I really don't want my whole blog to start revolving around him, but

he asked me the other day when I realized I liked him, and I rushed my answer a little then. I want to explain it better. 

Dear You,
I won't lie; pipe-cleaner heart was a bit of a shock. But it was one of the most pleasant shocks of my entire life, and above that it was incredibly intriguing. I instantly popped into my room and fell back on my bed and twirled it around in my hand and contemplated how incredibly different receiving this felt from receiving another Valentine earlier in the day. This was full of giddy excitement; this required concocting a plan to get to know you better. 

That plan started with inviting you to drink and chill with some fellow Dranglers and I on Valentine's Day night, but inviting you late enough that it didn't seem like I'd put too much forethought into it. K said taking the initiative like that might be bad, but I don't like being told I can't, so I did. And you came, and I stopped cuddling with my gay boys to sit next to you. And then a day or two later you came to Quad to study, and I did something for you that I've never done for anyone other than K before--I left my desk for you, just like I left my snuggles for you, because I wanted to be close to you more than I wanted to lay claim to the things that were mine. And you stayed with me til we were tired, and then you walked me home again, and at my door I hugged you and began to wonder. 

When we basically did a rinse and repeat a few days later, I knew something was officially up. And we were walking back to my building, I was wondering whether three walks home warranted a kiss on the cheek, but I chickened out when we actually reached my front step. The same thing happened at four. Confession: You may not realize this, because it hasn't really happened with you, but I am notorious for being a scared little bitch when it comes to guys. I can hold my own in almost any other situation, but my heart is usually too terrified of breaking to even step out on the ledge, let alone take the fall. I had to fight my heart out onto the ledge for you. I did it because this is...different. But I'm getting ahead of myself now.

But somewhere around that fourth time, the Social Chairs sent out an email saying we were going to have this members only event before the party on Saturday: 80s Prom Date Night. We'd be paired off and compete against other pairs for the title of prom king and queen. And while dates would mostly be random, if we emailed N we could rig the system. And as soon as I read that, I knew I wanted to be paired with you. That's the answer I gave you, the moment I realized I liked you. But it's more complicated than that.

Realizing that I want to do something cute like rig the system is one thing. Actually emailing N to ask her to sign me up with you was another entirely, but I wouldn't let myself chicken out of it, because more than just thinking this would be cute, I couldn't stand the idea of being paired with some random soph and seeing you with someone else. I wanted to be your 80s prom date. So I emailed her, and then I started pretty intensely researching 80s fashion, because despite actually hating the 80s, I wanted to show you that I cared about this. And seeing you walk in with that wig to rival my fro, I knew that being my date meant as much to you as it did to me, and a small part of me was honored. I didn't care that we didn't win any of our events; I was on your team and that was all that mattered. When the party actually started, you reminded me that dancing with you makes me feel beautiful. And when you suggested we slow dance like this was middle school, I almost melted. When I felt your lips meet my collarbone, my knees nearly gave out. 


This was different. And that's a long story, but I'm not done yet. You don't know how much of a mess I was in the 14-ish hours between our two conversations that Tuesday. We'll talk about it someday, maybe. Being a mess isn't the part I want to talk about now. The fact that I pushed through being a mess and retreating to calling boys stupid and blaming myself to talk to you again--that I, miss hides-and-cries-under-the-covers-until-the-world-gets-less-scary when it comes to guys, sought out a potentially crushing experience--that I couldn't be right with myself until I had talked to you again, and figured out what had gone wrong and why, that's how I knew I really liked you. That's how I know this is different, because I avoid conflict with guys like THE PLAGUE. But not with you, even though I was terrified...because depending on when you started counting, it had been somewhere between three days and two weeks, but I already knew that I wanted this to work. It took every ounce of strength and willpower I have, but I pushed myself and fought myself for you. That's how I knew I liked you in a different way that I've ever liked anyone else. 


<3

Moral of the untold story:

A) John Mayer may be a terrible terrible human being, but he's right about one thing: 

Talk it out. Get your thoughts off your chest, or you'll never feel...right. Don't lose the moment before you can fix things.

