It was a short drive in the Bimmer up over the ridge from Hillsdale. That puts me already in the hole, because I chose not to walk here in the freezing rain along roads with no sidewalks.
I found ample parking in the impervious cover asphalt lot in back, on the slope of a wooded hill. It's almost a form of rape, when you think about it.
The quaint independent coffee shop one block away, where I should be spending my money, has exactly three tables, all of which invariably occupied by folks camping out with their laptops. But that's no excuse. The wifi's good enough there, after all. And the coffee is better, to be sure. I could stand outside under their awning and work, if I really wanted to.
Inside the Starbucks were plenty of tables today. The place in filled with red decor advertising their seasonal drinks and their Xmas blend of coffee. There is no one in line but me. Three youngsters behind the counter. A tall bearded man, straight but with feminine mannerisms as many young men now, flirts with his bespectacled nerdgirl coworker.
"If I instagram someone, then that means we're friends," he jokes, using some level of irony beyond my perception to understand. She laughs at his joke.
He's very helpful, suggesting I purchase the Xmas blend. Nerdgirl warms up my chocolate croissant. As I take my drink to the table by the window, I reflect on how "instragram" has joined the pantheon of Twenty-first century Web 2.0 verbs. Quite a milestone for that site, one not easily bestowed (no one "yahoos" after all). I reflect on how we need a meta term to describe the verbization of social media website names. Googlization?
I'd already plowed through a bunch of the day's work, so I take a bit of break while drinking my corporate coffee. I open my Macbook and bring up the Tumblr in Action subreddit, which has become my go-to place to learn the post-post-postmodern neologisms that are being coined by the youngsters at a pace beyond the ability of my analog Gen X brain to keep up. Many of these terms seem to be related to an evermore fine-grained differentiation of gender, or some form of identified oppression based thereon.
I'm particularly fascinated by the evolution of pronoun usage. I haven't mentioned this yet, I think, but my latest personal project involves an online language-learning tool, which I'm been building as a hobby on and off for the last couple years. It's my own version of building a boat in my basement in my off hours. I've been debating with myself how I should treat "ze."
Of course, my real problem, from the point of view of Tumblr, is that (trigger warning) I'm an oppressive heteronormative homophobic patriarchal cis-scum shitlord, as I can learn from actually reading any of the Tumblr posts linked to on that subreddit. And despite this recognition of my fallen state, my manfeels still count for less-than-less-than-less-than zero. Fortunately that actually makes my life very simple, since I really have only one allowed course of action at this point: STFU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.
Yet somehow I continue writing this blog. As the Tumblristas would say: Wow. just wow.
And despite my constant microagressions and unceasing mansplaining, Red still seems to like hanging out with me. Or least that's part of my headcanon.
OK. I guess I've checked my privilege enough for now (if such is possible). It's time to finish the day by doing a little more work on my day job, writing computer code. It's such a drag, really, since what I do drips with rape culture in every keystroke.
If only I could use a feminist programming language...
Meh, it turns out I am.
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