I posted a while ago, in a entry that I entitled Lemon Heads, about probably THE COOLEST of the Def Poets. Lemon is an amazing dude. He’s a rough looking shawty (shorter than me gets you in the shawty category and yeah, I’m 5′10). But he walks around with a little book to write his thoughts in. I just really have a lot of love for him. Anyhow, his site has finally arrived, and no one could be more excited than me….yayyyyyyyyyyyy
Show him some love ya’ll
For those of you who may have been reading the “whirpool” post, I actually completed it….
So, Yoanna wins.
I can still remember the very first episode of Top Model. When I saw Yoanna’s face, I thought she was the most stunning thing I had seen in a while. Her face was so perfectly crafted that I could hardly see anyone beating her. But then I saw Shandi. She was a feeble looking girl with potential to be a high fashion model. Have you seen high fashion models nowadays? It’s about difference. They seem to all be so alternative chic. And I saw Shandi taking it all the way.
But Yoanna was my favorite. Up until the day that she “won” the contest where she and some people would have dinner at the house and have the girls serve them. Her attitude sucked. I couldn’t believe that she had snapped into diva style, just like that. I lost all respect for her. She was the epitome of a high fashion model, but I was hoping that this second show would create, yet another down to mars girl (you like that Speakerboxxx reference huh?). So I focused on Shandi, cuz she was this season’s Adrianne (and though I was all about Elyse for that gorgeous face last season, I was not disappointed with the winner).
So, though my prediction was that Shandi would win, I wasn’t suprised that she got knocked off. Television becomes predictable when you watch it so much. The people that are praised too much always end up being the ones to go. Shandi was that person. And boy did she bow out gracefully. I think they let her go because they knew that she never thought she would win anyway. For her, getting this far was more than she ever bargained for. When she was sent home, she knew that she was a winner anyway.
by the way, is it just me, or are there a whole bunch of Walgreens commercials on tv since Top Model began this season? LOL
So, it was down to Mercedes and Yoanna and I knew that winner. I wanted Mercedes to win cuz she’s so cute. But Mercedes is like my homegirl. A girl that is cute enough to get guys, but not fly enough to be seen as a model. She could do a local fashion show or something, but it would be more of a hobby than a career. Also, she stepped up her game too late into the competition. I mean, did you hear her talking big sh*t last night? LOL…She went from fun loving Mercedes to homegirl is too fly to lose to lil Miss Yoanna.
This is my next issue. From beginning to end, Mercedes was typecasted. I don’t think she was ever photographed in anything that seemed to be “Euro” style fashion. I know that that may not mean anything to you, but when you have someone dress like a cute black singer or as an Egyptian queen, it tends to be something that exudes elegance (but to Whites, I think it reads “Exotic”..and exotic in fashion means quick fad)…
Then in the end, they got bogus with it. If this show was supposed to be about the face alone, then hands down Yoanna would have had it. She is a stunning beauty. As a cartoon, her face would look exactly the same. And with makeup, on a magazine cover, I would definitely look twice. The only reason why I would look at Mercedes picture would be to say, “now why the hell did they go and put that barbwire sh*t around that girl like some type of oppressed animal?” That’s just me.
Lastly, I think the selection was based on the reaction. If Mercedes would have won, she’d be happy. Yoanna would have probably slit her damn wrists. She ate, slept, and thought about fashion. It’s kinda disgusting….lol…Mercedes cried, but I think she was proud of herself and in her heart, knew that she wasn’t going to win this competition anyhow. But she’s still a cutie.
Hmmmmm
Well, show’s over. What the heck am I going to do at 9pm on Tuesdays now?
Time on my hands
Since you’ve been away boy
I aint got no plans
No no no.
And the sound of the rain
against my windowpane
is slowly driving me insane, boy
I’m going down…
And damn, I went down. I went down deep into a hole of depression. I jumped into black waters and surrendered to the hands of the whirpool of depression that sucked me in. I embraced the uncontrollable and took the ride. I never thought about whether I’d recover. I only knew that I had finally broken.
I now understand why people remain busy in life. I now understand why people work two jobs when they make ample wages at one. I now understand why individuals join clubs and organizations that require far more of their time than should be necessary. I now understand why people say that having too much time on your hands can get you in trouble. Yeah, I bet it can. Too much time often means too much thinking. And with over analysis comes realizations that sometimes, we aren’t quite capable of dealing with.
