I froze for a moment, as any normal overly excited individual might have, before I double clicked on the message, just to make sure what I had seen was authentic. Before I had a chance to gather my thoughts and elicit a response a smiling face appeared in the message box on my screen. I knew at that point in time, I had no choice but to respond, as it appeared this was my best chance for an opening line. I had replayed the scenario several times in my head before, which looked sort of like something from the movie “You Got Mail”. I envisioned Cynthia hunched over her computer at her work station, using her already elf sized body to block the screen as she pattered away at the keys. She would maybe even make a glance or two to the side to verify no one was watching, before adding her reply to my response, which I was yet to compose. However, my mind went blank for those few seconds, and all I could think to send in return was…
“ :)“
I knew at this point in time, any chance of making a good first impression was lost, so I had to immediately follow up my response with a typical question.
“how’s it hangin?”
I instantly caught myself and remembered that she spoke very little English, so maybe slang wasn’t the best mode of communication. My thoughts were right, because she didn’t seem to make any sort of reply the few minutes I was waiting. What could have easily been interpreted as a short period of time, would seem that much longer to a person who is already over analyzing a situation involving a union between two people, especially when one party is definitely interested in the other. I corrected myself and then typed
“are you having a busy day?” to which she instantly replied
“yes it is very buzy :) ”
“really! Why is it so busy?”
I felt it wise to throw a quick question in, just to keep the conversation going. It gives ‘them’ a reason to have to reply.
“lots of bookings. What are you doing?” was how she wrote back. Clever girl, it seems she may have caught on to my technique. I began sputtering away almost a full paragraph on the reports I had written in the morning and how I was working on a list to send to purchasing. With all my efforts she replied with a simple
“ok :)”
At this point in time I was feeling a little uneasy, coupled with a small sense of satisfaction. I had already overcome the first step of establishing contact with this girl, and was now working my way into what I had hoped would be an interest jerking conversation. However, her very short answers had me wondering if she was interested at all. I began to run through a multitude of situations in my head, from the lackadaisical office girl, who was indulged in some 3 day old report, flipping back and forth to our conversation when she felt the need to give her eyes a break from the page. Or maybe even the very interested girl who had hoped that she would have been pages away into a mind blowing conversation by now, only to realize she encountered an average Joe who only saw it fit to send her useless facial expression and rhetorical questions. It also didn’t help that I was now lost in a train of thought and hadn’t written anything in the last few minutes, which may have her believing that maybe I had run out of things to say, or had nothing to say to begin with.
“I am sorry my inglish is very bad”, was her next response, which immediately killed all prior thought and put me back in the drivers seat. I began to pour out compliments of how I thought she spoke really good English, “a lot better than mine, that’s for sure”, to which she continued to respond with electronic smiles and gestures of written approval. When my kindergarten English began getting the best of me, I resorted to throwing a few one liner Spanish words that I may have remembered from the subtitles on movies I had seen months before. I could tell she wasn’t impressed, but gave me credit for making the effort.
As we grew more comfortable with each other, I started to do as any man would have done, and I ran ahead of myself. Replaying images in my mind of me and her walking up and down a beach, reciting lines from the numerous titles I had come to know, maybe even taking her up to my room and introducing her to my cat. That would make her feel sorry enough for me, or maybe even relate to the difficult situation I now found myself, being nose deep in this remote part of the world, with no easy way of finding escape. I could play for her some of my favorite Latin tracks, to which we could break out into one of those passionate, in sync, Antonio Banderes/ Jennifer Lopez type dance routines, where our bodies would move like a liquid substrate in a chemistry beaker being twirled round and round. Or maybe I could just invite her to go watch Dirty Dancing!
“do you like movies?” was my next question to her, which I thought she could answer easily in the same breath. But to my surprise her next response was…
“I am sorry, but I have to leave now… bye”.
And there was no smiling face, or written gesture of good will. Before I could even reply she had signed off from her computer, which meant any attempt to contact her at this point in time would have been useless. I would have been forced to stop her in the hallway and ask her for her phone number if there was any hope of us continuing my ballroom fantasy, because the hour of the day suggested that she would no longer be returning to her computer.
Still motivated by my phantasmal urges, I made an attempt to rush out of my office hoping that I would catch her evacuating the hall. No longer did I see the urgency to be candid about my expressions of interest. At this point in time all I could think about was rekindling the connection we had made for those few minutes on the computer, with the hope of jump starting something that would take me away from this social genocide that I now called home. Little did I realize that the state that I previously mistook for patience, would so quickly be transformed into desperation as my one hope of a comfortable existence had just left me out to dry with my eyes still glued to my computer screen.
