The hands of White Privilege

 Something I should have done the other day when I wrote this rant about checking my privilege.

Here is a picture I took about 12 hours ago of my hands, which bear the brunt of all my white privilege. Note the manicured nails, lack of calluses, and background, which was taken at my local country club, where myself and fellow co-conspirators drank mint juleps and ordered around  the colored servants through our monocles.

pictured:

   I am the descendent of slaves and terrorists- my family is American, for two generations now, but the B family was of Ireland, from the north on my dad's side, and the south on my mom's. So quit talking about reparations. 800 years of killing, all the blood still washes away.

       When someone complains that they're not making enough money sitting on their ass in a cubicle, or answering phones or making people lunch, I refer them to my picture. When your natural sleep position is to cradle your hands, which are curled into cramped claws when you doze off, I might be more interested, but for sympathy, I refer everyone to Webster's, where it can be found between "Shit" and "Syphilis."

   And I'm not looking for sympathy. My hands look like a bird's foot because it's the price I pay to do something I actually like to do. How many people, down deep, enjoy what they do for work? I certainly do, and it's something I choose to do. I could do other, less interesting things, and make less money and spend more time with the people I love... who would probably not like what that would do for my personality.
     I worked at Burger King. When I was 14. I made $3.25 an hour. You know, I didn't like it, but it wasn't terrible. Thing is, I knew minimum wage isn't something an adult should be satisfied with, but it's better than $0.00 an hour. It'll do to keep from dying of malnutrition while people look for better-paying work. And that's the business model- you're supposed to be smart enough to know that you're not going to feed your family and retire on McDonald's burger-assembly wages, and everyone knows it.
      Thing is, when you see all those people working at a fast food place, half of them have other jobs, and work far more hours than you do. And that's a good thing. A hard thing, but hard work is good work, on payday, anyhow, and my hats are off to those folks who bust their ass and put in the hours to make shitty pay work for them, but even then, it CAN be temporary, and probably should be. As much as I don't really mind, the 90-100 hour workweek isn't something I'll do forever. Eventually I'll slow down. I have enough odd and esoteric skills that I can choose to do that. Not everyone does, but everyone CAN, and that's my point.

In which I get a little jealous

So, I like to help prospective mariners get through the miserable labyrinthine credentialing process to become a US Merchant mariner. I don't usually do this for free, as, well, it takes time to do everything well, but I earn beer-money here and here, and that's about it. It's not a cheap thing to do, and I don't want to prey on folks who just want to learn a new trade.

      Short form is that I talk with guys, find out what they might want to do, what they're willing to do, and how long it will take them to come up with the fees that are associated with credentialing and training, where such things are necessary. After that, it's a matter of helping them find the right classes and offices and addresses, and then, when they get their papers, tweaking their resume and reaching out to see who among companies in their preferred line of work might be most amenable to looking over an entry-level resume. 

     Anyhow, this morning I sent off my first steward utility, a cook's helper, himself a trained chef and experienced short-order cook, who will be working on a ship with a large crew, to see if he'd like to make a career of it, or merely just work a few years and save up the money to open his own diner.


   In asking him to stay in touch, I am reminded of the phone call I made just before my airport taxi came, on the night I first left to join a ship. I was so fired up and excited, and grateful to the guy who helped me, so I called to say thanks to him for the advice he gave.
     I heard that same voice this morning when I picked up the phone, only I'm on the other side of it now. I miss that feeling.

The most interesting baby in the world

 I'll probably be ashamed of this when I stop laughing.

I checked my privilige... couldn't find it.

I read a great post by author Dave Freer on Privilege-checking for writers.

 I have a massive beef with this whole 'check your privilege' thing that is used to one group's advantage, as a means of quelling supposed ism's by simple one-upmanship.

 Last time I volunteered some time with the educational foundation I used to work with, I got that particular epithet thrown in my face by a former colleague, a pushy lesbian lady who I used to be very fond of for her wicked sense of fun and humor. In the ensuing years since I had seen her last, I coarsened considerably as I transitioned from a humble marine biologist who lived grant-to-grant and became a merchant mariner and, well, honestly, a little more masculine and loud- well, even more honestly, I always was these things, but used to hide my light under a basket, so to speak, which was good for socializing with other academics. But I did coarsen. A lot.
       After grad school, I immediately started fishing commercially full-time, and worked as a marine biologist on the side and off season. Sometimes I took extra time off to do certain projects, and traveling to conferences to give presentations on my work was a way to drum up future business, so it goes.

      Things being what they are, I got tired of being broke all the time. The only person who makes less money per hour than a marine biologist is a commercial fisherman, and the usual injuries, broken and rebroken fingers and toes, torn muscles and tendons, etc, are as much a part of fishing as the continuous infection that plagued my hands.

 I've got bad hands, you see, and this is where Dave Freer's writing really grabbed my attention.

   I worked as a deckand or captain of fishing boats since I was 7. No shit. $10 a day every Saturday, when it was nice out, with my neighbor, and twice a week in the summer. After school and weekends through high school. Whenever I had a day off in college, and on-and-off full time right up until 6 years ago.

