About a month ago, on April 19, McDonald’s held its first-ever nationwide hiring day. They planned to hire 50,000 people on that one day, but they were so pleased with the turnout that they wound up hiring 62,000 instead. At first glance, this sounds fantastic. 62,000 people is a population roughly equal to the number of people on Chevron’s entire payroll. It’s an army, in a very nearly literal sense. Not counting contractors, it’s a collection of people larger than the number of US troops left in Iraq.

This is great news for the economy, right? Even if McDonald’s is not exactly a prestigious employer, honest work is honest work, and surely this is a sign that the economy of the past few years is getting back on its feet.

Well… not exactly.

First, consider the sheer number of applicants for those 62,000 positions. McDonald’s is not releasing specific numbers, but they admit that over a million people applied. A million Americans applied to work for McDonald’s, and McDonald’s got to cherry-pick the top 6% for their liking. Florida had over 100,000 applications for 4,337 positions – one location here in Tampa reported getting over 2,200 applications for just five jobs. This doesn’t mean that it was easier to get into Princeton, Brown, or Yale than to McDonald’s, as some comments suggested, only that they had a larger pool of applicants competing for each position; because McDonald’s was hiring mostly for low-skill sorts of jobs, there are vastly more people qualified to do them.

Still, a million Americans tried to get jobs at McDonald’s, and 940,000 of them didn’t make the cut.

Second, while McDonald’s is (again) not releasing specifics, many of those 62,000 positions are part-time. Most of those shiny new McJobs will reduce the official unemployment numbers, but how many of them will make it out of underemployment? The latest U6 numbers – the number of unemployed plus the number of people who would like more work but can’t get it – hovers near 17%. A back-calculation for the Great Depression suggests U6 numbers of 37.6%, so 17% isn’t exactly apocalyptic, but these are unpleasant times indeed.

Now consider this: in April, the United States economy added 244,000 private-sector jobs. Unemployment went up, because there of various cutbacks in government employees, but we added 244,000 private-sector jobs. The stock market rallied and pundits called it a clear sign that America was getting back to work. Take a look at that number, though, and then take a look back at the 62,000 jobs we’ve just discussed.

One in four of the new jobs in our “economic recovery” is literally at McDonalds.

Would you like fries with that?

As tiny as this little corner of the Internet is, I’ve been getting a couple hundred spam messages a day lately. Until it blows over I’ve turned on some moderation features on the website. If you’ve replied to me before, you should have no trouble posting, but if this is your first time, expect it to sit in the moderation queue for a little bit while I catch up.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

So, on this fundamental, childhood level, invoking little things that changed my life, there’s something fantastic about walking through a bookstore and seeing a book titled Wisdom with the man himself on the cover. I love it. It’s one part photobook, one part essay collection, and I really do think it deserves its title. Neither Morgan Freeman nor Patrick Stewart appears, which does disappoint me a little bit (Stewart may be just a few years on the young end of the project’s scope), but overall I very much enjoyed my time with it, and I’ll be buying a copy soon. The book’s website has a great trailer, which sums up the book better than I could.

Part of Mr. Eastwood’s entry, particularly, caught my attention, so I copied it down to share with you here:

Take your profession seriously; don’t take yourself seriously. Don’t take yourself seriously in the process, because you really only matter to a certain degree in the whole circus out there. If you take yourself seriously you’re not going to be able to move forward and use your best artistic instincts. You’re going to be hampered by always wanting to look in the mirror and see if you have enough tuna oil in your hair or something like that.

I don’t think anyone would regret listening to that, either.

Usually I prefer to let people explore the Brain Food links unguided and draw their own conclusions, but I think Don Peck’s How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America over at The Atlantic is worth a particular mention. One in eight Californians is presently unemployed, nearly one in ten Americans, and things don’t seem to be in much rush to get better. I’m not sure if the long-term effects will be as bad as Peck projects, but the possibilities are definitely sobering.

It makes me a little bit grateful to say that I have a job to complain about. I have a few responsibilities there that will no doubt distract me over this long weekend, but I’ve finished dinner now and a few other chores, so I’m going to settle in for a weekend of writing now. The alarm clock is set for 7:30 AM tomorrow morning. At some point I will have to leave the apartment to do laundry and get some sunshine, but aside from that, after I finish this post I plan to reboot my laptop, open up First and Last and Always, and start writing.

Before I go, I found for you an upload of P!nk’s very awesome Grammy performance, and you can click through to a preview of the upcoming story. Those of you who know how to get in touch with me outside of this site are welcome to poke at me once in a while and make sure I’m not wasting time.

First and Last and Always
By Adrian Mailenna
For Hannah, because she made a difference.

