Everyone’s a critic.
Would you rather be a food critic, a book critic, or a film critic?
Everyone’s a critic.
Author: K
List 5 things you love about your culture.
1. Speaking a language very few people are likely to understand.
2. Ethnicity comes from the first Black (Afro-based) country in the world that gained its independence.
3. The food.
4. The big family. I have choices when members some don’t like me.
5. The different worldview.
Job Description for My Role as Chief Home Operations Manager (CHOM)
In August, life handed me a job description for the important role I’ve been neglecting since I got married 6 years ago: Chief Home Operations Manager (CHOM).
Congratulations! Upon marriage, you filled a part-time position for Chief Home Operations Manager averaging 30 hours per week, including evening and weekend hours as needed. Schedule is flexible based on other pressing needs and hours required may fluctuate depending on life circumstances.
The apartment seeks an energetic, motivated individual who can work well alone, is adept at managing household duties, and does not mind delegating tasks to a significant other. Candidate is a self-starter who should function well in a quiet environment without children. Detail-oriented is a plus. Primary responsibilities of the position will be:
- Caretaking of significant other as circumstances require
- Cleaning the bathroom sink, toilet, and shower
- Vacuuming the carpet
- Swiffering the bathroom and kitchen tile floors
- Washing dishes and putting clean ones away
- Wiping down the kitchen countertops
- Dusting
- Taking out the trash and recycling
- Overseeing the washing, drying, and folding of laundry
- Organizing out-of-place items on surfaces or other disorganized items
- Running errands outside of the household as required such as refilling stock of perishable and non-perishable groceries
Secondary activities include:
- Creating edible meals (original, appetizing, or enticing are optional)
- Scheduling of appointments and other activities
- Managing the household budget including balancing checkbooks, paying bills, overseeing responsible spending, and quarterly reviews
- Administration of insurance and medical claims
- Adept negotiation with vendors to secure lower costs on utilities, credit cards, or other other services
- Sifting through postal mail to determine junk and distribute important documents
- Occasional reorganization of closets and cabinets to make sure all items are accessible, active, and not expired
- Maintaining an pictorial archive of memorable moments
High school degree desired. BA or BS preferred. MA or PhD is ideal. 18 years life experience required; compassionate emotions, computer skills, and driving ability essential. Prior experience accomplishing household chores, using a calendar, reconciling a checkbook, and interest in home organization a plus. Good photography skills optional; will train on the job.
Wage begins at $0, regardless of experience. No reimbursement for travel. However, many hugs, kisses, and thanks are offered daily for a reward.
Affirmative Action Employer
Culture
Q. List five things you love about your culture.
A.
1. Griot and Banane Pesée
2. Speaking a language most people who don’t live in Miami or Brooklyn can’t understand
3. Parents from a different country
4. Good, homemade food all the time growing up
5. Spicy food like pikliz or piman (spicy slaws)!
Writing Prompt: Personality
Q. Is your personality more like your mother’s or your father’s?
A. My father’s.
Thoughts on Death and Other Life Lessons
Note: This post is extremely long after the jump. I’ve broken it out into sections. It’s a compilation of thoughts after losing a dear friend to late-detected, aggressive liver cancer. She’s the first friend (non-family member) I’ve ever lost to death.
This week has been a rather trying week. On the same day that my husband was admitted to the hospital for a nasty Staph infection, I learned that my friend and talented hairstylist Stephanie was in the process of dying and by the afternoon, had passed away.
I’m very much in shock over learning of her death as it was only last week that she called me and weakly told me that they had just released her from the hospital and that she’d get better soon. Never did I think that would be the last time I would speak to her. I just figured I’d text her again this week to see how she’s doing. Although Steph had beaten breast cancer earlier this year in February, she developed liver cancer that went undetected in the interim—and it rapidly progressed to the point where there was nothing the doctors could do.
Sometimes, death is so sudden and comes without a warning. One part of my brain has accepted the news of her death as a fact. The other part of my brain (or perhaps, my heart, really) keeps saying, “No way. Nope. She’s not dead. This is all just an illusion and she’s at home and she’ll be fine. She’ll bounce back. That’s what she did before and it’s what she’ll do again. In no time, I’ll be sitting in her chair and we’ll be chatting up the latest movies and music.”
