I've been through the Foreign Service exam in the past and while it was a big ego post to pass the written exam, getting through the next stage is really hard and really demoralizing. Especially because the exam format, grading criteria, and ideal candidate profile seems to change from year to year. Supposedly it can take you 4-5 times to pass through all the levels, if you're determined enough. I don't know how determined I am, especially because the last go around left me feeling pretty down on myself. I figured that was it, even if I was interested in doing something like that and I have enough overseas/language experience to be good at doing something like that, there's no way I'll ever crack the system. But I just read that because so many Boomers are going to retire from the State Department, they've started to look at overhauling the whole recruitment process. A story like this is enough to make me think that I'll throw my hat in the ring for another round (this is where the masochist part comes in). Even if some old timers are sniffing about how these changes means lowering their standards:
"The sense that everybody passed this exam is important," said Richard C. Holbrooke, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who brokered the Dayton peace accords, which ended the Bosnian war in 1995. Holbrooke entered the Foreign Service fresh out of Brown University, in 1962. Holbrooke
recalled that in addressing his Foreign Service class, then-Secretary
of State Dean Rusk "made a big point of telling us that we had come in
on our merit, and neither he nor anyone else could influence the
process." Set against that backdrop, "this looks like a lowering
of the standards for entry . . . at a time when their focus ought to be
on training diplomats for the real challenges of the 21st century,"
Holbrooke said.
Two thoughts about that comment and the article: 1) The appointment process is already somewhat politicized. People get posts as ambassadors as political favors. The abassador for my region in Peace Corps was Tipper Gore's tennis partner and a DMC fundraiser, not somebody who passed the exam. 2) In regards to Holbrooke's statement, I honestly can't tell why I passed one time without doing any preparation or studying versus the times I studied and didn't pass. I think how the exam was structured and scored in each situation was completely different. Not to say that some amount of intelligence and critical thinking didn't play a role in my being able to pass the Written Exam, but I think part of how somebody passes it is based on luck and whatever criteria is being used that year for the scores - it's somewhat arbitrary.
Of course maybe I should try again, especially seeing as how the current preferred method for doing intelligence gathering on Iran is to search Google. I can't speak Farsi, but I do have a MLIS.
Continuing my love hate relationship with the Wall Street Journal, last Saturday's issue had a really great interview with Haruki Murakami:
Mr. Murakami seems pleasantly detached from the obsessive worlds of his novels, where protagonists teeter on the edge, narrowly avoiding some abyss below. "Good writers always look into the darkness," he says, but some "go mad" in the process. Not so for Mr. Murakami, who peers into the underworld but always returns to flat land.
These romance novels must be where all those "Hot Librarian" fetishes started. I wonder, nowadays where is this whole fantasy* getting propegated? Or is it just turning up in tv/movie character cliches, online dating ads and really bad erotica? Of course the whole ridiculous thing about this is that: a) The chances of hooking up with somebody decent because you work in a library job are about nil and b) I'm not interested in about 99.9% of the guys who have some kind of hot librarian fetish (or who are librarians).
*in the sense of being so far removed from reality if you actually work in a library, not what somebody thinks about in terms of turn-ons
As if I didn't love Stephen Colbert enough already for his show and speech to the White House Press Corps dinner, now he's taking on the Decemberists! I will admit to being taken in by the initial hype and getting a copy of their first CD from a friend. Maybe it's because I'm getting older and remember pretending to like Sonic Youth or being impressed by somebody actually owning Sun Ra records because I wanted to fit in with my peers. Maybe that's why a friend of mine refers to them as "Craigslist roommate music." But do people actually like them (well, them and Sufjan Stephens)?! It's not even that their music is bad or unlistenable, it's just so unbearbly twee and self consciously twee that just makes me absolutely hate it. Which is why I'm completely stoked at the thought of Stephen Colbert going after Colin Meloy
I know what I'm going to ask Santa to bring me - refrigerator magnets of Austin's most famous homeless cross dressing transvestite mayoral candidate, Leslie Cochrane:
Knowing Leslie, he's totally making money off of this - a friend asked to take his photo on year because of his extra special Valentine's Day outfit (which featured a tiara of course) and Leslie's response was "Sure, for $5!" When I was going to school there, the same friend & I used to see him around town all the time and wondered what was up with a homeless crossdressing dude who would always be out in a tutu, tube top, tiara & full beard. She started volunteering with a group that worked with the homeless and in one of their employee newsletters, there was an interview with him about why he was a homeless cross dresser. According to Leslie, he was going to community college after getting out of the Navy and started researching the issue of homelessness in America. Leslie decided to become a homeless person to learn more about it and then decided to start cross dressing in order to raise awareness about the homeless. The cross dressing part definitely at least raised local awareness about him, although I don't if it's really changed anything in regards to conditions for the homeless in Austin. Definitely a smart guy because last I'd heard from my friends who still live there, he came in 2nd in the mayoral election (for having a platform based on sustainable development) and had gotten a sweet gig "house sitting" somewhere out on Bee Caves Road. Kind of sad that he's not always out on his corner anymore. I'll always remember the interview that John Kelso did with him one July in Austin about "Leslie's Hot Weather Dressing Tips" that advised wearing high heels (keeps you up off the hot pavement and closer to the breeze) and an undershirt (tip Leslie picked up while serving in the Navy).
