If only I were less bossy.

My Race-Based Valentine., by Jenée Desmond-Harris, Time via Yahoo! News. Emphases mine.

This Valentine's Day, more of us than ever will be looking for love online. And if recent studies are any guide, relatively few women on mainstream dating sites will bother to respond to overtures from men of Asian descent. Likewise, black women will be disproportionately snubbed by men of all races. Yes, even though America has been flirting intensely with a postracial label for some time, color blindness is not upheld as an ideal in the realm of online romance. On some sites, it's not even an option. (See the 25 most important films on race.)

Chemistry.com requires users to identify their ethnicity; like eHarmony, it considers members' racial preferences when suggesting matches. Match.com lets users filter their searches by race. The site's profiles include space to indicate interest (or lack thereof) in various racial and ethnic groups. But after Jennifer House, a black woman in Los Angeles, perused one too many profiles only to find the guys had checked off every box except African American, she changed her strategy. "Now I look at that section first so as not to get my hopes up," she says.

[ . . . ]

. . . a study published last year in Social Science Research examined 1,558 profiles that white daters living in or near big U.S. cities placed on Yahoo! Personals, which, much like Match, lists 10 racial and ethnic groups users can select as preferred dates. Among the women, 73% stated a preference. Of these, 64% selected whites only, while fewer than 10% included East Indians, Middle Easterners, Asians or blacks. (See a nerdy Valentine's Day guide on Techland.com.)

The story is a little different for the men, 59% of whom stated a racial preference. Of these, nearly half selected Asians, but fewer than 7% did for black women. Why? One theory offered by the study's lead author, Cynthia Feliciano, a sociologist at the University of California at Irvine, is that men's choices are influenced by the media's portrayal of Asian women as being hypersexual and black women as being bossy.

I keep explaining this phenomenon to my friends. I express to them that it affects me personally and how unhappy it makes me feel. Yet half of my friends still deny that the above situation is an actual problem. So I doubt that they will ever be convinced, even with an 87-year-old American institution acknowledging that racism continues to be a problem in 2010.

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I love being told who I am

and what I'm about. Apparently I'm also a white guy. Or at least, that is who is being allowed to speak on "my generation": Millenials on 60 Minutes.

I can't embed their videos because Yahoo! doesn't roll like that. So I posted the YouTube video above from twixters . . . which also seems to be run by a white guy. But I digress. Back to the old people making baseless judgments on me based on my age.

I actually have had this argument in person with someone who is pushing this baloney. Someone who insisted that most people between the ages of 13 and 30 (because I have so much in common with a 13-year-old) are impatient, self-centered, and condescending towards old people. I also read this ridiculous expose in TIME magazine over two years ago: They Just Won't Grow Up. Note the white guy again representing my entire generation.

I suggest these buffoons at TIME and 60 Minutes watch MTV's “True Life: I’m Supporting My Family”, or read a book about the youths, or actually listen to some real people in their 20s talk about how difficult it is to pay back student loans by working a job that pays just over minimum wage in a depressed economy.

A Case of the Mondays

As you readers may recall, earlier this month I had a tête-à-tête with mon amie Stephanie about how my life would be different if I were a nice white lady. I had considered doing an experiment to prove my point. But after today, no need. This morning I learned that one of my college classmates--same year, same School of Film and Television--is now three rungs higher than I am on the entertainment industry ladder. She left a company that won't even interview me, and moved to a new company where she got a promotion to a position that I should have been working in two years ago. The differences between myself and my classmate? I graduated with Honors, multiple academic and extracurricular awards, and a business minor, whereas she is tiny, white and (dyed) blonde.

You know where to send my (nonalcoholic) wine and roses, Stephanie.

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In other news that made me frown, this article greeted me this morning on the Yahoo! front page: Ten New Etiquette Tips for the Workplace, by Penelope Trunk. Yes, that Penelope Trunk. I agreed with Number 4, "Say no to video résumés." The rest of them were...ludicrous. I have excerpted the following for brevity and humor; for the complete article, you can click on the link above.

2. Don't ask for time off, just take it.

When you need to leave work for a few hours or a few days, you don't need to ask for permission -- you're an adult, after all...

3. Keep your headphones on at work.

If you use social media tools, you're probably good at connecting with people and navigating office politics -- good enough that spending all day at work with headphones on won't hinder you...

5. Invite your CEO to be a friend on Facebook.

...there's a good chance that your CEO is registered, and it's likely that she'll really want to hear from you about what to do on Facebook, since she surely has no clue.

9. Call people on the weekend for work.

...The people who grew up being super-connected don't differentiate between the workweek and the weekend, so they don't mind working over the weekend on bits and pieces leftover from the week...

...If your coworkers don't like being called on the weekend, they can tell you. But remind them that a flexible work schedule lets you put relationships first all the time, and a work schedule that cordons off five days a week for work and two days a week for a personal life means that the personal life takes a backseat every week of the year.