Despite my 8:40am-3:15pm work schedule, my 4:00pm trips to the gym, and my hour long sessions of Trading Spaces and While You Were Out, I’ve still had four plus hours of over analysis to do on five days during the week and more than double the think time, on weekends.
So it’s not a suprise that my breakdown came between a Friday night thought and a Saturday morning comment. At least, I would like to pinpoint that as the beginning though it must have been building up from quite a while before.
I began to think about purpose and choices. I thought about why people came and come into my life and how my decisions affected them and how their decisions affected me. If I could go back and re-do many of the things I once did, I would. But the past is the past and sometimes we are lucky enough to get another opportunity to explore it, but for the most part, our purpose is to move on. Dwelling on the past can stunt personal growth.
I started breaking down what life meant to me. I started trying to give all of this meaning. I began to pinpoint periods in our lives to prove that my theories made sense. I started with phase one, as a child whose life is really a reflection of family members and few close friends.
….Then the bell rang and it was lunchtime…So I’m going to continue this post when I get home…
6:07pm, and as promised, I’m back. I had to watch Trading Spaces and While You Were Out. You all must think this is a joke…lol
Anyway, I left off rationalizing my theories.
I don’t believe that God(or what ever spiritual being you subscribe to) intended for us to ever be lonely. I think that is why Eve was very much a necessary aspect of Adam’s life. With that said, I think that life is supposed to be something that is shared with others. Our purpose is to be the glue that keeps someone else together and likewise, that’s what they are to do for you. And it happens in a very special way.
When we are young, we have our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, cousins, and whatever family we want to talk about in our lives. Granted, there are situations in which this doesn’t happen because of some type of disfunction, but I believe that for the most part, there is some sort of guardian that is in our lives. As a child, I always had someone to pay attention to me. Whether I got negative attention (be it getting my behind cut up for doing some crazy junk) or positive attention (for excelling in school), I never had an opportunity to fall into a hole of depression. No matter how much I tried, my family was very much an active part of my life (of course, I’m excluding my bastard father). So they are the ones that kept me from slipping into the abyss.
But as I got older, I began to feel the disconnect that existed between my mother and me. “Two women can’t live in this house”, she often said. And I agreed wholeheartedly. There became a necessity for me to find the people who would take me through my next phase of life. When my mom made me angry, they were the people I vented to. We got in trouble together, we hung together, we fought together, and we experimented together. But they were there. They made the transition easy. I don’t remember there being a gap in time in which I was severely lonely and had no one to fill the immediate void that I felt.
However, that saying “all good things must come to an end” means something. And college brought that end for me. I chose a different path than most of my friends did. I chose to leave for college because I felt that it was the only place for me to be a woman without really having to grow up. I felt that I needed to leave my mother’s house instead of complaining about having to be there. So maybe I entered college for the wrong reason, but it definitely ended up being the greatest decision I ever made. There, I met a bunch of individuals that took the place of my friends from home. We became more like a family because of living situations and just the whole dynamic of college. We met guys together. We partied together. We took road trips together. We dabbled with illegals together. We were never apart. I mean, except when we were with our male companions.
And with school being so stressful and trying to balance a social life, when was there time to be depressed unless you wanted to go home. And I was quite content with not going home. But college is this interesting little land that can jade your vision on what reality really is. Aside from having to work and maintain decent G.P.As, college (particularly living on campus) throws you into the middle of some sort of private world in which you can really be unaware of the realities like loss and loneliness. You kinda get used to doing all the things that you do with your friends and lose sight of the fact that this is just temporary.
So when college was over, I stayed in Albany. I got a job here. All my friends left. They either went back to their families or decided to pursue their educations or their careers somewhere else. The people who once called me at 4am to ask me for advice, were now gone. Life outside of college is so different that we are just forced to deal with the fact that our friends may not have time to deal with the trivial drama and antics of our lives. So we don’t call and when we do, it’s just to say hello.
