Good Hair

Tags

hair, Lessons Learned, racism

I am very intrigued by Chris Rock’s new documentary, “Good Hair” coming out Oct 9, 2009. I am sure the take-away is that whether your hair is good or not is a matter of perspective…okay, and…? What else? We have been saying that about black skin tone, black features (nose, lips, hips), and black hair since the ’70s. What else can get us to move beyond really caring what folks think about our style and better yet allowing us to all be okay with rows, weaves, permed, natural, etc as an expression of the spectrum of what is beautiful as black?

I was always told as a little girl that I had “good hair” and always thought…doesn’t everybody with hair have good hair? I mean, unless you’re bald (not by choice), I thought you had good hair. As I got older I understood what they meant: it meant that my hair was long, shiny, and bouncy…not white hair, but closer than other black folks’ hair. This has nothing to do with me and more to do with the fact that my great-grandmother was Native American.

Anyone who knows me knows I have a love/hate relationship with my hair…as I think most black women do. My grandmother permed it at 16, which sent my mother over the edge. I now wish she hadn’t. But she’d bought into the “straight is beautiful” idea and thought it was time for me to look like a young woman, not a little girl.

I went natural a few years ago but couldn’t find hypo-allergenic, fragrance free products that worked for me. Perhaps I should’ve persevered but living in White-ville, CA it’s hard enough to find a perm much less any products for natural black hair. Now it’s back to being permed…and I have determined to continue India.Arie’s mantra, “I am not my hair”

Its time for us to redefine who we be
You can shave it off like a South African beauty
Or get in on lock like Bob Marley
You can rock it straight like Oprah Winfrey
It’s not what’s on your head, It’s what’s underneath…

 

Seattle

Visited Seattle for business and squeezed in a few hours of pleasure while there. The weather was gorgeous and so was the campus of UW. I got these pics of the Space Needle and the shore.

I was in town for an education retreat where I needed to put on the old charm…only thing is, that is not me! Well, I did my best and made some connections which I hope to bolster and that will help me in the future. Funny thing was I really impressed a colleague of my adviser when he found out that I moved to NY without knowing anyone to do this research.

I wish I could say it was courage. It was ignorance, not thinking. I really didn’t let myself dwell on the fact that I didn’t know anyone or I would’ve changed my mind. I told myself I could do anything for a year….

The wretched living situation I ended up in changed that! I cannot do anything for a year and thought I was really going to need psychiatric drugs…no kidding. But I am in a new place (physically and mentally) and feeling like I can do this for a year. Now if the research would just work out…

It never hurts to ask

Tags

jazz

Okay so, I went to see Esperanza Spaulding on Wednesday at the Highline Ballroom. We got there late (my fault), and were seated at an undesirable table with two strangers. There was a better table in eye-shot and I asked twice if we could be seated there. I was told that that area was closed and not the host’s section. Just a few minutes later, some folks just sat down at the aforementioned table. (Eye rolling should ensue at this point. How dare them just come in and sit there without being seated!) Then the host (who told me it wasn’t his area) sat other people in that area.

So, I stop him and remind him that I initially asked to be seated there. He tells me to go look and see if the tables in that area have a better view than where we were currently seated….well, of course now the good tables were gone…and of course, I did not bite my tongue but told him that the table I wanted to sit at initially was a great view of the stage.

And what happened next is SWEEEET!

The host takes us back downstairs (oh, did I mention we were on the balcony level and that Esperanza Spaulding is about 4 feet tall anyway so from the balcony she’d be a tiny speck with a big ‘fro) and seats us in a booth in spitting distance of the stage.

It never hurts to ask.

Autumn: a period of maturity

Tags

growing, maturity, seasons

I love, love, love fall (note the new header to my blog!) The crispness in the air, football games, county fairs, blankets, coats, and sweaters…I just love fall. I love watching the leaves change and seeing nature show off in technicolor. People on the west coast try to get me to love the weather there, but I have to have seasons. They help me to demarcate progress and change and generally give me a kick in the butt to enjoy the moment, to live fully in the moment. A Merriam-Webster definition of autumn is a period of maturity. And I am feeling that God is using this time to mature me. I am praying for wisdom and maturity during this season of the year and of my life. As the wise King Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes 3:1, “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven”.

randomness

So I got back home yesterday after 12 days, 3 hotels, two LONNG flights, shuttles, subways, and Amtrak trains. What random things I realized about myself on this trip.

I am a country girl. You can keep the city. Give me a big yard, wide open spaces, fishing, and slow Sundays full of visiting family and friends.

I am a crier. Really. I make my own self cry thinking about my friends and family.

I neeeeed people. Not seeing someone I knew for a week nearly sent me over the edge.

I have no patience for adults who can’t follow simple directions. When the fasten seatbelt light is on, this does not mean get up and walk around the plane.

NYers are not as rude as folks make them out to be. NY is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

Middle schoolers are loud. Really loud.