B) On a related note, don't assume the worst when something bad happens. It might not be as bad as you think.
C) I have fantastic friends. They give great advice, even especially when I don't want to take it (well, about most aspects of situations, at least), and I should listen to them more often.
D) I need to stop being a little bitch about the things that are important to my personal life. I'll raise my voice and scream and yell about like, injustices in the world, or academic problems, or problems in my friends' lives, but I'm usually too chicken to deal with issues in my own personal life with anything but ridiculous levels of (defensive) anger or semi-sincere apology. Now that I've seen firsthand what can happen when I have the balls to be honest about how I feel and what I want, that has to end. 
E) Life is full of surprises, man. 


That is all.

An addition to the list of things I really can't stand...

The malicious invasion of privacy at the hands of someone you considered a friend. Not necessarily even a particularly close friend; even just someone you thought you were cool with.
Princeton can be so difficult when you're a minority in every way. When your entire adjustment process consists of how to stop feeling so conspicuously different whenever you walk into a room. Not everyone--in fact, I would argue that perhaps not even the majority--of such people ever learn how to blaze an appropriate path between self-segregation and self-denying-integration, how to navigate Princeton's cultural landscape in ways that leave them feeling truly happy and fulfilled. I have always considered my friend R to be one of the few that has done this successfully. I have always looked up to him as an example of what I want my experience here to be like: breaking down the posts of the fence separating social spheres, being an example of what it means to embrace diversity without neglecting to take time for solidarity and brotherhood. 
I suppose "They" were right when they said the grass is always greener on the other side, though. Maybe he never actually broke any posts down to make a doorway; maybe he's been trapped on this fence for years, never really getting a foot on the ground on either side. Maybe I am too?
What are you supposed to do when you dedicate your life and heart and soul to an institution and your efforts go systematically unrecognized? What do you do when you construct your life around creating a family out of people you've met only recently, embrace a new identity regardless of its problematic history (and semi-isolate yourself from your brothers in so doing), only to get all the love you've poured into this thing thrown back in your face by a few members of the family you've worked so hard to be an integral part of? This isn't what he was working for. This is not what WE are working for. Regardless of sobriety levels, disrespect is disrespect. Banter is not cute when it is no longer immediately recognizable as playful. Time, love, dedication, sacrifice...these things are too precious to have thrown back at us. 
We are still waiting for the day when the world--when even our friends in the world--recognize that one can be intellectually interested in something without identifying with it; or even that a truly open and spiritually connected human being should be able to identify with the emotions and difficulties of any other human being, by virtue of nothing more than their shared human experience. We are still waiting for tolerance. We are still waiting for respect. We fight for this institution every day, in every possible way...when will it stop fighting us? How can I reconcile my love for this institution with the raw...hurt, anger, and downright betrayal I feel on his behalf? How do I show that I stand with him without marginalizing myself within this family I love so much? Should I even try to keep him from disowning us? Is there any reason to?

Thoughts from the Black Solidarity Conference

What I scribbled down during two particularly hard to sit through panels:
I hate when ppl interchange race and culture. Blackness in this country is inherently multicultural. Some of us were not raised by black communities. A growing percentage of Caribbean or African individuals are grouped with multigenerational African-Americans, and how does that interact with culture? Their culture is linguistic, is international, is full of persons who look and sound and think like them. They are from somewhere they don't want to lose. I can only trace my family back as far as Savannah, Georgia. What does that do to black "culture"? How do we cross those ties to present a unified front, and do we even want to? I like rock better than hip-hop, under most circumstances. I did not know what it meant to dream of fish. My blackness is an identity, but rarely stems from a cultural framework.

 [later]