And all of a sudden, I found myself sitting at home, with nothing to do. I felt so lonely. I felt like I was trapped. I felt like I should have gotten with one of the random dudes I knew to be dogs. I felt like if I had done that, at least I would have someone to call to come over and take my mind of off the loneliness. And I realized that I had hit rock bottom. I realized that, for the first time in my life, there was no one that I could call to come over and just lay there with me, or just console me, or just watch me break down. I realized that I am not built to do this by myself. I realized that I NEED someone to be there so that I feel like I am doing all of this for a purpose.
I’ve felt this way before. When I stayed at a woman’s house. Beautifully decorated, castle of a place. But no one to come home to. When does your purpose pass you by. When do the decisions that we make begin to affect how we think about what our purpose is in this life? When did I become so emotionally needy? How did this happen to me?
I needed damage control. I flipped on Simone for no reason and had to apologize and let her know that I truly didn’t mean it. I got agitated with K when she called to see if I was ok. I told Stacy that I didn’t feel like talking about it when she called me, and I refused to call Nneka when I felt like there was no one I could call. And all these ladies consoled me and understood what I was dealing with and extended invitations to me because they had never seen me in this state of mind. Can ya’ll believe that I was about to throw up? Aint that some real drama queen junk? I was so depressed, I didn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t think. And Shontell checked on me. Antoinette asked if I was ok. All these people stepped up. Shontell said she had to do it because I have always been there when she was a mess. I appreciated that. I couldn’t even call my mom. I think she would have thought that I was having a nervous breakdown. And she might have been right.
I still feel like I won’t find purpose here in Albany but I know that my reinforcements are tight like…. lol…(something clever). I’m not going to change what I’ve been doing. I’m not going to throw myself at random dudes. But I’m going to really make a conscious effort to give these men a try when they do approach me in a decent manner. I guess I’m saying that I feel like at this point in my life, I need a companion. Whatever that means. Not necessarily something steady, but someone that will be the distraction I need to get my mind off of why I don’t want to be here.I mean seriously, all men can’t be dogs…
I’m typing this today, but I wrote it on Friday. We had a conference day. These days seem to be pointless because students don’t come to school, but we do. And when we get there, we are forced to be students, listtening to a facilitator read to us from an overhead, the packages that we all received as we walked into the door. However, I had a good time. I guess I’m still in college student mode. I sat up and gave her my full attention and I learned something. I was sitting at the table with some rude mutha ****ers. Anyway, here are my feelings. They may come off a little lewd, but I think you guys can handle it…
The concept of thinking about how to think is one that I find to be quite interesting. As I sat in a cafeteria filled with educators, the question of whether we are taught to think or think on our own, was asked. Suprisingly, just a few individuals (myself included) raised hands to say that we believed that we are taught to learn. Perhaps this is the reason our students are being promoted through the educational system with little or no knowledge of complex ideas and situations.
To say that we are not taught to think is to say that students sitting in a classroom in which they are expected to learn new things, is pointless. If all of this is true, we can all sit at home and (as my mother would say) learn through osmosis.
If You Can’t Sit Still, Why Should I?
My motive is not to throw stones, but today’s workshop participants have me in a state of utter shock (Mr. Bell told me today, Monday that it is said that educators make the worst audience. I think I agree). To think that a set of adults lack the ability to remain focused and attententive to a facilitator makes me wonder where they get off being agitated by students who are unwilling to focus on them. Granted, everything we learn will not interest us (especially if we have learned it before), but to be unable to maintain our focus in a one hour timespan, seems problematic. But perhaps, I’m too critical.
Faking Jacks!
Suffering from a case of academic arousal.
Gimme some space to verbally masturbate.
Am I coming off a little too lewd?
Well, I’m sorry. Just wash it off of you!
That’s what being an educator seems to be about. Something in which these people can shoot out their knowledge to students, and if they don’t get it, they have to figure out how to deal. And the kids just move on to another verbal masturbator. And maybe, run into someone that cares about them. Someone who will truly teach them and allow the kids to know that they really care….I hope to be that person. These kids have been running on empty for quite a while. I’m just trying to fill them up again….
…So we talked and talked and talked. We established things and it all went smoothly. We agreed that it is just easier to say what you feel or ask questions if you don’t know. We laughed and I felt better. But I’m still breaking down. A lot of good came out of the convo. And I finally know why I’m still frustrated. Thanks for taking the time.