“iPad” by pierre bennu
photo taken by my wife’s iPhone

(click ‘read more’ for bigger picture) [Read more]

Ok so couple of months ago I became a father.
And I saw it. You know IT !
Birth!
Like a person come out of a person.
As you read this you I can feel you’re not amazed by this. Somewhere in you there is something saying “this happens all the time around the world” or “ I can see a birth on one of these medical shows on cable.”
But maybe you should say the phrase slowly 3 times and really think about it
“A  FULLY FORMED PERSON WAS PUSHED OUT OF ANOTHER PERSON”
I was not bought to tears of joy nor was I terrified it was just AWE. Like watching Cirque de Soleil rehearse. Puzzled… maybe that’s the word I’m looking for? How is this possible? Either way I mention this all to say something to all artists out there.

You are no longer allowed to say that you are  “pregnant with an idea” or that you “gave birth to something ” EVER! [Read more]

I remember the first time I saw George Carlin. I was maybe eight years old, and was flipping though channels at my father’s house. I came across this bearded man speaking to a large crowd of young people. In my mind he was a professor and those were his students… my father being a professor at Hunter College at the time was my only point of reference for that dynamic. He seemed almost too smart to be a comic. I remember watching him & being fascinated by the way he used words and thinking what school is this? Clearly he is teaching but what is the subject? And how fun it must be to be one of his students.

He will be remembered.

He left so much good stuff to for us to marvel at.

I would’ve loved to have been able to tell him to his face how much what he had to say and how he said it meant to me.

He is one of the greats.

i keep an old hotmail account. it used to be my main one, back in the early days of my internet life, and was a bit of a gangster situation because it was just my-name-at-hotmail, which clearly signified that i was ahead of the curve with getting email addresses, wasn’t i? no “my-name-plus-zip-code” or “name-plus-year-of-graduation” hotmail address for me, dammit. i am vanguard nerd. i am O.G. emailer. who runs this hotmail world, beeyotch? i do.

over time, of course, it became clogged with spam and useless, and besides in the interim i had gotten a yahoo address (way more storage; i used it to sign up to mailing lists i’d likely never read), built my own website and had my own domain-based address (way more fancy, even almost professional; it became my main address) and even most recently, gotten a gmail account (another moment of not being able to resist the uber nerdy chic since i got it super early when it was invite-only) (and yes, i know this matters to no one other than me, and only in that secret cyber place in my heart that is vain about my tech prowess. but don’t worry because really, that’s not what matters. it’s how you USE it.)

so, the hotmail had become mainly a place to let myspace send its constant friend request emails, and it sat there collecting mailing lists i no longer read but feel nostalgic enough about to not unsubscribe from.

it also housed like, 10 years or so of my early internet communication history. if i ever wanted to chronicle the trajectory of certain relationships, revisit correspondence between myself and my sister when one or the other of us was living abroad, refresh for myself just exactly why my various exes are just that - i was secure in the knowledge that the historical effluvia was archived there for my personal posterity.

and then.

i go to login one time to doublecheck an amazon order status, and those bastards had dismantled my account! there was a screen where i had to reactivate it, and they tried to play like it was just some routine maintenance shit b/c i hadn’t logged in in 30 days or whatever… and so i click the button that said, “yeah, assholes, i DO want this account, what kind of jerks are you guys anyway?”

and when i get in, i see that the entire history was wiped clean.

brand new.

inbox at zero.

spitwads.

.
.

inspired by the hubbub around 3-6 mafia’s oscar win.

copied from a comment made on kenji’s blog.

b/c it is late and i am a lazy bastard.

————————-

for the record, i was disgruntled wayyy before the oscar win. black culture’s strange fascination with pimpery is as inexplicable to me as its delight with black men cross dressing as their own grandmothers. i don’t get it. and i think it all speaks to a discomfort and dysfunction we have around gender and sexuality that we really need to deal with in a responsible way if we are going to survive with our collective minds, families, intact.

but at the end of the day, i definitely think songs like the oscar-winner are a result of a deeper issue, not the cause.

or, is that a chicken and egg sort of distinction?

i most often fall asleep with my face inside my husband’s neck; in that warm delicious crook where his chin and shoulder meet. the rest of us is often similarly entwined, with assorted variance required by mood temperament and pre-sleep activity; but this fact remains nearly constant. last night, (i had previously drunk coffee and was slightly wired) (and, to be honest, it was actually 7am this morning, when i finally wound down/finished work to an extent that i felt comfortable getting into the bed) his pulse seemed thunderous to me. insistent. i was struck with his intense aliveness, the juiciness and fluidity and solidness and heat of him. and felt in the core of me a huge gratitude and awe for this. but also felt like there was no way i could sleep with that much tireless rhythm right in my ear. i turned. and this is a thing about him that i love - his ability to have entire interaction and conversations with me in his sleep - when i gave him my back he curled right into me and pressed and held and instead of his bold intense heartbeat it was his deep and sweet breath in my ear. and i slept.

