I completely gave up on the posting-from-Jamaica scheme. We all knew that was bound to not work out. I was too busy getting kidnapped, writing papers and enjoyng the local botany to really focus on any kind of coherent blogging. However, now that I’m back to (my) real world I need a creative outlet that doesn’t have a deadline, so here I am.

I had fun. Lots and lots of fun. The Howie-Brockington Jaunt of 2006 was still my Best Week Ever, but by tenure in Jamaica definitely accounts for the rest of the top ten list. The people need to know about the goodness. I have a paper due in 6 hours, so I won’t be writing anything today, but I’ll just pick snippets to write about here and there until I get tired of talking about it. We’ll have a vote. What should I tell first?

-The Ballad of the Constable (A Trilogy)
-How I Almost Got Kidnapped Again
-”Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Bembe!”
The Harlem AllStar
-Assorted Hollerations
-BDWC Theory – An International Perspective
-The YMCA - The Boys
-The TMCA - The Kids
-The City Bus
-The Mini Bus
-How to Survive Sumfest with Explosive Diarrhea
-”Big chune, dis!”

Vote or something. I’m just going to pick what I most feel like thinking about and typing out at the moment anyway, but at least you’ll feel like you have a say.

I finally refound the password for my statcounter… these are always so damn weird. A year and a month of no posts, and still people find me.

So… I haven’t actually posted to this blog in forever… about a year, I suppose? At first, it was because I wasn’t doing anything particularly interesting or exciting with my life. Then I wanted to actually take the time to recode the site, install WP on my own server, and move everything over professional-like. That never happened. Then I did have interesting and exciting things happen… but I didn’t make the time to document them. In retrospect, I wish I had, but that’s life. I’ll try to do better.

99% of the people who know me know that right now, I’m in Kingston, Jamaica on study abroad with the International Partnership for Service Learning and Leardership. If you are of the 1%, the mystery is solved. I thought about having a whole updated website deal documenting my adventures, but then I opted not to bring my lovely TiBook with me. At the urging of my mother though, I’ve decided to at least try to use the little bit of consistent internet time I have to document at least a few of my adventures. And if I can do anything, it’s have an adventure.

I’ve been here for three weeks now, so a lot has happened already, but I’ll start from today and we’ll fill in here and there as we go along. Sounds fair? Good. And I will try to post pictures. Lots and lots of pictures. For now I have a bunch on the Facebook, which anyone can take a gander at here. But the wide open web is much more egalitarian and accessible, so I’ll try to post them here in the future. But we’ll see. Facebook is easier than ftp’ing.

Disclaimer I obviously don’t have time to be all detailed and thoughtful about this, so my journals, for the next five weeks, will more than likely be quite gramatically incorrect, mispelled and improperly coded. Don’t fault me for it. Just enjoy. I am learning to deal with imperfection in all its beauty.

Part 1:

So my shameful secret is exposed: I am 21 years old and I don’t have a driver’s license. This apparently isn’t an oddity in my family; one of my cousins is 20 and just got hers last month or so. My 45-year-old aunt Angie still doesn’t have hers. My mom didn’t get hers until she was 21. My aunt Wanda didn’t get hers until she was 25 or so. I’m not saying I deliberately look at any of those situations as an excuse, I’m just saying… it works out that way.

It started off innocently. I took driver’s ed like everyone else I knew back in the 11th grade. I barely passed the written test and even more barely passed the road test and this is why: the NC DMV test is hard as hell. None of it is practical information that the common man needs to know on the road. Instead of road signs and when to use your brights, the test largely consists of knowing how many points various infractions are worth and the proper times to use snow tires. In other words, crap a law-abiding citizen of Charlotte, North Carolina does not need to know. Because I had the honesty of spirit to tell my mom that I accelerated instead of braking when a car sped toward me through an intersection (thank God for that passenger-side emergency brake) and because of her inherent feelings of self-preservation, I hardly ever had the opportunity to practice. You know that pass that’s good for 90 days that you have signed by the school secretary? I had it renewed like 4 or 5 times. Finally I graduated high school and decided to just skip it and get a South Carolina permit. That’s where I was spending the summers anyway, and my Grandaddy was more than willing to take me practice driving on the mean streets of Florence.

So I passed that written test with flying colors and I could drive whenever and wherever I wanted… as long as there was a licensed driver over 21 in the passenger seat. Getting a license was always pushed to the back burner during the school year when I didn’t have a car anyway, and became paramount during the summer. The problem was that I began spending more and more of my summers in Charlotte or Maryland rather than Florence and passing the road test became more and more of a distant possibility. I actually drove quite well whenever I was with my granddad or Third. One jaunt with my uncle Greg in Maryland ended in utter misery. Driving with my mom always ended in an argument or was contingent on my doing something I was never realistically going to accomplish, like cleaning my room. I just kept getting my permit renewed every year and eventually I gave up. It just wasn’t going to happen.

Since I’ve started at UNCC though, my mom has been a lot more willing to let me drive, and I have gotten a lot more comfortable. I don’t doubt that it has a lot to do with my discussing this whole debacle at length with my therapist, and her equating my self-sabotage and fear of driving to my subconscious fear of controlling my own life. I told her the next time she saw me, I was going to have made a major step toward getting my license (which in my mind really meant having it in my hand). Then I stopped seeing her. I’ve been wanting to go back but I would feel like a real loser if I still hadn’t accomplished this after a year, so I called the Arrowood DMV and made an appointment. For today. And so it began.

I’m a fly girl on a shoestring budget. This week’s review:
The Chinatown Bus

I was wary as hell when my dear friend Miss H. suggested that we take the Chinatown bus rather than the train from DC to New York. My Amtrak ticket would have been $45 bucks, but her round trip ticket would have been $90. Since she and her friends have partaken of this particular mode of transportation in the past, I was a little more comfortable, but still not very.

We traveled on the Today bus line since that was the one that LaShaya had taken before. There are plenty more choices: the Fung Wah, Dragon Coach, Apex. We took the 9:30 that was supposed to arrive in Manhattan at 2:30. There’s no proper “bus station,” we just saw a bus parked in an alley parking lot between two buildings and spotted the “Today Bus” sign above a stoop and went from there. Rather than purchase advance tickets, we just paid our way once we boarded the bus. My fare should have been $17, but the guy didn’t give me back change out of my $20… I was still a little scared of the whole situation, so I didn’t say anything. LaShaya used exact change for her tickets so I didn’t have a comparison.

The bus was a comfortable and clean charter bus with a bathroom in the back and television screens to watch DVDs and tapes of the driver’s choosing. The passengers were a hodgepodge of ages and races, the same as you would find on any other mode of transportation, but there were plenty of young people. We both each had a bag for underbus storage and one to carry on. I’m not sure if there is a luggage limit but we had more than enough space under the seats an in overhead racks for our carryons. Some girl brought a tiny dog wrapped up in a blanket and I’m not sure if she hid it or not; I would reccomend checking their pet policy before trying that out. We left promptly at 9:30 and stopped once more to pick up more passengers in Baltimore; until then my friend and I each had a seat to ourselves. The bus was never overly crowded. There was one 15-minute stop at a rest area midway through the trip for food and bathroom breaks, and we arrived in Manhattan well before the posted time; the driver gave us the option to disembark in front of Madison Square Garden instead Chinatown, which we took since we had to make our way to Grand Central Station.

I didn’t catch the bus on the return trip, but according to LaShaya is was just as prompt and convenient. I was dropped off at the airport before she made it to the bus stop and she made it to DC before my flight made it to Charlotte. She had a little problem finding the bus and I think that it was a little more crowded on that trip, but her return was on a Sunday night as opposed to our initial trip on a Monday morning.

All in all, I give the Today Bus 5 out of 5 stars. I traveled comfortably from DC to New York City in standard driving time for about the same price as it cost me to get from New Rochelle to Manhattan and back just once. The Chinatown Bus officially = the new heat.

Thank you LaShaya, Eddie, Mommy, Nikki, Darnell, Wanda, Kris, Greggie, Michael, Debra, Sheree, Kristal, Mia, Vanessa, Charles, all of Shaya’s family, the wonderful folks at Love, Webster Hall, the Apollo, the Broadway Theatre, Radio City and 40/40, Apple (that good paycheck that made it all possible), Bank of America, Airtran, United, the NY MTA, the Metro North Railroad, sample sales, SoHo, Black, ?uest, Kamal, Knuckles, Hub, Kirk, Jean, Common, Kweli, Dice Raw, Jazzy Jeff, Big Daddy Kane, Skillz, Rahzel, Mos, Erykah, Chappelle, Slum Village, Bilal, J. Davey, Baaba Maal, Angelique Kidjo, Jay-Z, the cast of The Color Purple (including Mr Gaines!), Yvonne’s, Havana Club, Chelsea Papaya, Chinatown, the 9th Ave. Food Festival, mango Italian ices, croissants, McCormick & Schmidt, Chipotle, and most of all… the Chinatown Bus.

Boo Kanye. Boo Ghostface. Boo Amos’ Southend. Boo Roxy’s. Boo burgundy butts. It’s okay, though.

I rocked with the best.

Nas, Mos Def To Join The Roots For ‘Wet-Dream’ N.Y. Show

I don’t think I’ve been this excited about an event since… ever. I feel like I’m 8 and on my way to Disneyworld for the first time. Only better.

I’m bubbling over here.

Sam Jackson cures a nymphomaniac Christina Ricci of her sex addiction. Forget Snakes on a Plane. I wanna see Black Snake Moan.

The weird ways people stumble across this site never cease to amaze me. This week’s winner: biracial t-shirts (you in Newark… submit an idea and I’ll make one or something!) There’s the perv in Belgium searching for pedophiles, someone who wants an “i’m a hustla” tee (shouldn’t be hard to find), and someone in Marietta who thought I’d have some insight as to how George Smith disappeared… as if there were a whole lot of mystery to that one.

In about three weeks, I will be packing my stuff for my 10-day Spring Break Redux Extravaganza.

May 11 – The Roots & Common in Charlotte at Amos’ Southend with Erin & Nikki
May 12-13 – LaShaya Graduates from College and I Help Her Celebrate
May 18-19 – The Roots at Radio City Music Hall
May 20 – Mom, Uncle Eddie & I see The Color Purple on Broadway.

I’m more excited than anyone can really realize right now. This was originally supposed to be two weekend trips, but returning to Charlotte only to fly back up the coast a few days later was more than my poor bank account could swing. Ah well. I didn’t get a Christmas break either, and I’m not going to Detroit, so this trip is well deserved. I just can’t help feeling like this whole deal came together a little too easily, and that something is bound to go wrong… but I just can’t help being a skeptic deep down inside.

(Not so) Hidden Racism of the Week: These horribly counterintuitive Volkswagen Jetta commercials… why is a black person the cause of the accident both times?
Think about it.

So summer has come, and thus I begin my search for part-time summer employment. I would love a 20-hr/week office gig, but I’ll take anything that doesn’t include standing, selling, or restocking accessories. My soul can’t take but so much “customer service” either, but I understand that compromise is necessary.

In a perfect world, I would either find a receptionist job in a laid-back South Char. office that pays $13 an hour and runs 9-5 3 days a week, or I would get off my duff and finally start hustling these t-shirts, purses, and earrings with a profit-inducing fervor. Someone found this site last week searching for “biracial t-shirts” (how did that happen?) and I think that’s a sign. Plus I would love my life so much if I could find the time to create my DC/NYC wardrobe from elbow grease and freeness rather than buying it with sadness and cash (that exists only as long as Visa and I continue to carry on this charade). I think I actually have all the raw materials I need… except time and confidence.

So… can I put you down as a reference?

and is a poor testament to my having spent (not wasted!) 2.5 years in school learning nothing else except how to make things not look like crap. I’m a dissapointment to myself for so many reasons, the point that I’m not even sure if dissapointment is spelled correctly being one of them.

re:design.

I spent a good few minutes just talking about typefaces with one of my coworkers today. It was a pleasantly familiar, yet slightly uncomfortable kind of conversation, because I miss having those conversations in my life yet I don’t feel like I should rightfully be having them anymore. I truly feel like the part of me that is creative and vibrant has atrophied from disuse.

This goes also for my promising yet brief career as a published journalist. Now I just sling my opinions wildly into the world with the expectation that no one beyond a very limited circle (that means you, Graham) will ever see them. I feel safer that way. At the heart of it, creating for a real, live audience is something that I don’t want to do. I do, but I don’t. Because I’m scared.

Of life.

Seriously. I listed all of the major decisions I’ve made in the past five years, and my rationale behind making each one. They were all essentially made out of fear of something or the other. Fear of failing. Fear of succeeding. Fear of consequences unknown. I don’t know where all of this fear came from to begin with it’s there and it’s very loud. I perpetuate this fear by ruling every past decision as a gross mistake, regardless of the circumstances under which the decision was made. The latest example of this is my job. This is a decision I was afraid to make for many reasons, but I bit the bullet and applied and got it and took it and all should be well. However, I make it a disaster by complaining about it constantly, for no good reason. Thus, I can think of taking the job not as an example of me doing something reasonable and sticking it out, but as an example of me making yet another horrible mistake.

College was the first time I truly made a decision for myself, so in essence, I have lived my entire adult, brief though it has been thus far, in this totally unproductive way. Correcting this pattern is proving to be incredibly difficult because I don’t even know where to begin. I’ve been told that the beginning is seeing the positive in things rather than the negative, but that’s the essence of my whole problem, isn’t it?

Sometimes I wish I were just content with being a misanthrope.

I figure if I can’t do anything else, we’ll always have Tuesdays.

First off, two assignments, for anyone desiring a heaping spoonful of my undying love.
1. Make my computer automatically download the free iTunes Single of the Week. (my Automator skillz are weak, but it’s probably possible for a non-dummy)
2. Make me a portable media device speaker that looks like a freaking boombox. I want to put my player in the part where a cassette tape would be and put it on my shoulder and stroll through the hood b-girl syle. Eff that, I want it to play tapes too. And want it to have an aux. in, and I want it to run on D-cells or and AC adapter or a DC adapter… then I can play it out of the trunk of my nonexistent car for impromptu breakdance and/or cipher sessions. And I want it to charge said player while plugged in. Those are my specs. Now get on it.

Now, let me preface the following by saying that I love my people, but sometimes I hate watching my people on the news. I can’t completely discount the theory that newscasters deliberately seek out the most foolish looking characters to interview and put on TV, even if it is generally the foolish ones that hang around when stuff is going down. That being said, this cat has a blog dedicated to capturing these moments in one location for the world to browse. There are only two up right now, the infamous Bubb Rubb and my new favorite, the Alabama Leprechaun. When I say the Alabama Leprechaun is my favorite, I mean this is the funniest shit I have ever seen in my entire life. I thought it was a lost Chappelle episode or something.

Black People in the News

Last but not least, XtremeMac has produced a very familiar-looking speaker system, the Tango. Fast, aren’t they? It also looks like XtremeMac is the first to make a voice recorder for 5Gs. If only they’d come out two weeks sooner, I could have made someone’s life a little easier. Oh well. Maybe she’ll stumble across my blog.

Between this job, this school, and my lack of self-transport skills, I am slowly dying inside. Seriously. Oh, there went my spleen.

Someone asked me the other day why I stopped writing my blog. Honestly, I don’t have much to write about anymore. Everything is either job related and I can’t talk about it, sorority related and I can’t publicly talk about it, or school related and you don’t really want me to talk about it. I have finally become what I never, ever wanted to be: boring. At some point I feared I might be boring but knew deep down that I really wasn’t. Now, I know I am. Truly. I have, however, had some interesting experiences as of late.

