I can be annoyingly politically correct sometimes. Or to put it simply, I can be annoying. Period. Ever since I was the super bright gifted little know-it-all in my family when I was a kid I haven't been able to keep my mouth shut about my superior wisdom. (Now, before y'all gag on yer Shreddies, please note that I am employing here what is known as irony. Oh my God, I can't stop!! I just cannot stop.) Maybe I'm a born educator. Or maybe just a born pain in the ass. Which reminds me of once, many incarnations ago (well, thirty years anyway, in 1984, remember that year? Remember the book? I have read it maybe five or six times. And now I have it in Spanish translation and it is just sitting there on my bookshelf waiting for me. I purchased it recently at one of Vancouver's few remaining independent bookstores where I met the owner who is also the husband of a recently retired co-worker whom I run into from time to time. She looks ten years younger now that she's retired.) But thirty years ago when I mentioned in the presence of one super uptight, self-righteous, self-hating, stuck way in the closet homosexual Christian about something or someone being a pain in the ass, he prissily corrected me saying that I meant to say a pain in the neck which sounds much nicer and less profane and edgy than pain in the ass but as I tried to explain to the Christian Ayatollah, who also happened to have a violent temper and a tendency of physically assaulting anyone who disagreed with him, pain in the neck simply does not convey the annoyance in the way that saying pain in the ass does, especially when referring to someone like him. Or me when I'm being an annoying politically correct pain in the ass.
Just the other day I heard someone mention while describing an interaction with her building managers that one of them is black, but really very nice. I did say that we no longer identify people by race or skin colour. After all her being black or whatever colour I'm sure has nothing to do with her ability to do her job or her status as a nice person. But it is difficult for anyone born before 1960 to really adjust to modern (post-modern?) thinking which, among other things, is completely inclusive to the point of no longer even noticing that we are being inclusive. Like one of my co-workers who mentioned at a meeting that one of her clients is gay but that's okay, she doesn't mind at all and he's still a nice person. I kept my mouth shut. She was also born later than 1960, but she is from a conservative and visible minority culture (now I'm doing it!)
I thought of this a bit more this afternoon when I was enjoying an excursion in a local coffee shop with my sketch book and coloured pens and pencils. I intentionally sat on the other side of the café because two patrons were talking very loudly and very noisily and I frankly wanted to be as far away from them as possible. About forty minutes later they moved to my end of the café (well, not really mine but the area where I was seated.) They were not going to leave. They simply moved to sit just three tables away from me and I really did not want to listen to them. I packed up my stuff, flashed them both a dirty look and moved to the table they had abandoned, which suited me well since I was wanting to sit there in the first place. On my way home I stopped at Shoppers drug Mart, famous for crappy customer service. I mentioned to the cashier how poor I found the service and she of course shrugged it off and I did notice too that all the staff seemed to be the same ethnicity, but what difference should that make since I've been given crappy service by all kinds of people. And exemplary service. By all kinds.
At the end of the day, I really don't understand race, or even if there's anything to understand. Same DNA, more or less. And by the way I have not bothered to mention anything that might identify the race, ethnicity, gender or age of the two ignorant and annoying customers in the coffee shop nor what language they were speaking, because you know something? No single group has the monopoly on ignorant behaviour and really most of can be pretty awesome sometimes.
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