Corn Rows to Cornrows

From Kentucky rows of corn to a cultural moment, Dante's hair is finally long enough to be braided. He's wanted cornrows for a while, and his determination to grow out his hair in spite of how aggravating growing out hair can be told me that he was serious. We had a bit of a fight to keep his Nana from cutting it back into a little white boy's 1950s hair style, as she often loves to do. She doesn't understand the new braids, nor does she want to. So now it's a battle to keep her from subtlely undermining his new confidence. He declared outside the shop, "I'm a new boy today!" I've often felt like a new paragraph in the chapter of my life started with a new haircut. I was suprised to discover he felt the same thing.

Here's him, full of excitement, and his 'fro, in all it's glorious blaxploitation glamour:




From the wiki about cornrows:

A common way of styling hair in populations from sub-Saharan Africa, as well as North Africa, dynastic Egypt and the Horn, cornrows survived for centuries in the United States as a style of hair preparation among African slaves and their progeny...Over the years, cornrows (along with dreadlocks) have been the subject of several disputes in the American workplace (see The Allen Iverson Movement). Some employers have deemed them unsuitable for the office and have banned them - especially at-will firings and/or termination. African American employees and civil rights groups have countered that such attitudes evidence racial and cultural bias. Some such disputes have resulted in litigation.

Dante's braids took under an hour to do. His hair was barely long enough. He hung in there and didn't complain--braiding hurts, especially around the temples. He "laughed through the pain", according to him, as the braids have to be really tight. His hair is coarse, but not coiled, so I don't know how braids are going to work out for him. His hair texture makes it easy for them to slip lose. He's pretty contented here.






I know one thing. He's tickled pink.

-- Virgil

Birthday Madness! (Post 2)

(Obviously I'm still not over the birthday thing yet.)

Every year on my birthday my Grandma would call me and ask me if I felt any different today. The answer was usually no. When I turned 24, I felt different. I felt like an "adult." It was truly a physical feeling. I haven't experienced it since until a week from my 30th birthday. I got really excited about being 30. Most women I know who've been through it cry. I'm pretty jazzed.

Psychologically, it means two things to me. First, it means that people have to listen to me. Stop laughing! I can't be written off as a kid with no life experience anymore. Even though I've had way more life experience than I would normally have chosen, 30 means something to other people that "late twenties" doesn't. So take me seriously now, dammit. I may even follow up what I say with an announcement of my age. "You shouldn't vote for him. I'm 30 years old." To give it extra weight, maybe. Second, it means that I've entered the era of health maintenance. In my mind, 30 is the age that shit starts happening to women. So I'm in the process of scheduling checkups for things that I should've been doing all along. It just got more serious to me this past week.

I'm not scared about growing older. I'm doing well at this stage in my life. I'm finally going in the direction I want to go. I've got a good nuclear family. I'm pleased with my education (if a bit done with it already). I'm pleased with my work. All the accumulated experiences of my life have coalesced to give me one hell of a backbone. I know what I stand for. I'm comfortable enough to change if I need to.

If I could give one piece of advice to the "youngsters" out there (you know, those people who aren't yet 30), it would be to get into the practice of asking why something is the way it is. You can't sit there? Why? They won't raise your salary? Why? And make sure you get a good answer. If the person claims they don't know, ask the follow up questions: who does know, and how can I talk to that person? Many of your troubles will be solved right there.

The second piece of advice? No one is bothering to pay attention to how you look. They're too busy worrying about how they look. So go out and live your life.

It's been a good life, in spite of everything. Many happy returns. What's your birthday advice?

-- Virgil

Birthday Madness! (Post 1)

Post 1 will be what I did. Post 2 will be how I feel about it.

My absence on the net has largly been due to party fever. I don't know if it's because this birthday is a milestone or what, but I more or less started celebrating the Monday before last. In JW culture, you don't celebrate anything except their version of Passover and maybe your (or someone else's) wedding anniversary. No birthdays, no Christmas. So birthdays are sort of new to me. Even though I've been out for 11 years now, for the first few years after I got booted out, I never really celebrated. It was all too weird. After that, I'd go out for dinner. I always got a few presents, but it never really mattered to me if I received anything or not, because I was so accustomed to having nothing. Any little thing was a bonus.

So last year's birthday was OK. Nothing wildly special, the usual dinner and a few presents thing. For some reason, this year's birthday experience has been wildly different. This has been a party sort of month. I began in a party mood with America's birthday. Then there was Dante's birthday. Mine is two weeks after his. I started partying wa-a-y in advance. I've had three birthday cakes from three different sources. I partied all weekend in Pittsburgh. I opened my presents early and didn't give a shit about tradition. I blew out candles on a birthday cake (the 2nd of 3) for the first time ever. I had steak grilled outside for my birthday dinner. I was very demanding. My Director/Buddy commented that I had "a big dose of the birthday ass all week long."