Two days before my birthday I got into a pretty nasty car accident on Donner Summit. The road was pretty icy, it was snowing and the car in front of me starting skidding, fish tailing, and then shoots off the road and into a tree that's in the ditch next to it. I tried slowing down and stopping, starting skidding myself, and when I finally got my car under control, the car behind me slammed into the left side of my car. Fortunately the driver who went off the road and hit the tree was okay and the guy who hit me wasn't too pissed off. My car looks really pathetic and I have to wait until next Wednesday for the insurance adjuster appointment. The tail light is holding on by a mere wire, so I've had to duct tape it down to frame. In retrospect I don't know if I'd do the same thing again - trying to stop in those condition because I thought somebody was injured. If it happened again, I'd maybe go on to the next safe point and then call 911 because I'd be too afraid of getting hit myself. When I was duct taping down the tail light, I noticed how it was just a matter of a few inches that I didn't get directly hit on the gas tank.
In the days since the accident, a couple of people have said to me that I must have incredibly bad luck (this is the 3rd time in 2 years I've been rear-ended), but good karma for trying to do the right thing in a bad situation. Maybe that's true or not, but given how I had a pretty amazing birthday celebration, I'd be glad to credit it to karma. Among other things:
* Friend gives me Dolly's Dixie Fixins cookbook, purchased directly from the Dollywood! Even more awesome is that the funds all go to support Dolly's foundation.
* Friend freaks over her birthday present, a custom silk screened pillow of Nick Cave.
* Waiter immediately becomes my BFF upon seeing the Dolly book and slips us free birthday cake.
* We go next door to a bar that's pleasantly vacant, except for this hilarious drunk gal who is wearing a boob flashing vintage dress (Dolly would approve), a vintage coat with a fur collar (I approve), and carrying her chihuahua with her. She convinces us to do the in-house drinking special, 5 shot glasses mounted on a ski and I manage to weasel out of paying my share because it's my birthday.
I seriously felt like the Belle of the Ball that evening. Had it not been a week night (and like 15 degrees), I probably would've continued the streak of birthday goodwill by playing the slots or staying out really late.
A friend just sent me this picture in honor of my birthday today. I so hope we can get this pinball machine for the old folks home. Either that or I'm playing it on the Elderhostel Tour of Dollywood:
This opinion piece merits saving because it's the only thing I saw in the news after the school shootings in CO & PA that even acknowledges that misogyny played the primary role in the murders:
The Amish Shooting, A Hate Crime?
We're inured to misogyny
BOB HERBERT
The New York Times
Who needs a brain when you have these?
— Message on an Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt for young women
In
the recent shootings at an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania and
a large public high school in Colorado, the killers went out of their
way to separate the girls from the boys, and then deliberately attacked
only the girls.
Ten girls were shot and five killed at the Amish school. One girl was killed and others were molested in the Colorado attack.
In the widespread coverage that followed these crimes, very little was made of the fact that only girls were targeted. Imagine if a gunman had gone into a school, separated the kids on the basis of race or religion, and then shot only the black kids. Or only the white kids. Or only the Jews.
There would have been thunderous outrage. The country would have first recoiled in horror and then mobilized in an effort to eradicate that kind of murderous bigotry. There would have been calls for action and reflection. And the attack would have been seen for what it really was: a hate crime.
None of that occurred because these were just girls, and we have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that violence against females is more or less to be expected. Stories about the rape, murder and mutilation of women and girls are staples of the news, as familiar to us as weather forecasts. The startling aspect of the Pennsylvania attack was that this terrible thing happened at a school in Amish country, not that it happened to girls.