1. there are boxes everywhere. i mean, EVERYWHERE. who would have thunk that we had this much crap? it is all over the place. we are in need of major storage for books, VHS movies, DVDs, socks. but the good feeling is, it’s OUR HOUSE!! we could pave the floors in books, VHS movies, DVDs and socks and who could tell us shit? nobody. nobody could tell us shit, that’s who.

(maniacal laughter, insert here)

2. but still, inside my own need for equilibrium and daily beauty, there exists a situation where living on a carpet of accumulated crap is not acceptable. neither is it ok for said stuff to teeter at us from where it stands, stacked up against the wall in boxes we have yet to unpack because we have visions of the wall being a different color (that we have yet to choose) behind the bookshelves we have yet to design and build with tools we have yet to own and lumber we have yet to purchase.

i think we are going to have to suck it up and go to IKEA

but i say all that to say: aside from daily work, and catching up on the work that is backlogged from actually moving, is the daily work of reinstating order so that we can live and be creative in this new and wonderful space.

3. there is also the fact that this is the 2nd of november. i’m already 48 hrs behind when it comes to participating in NationalNovelWritingMonth, a national occasion of GROUPTHINK wherein thousands upon thousands of procrastination-prone individuals gather virtually to pretend to be writing novels, and a few thousand of them actually do so.

each november for the past, oh, say about 4 or 5 years, i have noted this passing fact with amusement, wistfulness, paranoia, dread, excitement, and wishful thinking. i use it as an occasion to pull out the various semi-conceived projects that are laid carefully in tissue-paper-lined compartments of my hard drive, blow off the dust, and leaf through their yellowed, crackling pages with fondness and pleased surprise. wow, i wrote THAT? i wish there was more of it. i’d sure like to read it.

it’s hard for me to imagine being the same person who crafted those words that i find. i know that i did, because i recognize the brainwork. but my mind has fallen out of the writing habit and that’s a problem.

NaNoWriMo is a neat idea b/c it consists of lots of [virtual] peer pressure and support and idea sharing and a place to go and whine about not having ideas or whatever; and is driven by the idea that no matter what, you should crank out a substantial amount of words every day, accumulating 50,000 by a chosen date, BECAUSE YOU CAN, DAMMIT.

but this is the thing: i am not so good with peer pressure. i am hard-wired against the grain and this becomes a problem when it comes down to certain circumstances, like following trends, joining food co-ops, popping my cherry earlier than i’m ready in a way i will come to regret, or joining mass writing movements. i have always found it difficult if not impossible to do any of it. perhaps this inability is linked to my distance from my writer-self?

*big dramatic sigh*

i really do wish that bitch would finish something though. it’d probably be good.

this is not some *hypothetical* perfect boot that i am imagining to exist out there in the ether, like some mythical ‘mr. right’ for whom i am sitting here, alone, wistful and pining away.

i am not the pining type.

this was a real pair of boots, i know they exist. i know where they are. i touched them, even. i smelled the leather. i didn’t try them on, though; there was no use torturing ourselves about it.

you know what i mean? the attraction was there, nearly electric in its intensity. we knew we belonged together, but alas, the price was prohibitive. it was not to be, my money being presently tied up in other investments. it wasn’t them, it was me. it was nothing personal, i just wasn’t ready to make that kind of committment.

we tried not to be melodramatic about it. we didn’t drag it out. we acknowledged our connection, and turned our faces forward, moved forth into our seperate futures, no regrets. it had to be this way. i sang ‘next lifetime’ under my breath and marched on.

(music up…..

….end scene ROTFL)

i am not given to this kind of behavior with little cause. it doesn’t happen often and when it does, i take it seriously. there was only *one* other pair of sole mate shoes with which i had an equally dramatic & similarly doomed relationship.

it was five years ago, and i still remember them vividly. it was in london… a city full of mist and cobblestones and strangely angled streets and much mystery. and amazing shoes.

this pair was an unassuming oxford… the sole perhaps a trifle thicker than classic. perhaps the toe turned up a little, rounded? reminding one of chaplin, crib shoes, elves? the leather was matte & black, so soft it looked delicately weathered. the cut work was hand-stitched. with *brown* sitches, gleaming against the shoe like old pennies.

they were so beautiful, i just had to stop and stare. introduced myself through the shop window at first, being shy, but moving in soon enough, pulled inexorably to them, my earth-tone-addicted flower child self twanging in response to a nudge from an inner dandy rearing its dapper head.

what would i do with a pair of english oxfords? i’d have to rock purple organza many-tiered skirts and denim jackets torn off at the waist and buttoned tight over antique camisoles. i’d have to wear turquoise and white, and have embroidery at my hemlines. i’d have to abandon my many favorite t-shirts and step outside of the cotton jersey/denim family to clothe myself. eeek!