 I don't know why I keep coming to this conference. I can't reconcile my conflicting understandings of what solidarity amongst black peoples with my own personal strivings and the characteristics of my soul. I go to these lectures and participate in these discussions, but I...I never feel like they're talking to/about me. I don't like saying this; in fact, it hurts me to say this, but I don't really feel "black enough" to be here--not by the normative (and frankly, quite stereotypical) definition of blackness being presented. So many people equate race with culture, race with class, race with mindsets, race with academic interests...black peoples are amongst the most multifaceted, diverse peoples on the face of the planet. There is no way to group multigenerational (my-ancestors-were-slaves-and-slavemasters-on-both-sides-of-my-family) black Americans with recent African- or Caribbean immigrants from a cultural perspective; there is increasingly little room to group even MAAs by culture when you factor in things like class and educational attainment. You are isolating huge pockets of black peoples by equating blackness with hip-hop or the South or underclass values. You are dividing us by talking about giving back to the black communities we came from, because we do not all come from such communities. Sometimes I feel like, while I identify as a black person, not all black people would even consider identifying with me, because through multigenerational oppression and internalization of racist interpretations, the masses of black peoples have stopped associating blackness with school, with the Ivy League, with graduate education, with the academy and the professoriate class. I'm rambling here, but what I'm trying to say is sometimes groups of black people make me feel like as much of an outsider--if not more--than people I'm supposedly not supposed to have anything in common with. Princeton is my first black community. How does that let me fit into "solidarity"? Why does being here make me wonder what the fuck I'm doing here? How can we celebrate diversity in solidarity--the classic sociologist Emile Durkheim says that social solidarity, in an organic and productive sense, can arise only out of diversity--painting a monotone portrait of black collegiate America as is presented at this conference does violence to the concept of solidarity. It makes me feel nothing but excluded, and even worse, it makes me think that whoever is in charge of our togetherness hasn't even considered me. 

xkcd knows my life.

I wish I could define gender, and sexuality, and race, and age, and life stage, like the girl in this comic defines being a grown-up...

smdh

...Ex-step-grandmother's sister, I don't know how to tell you this, but...a) you are NOT my cousin, and b) I WILL NOT BE YOUR FRIEND ON FACEBOOK.

the end.

In Honor of Today

PS, Sorry I stopped showing love to you, blog. We will remedy this soon.

My Life has...Purpose?

So a few of the research opportunities to which I'm applying call for Statements of Purpose as part of their applications. When I learned that I started freaking out, like I'm 20 years old (for a few more hours), I'm just a student who wants to keep being a student--you want my life to fit together into some sort of a cohesive narrative about why grad school is right for me and I don't think that's going to happen yet (ever?). I was scared I was going to have to bullshit the whole thing and I wasn't going to get in because this was going to be a piece of crap, and I was scared of how I was going to un-piece-of-crap-ify it by the time legit applications roll around. 

And then I started writing, and shocked myself. It...works. I didn't have to BS any of it, because once I got going, I realized there were signs and there are reasons why I want to do what I want to do and as much as I wouldn't have believed it a few days ago, there is a purpose to all of this. I've never thought about my life as something purposeful before. It's...interesting, to say the least. I won't call it fate, I might call it destiny, because I think it's more than coincidence....It's weird how we're writing stories that have follow-able plots without even being aware that we're holding pens. I always say that I want to be a professor because really, what else would I do? Nothing hopefully seems a lot more obvious after you read this:

Then entirely confident in my future as an English major, I enrolled in my first Sociology course on a whim, but quickly became enamored with the discipline and the change in perspective developing a “sociological imagination” entailed. A particularly interesting reading in that first class inspired me to take Families later, and in retrospect, I think I knew that introduction to the field had changed my life plan even before I enrolled in Inequality: Class, Race, and Gender instead of the last prerequisite to declare English. That course, in addition to introducing me to the truly interdisciplinary nature of Sociology, presented me with my first experience with original sociological research, in the form of a group project surrounding social stratification found in the most common fields Princetonians enter after graduation. From the earliest stages of that project, it became clear that I devoted myself more entirely to the research than my fellow group members, printing piles of articles and enjoying the process of enveloping myself in the structural faults of the nonprofit sector—my English-heavy close-reading background translated into research suiting me well. Recognizing this love for research prompted me to realize that my friend’s half-joke that she could see me as a professor held some weight; a tutor throughout middle- and high schools, and the friend who is ever-ready to enlighten others with some nugget of knowledge, teaching comes naturally to me, and despite having always been an avid writer, I had very recently realized that writing scholarly works might come just as naturally. These combined realizations led me to apply for, and thankfully be awarded, recognition as a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, a feat which I hope, like this research opportunity, will enhance my chances of acceptance into a prestigious PhD program in Sociology.

