The basement bathroom needed some new paint and repairs for reasons I’ll get into in another post. But it got Danielle in a renovation mindset. So she decided to paint the master bathroom. And, in the course of examining the bathroom she found out that the vanity lighting was rusting and needed replacement. So we ended up replacing nearly everything metal in there from shiny Chrome to Nickel. So here’s how the bathroom looked before she painted and I replaced the metal pieces:

When you’re part of a dominant class you don’t realize how differently you see the world. Sure, I’m ethnically Hispanic and have suffered humiliation and financial consequences over one overt racist incident. But by and large the world is my oyster. I’m a man and racially I’m white. In fact I’ve had coworkers come to me and disparage Hispanics (all-to-often a codeword for Mexicans - especially Illegal Mexicans - in the USA) and then say, “they’re not like us white guys.” So for the most part I never saw anything awry with pop culture. In fact, one of the few times I realized consciously that I wasn’t actually represented on TV was when I did see myself represented on TV in the form of reruns of the TV show ¿Qué Pasa, U.S.A.?. The show was exactly about me - it was about kids (although I think they were high school age or older) who were born in the USA to Cuban immigrants and whose grandparents only spoke Spanish. It was odd and fascinating and I couldn’t get enough of it. But other than that one year or so when I saw those reruns, I was able to identify with virtually any TV show. I could see myself as Chandler, Ross, or Joey in Friends. (Or as a character on Full House or Home Improvement) Now, I loved showed with African Americans like Hangin’ with Mr Cooper, Family Matters, The Cosby Show, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air so it’s not as though I needed to see myself in TV. But until I started poking around on the Internet as an adult I never realized that for people like African Americans, those four shows were almost the only opportunity they had to see themselves on TV (especially in a positive sense). And forget it if you’re Asian! (including Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis) I came to realize that I had been as naive about the entertainment landscape as those white couples from the 1920s who use to take trips to Harlem on the weekend to experience the Jazz and other aspects of African American culture. At the end of the trip they could retreat to their comfortable lives while the African Americans were stuck there.