I told anyone who would listen that it was my birthday. Before it was even my actual birthday. "Are you going somewhere this weekend?" "Yes, I'm going to Pittsburgh. It's my birthday." "Oh, it's your birthday today!" "No, it's my birthday in 4 days." "Oh, that's nice." "I'll be 30. Whoo-hoo!" Weird looks followed. I bought myself as many presents as I received. I had to force myself to quit buying presents for me. I cracked my birthday wine (last year's present) a week in advance. I danced around the house every day up to my birthday singing "Birthday, birthday, birthday!" for no good reason. I would say I did this for 5 days.

I went to Pittsburgh for my birthday weekend. I saw a Pirate's game (they lost to the Astros 2-1). I bought a hot dog and an overpriced beer (birthday baseball!). The bases were loaded in the bottom of the 9th with the best batter at bat and almost a full count, so it was a genuine first time experience, even if it was a heartbreaker. There were fireworks after the game (birthday fireworks secretly for me). The view in the stadium is beautiful. The stadium is across the river from the city, and it's a very aesthetic experience as the sun is setting. Sort of like this, but a bright sunny day that fades into a gorgeous orangey glow:

I went to the Carnegie art museum on Saturday (birthday art) which was displaying lots of American masters (American birthday!). I love art museums, but I can't visit for more than an hour or so before it all starts blending in together. There were lots of charcoal and graphite pictures, my personal favorite mediums. I ended up buying myself a ring (birthday present!) made by a Canadian who works with only steel, bronze and rubber. That has the potential to be an addiction, as his work is within my price range and I'm fascinated with stuff like that. My Tiffany's wedding ring is solid silver by Paloma Picasso, a double band that crosses in the shape of the infinity symbol on top. It's heavy and I love it. I had birthday barbeque that night.

On Sunday we went to the zoo. Most of it was great, but we went a little too late in the day and caught most of the crowd. Some of the exhibits we passed on because there were just too many people and too much noise. I'm never quite sure how I feel about zoos after I've been to one. Sometimes it seems like a good idea. The zebras looked happy. Two baby elephants played and wrestled in the water, which was fascinating for a good 25 minutes. The lions were gorgeous, although in the wild they sleep up to 20 hours a day and are only active to hunt. Since they don't have to hunt in the zoo, they're active even less. That can't be good. The monkey house had so much shit in it you could smell the ammonia. That can't be healthy. Sometimes the animals looked really bored. I bought a coffee mug that said "extinction is forever" and had a polar bear on it (birthday present!). I discovered that I am allergic to big cats and to camels. Fascinating.


The night before my birthday, I got into my presents. Among the presents I got were an Ipod (exciting!) and the book I'd been wanting for months. It's called In Vogue, and I was thrilled to get it. My presents are still sitting on display. The newness hasn't worn off yet. On the actual day of my birthday, I went shopping and bought myself, among other things, three Ian Fleming James Bond novels and Freakonomics (because I'm an economics freak myself), and a swimsuit. I bought myself 36 roses in varying colors. I stopped before someone got hurt.

Next year, I'm considering partying all month long. After all:



-- Virgil

Random Musings

Mindblowing concept: "an intellectual concentric"


Recent conversation in the parking garage while Dante was bopping and scatting around:
Batmite!: He really doesn't seem at all like your kid. He's always "on" and you're so laid back.
Me: *shrug* Idunno.
Dante: Does the machine give you change back?
Me: Not today.
Dante: Burn the machine!!!!!!! *(followed by "burn the machine dance" and chants of "Destroy it! Destroy it!")
Batmite!: Never mind. He's your kid.

Gross Understatement of the Week:
Director/Buddy: This could take a while.
Me, staring at stack of paperwork for annual statistical report: ..................

Best thing that happened so far this week:
Opening my bottle of "birthday" wine early and sipping on it all week. (My tradition, which I confess is only a year old, is to buy/receive a bottle of wine for my birthday, keep it unopened all year, and then open it on my next birthday while reminiscing about the year gone by.)

Atheistic Musings: Part 2

One thing that bugs me as an atheist sometimes is people's refusal to give proper credit where credit is due. By this I mean when you do something nice for somebody or something that required sacrifice on your part or someone else's part, the first thing out of the receiver's mouth is "Thank God!"