I heard the echoes of a door shut in the hallway, and I couldn’t help but leap from my seat towards my window to catch a glimpse of what might be Cynthia making her way to the office exit door. My office was the last door perpendicular to the exit at the bottom of a very long and medieval like tunnel of business rooms and potted plants. Her office was located closer to the top of the hallway, which would give me just enough time to witness her make her departure, or stop her dead in the tracks. I hadn’t even gotten my door fully open when our eyes made four… but for only the slightest second, as she tucked her chin back into her collar and walked straight towards the exit as she always did. I barely had enough time to analyze the lines on her face to know if she flashed me a look of disdain, pity, apathy or contentment. All I knew was that my short lived consolation had transformed into agitation and I could not help but question myself.
Could she have been the one I was talking to only moments earlier? What could have driven her to scurry away so quickly? And would I ever get the chance to talk to her again?
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Thursday, October 23, 2008
(Untitled) Part 4 of a short story I began writing... read the first 3 parts first!!!
Having been out of the dating game for a while I had to rely on an alternative source for providing me with the ‘low down’ on Cynthia, as a simple “Hi my name is”, was way too much for my nerves to handle. Let’s just say it’s only wise that if you haven’t driven stick shift for a while, don’t expect to look like anything from out of Fast and Furious when you jump back into a vehicle that requires you to work the transmission. Especially if there are a number of other mechanical problems you have to overcome. Therefore, calling in reinforcements wasn’t too out of the ordinary. I turned to the one guy in the workplace I could actually trust when it came to this sort of a thing. It would only require that he was not interested in the target himself, and that he was given play by play descriptions of everything that took place, from the first meeting, to anything that transpired after wards!
So I wasn’t that surprised when Steve appeared in my office with a sheepish smirk on his face, as if he has just won a very large bet. He was holding a piece of paper in his hand in which he had done a horrible job of folding properly enough, because it didn’t conceal the email address which was scribbled on it. It led me to believe that maybe he purposefully wanted the entire workplace to know that he was delivering a message that should have been kept private, and was even more carefree about the fact that there was enough evidence showing to incriminate who he was carrying the message from. With great haste I snatched the prize from his clutches and immediately began pounding away at my keys, entering the initials which had been scribed on the leaflet.
I’m not sure what made me believe that Steve would have saw it fit to give me some privacy at this point in time, but all I knew was that it grew incredibly difficult to remain oblivious to his constant questions, and over-exaggerated comments on the female specie. There was no doubt he was feeling immense satisfaction for himself, and would stop at nothing to make sure I was aware of the great deal of gratitude I now owned him. You see, Steve was the kind of character you may have never even knew existed, had he not been required to leave the comfort of his work station to make random office calls to staff who experienced computer mishaps. He was the hotel’s computer guy, and could perform a number of hidden tasks that would seem incredible to us normal click-and-point off-liners, as he would call us. I still remember when, Steve made a half naked picture of the Sales Manager ‘accidentally’ appear in everyone’s inbox, just because she refused to sign for a few computer monitor’s he was expecting that week. Or when he made the Resident Manager’s computer mysteriously start changing reservations and moving around itinerary. I still suspect he was the one that broke into my myspace page and changed my info to include that I was now ‘interested in men’ and looking for ‘a very sexual relationship’. He was the kind of guy you would want on your side if you began typing up an email to the head of the company telling him how much you wanted to grab him by the throat and drown him in the swimming pool, and then you accidentally clicked “send”.
In the midst of his comments on successfully getting a girl to bed, and the right kind of music to play in the sac, I managed to enter the email address into my computer. I knew there would be an additional waiting period before I would finally be able to say I captured Cynthia’s interests, because even though the message was sent, it was now left for her to accept my invitation. I decided I would quell my anticipation by running head first into some real office work.
It wasn’t a-typical for us office rats to take a break every now and then and just babble on about someone else’s misfortunes or some personal occurrence, but Steve had seemed to take up a considerable amount of my time now and I was eager to play the role of ‘enthused employee’ once again. I think he sensed my impatience and lack of response at this point and time and with a gesture that lacked desperation he made his way out the door. I guess it wouldn’t be too far fetched to say I was happy to see him go, as it was nearing that point of the day we called ‘the hour of power’; the dying 60 minutes before it was time to call an end to the days activities. I quickly turned my attention to my work station again, and it just so happened that in the middle of composing a Purchasing list, a message suddenly appeared on my computer screen…
“Cynthia has accepted you invitation..”