The best way to get a life is to stop being so rigid about the distinction between time for work and time for life.

For more unintentional humor, Ms. Trunk also wrote Why We Should Be Grateful for Gen Y earlier this month. As usual, my jollies came from the comments (ellipses and misspellings theirs):

from hatesstupidarticles:

"Who is this lady? Does she write these articles because she has a hard time at work or does she really go around calling people gen x and gen y. News flash... 15 year olds call each other gen x.... I got a great idea, why dont people just go to work, do what they need to do, then go home and in return you get a paycheck.. I just summed up this ladies article in a few sentences. Can her yahoo...."

from Kharlo T:

"Obviously, this article must be a joke. Don't ask for time off, just take it...Invite you're CEO to be a friend on Facebook...Call people on the weekend to work. What was smoked before writing here? I would clearly not hire the author as a consultant to improve employee SAT. The organization would loose billions and loss productivity of just trying to figure out where all the employees have gone. Oh yeah, I must have missed out because I haven't included them on my Facebook. DUH!"

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Happier news. After the comments that I wrote on Friday at this post about Mad Men at the TIME magazine Tuned In blog never appeared, I thought that the Time Warner family had it in for me. Apparently it wasn't personal, and James Poniewozik does not have a vendetta against me and my kind; some bug on the website registered my comments as spam. Also, Mr. P then responded to what I had written about the show. This experience has taught me that it does pay to ask about what happened when you were wronged. A similar situation happened to me with Dan and the Willamette Weekly. I got all paranoid then, too. But it turned out okay. Now I get to add a new site I like. Welcome, Tuned In!

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Next happy. Things I Had to Try Really Hard Not to Say When I Found Myself Standing Next To Jenna Fischer at a Bookstore, by pamie on pamie.com.

1. "Oh, my gosh! You're Pam! And I'm Pam! I mean, I'm really Pam, and you're playing Pam, but your Pam is awesome and I'm not fictional."...

...3. "Hey! My name is Pam and I write on a TV show and you play Pam on a TV show...

I tried to explain this meta concept to my friend Chrissy a few months ago. She either didn't get understand what I saying, or she wasn't that impressed by the realization that every other TWoPer had already come to when The Office premiered in 2005.

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More happy. Man Band, man! by Irwin Handleman on From Studio Twelve A.

...I did not see the commercial for "Mission: Man Band" until last night, but boy am I glad I finally did. I could not be more excited about this show...

...It's Rich Cronin. Who is Rich Cronin? Let me give you a hint: "I like girls that wear Abercrombie and Fitch, I'd take her if I had one wish". Or who could forget the classic couplet: "When you take a sip you buzz like a hornet, Billy Shakespeare wrote a bunch of sonnets!"

That's right, it's the lead "singer" of LFO. They were most likely the low point of the boy band movement. That song was just horrific. It's like "Transformers" is to me now, it makes you question the country you live in. As someone on youtube posted under the "Summer Girls" video, "this is why the world hates white people. I am so ashamed"...

Here's the Television Without Pity take on VH1's latest masterpiece: Mancasting.

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That was my day. How was yours?

I still won't see it, yet I can't let it go.

Not exactly the well-funded version of “Silent Scream”, by Amanda Marcotte, on Pandagon. I love pandas.

Amanda liked Knocked Up. A lot. So why am I linking to her post? Because of the 145th comment that follows her post, by Sam:

...I’m sorry, Apatow-loving feminists, you almost swayed me, but not quite. The movie is pretty sexist. Sexist and funny, like most comedies out there, sure. But to say that Apatow’s brilliant directing masks the misogynist undertones of the film is giving him way too much credit. The last scene of the movie features a guy looking at his daughter and telling her that NOT WEARING A CONDOM WAS THE BEST DECISION HE EVER MADE. On that alone, the movie is seriously problematic...

That comment led me to this post, More Knocked Up Knocking, on The Egalitarian Bookworm (Chick?)..., which led me to this article in Time magazine: Not Knocked Out by 'Knocked Up', by Richard Corliss.

Having chosen to bring the baby to term, Alison now has to figure out whether she brings Ben into the equation. In such a dilemma, whom can she confide in? You might expect that such a personable sort would have a circle of women friends — what Apatow would call her pussy posse — but not Alison. All right, no girlfriends. But she's got an infotainment job in L.A.; the place must be swarming with gay men, ready to offer their sympathy or tart wisdom. In show business, isn't there a Will for every Grace? No again; Alison is effectively friendless. In the old movies, the heroine was often isolated by convention or prejudice. Here, Apatow strands Alison is in order to make the unthinkable Ben an attractive, indeed the only, choice.

Where is my Will? No, wait. I am Will, the uptight intellectual trying to find a man who will put up with my idiosyncrasies. What I should be asking is, where's my Jack?

Someday I'll actually watch the movie that I can't stop blogging about. But that day is not today.