I was home sick yesterday, which meant I watched some very, very bad television. I could have watched something of quality on DVD, but I feel guilty if I actually enjoy myself when I've taken a sick day. So it was Maury, who got help for some 13-year-old hoes, and then Springer, which has become even more cartoony than it used to me a few years ago. Springer now has this pole on the side of the stage, and when an audience member says something particularly mean and funny, they're urged to go hang out on the pole, and stripper-dance with it or something. It seems to be a bit of an honor. My mind's a bit hazy on the pole thing, to tell the truth - I was half-awake by that point.

The only other thing of note that happened yesterday was that I got a work email saying that we were soon to have mandatory Diversity Training sessions. I actually thought it might be an April-Fools' Day joke, but no. Apparently my uber-uber-boss has never seen The Office, or she has seen it, but didn't understand that it was a comedy. I am going to have a very hard time taking this seriously. First of all, my office is 95% white; I live in a very white (though very liberal) area of the country. If we had more applicants of color, we would hire them, but we don't. (A similar problem happened when I was at college, and they were desperately trying to find a minority professor for the art department, but got very few minority applicants. They were so hard up that one of the finalists was a white guy who happened to have an amputated foot.) True, some people here may be unaware of their "white privilege" but I bet they're few and far between. Maybe I'm giving people too much credit, I don't know. But I do think that the kind of ingrained racism people here might have wouldn't show itself in the workplace.

I predict the workshop is going to teach me that having input from a diverse group of people will make the organization stronger and more creative. If it turns out I'm correct, can I get that day of my life back?