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

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

DON’T!
Don’t you ever touch someone’s baby!
Unless given specific permission, don’t do it.
Let me be more specific.
DON’T TOUCH MY BABY!

Look, I don’t know where your hands have been. You might have just come out of a public restroom and god forbid your finger broke through the thin public restroom toilet tissue when you cleaned yourself. Assuming you do that. Then when other people are in there with you, you pretend to wash your hands but it doesn’t matter cause you touched that dirty door knob on the way out. This is the stuff that runs though my mind when your smiling face approaches wanting to touch my child.

Exception: Old women CAN touch my baby. I love when old women touch my baby. The things they say are so beautiful and wise. However …old men. YOU CAN NOT TOUCH MY BABY. Sorry, that’s just the way it is. This old man tried to touch my baby at the farmers market… I saw him coming a mile away with my newly parental super powers. It wasn’t so much that he was old but he was nasty. Like he had that old man skin disease, scaly, scabby undefined old MJ thriller S#!@ all over his forearms and he tried to smile as he was reaching in. I abruptly stared into his eyes and burned his soul then I turned the baby in the other direction. His potential grope tuned into a congratulations to which I responded with a giddy school girl “thank you.”

A friend of mine told me a horror story about when her child was small, random folks would try to kiss her. I asked, what did you do? She said she told them that the baby was sick. That seemed to work. I think I’ll just go that extra mile and tell them he has baby herpes or really bad breath.

Here is some sound advice from Jay Smooth. His blog is always thoughtful and informative check him out on youtube or at his site. ENJOY.

p.s. to whom it my concern, we need to talk

What if I told you that i saw a game that involved a character that had dark skin with big red lips and was wearing only a grass skirt? What if I told that he also had a bone through his nose and the goal of the game was to out run a rhino? What year would you think these images from? Perhaps the turn of the century, perhaps early 40’s or 50’s.

Well folks you’d be wrong those images where from the year 2007 and the place those images were seen was on a banner ad on MYSPACE!

There’s more than one - in another, a similar character stands opposite a gorilla, with the goal of the game to push a coconut out of a tree.

If the ad were on a smaller site perhaps I could manage to be less concerned. But this site has captured the imagination of millions of people around the world and whether consciously or not they influence the perception of those people depicted. I know that these are concerns of myspace as indicated by their very detailed process of screening and the ability to report if some one is lewd, crass, offensive or otherwise insensitive. So imagine my shock when I didn’t get so much as a “we’ll look into it’ and got pretty much the same reaction when I sent the complaint to other sites whom I thought could help make my point.

The silence was deafening. Was I crazy?

[Read more]

Dear folks at Guitar Hero,

First of all I want to say that me and my wife really dig your game. All the artistry, craft and fun that went into it shine through. I appreciated the behind the scenes extras… I really felt like I got a feel for the staff making it all happen. We actually bought a second controller which is a bit of a big deal for us as we are not “gamers” in the conventional sense.

As a generally happy customer I just wanted to inquire about what I felt was a lack of black characters and songs with black folks behind the strings. [Read more]

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.

From disturbing observations to oven mitt eulogies, here are the ramblings and ruminations of a writer of color as she examines the social nuances of everyday life within - and without - big city limits.

Now Playing: Lemme Ghetta
By Hamida Kinge
5-23-06

“Won Ton Phooeyyyyy” the young man says in a barely-audible tone, with an accent lifted straight out a vintage Kung-Fu flick. It’s the kind of thing he might say louder if in the presence of his friends, but right now he seems to be no more than thinking aloud, as if subconsciously singing a familiar jingle.

As he enters the Chinese take-out joint, the man — 20-something with red-brown skin and a long, sandy-colored beard — is dressed de rigeur for the
part: army fatigue jacket, white tee and shin-length, wide-legged jeans accented by construction Tims.

He heads for the foggy, plexiglass window and upon reaching it, says wryly to the cashier, “Lemme  Ghetta Philly Blunt.” [Read more]

here is a NY Times article about the matter.

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An accelerating exodus of American-born blacks, coupled with slight declines in birthrates and a slowing influx of Caribbean and African immigrants, have produced a decline in New York City’s black population for the first time since the draft riots during the Civil War, according to preliminary census estimates.

press ‘more’ to read the rest here. or see the original piece @ the nytimes.com [Read more]

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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.

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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?

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.