I think of all the close people in my life who have passed away: my uncle, my father, my husband’s grandfather, and now my dear friend. In each instance, I either saw or spoke to the person shortly before the person died. In one of those instances, I prepped myself, but I was still young and the news came to me as a shock regardless.
Believe it or not, my favorite verse in dealing with death is John 11:35 in which the Bible says, “Jesus wept.” Two simple words. How can they be so powerful?
I am reminded that even though Jesus knew he would raise Lazarus from the dead in a matter of minutes, in his humanity, Jesus felt the pain of death at that moment. The irreversible effects of the Fall may have weighed heavily on Jesus as he reflected that death isn’t the natural order of things. Death isn’t supposed to happen. The god-man knew that death was never what God originally intended for man to experience. Because while death takes the life of loved ones, death on this side of heaven doesn’t have the most impact on the person dying; death has the most impact on the people who are left behind as a result of the person’s passing.
Death is a cruel thing to wrestle with. One minute a person is here in our lives, impacting us, shaping us, affecting us; the next moment, the person is gone, life extinguished from the body, never to speak, embrace, or breathe again.
Think of major catastrophic events that have occurred throughout U.S. history: September 11, the 2011 occurrence of devastating tornadoes in the Midwest (namely Missouri), Pearl Harbor, Oklahoma City, Hurricane Katrina, even the 1989 World Series Earthquake. All of these pretty much came out of the blue with little to no warning. Even with hurricane warnings for Katrina, no one could have foreseen the impact that it would have had on the levees that broke. One minute people were fine. The next, they were not; some were injured, some were homeless, and some had died. While I don’t have any scientific proof, human brains tend to process things gradually. That’s why we like “transitions.” It provides an appropriate smooth shift from one thing to another in which without that shift, the change in events would be jarring.
Death is its own form of personal catastrophe to the people it impacts. Each and every single time. It is not natural and it shouldn’t happen. Jesus knew this. That’s why he cried before he raised Lazarus from the dead. I used to think it was merely an example from Jesus giving humans permission to grieve over a loved one. The older I get, the more I realize “Jesus wept” for real. That hurt was real and deep. Jesus raised Lazarus as an example, but Jesus also knew that this was temporary. Lazarus would die again. And his death would be much more semi-permanent.
I may have a funeral this weekend to go to in which I say goodbye to Steph’s body. Perhaps I’ll be able to say hello to her again at another point. Continue reading “Thoughts on Death and Other Life Lessons”
Dedication page for my future book
This is what it will be when I get it published:
To Daddy,
Because you saw this back in 1988 with Sarah’s Boots. I miss you.
-Kakou
Writing Prompt: Worry
Q: What do you worry about?
A. Stuff. Lots of stuff. Read previous blog posts to get an idea.
Writing Prompt: Exercise
Q. What is your favorite way to get exercise?
A. Combo of strength training and cardio a la Jackie Warner and Jillian Michaels.
The Advantage to Writing Prompts
I guess they’re good for scheduling regular posts.
Q. Have you ever participated in a protest? If not, would you?
A. Probably not. They haven’t really accomplished anything significant after 1970.
Why I Don’t Like Writing Prompts for Blog Posts
The questions tend to be closed-ended and leave very little room for me to expound. Case in point, the following question from WordPress:
Q. Do you feel obligated to finish all books you start reading?
A. Only if I’ve read more than 50 pages.
Git ‘Er Done: Tackling Debt and Entitlement Programs in the U.S.
I don’t normally use my blog to talk about politics. At one point in my life, I was heavily involved in politics: volunteering for a grassroots political party in NY and working for a high-profile senator. Now, I try to stay out of the loop of politics, mostly because being involved in it just makes me mad since very little gets done on a grander scale. So this post will be brief.
DEBT CEILING
Imagine the following conversation:
ME: Hello, I’d like to increase my credit limit with your company.
CREDIT CARD COMPANY (CCC): It looks like you have a $20,000 limit, and you’re almost maxed-out on your credit card at $19,500.
ME: I know, but I’d like to keep spending in order to dig myself out of debt so I’m requesting a credit limit increase.
CCC: All right then. (pause as application processes) Looks like your request to increase your credit limit went through. You’ve received a $10,000 increase. Happy spending!
How am I supposed to decrease my spending if I raise my credit limit in order to spend more? I know the example doesn’t translate exactly as the government needed to raise its debt ceiling but without decreasing any significant spending, it’s simply putting a Band-Aid on gunshot wound.