Though my group didn’t have full freedom to choose a research topic for that assignment in Inequality: Class, Race, and Gender, the choices presented to us demonstrated something integral to my love of sociological research—the ease with which a topic of general interest to me could become an academic project.  From that point on, whenever I read an article or had a discussion with a friend about some social issue, I began to wonder how I could study it and come to some sort of informed conclusion; my junior independent work this year grew out of the same process. Almost since enrolling in college, my friends at other institutions and I had often debated the benefits of going to our respective schools over others, and after reading an article in the New York Times about college’s effect on students, I realized that I could turn this debate into a substantive research endeavor. Under the guidance of a graduate student, Alex Davis, and my advisor Professor Rebekah Massengill, I developed an interesting research question and constructed a thorough questionnaire and extensive list of variables on which to compare institutions; this pair has proven instrumental to my research as I can further develop ideas through conversations with them, as well as approach them with questions about survey design, data collection, or even use of STATA for data analysis. At different stages in my research process, each of these mentors jokingly informed me that I was working too hard for a junior project, reflecting again the fact that I take naturally to research and truly enjoy it more than most.

Befriending and having intellectual discussions with persons from a wide range of racial, economic, cultural, religious, national, and regional origins throughout my time at Princeton has engaged me academically with the often-overlooked intricacies of identity politics. Additionally, my current research topic has shown me that, at this stage of life at least, higher education and the changes to individual identity it prompts fascinate me—I hope to study another aspect of this topic in my Senior Thesis next year. The Sociology courses I have taken so far, in conjunction with my overall college experiences and the people I have come to know during my time here, have inspired me to seek to understand the gray areas of social life and society, most clearly in the areas of individual identity, both in terms of culturally significant identities that are not traditionally studied (such as identifying as an adult), and the complications that can arise from various conflicts and convergences amongst traditional identity markers. In my current research project, in which I ask whether one type of institution better facilitates its students’ transitions to adulthood than does another, I hope to broaden the expanse of knowledge regarding the effects of higher education on young Americans by drawing attention to and filling an overlooked gap in the literature, effectively demonstrating that “higher education” as a topic of study contains its own gray areas and points of heterogeneity that warrant further study. I plan to continue to conduct research in this manner in the future, by delving deep enough into areas of interest to me that I find yet-unexplored layers to be probed and analyzed. As truly strange as my friends and classmates may find this, I find exhilaration in being surrounded by books and articles, reading and highlighting, trying to find my way to a research question—in the simplest of terms, I love research, and would relish the chance to make a career of it. A winding road comprised of specific courses, professors, and graduate students led me to pursue a degree—and hopefully, a career—in Sociology; without these individuals and their work, I may have gone on to criticize contemporary novels and lived blissfully unaware of the ways in which I could add to the knowledge of the world, and I cannot bypass the opportunity to affect others in the same way by continuing on to graduate school and, eventually, professorship. A multi-tasker by nature, I aspire towards a dual career in professorship and administration, so that I may ensure the incorporation of diverse ideas and teachings into curricula and academic atmospheres.

