. Syslog started to process all of the backed up log lines, while also trying to process the current incoming production log lines. We started falling behind in processing because syslog couldn't keep up. The thing is, no one knew that he'd done this evening work. He didn't call anyone, didn't send out an email, nothing.

I was on-call, so I got an alert about the lag. I checked a bunch of system logs to see if I could figure out what the issue was. We were clearly having problems, but it was none of the usual suspects. Eventually I called Teflon Man and he said, "Oh, I did this thing." He explained what he did (see the previous paragraph) and I told him to go back and change it because it was fucking up production. He did so.

Here's where the accountability issue comes in. This morning I spoke with him and identified 3 things that I thought were problems:

1. That we did not have monitoring that helped us quickly pinpoint the problem. This was a team issue, not his problem, but I thought it was something we should work on because time to resolution was pretty long. This was a no-blame point. All of my team are on notice when it's a monitoring failure. 
2. That a production change was made at night without a head's up to anyone. 
3. That he didn't monitor after his change to verify that everything was working smoothly. 

He was able to agree with the first point because it was a team issue. He didn't have to take any personal responsibility for this failure. The other 2 points though? Oh, he had answers for those and at no point accepted that he may have done something wrong. Regarding making a production change at night he said, "Well, it wasn't a production change really. I was only changing Staging and Dev." The change was made on a production box; what part of that means it wasn't production? 

On the third point he had the same argument. He had checked to make sure syslog came back up after he restarted it (which was necessary for the configuration change to take effect) and that was it because, again, he didn't think he was affecting production. Ummm...you had to restart a service that pulls production log lines. How is that not affecting production?! 

Ultimately he blamed it on the technology. Syslog isn't robust; syslog couldn't keep up. It also turned out that after he restarted syslog it was still backed up with the logs from the other environments because the permissions on the new mounts weren't correct, so it couldn't write to the new storage location. Who do you think created the new storage locations? He did. You'd think he'd have checked to make sure they were writing where they were supposed to be, but no. 

He had excuses for everything: excuses for why he hadn't monitored production after making the change to make sure we were still processing properly; excuses for syslog wasn't working; excuses for why he hadn't checked the permissions. At no point did he accept responsibility for his part in the problem. I'm not saying some sort of groveling thing; I mean a simple, "My bad." I make mistakes and I own up to them. This dude? Nope. The email he sent this morning was like this:

It appears that syslog was behind transferring production logs due to issues with processing the dev, qa and staging logs. After disabling the non production environments in syslog the production files started transferring normally and the pipeline is now catching up and lag is now decreasing.

Nice generic email that at no point explains that it was his fault. My emails, when I fuck something up, say things like, "I did x and this happened. I fixed it."

Lest you should think I'm not a team player, let me assure you that that is not the case. When I gave a post-mortem to my boss this morning I didn't say, "Teflon Man did this." I said, "We made changes yesterday" and "last night the config was changed". I kept it vague, I kept it team. No one is trying to throw anyone under the bus. But within the team, when you've caused the on-call person grief, you say, "Whoops, my bad" and own up to your shit.

Not Teflon Man.

This is especially grating this week because I've had a shitty week which started off with a botched firewall deployment which was my fault, and I got grief about it. Direct grief, not vague team grief. I owned up to it with the boss and my team. But this freaking guy right here? Nope. And my boss won't hold him accountable in any way. He found out that Teflon Man made the changes and his response was, "I'm concerned that we didn't troubleshoot it correctly, that it took us longer than I'd have liked to figure out what the problem was." Really? That's what you've got? Someone made a change to the production system sans warning, sans input from others, and you're focusing on how long it took us to figure it out? That's all you've got? Not maybe that if we'd known about the change that would be the first thing we'd have investigated?

Ugh.

Streaming's Got Me Steaming

Friday night and I'm at home with The Kid because Wifey has a social engagement. I dig our Troublesome Twosome evenings because it's a nice bonding opportunity for the two of us, and often what I'll do is set up a movie night since we generally don't allow her a lot of screen time. We do it up: fun "junky dinner" (like hot dogs are something), popcorn, ice cream. The works. That night she asked to watch The Lion King. You remember The Lion King, right? "I just cant wait to be king"? "Kakuna Matata"? Came out in 1994?

