transmothraI’ve been pretty down about my PC lately. It’s hard to read the screen most of the time, and it crashes often, failing to reboot about 90% of the time. But I just had to try and write this.
I just picked up Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable, inspiring, and engrossing work. So I’ve been thinking lately, you could easily guess, about religion and god and death/afterdeath and all that.
Here’s what I’ve come up with:
May I just take a moment of your time to point out that:
Every white (and non-American Indian) person living in the United States today is a descendant of debatably illegal immigrants? And that, while we’re on the topic, the non-white immigrants to this country were nearly exclusively brought here in chains by whites?
So just exactly what god damn right does anyone have to say that any human being is illegal or that they are trespassers?
The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
-Emma Lazarus
It’s the oldest catch-22 in history: Experience necessary. How do people with experience obtain that experience? Presumably, every human starts life as infants, with little or no experience within the field in which they will eventually earn their keep. So why is it that every interview always ends with a polite summation of my lack of experience?
It’s hard for me to articulate the fact that I can do absolutely anything thrown at me, other than by awkwardly blurting out “I can do absolutely anything thrown at me!” while a horrified interviewer looks on, aghast. But my lack of experience equates roughly to lack of proof.
Joseph Heller explained the Catch-22:
If you’re insane, then you can’t request to be reassigned from flight combat, because it would prove that you’re sane. If you request to be reassigned from flight combat, then you’re not insane, because only a sane, rational person would make such a request. Therefore, you can never leave.
Ergo, if you do not have experience, then you cannot gain experience. If you have experience, then you must have started with experience.
The thing is, I am experienced. But, because on previous projects I was the designer, the information architect, the developer, and the entire MIS department, all by myself, I therefore cannot prove that I can work as a specialist in one area, working from specs from another specialist in one of those other areas.
What I cannot deal with is the fact that I am stuck forever as a lackey at low-rent jobs that I hate with all of my passion because I am a lackey at low-rent jobs, even though I am 1000% smarter than 90% of the other people around me and am capable of doing so much more – but am relegated to mopping up other people’s messes for the rest of my fucking life.
When I pulled into the apartment parking lot after my miserable interview, Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” came on.
You’re going to reap just what you sow.
I am overqualified, but underexperienced. I am, therefore, a failure.