discrimination

I have a long and winding post I am reconsidering before sharing, but let me sum up:

Discrimination is the ability to make choices based on criteria.

It is the bias or favoring of certain instances regardless of fact that makes it prejudice.

Discriminating taste used to mean having high standards. We still need a word for someone who has high standards.

Let's go back to using bias, prejudice, bigotry, or any of the other words and stop saying that having standards is the same as prejudice.

I don't care how you look, I want you to be able to do your job. And I am going to discriminate. The goal is to get me to judge you based on appropriate criteria that are necessary for the position. But saying people "should not discriminate" is puerile and misleading.

Unless you really mean that anyone who is different is actually inferior so the only way they can be included into society is by disregarding appropriate standards. Then, maybe, we really should reconsider whether the inclusion is worthwhile.

Discrimination is NOT bad. Prejudice is bad.

bulletproof vest

Watched Bulletproof Monk. Liked it pretty well. It was way less sexist and rigid than a lot of kung fu type movies. Maybe because it was made this millennium.

My favorite aspect was how the evil people who had tortured and killed mass numbers of people were operating a Human Rights organization that was supposedly fighting evil. Takes one to know one, I guess.

I am a complete failure at sewing. I struggle mightily to thread the damned needle and then the thread pulls right out of the eye after every stitch. If it doesn't pull out of the needle's eye, then I haven't remembered to tug it tight and the mend comes undone the first wearing. I hate how I'm expected to magically know how to make thread work. I also hate how I'm magically expected to know how to get along with other women. Even if I did learn how to interact in school, it wasn't with the catty competitive bitches that the real world contains. And worse! it seems like the sewing skill and the ice-cold shoulder bitches would be mutually exclusive, but they are NOT!

I need to go shopping for bras and lingerie. I dread this. Not because I am short of money. There is definitely a budget allocation for this line item. Not because I am worried that there will not be garments in my size (hell, Lands End catalog has my size now, though they have adopted the Victoria Secret lingerie measuring which means I really need something 2 sizes bigger). No. I am dreading it because I do not know what the correct behavior is when one needs assistance. I can, just barely, get my own bras fastened behind me, but I need help if I am stiff or it is too cold or if they are new and virgin bras. If I try to fasten the bras in the fitting room myself, my shoulders ache for days; last time I pulled a muscle that goes around my ribs so it hurt to breathe. So I have to have help. But I have no close female friends. So I can either have a complete stranger touch me intimately but professionally after snidely commenting on my lack of social skills or I can do without appropriate underwear. It makes going into a Starbucks look like a test in kindergarten and Starbucks is one of the looming concerns when I was last working because I don't speak their language or know their ritual dances.

I can make coffee at home. But it's really damned hard to make your own bras, even for the magical womanly women who can sew without pulling the thread all the way through to loose again.