plus i was in london, in college, and had my first credit card ever. i was still cringing off the joke i’d played on myself with the exchange rate and a pair of buster brown-esque wooden platform sandals (which worked with my tshirt aesthetic, let me tell you, but freaked me out when i saw the statement. those were HOW MUCH in american money? LOL)

with the sandals, see, i could continue dressing like i did in second grade, which is *really* my aesthetic preference. all my fashion fantasies aside, my inner child is skipping down sesame street in bellbottom blue corduroys and a striped turtleneck. it is risk-free to follow her there.

but hand-stitched english oxfords… that’s changing the game a little. that means i was going back to atlanta and completely re-examining my wardrobe. sorry, i should have written ‘wardrobe’ in quotes. as in, “so-called wardrobe.” english oxfords meant making whole different level of committment to the act of dressing myself.

was i ready? could i do it?

puh-leeze. i dropped those shoes like a hot potato and bought a pair of british adidas.

yesterday, from three different people, i got that email forward.

you know the one.

“you’ll lose your hotmail if you don’t forward this to 10 — 20 — 30 of your friends and also you’ll catch the plague and get yr kidney stolen and die but if you forward it bill gates will send you a check for $4,835.93, i know because my cousin got hers!”

we’ve all gotten this annoying-ass missive at one time or another, usually from some well-meaning and friendly soul who thinks they’re doing a good & helpful thing.

they are not. they are killing electronic trees & cluttering up my inbox with cyber trash. this morning i was inspired to commision an educational initiative from honeychild-hates-forwards, inc.

what follows is a couple of unmitigated truths of email, hoaxes, and the art and science of forwarding nonsense to innocent cyber-bystanders. this information is good to know in general but has particular good use as a guideline for what not to send to ME. please feel free to forward THIS around, far and wide.

1. if something increases font size three times in the course of the email, it is ALMOST CERTAINLY BULLSHIT.

don’t send it to me.

2. if it tells you you have to forward it to 10 people, 20 people, or “everyone in your address book,” it is DEFINITELY BULLSHIT.

don’t send it to me.

3. if it threatens you with the loss of your email, or promises you money from some corporation, but doesn’t come directly from the corporation or service provider in question, it is NECESSARILY, OBVIOUSLY, INDUBITABLY BULLSHIT. nothing somebody forwards you is or can be official correspondence, it can never be traced by the company supposedly involved, it is NOT real, and it is annoying as hell.

don’t send it to me.

4. if it promises good luck, or threatens bad luck, it’s KARMICALLY EVIL BULLSHIT.

don’t send it to me.

aaarrrghhghghg!!!

this has been a public service announcement brought to you by jamyla-hates-forwards, inc.

fooey on that person, whoever it was. i mean, what is the purpose of cramps? what is their reason? is it about fitness? am i building hidden muscle power in some secret velvet place? my body is doing something fabulous & necessary and kind of clever, after all; purging and renewing its very cells! why should this not be a fun time filled with wonder and the delicate crystal song of new electrons dancing?

i read somewhere once that our bodies do not retain sense-memory of pain. we just can’t do it. you know those little orgasm after-shocks that rock you an hour after a Good One? no such physiological equivalent for ouches. once the pain is gone, it is GONE. perhaps this is how women come to give birth to more than one child. (hee hee.) more relevant to my own experience, perhaps this is why each month i sing the same broken lament: in the face of sudden & always somehow surprising crampage, i mourn my absentmindedness and demand of myself the IMMEDIATE development of better pain management skills.

i imagine it needn’t be that hard. i imagine it would simply require greater attention paid to the dosage/schedule/timing of the soup of random chemicals i ingest for two days every month.

i’m talkin the good stuff. ibuprofen, acitometophen, aspirin, naproxin sodium. sometimes combined in strange and intoxitating ways with that kick-starter, caffeine, by the people at MIDOL or EXCEDRIN (yeah daddy, talk those sweet chemical compounds to me.)

now, normally i’m not a huge supporter of the medical/industrial complex in general. i much prefer unadvertised and organic substances that can be plucked from the fertile earth and swallowed, smoked, steeped and sipped, or used as a fabulous conditioning rinse, depending.

but once a month, like many other Good Witches In The West with extremely low pain thresholds, i take my meds. i pop them when i feel the twinge, then languish in agony until it’s gone. and in that moment, that’s my only thought. not, ‘fight the power’ or ‘affordable healthcare for all’ or ‘the earth is our mother, she has all i need,’ but ‘GET THE PAIN GONE.’

and then once it’s gone, because i am a dunderhead, i forget i’m supposed to be in pain at all and go gallavanting around living my ordinary life of constant discovery and joy in everything. until WHAM-O, back it comes and i’m like, “oh, that’s right, my period just started. my uterus is doing stuff, huh? i should’ve probably taken another one of those little pills like twenty minutes ago, and then i wouldn’t be curling slowly into a fetal ball right now.”

o, cruel attention span, thou art mine own worst enemy.

grumble grumble.