Yay for Me!
First was the agony and ecstasy that was seeing Dave Chappelle and the Block Party All Stars at Oven’s auditorium last month. Agony: the show selling out in 20 minutes and my having balcony seats despite being in line at the box office and on line at Ticketmaster.com since 9:50 AM. Ecstasy: the seats being not all that bad and the show being AWESOME! I wasn’t old enough to attend the 25-and-up afterparty, nor was I bright enough to guess that Dave would do a surprise aftershow at the Comedy Zone, so the only pictures I have are screenshots from the dozens of minutes of illegitimate video shot on my wonderful (and now broken, which is another story) digital camera, which I will, out of respect of copyright law and the code of the streets, not distribute to the public. Kweli rocked it, Erykah ripped it, and Dave… Dave is just fucking classic, is all.

I went to see the Block Party movie instead of the stepshow during CIAA weekend, and that might have been the best and only good reason for avoiding social engagement that I’ve had in a long time. There were all of 8 people in the theater, counting the people who came in late. I thought this might have been because all the black people were CIAAing it up, but apparenly this continued across the country and the following weeks. That’s a dissapointment, but an understandable one… if it had been a standup special, the theaters would have been packed. The movie was WONDERFUL and only solidified my standing belief that that concert would have been one of the standout experiences of my life and would probably have made up for my not getting to see the Roots/Fugees show in Charlotte when I was in the 9th grade (but that is yet another story). Maybe there’ll be a Block Party II? Some weekend when I can ditch school and work? Maybe I’ll have friends by then? Who knows? That last one is only half rhetorical.

*This is the closest approximation I can think of to that sound Prince always makes. You know the one.

What is it going to take to get you people to understand that this is more than music?

(text of story respectfully janked from cocaineblunts, since VH1’s site sucks ass Macwise)

“Throughout his career, Cam’ron has put more than a few MCs on notice, but now he’s turning his scorn toward sexual predators who try to hook up with kids on the Internet. In October Cam plans on putting out a DVD featuring several of his own sting.

‘I saw a special that MSNBC had done one time on [adults] on the Internet thinking they’re talking to 13- or 14-year-olds,’ Cam explained of the inspiration for his latest and most surprising endeavor. ‘These people drive 200, 300 miles just to meet a 13- or 14-year-old. It ranges from teachers to rabbis to construction workers. It’s just disgusting.

‘We set up a similar situation where we are videotaping people thinking they’re gonna meet little kids,’ he continued. ‘When they get there, it’s gonna be me and [my manger] Big Joe like, ‘What the hell are you doing, you damn pervert? What the f—- is wrong with you, coming to meet a 13-year-old boy?’ We’re gonna talk to them and not let them leave until we find out what’s wrong with them.’

So far Cam has caught two people in compromising positions, he said, and he wants to catch at least eight more for the still-untitled DVD. According to his crew, the Diplomats, there will be no police involvement.”

This is so random/extreme/hilarious/awesome that I don’t even know what to say. First of all, I’m dying because the first thing I thought of was, hey, they just did that on MSNBC… And here he goes talking about that was his inspiration. Comedy. Secondly, what exactly are Cam and his manager going to do with these pedophiles. “Talk to them and not let them leave until we figure out what’s wrong?’ So like, a therapy session? Will Cam wear the pink chinchilla? Why will I actually go out and purchase this just to see? I can’t even hate though… R. Kelly pisses on a kid; she’s “fast,” he’s the Holy Grail of music… any bit of awareness/proaction/exposure counts.

But this does throw some complications into my psyche. I conveniently forgot the controversy over that one song where Cam’ron says something about Nas’s daughter and R.Kellying her face. But you know what? I’ma let that slide because the man apologized, acknowledged his line-steppage, and is finding a (albeit zany) solution to the problem, rather than mocking it.

This might be a movement.

In honor of me feeling like a young black slave for the past two weeks, and my having to go in to work at 8 in the morning, and my back feeling like a slab of frozen meat (please, Oasis Day Spa, have your power back on in the morning…), I have only semi-useful information:

– The only thing of value within the Nip/Tuck season finale was the commercial for Running With Scissors.

-Running With Scissors, by Augusten Burroughs, is going to be a movie. Now for real, someone has to check it out with me.

-Bacardi and grape juice is not a substitute for wine or muscle relaxers. If you remember nothing else, remember that.

The Bacardi and grape juice really seemed like a good idea at the time. They can’t all be winners.

“Rather than surrender to forces beyond my control, I’ve decided to hang on till the end of the ride.” ~Richard Pryor, 1995

If there’s anyone who truly rode this motherf-cker till the wheels fell of, it was Richard.

Mike Epps, you’ve got to do this better than Jamie did Ray. Like really.

Christian has an identical twin, and the twin is the Carver. This is how I know:

1. I generally thought that Kit had planted evidence, thus the matching DNA in the condom. However, that was just an assumption; it was never cleared up. An identical twin would share Christian’s DNA.

2. The Carver couldn’t cut Christian’s face. Because it was his own?

3. Peep the Carver’s site at www.myspace.com/thecarver. The whole point of the site is to give you clues. Under interests:

The Wally Lamb refrence under “Books”... Wally Lamb’s second novel I Know This Much Is True is about identical twin brothers from a horribly abusive family, one of whom ends up emotionally detached and the other of whom ends uf being a paranoid schizophrenic into public self-mutilation. (As a stretch, could the obese “Mama” from the first ep. of the season be a vague refrence to Lamb’s first book, She’s Come Undone?) I pulled out the Wally Lamb refrence because it was emphasized in the list.

3. The Carver obviously has a specific vendetta against Christian and what he does. He doesn’t want Christian to have anything good in his life, thus his kidnapping of Kimber (who I doubt is going to go back to him after she is found. Spoilers.). Perfect M.O. for a forlorn twin who wasn’t able to live the life his (or her) brother did.

Once you get going on the theory, it all seems to fall together. Let me know what you think. Courtney, you do not count… you can’t handle the Tuck.

I’m watching National Geographic’s Taboo. Now, when National Geographic shows “natives” in Africa, India, Polynesia, or wherever, they just film them naked and raw. But they’re showing these nudists in Florida (who are white) and blurring their intimate bits out. Now, what’s up with that?

National Geographc don’t care about brown people.

So I went to the Little Brother show last night at Tremont and it was soooo good! The openers were even decent, esp. The Others and Herron (am I the only person in the world not on myspace?) Hands down the best 12 bucks I’ve ever spent. The chick singing wasn’t all that great, but she was alright. And I discovered Sparks, which has taken the place of Smirnoff TB on the casual drinking list. But I digress.

the offending writing implement. that’s the only pen I own that writes halfway decent.

Since I’m broke and whack and have the bootlegs of all their CDs, it’s not like I had anything to get signed, so I had to take one of the little Mistrel Show posters, which aren’t so little at all. Phonte and Big Pooh only signed a couple of autographs and they’d already left by the time I got up to the stage, but 9th hung around for a while… but he didn’t have a pen to sign anything with. Being the person I am, I volunteer the only one I had, which happened to be my good green AKA pen. Obviously I had to hang around until he finished or somebody volunteered another one, ‘cause man couldn’t keep my pen. I think I looked like a groupie.

(a good ten minutes after he’d signed my poster for me and I thanked him personally for djing the NPHC cookout at State a year after he’d been doing beats for Jay-Z…)
“Oh, you want a picture?”
“Oh, sure. Umm, I’m not stalking you out or anthing, I’m just waiting on my pen.”
“Haha, my bad. Here you go.”
“It’s no problem, I wouldn’t care, but it’s an AKA pen. I can’t let you keep that one.”
“Ahhh. You’re an a-kah? (and a scrunchy face)”
“LOL! Why you gotta look like that about it?!”
“lol. I’m just kidding.”

Lape, you should’ve come with me.

No, there’s no Dipset here. I mean literally, more than music. In putting the cart before the horse and planning a show before I’ve sewn a stich, this became my new favorite site:
Imaginary Runways
Because everyone knows runway shows have the best music.

That reminded me that I never found Kara Saun’s runway music from last season’s Project Runway, so I did that, too.
JFK HOLLA (on Soundclick)

And somehow I got around to rounding out my Daft Punk holdings, and found that Busta Rhymes sample completely by accident. Turns out Lagerfeld used the original for the Spring ‘06 Paris show.
Daft Punk – Technologic

Oh, you didn’t know I was a runway dork? Clearly. PR party Wednesday night.

I felt like I could spend a little extra money this weekend, so I bought tickets to the Little Brother show on the 4th and a tshirt from Threadless, two things that I’ve been wanting to do for a minute now. I’m really excited about the show; since LB’s October date was cancelled in Charlotte and Kweli bailed on Bar Nun, my concert jones has been completely unfulfilled this semester. It would still be nice to have a cutie to go with, but the chances of A. my making an effort and B. it paying off in a week are slim and none, respectively.

So I never actually took the time to check out Threadless, even though I see ads for their shirts all the time and loved them. But today while researching printers and other resources for my own shirts, stumbled across their annual Christmas sale and bought something. It really wasn’t an impusle buy, honest. I saw a shirt I really dug and kept thinking about it all day, AND it was fate because by the time I went back to the site last night all they had left in stock was my size. So I’m definitely submitting a design later on this week, maybe not for the SXSW competition but definitely for the general running. I’ll keep you posted.

Gobble gobble gobble. This year I’m thankful for:

being alive
having family who love me no matter what
pink eyeshadow
friends who love me even when we’re far apart
friends I love even when we’re close together
jamaican beef patties.

Happy Thanksgiving

I had a really hard time narrowing down the contenders for this week. With new tracks from India Irie, Rhymefest, Kanye, and Beck I just didn’t know what to choose… So I’ll pick two.

Beck: Hell Yes

Rhymefest ft. Kanye: Brand New

If you’re awesome like me, you’ve doubtless banged these already, but if you haven’t heard it, it’s New To You.

(keep in mind that all media files posted here are from CDs I either own or am going to own by the next major holiday/paycheck. Files are only available for one week. If you miss it, take it to Limew—I mean, the iTunes Music Store.)

FYI: As of 6:30 this evening, internet service at my apartment was turned back on. I’m still writing my feature in the paper, though.

Right about now I suppose Tuesday’s edition of the University Times is rolling off the presses and onto campus… with my first published article inside! It’s a Viewpoint article for the pro side of priority registration. Having spent every semester prior to this one registering like, a day before 2nd semester seniors (man, I miss the Park), it’s a topic that I felt I could speak on with some expertise.

So Creative Loafing has the honor of hosting my first published anything ever (a letter to the editor in response to an article) and the UT has my first real article. I know that this is an awfully late start for someone who claims to want to be a writer, but I’m just a late bloomer, that’s all.

A while ago while checking in for my appointment with the woman-doctor, I was selected to undertake a semi-anonymous survey about “black women’s attitudes, knowledge, and experiences with sexual health and the ‘down low’ epidemic.” I did it for the free t-shirt. I wish there had been a comment box, for if there had been I would have written in large, black box letters “DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE!”

The “down low” is a new name for the same ol’ thing. Liberace was on the down low. The daddy from the Brady Bunch was on the down low. Rock Hudson was on the down low. Why do we [black people] have to set ourselves apart on some silly shit? I will agree that the black mainstream is much less tolerant of homosexuality than the white mainstream, but I disagree that there are massively more “straight” black men who sleep with other men on the side than there are “straight” white men who do the same. Unless you are of the opinion that black men are simply so damn sexually magnificent that even they can’t stay away from themselves, it just doesn’t make any sense. (I mean, they are magnificent, but damn.)

So I finished the survey. It asked a whole bunch of personal questions to say it wasn’t so anonymous… maybe I don’t want Brocker Health Center knowing whether or not I screw black guys exclusively or dip into the cream from time to time. Can a chick have jungle fever on the low? I wonder how successful/accurate their results ended up being, because I know I felt a little uncomfortable answering sexual risk questions right before a gyno exam (do you always use a condom? are you afraid of getting AIDS from a down low man?) and I’m not even doing anything. The UNCC t-shirt was nice though. My first one. And all because of a laundry-detergent rash.

So my camera and I had our first date tonight, and I must say that it went… okay. We have to get a little more comfortable with each other. I just keep comparing it to the Nikon… even though it’s been a year, I still can’t help thinking about it. Everything was just so easy with that Nikon and I. We hit it off immediately. It was like we were meant to be together. The way it just fit so perfectly ergonomically in my hand… but I have to move on. A credit card bill that I’m going to be paying off for the next six months reminds me that I’ve put a lot into this relationship… and it will work.

Now, I’m by no means a camera expert, but I can say that the A610 is a good little camera. It has a nasty habit of turning off too soon while taking a break and resetting your options (flash off, macro/closeup shot, etc.) but I think I can change that. The display is WAY too small, and I didn’t really use the 360 like I thought I would. The battery life is good. Having full manual control is awesome. The user interface is not as intuitive as I would like it to be. Even under imperfect lighting conditions and no tripod, working without the flash produced far less blurry pictures than the Nikon ever did. Overall, I give it 4/5 stars.

On the subject of Canon products, can someone tell me why my scanner and my computer just won’t get along anymore? Since everyone in studio has that same scanner, someone should mail me their installation CD (Graham) and maybe their USB cord (Candace). Please?

Yesterday, I got this in my facebook message box:

CRUSH is introducing a new THURSDAY night jumpoff… Come with your best swagger, because this is for the Young, Fly, and Flashy!! So Fellas throw on that button-up and Ladies do what you normally do!!

DJ Tab D’Bia$$i, The Million Dolla’ DJ of Power 98 will be on the turntables. LISTEN TO POWER 98 FOR MORE INFO!! You never know who you might rub elbows with.

CRUSH is the premiere Club Uptown right beside the Westin Hotel. If you haven’t been in CRUSH, you haven’t experienced a REAL club!!

This would be just another club advertisement, and draw no rancor from me (y’all know I love the club) if this hadn’t appears a couple of weeks ago after a some vaguely discriminatory practices at another club:

Another example would be for those of yall who have tried to go to Crush on Wednesdays, and have been forced to leave, either because you didn’t have a second i.d., or because you weren’t dressed “appropriately.” At the door, white people get through security very fluidly. But let a n*gga get to the door. Here comes the array of requirements. Not only will you have to show your i.d. for age verification, but if you’re black you will surely have to present a college i.d. Secondly, they have a list of inappropriate attire, which I have noticed, gets longer every semester. It started with do rags and hats, and now encompasses timberlands, air force ones, all basketball shoes (ha), athletic wear, long t shirts, baggy jeans, and even ‘jeans with writing’, so I can’t even sport my Girbauds in there. Now if you’re a black male, take a quick mental thought of what you have in your wardrobe, and tell me if there’s anything you own that you can wear to the Crush.

My point? They are singling us out so as to limit the number of n*ggas that walk through their doors, whatever their motive may be. Crush is the most extreme example, but it isn’t the only club that follows such racist guidelines.

Closing: THIS SH*T HAS TO STOP. We (black students) need to find out how we can end this insolence. We’re in the year 2005, and I’m appalled at how things like this can happen, legally.

And these came from the same group. Aint that some shit?

I’m all about people doing what the heck they want to do with their own private establishments. If I owned a club, I’d bar hoochie wear and perms; that is and should be my right. And if I were a girl with a perm, instead of trying to slick curl my hair or complain about “that bitch and her bitch ass club,” I wouldn’t stick a foot on the premises.

But apparently, young black people are like, immune to that type of thinking. Even if a place treats you like shit on Wednesday night, it’s okay to go there Thursday when the black DJ is playing. They love black people, right? So wrong, so wrong. You’re still putting money in people’s pockets who obviously are happy to have it in a controlled atmosphere, but not when it’s drunk white girl night. And you do know that is the issue, right?

Granted, a man is less likely to wild out in church shoes, but the root issue here is white women, which is essentially the root issue of like, everything that happens on the globe (men live for sex, white men rule the world, white men rule the world around sex… with white women.) Why else would most black men go to a whack white club in the first place? (White club does not = whack, but white club = shitty music and nondancing = whack, for us darkies and our dancing asses.) I swear, sometimes I feel like Lawrence Fishburne in School Daze hollering at niggas to WAKE [THE FUCK] UP!

