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from Evelynne

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If you see a dead picture link and REALLY want to see the picture, e-mail me and I'll e-mail it to you. I had to delete a bunch to save space.

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Kevin
Callie
Tino
Erin
Ottoman Empire
Sundry Mourning
Sarah
Amy
Atara
Kristala
Jaffo
Bear
Terry Lee

2001-02-05 - 981427583

Who's Who Cheat Sheet
Who I Read

On the internal soundtrack: "Smoke on the Water". I forget who. Purple somebody?


So, Rob and Rianna came over on Friday night and we had a very, very good time. They had to cut the evening short because of their dog, who cannot yet be trusted in the house alone. We agreed that next time we'd meet at their house instead, so the dog can run around like a maniac all evening and we'll all be happy.

We've all got family members or friends who do things that make us shake our heads with amazement, so we had some fun catching up on what everyone had been up to. This is always fun.

After eating and gossiping for a while, we started playing a game called "Cranium", which they had received as a gift. Involves word games, drawing, charades, stuff like that. We had a ridiculously good time with all of it, hopping around like idiots and laughing our asses off.

This is a difficult game to figure out -- the rules for moving around the board were atypical and I found them hard to understand at first. This is true even when you're sober as Rianna and I were. If you're tipsy, forget it.

Poor Rob has to go to the northern peninsula of Michigan for 10 days. Yuck.


While they were here, we chatted about Poindexter's and my former landlady, who rents out the house next door to R&R.

Now, this woman is nuts. We told R&R about her wackiness back when we moved out, and as Rob said, "It's not that we didn't believe you, but" the fact is you need to experience her for yourself before you realize how nuts she really is.

She used to call us regularly to say stuff like:

"I just wanted to make sure you empty the lint trap in the dryer every time you use it. It's really important that you do this."

"I just wanted to remind you to run the disposal before you run the dishwasher, make sure you do that every time."

She has these things in the lease, and she reminded us of them before we moved in, yet she still felt compelled to remind us yet again every time she called. She was positively fixated on them.

At one point, she brought over a rickety half-bench/chair kind of thing, made of wood, grayed by weather and falling apart. She then suggested that Poindexter fix it up for her. "I don't know if you like doing that kind of thing, but if you could fix it up, that would be great."

Spend all that time fixing up something we have to leave at the house when we move? I don't think so.

When we moved out, the things that were most important to her were apparently the condition of the oven and some other tiny detail I've forgotten. The oven was clean, so she was beside herself with joy. We thought all was well. No.

Two days after we actually moved out, she called up Poindexter at work. She was having a conniption fit because there were leaves and sticks in the window wells for the basement and the yard. She went on and on about this for a while, sounding quite upset and angry. So he asked if she wanted him to come over and take them out, and she said she'd done it already herself.

So Poindexter said, "Well, what do you want us to do?"

And she said, "Well, I'm going to take $20 out of your deposit."

Poindexter was livid at this point. She had interrupted him at work to rail at him about something she'd gone and done herself, when she could simply have asked us to come back and fix it. We would have done it. So he said, "Well, that's fine, you can take it out of the interest on the deposit."

The landlady freaked. "What interest? There's no interest!"

Poindexter informed her that she was required by state law to put our deposit in an interest bearing account and that she owed us the deposit plus interest since we'd been at the house more than a year. We had researched this very carefully because we were wary that the landlady would do something weird to us. We also guessed, correctly, that she wasn't planning on giving us any interest. We were willing to forego that in the interest of a trouble-free moving-out. The interest was significant -- over $100, I think -- but dealing with the landlady is just hopelessly difficult and not worth it.

Once she started nitpicking, though, Poindexter brought up the interest. She told him she'd have to call back. Poindexter was convinced she was calling a lawyer to verify the interest story.

If she did, she found out we were right. When she called back, she said she had overreacted and she would give us the whole deposit back. And, happily, that was the end of that.

Rob and Rianna had this to offer:

The people who moved in after us were a couple our age with a baby. The male half of the couple, Fred, I think, really liked working on houses (and was too impatient to wait for his own house) so he fixed up a few things. He painted a few rooms, rewired some hideously faulty wiring, put in a screen door to brighten up the living room, re-seeded the backyard and put down mulch, stuff like that. Stuff I would never, ever do unless I was getting a break in the rent, which they weren't.

When they moved out last month, the landlady started pitching fits at him because the walls in some of the rooms looked dirty. Fred was livid. "I painted the other rooms! Those are how the walls were when we moved in!"

Poindexter and I weren't surprised. According to R&R, she is now hiring someone to paint the rest of the house, too.