ENTITLEMENT PROGRAMS
I call this the $&!t the government won’t touch.
Social Security benefits: Social Security is unsustainable and MUST BE phased out for anyone 35 and younger. The retirement age needs to be raised from 67 to 70 for those currently 35-50 years of age and early Social Security benefits must be completely eliminated. Sorry, we can’t afford for you to collect early. If you’re disabled or have special needs (taking care of a family member), apply for an exemption.
Welfare: Families or individuals max out on this program after 5 years. This is supposed to be temporary assistance, not a way of life. If you are still popping out tons of kids after 5 years to stay on this plan and haven’t learned to either use birth control or keep your legs shut, it’s time to put your kids in government-assisted day care and get a job at McDonald’s. Dropping people after five years is more than enough time to allow a family or individual to get some kind of job and get back on their feet.
Unemployment benefits: I know this economy sucks and it’s not easy to find a job that pays well. As a result, the government can’t keep paying all the people who get laid off. But guess what? There are jobs out there. It may not be the white-collar, best-paying job out on the market, but if you’ve been on unemployment for more than 52 weeks (1 year), it’s time to get a minimum-wage job or work two part-time jobs in order to make ends meet.
National health care: Time to put this on the shelf for a while. (It pains me to say that.)
Medicare/Medicaid: This one isn’t as easy to eliminate or phase out as there are millions of people who legitimately need this kind of assistance. The problem with government insurance is that it’s also compounded by the fact that private insurance costs are so high. But I’m sure there are ways to trim spending within this government program.
But thanks to partisan politics and fear of voter backlash, nothing will get done and all Americans will be forced to suffer for it.
“The Help”: In Defense of a White Woman Writing about Black Women
Apparently there was an uproar about Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling novel, The Help, about black maids oppressed by their white employees. Now that the movie’s out, the uproar is even louder. Tons of people (both white and black) have claimed the book is racist and historically inaccurate. Ms. Stockett isn’t doing too bad in spite of this—at a nearby speaking engagement, she was charging $65 for admission.
I pose the question, then, that my husband posed to me last night: why is it racist if a white woman writes about black women experiencing racism but not racist if a black woman writes about how white women treated black woman during a time of racism?
As a writer, I say Ms. Stockett is free to express her mind about her “fictionalized” book. (I’ve heard that The Help is really a fictionalized version of true stories from Mississippi.) It’s a novel which means that it’s fiction which means that it doesn’t need to be the most historically accurate book ever.
As a black woman, did The Help offend me? A little. I bristled during the first hundred pages of the book. Then I jumped to the end to see if the author had some kind of Afterword, which she did. I’m not sure I would have continued reading the book had I not read the Afterword. It makes me wonder whether Stockett was a little girl influenced by a black maid who just suddenly disappeared because her racist momma might have fired her and was atoning for her parents’ sins.
There is nothing Sambo-ish or overtly racist about this book. (Maybe the movie is different?) The main black women, Aibileen and Minny, are not idiots. I think Stockett happened to do a very good job of portraying black women who lived in the mundane: they were maids beholden to white employers who didn’t physically abuse them but still mistreated them. So these black women got back at them in a mundane way.
People complain that Skeeter is the white woman who “rescues” these black women. I see Skeeter as part of the majority ruling system that helped to make things right (again) in the a somewhat mundane way. She didn’t lobby Congress or hold hands with Minny and walk down the street in a march. She turned a racist institution upside down by publishing a book about black maids dishing on what it’s like to work in white households. Skeeter would have been nothing without the black maids who shared this information with her so no, they weren’t necessarily beholden to the “white woman” to “rescue” them.
America is a free country last I checked, and Stockett is free to write about black women as she imagines them just as Alice Walker is free to write about white women as she imagines them without being racist. Was there a lot about the civil rights movement that was left out? Heck yes! It’s very much (as Melissa Harris Perry argued against) Real Housewives of Jackson, Mississippi with a definite focus on the white women in the households. But there’s a lens that focuses in on the maids in those households too.
Black people are rarely (if ever) satisfied when white people write about racially sensitive times such as the early 1960s. White people don’t ever seem to get it right because they don’t seem to “understand” the plight of black people from those eras. But that’s what imaginations are for. And with the millions of black women in America during the 1960s, it leaves a world of possibilities.