So we hit the tv room and I prepare to search for it online. I'm used to this dance, y'know? It happens every time we want to watch something. I start off with Netflix and usually strike out because Netflix has zilch for movies. Then I move on to FiOS On-Demand because why not? Usually I can stop right there and get on with my evening. Not this night, my friends. Not this night. FiOS didn't have The Lion King. I move on to XBox and start searching their various video offerings for it, including Amazon Prime. Nothing. At this point I'm wondering if I'm doing something wrong. I can find Big Hero 6, which was out not that long ago, but I can't find a decades old movie?  It didn't make sense to me. Unfortunately no amount of searching yielded the ability to stream The Lion King. So, we had to watch Bob the Builder episodes. A bunch of them. I fucking hate Bob the Builder. All of those construction vehicle characters have entirely too much hubris.

Later that night after the little one was asleep, I figured I'd treat myself to a little movie viewing. I had a desire to watch some super hero action/adventure, and I was kinda craving Robert Downey Jr. so I decided to look for a little Avengers. I followed much the same route as earlier (with the exception of the XBox Video because by this time I was laying in bed with my iPad). I started with Netflix, went on to Amazon Prime. Not available to stream. Netflix has some cute Avengers cartoons, but I didn't want cute cartoons. Okay, how about Iron Man? I'll even take the first one. Nope. At this point I wanted to throw something. So much content, so many services, and we still have really shitty selection. I honestly don't get what makes it so that I can't stream any of the Fast and Furious movies, or Spiderman or even Taken, but I can get Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Robocop? I can get something old as shit like The Fifth Element, but not The Lion King? Why can I stream Dirty Dancing but not Mannequin?!

I know, I know, there are complicated forces behind these things, legions of dark-suited media pimps haggling and bargaining across the biggest solid oak table you've ever seen. It just seems crazy to me that everything is not available to stream by now—especially the old stuff! Like, I thought Netflix was the Last Stand for some of these old movies. Who does it benefit to keep this stuff vaulted up? Surely you'd make more money letting a service offer all of this old stuff so that people like me can go traipsing down memory lane than by letting it rot in a vault? How about the fact that Age of Ultron is coming out soon? I can't be the only person who wanted to reacquaint myself with The Avengers so that I would be up-to-date when the movie releases soon.

I get that "they'd" much rather have you buy the DVD/BlueRay disc/whatever but surely there's a dropoff time where you reckon if someone hasn't bought it by then, they're not gonna. I haven't purchased Michael Keaton-era Batman; I doubt that's going to change now. So just freaking stream it!

I wound up watching Voltron that night. Voltron! I love Voltron, but c'mon. You have Voltron and you don't have Short Circuit?

Ugh.

The Cost of Recording

I'm a musician...sort've. I don't make any money off of it, but I play in a band and I launched a solo project about a month ago. I have a website with a blog and all that jazz and I would normally post this kind of music-related biznazz there. The thing is, this little rant is going to be about someone local, someone known, and I don't want to burn any bridges before I've built them, you know what I mean? So I'm just gonna go ahead and separate this out so I can get it off my chest but still maintain relations in case I need them again in the future. In the short term I have no intention of working with him again, but you never know what's going to happen.

When I decided to launch this new music project I had this great idea. I was going to release a single month. It would be a good way to keep people engaged, prevent them from burning out on the same old tune and losing interest. I happened to have a bunch of professionally recorded tracks that I'd done a couple of years ago. Wifey got me some studio time with a friend of ours who has a studio in town, and I went in with my guitar and laid down rhythm and vocals, had the dude from my band come in and play bass, and then had some local college kid do drums. I recorded like 6 or 7 songs during this time. They were essentially done and all I needed was some lead guitar work. I had asked a friend of mine to do it and he agreed, but he kept putting me off and finally the whole project just languished. When I re-committed myself to a solo project I thought, Cool, I have a bunch of pro tracks to start off with. I'll just play the leads myself. I planned to do a combination of releasing the professionally recorded ones and home-recorded demos of new songs.

There was a small snag in my plan though. Upon re-listening to the previously recorded tracks, it became clear that the dude with whom I'd initially recorded either had a tin ear (which I feel like he didn't because his other shit sounds pretty good), or just didn't really give a damn. The guitar was so badly out of tune it made me wince to go back and listen. I remember recording an EP with my band, using this guy (let's call him Scarf, because he wore a scarf one time) who has a studio in the same building as our practice space and having him flat out replace my guitar with one of his own to play because it didn't sound very good. That's a producer, and it makes sense. It's what I'd expect. I'm going to release these recordings and tell everyone that you recorded and produced them. It's in your best interest to make them sound good. For whatever reason that didn't happen with my initial recordings. I never told the dude either because I have no backbone. At any rate, I now found myself in a position of having to re-record all of the guitar, and some of the vocals too.

