I hate daylight saving time.  I have no preference for one time over the other, but I detest the process of abruptly and arbitrarily offsetting your time by one hour.  Many devices will automatically adjust their own time, but some won’t.  Most of us will still have one device where we either don’t know how to set the time, or it is too much of a nuisance.  For me, that device is the stereo in my car.  We end up making that one compromise; we won’t set the time but make a mental adjustment that the time displayed is an hour off.  The time will be right again in a few months.

Continue reading “Debugging our prejudice”

I sat in my Senior English class in high school.  Our classroom opens into the hallway; movable panels separate our classroom from the next.  This particular classroom sits on the end of our hallway.  I spent a fair number of my afternoon hours in this room that year.  One afternoon, I got into a discussion with a classmate, he was popular and the class president, if memory serves.  During this discussion he calls me a ‘sumo wrestler’.  I am both Chinese (not Japanese) and overweight.

It was a derogatory reference to both my race and my weight.  Having dealt with interactions like this often, I understood that while I need not escalate, I did need to respond.  In my mind, I searched for a proportional response.  I called him a ‘spook’; yes, he was black.  I knew it was derogatory and racist, and I still did it.

Continue reading “How much do we really value life?”