Listen to the Rain

The subject line is a stretch, but it'll be memorable if I ever have to find this in the future.

There are two things of import that happened lately. The first is that I went through a racial equity training at work hosted by the Racial Equity Institute and strongly encouraged by management. I was pretty dubious of its worth going in, since implicit bias training doesn't work, but though they did touch on that in the beginning that's not actually what the class was about. It was simply informative about the way systems are set up to put white people on top, and how whiteness is implicitly cast as the default and everyone else is in some way a deviance from that. I already knew most of the information they presented about restrictive covenants, the racial wealth gap, and so on, but by their own admission many of my co-workers in the training did not, so hopefully opened their eyes to something that a lot of them had never had to think about before. I'm not sure it really needed sixteen hours--two full working days--of time, but it wasn't the pointless waste of time that I initially expected.

The only thing I really took issue with was their claim that the concept of race began when the white planter class needed to pit workers against each other in order to maintain economic dominance. It's all nice and progressive, but the first racist laws in recorded history were actually the Limpieza de Sangre laws in 15th century Spain targeting Jews and Muslims, and the concept of race is ancient--the Book of Gates in the time of Seti I in 1275 BCE depicts the four races of humanity: the Libyans, the Nubians, the Syrians, and the Egyptians. Inconvenient for their narrative, but history is rarely neat.

The other major thing I did recently is that I ordered a new phone! I've had my iPhone 7 since the day it released, and since it had 256 gb I stopped doing yearly upgrades because I finally had enough space for everything. Well, I filled the whole phone up and now the battery is such that it goes from 100% to 20% while playing music on a 20-minute walk, so when the iPhone 12 came out this year I decided it was finally time to upgrade. It came on Friday with my information all set up on it, I moved my SIM information (or whatever) over and then copied the rest of my phone's data...which I should have done on Saturday, because I have gigs and gigs and gigs of music and I was up until almost 4 a.m.! sashagee wandered in at one point because I hadn't come to bed and found me not playing games, not reading anything, just staring at the progress bar, willing it to move faster. It eventually completed without issue and the next morning I started trying to get used to how it worked.

I miss the button. Now everything is done with swiping, but with different degrees of swiping, so I'm constantly swiping too much and closing my program instead of going to the app switcher. I need to find some kind of guide to all the functions I've missed, because I had my perfect phone and didn't pay attention to any new capabilities. My phone's at 55% and I haven't charged it since Friday night, though, so that's already a huge improvement over my old phone! I feel like I went from a stone tablet to a Star Trek data slate.

FaceID doesn't work with a mask, though, so the future isn't quite here yet.