No, I’m not about to tirade about white women, because I have a lovely caucasian aunt who is married to my lovely negroid uncle and they have a lovely biracial baby and defy all the negative stereotypes of BDWC theory. However, I am tirading about dumb people and our willingness to complain when people treat us like crap but still throw money at them whenever its convenient. I’m actually surprised at the public outcry over the racial incident at this Greek store in Nashville, TN, but I wonder how long it will be before people stop wanting to drive a couple extra miles across town to pick up their big blue and gold umbrellas and go back to this man and his horrible wife and help them put some more food on the table. Why do we do this crap to ourselves? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: my generation isn’t worth shit when it comes to seeing a problem, making a sacrifice, and making a change through any means necessary. We would rather see a problem and complain to high heaven while bending over and taking it in the ass for an indefinite period of time. We can’t seem to get it that the triumph isn’t in the vocalizing of an issue, it’s in the getting off of one’s duff and doing something about it.

All I know is, I’m staying my ass at home tonight.

WHOOT! My new digital camera came in today. I don’t even know if excited is the word for how happy I am. Watch out facebook. It’s a Canon PowerShot A610 and so far it’s great. I’m more accustomed to Nikon controls, and I still really miss my little Coolpix 4300, but Nikon’s shitty customer service and refusal to fix a known product defect two weeks post warranty turned me off of them forever. I’ll take a bunch of pictures and offer a review… later.

yes, the 360° display is as pimp as it looks.

This is becoming a regular thing. You like? Thanks to Courtney S. for putting me on to this song in the first place.

Toni Braxton: Take This Ring

It used to be a point of consternation, but I love the way Toni Braxton comes out with one hot song every two years or so and then dips back out of the spotlight. What is she up to, like 17 albums? Anyway, that’s better than glutting the radio with a bunch of half-assed material and burning out because people hate you. Ashanti, are you listening?

I’m not quite sure why Rich Harrison decided to use the same go-go beat from Amerie’s One Thing, but if it works, work it. It’s got a nice beat. You can dance to it. I give it an 8.

T. Hussle – “She’s a Virgin Too”

Now, the first thing I thought of after seeing this title was T.I. and Pharrell’s “But She a Freak Though”... but I downloaded it anyway. It’s actually a sweet lil’ song… the way I took it. Yes, I’m not ashamed to say that I respect my Granny and keep the goodies on clink, not for any particular religious or moral reasons, but mostly because I’m selfish and I usually don’t do anything unless there’s a noticable benefit for me involved. To date, I haven’t yet met a gentleman who’s enough of a pro to override the cons. (And I mean that in whatever way you want to take it.)

I have at least one very good friend who shares the same opinion, and while sometimes it looks like we’re going to end up being lonely old ladies with a million cats, I look at my other friends fretting over pregancy scares and crazy infections and I just don’t want to deal with it. Honestly, I have enough to worry about as it is. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not exactly a nun (and I mean that however you want to take it). But I made a conscious decision several years ago that I was not under any circumstances going to have a kid grow up under the same conditions that I did and the older I get, the more comfortable I am in that decision.

So I’m not going to sit here and say that I’m not having sex until I’m married or engaged, because I honestly don’t know. I mean, Gary Dourdan could show up anytime. All I know is, it’s a hot song. Take that or leave it.

My infatuation with Aaron McGruder nonwithstanding, the Boondocks on Adult Swim was actually really funny. Something seems off about Grandad’s voice, but he is funny as hell. I was also questioning the animation style, but I think it might grow on me.

This was one occasion where the promo editing really didn’t do the program justice, because I was a little dissapointed by what I had seen; but through either bad editing or clever marketing the funniest moments were completely surprising. I guess next week will determine whether I was just pleasantly surprised or whether the show is actually as hilarious as I found it.

Quote of the week:
“Gay? No, I’m not gay. I mean, I think a man looks good if he got good hair and a ponytail, but I’m not gay.” © Grandad

Today also wrapped up the 48-hour What’s Happenin’ marathon. Has a better character than Rerun ever graced the small screen? If anyone knows the new regular airtime on TV Land, let me know.

I want someone to name me one problem, sans the weather, affecting the Earth today that is not directly or indirectly traceable back to European imperialism as its root cause. Go.

So Cam’ron was shot early yesterday morning in a carjacking attempt, probably around the same time that I was standing in line at F.U.R. for the Kappa party that no Nupes were getting into but otherwise enjoying Club Parking Lot in the 40° cold. And a good thing, too, because I was definitely in the car with part of the Dipset hype squad earlier that night getting set up for a bustdown. Allow me to explain.

So I’m on my way to the step show (which is at the Armory) and I’m taking the Metro since none of my girls are going. So this lady walks in, who I assume is an AKA because she’s in a pink and green outfit (and what grown woman would go to the stepshow in a pink and green outfit and not be a soror, right?) trying to sell a stepshow ticket. I’m like, nah, I’m thinking about getting rid of mine myself (since it was rainy and cold and I’m lazy) and she’s like, well how are you getting there? And I’m like, I’m taking the Metro. And she’s like, well I’ll go ahead and go and give you a ride if you know how to get there. So I’m like, sounds like a decent plan and go upstairs to get the directions. So I come back down and she’s standing at the SUV, in which there are like 3 guys. Now, the rational Dani said “hmm, this doesn’t look like a good plan,” but of course the dumb lazy Dani said, “just get in the car, it’s cold.” So I did. And we sat there for about half an hour, I’m chit chatting and being personable, and the lady is, I assume, doing who knows what outside the car. So after a while the driver hops in and we take off.

Since I was in the very back of the car and in the middle of a conversation (okay, I was macking with the cute dude and he’s telling me how me and my girls are going to get into the club for free) it took me like a minute and a half to realize that the driver of the car was not the aforementioned lady who offered me a ride, but in fact some completely different dude. This actually came to my attention as the guy I was talking to asked me where my friend went. So I’m like, wait… she offered me a ride and told me to get in the car… and he’s like, okay, she came up to us and asked if she could have a ride because she didn’t know how to get to the Armory, and then she never came back. He’s like, but we’re going to the step show, we’ll still get you there, which might have sounded decent if we weren’t moving in the opposite direction.

Fuuuuuck.

Now the scared Dani is going, “tell them to stop the car and let you out NOW.” The rational Dani is going, “if you kirk out they’re either going to get agitated or put you out on the side of Georgia Avenue somewhere in NE DC in the rainy dark and you don’t know where the hell you are… be cool.” This time I actually did the arguably rational thing and waited until I was at least in a well-lit populated area, which happened to be in SILVER SPRING MARYLAND.

So as soon as I see lights I ask them to please just go ahead and let me out here, and by the grace of God, they oblige, and I only have to wander around for 10 minutes before I finally find the Metro station. I did get a free Dipset mixtape out of the deal, though. It’s piff.

this page renders for shit in IE/Win. Why do people still use IE anyway, and WHY would you STILL use IE on a Mac? Don’t you have to like specifically look for the app in the dark pits of nested folders? That’s telling you something.

I’ve been trying to put my grandmother on to Firefox, especially since she basically had to have her computer rebuilt because it was so full of popups and spyware and dialers (thanks to my randy teenage cousin and his unsupervised internet exploits). However, my grandma is a woman of habit. I’m one step away from deleting the icon from her desktop, but I’m afraid she’d call Bellsouth irate because her internet isn’t on the computer anymore. le sigh.

Last week she offered to send me my grandad’s and uncle’s old Verizon phones since mine has been showing its tail lately, and I could just have my number transferred over. But first she asks me if Verizon will make me pay any delinquent bills on their accounts before I can use the phones. That was the first sign that this plan was not gonna work out for me. So the phones arrive in the mail an they look like crap. They were both new, so I’m not sure what the problem is. Come to find out, Gramma decided to disinfect the phones with rubbing alcohol and ended up stripping the metal/plastic off the face of the phones. Now, after seeing that you’ve mucked up one phone, WHY WOULD YOU DO IT TO THE OTHER ONE? Gramma, I love you, but this has got to stop. This is the same person who had me itching like a crack fiend for days because she washed all my underwear in straight colorsafe bleach (didn’t read the bottle). My Gramma is a smart woman, but she just straight doesn’t follow directions. I wish I’d known about this back in the day when I was getting beat for doing something off the wall.

The moral of the story is: Grandmas are helpful, they just need to be watched.

“hunger hurts, but starving works when it costs too much to love.” ~ Fiona Apple

Happy birthday to me! Yesterday I turned 21, finally legal, and I spent the first weekend of the LaSherinelle October Homecoming Birthday Smash with my friends in Greensboro, for NCA&T’s homecoming festivities. This makes the third birthday that’s passed without my dad saying shit.

I suppose he’s not totally to blame, I haven’t called him since the summer before my sophomore year either, but one would think that he would be the bigger man and at least call on my birthday. Or Christmas. Or anytime. But then again, we’re talking about the same person who’s never lived more than an hour away from me, but has still never come to visit more than four times in a given year. The same person who would travel to Charlotte to shop at the mall across the street from my home without even calling or coming by. The same person who told me he wasn’t coming to my high school graduation, but still came on the low just so he could tell his people that he went. (He never intended for me to know that he was there; my mom spotted him on the way to the bathroom. He admitted it several months later.)

I finally got fed up when he promised to drive me to Raleigh for summer school, but completely stood me up so that I had to get a last minute train ticket and get my best friend to drive me there and move me in. Thanks, Erin. When you can depend on a flighty eighteen year old girl before you can depend on your own father, it might be time to let that shit go. So when he called to ask me how I was doing on my move-in day, I entertained him politely and just never called back. I think he called me once later that summer, but I wasn’t going to give him the pleasure of knowing any of my business. To this day, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know that I no longer go to State, that I’ve changed my major, that I spent the last semester at home, or anything else that’s gone on in my life in the past three years. I ran into him last summer at a funeral, but otherwise neither of us has made any effort to contact the other.

I feel bad sometimes, horribly bad, because you hate to think that someone who should care about you more than anyone else just doesn’t. That is as tough a pill to swallow at 2 as it is at 21. Long ago, I saw a program on TLC that said that men basically aren’t loving creatures, and so while mothers almost always love their babies to pieces the minute they’re born, fathers generally have to fall in love with their kids. I used to think that I had done something wrong, that I wasn’t smart or pretty or charming enough to make him fall in love with me. But a few months of therapy and a breakdown later, I realized that he’s just a shiftless bastard. My therapist once asked me what I dream about when I daydream about him, and I replied that I always imagine myself a giant and he a little ant-sized person, and I would shake him and squeeze him until he hurt as much as he hurt me. Despite our efforts to guide my fantasies in a more constructive direction, I still have those dreams. He has no excuses. It was never my responsibility to teach him how to be a good parent, no matter how much he tried to make me believe it. I don’t deserve to be treated that way by anyone, and he doesn’t deserve any kindness from me. So if I have to cut someone out to get the treatment I deserve, so be it. I’d rather be ignored than mistreated.

I should admit something: I actually wrote this post a week ago and saved it until today because I thought I’d be too angry and dissapointed to actually write this after the fact. But you know what? I didn’t even think about him calling or not calling untilI went online and saw the post stub saved under my drafts. Everyone who matters has already let me know that I matter to them, and that is truly all that matters to me.

Apple has released video iPods. I told you so, bitches.

I knew that the iPod was just waiting to be one step more than what it already was. After the photo-capable ones appeared, I knew video was coming up next. So I held back, and my waiting was surely enough not in vain. Once these first gens get out of the way (you know they’re going to have bugs and battery issues) I can FINALLY feel economically justified getting an iPod. Shoot, I might just get one for Christmas anyway and dash consumer savvy by the wayside.

Power and battery(3)

Built-in rechargeable lithium ion battery

Playback time (60GB model)

* Music playback time: Up to 20 hours when fully charged * Photo slideshow with music viewing time: Up to 4 hours when fully charged * Video playback time: Up to 3 hours when fully charged

Battery life on the 60g model looks really good, long enough to actually watch a movie under prime conditions. (of course I’m looking at the 60g… who do you think I am?) but the 30g model only gives you 2 hours of view time. If you’d actually be one to watch a ripped DVD on your ‘pod, that might not be enough time to view the whole flick. I still wish Apple would rethink the whole built-in battery thing, because I don’t feel good at all about having to replace a $600 device three years from now because I can’t get a full charge. Having dealt with this crappy Powerbook battery for what, four years now, I know how irritating that diminishing charge thing can be.

My dream was always to have the iPod that was also a cell phone, PDA, and digital camera, but knowing my knack for misplacing my stuff in safe places (my room, my couch, my grandparents’ house) it might not be such a good idea to have all my necessities wrapped up in one device. This is as close to perfect as it gets. Oy vey, and we give up scholarships like millionaires over here.

There, I said it. There is something of value of BET besides the In Living Color reruns. I kinda fell in love with Dame Dash’s swagger after watching State Property for the first time at three in the morning a while back, and this show is like, great. I can guarantee that Donald Trump never snapped on somebody’s shoes during a challenge.

I can also be pretty sure he isn’t punching staff members in the chest, either. Wtf? On Russel Crowe, explosive violence is def. not a good look, but with Dame I can live with it. I honestly thought he was gonna go hard on a bitch in the boxing ring on the first episode, but I guess that would’ve been too much; but if they start to fighting there’s no telling what might jump off. Ultimate Hustler seems to have struck that nerve of unpredictability that’s absent from most of ‘reality’ TV save The Amazing Race and Project Runway. And so stand my Reality TV Triad. Those are the only shows I’ll watch, promise.

Now, go on to the store and cop my birthday Armadale.

Thursday is “Coming Out Day” on campus, and of course, the College Republicans are holding a “conservative coming out day” to coincide with the festivities. This made me wonder, why do gay people feel the need to officially “come out?” If you’re gay, just be gay and live your life. For all the efforts of various organizations to equate the struggle for gay rights to the struggle for civil rights for minorities in this country, (which are not equal.. we’ll speak on that later) they sure don’t live it out equally. I never had to have a day of celebration or call in a family conference to announce that I was black or female. I have a friend, my loving cup of honey named Graham, who let us all know he was gay by casually mentioning his boyfriend in a conversation. Some of us were surprised, some people werent, but from that point on it was just a part of his life. That’s how I like things to roll: smooth, uncomplicated, and easy. No one needs to be “in the closet,” but is there really a reason other than self-aggrandizement to have a “coming out” parade? Just leave the damn door open; the people who feel like looking in can feel free to get in there and poke around.

In a perfect world, no one would feel pressed to announce their gayness with fanfare and emotional catharsis. In reality, I suppose you have to let ignorant people know these things before they start cracking innapropriate jokes around you (although that’s their problem and embarrassment). You have to let the opposite sex know before they start trying to get at you (although you could just cross that bridge when you come to it). You have to let the same sex know so they can start trying to get at you (although I would think that two like-minded individuals would be able to find each other). Basically, it seems like grand, public pronouncemnets and announcements of sexuality are for the comfort and convenience of other people, with little or no benefit to oneself. Isn’t that the opposite of self-affirmation? And anyway, to hear a black woman tell it, men need to be coming out that they’re straight, considering black men are automatically put on ‘down-low’ status until proven otherwise. (Just kidding, the down-low is a myth, and don’t you forget it!)

Maybe I should come out that I’m straight… you think my hair is throwing brothas off?

Stella McCartney’s Fall 2005 collection for H&M breaks Nov. 10

Just after I’m to be in DC, which is the closest H&M to me. We’re supposed to be having Thanksgiving at my place, and if I get my surgery in December, I’m probably not going up there for Christmas break. Why can’t they build an H&M in Charlotte? We’re good enough for Urban! Maybe I can make a jaunt up there at the end of break, after my surgery, and do some little-boob shopping. I swear I love H&M. Is it too obvious?