Black + White = Black?*

TV presented me with something interesting today. That doesn't usually happen, and it certainly doesn't usually happen on two back-to-back entirely unrelated television shows. So I was waiting for House to come on, right? And I was watching Wheel of Fortune to bide my time (I'm a BEAST at Wheel). And a black woman beat her opponents by a landslide in the end, including trips to both Hawaii and Alaska (woot woot!), and when Pat asked her who was in the audience with her today, she said her mom. The camera pans over to where her mom is sitting, so she can wave, and Pat sounds...confused for a moment until he realizes that her mom is the white woman waving at the camera, and says, "Oh, there she is!" sounding totally and completely surprised. And I can't even yell at him for being surprised, because I totally was too. 
Then House came on. We could tell by the previews for this week's episode that something interesting was going on between the two patients this week: one a middle-aged white drill sergeant and the other a black teenager who's been in and out of trouble and foster care. My friend guessed they were secretly gay lovers, and I had been willing to go along with that, because it's just the kind of plot twist House would go for, but *spoiler alert* it turns out they're actually father and son, in a totally unexpected Luke-I-am-your-father moment (Yes, it is possible to recognize Star Wars tropes without ever having actually seen Star Wars.)
And so twice in one night makes it more than a coincidence in my book. It makes it reminiscent of a social phenomenon. It makes me think of the "Mixed Race Movement" and my friends S and J who refuse to identify themselves as one race or the other. They are my black friends whom I cannot call non-white, and they often make me question whether I can call myself the same. It reminds me of how, a few weeks ago, my friend JW said that he can't tell when black people are Blasians; they just look black to him. I thought it was funny because I can pick the Asian features out almost instantly, because I'm so familiar with what the absence of them looks like. But no Blasian person could ever pass for just Asian. If TV says white mom plus black dad = socially black, and TV says black mom plus white dad = socially black, and society when scrutinizing Obama's presidential campaign said white mom plus African dad = not black enough, then what is blackness and where are the lines drawn?
Racial mixing is really interesting to me, especially in conjunction with a mixing of the socioeconomic classes. A strange creative part of me wants to turn The Little Mermaid into The Little Mulatta and still have her hoard her secret life away from her parents, sing "Part of that World", and leave the world she grew up in for something new and different (read: to her, clearly better). Oh, the things it would mean.

*That may be the title of a book or an article about mixed-race individuals, but I couldn't find it on Google so decided to use it. No copyright infringement intended.

Next step(s) in my continual quest for self-improvement: I miss art. I don't even remember how we started talking about this the other night during a half-(meaning only me)-drunken cuddlefest the other night, but B and I were discussing the fact that I used to be really into pottery when I was in middle school. I have this bowl that went on a statewide art tour to a bunch of different colleges, and there's an etched plaque I made of a tree supposedly on permanent display in my middle school. I got to go on this cool field trip to this place in Millville called the Clay College (which I just realized still exists and now I want to go back but I vaguely remember it being prohibitively expensive. But you know what ISN'T prohibitively expensive? What is, in fact, FREE? The Ceramics Studio on campus. I've always talked about wanting to go, but I've never actually gone, and you know what? I'm sick of wanting to do things but letting...who-knows-what get in the way. I just finished watching the pottery episode of Community (my new obsession in life) and I don't care if there are people who are better than me, and I don't care if no one wants to do it with me, I'm going to get my hands dirty again. I want to pick clay from under my nails. I want to feel something forming underneath the palms of my hands and I want to guide it into being. I want to create something from a lump of nothing. And next year, I'm going to take a pottery class (as long as it's not on Thursday nights).  

I want to make a major life change...

...that may be a little premature according to the tangible markers of adulthood I've attained, but should have happened a longggggg time ago emotionally: I am going to start referring to the house I grew up in as "my mom's house", rather than as "home". While seeing my family still feels like "home" for the first day or two, and seeing the friends I grew up with can have the same effect, this place is no longer my home. My home is in Princeton, NJ right now. My home is where I live. It's 113 Edwards 33 Prospect Street, for now, but that will change over the summer, and again in a year and a half, and again and again after that. But this house that I'm in right now, it's not home anymore, and while that makes me feel slightly homeless sometimes, it's something I need to come to terms with.

I've said this over and over this past week:

"I feel like a...'college student'".

Which begs the question, well what do I feel like the rest of the time? (Some part of my brain answers 'a Princetonian'.)

Anyway, I've been...watching LIVE TELEVISION. Watching TV and drinking. Going TO THE MOVIES. Playing video games. Playing video games and drinking. Watching other people play video games and drinking. Drinking for no reason at all. Ordering pizza at 1 am because we're drunk and hungry. Doing the very minimal amount of productive work to feel as though my life is not an entire waste. Making money by doing paid psychology experiments instead of having a real job. Not setting an alarm any day of the week. I suppose the best statement to describe how I've been feeling is "like a BUM". Why do I associate these two things in my head? They obviously don't go together in any way in my understanding of college for myself, or even for the majority of the people who have taken my survey, most likely. So what's going on here?

The following question was inspired by a random wall post from one of my friends to another one of my friends...

Would you date yourself?

It's an interesting question. Really calls on you to do SERIOUS self-assessment, but from an outsider's perspective instead of an insider's one, and from the particular-outside-viewpoint of potential romantic interest. I don't suppose this will be an easy task...

