How I Ruined Medium

We’re having a discussion over at POMQA community on Slack about how male Medium suddenly feels.

I added that it also seems to be increasingly white, and American. February 8th was Chinese New Year’s. 800,000,000 people watched the Gala on CCTV and there was not one mention of the Year of the Monkey on my Medium feed. The lunar new year got less play Carley Fiorina’s Rage Quit from the Republican Primary.

I know what is going wrong. It’s because I’m here.

Now, I won’t bother to remind you that I told everyone that you should fear me, but I did. Warning or not, it’s not your fault that I am here. I just showed up, and the party pooping had begun.

Dominant Culture Are Us

I just want you to know that it bums me out too. Look, I know I don’t deserve any sympathy, but just walk a few paragraphs in my penny loafers, would you?

You don’t know what it’s like to be a stormtrooper for the empire. Wherever I go, I bring the dominant culture with me. I can’t shake the stink. Not only am I totally infected, I’m a highly contagious carrier. I’ll walk into your sub-culture gathering, open my mouth, and start barfing out droplets of the Odyssey. One sneeze and you’ll be covered in Faulkner. I’ll turn your plantains into potatoes, your potatoes into bread, and your bread into oatmeal. One day you will wake up being force fed pablum and you’ll wonder, “what the fuck is going on?”

Do you think I like to pollute every clear stream of culture I find? No, I don’t. Seriously, I’d like to gawk at your otherness in all of its native authenticity, but that’s impossible.

There are two kinds of gay bars. Gay bars that are 100% full of gay people, and gay bars that have straight people in them. Which sounds like more fun to you? Guess which one I will never get to go to.

I went to College in rural, southside Virginia. I wanted to go to a black Baptist service at a church near the school. I asked a lot of people about it, and after gathering some advice and reassurances, I put on a suit one Sunday morning and went to church. The people at the church were perfectly welcoming and gracious. I took a seat in the back. I watched the service and participated as best I could. There is no easy way to unpack what my presence meant or might have meant to the people in the church that day. My guess is that I fucked something up. I bet the service would have been better for just about everybody if I was not there. My intrusion probably didn’t benefit anyone but me. I gained a lot by being there, but that’s no surprise, is it?

I have been to both a Ye-bi-che and Fire ceremony on the Navajo Nation. You know what fucks up a Navajo ceremony? Me!

Now Medium

You might think, “We had a nice thing going on Medium.” It’s true. When I showed up last summer, I was attracted to the conversations that black people were having on Medium. There were a lot of women too. I wrote an article called “What If the Hindus Are Right” and a lot of Indian people read it.

Sometime around November I started to sniff my armpits. Did I forget my deodorant or something? Why does everybody seem to be leaving?

Hey, are You People having a party somewhere on Medium without me? Did you create a sub-Reddit or Slack community so you won’t have to listen to my hot take on the Formation video? Don’t you want to hear my hot take on the Formation video? I’m pretty sure you do.

Isn’t there a tee shirt or something I can buy that will let me in to your FUBU corner? Come on. Please. I’ll try not to talk. If I mention Winston Churchill or Otto Von Bismark you can kick me the fuck out.

This Is A Problem I Can’t Fix

If I could, I would invite all my black friends to start using Medium. The problem is that I don’t have any black friends. I would tell the women in my life to do the same, but the women in my life don’t listen to a word I say. I would encourage all of the Chinese Medium users to blog about their New Year’s celebration the way that Me and Lisa Renee blogged about Christmas.

but apparently THERE ARE NO CHINESE MEDIUM USERS. Which is a shame, because I would sure as Hell like someone to tell me if this was, in fact, the worst New Year’s Gala EVER. I find that hard to believe. Check out the monkey dance. If this is the worst, I want to know which gala was the best.