(right- or opt-click to download)

Ne-Yo ft. Peedi Peedi: Stay With Me

I heard this song the other day and thought it was cute. When I did a Google search I saw a link in Teen People and thought, hmm… this guy doesn’t look like any teen… and sure enough he’s 22. That’s practically my age. Why are you my age and on the Scream Tour with 13-year-old girls coming after you? Skeevy, yes, but even more intrigued than I am about the song am I about these names. NE-YO… how do you even pronounce that? Like Neo i.e. The Matrix or Neh like NEHI cola? How do you pronounce NEHI cola? And Peedi-Peedi… is this Peedi Crack’s son?

Bassey Fumes Over Kanye Sample ContactMusic.com, 9/21/05

What would posess a superstar, major-label producer to not get clearance on a sample? Especially an obvious and recognizable sample that’s the whole basis of the lead single from the most anticipated album of the year? I’ve been trying to figure this out since I heard the original “Lovers and Friends” that Usher and friends didn’t just sample, but straight rerecorded without so much as a mention of the original artist. (I would toss a link up, but I’m lazy.) Oh well.

Fiona Apple has a new album? I might have to cop that. After I hear 2K6: The Tracks.

Oh, and this is freakin’ hilarious. I need to find this video.

White People’s Burden Robert Jensen, Alternet.com

I don’t really have a comment on the article; it very eloquently and succinctly says everything that needs to be said. I do have comments on the 500-odd comments that have already been posted to the article. It’s just sad and funny to me. What some people refuse to admit is that there exist (or they may be) “semi-racists.” They might not burn crosses in my front lawn, but they’ll tell a racist joke. They’re the frat guys who study with you for a Psych test, but have a “Dirty Mexican” party at their house on the weekend. The guy who has a black buddy at work, but see how quick he’ll call his daughter’s black boyfriend a nigger. They are the reason why my grandfather would rather deal with the most racist of southern Rednecks before putting too much confidence in your typical liberal yuppie, because at least you KNOW what the redneck is thinking.

But white Americans have a problem with that, presumably because the majority of them enjoy their white privilege very much and don’t want the uncomfortable guilty feelings of knowing that the profits of subjugation and slavery didn’t just vanish in the sixties. I mean, think about it: the people who grew up in Jim Crow are our parents. Do you really think the playing field has been leveled that quickly?

Of course not, but that is what the majority of whites would rather believe, because they have the luxury of being able to. Condoleeza Rice may be the only black person of note in this country with the (lack of) balls to regurgitate that line. On to the commentary:

“Mentioning race doesn’t mean you’re racist!”

No, it does not. Trust, if anyone knows this, I do, and I’ve already covered it in a previous post. However, when you are telling a story or whatever and introduce people’s ethnicities, although they have nothing to do with the context of the story, it means something. It means that you want your audience to know the races of the people in the story because you want them to bring their predefined sterotypes with them in painting that mental picture you’re trying to make. If I were to say, “I was in the grocery store and this lady with three kids tried to bogard in front of me in line…” You would see it one way. If I said, “this Mexican lady with three kids…” that adds a whole other layer of meaning, because why would I have to point out that the lady was Mexican, unless there was some sort of a background there? How do I know that the lady is Mexican anyway (as opposed to Puerto Rican, Panamanian…)?

Which brings up our next point: I get so irritated hearing people call each and every hispanic person they see “Mexican.” It’s stupid. It shows a complete lack of respect for a person’s origins. I hate to say it, but it’s also derogatory in the context in which many people use it, because our racist-ass American POV says Mexicans are lazy and dirty and can’t speak English and are over here illegally anyway. So that’s the brush with which not only all Mexican people, but all hispanic people in general, are painted. If someone repeatedly referred to me as Trini, and I know my butt has never seen Trinidad, I’d be annoyed. I’d be especially annoyed if the stereotype was that all Trinidadians steal and lie. Maybe I’ll start calling random white people Slavs. Or Ruskies.

“But why should minorities get first dibs on jobs and scholarships? That’s not equality!”

Okay… how did George Bush get into Yale? Not on his academic merit, I’m sure. He was a legacy. How many black, hispanic, Asian, or Native American legacies are there at… most universities? Hell, minorities couldn’t piss at most universities until a generation ago. Affirmative action negates the unfair advantage that white people have (by virtue of their simply being white) by forcing minorities into certain slots. A black person who made a 700 on the SAT is not going to get into college above a white person’s 1500, but a black person with a 1500 might. Is that fair? Arguably no, but it’s definitely not fair that the white kid got an automatic subconscious bonus point when he walked through the door. Affirmative action gives minorities that same bonus point, both figuratively and quite literally. Last year, the Young Republicans on UNCC’s campus had an “affirmative action” bake sale, where they sold cookies to white people for $1, and to minorites for 50, 25 cent, or for free. The NAACP or the BSU had a rebuttal sale, but they didn’t do it right, either. A REAL affirmative action bake sale would be for the NAACP to buy the flour, sugar, chocolate chips, the stove, and everything else out of their budget, spend all night baking all the cookies, put them in bags, and then give them to the white kids to sell at 100% profit. That’s how the world gets down.

So I’ve wasted about an hour of work time, talking to the air on topics of nothingness, because no one who needs to wake the heck up ever will. Racists and their undercover brothers will continue to rampage on the defense and make excused for themselves, and those who demand better will continue to be accused of “playing the race card.” What can I say? I’m a feminist and a black advocate… best of both worlds, huh?

Instead of watching Nip/Tuck last Tuesday, I mistakenly got involved in the 2-hour premiere of The Amazing Race: Family Edition. I was confident that the Black family (who also happen to be black… coincidence?) would not win the big prize, but I wanted to see how they would do and give my support, since the mother is my soror. I was also intrigued by the addition of little children, and I was wondering how the challeneges would be organized to keep the playing field level.

I should go ahead and say that I doubt I’ll be watching too much of the rest of the season… There’s more…

I skipped class this morning, and I feel antsy. Just some thoughts.

From Sheehan Arrested During Anti-War Protest (San Francisco Chronicle)

“I would like to say to Cindy Sheehan and her supporters: Don’t be a group of unthinking lemmings,” said Mitzy Kenny of Ridgeley, W.Va., whose husband died in Iraq last year. She said the anti-war demonstrations “can affect the war in a really negative way. It gives the enemy hope.”

Bitch, shut up. Are you being an unthinking lemming with your support of the war, tagging the bullshit line of voicing discontent “gives the enemy hope?” Why is it so difficult for some people to have a difference of opinion without denigrating those they disagree with? I mean, I’ve been holding back in saying that people who still support the war are somehow dumb or just unwilling to admit that they’re wrong (although they are) and considering that maybe they just see things a different way. Other people should do the same. Or the… contrapositive of that.

D’Angelo Critically Injured in Car Crash (Rolling stone)

The heck? Didn’t he just get his sentence suspended last week? What sad irony. I don’t know what Angie Stone did to turn him out to crack in the first place, but I hope he survives and is okay… maybe he’ll have a “Through the Wire” life-changing experience a’la Kanye.

So Nip/Tuck comes on tonight. Spectacular yes.

Search terms that have been bringing people here lately:

Tearria+Marie
Thicke
John+Fountain+the+black+church
pretty+black+girls
John+Mayer
spectacular+yes

If I were the seeker of any of these topics and ended up here, I’d be pissed. I’m starting to think that maybe blogs are taking up too much space on the internet, and clogging search results, especially Google results, with bs sites that nobody wants to read. I mean, it’s nice to hear an opinion once in a while, but do I really have anything germane to say about Tearria Marie? Does anyone?

And thanks to my endless ramblings about my breasts, I have a linkback from adultteensluts.com. Classic.

I am currently trying to write a letter to my insurance company begging them to pleasepleasePLEASE approve my request to cover a breast reduction mamaplasty. I’m not quite sure what to say. It’s not fun, it’s not sexy, it’s not in any way enjoyable. I can hardly walk, I’ve gained twenty pounds in the past nine months, and part of that is because the simple act of walking leaves my back so tired and aching that I don’t have the energy to work out by the time I get to the gym. I could lose 1500 grams of tissue per side and still be in a full C, possibly a D-cup. I feel like a freak.

So I’m reading success stories and tragedy stories and all these accounts of other women who’ve gone through the same process, and I haven’t even come across anyone who’s as bad off as I am. Yet I’m still worried about my insurance not covering me. It’s reached a point where if it comes down to choosing between paying tuition and housing or paying for this surgery, I’m just going to have to sit out a semester, because the physical stress of simply getting around campus is too much for me to handle. I don’t want to do that because I just finished taking time off, and I’ve made such good progress getting myself back into the swing of things… I just don’t know what to do anymore.

There’s more…

So I finally bit the bullet and took advantage of the free trial on cafepress.com to start selling some merch. Now I can finally print up all the cute little t-shirts I want and make a few ends in the process. Feel free to comment/criticize/ask for something custom.

Always one to eschew manufactured irony, I never bought one of Urban Outfitters’ “Everyone loves a black girl” tees, 1. because I could just as easily make most of what Urban Outfitters sells and they’re too expensive for my blood, and 2. because it’s not true. Why do you think they didn’t make those when they made the Jewish/Asian/Irish ones. A black girl is a lonely soul indeed, often hated but universally imitated. I mean, look at the collagen trend and the booty implants and the puzzling phenomenon of white girls with cornrows. Everyone might not love us, but clearly, everyone wants to be a black girl.

Can we get Britney Spears one of these?

Okay, so I’m watching Nip/Tuck and feeling like this episode is long as shit because of all these movie previews and I’m mad because I hyped myself up for this and it’s boring. Then the last 10 minutes roll around and its all pure gold. This man said “three ways are the new black.” Could someone please buy me the first 2 seasons on DVD? Please?

So shoot me…. I really want to know what kind of fraud Kenny Chesney ran on Renee Zellwegger… isn’t he famous? What exactly was this celebrity man hiding that she didn’t know about? The whole thing is a little intriguing. What also intrigues me is this: originally Jack and Meg of the White Stripes were said to be brother and sister, but they’ve now admitted that they’re actually husband and wife. Now, while they were siblings, wasn’t Renee Zellgwegger dating him? Yes, I’m a lame because my brown but is sitting here contemplating the lives of Kenny Chesney and the White Stripes. I told y’all I’m a suburb girl.

Yesterday I was thinking about where my mind was when I was a kid, and how my perceptions of the world were all based on my limited experiences growing up in podiddly Florence, SC. For example, all of the black people I’d ever seen lived in one story houses. All the two story houses I ever saw in Florence were in white neighboorhoods. Therefore, all black people lived in one-story houses, and all white people lived in two-story houses. The execptions to this were the Cosbys, my uncle Charles, and our family friends the Hams, but they were different because because they were in “big cities” (New York, Baltimore, and Charlotte, respectively.) I did know some black people who had stairs or at least steps inside their houses, so this is why I still have a fervent desire to live in a split level home or one with a recessed living room. When our neighboors on the street behind our house added a second story to their home, it only reaffirmed my belief that black people, at least in Florence, couldn’t live in a house that was originally a two-story. The best we could hope for was to be able to add on. And I was ashamed, because that was about as bad as having an above-ground pool.

So, black people for some reason could not be “rich,” or at least not as rich as white people. I thought that all white people—and I’m really serious—were fantastically rich like the people on soap operas, and they lived soap opera lives in their two-story houses. Black people could only be “kinda rich”. I figured the richest black people in Florence had to be the Curtis Mathis man, my neighboors the Jetts, and my assistant principal and her family because her daughter wore ribbons in her hair on regular school days. White girls wore ribbons, and black girls wore those big balls or the elastic pony-o’s. I tried in vain on several occassions to tie my hair in ribbons but I couldn’t; this was obviously because I was not rich and therefore had to leave ribbons alone. The Jetts had a gigantic satellite dish in their back yard, and you had to get a pass from the government to do that because a person with a satellite could talk to astronauts the way my grandfather could talk to truckers with the CB radio in his van. The Curtis Mathis man was pretty much like a president or something, because he owned a TV store that sold big screen TVs. When I saw his name refrenced in a Judy Blume or Beverly Cleary book I was floored: this man must be famous. Why is he in Florence? I was thirteen before I realized that the man who owned the store was not Curtis Mathis, and this was after I’d been in his daughter’s wedding and developed a deep distant crush on his grandson. I give myself a bye on that one.

I also remember the day it finally struck me that the Cracker Barrel was not so named because only white people ate there. I was in the fourth grade.

Looking back, it seems really stupid, but when you put it all together, how does a kid know anything different than what she grows up with? Just going by TV and my daily life, I had the wonkiest, most screwed up view of what my life was going to be like, and if I hadn’t been such a voracious reader, I don’t know how I would have turned out. Eventually through books and magazines and anything else I could get my hands on, I realized that I wasn’t really poor at all, that black people could live anywhere they wanted to, that no one really lived like the Forresters on As the World Turns, and that I wasn’t doomed to be troubled teen on Geraldo simply because I grew up without a dad. I learned that there was a great big world beyond Florence that wasn’t inaccessible to me, that Charlotte wasn’t the most far-off place in the world, and that maybe someday I’d be able to go to New York, because there weren’t really huge rats like Splinter roaming around.

I live in a two story house in Charlotte and I’ve never been close to going on Jenny Jones. I wear ribbons in my hair whenever I want to, and the Cracker Barrel has some really good food. Satellite TV has nothing on digital cable, although satellite radio is pretty sweet, and everyone knows I’ll hop a train, plane or taxicab to anywhere—even New York—whether someone’s coming with me or not. I even braved Harlem alone at night to go to Amateur Night at the Apollo. I’ve been to Disney World and held my grandfather’s hand while we walked through the Epcot Ball that his line made the joists for, and done all kinds of seemingly small things that I truly never thought I’d be able to do, because I was just a black girl in Florence. So for every kid in every city, town, farm, and ghetto… dream big. You just might make it all the way to Charlotte after all.

So, under normal circumstances I would be going to Slam Charlotte tonight, since I always go, but I’m feeling a little under the weather. The weather being bloody with a 70% chance of cramps. Yes, the Menstruation Fairy has entered my life for the second time this year thanks to the wonders of modern technology. It’s officially been a year since I’ve ovulated of my own volition. Though this does not bode well for my child-rearing future, it might come in handy when I have to sell my body for tuition money. I’ll keep you posted.

So I’ve become somewhat convinced that my lack of ability to attract a mate is somehow connected with my lack of fertility; didn’t some program on The Learning Channel say that women are more likely to get hit on when they’re ovulating? I guess I prove that the opposite is also true. It’s only half as disappointing as it sounds though; I’m not really looking for anyone, I just get foxy after watching CSI.

It was 1995 and R&B was just beginning its slow and tragic decline to be replaced by hip-hop. Then, along comes Jon B., the original sexy white guy with a ghetto pass. Now, Jon B. fooled a lot of people; I’m sure there are some who still think he was either Puerto Rican or real light-skinned. But it didn’t real matter, ‘cause he was fine and he made good music. And we were all so sad when he left.

Just when I was starting to wonder how New Edition and ABC morphed into the Backstreet Boys, Justin Timberlake came out of nowhere with a ceasar cut. Wtf? Was Britney stopping him from wearing those RocaWear suits before? Justin was the new John B. and I for one was loving his lil’ sexy vanilla soul. But you all know what happened: we had to take his pass back after he exposed Janet’s titty and then sold her out. Boo, Justin. Boo. Everybody knows the Jacksons are royalty. Pass revoked.

So Jon B. keeps trying to make a comeback, but it’s not really working out for him. Thicke is definitely the new Justin, so I’m wondering why he isn’t jumping off? I know he’s Alan Thicke’s son and that’s kinda lame, but dang! Why can’t the man get a break?