Even with his heart pounding in time to the DJ’s command, a hundred and twenty-six beats per minute, Jamie could feel the one it skipped. Someone was watching him; he’d felt it, uncoiling a tight, nervous desire from the base of his spine, sliding it up his back until it made the hairs on his neck stand on end and his knees go weak, made him excited and just a little scared.

For months he’d walked past the door here, stolen glances past the curtain at the slender, pretty boys dancing together here, taking each other home, but he’d never dared step in before. Now he wasn’t sure whether he should have come. Someone would notice him; someone would tell; people would know; they would be polite of course, nothing overt. It was the twenty-first century after all, but he would hear their whispers, notice their sideways glances in his direction, and he would move again, unable to cope, unwilling to be that token friend, unwilling to be treated so differently. It wasn’t his fault he’d been born this way.

But there was that look. It promised so much.

Staggering off the dance floor, he scanned the crowd as he made his way, panting, to the bar. Through the back of his mind he remembered a glimpse of perfect golden skin and kinetic black hair beneath the DJ’s lights, but most of all the flash of bright green eyes, inviting and seductive, even from across the room. Somehow he knew he needed to find them.

He hopped up onto a stool. He needed a drink, too. It was hot out there.

It’s very fashionable right now to donate money to Haiti, but please be careful where you donate; anywhere money flows, there will be unethical people trying to take a cut, and even legitimate organizations can be astoundingly poorly managed. Charity Navigator seems to be a good place to check things out first; they don’t have the resources to check every charity, but they rate most of the big players. Personally, my Haiti-bound donation went to Doctors Without Borders.

On a lighter note, I’ve been spending a lot of time wandering RedBubble lately. My friend Caitlin introduced me to it back in August, when I bought a print of her “Tokyo” project, and I keep coming back, usually just to explore. They have a great talent pool, and their print quality is fantastic if you feel the urge to buy something. One of my favorite recent finds is JenniferB. Really, I think the best way for me to introduce her is to shut up and let two of her poems speak for themselves:

1. I Want To Fuck You With Words
2. To be continued…

Some of her writing is a bit morbidly uncomfortable, but I think it’s still worth reading.

In site-related news, I’ve commissioned Ten-Chan to illustrate one of the Elves stories I finished back at the end of 2008. She says she should be finished soon, and I’ll post it appropriately as soon as I can.

Granted, I have other problems at the Folsom Street Fair, which is usually a stream of low-grade, distressingly insistent come-ons rather than single undignified acts of borderline sexual assault, but this is another story, for another day.

I first encountered this unfortunate circumstance at last year’s YaoiCon, a few days before this site opened. Friday afternoon, I was walking out back to a friend’s room to adjust my costume when someone grabbed me from behind and started hip-thrusting. It was really very uncivilized, and while someone on Constaff saw it and offered to revoke the person’s badge, I asked them to give only a first-last-and-only warning. People look forward to YaoiCon all year, and it’s easy to get caught up in the sheer vibrant enthusiasm of the convention. It didn’t feel like my place to ruin someone’s weekend only a few hours in. Under certain circumstances, a gentleman is obligated to forgive.

Random hugs are common at Fanime, among old friends, new friends, and even strangers. That’s part of what makes the con special to me; there’s something magical about the way it expresses the simple joy of having so many fans under one gigantic roof. In an average Fanime I probably hug close to a hundred people, so when one more person caught me on the way to the doors, raising his arms for the hug, I didn’t think much of obliging him. It wasn’t enough for him, evidently, because almost immediately he started grinding his crotch against my leg. I didn’t feel much, per se, but being sheathed in skintight napa leather is a deceptively sensitive experience. The feeling was very distinctly anatomical, and I could tell from his motion that he meant it. Even if I couldn’t, the shit-eating grin on his face would have been hint enough.

That was not civilized. He is not civilized. We scold dogs for that kind of misbehavior.

You can see him off to the left here. I’m told his name is Viki. I’m posting his picture as a warning to others. He has no excuses.

Where YaoiCon is a sexually-themed convention, Fanime is not, and Fanime’s Monday afternoon is its very last dance, an extra day that most conventions don’t even have. It’s an afternoon of goodbyes, almost, and by then it’s time to start fading back to Earth, back to the real world and its very real expectations. Out here, at least, “acceptable behavior” simply doesn’t include dry-humping people without permission. At its core, the problem is only tangentially sexual; really I believe that it’s a problem of respect and dignity. I find it telling that neither of my tormentors apologized; instead, they gave me empty stares, almost as though they couldn’t understand that I might be offended. No modern apology is adequate, but I would have appreciated the attempt.

I suppose I should count my blessings. At YaoiCon I only had to suffer five or six quick thrusts; they stopped when I obviously didn’t enjoy them. This latest incident at least ended with my firm no.

That’s not the point, though, is it? I shouldn’t have to put a stop to it; I shouldn’t have to remind people that some things are out of line.

Apparently, though, this concept is a little more difficult than I thought.