One Eyed Wonder

Don't be nasty.


Sorry! I haven't updated this week due to the start of Spanish 201 (much harder than 102!), HUGE Board Meeting for my internship (much bigger than I assumed), and a scratched cornea (...aaaarrgh?). 


MEANWHILE, I've decided to switch my "I'm Impressed By" segment to "I'm Inspired By" because the things I learn from the people I write about here are more than impressive, they inspire me. And really, who cares what I'm impressed by? That just feels kind of pretentious.


I'll be continuing the old segment under the new heading starting with my former roommate/good friend/ AMAZING designer of fashion, **Allison Daly** 


She's amazing and you won't want to miss what she's working on. Trust me.


See you soon, loves!

Like Me

I love Target. 

Like, love it. I love their clothes, shoes, accessories, even their Archer Farms food brand. Target makes my day, most days.

Yet, I have a little beef with Target. Well, really, with clothing companies in general, especially those who produce graphic t-shirts. 

Why can't I find a graphic t-shirt with a famous black woman on it?

Yes, I could order one on-line or buy one at a concert, but why can't I just walk into a Target, Macys, or JC Penny, and grab one like any Marilyn Monroe devotee?

Please, don't say that it's because of supply and demand and not enough people will buy them. I would buy 15 for myself, and my good friend Charla would buy another 15 if Lena Horne's face was on them. More than that, have you noticed how many black people walk around with Obama on a shirt? Can you imagine how many women would buy a shirt with Tina Turner on it?

Who can I find on a t-shirt? Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelley, Jackie Onassis Kennedy, even Madonna.

All beautiful, all talented, and all white.

Hell, even Gaga has her face on shirts and we're the same age!

Most of my female friends are white (that's a post for another day), and although I do have black female friends, unfortunately, we find ourselves unable to spend a lot of face-to-face time with one another. So, whenever a conversation with my white female friends moves toward the subject of beauty or beautiful women, I feel a little...out of sorts. 

While I can certainly agree (who wouldn't?!) that Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelley, and Jackie-O are beautiful women, these are not the women I was raised thinking of as the epitome of beauty. I too watched watched their movies, mostly with my grandmother, and later during my teen years when I had a brief obsession with black & white movies. However, my education in classic examples of beauty were a little more diverse than that. 

I was raised on beauties like Dorothy Dandridge, Tina Turner, Lena Horne, and Sophia Loren. Women who's bodies were curvy and strong, feminine and positively awe-inspiring. Women with dark(er) skin. Women I can relate to a little more.

Honestly, even the women I was raised to idolize (in the way of beauty) aren't exactly bold examples of the range of beauty among black and Latina women. But they're closer.

Beautiful is beautiful, and I get that, but understand that I like knowing that my dark skin isn't considered NOT beautiful.

I'm not saying that white women don't believe that the only beautiful women are other white women. That's ridiculous. I'm just using these conversations as an opportunity to showcase the women I was brought up to believe were beautiful. Women who, in my opinion, aren't given the same visibility of an Audrey Hepburn or a Marilyn Monroe, but who are equally as beautiful.

Can I please get ONE of these sisters on a T-Shirt?!

Dorothy Dandridge

Lena Horne

Tina Turner

Sophia Loren

Pam Grier

Rita Moreno

Stories You Can Keep

I wanted to walk to the library today because I want to save the world. I made it halfway before a friend stopped and offered me a ride. He was going to be driving whether I was in the car or not so it only made sense for me to accept. Sorry, world. 


This trip to the library was fueled by my desire to feel productive. I walked through the doors and right into the heart of a tour from university orientation. The walk-thru left me feeling old and inappropriately ogled by freshmen's suburbanoid fathers. To be fair, I may have made eyes at the orientation leader. But I KNOW him.


I was there to produce and print. Printing papers, though it wasn't helping the world any, did have a way of making me feel like I'd actually done something. It was physical evidence that I had been somewhere with a professional printer, which of course confirmed any previously assumed bouts of productivity.


Unfortunately, nothing I was working on needed to be printed, but I was sure that if I stayed ON the internet long enough, something would require a print job, so I ended up where we all end up.


Facebook.