I think Justin may have spoiled it for all the future caucasian crooners; the black community is not ready to let another white man into our lives. Justin broke our heart, and it’ll be some time before we can learn to love again. So Thicke, keep on trucking; a Coke commerical here, a TV theme song there… just do what you can for now. Someday, we may be able to receive you with open arms, but the scars are too fresh right now. Maybe you should sing about that, Thicke. Let us know that it doesn’t matter what that other man did to us. That you’re different. That you’ll treat us right.

Help us, Thicke. Help us learn to love again.

David Banner and I could engage in some adult-type activities. His intelligent gangster and striking resemblance to my ex caught me first, then I read the real lyrics to Play. Now he’s coming out with a cartoon on Adult Swim? Good heavens. Come on with it then.

Maybe his backing of Heal the Hood will help to at least highlight the fact that there are a heck of a lot of displaced people who were renting in public housing projects, and therefore have no rights to reclaim their homes if the city decides to sell the land to Hilton and build luxury hotels. (This will happen.) Perhaps Home-in-a-Box (backed by Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick Jr.) will help some of the poor rebuild their homes, that is if the state doesn’t decide to take the land and sell it to private developers first (this will happen, too. This is why.)

Now don’t be mistaken: the goal here is not to put a whole bunch of poor people back in the shitty conditions they were in in the first place; the goal is to help people get to a better place than where they were by first getting them back on their feet in the location they were in. Because the state of Louisiana is going to try to erase these people from their homes. Some people don’t want to go back and are using their displacement as a jumping-off point to build a better life in a new place. That’s a great choice for the people who are making it, if that’s what’s good for them. But the residents of New Orleans who want to return should have the right to do so, whether or not they match the Halliburton-built vision of a new tourist destination. (I bet the “New” New Orleans won’t have shoddy levees.) Alright, that’s it… last post of the day, I promise.

The group K-Otics (out of Houston, of all places) put it all together like the piece of a puzzle © Kweli and remixed Kanye’s Gold Digger with some choice words about Dubya. Have a listen.

In case you were wondering, C Murder is alive and well in Angola Prison, where he was sent after the Gretna, Louisiana prison he was in was struck by the hurricane. I might be the only person who actually cares about the lives of all of the prisoners who were caught up in the flooding… notice that the news stopped mentioning them real quick. I seriously doubt that there was any kind of an earnest attempt to rescue them, and it’s been reported that many were shot and killed trying to escape (death). That makes me sad; not everyone in prison is there for murder, neither are they all guilty. It’s sad for anyone to lose their life that kind of way.

Like I said:

Why is the apartment-hunting situation so crucial right now? Like, I’ma be living in an apartment 24 hours from now. When the girl gets on the grind the girl gets on the grind. Please believe it.

Okay? Holla at a scholar in Pine from now on. Don’t think this process went by without incident; of course somebody was tryin’ to bring the drama and I had to shut it down… (why are you lying saying you were first in line? B-tch, I been here since 4:30. Take your waking-up-at-5:45-behind to the back of the line.) There were only three spots so the shit was crucial. On a normal day, I probably wouldn’t have called the girl a liar, or asked how the heck she figured she was going to schlep down here an hour after me and be in front of me, (and yes, I said schlep. I took it there with the Yiddish slang). Maybe after being told “Well, some people need to go!” I could have said something a little more polite than, “Exactly, so move out the way so I can make my room change.” Maybe since I was bundled up in my AKA blanket I should have been a little less thug, but daggit when the girl is serious, the girl is serious.

Now let me sleep through my 9:30.

It dissapoints me that people have been “changed” after witnessing the piss poor actions of this government since Katrina. What, you thought the shit was good before? It just kills me that it takes some kind of crazy disaster for people to get an effing clue… and people still don’t really get it, because a year from now something else awful is going to happen and people will be “changed” again. In the immortal words of Lawrence Fishburne,

WAKE UP!!

On that note, I’m going to sleep.

Why is the apartment-hunting situation so crucial right now? Like, I’ma be living in an apartment 24 hours from now. When the girl gets on the grind the girl gets on the grind. Please believe it.

Speaking of the grind, I’m writing up my business plan so that I can qualify for a small business grant and get a new computer for free. If Halliburton can hustle the government out of 10 billion dollars, I know I can grab a grand or two. I’ll keep you posted.

But let’s talk about what’s been bothering me lately: nasty assed people. As my mama says, some people really believe that their piss is golden and their shit is made of chocolate chips. Is there any other explanation for the widespread refusal of some people to wash their hands after they leave the bathroom? While waiting on a stall earlier today, I saw one woman actually wash her doggone hands. The rest did a quick water-rinse and more than a couple just walked the hell out. How do you go to the bathroom and just walk out? Didn’t your mama teach you anything as a youth? And these be the same people who wanna borrow a pencil or offer you some chips. Gtfohwts. Immediately.

It’s almost time for the fair again, and I’m still thinking about the e. coli breakout that had so many kids sick from the petting zoo at the N.C. State Fair. One of my studio-mates was even out of school for a couple of weeks with that. Parents were upset on the news, talking about there need to be sinks at the fair and more hand sanitizer stations. Y’all, I have been going to the fair hard for as long as I can remember, and it’s no secret how I save up my money and don’t eat 2 weeks prior just so I can gorge myself on fair food (we’ll come back to that). If my hungry behind can have a feast at the fair without getting sick, why can’t your kid?
You know why?

BECAUSE YOU AND YOUR KID ARE NASTY, MA’AM! Why would you walk through a petting zoo eating popcorn? That don’t even sound right. Common sense should tell you that the fair is more germ ridden than a backwoods gas station bathroom. Eat with a napkin. Or better yet, warsh yo’ dayum hands before you eat.

Raleigh responded to the outbreak by promising to install more hand sanitizer units along the midway. People. Hand sanitizer is a backup product, not a substitute for soap. I’ve actually been to public bathrooms where there’s no soap, only a bottle of hand sanitizer. You know what’s left on your hands when you sanitize them after taking a D? Sanitized shit. If you sanitize your hands after rubbing on a goat, you still have fleas and goat hair on your hand. Maybe hand sanitizer is just what we need to thin out the hygiene-deficient folks in the world. Maybe all the non-hand washing people will eventually catch some fecal disease. I really wish they would, because the next time I see a heifer leave the bathroom without washing her hands, I’m going to just be thug with it and remind her: “that was piss, ma’am. Not Mello-Yello.”

Think she’ll get the clue?

Mayor May Force People Out of New Orleans – Yahoo! News

Let me just say that I fully support the move to make people get out of these flooded areas. I just question how exactly they’re going to go about doing it. None of the people thus far associated with this Katrina relief effort have yet proven themselves to be especially competent or thoughtful, so I expect some mishaps with trying to force people out of their homes. I wouldn’t put it past some of these heavily armed paratroopers to shoot people who won’t leave. Crazier things have happened.

But the people who are still dead-set on staying in New Orleans need to get the hell out of there. There have already been reports of dysentery and deaths from waterborne bacterial infections. Staying in those kinds of conditions will only increase the death count. And how are the rescue/recovery teams going to do their jobs effectively if they have to keep going back to places they’ve already cleared to check on people who elected to stay? What happens when the ones who stay change their minds and want to be rescued? Do they expect people to keep coming by to bring them food and water? What are you going to do in a city full of 10,000 dead bodies with no electricity, sewage or other public utilities.

But I suppose you can’t force people to do anything. I’m sure that some people are simply being stubborn, but there are undoubtably others who are scared and traumatized or mentally ill. What about them? Taking people out by force, if not done with finesse, could result in violence or further trauma, and I suppose it isn’t really realistic for resue teams to know which type of situation they’re dealing with.

I just don’t know the best thing to do. Two weeks ago I would have trusted the authorities and relief workers to have a decent plan, but it goes without saying that that ain’t the case anymore. ::sigh::

Well, at least we know now where Little Georgie gets it from.

“In a segment at the top of the show on the surge of evacuees to the Texas city, Barbara Bush said: ‘Almost everyone I’ve talked to says we’re going to move to Houston.’

‘And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this—this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them.’

I think I should stop reading Susan’s blog because clearly I get way too riled up. It’s not that I’m surprised at what people say; I’m just surprised at what some people have the balls to say in public. I suppose it only illustrates how classist and inconsiderate a lot of people must be, when these kinds of comments aren’t even criticized or given a second thought before or after being said.

What I really don’t get is how dumb the American people must be that we allow politicians to “spin” this kind of crap in another direction. There are still people who won’t admit that this devastating non-response isn’t in any way connected to class or race. How can you ignore that? If we as a nation would simply admit our faults and failures, we could at least begin to try to work on them. But everyone wants to sweep that kind of unpleasantness under the rug. Sometimes I feel like I’d rather us just go back to the overt discrimination of the pre-Civil Rights Era, because at least then you knew who your enemies were, and you couldn’t fool yourself into believing that you had none. At least then the little people knew that we had to stick together and support each other because no one else would.

Maybe that’s the lesson that we can take out of this whole ordeal: we’ve let ourselves be misled into thinking that we actually have a seat at the great American table, when all along we’ve only been getting glorified table scraps. People get a little something and move on up and out of the community, leaving the masses behind. What happened to the systems we created for ourselves? What happened to the communities we built to sustain us when the powers that be were fully against us? Why did all of that go away? Sometimes I feel that honestly that the race I’m a part of, that the class I’m a part of, are no better off today than we were 20, 30 years ago. Black is still black and the working middle class still gets fucked.

God Bless the USA.

Spent the weekend in Florence with the family. I did succeed in getting a hold of some Krispy Kreme doughnuts. I think I ended up eating one chocolate and…6 glazed? Yes. Six glazed Krispy Kreme doughnuts. All between lunch and dinner. I’m such a hog.

Wanda, Greg, Kristin and Gregory also came down, so the weekend was a lot of fun. Gregory starts school on Tuesday and Kristin became a woman on Thursday so we had a lot to talk about. I really wish I had my digital camera because I surely would have posted a video of the “dance contests” Gregory kept wrestling me into, but oh well. I just love my familypeople more than anything in the world, and I’m glad they keep me around.

I’ve been hearing people around me remark that this isn’t the time for blame-laying, the focus needs to be on rescuing these people who desperately need water, food, medical care and shelter. Well, I am in North Carolina and I can’t provide any of those things to anyone right now. That hurts me, and rather than crying and moping around because of what I can‘t do, I have to be proactive and do what I can. Those of us who can need to speak for those who can’t right now. We need to force the national, state, and local officials responsible for this post-Katrina melee to take responsibility while their constituents are unable to. We need to ask the tough questions and demand answers instead of accepting half-hearted lines of “this isn’t anybody’s fault—this is nature.” The hurricane may not have been anybody’s fault, but the NO levy breaking sure was. The forced evacuations were unpreventable, but the conditions of squalor in the Superdome where people were told to take refuge were not. Some heads need to roll after all is said and done, and I’m doing what I can to see that happen.

I suppose the laissez-faire attitude of our president would have been expected by a cynic, but I am guilty of half-falling for the belief that on a macro scale, people are people. Instead, its been proven over the past week that black is black. I thought that in times of national disaster, the government would never have the gall, the complete disgregard for appearances to treat minorities differently, but I was wrong. Condoleeza Rice had the nerve to answer such allegations in a press conference with a well-rehearsed, “No, this is America… we don’t do that here.” But even she looked like the pill was as hard for her to dispense as it was for us to swallow.

The fact is that most of the faces streaming across our TV sets for the past 7 days are a disheartened, suffering shade of brown. This is no coincidence; the white people packed up their families and cars and booked it out of town. Those without the resources to leave were left to their own devices. No busses were sent into these rural communities and housing projects to evacuate the poor without cars and money to get anywhere else. Yet the director of FEMA claims that those who drowned in flooded out homes were responsible for their own deaths. After survivors waited three days with no sign of food, water, or rescue in sight, they took matter into their own hands and were threatened with assault rifles for “looting” potato chips and bottled water. Even the mayor of New Orleans cared more about the inventory at Walgreen’s than about rescuing his own people.

Meanwhile, where is the National Guard? Besides the fact that many, many of them are currently busy in Iraq, the ones who remained didn’t come until Thursday. What a coincidence that this was also the day that Bush decided to cut his vacation short and take a little trip down tuh’ Biloxi. I suppose it was the least he could do to go back to work early; our Vice-President sure as hell didn’t. He reported that he could work fine from his Wyoming ranch, and considering that he’s almost dead anyway, I guess this was the best we could hope for. Unlike our mainstream media, foreign reporters and a few brave Americans have not hesitated to notice the fishy circumstances surrounding the presidental tour: the fleets of busses that suddenly arrived but never came back, the fake food distribution points set up to decorate official photos, the spontaneous and short-lived “levee repair.” As soon as he left, conditions swifty returned to abnormal and frustration and desperation rose ever higher. To make matters worse, our leaders won’t accept from others the aid they refuse to provide: FEMA reports that offers of aid from at least 60 other nations have all been denied, with no logical reason or explanation in sight.

Politicians and pundits both at home and abroad keep asking, “this is America! How could something like this happen here?” To them I reply, exactly. This is America. What else did you expect? What many fail to understand is that America has since the middle of the last century propped itself up to be the picture of idyllic, enlightened society. Picture being the operative word. Rather than actually being the “best country in the world,” we are far more concerned with being able to say it and have the rest of the world believe us and use political spin and token figures to pretend that racism, poverty, and governmental apathy and ineptitude simply don’t exist here.

Well, over the past week, the mask of America has been washed away just as quickly and completely as our Gulf Coast. Right now there is a lot of anger and dissapointment with the powers and conditions that be, but what will happen to that emotion in two weeks? A month? Will we allow ourselves to again be distracted by panic and fear as we have been in the past, or will we, as a nation of thinking, compassionate, brave people finally say enough is enough and force the people we’ve entrusted as leaders to repair our terribly ineffective infastructure and be about what they talk about?

The revolution is in front of our faces in 24-hour Trinitron color. Even Bill O’Reilly is disgusted. I think it’s safe to say that the whole world is aware that the U.S. is not an infallible well oiled machine. We’re a big shiny Buick with a busted transmission and a rusted motor. I just hope we’ve finally worked up enough anger and guts to grab a wrench and get to fixing.

So I tried to run game on the Apple store today, but it didn’t really work out. I did, however get invited to a spoken word night by the Black Apple Guy and I chatted hard with the Design Guy. Now I know that a: my computer is going to die soon, b: I should throw away Font Reserve and get Font Agent Pro, and c: I could surely get a part time job at the Apple Store.

Now, most people who know me know that if I’m hardcore about anything, it’s my hair, my people, and Apple computers. In that order. Wireless internet and Oreo cookies round out the top five. My life would truly make a 180 degree turn if I could work at the Apple store. I don’t even care what kind of job it is; I would sweep the damn floor if I could still get that discount. I would wear my little employee shirt with so much pride. I would use it as a conversation opener, “Yeah, you know, I work at the Apple store and…” Oh, man. This is going to be great.

I really suck at getting jobs in general, but I’m pretty good at getting good jobs that are going to get me somewhere. I’m not sure where iPod pushing is going to get me, but the Design Guy assured me that my knowledge of pro software would be a huge plus. My only weakness is lack of retail experience, but I could make mention of my side hustles to make up for that. Let’s just think good thoughts and count on a busy retail season.

DAMN I look horrible. I’m STILL fat, despite the fact that I excercise and I’m good if I eat one square meal a day… no snacks. I’m convinced that I’m either pregnant or this damn Paxil (which does nothing for me, by the way) is making me retain ungodly amounts of water. Fat people sweat, and having to walk a good mile uphill in 98 degree weather every day leaves me feeling like a soggy dog by the time I get anywhere. Somebody thought it would be great if 85% of my sweat glands were in my forehead, so I’m thisclose to carrying a little rag in my back pocket and pimping the sharecropper-chic look. This morning, by the time I finished getting dressed (why am I about to sweat to death sitting down, naked, in an air-conditioned room?) I notice that I’m perspiring across the bridge of my nose. The bridge of my nose? Who sweats there?