So I wasn’t that surprised when Steve appeared in my office with a sheepish smirk on his face, as if he has just won a very large bet. He was holding a piece of paper in his hand in which he had done a horrible job of folding properly enough, because it didn’t conceal the email address which was scribbled on it. It led me to believe that maybe he purposefully wanted the entire workplace to know that he was delivering a message that should have been kept private, and was even more carefree about the fact that there was enough evidence showing to incriminate who he was carrying the message from. With great haste I snatched the prize from his clutches and immediately began pounding away at my keys, entering the initials which had been scribed on the leaflet.
I’m not sure what made me believe that Steve would have saw it fit to give me some privacy at this point in time, but all I knew was that it grew incredibly difficult to remain oblivious to his constant questions, and over-exaggerated comments on the female specie. There was no doubt he was feeling immense satisfaction for himself, and would stop at nothing to make sure I was aware of the great deal of gratitude I now owned him. You see, Steve was the kind of character you may have never even knew existed, had he not been required to leave the comfort of his work station to make random office calls to staff who experienced computer mishaps. He was the hotel’s computer guy, and could perform a number of hidden tasks that would seem incredible to us normal click-and-point off-liners, as he would call us. I still remember when, Steve made a half naked picture of the Sales Manager ‘accidentally’ appear in everyone’s inbox, just because she refused to sign for a few computer monitor’s he was expecting that week. Or when he made the Resident Manager’s computer mysteriously start changing reservations and moving around itinerary. I still suspect he was the one that broke into my myspace page and changed my info to include that I was now ‘interested in men’ and looking for ‘a very sexual relationship’. He was the kind of guy you would want on your side if you began typing up an email to the head of the company telling him how much you wanted to grab him by the throat and drown him in the swimming pool, and then you accidentally clicked “send”.
In the midst of his comments on successfully getting a girl to bed, and the right kind of music to play in the sac, I managed to enter the email address into my computer. I knew there would be an additional waiting period before I would finally be able to say I captured Cynthia’s interests, because even though the message was sent, it was now left for her to accept my invitation. I decided I would quell my anticipation by running head first into some real office work.
It wasn’t a-typical for us office rats to take a break every now and then and just babble on about someone else’s misfortunes or some personal occurrence, but Steve had seemed to take up a considerable amount of my time now and I was eager to play the role of ‘enthused employee’ once again. I think he sensed my impatience and lack of response at this point and time and with a gesture that lacked desperation he made his way out the door. I guess it wouldn’t be too far fetched to say I was happy to see him go, as it was nearing that point of the day we called ‘the hour of power’; the dying 60 minutes before it was time to call an end to the days activities. I quickly turned my attention to my work station again, and it just so happened that in the middle of composing a Purchasing list, a message suddenly appeared on my computer screen…
“Cynthia has accepted you invitation..”
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Racist? I know you are but what am I
So on this particular morning as I was completing the last set of sit ups on my almost extinct ab lounge machine, I was treated to a particularly interesting interview on one of my favourite BET shows, My Two Cents. The interviewee (whose name I am yet to determine) had published a book in which the premise was that the black community is to be divided into separate categories based off the intensity of the pigmentation in their skin, in other words, there should be a separation of light skinned blacks and dark skinned blacks. This brought me back to an idea I had in a University Social Psychology class, where we were given an essay to write on stereotypes, and I, being the already extreme ideologist that I am, suggested that racism was inevitable. It damn well cost me a good grade in that class I can tell you that! But the basis of my argument is something I see reflected in society today, which almost forces me to go back to that professor and demand a higher grade.
The idea comes from a social mechanism in which human beings tend to classify things in their surrounding, for several purposes. It’s a phenomenon that we see reflected in a Psychological process called classical conditioning, where a simple Skinner Box demonstrates how a rat can interpret a completely unrelated event like scratching it’s butt, to the distribution of a food pellet. Silly creatures you say… well where do you believe superstitions come from in homo sapiens ? Back in time unrelated events occurring too close to each other led to the belief in things like gods… In modern time it makes people scurry when they see a black cat, or think twice before they open an umbrella in a house. Or more popularly, makes someone forward an email to all the friends on their list, just to prevent having years of bad luck (or bad sex).