Would I date myself? I'm not sure. I'm a little crazy, but then again, everyone's a little crazy in their own little way, right? I've got big dreams that I will achieve, lest I die trying, but hopefully we've reached an era of life when ambitious guys can handle a lady having some ambitions of her own. I'm not that pretty in a lot of the stereotypical-impossible-airbrushed-dominant-culture kind of ways, but I do my best to work with what I've got and I think it shows. I'm a big girl, but a big guy needs someone who can take it. I'm not the housewife type, but we're talking about just a little dating. I'm a bit clingy, though, which I can see being an issue, but my clinginess is a byproduct of the fact that I give as much of my heart as I can spare to the people who are important to me. I'm kind of an intense person about a LOT of things, but who wants to be a candle when you have the potential to be a bonfire? I love to snuggle and if you don't I don't want you anyway, XD. I'm not very walk-all-over-able, and I will challenge your ideas and want to have intellectual debates but again, if this is a bad thing in your book, keep right on movin. I drink, and I curse, and I sometimes have problems with authority, and I don't "do the whole religion thing"; there are other lifestyles that simply can't get with those qualities, and I respect that--I probably couldn't be with someone who is super-religious, or someone who categorically does not drink or curse, just like I couldn't be with someone who smokes. I'm not a great dancer, but I will get out on the floor and shake somethin, and according to Lee Ann Womack that's what life is all about, right?

But I think I'm approaching this wrong. The question is not would some rando guy date me, it's would I, knowing everything I know about myself, date me? I, knowing how I am when I'm by myself, knowing that I change my mind all the time, knowing the kind of thoughts that run through my head and the way I approach things like friendships and relationships, knowing my every little bad habit and all the things that piss me the fuck off about other people. And I'm...struggling with this. At first, I am inclined to say no, because I don't really like to be alone with myself. I'm working on it, but have not successfully reached comfort in alone time yet. (Unless this counts; blogging might be my only legitimate hobby. Meditation too, kind of. I want to take up yoga once the new semester starts.) But I love the person I am when I'm spending time with the people I love. I'm an extrovert; my energy and happiness and the warmth in my life mostly comes from my relationships, which I put so much of myself into and expect so much from. Knowing everything I know about myself means knowing my goals and aspirations and knowing the person I'm striving to become as well as I know the person I am, right? I would date the person I'm trying to be. I think that means I'd also like to help me get there...     

Signs of being an alcoholic...

I just told a friend I couldn't get free facials with her on Thursday at 7pm because I'm planning to already be wasted by then. XD

Does King Deserve to be King?

One of the biggest tangible changes being an African-American studies certificate pursuer has made in my life is my like, newfound...let's say "objection" to Martin Luther King Day as a holiday, as part of a larger...yeah, I think we can actually say "disgust" with the commonplace representations of the Civil Rights Movement in contemporary American classrooms and homes. I hate being lied to, particularly by authority figures. I hate the images of Christopher Columbus and Abraham Lincoln that are portrayed to young children everywhere. I hate when culture tries to rewrite history to make it more convenient. And similar to all these hatreds, I hate that America puts MLK up on a pedestal without addressing any of the flaws in his strategies and ideologies. 

Now don't get me wrong; Martin Luther King was an incredible man who did phenomenal things for black people in this country, and who tried to do similarly phenomenal things for poor people. There was a time when I would have said that I owe my very lifestyle to him; but that kind of statement, and the mindset it reflects, is exactly what pisses me off so much about this holiday. I owe my lifestyle to the Civil Rights Movement, fact, but while culture elected King as the Movement's face, there are so many other people who made contributions just as--if not more, in light of the fact that I am a black WOMAN--relevant and effective on my day-to-day being. With all of my knowledge of African-American history, I can think of NO reason King deserves to be elevated over Malcolm X or Ella Baker. I can think of NO reason for the American public--even the BLACK American public--to think of Rosa Parks as just some little old lady who wouldn't get up from her seat on the bus one day, as opposed to the die-hard political activist she really was.

