dear my agency

[fox]

Thanks for getting me a gig beginning today, when the previous one ended yesterday. I appreciate that. But listen, was it too much to expect that you'd also tell them I was beginning today, so they might not have been a surprise to them when I turned up at 9am and they might not have left me sitting in the lobby for 20 minutes while they tried to work out what the hell was going on? Cheers.

signed,
Fox.


Of course, now that I'm here, around the corner from me two or three people are arguing with increasing vehemence (but not increasing variety of argumentative strategies) about whether one of them does or doesn't really know what it's like to live in the ghetto, based on the fact that she's lived in a majority Latino neighborhood but not a majority black one. The one woman says "That don't count", and the other (more reasonable!) one says "You just don't know what 'ghetto' means", and the first says "THAT DON'T COUNT", and it goes on from there. At one point the second woman said something about Mexicans, and the first said "Well, if you'd said Mexicans, that'd be different, but you didn't, you said Latinos, and that don't count", and the second woman was now in a position to point out that the first woman didn't know what 'Latino' meant, which, of course, didn't count.

This is among the most upsetting conversations I've ever overheard.

Comments

[knitmeapony.livejournal.com]

CRINGE.

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

You are not, repeat ARE NOT, just whistling "Dixie".

[knitmeapony.livejournal.com]

That's some kind of horrible intellectual pun or something, hehe.

[dorothy1901]

Right, the term "ghetto" never counts unless you're talking about the Jewish section in Venice.

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

Or Warsaw.

I actually thought for approximately three nanoseconds about going and interrupting to talk about the historical meaning of "ghetto", but a) there's obviously a modern usage that has nothing to do with Jewish neighborhoods, so it would have been irrelevant, and b) I'd been in the building for a total of six hours by that point, and That Don't Count in particular was getting really angry, so it would have been ill-advised and possibly dangerous.

But, ugh. "Mexicans would have been different, but you said Latinos." I felt physically sick. Guess that means I was raised right, at least.

[mearagrrl.livejournal.com]

Well, OBVI. Because "Latinos" is a *fancy* way of saying Mexican, see. And fancy things aren't ghetto. So she wasn't in a ghetto. DUH.

Um, or something.