The Aerie
It's a quick weekend going by this time. Work has been kicking my butt recently, so on Monday I have to try to arrive at work as early as possible - 6 a.m. maybe? - in order to finish my current tasks before the 9 a.m. review meeting. I got the big, huge subtask done right at the end of the day Friday, so hopefully I can wrap up the two smaller subtasks in short order. The work is painstaking and tedious, as well as being boring! Yay!
Meanwhile the spouse and I made the most of our weekend by going for dinner at Bar Abilene, a "trendy local nightspot" as the kids might say, featuring inauthentic Mexican cuisine. We got the taco assortment platter, including shrimp, pork, steak, and other varieties of taco. The place was a noisy barn, with TVs hung all over the ceiling, and featured a chill draft. The food was okay, and our server was very good - I never had to wonder where she was, and she didn't barge up to the table in the midst of an earnest discussion to bark "How's everything taste?!" I tipped her well, but we won't be going back there soon.
The other fun yesterday was getting into an argument (a debate?) with my birthmother regarding illegal immigration. Her perspective is that she's living in a small southern community where the population has turned over to become largely Mexican. The population seems to be largely young men, meaning that she hears cars with loud stereos rumbling by all hours of the day, and lots of them. She's not happy with illegal immigration. Meanwhile I'm up here in Minneapolis where, while we have our share of Mexican immigrants (and I can't say which are legal and which are not), I am certainly not in her situation.
Meanwhile, I hold that the whole problem of illegal immigration is a result of NAFTA and other trade policies that favor the über-wealthy, and arguing that every illegal immigrant be immediately deported makes no sense since the economic pressures driving them across the border are of our making. What should they do, go sit and starve to death in Mexico City because Wal-Mart wants to offer low-low prices in the United States? So if you don't like illegal immigration, work to get corporate lobbyists out of D.C.
I'd say both approaches are equally unlikely to succeed.
I've had this argument before in other venues, but I've noticed a really disturbing thing. In trying to research actual facts about the effects of illegal immigration, I'm having trouble finding anything but the same propaganda messages repeated all over the Internet.
Nine months ago when I debated this topic on a local forum, I was able to Google up information about how certain anti-immigration myths used today go back to Nineteenth-century tactics used against Italians and Irish. Now when I search on the same terms, I get page after page and blog after blog repeating the same vicious anti-immigration article, to the point where I can no longer find the factual reference on the Nineteenth century that I found nine months ago. It's Big Lie theory applied to the blogosphere: get enough wingnuts to post the same things, and the search engines will be overwhelmed.
It's creepy and disturbing. The Internet is supposed to (as much as such an anarchic thing can be 'supposed to' be anything) be a medium for the free exchange of information: instead it's being perverted as a tool to figuratively shout down any but a single point of view. How long till searches on abortion turn up only anti-abortion viewpoints, and searches on Iraq turn up only references to 9/11?
Anyway so I'm having that pointless argument with my birthmother. I can't see where I'm going to change her mind when her messages to me are undoubtedly typed to a background noise of loud traffic and Tejano music, particularly if I can't find any factual information to back up my point of view.
Today I have to iron shirts (yes, I iron my own shirts - a fact that astonishes women from Minnesota to Germany), sign up for my next quarter of classes at the U, and pay my payroll taxes. On top of that I'm converting a batch of CDs to mp3 files, and trying to work on my mystery novel a little bit. All this activitiy in order to stave off my fierce loathing of January.
But that's another topic for another day.