Preggomagnetism
Preggomagnetism: The basic mechanism by which pregnancy announcements of others are drawn to infertile couples.
In the past 3 months, I’ve learned of 8 women who are pregnant. After 2 years of dealing with this, I should be used to it. I should start being happy for all of them and stop being bitter. I keep trying to tell myself that I’ll one day join that happy category but month after month goes by and I’m still childless.
I’ve finally made steps to join a local infertility support group. Why not? I can piss and moan about not having kids to other people who feel the same way.
A friend has kindly told me that I need to stop comparing myself to other people. This has made me realize my habit of “Keeping Tabs on the Joneses” rather than “Keeping up with the Jonses.” I have the ability to look at what everyone else has and think wistfully, Gee, I wish I could have that.
Perhaps it’s my friend’s maturity in age and longevity of infertility that allowed her to not experience that problem. I suppose there’s something to be said for the resiliency developed the longer one deals with the problem.
Infertility (when you don’t want it) is a curse. Of course, there are those well-meaning people who say, “Enjoy the time you and your husband have! You’ll never get it back!” or “Enjoy your child-free years! God is using this period to teach you something valuable!”
Bottom line: there is no blessing in dealing with pain, grief, and hurt month after month. It’s hard not to be angry with God because He chooses to bless some couples with kids and doesn’t allow others to have any. Because health insurance costs have become an issue, my husband and I will not be able to pursue infertilty treatments for the rest of the year. We’re praying for a miracle.
But not expecting one at all.
Mid-July Ramble
Every time I’m away from a computer (like, oh say, when I’m driving), I begin composing a blog post in my head. Now that I’m actually at a computer, my brain is blank.
The Mundane
I’m working three different jobs at the moment and about to lose my mind: the library, proofreading at an ad agency, and editing a book. I’m not used to working three different jobs in 12 hours. It’s actually rather tiring. I need downtime or I get cranky and miserable.
Other thoughts
I’ve accepted that I’m not called to be a parent for a while. It’s a difficult thing, but I’m trying to be okay with it. Especially since it seems like every month that goes by leaves someone else who I know with the happy knowledge of a new addition to the family. I really don’t want to be whining/complaining about this 5 years from now. (Yes, I know I whine and complain about this.)
I’ve decided that God’s basically testing to me to see if I will continue to love Him despite what I can’t get. In my pain and suffering, I can’t see that so much. It just feels like He’s holding out on me. (And I still think that to some extent.) But if I ask my mom for something and she can’t give it to me, I don’t get mad at her and give her the cold shoulder. I get disappointed and grudgingly say “Ok” and move on. My love for my mom isn’t predicated on what she can give me. So why would I treat God like that? Maybe because I know everything is in God’s power so I expect He should do whatever I want? I don’t know; I’m really just typing out loud. (wink)
Family
I’m learning (the hard way really) that just because someone is related to me doesn’t mean they need to/required to love me or care about me. Some do but it’s not necessarily something that everyone in my family holds true to. This knowledge is painful because it forces me to stop seeking love and approval from people I want to care about me. In some ways, it hurts worse than people who aren’t related to me but I have to stop treating certain family members like they should love me just because our parents are related. I need to let go of the hurt and pain I feel from them. I have tried to reach out to them as adults and I can’t break through their clique. It’s about time that I stop trying to fit into a clique. I’ve never been a clique sort of girl—ever—anyway.
—
Life isn’t the worst it’s ever been for me but it’s a very difficult, stressful time right now with a lot of changes occurring. I’m thinking of pursuing another career endeavor in which I could fail spectacularly. (If you’re going to fail, do it with flair, right?) I’m swimming in mounds of debt with the current of people I owe taking me under. I have a lot on my mind. I feel like a failure in a lot of ways. It’s difficult to stay positive and upbeat and believe the future holds better when things, in some respects, look so bleak.
I’m reading Bethenny Frankel’s latest book, A Place of Yes. Say what you want about the Real Housewife/entrepreneur but I love her to pieces. She is a typical New Yorker: frank, no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it-is, and in-your-face. It’s also the other reason I enjoyed Jillian Michaels’s book, Unlimited. I need reading material that inspires and motivates me without sugar-coating my weaknesses and problems that I create. And right now, I definitely need some of positive motivation.
And don’t get me started on where I’m at in my spiritual life right now…
This Journey Is My Own 