So while I’m looking like an overworked stripper at 9am, I’m also starting to resemble a fat crack fiend, since sweaty hot skin = breakouts galore. And of course, I always break out in the middle of my forehead. This just gets better every minute, doesn’t it?

So all of my clothes are too small, since like I said I’ve reached the proportions of a wildebeast. This forced an emergency expenditure of a couple hundred dollars to buy pants that will fit my grossly enlarged ass. (Of course, it only speads on the y rather than the z-axis) This prevented me from buying any shoes, so I’m wearing flip flops I bought for $2.50 at the Children’s Place like they’re Rainbows. Let’s not forget about my tits, which have charted previously unknown territory in the alphabet by now… even the $80 bras I’ve been buying for the past year don’t fit. But you know what? I have to make do because even the big-bra people don’t make my size now. Great.

And back to the pants: I have to buy two sizes up from what I actually fit into because MY BELLY IS FUCKING HUGE. I’m expecting at any moment for a little skinless creature to bust out of there a’la the Alien movie. I look pregnant. So much so, that even though this is impossible, I’m going to the doctor tommorrow to figure out what the hell is wrong with me. So my denim Hammer-pants pants are actually too big, but I HAVE to buy them huge to button across my stomach. I should have just cut the bullshit and bought maternity jeans. If anyone wants to send me a gift certificate to A Pea in the Pod, please do.

So, in short, I look like a cretin. No, I don’t know anybody. No, I haven’t made any friends because I’m too ugly to share air with and I leave my room as little as possible because I feel like a rolling sack of shit. There is only one postive thing occuring in my life at this moment, and that is:

my hair looks fucking great.

The color came out very nicely, and for a $100 hairstyle, I’m making it last as long as possble. If the rest of me looked as nice as my hair does, I’d win beauty pageants. It’s perfect. I can say with absolute conviction now that God really hates me this week. Really.

It’s so late and I’m so tired, but… just.. ugh. This thing about Kill Whitey Parties came across my desk and while I can always formulate a response, I’m too tired to write it out. I just want the record to show that the topic has been duly noted and shall be commented upon within the day.

I am also extremely concerned about the current weather conditions in New Orleans. From my understanding, everyone who is unable to make it out of the area is being put inside the SuperDome. I know that N.O. has to have a few skyscrapers or something… the wisdom of herding thousands of frightened people into an enclosed stadium is eluding me. Apparently everyone is being seated in the upper rows of seats because the field may flood as well, but can you imagine the panic that could break out inside that place if that happens? It doesn’t matter how far up people are; if water starts covering the field, there will probably be more injury and loss of life due to people trying to rush up or out of the place. I just pray that the storm is not as bad as it’s expected to be andeven if it does reach that point, a bad situation won’t turn even worse.

My mom and I were thinking about it, and we concluded that the following steps might be useful in a time of crisis and mandatory evacuation:

• open up the other lanes of highways for outgoing traffic. There only needs to be one lane for incoming.


• use the city’s school and public busses to evacuate people who otherwise can’t leave their homes for lack of transportation.


• people always go crazy stockpiling water and nonperishables before the evacuation order, but then end up leaving the stuff in their homes when they do evacuate. Round up all that stuff somehow and send it along on the busses or to shelters.

Or maybe FEMA has considered these things already. I doubt it, though.

I’m expecting to see some activity in the white bootleg market after August 30. Thanks Kanye!

Heard ‘em Say, track 2 on Late Registration, features the vocal stylings of Adam from Maroon 5, so perhaps this will generate some heavy crossover interest. I mean, it worked for John Mayer. It’s a beautiful song, and I’ve got it on repeat with Faithful, Back to the Basics, and Chi Ali’s Age Ain’t Nothing But A #. That last one is from way before Robert tried to justify his banging underaged Aaliyah. Cop it post-haste.

I know I just posted like three minutes ago, but with the dissapearance of Olivia Newton John’s boyfriend and NOW the missingness of music producer Julian Irwin, I had to speak out.

Didn’t I call it? Back when I made mention of the white man on the boat I told y’all that white men were becoming the new white women, but nobody was trying to hear me. I guess Ms. Figueroa was the only person of color whose whereabouts were unknown, and once the authorities got that mess all over with (funny how they found her killer so quickly once the media deigned to pick up the story…) they could move on to bigger and better things, like missing white guys. I’m really starting to wonder if the American public is really this bad, or if the mainstream media underestimates people. Are (white) folks really that bad that they will work themselves into a frenzy over some “missing” men before they can care about a nonwhite?

I am in no way discounting the loss of anyone; as I’ve said before It’s a terrible situation that I’ve been through myself and it’s awful when someone is missing no matter the gender, race, or age. But honestly, who the hell is snatching up grown-assed white guys? What’s the reason? Are they being sold into man-sex slavery? Organ harvesting? At newstime Olivia Newton John’s boyfriend is looking like he faked his own dissapearance (was getting physical that bad?) and the producer guy sounds like he hit up on a bad acid trip. For all the hubbub and consternation over unbalanced media coverage, the face of the great American concern has changed… but it only grew a beard and a harder jawline.

So I asked my grandparents to bring me my bicycle, but I’m definitely not bringing it to campus for a while. I have to build up my street cred first. Back when I had a measure of crediblity, I couldn’t ride the much celebrated cycle (a Christmas gift freshman year) because my grandfather didn’t want me to slip and die on some ice, and by springtime the bike had been “given” to Marc (like he ever rode it.) So now I can get the thing back, and I’m ready to trick it out with a wicker basket in the front and a little dingy-bell, but I can not—I will not—break out on a new campus riding a damn bicycle. Especially not with a bell. At State, it would have been cool, everybody knows I’m a little different; but one can’t be too different too soon in a new place or you never make it out of the gate.

Give me a good month, because this walking is driving me crazy.

So it goes, I got the job in the Student Media offices and there’s no way they can not hire me to work on the staff. I mean, how many other top-shelf writer/designers can they find on this campus? None as fly as me, I’m sure.

This means that I’m on my way toward not being quite so broke (living without a scholarship is a BITCH!) and I might have enough money to replenish my wardrobe and get a new camera before the 2005 LaSherinielle NC-DC Eastern Seaboard Homecoming Birthday Extravaganza of the Ages. What is this event? I turn 21 on October 16, a date nestled ever so sexily between NCA&T’s Homecoming weekend (at which I made my debut appearance last year) and Howard U’s Homecoming weekend (at which I wild out every year like they’re giving me a degree). To add to the love, Howard’s playing A&T for their game. I’m not ashamed to say that my only priorities between 10/13 and 10/23 will be catching my respective flights and staying as lit as possible. Oh, you thought last year was crunk? You’ve never seen me legally twisted. You know my people: we play no games. I’m bringing the A-game sexy, there may be a houseboat involved, and I’m taking no piss-poor planners. You wanna go? Get your bags packed, be down or be done, holla at me on flyi.com. I shall keep a log of The Movement.

Now that Kanye West has made the cover of Time magazine (I wonder if he made them pay for the interview…) I guess it’s official. He’s literally and figuratively the posterboy of hip-hop. Now, I will not deny that Ye can maka a hot track, but he is just not as hot as the world is making him out to be.

As a producr: brilliant? The initial forays into sped-up soul beats were fantastic, but that can only hold up for so long before it gets old. Actually, it’s already old, and he’s oversaturated the market with himself. The same thing happened to the Neptunes until Chad and P took a step back, reevaluated their game, and laid off the the heavy guitar and falsetto hooks for a minute. His beats are still fire for the most part, but he’s on the edge of tired.

As an MC: please. Kanye has got to have the clumsiest delivery ever. He’s been doing the “international asshole” shtick since he came out the block, and he shown himself to be incredibly one-dimensional. Kanye at first seemed like an intelligent guy with a lot to say, but he’s just been saying the same freshman-year shit over and over again. None of his lyrics are especially deep or elucidating; he reminds me of the guy in college who was smarty-art in high school, comes into a 300-level English class like he knows something, and gets played by the upperclassmen who let him know in so many words: we went through all that last year. Diamonds from Sierra Leone… okay, how many years ago was it that the Rhodes Scholar declined his awards because of Cecil Rhode’s shady business practices? I guess Kanye was too busy digging in the crates trying to finance his first Jesus piece to catch that news blurb. His lyrics make me laugh when they’re supposed to, yes—but his great “message” is nothing that hasn’t been said and said again by other emcees over the years.

So no, I’m not going to spend my hard-earned $13 bucks on Late Registration; I’m still smarting from the dissapointment of College Dropout. Will I download most of the tracks? You’re acting like I haven’t already. I’d just love it if the real artists who are on some real shit (Kweli, Jean Grae) could catch a break in the mainstream media like Ye has… but that is obviously asking too much.

There’s a difference between saying something racist and saying something potentially offensive that happens to be unique to particular race. For example, to say, “Mexicans are dirty,” is racist as hell. To say “Illegal imigrant Mexican children shouldn’t be allowed to go to public schools,” could be offensive and would therefore be considered racist, but dammit, it’s true. If there were crazy numbers of Canadians or Nigerians busting over here illegally, not paying a lick of taxes, yet sending their non-English-speaking children to attend already-overcrowded public schools for free, I would have just as much of a problem. But no one will ever say that, even though Vicente Fox can talk about what black people over here will and won’t do.

However, many people will turn any mention of race into an offensible issue. Americans tiptoe around the elephant in the middle of the room like it’s not there, when it would truly benefit everyone to just admit that the damn thing is there and give it a peanut every so often. I am very unashamedly black, and I have no problem bringing up “race”-related issues in mixed company, just as I have no problem discussing the physics of stilleto heels and leg wax when men happen to be in the room. It amuses me watching someone try to identify or describe someone who happens to be of another ethnicity; I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had someone go through the whole gamut: the lady in the blue dress… she wears glasses… she has long hair, she wears aquamarine nail polish on her baby toe… when clearly they are talking about the only black person in the room. Just say she’s black! It’s not a curse word! If I’m trying to figure out who someone is and my conversation-parter starts with that craziness, I just ask straight out: “Is it the hispanic lady or the white one?” I’ve never not seen a wash of relief go across their face.

Why can’t we all just admit that we’re different and revel in it? We all do and say things as a group, good and bad, that are unique to our group. Black people talk in the movies. White people wash with the raw soap. Indian kids do crazy well in school. There are always outliers who don’t match the stereotype, but a stereotype is by definition an oversimplification. It’s probably not good form to speak in generalities, but goodness—there are 7 billion people in the world; any statement is a generalization. I like it that my people are different from other people and others aren’t the same as us. Things would be a heck of a lot less interesting if everyone in the melting pot really did melt.

I just think the elephant needs a hug once in a while.

I kinda fell in love with the 16×16 icons at Drunkey♥Love, so I took it upon myself to add a few and reduce some to 12×12. Feel free to use. And visit D♥L for lots more goodies.


download 8kb .zip file

(all icons in .png format)
If you use any of these, leave a comment and let me know. I’d like to see them in action.

Honestly, I don’t watch MTV’s “My Super Sweet Sixteen.” I went to high school with those girls and I do NOT want to relive that b.s. However, when I saw little chubby Sophie snap on the uninvited girl who had the gall to be holding an invite in her hand, I had to keep watching. Homegirl was hood. And she wasn’t quite as bratty as the other chicks they usually have on the show. Maybe I’m biased, though, because she looked like she might have been a little chocolate chip. At any rate, she kind of reminded me of my sixteen-year-old self, y’know, if I’d had a white mom with no reservations about overextending her line of credit.

My classes start tommorrow, I have the best schedule ever, my roomate is pretty cool, and I’M GETTING MY BOOBS CUT OFF IN DECEMBER

So yeah, life is kinda sweet.

I just flipped past Fear Factor on Fox—PLEASE believe I do not watch Fear Factor like it’s a valid show—but people were spitting milk into glasses, and I just knew that that milk had been sucked straight from a teat of some sort. I win: they were racing to suck milk from goats and fill up the glasses.

Now, that’s just unsanitary. Not for the people—they just nasty. But that goat don’t want you suckin on his titties! What if those people have herpes? Or HPV? Or mouth cooties? Now the goat has gingivitis of the titty and who’s gonna say something about it? And that woman goat might take offense to being suckled by another woman—now you’ve turned that goat into a lesbian and she couldn’t say anything about it.

And PETA is still trying to jock people’s Starter jackets.

Honestly, if I were an outsider looking in, I’d think we were crazy.

My general religious/spiritual beliefs nonwithstanding (save it for another day), John Fountain took the words out of my head with his recent Washington Post article. Granted, I don’t quite get the correlation between the failings of the church and the disconnect with black men specifically, but maybe you have to be one to understand. I see it as a failing of the Protestant Christian church as a whole.

The church, or at least the face that you see/hear/know about on a public level, is about money more than anything else. I truly cannot tell you the last time I heard about a church other than my own doing something for someone out in the community, but I can tell you how many times today I’ve heard mentioned the name of this celebrity pastor, or that star-spangled congregation, or the big new building that’s being built. I have heard “so-and-so church has their sanctuary paid off!” thrown around as a major compliment more times than I need to. I used to watch a lot of different televised church services while I was away at school, but I had to stop, because I just couldn’t take the greed anymore. I’m not sure if this is a new thing or if I’m just now noticing it, but the message seems to be that blessings=riches and “God’s fruits” all come in the form of monetary and material gain. I’ve sat in church and heard pastors say that you are not a Christian if you don’t tithe. I’ve listened to more than one popular, TV-show-having preacher make the statement that they or someone close to them “never received a blessing” until they “sowed a seed” that they could barely afford to spend to someone’s ministry. You’re a pastor and you’re telling me that your “blessings” have all come in the form of cars, houses, and enough money to finance a new rec center? Are you serious? And here I thought the Bible said that it’s easier to fit a camel through a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven. Oh, but wait: it’s okay to be filthy rich as long as it’s for the ministry. Pardon me.

Yes, it takes funding to build buildings, do outreach, and get the message across to as many people as possible. But the church today has crossed the line into downright materialism. I’m tired of hearing these so-called religious leaders ranting about how they’ve been “blessed” with the millions to afford personal chefs and send their children to private school. I suppose the CEOs who get rich off divesting people of their pensions and pimps who profit from exploiting children are the holiest people of all; they sure are some of the richest. T.D. Jakes must be making at least a mil yearly… he should take a leap of faith and “sow” $999 thousand to see how far he gets, instead of investing in any more of those shiny suits.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m only seeing the face of Christianity that’s in the newspapers, television, magazines, and internet every day, and this is an innaccurate depiction. Maybe my little shiny-suit-free church isn’t one in a million, and these temples of plenty are in the minority.

In that case, they need to stop making us po’ folk look bad.

So yes, PETA emailed me back. The gist of the response was, “we didn’t mean to be offensive, but we were trying to make a point.”

I’m sure the hicks who want to keep the confederate flag flying at the SC courthouse are trying to make a point, too.

Am I crazy? Because I’m not seeing the logic in this argument: “By teaching respect for animals, we can also cultivate attitudes of nonviolence toward humans.” The argument just does not work both ways. Since when does PETA champion nonviolence toward humans? When they mail razor blades to fur farmers? When they pay for legal support for activists who firebomb research labs? Oh, that’s right; they only support nonviolence toward humans who agree with them.