Martin Luther King was many many wonderful things, but he was also a stickler for some pretty bad ideas: a) political sexism, and b) passive resistance. I think that to some degree, the black "community" as a whole is still struggling to recover from the lasting implications of the utter dominance of these ideologies, and the effective hero-worship and idolization of King in this country simply pushes conversations about the inherent badness of these ideologies further and further under the rug. If we can't address the faults of the persons we are told to view as having been great in the past, how will we ever recognize them in the future? Sexism in the black community is STILL un-talked-about by anyone but black feminists, and fact: no one really listens to them anyway. My mother STILL says she's oppressed as a black person but not as a woman, and black women's position in society will NEVER increase until we can eradicate the existence of such limited mindsets. But how can we if we continue to praise King as our savior? Political sexism is, in some aspects, even worse than in-everyday-life sexism, because it's like saying there are specific areas in which women can never be equal to men and certain arenas in which they should never be listened to, as opposed to just being generally ignorant. Passive resistance too often leads to just sitting there and taking the shit this country throws at us, and maybe I'm a radical but I will fight to the death for the things I deserve. We all should; it's the only way to get anyone to listen. The Movement has DIED; now we all practice passive resistance, and our men and boys rot in jail, and our children fail in failing schools, and our success stories are ostracized and remain single and childless for being strange exceptions to unwritten rules...it's not getting us anywhere. Blindly accepting King as the face of the Movement, as the King of race relations in America and as having the chief ideas that should be recognized and remembered just sets us back into the faults of his time, and I for one shall not regress.

Lament!

WHY

ARE 

ALL 

THE 

BOYS 

WHO 

LOVE 

ME 

GAY?!??

Something Incredible Happened Saturday Night...

Nearly 8 years ago, my mother and stepfather got divorced. [Insert chorus of HALLELUJAHS! here] Lots of wonderful things resulted from this, along with something terrible. As soon as the divorce was final, my stepbrother's mother decided that he was no longer to have any contact with his "other family". She wouldn't let him talk when we called, and when we kept calling, she changed their phone number. My brother, the one who is the same age as me, with whom I bathed and slept and played and grew and loved during all the earliest years of my life, was suddenly gone forevermore. 


I've missed him to varying degrees throughout the rest of my life, more and more since Greg reminded me what family is supposed to feel like. I don't really give a shit that we're not technically related anymore; that is my brother and I won't really tolerate anyone saying anything different. When he turned 18, my mom and I really started trying to get back in touch with him, because his mom couldn't stop us anymore. First we called his father, but [don't get me started on] that man hadn't spoken to his firstborn son in years and was disturbingly disinterested in our desire for reconnection. Fuck him. So then I started periodically searching Facebook in an attempt to find him, but he has both and very common first name and a very common last name, and I didn't know where he lived or where he was going to school or anything that could help me narrow the search. I have two friends at school who live in the area he lived in when were growing up, and I asked them if they knew someone by his name, and one of them did! But it wasn't him. 


To make a long story short, we were very discouraged. Short of hiring a private detective, there seemed to be no way to put our little family back together, and that fact was generally a small piece of sadness inside me all the time. (I am so sick and tired of people ruining MY family with THEIR issues. You no longer wanting to call someone "boyfriend," "husband," or even "son," does NOT automatically entail that I no longer want to call him "mine" in some form. There are some bonds I can never imagine breaking, no matter how hard they are strained.)


I can't really even express in words, then, how I felt when I checked my phone after watching a movie and saw that I'd missed a bunch of texts, two of which were as follows: One from my little sister saying B**** had friended her on Facebook, and one from Facebook saying those impossible little words: B**** J****** has requested to add you as a friend on Facebook. I was just talking the other day about how fragile life is, how it can just turn upside down and inside out in the blink of an eye. Sometimes upside down is a wonderful wonderful way to be. Life has this funny way of scaring and blessing you at the same time. My dad is so sick, just laying in bed because sitting down hurts, waiting for a call that he can come back to the hospital, and I am so worried about him. But my long-lost brother just walked back into my life and has missed me as much as I have missed him. He wants to see me as soon as possible and I just want to hold him for hours. I just want to look at him so I remember his face again. I have his number and I can't wait to hear his voice.