The first status update in my news feed was from one of my most favorite authors, Mary Miller, and attached was a link to a story she'd written. This was perfect print-out material! I was super excited for a) a new story with potential for high likability 2) not having to feel like an asshole for just printing out more copies of my resume. Each time I do that, the help desk librarian looks at me as if she wants to say,


 "Trick, all the resumes in the world aren't going to get you a job. Don't you know we're in a recession? Stop killing trees and learn how to convert a PDF, dummy." That librarian was  a bitch in my head. Meanwhile, I was excited for this story to rock my world and even more excited about it being a cool crafty project. 


After I'd followed the directions on putting the little book together, and surprisingly didn't mess anything up, I started reading it. Then, I finished it. I read the entire thing standing right next to the printer. From the first to last line, I was completely enthralled. Maybe it was the image of a giant stuffed giraffe buried in a shallow grave of packing peanuts, or the fact that I have my own issues with an ex that aren't really issues yet but they will be because, eventually, they'll have to be, that made it impossible to sit. I don't know.


I put my little book in my over-sized purple bag (even my accessories are loud), and left the library feeling weird and open like someone else knew about my little shames. The protagonist had too much of me in her and I couldn't tell if that meant she had "me" in her or just "woman" in her. I was taking the the bus home. 


For a few stops, I was the only one riding even though the first heavy raindrops before a storm were falling. Finally, another woman got on. Her fishnet stockings made my bare legs shiver and when she said my boots were "fucking adorable", I smiled at her the way I smile at men who buy me drinks I'm afraid have been roofied. 


I pretended to read the little book again so that I wouldn't have to stare straight ahead, right at her crisscrossed kneecaps. My ex worried about me leaving him for a black man, but I never worried about him leaving for a white woman. And as I sat across from this homely woman with pale knees, fishnet stockings, and a nervous tick that caused her to chew away at her thin bottom lip, my lack of suspicions were confirmed. 


My stop came fast. When I stood to leave, the woman turned and smiled at me, the corner of her mouth still comfortably tucked between her teeth. The smile I tossed her way was more genuine than the one before.


"For you." I handed her the little book. I didn't want to sleep with it under my pillow and I didn't want to see it every time I opened my big purple purse. The book was mine, but the story wasn't. It seemed right to pass it on to someone else who might love giraffes or an ex. 


I hope it took her fucking breath away. 

I'm Impressed By Derek Walker

As I wrote yesterday, I'm not very comfortable promoting myself. However, I LOVE promoting my friends. I'll admit that I am biased, but I also have to say that I am not easily impressed. I've decided that in order to find a comfortable balance on this blog, I'm going to start profiling my talented friends, and occasionally, other talented people that I encounter either in person or via the interwebz. 

This new segment of my blog will be aptly named "I'm Impressed By" and will then go on to profile what's impressing the hell out of me. 

Over the past few weeks, I've been collecting various data from facebook, myspace, flickr, youtube, and other personal websites my friends use, so that I can write these profiles on them. Oh yeah, I took my stalking to the extreme. I've even separated them into visual artists, writers, musicians, etc. 

I'm super excited for this new development in my blog. I hope you'll enjoy reading these profiles as much as I enjoy creating them.

********************************************
Derek Walker

Not hard on the eyes, ladies :)

I'm going to kick-off the first "I'm Impressed By" segment with my good friend Derek Walker. Derek is a mere month younger than me, though he continues to impress me with his artistry in graphic design, sculpture, and other forms of art. He possesses the ability to mold with his hands what he sees in his mind with seemingly little to no effort. 

Derek not only impresses me with what he produces, he inspires me with the constant pursuit of his own inspiration. I know what he likes because he shares all of himself with the world. To meet him, is to learn from him about the parts of this life you previously assumed you'd already figured out. Bending your vision and forcing you to look at the universe, not just from a different angle, but from many different angles, he will show you something magnificently contrary to what you believed to be true.

Equal parts hip-hop, dreamer, and naturist, he has the rare and beautiful ability to use what he sees in the world to create a vision that is undeniably from the mind and spirit of Derek Walker. 

Here are few of my favorite works from him:

All of the photos are the property of Derek Walker and have been used with his permission.