I decided to work with Scarf. He was a known, I liked the work he did on our EP, and he was conveniently located. No-brainer. I sent him the tracks I had and said, "Tell me what I need to do to make these sound good." His assessment? That much of it was unusable. He didn't think the drums were mic'd very well and therefore they lacked good levels, and he agreed that my guitar was out of tune. He said it would cost me more money to have him try and massage all of that into something listenable (and it still wouldn't be great) than it would be for us to start over. He would use what he could, but in the interest of quality replace whatever didn't rate.

WeightWatchers

Weightwatchers is the best of times and the worst of times. It's the best because I honestly do lose weight when I do it. How could you not? The simple act of paying attention to what you're eating is enough to get you pointed in the right direction. That's pretty much its plus point (see what I did there, fellow WW subscribers?).

The downside to WW...well, jeez, where do I begin? How about finding out that everything you thought you knew about eating just doesn't matter when you start the plan? This is my second time doing it and I was still shocked when I started. I got up in the morning and prepared to pour my standard bowl of cereal and milk. We're not talking Reese's Puffs and whole milk, people. We're talking Kash GoLean and unsweetened soy milk. A nice healthy, well-rounded way to start my day I thought. Nuh-uh, not according to WW. They generously allotted me 27 points per day to start, and that bowl of cereal and soy milk? A solid 7 points. 7 out of 27. And that's only if I actually follow the serving sizes listed on the products. Do you know what a serving of cereal is? 3/4 of a cup. Have you ever poured exactly 3/4 cup of cereal into a bowl? It looks pathetic. Like, surely there's more, right? Nope.

I can't decide if this is an issue with the serving sizes reported by manufacturers or if we simply make our bowls too big, but this is the way of the world when you join WW. You start to realize that you can no longer eat the portions you used to eat, even if you didn't think you were overeating. It will break your spirit when you learn that a serving of pasta is actually only 2 oz and you see what 2 oz of dried pasta looks like in your hand—and that it will cost you 5 points. That's before you add olive oil, or pesto or red sauce or whatever you like on your pasta. You pretty much decide right then and there that it's not worth eating pasta any more because how depressing is that?

And hunger. If you try to eat the things you ate before but simply adhere to the serving sizes listed, you will never feel sated again. When I ate what was, for me, a normal serving of cereal in the morning I was usually hungry by mid-morning. What was going to happen when I ate even less than that? It's an impossible strategy, until you learn what WW is actually trying to do.

See, they fool you a little. Their literature and ads spend a fair amount of time reassuring you that you don't have to give up on the things you love. Yes, you can still eat cake or pie or a hotdog or whatever! The word "diet" brings thoughts of deprivation and denial. Deny yourself the things you like to eat. Everyone knows this eventually backfires and can often lead to bouts of binge-eating. But WW says, "Hey, no, we're not asking you to do that. That's silly. We just want you to think about what you eat, plan it a little. That's all. No big."

The things is, you absolutely can continue to eat pasta and pizza and cake or whatever, if that's your thing. Just know that if you eat a piece of cake, it'd better be the tiniest sliver known to man or you'd better plan to not eat anything else for the rest of the day. Go ahead, have a bowl of pasta. Same rules though. You have 27 points. You can spend it on whatever you want, but that's all you get so choose wisely. To be fair, they do also give you these extra weekly points that you can use, so technically you could go over your daily allotment, but I get the feeling that doing that a lot doesn't yield the same kind of results.

You eventually get the hang of it. You realize, okay, I want some pasta. It's 5 points. 2 oz of pasta is not going to fill me up. So, I'd better make it count. I don't want to be hungry in an hour after using 5 points (and then some unless you eat just plain pasta). So you layer your pasta with a shit ton of vegetables. Lots and lots of vegetables. Conveniently, most vegetables and fruits cost no points. You can literally eat a lb of grapes and WW will say, "Cool. Good for you." You learn to pile these foods on to actually get full, and you learn to live off of these if you plan to splurge and have that piece of cake.