Also, the landlady is now pestering Rob and Rianna. She went over to their house and asked them to forward the previous tenants' mail, since she was apparently too lazy to do it herself. She also begged them (literally) to use their phone, even though they had guests, saying that it was vitally important that she use the phone, she really, really needed to use it. She's quite good at seeming to be in dire straits.

She got on the phone, and she's all, "Hi honeyyyyy, I'm running a little late, we'll have to wait a little while on dinner..."

She's nuts. Her personality flip-flops. Poindexter thinks she drinks or takes happy pills of some kind, because she's usually all cranky and irritable and worked up early in the day, and then after some particular time in the afternoon she's all happy and relaxed. One of the oddest people I've ever experienced.


Ugh, I'm stuffed. I ate too much lunch. Poindexter and I tried a new recipe last night -- chicken and rotelle in a sauce made with balsamic vinegar, sun-dried tomatoes, sauteed garlic and onion, and a lot of fresh basil and godDAMN it is good. Finally a GOOD recipe for a change. We've had a streak of bad luck lately. I think it's hard to screw up when you have sun-dried tomatoes, though. Those things are amazing. They're like bacon bits, flavor-intensity-wise, but good for you.


OK, so Poindexter was flipping channels, and he stopped on a channel that was wrapping up a show about some aspect of black history. He and I were talking about something and weren't paying much attention at first.

They had a little graphic at the top with a photo of some famous historical figure and the name of the show in a pretty font. Very classy and sophisticated. At the bottom was an advertisement graphic for a sponsor of the program.

I took one look at the ad graphic and said, "Oh my GOD, I cannot BELIEVE they did that. Who put that up there?"

Poindexter took a look, gazed blankly for a second, then started to laugh.

The ad graphic was for Popeye's Chicken and Biscuits, and there was a voice-over about Popeye's celebrating black history.

I asked Poindexter to explain what struck him as funny, and he said, "The inappropriate stereotype, and the fact that Popeye's is targeting an audience based on an inappropriate stereotype."

We were in agreement on that. It was pretty weird. I wonder if they caught any flak for that.


So this whole thing got me thinking about stereotypes.

To play fair (or devil's advocate) and not just have a knee-jerk reaction, think of it this way. If you're an advertiser, and you're trying to reach people who like your product, is it unreasonable to assume that a large number of the stereotyped group might be watching the program, and that the stereotype might well apply to a fair number of the viewers?

To be honest, I'm of the opinion that stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason. Some people who would be horrified by the above stereotype wouldn't hesitate to tell you that Republicans are racist, or corporations are evil. There's some truth to those, after all. A lot of racists are Republicans, much to my everlasting annoyance. Corporations, which by definition exist to make money, can certainly be seen as evil depending on your views on "making a profit".

Let's look at a few slightly less controversial stereotypes and you tell me if there isn't more than a grain of truth to them. Be honest with yourself, even if you're an exception.

People who like math are geeks.
People who drive old VWs smoke pot
Women like flowers
Men like football
White people have no rhythm
People who vote Republican are religious wackos

Note that every single one of them applies to a group in which either Poindexter or I belong. With the exception of the pot and Republican stereotypes (we're drug-free non-religious types), we fit those descriptions pretty well. And we can name a lot of other people who fit these stereotypes, too.

The place where you get into trouble, of course, is when a stereotype is no longer true (culture changes, after all), or when you make the mistaken assumption that the stereotype applies to all members of the stereotyped group.


On a more basic level, stereotyping is just human nature. It's a form of categorizing. Humans like to categorize. They divide people into groups -- rich, poor, Southern, Northern, Californian, religious, atheist, city mouse, country mouse, us, them -- and make blanket assumptions about the entire group. Given that culture or a common interest does tend to mean that people in a group share similar characteristics, it's not surprising. And when the stereotype is comparatively benign -- I mind less, for instance, people wrongly suspecting Valentine's Day is important to me because I'm a woman then people wrongly suspecting I harbor white supremacist feelings because I voted for Dubya -- it doesn't really cause a lot of damage.

But at the same time, there is SO much variation among individuals in a particular group that it's ludicrous, to use one of my dad's pet words, to assume that you can apply them to an individual with any sort of accuracy. So while it might work to make assumptions about groups of people for advertising-targeting purposes, it doesn't work well at all applied to individuals. All of us would do well to keep that in mind.

This is why I am such an individualist. I acknowledge that there are societal and cultural influences on people, and that they can be very, very strong. But when you get down to the nitty-gritty, everybody is different. Every single person is a unique combination of genes and environment that won't be neatly categorized at all. The individual is more than the sum of the outside forces bearing down on him.


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