Things to Read

As promised, I will continue to post stories and/or poems that I've written. I find it more than a little strange that I have no problem posting very personal information on this blog, but I still hesitate to post my writing. But hey, I'd like to be a respectable writer someday (whatever that is), so here is another story. 

I hope you enjoy it:

Catchings

My grandpa sat across from me at his kitchen table. His fingers busy separating the edible parts of frogs he’d caught down by the lake. Equal parts intrigued and disgusted by the act, I marveled at the way his fingers bent and snapped their sinewy limbs.

            My grandpa’s house was sad. The kitchen walls were stained teeth. They meant to be white, but age and abuse had dulled and darkened them. There was a “Splish. Splish. Splish.” sound coming from an old white bucket sitting next to his refrigerator. My fingers twitched each time I heard it, but my eyes stayed focused on grandpa’s hands.

            “Don’t be trusting them boys out there, little girl. They ain’t worth shit, and they don’t know shit.”

He spat the words toward a frogs half open body. If it had been alive, I wouldn’t have been sure he was even talking to me.

            I knew things about my grandpa. I knew that he used to hit my grandma and that she used to hit him right back.

“I hated when I’d lose my temper and hit her cause that meant I was gonna have to fight her all night, then get up and go to work in the morning.”

 He never talked about it in front of Grandma or my mother, but I knew the story well.

            If I closed my eyes when he told it, I could see my grandmother wielding a cast iron skillet in one hand and a pot of boiling water in the other. My grandfather realizes he’ll have to make a decision: which hand to avoid. He chooses to shift away from the water and in doing so is stomach bludgeoned by ten pounds of Calphalon weaponry.

            “Lord, she’d knock me right on my ass then yell at me for making too much noise!”

            He shook his head and looked to his walls. His eyes squinted and his chin turned up as if remembering that these walls used to be white and wondering when yellow happened? How yellow happened? He dropped his chin back into his chest, and started talking to the frogs again.

            “I wasn’t no good,” he muttered. “We’re no good.”

            “Splish. Splish. SPLASH!” The white bucket turned over and out came a small flood of lake water and a great big catfish. It struggled for air, or the opposite of air, or something else, and spastically flipped from side to side, end to end.

            My grandfather and I watched the catfish suffocate in the middle of his unmopped floor. When it stopped moving, he picked it up with both hands, sat it in front of me and said,

“You’re gonna learn to gut this fish like a man.”

He put his knife in my hand and began to talk me through it. I listened to his instructions, though I continued to hear a faint “Splish. Splish. Splish.” The bucket was still overturned and the water on the floor raced toward crevices and crannies to fill. I was angry with my grandfather the way a child is angry, I wanted to leave this kitchen, this sad house, and his damn stories. But I was learning to gut a fish like a man and I was taking it like a woman. 

Can You See Me Now?

 Since August of 2009 I have lost 30 pounds.


Here are the two pictures of me, in the same dress, to help illustrate the difference in my appearance. The picture on the top was taken August 2009 (with my roomies) the picture on the bottom was taken May 2010 (with Boo).

I'm glad to be healthier. I'm proud of myself for taking more steps to take care of my body, and I feel even more comfortable in my skin than I did before (and you KNOW how comfortable I was in my skin before). 


In the past year, I've gotten contacts, lost 30 pounds, and am no longer bald. Not to mention, I've finally found a sense of style that is very "me" and I feel much more at ease wearing dresses and other "girly" things that I would have shunned before, assuming that I couldn't pull them off. 


Inevitably, my attraction rates have gone up. I've garnered more attention from the opposite sex (and same sex, for that matter) in the past six months than I have in the whole 22 1/2 years beforehand. It's a little awesome, a little unsettling, and often, pretty useful. Overall, no one complains about being thought of as attractive, especially when you went to so long being thought of as only mildly attractive at best.


I feel as though this post is sounding like "Hey! I used to be an ugly duckling and now I'm a beautiful black swan! EAT IT!" But that is not my intention. My intention is to set the stage for what I really want to write about, which is the opportunity to live on both sides of a fence. 