This is a nice, clever way to get vegetable-adverse people to eat more of them. I get it. But a person like me, whose meals largely consisted of vegetables and tofu and brown rice and other shit that I thought was healthy? It's just frustrating. I'm not trying to eat cake. I'm not trying to eat fried chicken. I just want a bowl of fucking cereal and some fucking soy milk. Now I either have to accept that I'm going to never feel satisfied by breakfast again, start piling a bunch of berries on my cereal (whether I want to or not) and hope they help fill me up, or change my breakfast eating all together and decide I can only have cereal and milk as a treat to myself every now and then. That...that just pisses me off. Who uses milk and cereal as a treat?!

You know what started this rant? My company provided sushi for lunch for us today as a reward for good financial performance. I had four pieces of sushi—not fried, no tempura, just stuff like spicy tuna and squid nigiri and a california roll—and some edamame, and it cost me 20 points. 20 points for lunch. A small lunch even. I'm hungry again already. To add insult to injury, because I lost weight WW decreased my daily point allotment. I went from 27 points to 26. It's one point, but if you do the program you'll realize how precious one point is. I'm hungry and I have 6 points to use for the rest of the day. Dinner should be creative. Maybe I'll dive into some of those extra points.

But hey, I'm losing weight, right? And that's why no matter how much it sucks I will continue to do it. The reality of WW though? Shitty, shitty reality. I'm gonna go gnaw on some cardboard now.

How Warehouse 13 Did Me Wrong

Time for today's tv rant. It's late I know, seeing as how WH13 has been off the air for a good 2 months now. For some reason this morning's shower mental meanderings took me back to it though. At the time of the finale all I could muster was an outraged tweet. I suppose I've pouted and ruminated enough now to use more than 140 characters.

There's nothing new under the sun in tv and movies. Whenever someone thinks they've done something new and inventive, it's really taking an existing framework and implementing it in perhaps a different way. WH13 was no different. Their framework was the oft-used male/female duo solving mysteries and fighting the good fight. If I thought about it hard enough I could probably come up with a few shows from every decade since tv came into existence that uses this. Off the top of my head: Hart to Hart, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, Father Dowling Mysteries, and Moonlighting for historical fare (is my age showing yet?); Bones and X-Files for something a little more current (probably reaching with X-Files, but my tv-watching dropped off with adulthood). Anyone remember Friday the 13th, the Series, which WH13 has been compared with on many occasions?

With a few exceptions (because yuck, Father Dowling Mysteries), this framework has been put to use to tell the story of partners working together and ultimately becoming "partners" in every sense of the word—even if it took several seasons (hi, X-Files!). Having attractive female and male co-stars whose characters don't eventually get it on? That's simply not done. It's become a given, something you can predict immediately. The crimes and mysteries may vary—and that's how the studios convince themselves that they're doing something "different"—but the romantic aspect is pretty much a done deal. This is why I was initially so impressed with WH13. In addition to being a funny show with a neat little plot (despite its resemblance to Ft13th), I didn't feel like the whole thing was just a mask for a romantic plotline. I enjoyed the sibling-like relationship between Pete and Myka. It was fun, it was funny. It worked.

And then the final episodes. They went and ruined everything by buying in to the played out romantic subplot between the two main characters. What made it extra ridiculous and frustrating was that it didn't even flow! Watching Pete and Myka kiss didn't feel like, "Aaahhh, finally; the romantic and sexual tension has been resolved." There was no sense of coming home, of closure, of meant-to-be. It felt like "Eeeewwwww" with a side of "What the fuck?!". It certainly didn't feel like this was something the show runners had intended to happen all along. If it was, then they either have zero skills in casting people or zero skills in creating romantic or flirtatious undertones.

Adding insult to injury is the fact that despite whatever their shortcomings in writing or casting they had—with little to no work on their end—an awesome alternative to doing the guy/girl partner/romance trope. Jaime Murray and Joanne Kelly had more chemistry in a handful of episodes than Kelly and Eddie McClintock had in 3 seasons.