Most of the time this doesn't rankle me; but when the person then goes on to describe how they'd been beseeching God to make sure something they needed done actually happened, it aggravates me. I realize that most people are just expressing relief when they sigh "Thank God." When they go into depth about how God has just provided them with, say, a GED manual absolutely free after months of praying, I lose sympathy. Why? Well, for one thing, I know that without too much statistical deviation, this person is never going to go on to "pay it forward." Because s/he has just taken the act as proof of the motto "God will provide."

Being in nonprofit, I see/hear this all the time. Whether it's food banks or free clothes or the previously mentioned free GED book, God is behind a lot of those things, unbeknownst to me. All this time I thought it was the effort and sweat of people trying to make the world a better place. Local businessmen reached into their pockets and in some cases coughed up a lot of money, not because a sky daddy told them they were supposed to, but because they like the community they live in and they're committed to seeing everyone prosper. Not so we can all ring in New Jerusalem together. Some of those people work for depressingly low wages from shockingly good educational backgrounds, because they get fulfillment from the work and because they want to solve problems. It rarely happens that the goddidit crowd donates back to the agencies that took care of them. Why should they? God "provided" for them, they have faith he'll "provide" for the next person as well. But God doesn't write my checks. Public money from committed people is where my check comes from (measley, though it is).

Even worse is the cop out of "God works through you." That one strikes me as particularly pathetic. God bothered himself to make sure you got your free GED book, but he isn't concerned enough to make sure Somalian kids get a bowl of rice? God has a weird notion of priorities. I also hate the "I donate to my church" cop out. Where was your church when you needed something from the food bank? Why do you keep giving them money if they never give anything back to you? When the United Way has their fundraising season, I have actually been on the phone with agency directors (who are supposed to set the example for their staff) whose salary comes in part from the UW tell me that they don't plan to give to the UW because they "already donated at church." Then let the church fund your position. See how long that lasts.

I guess it all goes back to the notion that for many Xians, atheists have no morals because they don't have a sky daddy to command or punish them. Many Xians don't follow the Biblical concept of providing for those in need. Far from it. If that 80% majority actually gave something, and their churches were using it to "help" the people, I'd be out of a job. I hope that someday I am out of a job. That means the problem has been solved. Until then, I'll keep fundraising, grant-writing, recruiting and educating--because I think it's the right thing to do. So next time, the least the receiver could do is say, "Thank you."

-- Virgil

Atheistic Musings: Part 1

Even though I was raised fundamentalist, I've been an atheist since I was around 5 years old. I had some street preacher tell me as an undergrad, "Oh, you knew god when you were little. You just forgot." I laughed out loud, at first over the sheer ballsy-ness of the argument. I'm not wrong--you just forgot. How can you remember something that never happened? How do you prove a negative? It's the same argument Xians use all the time: prove He doesn't exist! You can't prove God doesn't exist anymore than you can prove pink unicorns that sprinkle the world with faery dust don't exist. But that doesn't mean that you then just shrug and become agnostic at best. Based on current evidence and the reasoning of your own brain, God, particularly the Xian God, is embarassingly easy to dismiss. But I laughed, too, because I remembered thinking to myself when I was about five or six: Being human is nice. Why doesn't God like us? That doesn't make sense. We're better off on our own, I guess.

I, of course, kept that to myself.

But even living in a fundamentalist cult, I just couldn't wrap (warp?) my brain around a god and conform to it. And I tried really, really hard. When I heard the story of Adam & Eve's expulsion from Paradise, I swear to the god that doesn't exist, I thought it was a heroic event. It was full of philosophical problems for me: why would god set temptation right in front of their eyes? Wouldn't that be like setting a loaded gun in your kid's playroom and then whipping it when it got (naturally) curious? Why would the tree of knowledge be forbidden? If god supposedly made us curious, wouldn't he know that the tree of knowledge would be the first thing we'd go after? With my personality, I'd take the knowledge fruit knowing damn well what was to come--it would be worth it to me. Live in ignorance and servitude for eternity or be able to decide things for yourself? Hell, I'm taking the whole tree! I'd uproot it and drag it right out of Eden. If god is all knowing, didn't he know this was going to happen? Weren't we set up to fail from the start? If we'd never heard a lie before, how would we know we were being lied to?