I have had the opportunity to go from below-average-attention-receiving-girl to above-average-attention-receiving-girl over the course of six months. I'm not going to lie, I find it disturbing that the change in my appearance has changed the way people react to me so much. Nothing about my personality has changed. I'm still good for a joke, the answer to useless celebrity trivia, and you know I know where the free food is. I still like comic books, still horrible at censoring myself in public, and I still haven't seen Pulp Fiction. But the way people treat me has changed significantly in positive and negative ways.


Here are some of the pros and cons of this weight-loss situation:


Pros

• It's easier to believe I'm attractive. Although I've always considered myself attractive (not huge into the whole self-hate thing), I've also spent quite a bit of time convincing MYSELF that I am. It's strangely exhilarating to have strangers positively (and frequently) comment on your looks. 
• I'm more likely to try new things with my look. The more people comment on some of my more quirky embellishments and accessories, the more I want to find really unique things that look good on me and could be conversation starters.
• Men are nicer to attractive women. I'm not saying it's right, but I am saying that it's true. The loss of weight, glasses, and a mostly drab wardrobe, has lead to more free drinks, offers to help out, and even compliments on other (non-physical) parts of my life. Do I realize that they're just trying to get in these jeans? Of course. But I'll take that drink...
• There are more clothes in my size. I've gone from a 14/16 to a 10/12. It's a lot easier to find cute clothes that I actually want to wear now. Though it's still tough to find jeans because, while I have bigger thighs, I don't have a wide waist. My solution? Wear more dresses and skirts and belt them. I feel prettier in them anyway.
• I'm a surprise. I've always described myself as a get-to-know-you girl and not a want-to-know-you girl, meaning traditionally, men have only been attracted to me after getting to know my personality, and not based on initial physical attraction. Because of that, I've been free to develop a sense of humor and not be ashamed of any of my interests. The men who've approached me in the past six months have been pleasantly surprised by my personality. To be clear, I'm not downing myself here, I'm just relaying how it usually goes for me. I don't think that being a get-to-know-you girl isn't as good as being want-to-know-you girl. To be honest, I think it's better.

Cons

• Some women will no longer trust me/like me. There is a particular woman in my life who LOVED everything about me when I had glasses, was 30 pounds heavier, and bald. Now that men, especially the kinds of men that she would go for, are openly, and at times unabashedly,  attracted to me, SHE CAN'T STAND ME. This is weird for me because I've never dealt with jealousy issues between women, and let me tell you it can get nasty. Even though I haven't retaliated against her slander, though I did confront her about it, it's still odd and dramatic and it makes me kind of sick to my stomach. It's weird thinking that because I feel more comfortable, more women will continue to think that I'm after their partners. It's just such a  foreign situation.  
• I worry that I'll begin to rely on the comments and approval of others. I've always been pretty confident in the idea that I'm a catch and any man would be lucky to have me. I worry that should the attention I get now go away, as all things must change, that I will feel lost without it. I try not to take the compliments too seriously because I know that the size of my waist isn't at the top of my list and that eventually, I could gain the weight back. I don't want to feel like I'm no longer an attractive person when guys don't hit on me anymore. I don't want to put that kind of pressure on myself.
• It's expensive to lose weight. There are so many reason why this is true. The top 3 reasons are: You have to buy new clothes that actually fit, more confidence makes you want to experiment more (as in buy more stuff), and food is more expensive when you're trying to be healthy. 
•  Men are nicer to more attractive women. I know this was a pro, but it's also a con. While I get more drinks bought for me at the bar, I also get more men being fake nice to me to try to sleep with me. Even if it's kind of exhilarating to have a guy look at you and decide getting to know you is his mission tonight, it's also super disappointing to find that he only want to get to know you in the biblical sense. Don't get me wrong, I'm not looking for love in these clubs, but at least when I had glasses and was approached by a man at the bar, he was usually a pretty nice guy. Now, I'm like a douche magnet.

One more thing that I've noticed is that I'm starting to catch a lot more flack from black men about dating white men. This past weekend, while walking hand-in-hand with my white ex-boyfriend/current whatever (which is a whole other story), a large van in the street slowed down so that a black man could stick his head out of the passenger window and yell, "Hey! Get your hands off my woman!"

We just smiled and waved because...what else could we do? The man then smiled and waved back. Clearly, he was (kind of) joking, but that isn't the first (or fifth) time that's happened to me in the past 6 months. 