Bottom line, if you’re saying that human suffering compares to animal suffering, you’re just as bad as the people who mistreat humans and consider them animals. But then, if you’re a person who believes that animals should have the same rights as humans, I guess it doesn’t matter. That is the difference between someone who belives in animal welfare and someone who belives in animal rights. The former simply believes that animals should be treated humanely (with kindness, mercy, and compassion). I’m very much for animal welfare; I’m not for elecrifying bunny rabbits, I don’t like seeing animals in the circus, and I don’t go for elephant ivory and exotic animal fur. HOWEVER, I’d rather see a rat die from cancer-drug research than my grandma. It’s about extremes.

So I have a vegetarian roomate, which may prove to be interesting if she is the “you shouldn’t do what I don’t do” type. I might have to go on a Beef Binge or a Poultry Picket. But I don’t wanna get fat.

Pray for me.

and just come over here and do me. Your macking is tight, but let’s stop playing games.

PETA wrote me back, by the way. I ain’t beat for the bullshit.

this takes the vegan fruit cake. This video at PETA’s Animal Liberation Project site attmpts to make the point that “We Are All Animals,” and in doing so compares American slavery, forced child labor, Nazi concentration camp, and Native American obliteration with the plight of farm-ranged cattle and circus bears. I’m against animal cruelty, but I do belive that if animals were meant to be treated the same as humans, it would be staggeringly obvious. At press time, the greatest technological breakthrough ever made by an elephant was finding a bigger stick to swing through the underbrush with.

So I wrote PETA a letter. I doubt that it’ll do any good, because the narrow, fanatical minds that could see it acceptable to kill a human scientist for harming a rabbit or beat a woman down for wearing a fur coat are not going to change for me; but I couldn’t let it pass. I think I’ll go fix myself a meat and sinew sandwich, now.

The Letter:
Although I am against animal cruelty and brutality, I am offended by the means that your organization uses to communicate its’ point. I recently viewed the “Animal Liberation Project” flash presentation at your website, and to be honest, I was not moved. You are comparing the pain and torture suffered by African slaves, Native American Indians and Jewish concentration camp prisoners to that of circus animals and farm hens.
If you honestly think that this is appropriate and that the enslavement of a human being compares to the display of circus animals, you are no better than the slavers, soldiers, and Nazis of the past.
~me

Aries: (March 21—April 19)
You always say The Man is holding you down, but you never mention the intense sexual rush it gives you.

SOMEBODY HAS GOTTA GET OUTTA MY HEAD! I officially have confirmation that i.am.the.shit. Backstory: around early 2003 I fuund out that my AIM profile and away messages are like, syndicated or something across the nation. I’m serious. There are people I’ve never seen before in Ohio, California, and Texas who read my AIM info on a daily, hell, several-times-a-daily basis. Since I’ve not been in school, I’ve slacked off, I know… but there is hope for the future.

So at some point between freshman and sophomore year, I made the profile:

Things I’ve Faded Pharell singing hooks overdecorating in red the right-side salad bar in Fountain sandals in snow

“These things are HAWT” buy me these.* instant grits situnder dryers Pocky Shea butter from the lady at the flea market

These were on my profile for a good couple days, and what do I see tonight on Adult Swim?? The above as bump! It wasn’t exactly the same, but “Things I’ve Faded so you should fade them too” is miiiiiine. I’ve been cultivating, polishing and coddling “buy me these” for yeeeears! I can’t believe that an actual and honest personal phrase has been janked by [adult swim]. I’m flattered, yet pissed. Now whenever I say it, I’ll look like a poser. Crap.

I was saving up all my postey goodness until after my Big Fat Tennesee Weekend, but since that’s not going to happen as planned, here I am still trying to polish my CSS skills to a brilliant shine and downloading new music. (Can I say again how much I LOVE my neighbors in G-towne?)

So I have this new song on repeat: Robin Thicke has a new album out, and though the whole world slept on the last one, I’m still trying to make people belive that it really was hot… or at least three of the singles were. I think the world might be a little bit more ready for his blue-eyed soul this time around, now that Joss Stone has paved the way and Teena Marie is making club bangers with the Cash Money Millionaires. His newest single “Wanna Love You” is pretty nice, and there’s something that sticks to me about the beat, even though it’s simple and rather tame for the Neptunes. However, I believe my part-time lover is overdoing himself singing these hooks—it’s just not hot anymore, doll.

I might slap a link up in a few days, or not. We’ll see.

10-second postpartum edit: The beat is the background notes from Billie Jean raised by an octave or two. I can always catch a sample.

So did everyone watch Mo’Nique’s FAT Chance Saturday? I really hope so, because it was hands down the best beauty pageant I’ve ever seen next to Little Miss AKA 1988, but I’m partial. I was loving it! Mo’Nique is gorgeous, and I’m still wondering why in the world she doesn’t have her own clothing line yet (maybe she has a no-competitor contract with Just My Size?). All the ladies were gorgeous… it really changed my perception of the types of clothes a plus-size woman can wear. I don’t quite meet the plus size mark, but I was racking up fashion tips for myself!

All of the contestants were plus, but none of them were what I would call obese or terribly out of shape; they all carried their weight really well. I’m a firm believer that a woman CAN be 200 lbs. and still be fit, and that healthy does NOT necessarily equal skinny. Hell, if every woman looked like the Olsen twins we’d be in a sad state. You can’t birth babies with them narra’ hips.

I really don’t have much to say, except that the show was good. I’m sure the haters will be in rotation my Monday morning. (eew! fat people are gross!). Brush those chubby shoulders off.

This is a serious question. Don’t white people need bootlegs, too? I don’t dig R. Kelly and I’m not too big on Tearria Marie. I really want The Killers’ album but I’m tired of dodging the RIAA with this illegal downloading. This isn’t a game—I asked a black bootleg man if he had Maroon 5 and he looked at me like, “Wha??” That was obviously a bust. So white people, I need you to help me: hook me up with the caucasian bootleg man!

You’re out there, white bootleg man. If not, then this is the perfect opportunity for some young white hustlers to get a come-up. Or some black hustlers can expand their repertoire. You wouldn’t belive how ripe the streets are for a $5 DVD of Wedding Crashers. Owen Wilson is cute!!

The suburbs is watchin’. Get this paper.

“When the picture came up, a pain shot through my groin. And I don’t even have a penis.”
~ Mama

This may be the most painful device I’ve ever seen in my life. Yet it looks oddly like a South African inventress has already come up with this, but I truly don’t know which came first. I suppose the idea of an anti-rape device isn’t really new in theory, it just hadn’t been produced and sold yet. Either way, I’m seeing how this could be both a great and horrible idea.

I think Sonette Ehlers’ version is a bit more humane (considering we’re talking about rapists here), while the Swedish version would be safer for the wearer (he can’t hit/shoot/stab you and try to hold his package together at the same time), but I’m just waiting for the first news report of some woman donning such a device just to be an ass and get back at her husband/boyfriend for cheating or leaving the toilet seat up. Yeah, I said it: some women are just assholes. That being said, I’d still buy one and I don’t think they should be banned from the market, but I think the likelihood of misuse is kinda large. In which case, I vote for the model developed by my Afrikan sista. Also, I would think that there would be an awful lot of potentially-VD-infested blood released into one’s cooch with that second one. We don’t want any of that.

I’m dissapointed that there are activists—especially females—in South Africa condemning women for taking bold, direct action to defend themselves. If Charlene Smith were one of the women who knows that the police and governement are not going to take her rape seriously, I doubt that she would be so quick to cast stones. Educating potential rapists? Yeah, I’m sure that there are some men out there who are simply ignorant to the fact that forcing themselves on women is unnacceptable and disgusting behavior.

I am continually saddened and confused about the poor state of womanhood all over the world. I mean, is there anyplace where we get a break? I can’t think of a single present-day culture that at its’ core values women as equals to men in terms of basic human rights. Which is interesting, considering what we now know scientifically of mitochondrial DNA and the human embryonic development. Oh, you don’t know? Well let me tell you.

There are certain DNA markers that are only passed through ovum, meaning that while your DNA is a mixture from four different grandparents, it’s still almost identical to your maternal grandmother’s. Thus you have the theory (which I think has been proven as fact now) of the Mitochondrial Eve: the most recent common human ancestor. Male (Y-chromosome) DNA inheritance can’t be traced very far at all.

And I learned this yesterday: everyone is female at conception (that’s why men have nipples!) Sperm-contributed sex chromosomes don’t kick into gear until several weeks after conception, so in the meantime a fetus develops based on the mother’s X-chromosome. After a while the other one starts operating and finishes the sexing of the fetus-baby… ever notice that male and female sex organs are physiologically similar? But we’re all female to begin with. Maybe that’s why men are so mean; they hate their inner femininity? I don’t know, but that might make a good psychology study.

Maybe I should switch to Anthropology.

Charlie Murphy says that Chapelle’s Show is no more.

First Rick James dies, now this? WTH is going on here? I call shenanigans. Charlie Murphy ain’t nobody. I think I’d trust an announcement from Comedy Central or maybe Dave himself, but when did Charlie become an official spokesman for the show? Maybe this is all a clever ruse to get everyone dejected and sad, and then when we least expect it, KAPOW! Season 3 Wouldn’t that be fun?

Or maybe I just need to let it go.

At any rate, my wireless internet is back in action, so not all is lost. And I’m growing more elated by the minute about The Big Move… across town.

So I got a call today, or rather my mom got a call today, requesting my presence to temp again at my old job. That would be awesome, because a) maybe they could find a part-time gig for me and b) that would give be just enough money to replace my digital camera. If I replace my camera, I can stop lying to these clubs and telling them that I have a camera (it’s not lying… I have one, it’s just broken) and my karma will heal up and I can pimp this secondary side-hustle. That would be my pocket/travel money for the fall and maybe enough to make a down payment on a G5, which would allow me to step my primary side-hustle into high gear. That would be perfect.

But first, I need my old job to return my returning of their phone calls. Is this a bad thing?

...and so begins the media blitz. First of all, its hilarious to me that this nation can even get into these frenzies as they do over missing people. People go missing every single day, there are starving and homeless children in the streets. Women get beat up and raped every couple of minutes… but the news has been talking about Natalee Holloway for the past two months. Dammit, I know the child’s name without looking it up.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s sad when a person is missing and/or killed. I feel for the parents, families and friends of any person who’s gone missing. I’ve had to deal with that situation in my own family more than once and it’s horrible. BUT the dissapearance of my teenage cousin didn’t make national news. There have been a couple of articles in the national news in the past couple of weeks about this love affair that the American public has with these white damsel in distress stories, so I’m not going to rehash anything that’s already been said by others, and that I’ve been saying since this ridiculousness started several years ago. The bottom line is that the media latches onto a story and rides it as long as the public’s attention will hold, and the general caucasian public loves to fret over white women.

So there’s been little to no coverage of Latoiya Figueroa, the pregnant mother of a seven year old who went missing in Philly a couple of weeks ago. Instead, the soup du jour is a missing white guy (how’s that for variety?) named… get this… George Smith. Can there be a more boring story? I mean, how much mystery and drama can you create out of a man missing from a boat in the middle of the ocean?

But the news has been trying its damndest anyway. Oy vey.

etaHa! Arron McGruder is soooo my soulmate.

So I like clicking the “next blog” button at the top of the page to see where it takes me. I once ended up at the blog of the guy who would be my soul mate if we actually knew each other and he didn’t already have a gilfriend he was trying to marry. Anyway, I started putting in “randomwords”.blogspot.com, and just to check on who had taken the name I was going to use originally, I tried picaflor (means flirt in Spanish, like my AIM id.)

So the first thing I notice is that this person reads The Onion. What are the odds, right? And she writes kinda like I do, only younger and less polished… to make a long story short it took me a good minute and a half to realize that this was, in fact, my old blog from 2002, recounting the weekend of my high school graduation. It’s like opening a little time capsule, or how I would find candy and money from the year before in my coat pockets on the first day of winter. How special.

As far as I can remember, Erin and I did end the fight, the gift count didn’t increase over the summer but went way up after school started, and I didn’t do jack over the summer but hang out with Erin and enjoy myself.

Life hasn’t really changed that much, has it?

These funky children are leaving my home today (spectacular yessss!) and I’m foregoing my morning jog since I’m getting my excercise bike later today. To all who ever slept on The Great Effort, today I sneer. Later, when I am svelte once again, I will laugh in your general direction.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what this Effort is for. It’s definitely to lose this belly weight that I’ve built up over the summer. It’s definitely to have slimmer thighs. I’m not buying any more clothes, so I really need to fit COMFORTABLY into a size 10 by the time I start school and have to wear something other than pajamas and sweats all day. If my clothes were all 12/13’s, I’d probably just stand my ground at 180 and keep it (not) moving.

But I can’t shake the feeling that there is a much more sinister—well maybe not sinister, but at least obsured—reason that I’m so fixated on losing weight. I mean, why do I have the urge to jog at 5 in the morning? (Really, I’m forcing myself not to go out… i’ll have my bike back in just a few more hours) Why do I own an exercise bike? Why am I eating yogurt?? I’ve never had this kind of willpower before and it’s kind of shocking to me.

I definitely want to be more attractive by the time school starts. I know it’s superficial, but I’m starting over with completely new people. I don’t want to be “that girl”... you know, the chubby one with the great sense of humor? At the very least I turn into that girl over time, but I try not to start off that way. Because people do judge you by your looks. I don’t want to come off as sloppy at first bat (as my mother says, “not well groomed”) because that’s not who I am; that’s who I become when I feel like shit and I want to push people away. But that’s not my life anymore, so I don’t have to be that fat girl.

So being superficial is just going to have to do for now. It’s making me get up and move my butt, and meet some of my neighboors. It’s helping me to build a healthy heart and body so I won’t have old, tight muscles and a skippidy heart and I won’t get winded walking up a flight of stairs. I’ve found a skin care regimine that works and I’m sticking to it really well; no more spottiness and having to hide behind tons of makeup and glitter to feel pretty. No more “I can’t go out because I don’t have anything to wear.” And I can finally stop making excuses for not getting this surgery that I desperately need. (Stick a pin in that. I’ll address it later) I just feel kinda close to splendid and I like the direction of progress I’m moving in.

The only thing better than high speed internet is FREE WIRELESS HIGH SPEED INTERNET.

Olde Georgetowne is that jumpoff for real.

Thanks to the unintentional generosity of one of my neighbors, I now have high-speed wireless internet in my mom’s bedroom. I thought I wouldn’t be able to jump this off until August, but the audioblogging commences… NOW! First up: I’m getting conflicting info on Kanye’s Late Registration. First of all, let me tell you that I bought College Dropout the day it dropped and I was highly dissapointed. I mean, by that time I’d downloaded most everything ye had put out up to that point, including his early mixtape stuff. He definitely sold his best beats. I just wasn’t feeling a lot of the tracks and I knew it could have been better—mostly because I’d heard better from him.

After hearing the Diamonds are Forever remix and seeing the video (which is, in fact for the original song, which is completely different) I was kind of getting excited about Late Registration. On a downloading binge last night, I tried to preview it, but what I ended up getting was a bunch of wiggledy wash. Half the tracks labeled as from the album were actually old mixtape tracks. I thought maybe they would be updated and polished, because those are some of my favorites (Home, Half Price), but they were the same old tracks. I think someone just heard something new to them and labeled wrong, and the wrong labels spread. That being said, I think I may be dissapointed again. Nevertheless, there are some gems.

“Soulful” – Ye ft. John Legend “Home” – an old fave

It’s a celebration, bitches.

And I don’t mean cool-funky. I mean stank-funky. Like, don’t warsh yo’ ass funky. WTH is the issue with children that they can’t stand to bathe? I remember being that age and being so worried that I might smell. I carried deoderant in my bookbag and gave myself a little wipedown after outdoor lunch. My cousins—let’s let them remain nameless—are 11, 13, and 14 and they have no problem smelling like a package of spoiled meat. How can they stand to be alone with themselves, much less all holed up with each other?