    The shit with my hands started when I was 13, and severed two fingers on my right hand, and mangled the others. Long story, but I recovered really well, and the surgery to repair everything went perfectly- I have all my fingers- the skin on the underside of my fingers wasn't completely cut through- just everything else.

 But my right hand never got very strong. To this day, I do things like open bottles and plastic with my teeth or a knife. My 'good' left hand got broken up pretty badly the very next year, and a glut of redfish used for bait the year after that wiped out the elasticity of the tendons- redfish is bony, and the bones puncture the skin, introducing infection about 95% of the time. I got blood poisoning at least a half-dozen times when I was 15 from that shit. The infection never fully went away until I fully quit fishing, and even then it took almost 2 years. Oh, and a nasty burn from sodium hydroxide (caustic soda is the trade name) sloughed off all the skin on my right hand's pinky, leaving it covered in scar tissue that doesn't completely heal, so my right hand pretty much looks like a bird's foot which turns a lurid purple when it's cold outside.


     So, this picture that Dave Freer put up, and the story accompanying it (read it! You'll like it) really caught my eye.

No this is not a slightly younger Uncle Si

http://madgeniusclub.com/2015/04/06/bring-it-on/



     I absolutely know that look. That's how I feel after I touch salt water and oil (all the damage, skin constantly sloughing off, etc also makes me sensitive to oil- and I run a  a goddamned tub carrying thousands of tons of it).

   These are the hands of White Privilege. Bloody, unable to be straightened, painful.

 Shit, I can't lay my hands flat on a table without pain. Their natural position is a nasty hook shape. I can't write longhand, and couldn't, easily, through college and grad school, so I can type faster than any two people you know.

 But I'm Privileged. I'm privileged to work 100ish hours a week, spend 10 months a year on a goddamned floating tub away from my family, where the stress makes my hair fall out and leaves me unable to sleep more than a few hours at a time. When I do go home, there's no generator screaming 20 feet away from my bed, so the silence leaves my ears screaming shrilly from the tinnitus of living intimately with 4 big fucking diesel engines within earshot 300+ days a year. My wife turns over in her sleep, and I shoot out of bed like a watermelon seed squeezed between two fingers, because the sound of someone in your room without knocking on the door means they were too panicked to remember their niceties and are about to grab my shoulder and breathe the stink of old coffee and fresh panic in my face while talking about whatever got fucked up.

 And that's the world I live in. I CHOSE it, I embrace it, I accept the imperfect parts as cost of doing business for the better parts. But I wouldn't call it privilege.

   To call me privileged is to deny my experiences, and to deny me agency as architect of my own life and life choices. It's infantilizing, bigoted and asinine.We get from yesterday to today mostly in the course of reacting to our circumstances, and little more than that. From what my WASP friends describe as growing up, it sounds awful, maybe worse that growing up in an Irish Catholic enclave, with not-quite-enough-money, but both parents present and involved. Whatever, I wouldn't want the childhoods I heard described, but I'm not envious of a certain feeling that life might have been easier for them early on.  Whatever it is, it ain't my business, and if certain people just can't get over the fact that someone, somewhere, might think differently than them, well, fuck them, because, you know, it's not the quiet folks who are busy working hard who make the noise. It's the leisure-riddled guilt-mongers, and that is what my lesbian former-acquaintance had become, and why I never went back to that group with whom I used to find so much satisfaction in working.

 So, if I'm privileged, it's because I fucking worked for it. I AM privileged, come to think of it. I get to see things that most folks never see- a bow wave blasting 100-feet into the air- sunrises and sunsets are part of my every day- that's my normal, where others have to stop everything and try to remember to take the time to look- I see them daily, usually both the same day, and more often than not, they're lovely. I see marine life up close, and I know exactly what I'm looking at because I was actually REALLY good at what I did, and since I grew up knowing that I wanted to work on the water, and all the shitty jobs and broken bones and hard-won life lessons made me appreciate what I have and what I can do with it, and, really, I don't mind working 100 hours a week. In fact, I hate when people who only work 40 hours a week complain about not having enough money or not having enough time. Fuck it, I've already put my 40 hours in by early mid-week. There's 60+ hours more to work with before you cut into sleeping time, so anyone with the time to bitch also has time to work.

halfway...

Welp, crew change tomorrow, but not for me. I'm just at the halfway point. Looking forward to getting the next two weeks knocked out and behind me, of course.

    

Happy Easter!

Sorry- no dick and fart jokes, or naked Brazilian women this weekend.



On this most solemn and joyful weekend, please keep in your thoughts the men and boys who have been martyred for their faith. ISIS has begun crucifying adults and even kids, and, although there is so little mention in the media of this, in this horror we are seeing the making of saints who choose death over ISIS' perverted 'reversion.'


PATER NOSTER, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra. Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie, et dimitte nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo. Amen.

“The Lord will overshadow thee with His shoulders, and under His wings thou shalt trust: His truth shall compass thee with a shield.”  Psalm 90: 4-5

Old vid from a steamship engine room

   Testing this interface out, see if it works. This is a quick vid I took years ago of the engine room in the 40,000 ton steam tanker NEW RIVER,  just the operating deck in the engine casing, nothing of the boiler casing or bilge decks.