You know what? Let's just lay the cards out on the table. If HG Wells had been realized as a male, and an actor had been cast that had the same chemistry with Kelly that Murray had...well, we would have seen another well-used plot device employed. How about the age old "good guy falls for the bad guy" story arc? Good guy tries to redeem the bad guy, maybe sees something in her that no one else does, sees potential for good? Or hell, maybe the bad guy is still a bad guy but the good guy really, really digs her? We probably wouldn't get a happily ever after, but we'd get some maintext, right? Yeah, except Jaime Murray is a woman, and they didn't expect the two of them to zing quite like they did. And rather than flesh that zing out, let it drive the creative process a little, give that chemistry a voice, the show runners decided to take the safe road. They used the chemistry to titillate, to draw in the fans, but never delivered, never committed, and in the end shored up the standard heteronormative story we've come to expect. And Jack Kenny is gay! I mean...that's not to say that every gay person has to put gay themes or characters in their creative work. But if the bug is biting and you swat it away? Feh on you. He had an interview with Collider.com where the question was asked: "How do you approach writing for this cast, to keep the great chemistry they have?" His response?

"We write them like family members. We write them like brothers and sisters, and daughters and sons. Everybody can relate to family.  Everybody has a mother or father, or a brother or sister that drives them crazy."

Sure, sure. Makes sense. Until you read this SciFi Vision interview that has him saying that Pete and Myka were endgame from the beginning. He describes a "dynamic between the two of them that there was a will-they-or-won't-they kind of tension". I'm beginning to think I was on the money with the theory that they don't actually know how to write romantic tension, because that there that he's describing? I've seen that dynamic done expertly on many tv shows, and this wasn't one of them. Actually, I'm starting to think that maybe he didn't watch his own show. He goes on to say that it was never going to be about Myka and HG setting up house together...but that was apparently good enough to have Pete and Myka do in the end? He even directly contradicts the actresses themselves: "If you seriously sat down with Jaime or Joanne they would say, 'Well no, they're not going to go set up house somewhere.'". Murray and Kelly have been pretty vocal in their support of and openness to a Berings and Wells "partnership". And somehow putting them together would have been "trivializing" their friendship, but not so with Pete and Myka. Ugh.

I kind of want to put together snippets from his own interviews and email them to him like "What the fuck, man? Do you even know what you're saying?"

I didn't expect a Myka/HG sunset. I was hoping that they'd get some respect, that we might get to see some maintext, that the show would be brave and different. A torrid romantic affair between the troubled villain and the quirky hero for a short while would have been pretty rad. Instead they play into the same tired themes that  Kenny himself acknowledges in that interview. As he said in regards to the Pete/Myka pairing: "...it's not like we're breaking any new ground here". And that is the biggest shame of all. When you hear a creative person admit, almost cynically, that they were just following the formula. How disappointing.

Where's My RAM?

I ordered RAM from Crucial in late November. 8GB to add to my Macbook Pro so that I could do some serious home studio amateur recording. I'm cheap, right, so I picked the free shipping option. I knew it would take a while to come, so I didn't sweat it. It would get here when it got here. Except finally, this weekend, I kinda thought to myself, Okay, I get that it was free shipping, but was it coming from rural Ecuador? I decided to finally track the package and find that things are not as simple as they seem.

First of all, although Crucial provided me a link to ups.com for tracking, the package was actually being delivered by my local post office. Part of some service or other called Mail Innovations where UPS gets the package as far as your local PO, and then USPS takes over. So you get one tracking number for UPS, then another for USPS. Oh, and information about your package may fall into a black hole of some sort when the transition happens and you have to wait for it to pop up in the local postal service system. Super.

The tracking information said that it was delivered on November 30th, at 8:41pm. To an address the next town over. Great. My package has been delivered to the wrong address, and since it's over a week since delivery something tells me the recipient wasn't a good samaritan type who would at least give it back to the post office. Unfortunately for me I discovered this Saturday night, so there were no official channels available to me. I made a last desperate effort though. I looked up my address in this other town, figuring that it was likely delivered there. I actually drove to this person's house at like 7pm. I checked with my wife first as she's my sounding board, my crazy test. If she thinks it's insane, it's probably best that I don't do it. She saw no problem with a black woman riding up to some stranger's house at night looking for a package. So I went. Unfortunately, the dude who answered didn't speak a ton of English (although he did answer the door and talk to me, which gets mad props), and I don't know if he even understood what I was asking. I was all like, "I live on 123 Sugar Lane in Middletown" and he's like, "No, this is Concord." Ummm...yeah. I walked away empty-handed from that encounter. But, alive! That's a plus.