The disrespectful, degrading, contemptuous treatment of women is so pervasive and so mainstream that it has just about lost its ability to shock. Guys at sporting events and other public venues have shown no qualms about raising an insistent chant to nearby women to show their breasts. An ad for a major long-distance telephone carrier shows three apparently naked women holding a billing statement from a competitor. The text asks, "When was the last time you got screwed?"
An ad for Clinique moisturizing lotion shows a woman's face with the lotion spattered across it to simulate the climactic shot of a porn video.
We have a problem. Staggering amounts of violence are unleashed on women every day, and there is no escaping the fact that in the most sensational stories, large segments of the population are titillated by that violence. We've been watching the sexualized image of the murdered 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey for 10 years. JonBenet is dead. Her mother is dead. And we're still watching the video of this poor child prancing in lipstick and high heels.
What have we learned since then? That there's big money to be made from thongs, spandex tops and sexy makeovers for little girls. In a misogynistic culture, it's never too early to drill into the minds of girls that what really matters are their appearance and their ability to please men sexually.
A girl or woman is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes in the United States. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count. We're all implicated in this carnage because the relentless violence against women and girls is linked at its core to the wider society's casual willingness to dehumanize women and girls, to see them first and foremost as sexual vessels — objects — and never, ever as the equals of men.
"Once you dehumanize somebody, everything is possible," said Taina Bien-Aime, executive director of the women's advocacy group Equality Now.
That was never clearer than in some of the extreme forms of pornography that have spread like nuclear waste across mainstream America. Forget the embarrassed, inhibited raincoat crowd of the old days. Now Mr. Solid Citizen can come home, log on to this $7 billion mega-industry and get his kicks watching real women being beaten and sexually assaulted on Web sites with names like "Ravished Bride" and "Rough Sex — Where Whores Get Owned."
Then, of course, there's gangsta rap, the video games where the players themselves get to maul and molest women, the rise of pimp culture (the Academy Award-winning song this year was It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp), and on and on.
You're deluded if you think this is all about fun and games. It's all part of a devastating continuum of misogyny that at its farthest extreme touches down in places like the one-room Amish schoolhouse in normally quiet Nickel Mines, Pa.
* * *
Bob Herbert is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times.
I've been sick in bed all weekend and ended up reading Scott Smith's The Ruins. It's not that great of a read and trods the same territory as The Beach and is kind of (slight spoiler) like Anaconda, except without being campy or entertaining. It's set in the Yucatan Peninsula and talks a lot about the Mayans, which made me think, does it seem like there's some new trendy fascination? Are Mayans the new pirates (or ninjas or zombies)? Like there's an awful lot of "Mayan" brands of hot chocolate, chocolate bars, power bars, or ice cream (anything that's dark chocolate and spices) in the aisle of the grocery store. And then there's the buzz about this book (Ben Stiller's going to make it into a movie) and Mel Gibson's nutso film about the Apocalypse that's all in the Mayan Yucatec dialects. I'm totally fascinating by the culture and history of the region, but I just get the impression that "Mayan" is the trendy ethnic buzzword used by marketing people who've never set foot outside of Club Med in Cozumel. It definitely has nothing to do with my experiences of being out in rural areas of the Yucatan or Chiapas, where nobody speaks Spanish, people are treated as second class citizens because of racism, and you'll see just some of the most appalling examples of poverty anywhere in the world.
Actually what would've made The Ruins actually worth reading would've been if it had been a satire about clueless Westerners being done in by their appropriation and exotification of indigenous cultures. Especially because the (nameless and faceless) Mayan characters in the book basically serve the role of mysterious, indigenous Other. But that's probably a little too clever to be a Ben Stiller movie.
I ran across the front page of the LA Times today and just from reading 3 articles, it's obvious that last week's elections really haven't changed much. Bush is trying to rush through Bolton's nomination during the lame duck session and Rosa Brooks has an essay about how the GOP had four whole days of the spirit of bipartisanship before getting back to the business of putting women, other nations and the poor in their place:
The GOP's short-lived humility:
In yet another sign of renewed political vigor, the administration decided to give hungry poor people the finger too. As of Thursday, the Agriculture Department has decreed that the 11 million impoverished Americans who can't always put food on the table don't suffer from "hunger" after all — they just experience "very low food security." (Kids, get a head start prepping for the SAT questions of the future! Sample analogy: "Very low food security" is to "hunger" as "alternative interrogation methods" is to: _______. Did you guess "torture"? Well done! You've been paying attention!)
