• The car is finally in for surgery.  It's going to cost me $737, so now that I will soon be mobile and free from my prison, I won't be able to go anywhere because I'll be broke! I don't mind though, I miss my Angel! She's been a good car.  When I got her she was a year old and had 33,000 miles on her.  Now she's 10 years old and she's got 97,783 miles on her.  She gets fantastic gas mileage, too.  When Environgirl, Tristaprez and I took her to New Orleans, we didn't even have to re-feul.  We still had an eigth of a tank left when we got into New Orleans.  We probably would have had more gas left if we didn't have to sit in really bad traffic for an hour.

• It has come to my attention that some of us are so self absorbed that we tend to make everything about us even when it clearly isn't.  On three separate occasions either Environgirl or I attempted to blog about some issues within the black community that we as the black community should address. The first issue was brought up by Environgirl.  It was the issue of why some black men who date white women or women of other races do so not because they just happen to fall in love with someone of a different race, but because they consciously decide not to date black women. OBVIOUSLY THERE ARE MANY CASES WHERE THEY JUST HAPPEN TO FALL IN LOVE WITH SOMEONE OF A DIFFERENT RACE, but there are some black men and black women who say, "I don't date black men / women because they are ___".  Egirl also wanted to address the issue of why black women are so angry about this phenomenon.  For some reason many of the white people who replied were offended. Why?  She specifically stated in her post that she didn't blame white women for any of it, she said that the problem existed within the dynamics between men and women in the black community.  Never-the-less, she got some angry responses from white women. No matter how many times she stated, "I'm not blaming white women for any of this." It fell on deaf ears or blind eyes.

The second issue was the issue about how some black children consistently chose a white doll as the "good" or "pretty" doll in a repeat of an old experiment done in the 1950's.  Her point was if black children still had a bad perception of themselves over 50 years later, then we (meaning the black community) have not been doing a very good job of raising our children to value themselves.  Oh my Lord, the responses she got about that experiment and that post!  For some reason a few people felt she was somehow blaming white people for this.   How could she blame white people for black parents not giving their children a better sense of self?  They were blasting the experiment itself, criticizing the young 17 year old film maker, and insisting that all kids felt bad about themselves in some way. Yes, most kids feel bad about themselves in some way, but a kid with a big nose or curly hair can change it. You can't stop being black. Do we honestly need to internalize everything?

 

Finally, the latest issue was an issue I brought up on another post that was about how shoddy and unscientific measuring intelligence was.  I wrote that my brother refers to himself as "Wesley Snipes black" meaning he's very dark skinned. The whole point of writing that sentence was to point out that you wouldn't know by his phenotype that we had a half Irish great-grandfather and a Creek Indian great-grandmother. Therefore, the whole idea of racial differences in aspect to intelligence is difficult to measure in a country where no one is pure anything. Someone innocently replied that she didn't know what "Wesley Snipes black" meant. I explained what it meant and that there was an age old rift between light skinned and dark skinned blacks. I told her is was a ridiculous rift and that most people who aren't black don't even make the distinction between dark and light skin tones when it comes to black people, because to them black is black.  For some reason even that issue was taken personally and another big misunderstanding emerged. Somehow even though the problem was intraracial, it appeared to some people that I was blaming it on white people, therefore one person tried to go out of their way to prove that issue didn't exist.  It was absolutely absurd! It would be like someone saying, "Ya know, red heads are looked down upon because it is a throw back to how people discrimated against the Irish." and then me discounting the notion by saying, "Oh yeah? What about Lucille Ball or Conan O'Brian?".  What in the heck does that even accomplish? How does the fact that Lucille Ball or Conan O'Brian have red hair negate the fact that "ginger kids" were and in some cases still are looked down upon?  The whole phrase "I was treated like a red-headed stepchild" didn't just come out of the blue. 

 

Usually when I get this pissed off, I step back and look at a situation as if I were studying a case study.  I guess, there is a tendency for people to try to insert themselves into your problems and make your problems about them. How often do you find yourself talking to someone about something that bothers you and find that the person you're talking to ends up talking about themselves instead?  You want to say "Hello? I'm talking about me here!"  I guess that's what happened in those cases. 

 

• GO AWAY GOOGLE BOT!