But besides the theological quicksand in the story, the whole idea was just so very exciting to me. A woman decides that she's fed up with being ignorant, and why shouldn't she be able to decide things for herself? She likes what happens afterwards, so she takes some back to her family because she loves him and wants him to have it too. He also likes it. Then they figure out the heavenly realm are a bunch of pervs who've been staring at their nakedness for a while, and with their newfound knowledge they make clothes for themselves, proving that one of the first forms of knowledge is fashion! Afterwards, those in charge get falsely pissed at the people (knowing they were going to screw up anyway and ruin their peep show) and throw them out of "paradise." So they leave, having to create something with their own hands through independence, creativity and cooperation.

Sounds great to me!

Milton's Paradise Lost describes the way I always thought about it as a kid:

Some natural tears they dropt, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

Sure, it was a bit traumatic, but they got over it. And together, they went on their solitary way with all the world before them. What to choose first? The fact that they could now choose at all told me when I was a little girl that this was something like an heroic epic. I never thought it was a sad story.

I never went into nature and felt "humbled" by creation or a creator. I felt powerful and alive and happy to be concious. Of course, that set me up to be in love with Ayn Rand and Objectivism later, but that's beside the point. (When I first read her book Anthem's Most Important Line "I am the warrant and the sanction" I practically jumped up and down.) As such, I've never understood why many Xians feel that atheists have no morals because they have no Bible. The flipside of that, of course, is that Xians must have no morals if they have to rely on the Bible to warrant them. Would they all go around looting and killing and raping if they didn't have a book to tell them not to? That's the scarier thought. I've worked out the reasons why I do/don't do things. My reasons are more explainable and understandable than "God told me not to" or "He'll roast me for it."

"There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point."
~ Richard Dawkins

-- Virgil

Chance for a Book Burning?

I help run a nonprofit that fights illiteracy, and one of the best things we've managed to do is put a bookmobile on the road. It goes to remote parts of the county, where people have transportation issues or don't have a branch of a public library there (amazing that those places still exist!). Because we run the mobile library ourselves, we have our own library software, and we have to catalogue all the books that are donated/purchased in the software, glue the cards in, etc. etc.

I never thought I'd want to "censor" books for people to check out, even when I had got my fill of the religious crap that was donated to us. I still stuck it on the shelves. However, we recently got one book that's absolutely driving me nuts. I haven't catalogued it yet, because I don't want to. It's called Courageous Souls: Do We Plan Our Life Challenges Before Birth?

This book is about how the "soul" you have planned its upcoming lifetimes, including deaths, accidents, relationships, etc. It plans its own accidents! Apparently 10 people share their stories through the collaboration with "gifted mediums and channels". I suppose it's one of those everything-happens-for-a-reason books.

Am I wrong to think this is utter crap and to quietly slide it under the rug somewhere?! I would've never imagined having such thoughts before, but this pulpy crap just made me snap.


On the other hand, having your own library is pretty cool. Someone donated a copy of the New Testatment to us. This is how I catalogued it in the software--just because I can:

Title: New Testament
Author: God
Genre: Fiction


:D

-- Virgil

Get This Song Out of My Head!

You know how some songs get stuck in your head and rumble around when you wish they'd just crawl off and die? Carrie Underwood's song "Before He Cheats" is that way for me. So, I figured if you can't get it out of your head, just change the words! It's not like any of the following wouldn't be what really happened if she did all of what she says she did anyway...

Right now you're prob'ly wondering why I'm sitting with a bleach blond tramp, and she's trying to get frisky...
Right now, you're prob'ly wondering why I'm here in my Tina Turner hot shorts drunk off the whiskey...
Right now, he's prob'ly gettin' stitches in his forehead from where I threw a combo...

And he called me "psycho"...

So I dug my key into the side of his pretty little souped up 4 wheel drive,
carved my name into his leather seats...
I took a Louisville slugger to both headlights,
slashed a hole in all 4 tires...

Maybe next time he'll think before he cheats.

Right now, I'm waitin' to get printed by that flat-footed sucker who brought me into the pokey...
Right now, they're saying that I'm drunk and they've charged me with "battery",
Right now, I'm prob'ly lookin' at at least six months before I get to go home...
Because they know...

That I dug my key into the side of his pretty little souped up 4 wheel drive,
carved my name into his leather seats,
I took a Louisville slugger to both headlights,
slashed a hole in all 4 tires...

Maybe next time I'll think before I beat.

I might've saved myself a little trouble for next year,
Cause the next time that he goes out on me...

Oh, you know I won't be free!

No...no not free
'Cause I dug my key into the side of his pretty little souped up 4 wheel drive,
carved my name into his leather seats...
I took a Louisville slugger to both headlights,
slashed a hole in all 4 tires...

Maybe next time I'll think before I beat.

Or.. Maybe next time he'll think before he cheats...

Ohh... before he cheats...