As for international
relations, White House functionaries demonstrated their usual respect
for diplomatic niceties by illustrating the Web page announcement of
Bush's make-nice visit to Vietnam with the flag of the former South
Vietnamese government (defunct since 1975, when the South surrendered
to the North Vietnamese). Because remember: We can re-invade Vietnam
any old time we please!
We should have known better than to take postelection Republican humility at face value. For the GOP leadership, calling for bipartisanship after the election was the political equivalent of the narcissist who, oozing sincerity, says, "But enough about me, tell me what you think of me."
Translated out of
Republicanese, "bipartisanship" means "but enough of me forcing my
policies down your throats! Now it's time for you to embrace my
policies!"
Oh but it doesn't stop with just "very low food security" as a euphemism for hunger, the Bush administration also appointed the head of "A Woman's Concern" to be part of a family planning commision. You would think that women would be concerned about things like having control of their fertility, protecting themselves against STDs or AIDS, deciding if they want to have children, how many children, what they want to do in the privacy of their own bedrooms with their partners - except that the issue that this group is concerned about is safe and legal access to contraception. Yep, they're one of those groups who think that people should only be having sex if procreation is involved. It strikes me that putting somebody like that in any position of authority in regards to family planning is a lot like putting somebody who's Quaker or Amish into a high ranking position at the Pentagon. Plus it's just ridiculous that people seriously think that going after contraception and trying to make people feel ashamed of sex is really the best way to deal with public health issues.
Finally, I am all cranky because I had to fly to a meeting today and noticed that the people in the seats next to me had managed to bring their drinks in through security. When I asked them, they got all nervous and evasive about not being stopped. Afterwards, they started talking and it was pretty obvious that they were both FBI agents. So basically if they were able to bring drinks from Peet's (which is in the area before security and which has a big "YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO BRING YOUR DRINKS THROUGH SECURITY" sign) all the way on to the plane, they totally did not have to go through the same search requirements that the rest of us do. Maybe I'm being nitpicky because I'd like to bring my Peet's coffee on to the plane, but I kind of resent somebody getting to go around the rules simply because they're FBI.
I decided to get my passport renewed 8 months before it expires because I'd heard about how the federal government is putting all these measures into place to better verify and track overseas travel. I also decided to pay the extra money for expedited processing because it supposedly takes forever to get your passport renewed and this way, I'd get it back before the rumored date that the RFID chips were going to start appearing in passports.
The photo requirements were weird enough, what with me having to take off all of my jewelry and glasses because they need an image to scan for biometric verification. Well, I just got my passport today and it looks like crap! Seriously, I am so going to get pulled out the line in Customs because it's so poorly put together that somebody is going to think it's a forgery and I'm trying to sneak into their country under false pretenses. They don't even use your passport photo anymore, it's screenprinted on to the page and covered with wavy lines (probably for the biometric reading), but the result is a faded and obscured picture of my face. How is somebody going to be able to verify that it's me? I'm probably going to have to carry a second piece of photo ID with me. Plus the information is typed up in this really small, really typewriter looking font, which lends an extra "klassy" touch. I could have done a much better job of putting this together at Kinkos than the State Department was able to do. Or as my friend Julie put it, "Dude your passport looks like a zine."
Nevermind just looking crappy and maybe getting me into trouble, but where's the sense of pride and professionalism? The US does kind of have an international image to uphold of being richer and snootier than everybody else. How am I going to do in other countries when they see this cheap, shoddily made passport as a product of the State Department? They're gonna laugh and then throw me in jail for trying to use something that looks like it was forged on the cheap. Plus I always thought after living in Texas under the first Bush administration that they were all about putting the private sector perspective into the public sector to get more efficient and better quality results (like trying to outsource food stamps, welfare and medicaid to Lockheed). If they can't produce a decent looking passport, what does this mean about things like all those latrines Halliburton is sending to Iraq?
So in closing, I spent $125 to get my passport renewed and now I have something that's totally shoddy, looks like it could be a forgery, and which will probably get me questioned whenever I go through Customs (in addition to sometimes getting flagged by the Do Not Fly list). Way to go there with the new regulations Department of Homeland Security! I feel safer already!
