September 30, 2005 :: Going through it

Yes, I've been absent from posting for a while. I'm going to take the punk route out and blame my schedule. For those of you who don't know, I started a part-time MBA program at the University of Maryland this fall. It meets two nights a week, from 6:30 - 10:00 pm. So far, it hasn't been a HUGE amount of work, but the adjustment to my schedule has been the biggest issue. I have to get used to going back to school again, being in that scholastic mindset. I have to remember that time outside of work isn't mine to goof off as I see fit, but rather now I have HOMEWORK to do. Still, I had a certain swagger. I have been a grad student before, in a much more difficult program, so I figured this would be no sweat.

Then I walked into my accounting exam on Wednesday. For those of you who know some accounting, the exam required us to prepare a balance sheet, an income statement and a cash flow statement by the indirect method. Balance sheet, no problem. Income statement, seems right. 90% confident. Cash flow statement.... kept me in the exam room until I ran out of time. Try as I might, I could not get those numbers to add up right. It didn't help that the prof said during the lecture on the topic that plenty of people who graduated with degrees in accounting can't prepare indirect cash flow statements. It didn't help that we only spent 30 minutes of total lecture on the topic, in a course that is all of seven weeks. It SHO didn't help that lots of people turned in exams and walked out early, while I was still struggling. That had me shook. That used to be me, trying to see who could finish fastest. Broke my confidence. One of my math profs in college used to joke about students who just stayed in the exam room as long as possible, waiting for divine intervention to help them.

So now I realize I might have to buckle down a little bit harder. I might have to ask the prof for some extra credit, or something. I might have to go to office hours, although they are inconvenient as hell.

And yes, you might be seeing less of me on the blog, but I'm not dead. Just relearning how to be a student.

posted by Rainmayun at 12:32 PM -

September 06, 2005 :: I never thought I would

...post a link to a hip-hop song on my blog. A lot of people have forgotten that, once upon a time, hip-hop was the voice of a dispossessed people. Just yesterday, I was watching BET (a rare moment for me), and I saw three videos that all looked pretty much exactly the same to me. I had heard of the artists, but not the songs. All three featured scraggly looking unkempt black men waxing obnoxious about ... whatever. Bitches and bling aesthetic, as datfuule calls it. Same vaguely cinnamon looking women gyrating around in a disinterested fashion. It would be disgusting if it weren't boring. And yet, if I was one of the younger generation, and had grown up on nothing but songs and videos like these, I would not even know that I should expect better.

And then I came across this. It's a near 14 minute mix with sound bites from Mayor Nagin and others, over beats, and it crystallizes how a lot of my friends in the black community are feeling right now. It ought to be required listening for a lot of people.

posted by Rainmayun at 11:20 PM -

September 02, 2005 :: The new diaspora

Like many of us, I've had a lot of thoughts running through my head this week about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the former residents of New Orleans. I'm transfixed by it all, and I don't see how anyone else could not be. So many things are going on, in the world at large and in my own thoughts, that it's been difficult to sort them out. I'm glad to see the mass media waking up to the racial dimension of this situation, and its contribution to making things worse. I'm sorry to see the piss-poor organization and command & control structures of the federal government. I'm awed by the satellite, aerial and up-close photos of devastation, and in pity of the masses of people who literally have nothing but the clothes on their backs and who have to start life all over again from scratch. I'll let other people talk about most of these issues, but one thing in particular is pressing on me.

In a few days, or maybe a week or two, hopefully the evacuation will be pretty much complete. But then what? All these people, most of them black, will soon exhaust whatever temporary resources they have at their disposal, be it credit cards, relief fund vouchers, cash on hand. They will need to get jobs, somehow, when they have no work history, no employment or education records, and some probably don't even have identification. They will need to be absorbed into the economies of the rest of the country, and it won't just be Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee, it will affect all of our communities.

In all the darkness of the past few days, I've been looking for a few rays of sunshine, of hope. Here's one: people all over the country are offering room in their houses, for free or very cheap. With all the focus on looting and other crimes, the generosity of this country has been lost in the shuffle. Hopefully we will see more of it in the weeks to come. My personal opportunity for this is at hand; my brother's roommate is from New Orleans, and pretty much his entire family lived there. They lost everything, and they're all on their way here. Most of them will stay in my brother's house (which is quite a bit bigger than mine), but I'll probably put up two or three of them in my spare bedroom and help them out with food, clothes and bus fare until they can get on their feet. That will make me feel a lot better than the money I gave to the Red Cross.

Another ray: So many of the pictures we see are so depressing, that I wanted to share one that isn't quite so depressing.

posted by Rainmayun at 3:56 PM -