Now, I’ve been known to skip a shower or two over the weekend… when I’m in my house, by myself, not going anywhere. I surely will not cross the threshold of my home smelling like a wet dog. These kids really feel like it’s alright to take a 45-second shower and roll the f%@# out!! I’m not one to tell somebody else’s kid they stank… BUT you can be sure that if I were the one driving them hither and thither, they would sit their stinking selves in this house—actually, outside this house—until they could wash and meet some kind of standard of cleanliness.

Damn!

I’ve been so freaking heavy lately. Geez. What is wrong with me? Maybe it’s the spectre of Charlotte looming over my head… knowing that when I go back I’m going back to stay for a superhellalong time. I might not leave again until—shudder—the middle of September!

I jest. A little. I love Charlotte; I’m just SCARED. But enough of that, I’m trying to stick to this post-a-day joint. Let’s see… I need anybody who knows anybody who knows anybody in UNC-Charlotte housing to slip a sista’s housing app to the top of the pile. I need IB North America to get on the ball with forwarding my test scores. I need my grandfather to stop forgetting to do the favors I ask him to do. If I can have those three goals achieved, I’ll be made in the shade. Make me lose 7 pounds in 7 days and I’ll be made in an air-conditioned beachfront cabana.

I also need to start looking for a CAR! Bless my wonderful grandparents with their “If you’re gonna get a car, it might as well be a new one,”-hollering selves. My ma just might listen. Believe me, I don’t care what I get; you could give me the keys to a beat up ‘67 Gremlin and I’ll ride that sucker till the wheels and the doughnut fall off. If I can do nothing else, I can pimp something tore up like it’s the new hotness. So please: anyone, everyone—the Paypal link will be up by the end of the week—all I need is like $3500 and that’ll get me a Vespa scooter outright. And that is fiiiiine by me.

On a sadder note, I’m still suffering residual damage from my injury. If you didn’t know (I assume 90% of blog readers 1.know me in person and 2.are reading this like three months after I’ve posted it) I took a fall down a flight of stairs about 3 weeks ago at my aunt’s house. What kind of doofus really falls down the stairs in 2005? The only people who say that are babies and battered wives. I think the doctor thought I was either drunk or a victim of familial abuse but at any rate he set me up with way too many painkillers, muscle relaxers, and anti-inflammatories. I still feel bloated and hazy from all that gunk, and I haven’t taken any for like a week and a half. Urg.

“Some niggas recognize the light but they can’t handle the glare.”
~Common, The Light

Read this article first, then get back at me.

I respect the notion that sometimes a woman has to take the back seat and submit in order to get and keep a happy relationship with a “good black man.”

But I darn sure don’t agree with it.

Now, before I go any further, let the record show I’m single and have been for 99.9% of my life. It’s not that I don’t want want a boyfriend,
it’s that I don’t just want a boyfriend. You see, I tend to get caught in the “friend zone.” You all know that zone. You meet a guy, you become friends, and gradually you become really good friends. Like, help me move out of the dorms friends. Let’s do our laundry together friends. “Hey, could you help me pick out a birthday gift for this girl I really like?” friends.

Yeah, that zone.

I dislike it, but I don’t run from it. I like being a friend, and having good friends. I can’t imagine getting lovey dovey with someone without having been friends first. The problem is that most of the world sees it the other way around. The common advice is “don’t date your friends.” Well, why would I want to spend time with someone who’s not even my “friend?”

I know some people say that the friendship grows later, after you’ve gotten to know one another. But my inclination to swap bodily fluids with someone I don’t already know quite well is reserved for celebrities and soccer players. Sam Spade on the street doesn’t make the cut. If it weren’t for all those Jim Crow laws and lynchings, I probably would have done well being born a couple of generations earlier.

But I wasn’t, so I’m single. Because by the time I know enough about a gentleman to want his tongue in my mouth, he knows enough about me to not want it there. I’ve crossed the line from girlfriend to girl-friend. And boys don’t want to date their friends, no matter how wonderful and consoling and helpful they are. Obviously not, if they’re scared off by a woman who won’t just “take his hand and go with the flow.” Maybe things are different when boys become men, but I doubt it. In any case, I’m just not the type to wait around for someone to take care of me. I’m not saying that I’ll never yearn for companionship; I’m saying that I don’t need any ol’ man. And I am not willing to accept any fellow that I cannot consider my friend.

I’m not ready to just take a hand and follow you; I need you to be secure enough to take my hand and walk with me. If you have to take control of the household because you feel emasculated in the white man’s world, hit the door. I’m defeminized in the white man’s world. But that doesn’t mean I need to put on a petticoat and nurse a baby to feel secure in myself as a girl. It works both ways.

It’s not that I don’t ever want to be with someone, it’s that I’m not willing to settle on one of the biggest decisons of my life. If I’m single forever, I might be a little miffed, but I’ll have no regrets. I know how great I am.

And I always get what I deserve.

the black community can actually get somewhere. That is, according to Rev. Willie Wilson of Union Temple Baptist Church in DC. He expounded upon some of his uplifting opinions earlier this month during a controversial sermon in which he warned that “lesbianism is about to take over our community” and that “Sisters [are] making more money than brothers and it’s creating problems in families… that’s one of the reasons many of our women are becoming lesbians.”

Well call me a monkey’s uncle. I thought it was ‘cause of playing too much sports.

But his opinions don’t surprise me. I have noticed this vaguely misogynistic undertone among many in the black church in recent years; this belief that until now was confined to the pulpit that young black girls are “turning into lesbians” at an alarming rate. Now, I know Florence isn’t the most cutting edge place in the world, and I know that Charlotte is still on the come-up, but I think if there was a lesbian craze, my never-could-get-a-boyfriend self would have at least known about it (or maybe I was too homely for the butch girls, too?) I really don’t know where it’s coming from.

What does surprise me is that this pastor has done work in the past to “build bridges between gay and straight African Americans.” He has instituted a widely acclaimed AIDS outreach program in his church. So why did he choose now to espouse his pretermitive views? Given his role as a leader of the Millions More March it’s as if he’s deliberately trying to alienate the black gay community.

To me, the sermon is more shocking for his imagery than his philosphy. A lot of preachers (and parishioners) agree with his beliefs, but I’m just not used to hearing about strap-ons and butt grease on Sunday morning. But that brings me back to the question I’ve been asking since I was old enough to fashion it: why are so many “Christians” so obsessed with homosexuality?

I hear so many people talking about how they put a stop to their daughters’ “dressing like a boy,” but is anybody stopping their sons from calling girls bitches and ‘hos at every turn? So many parents take issue with their sons playing with their sisters’ dolls or “acting like sissies,” so they turn around and buy them toy guns instead. The real underlying problems are so often neglected, while society only focuses on the superficial, “what’s everybody going to think” type junk.

It really bothers me when I see a girl like Kristin, a precious little girl who will no doubt blossom into a gorgeuos young lady (sooner than we’d all like), relectant to buy a skirt that doesn’t reach her ankles or a summer top that reaches her knees because the boys at school tease and disrespect her about having a shape. Has anyone ever thought that maybe that’s the reason so many young girls, and young ladies, have no desire to date or “mess with” any of the man-boys they meet? Not because they’d rather be with each other, but because they’d rather be alone than deal with a mess of a “man.” Can we focus on raising a generation of men worthy of our daughters, instead of alienating a generation of women stuck between surrender and solitude?

sidebar: was the first one called Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory?

Anyway, I must say that I was surprisingly dissapointed. I really thought that the Roald Dahl-Tim Burton-Johnny Depp trifecta would have produced some wonderfully weird Wonka World on par with… well, everything else Tim Burton does. So what the heck happened?

First of all, let me back up. I am a Wonka fan on all levels. Even when I read the book as a kid, I was delighted with the darkness of it all and the well-veiled social undertones that Dahl was so great at. I was thrilled when I read the book to find that the Oompa Loompas were originally African Pygmies who Wonka “rescued” (best social commentary/character kink evar).The movie never gets old to me because while the visuals and wackiness were so cool to me as a little kid, I enjoyed it even more as I grew older because of Wilder’s deadpan character… the whole thing is just great to me. So I was expecting this movie to be a older, darker Wonka.

And I think that may be what Tim Burton wanted too… but it didn’t quite get there. I think they tried to make it too similar to the first movie. I think the studio pushed the whole package from “dark and witty” to “summer kids’ blockbuster”. I thought this would be a movie that I’d enjoy talking about later and watching again. But it just wasn’t. I even liked Wonka’s backstory and the casting was perfect But the plot just fell through.

The musical numbers were overrought and gimmicky and Depps delivery only shone in those beginning moments where these potentially beautiful and interesting plot points started off… he came off goofy and stilted in the other 70% when those plot points dissapeared into thin air and never developed. I feel like I should have walked out of the theater feeling like I did when I saw Edward Scissorhands, but instead felt like I’d seen one of Disney’s latest non-Pixar animated gumball flicks. Depp was perfect for what this version should have been, but came off goofy much of the time because of what the film ended up being.

I am not daunted, though.Corpse Bride looks delightful.

“It’s not the Klu Klux Klan killing [black folks]. It’s a hamburger and fries.”
~ some man on the Cousin Jeff Chronicles (y’all have seen the BET commercial)

So, did the hamburger jump in your mouth? Did the fries run you down a dark alley and force themselves upon your gut? I wasn’t aware that Pepsi was burning crosses on people’s lawns in 2005. So tell me how the HELL the epidemic of obesity is killing black people like a white supemacist terrorist group.

I seriously take offense to that because it’s such an UGH statement. I don’t even have an adjective for it… only an exasperated sigh. People are fat because they eat a lot and don’t move. There are a lot of fat people in America. Some of them are black, and some of them are white. I daresay that this might be one area where we all are right on par with each other. So what is this big argument about fatness and black people (especially poor black people)? It’s not about race, it’s not about class… its about YOUR LAZY FAT ASS!

Black cuisine in America has remained pretty much unchanged since, like, slavery. We love delicious, fried, fatty, grease laden stuff. We eat fatback and chitlins and leafy green vegetables stewed with bacon strips. We save grease drippings and use them as a flavoring aid. I’ve eaten more than one mayonaise or sugar sandwich in my day, and that was in the lean time. But if I’m not mistaken, my grandma cooked the same stuff for her kids. And her grandma cooked the same for hers. So the diet obviously isn’t the problem—it’s that instead of being locked outside after breakfast, coming back for lunch, and having to be dragged back in at dinner, I spend more than 8 hours a day in front of one kind of screen or another and eat my fatty dinner in the chair I’ve been sitting in all day. Before my generation, there were “school clothes” and “play clothes” because playing required going outside and doing active things that would get your clothes dirty. That’s why kids—all races of kids—are growing fatter and fatter every year.

“But they fill the hoods with fast-food restaurants, and healthy food is so expensive. Low income people can’t afford to eat healthily on limited incomes.”

The last time I checked, a steady diet of fast food is much more expensive than comprehensive grocery shopping. The cost of 2 Happy meals will fund enough ingredients to feed a family of four and maybe have some leftovers. Ramen noodles are about the cheapest food the world has ever known, and trust me—they will not get you fat.

And struggling with obesity doesn’t even sound like a problem that poor people should have. Think about it. If you’re low on disposable income, you might be taking public transportation, so you should be walking at least a little bit from bus stop to bus stop. If you’re living in a tenement you damn sure shouldn’t have any video games or high speed internet, so what the heck are you sitting in the house for (ain’t too much to watch on air tv)? There’s your daily exercise right there. So clearly, if you’re poor and fat, you have way too much going on in your life. Prioritize much?

What to Do When Your Mom Discovers Your Blog

My mom has discovered mine (formerly on LJ) and I was greeted with “You sure do curse a lot in your little online journal.” Then, “Write some more stuff. You’re funny.” I guess my life is a semi-open book, and I really don’t care. I assume that anything posted on the internet, or put into writing for that matter, is fair game to be found by anyone so why the heck would I post anything online that I wouldn’t want anyone else to see?

I guess that brings me to the whole point of keeping a “blog” in the first place: I talk a lot, and I have more than a handful of friends with whom I’ll share my life experiences and tales and triumph and woe. It’s easier to write things down than say them out loud anyway (and I like having a permanent record of my fleeting thoughts) so why not put them out there so that whoever cares to listen can… listen? So there’s the answer to that question, Courtney and Erin. See, I’ve killed two birds with one stone already.

Why the move from LJ? Because I also like witty banter, and that’s a little hard since most of my journal-reading friends don’t have LiveJournals. And plus, I just wanted to be different.

Bless His Soul, but people have been telling Michael Jackson for years: Stop The Love That You Save—it’s Bad! But Michael always replies, Leave Me Alone! It’s just Human Nature! Why you Wanna Trip on Me? I thought Mike had had enough of the Young Folks, but obviously not. Another little boy said Mike asked him How Funky Is Your Chicken and tried to Reach In. Mike was able to claim We’re Just Good Friends and make all the other accusers Beat It, but this P.Y.T. said Doctor, My Eyes! The DA was waiting for a chance to say That’s What You Get and this time they really socked it to him. They said it’s Too Late to Change the Time and it turned out that this Private Affair was going to the courts. Everyone was in a State of Shock. Michael’s always been a Dreamer—he’s a master of the Art of Madnes—but is this kind of Torture really part of his Style of Life? It was getting really hard to continue to Blame it on the Boogie. Some people started thinking that maybe Michael really was In the Closet, but others said just listen to what the lawyers Say Say Say.

While Michael’s family continued to Keep the Faith, the media did a Jump For Joy. You know how they always Wanna Be Startin’ Something. While he’s showing up in pajamas, his attorneys were working Night and Day to keep him living his life Off the Wall. I know it made them want to Scream because it was like he just didn’t want to see the Man in the Mirror. He pulled it together just enough though (maybe Janet helped him to Trust a Try and keep it under Control). He realized the situation was Dangerous and he was really on the verge of being Gone Too Soon.

The case was a real Thriller—I turned into a Tabloid Junkie and I had to Get on the Floor once the verdict came on. If he ended up being guilty it would have really Rocked my World, because if Mike had really done all those things, I just didn’t want To Know. The whole time I was thinking about the mother—if she really thought Blood was on the Dance Floor, why didn’t she Jam like a Speed Demon instead of saying Enjoy Yourself? If there was really something going on, she would have asked her baby Who’s Loving You and said 2 Bad, we’re Standing in the Shadows of Love Darling Dear, but I’m gonna take a Stand and Walk On away from the Boogie Man. But she didn’t…I think it was all about the Money for Dirty Diana.

Well, Can You Feel It? The prosecution had to Give It Up because the jury’s Reflections said it doesn’t matter if he’s Black or White. There’s too much doubt for us to say Who Is It, so that’s how it goes, you Never Can Say Goodbye. They just couldn’t make this Moving Violation stick. Ho How Happy the Jackson family was, but I think they only said I’ll Be There until they could get over this Bridge Over Troubled Water. In a few days they’ll all be Going Back to Indiana and Michael will see that The Love I Saw In You was Just a Mirage.

I tell you, Mike sure is a Smooth Criminal, cause now he’s about to Ease on Down the Road. I’ma give him One More Chance… I just hope This Time Around that he will Heal His World, Remember the Time and Stop While He’s Had Enough. I’ll Bet You he takes this as a warning: You’re Gonna Change Your Style and stop Living Together with Ben and Billie Jean. The next time he runs up talkin about I Can’t Help It, he’ll be sayin’ Baby Be Mine on cellblock D. And you know what I’ll say? That’s What You Get.

I’m a colored girl with a hell of a lot to say. If you are too,

1. get the button (hotlinking is ok, but you might want to download your own in case my server goes wacky.)

    

2. leave a comment (with a link to your site, of course.) and I’ll list you here.

I like reading what others have to say, even if I don’t always agree. Makes life interesting.