I love kids. I miss teaching.

Teachers’ lounges can be toxic.

There is no place like home.

Absence does make the heart grow fonder.

I am directionally challenged, but I can read a map!

sleep eludes me…

I never thought I would be one of those people up at 3am blogging, but here I am. Since beginning school, sleep has been coy, shy, and hard to woo. Tonight is one of those nights where she entices and then leaves me after a brief tryst. She is run off sometimes by harassing, loud-mouth concerns that crowd my brain, taking over her space. She doesn’t like to share, but doesn’t fight to hold her ground. I try to help her but today we both lost and I sit in bed blogging and watching HGTV….they should take house #2. It’s a no-brainer. The first thing they’ll have to do is get rid of that hideous wallpaper…

 

Throwing my hat in the ring…

Tags

politics, racism, sexism

I generally refrain from speaking about politics because as a conservative Christian living on the planet called “California,” it leads to strange gazes and talk of lowered intelligence.

Yet I read an op-ed pieceby Maureen Dowd in NY Times this morning that is still nagging at me and I must write about it. I must admit that I enjoy reading Dowd. I love her sharp, sarcastic tone (I can’t imagine why that would appeal to me…). I also must say that I am neither Republican nor Democrat, so this entry in no way states my leaning politically; it does, however, speak to my strong reaction to issues of race and gender.

Today, Dowd wrote, “With Obama saying the hour is upon us to elect a black man and Hillary saying the hour is upon us to elect a woman, the Democratic primary has become the ultimate nightmare of liberal identity politics. All the victimizations go tripping over each other and colliding, a competition of historical guilts.

People will have to choose which of America’s sins are greater, and which stain will have to be removed first. Is misogyny worse than racism, or is racism worse than misogyny?

As it turns out, making history is actually a way of being imprisoned by history. It’s all about the past. Will America’s racial past be expunged or America’s sexist past be expunged?”

I want to take issue with this idea that once a woman or a black person enters the Office of President then misogyny and racism are expunged. If emancipation, voting rights, civil rights, equal opportunity employment and housing laws haven’t done it what makes us think that ONE person in the Office of President will do it? I am again befuddled by our shallow understanding of deep ingrained prejudices and what it will take to turn the tides.

Staying TruBlue

So it’s the day of the first big game and we go in with a -2 given that both Frasor and Lawson will be out. Yet I am still staying truBlue…they were my Heels when we had the drought between Dean and Roy and they’re still my boys. Perhaps the home court advantage will boost us. Whatever the score, we all know it’s gonna be a great game.

My consolation is good always triumphs over evil (aka Heels over the Devils). Perhaps not in this one battle, but we always win the war!!! Love them Heels!

Sit down somewhere

Those of you raised as I was have heard this statement several times from the adults over you….”Chile, get somewhere and sit down!” In this media-saturated time, I wish many of the people in media had grown up with that advice, or would at least take it now. I have a running list of folks that I wish would just get somewhere and sit down. One who has finally done so is John Edwards. Thank Heavens!

Yet there are still a multitude of folks who need to mind their own business and stay out of other peoples. Case in point, Dr. Phil. Phil, get somewhere and sit down. You are not helping anyone. Another: Juanita Bynum (those of you not close to the Evangelical Christian ministries might not know who I am referring to, nonetheless she REALLY needs to get somewhere).

Now that I am on the other end of the advice….I realize this advice is for a particular busy-body type who either 1) needs to deal with their own issues and get out of others’ business, or 2) they are all in something that’s over their heads, out of their realm of knowledge or purview so to speak. This latter one was my problem (and that of many oldest/only children). It is the problem of sticking our noses into adult conversations and losing our minds for a minute and trying to put our two cents in. At this point, an adult would generally look at us and tell us to go sit down somewhere.

Only if others had taken this same advice….

Sunday nights…

There were Sunday nights when I taught high school that I got irritable as the sun set and I realized that my weekend was coming to an end and I would have to go to work the next day. And as a former high school student informed me after a summer stint of teaching, as if I didn’t know, “teaching is hard work!”

I feel that way now as I look at the clock and realize that I must report to the office tomorrow. Yet I am a bit more irritable as there really is no off-time being a graduate student. (I know it sounds like I am complaining…I am, but I do realize how blessed I am.) Work is always waiting, lurking, hovering nearby only to be pushed aside for brief moments. I have come to realize that I have complicated my existence by going to graduate school. Not that other people’s lives aren’t complicated, but I sometimes yearn for my first job where I could take hour lunches, come in late and leave early, where I left work at work and didn’t think about it from Friday evening until I drove in on Monday morning.

What’s funny is that during that job I was SO EXTREMELY bored out of my mind. And I would be bored now, but it would be nice for a little while. I guess I just need a vacation. A sabbatical. Unfortunately those only go to tenured profs….gotta long ways to go.