Confession: Everything I ever say about family and how mine isn't that big a deal to me is total and complete BULLSHIT. I think I just tell myself that to avoid remembering how much it hurts to have lost such important parts of it. But I don't have a word for how deliriously ecstatic Facebook-chatting with my brother the night before last made me feel, or for how terrified I am about my dad's health right now. My friends are my family, but my family is my family too, and my heart is feeling so much at one time right now. Daddy, I love you. BJ, I love you too. There are some bonds that can never be broken.

This post is not meant to be a Debbie Downer...

 

I usually have something witty and cute to say about life in general, or my life specifically, like how they say change is the only constant in life, but today I want to take a moment to recognize that that volatility makes life really really fragile. Not only in the oft-talked-about highs-and-lows/rollercoastery ways, but just in the ideas that it can change irrevocably in the blink of an eye, and it can be over just as fast.

"When a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations, to try to impose some order on the chaos and make sense out of that which seems senseless." -- Barack Obama

 National tragedy this week in Arizona: Six regular people living their regular lives decided to go out and participate in democracy--crazy idea--and it cost them their lives, some of which were long and full, but others of which were truly just beginning. 14 more people were injured, with various degrees of severity; their lives have been changed forevermore.

Princeton tragedy: We lost a Tiger this week. A freshman girl from Virginia, who lived in Forbes and played on the softball team. Two of my friends knew her well, and I can't begin to imagine what they're going through because I have never lost a good friend. Her death was ruled "natural causes"; she had evidently been having medically unexplained seizures since May, but had decided to come to Princeton instead of deferring a year to try to figure out what was wrong. I've heard a lot of people commenting that they didn't understand why she would do this, but reading the articles on the homepage about how her friends are mourning her, she wanted to sleep in her uniform, and even her parents called us Tigers her family, it makes sense to me. This place has given me the best years of my entire life thus far, years I sometimes doubt will ever be matched, and from what I can gather, it gave her the best 5 months of hers. And that makes me glad. I just...she was (relatively) fine at dinner the night before, and they found her dead in the morning. Just like that.

Something that has the potential to become a personal tragedy: Okay, I'm being melodramatic. But I'm worried. So I've been pretty quiet about this because I don't know what to think, but things have escalated to the point that it must be shared: my father has been in and out of the hospital for the past week-and-a-half or so. This may be more information than you need to know, but he woke up last Thursday morning with a full bladder and couldn't go. The pressure just kept increasing and increasing so he went to the hospital and had to get a catheter put in. That was in for a week--and he missed work for a week--and when they took it out this Wednesday, he still couldn't go. Now they're saying he has to have surgery next week, and they're going to run tests on samples from his prostate, which means prostate cancer is a feasible explanation for what's going on right now. How do you go to bed one night feeling relatively alright (my dad has high blood pressure and diabetes) and wake up the next morning showing potential signs of having CANCER?! He gets regular checkups and everything! My mom says I'm worried about nothing right now, but I can't help it; I'm freaking the fuck out. 

Too much has happened this week. The world is a crazy place, and our time in it could very well be shorter than any of us imagine. So LIVE your life, okay? Drake has some new song out with Nicki Minaj (said in a disgusted tone, but the reason behind it is another story for another time) in which he says, Every one dies but not everybody lives, and he's entirely right about that. I'm NOT going to say to live each day like it's your last, because let's be real: you'd probably end up in jail or in the hospital or do something to directly cause it to be your last.

I will say this though: I was doing this self-affirmation exercise for a while last year but I stopped: at the end of the night before I went to sleep I would think about one positive thing that happened that day, one thing that made that day worthwhile. It sometimes meant actively taking steps to make something worthy of this title happen each day, and that's something I want to start doing again. It's something EVERYONE should do, because whether we like to think about this or not, your whole world could turn upside down, inside out, or just plain dark overnight. 

Cheesy Blogaversary Post

Sunday marked a whole YEAR of me keeping this blog, and that should be celebrated! I don't know if I thought I'd stay with it this long when I started it...I hadn't really put all that much thought into it, but though school/life sometimes wins over me updating this regularly, it means so much to me and here's to hoping I have another year of wonderments and misadventures to share with all of you! Yay!