But going back to stereotypes, Psychology teaches that classifying certain characteristics, can even save your life in times of quick and urgent decisions (schema). Now I may not be a scientist, but something tells me that if I am ever lost in the woods, a plant with a particularly pungent smell may not be the first one I choose to eat from; An animal with a particularly unpleasant demeanor may not be the one I choose to pet, and a location with a particularly somber appeal may not be the one I choose to take shelter in. Similarly, if I’m walking in the city one night and I see a white bearded man behind me in a sleeveless leather jacket with tattoo’s and a bandana, he wouldn’t be the one I would choose to ask directions from. Maybe past events, experiences or something we read in a book may have taught us how to link these cues to unpleasant outcomes, and my first reaction would be “well maybe he’s a skin head looking to inflict harm on me as a black man”. The extremist may take my leather jacket example and argue that what I have demonstrated is stereotyping which may ultimately lead to racism; but in a split second sort of situation, I’d rather be wrong and alive then right and not alright! The explanation is that as human beings we tend to look for social cues, with the ultimate rationale being our survival.
This now brings me back to the idea I had in that University essay where I mentioned that racism is inevitable. Even if there were no whites, Indians, Chinese or Blacks, people would find some way to categorize human beings and place them into a social hierarchy. Imagine we were all literally colour blind, and all we could see are shades of grey, is it possible that we could all get along as variably grey individuals or would we see the need to classify people, based on hues? I ask this question because I have recognized the human ‘urge’ to classify things into good, better and best, and therefore believe that regardless of circumstance, we would continue to stereotype and group a set of people just to satisfy this ‘urge’.
This is not a completely left field idea. Why is that we see the need to see who is the better specie, the better gender, the better country? Why do we spend large sums of money to find out which country has the prettiest woman, the best designed car, or the smartest set of people? And again why is it necessary to know which country is the most famished, decorated, or even the most violent? The answer to many of these questions is survival, and it does make sense when we relate them to objects in most cases, but why is it necessary to relate them to human beings?
Could it just be narrowed down to an explanation as simple as… survival?
The idea comes from a social mechanism in which human beings tend to classify things in their surrounding, for several purposes. It’s a phenomenon that we see reflected in a Psychological process called classical conditioning, where a simple Skinner Box demonstrates how a rat can interpret a completely unrelated event like scratching it’s butt, to the distribution of a food pellet. Silly creatures you say… well where do you believe superstitions come from in homo sapiens ? Back in time unrelated events occurring too close to each other led to the belief in things like gods… In modern time it makes people scurry when they see a black cat, or think twice before they open an umbrella in a house. Or more popularly, makes someone forward an email to all the friends on their list, just to prevent having years of bad luck (or bad sex).
But going back to stereotypes, Psychology teaches that classifying certain characteristics, can even save your life in times of quick and urgent decisions (schema). Now I may not be a scientist, but something tells me that if I am ever lost in the woods, a plant with a particularly pungent smell may not be the first one I choose to eat from; An animal with a particularly unpleasant demeanor may not be the one I choose to pet, and a location with a particularly somber appeal may not be the one I choose to take shelter in. Similarly, if I’m walking in the city one night and I see a white bearded man behind me in a sleeveless leather jacket with tattoo’s and a bandana, he wouldn’t be the one I would choose to ask directions from. Maybe past events, experiences or something we read in a book may have taught us how to link these cues to unpleasant outcomes, and my first reaction would be “well maybe he’s a skin head looking to inflict harm on me as a black man”. The extremist may take my leather jacket example and argue that what I have demonstrated is stereotyping which may ultimately lead to racism; but in a split second sort of situation, I’d rather be wrong and alive then right and not alright! The explanation is that as human beings we tend to look for social cues, with the ultimate rationale being our survival.
This now brings me back to the idea I had in that University essay where I mentioned that racism is inevitable. Even if there were no whites, Indians, Chinese or Blacks, people would find some way to categorize human beings and place them into a social hierarchy. Imagine we were all literally colour blind, and all we could see are shades of grey, is it possible that we could all get along as variably grey individuals or would we see the need to classify people, based on hues? I ask this question because I have recognized the human ‘urge’ to classify things into good, better and best, and therefore believe that regardless of circumstance, we would continue to stereotype and group a set of people just to satisfy this ‘urge’.
This is not a completely left field idea. Why is that we see the need to see who is the better specie, the better gender, the better country? Why do we spend large sums of money to find out which country has the prettiest woman, the best designed car, or the smartest set of people? And again why is it necessary to know which country is the most famished, decorated, or even the most violent? The answer to many of these questions is survival, and it does make sense when we relate them to objects in most cases, but why is it necessary to relate them to human beings?
Could it just be narrowed down to an explanation as simple as… survival?
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