For the record, I'm not some "black men ain't sh*t" kind of woman. I would happily date a black man if one of them would happily get the balls to ask me out. That doesn't happen to me. Like ever.

But for some reason, some black men have decided in the past six months that I "belong" to them and that my dating white men is out of line. Meanwhile, none of them have asked me out either, so....what am I supposed to do? Turn down white men in order to wait around for the black men who don't try to date me? Sorry, I'm into this thing called "logic" and you might need some.

I'm not dumb, I realize that this mostly has to do with the change in my appearance. I'm not blind, and I'm not going to do that stupid "Oh, I didn't even notice that my looks have changed!" thing that some people do. This post may make me sound a little conceited, but I'm trying to be honest. 


WE ALL KNOW THAT I LOOK DIFFERENT. The jig is up!

The question is, does looking different mean that people have different expectations of me? Do I look like a boyfriend/husband stealer? What happens if I gain back the weight/shave my head again/need to go back to glasses? Now that black men seem to consider me attractive, am I betraying them by dating men of other races? 

Most importantly, am I supposed to pretend that I don't notice the added attention? Why or why not? Give me some realness people.

Do You Trust Me?

I have a tendency to date difficult men. 


Not difficult as in mean or selfish, but difficult because I tend to (seriously) date very smart men. I've said before that I love the nerds. Men who are so smart they're lucky they function in normal society. Why does that make them difficult? Because smart men often assume they're masters of the universe, even if they only quietly assume so, and when you consider yourself a master of the universe there isn't a whole lot anybody else can tell you about anything. Even if it's about themselves.


Being self-aware is extremely important to me. I am constantly toeing the line between being neurotic and being appropriately analytical about my relationships with others. So you can imagine how much it would irk me to have someone tell me that I don't know how I feel. It's pretty much my ultimate pet peeve.


This weekend, I had a conversation with an ex-boyfriend/current-whatever in which I explained to him that while I do love spending time with him, I was very happy in the relationship that we had (before he broke up with me), and wasn't interested in trying to re-make it and possibly ruin my memory of it. His response:


"I think you're mis-remembering how happy you were. I mean, I was an asshole 80% of the time (SO not true!) and I think you weren't as happy as you seem to think you were."


*blinks* Side-eye *blinks*


 Well that started a debate. Not even about how happy I was. Nope, we debated about his tendency to assume he knew more than I did about how I was feeling. A debate we'd had too many times to count while in our relationship (where I was EXTREMELY happy). 


To be fair, he's not the only guy who does that. He's not the only PERSON who does that. How many times have you heard someone say (or said yourself) "Well, he/she SAID they felt/meant(blank), but I know they REALLY felt/meant (blank)." 


We do it all the time. Yet, we all seem to know that you can't have a relationship without trust. So why don't we trust our partners to know themselves? Why do we twist their words or assume that they mean the worst? Why do we try to see our own insecurities in the praise they attempt to give us?


Seems to me that, in order to have a good and healthy relationship, we can't only trust our partners not to cheat on us or intentionally hurt us, we must also trust them to know their own hearts. We have to trust that when they say they like us, love us, find us attractive, want to be with us, are happy, or can't get enough of us, they mean it!


It's funny because all so many people want is love and understanding and when someone tries  to give us those very things, we try to find anyway to prove that they don't really want to do that. We find any way to poke holes in their story, or their determination to love every inch of who we are, inside and out, flaws and all. 


How can we make it without that trust? As much I have to trust that my partner won't leave me, I also need to trust that they won't leave me because they don't WANT to leave me. I can't know if that's true, but love is about faith. If you don't have faith in that person, then what do you have aside from the overwhelming fear that you are nothing but an obligation?


I don't want that. And I debated with him because I needed him to know that he was never an obligation, and that I wasn't always a happy person, but I was ALWAYS happy that he was mine.


It ended with him smirking at me, the way he does when he realizes he's been stupid and is kind of impressed with my ability to defend myself and my positions rationally and with unfailing logic. He threw his arm around me, pulled me in closer to his chest, and said, "I forget that when you're in the room, I'm not the smartest one here." Which, in essence, is about as arrogantly asinine as you can be. 


But it is still the sweetest thing he could have said to me at that moment. And yes, I was happy.