| * * * * * Tuesday, October 12, 1999 is the day that statisticians estimate that the world's population will hit 6 billion!! The organization Zero Population Growth is publicizing this as Y6B, and educating people on the risks of uncontrolled population growth. The Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality, released today, found that racial stereotypes and attitudes heavily influence the labor market, with blacks landing at the very bottom. The mammoth, seven-volume survey, sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation and the Harvard University Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy, looked at 9,000 households and 3,500 employers in the four cities (Boston, Atlanta, Detroit and Los Angeles). In Detroit, for example, it took unskilled, unemployed whites an average of 91 hours to generate a job offer. It took blacks 167 hours. The Census Bureau said 16.3 percent of Americans did not have health insurance last year. (A family of four was considered poor if it had an income of less than $16,660.) But nearly one-third of all poor people, 11.2 million of the 34.5 million in poverty, had no health insurance, the Government said. About 5.6 million people worked full-time last year and were still poor. In 1997, the six governments which executed the greatest number of people per capita were China, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Florida and Texas. [and these are the fruits of the Bush "dynasty"] Mayor Giuliani likes to travel the state bragging that he's pared the city's welfare rolls by more than 400,000 people. What he doesn't tell his applauding audiences is that two-thirds of the 400,000 were children. And he doesn't talk about the families who were improperly -- unfairly -- stricken from the rolls. (nytimes) |
o c t o b e r . 3 1 . 1 9 9 9 (10:35 pm, berkeley) i was an alien spaceship with a yellow handbag for all hallow's eve. today, for halloween, i'm a girl with scruffy hair and a nascent cold from tramping around the castro in a silver-and-none-too-warm outfit. i think i had unreasonable expectations of what my first post-college party holiday was supposed to be. (i successfully avoided fourth of july hoo-ha by going to vegas and indulging in vegas hoo-ha.) party-hopping and casual candy - the northern california version of mardi gras, or maybe ecstatic costumed joy. but i didn't eat any candy, even though there was a lot around and the silver makeup i used on my face ended up being soap-based and running into my eyes. i think i wanted halloween to be a showdown between my anti-social tendencies and my new shiny life as a bay area webgirl but instead i think i just reminded myself that running headlong from friend to friend in some kind of relay race for the cure for loneliness just makes me tired. i mean, halloween's depressing, in the same way 2 weeks vacation is depressing. it reminds me what the rest of the week is not; it's sanctioned goof-off time, a "safe" space where you pretend you're not a sad-eyed bank teller but come in dressed like colonel sanders. yesterday afternoon, c and i spent wrangling with costume ideas - i was first going to be a laser pointer, then a girl with random flashing lights strapped to her, then an alien spaceship with the alien standing at the door. and somewhere along the way i stopped wanting to one-up whoever else was going to show up thirsty and baffled in the castro and just wanted to go home. halloween for adults is this weird playground confrontation - my costume is cooler than yours - or an excuse for some men and women to perfect their slutty look. (how many costumes are an excuse to go nearly naked anyhoo?) and when we bused it up to haight and saw the block-long line of people queued up to buy wigs and face-paint at the costume shop - i had horror-shudders of grown-up costume parties where everyone comes in outfits they rented at the local costume shop. nixon masks. cowgirl outfits. dracula capes and the same white face paint. i know it's l's favorite holiday (i went down philly-way two years ago (?) and helped dress up a dorm basement in cotton cobwebs and glow-in-the-dark body parts.) and there's definitely something to be said for a night devoted to candy and pranks but i think my favorite part of halloween is carving the pumpkin. // even eddy told me that i wasn't taking care of myself |
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