I was reading an article from Double X by Emily Bazelon about how the recession is wrecking friendships…
Because of the downturn, friendships between two people whose Saturday night spending and overall class status used to calibrate precisely have now turned into trickier relationships between one person who still has money and one person who doesn’t.The rifts between friends created by the recession are a kind of collateral damage.
While I don’t 100% identify with the article, it did make me think of how some of my friendships have changed since my …

While watching BET’s Tiny & Toya, I thought to myself, “geez, I hope we don’t spend the rest of the season listening to Tiny whine about T.I. being in jail.” Shortly after having that thought, I started to think about it outside of a reality show context. To me it’s just another “storyline” in a television show I watch occasionally. To her, the head of their family and the love of her life is gone for a year and a day. While she’s trying to maintain a normal life down …

You can’t always go home. I watched Grosse Pointe Blank all the way through for the first time today and John Cusack said that when he realized his childhood home had been turned into an Ultimart. He was home for his high school reunion (incidentally, I’m on the committee to plan my HS reunion right now) and people were all weird and asking where he’d been. I used to think my reunion would be cool. Now I’m like ugh. I digress…
Who says you can’t always go home? People always say …

I had the dumbest conversation a couple days ago. I was sitting here with my uncle and my step-dad (who is only my step-dad because saying “my sister’s father” is so cumbersome) enjoying the night breeze, drinking Guiness and Heineken (my uncle opted for Steel Reserve. SMH), and blowing it down (cuz that’s what the kids are calling it).
Anyway, my step-dad, who has been broken up with my mom for years now, was talking to us about all of his female troubles. He’s a single dad with two girls …

I waited a long time to post up anything about this Chris Brown/Rihanna (Robyn Fenty) situation. I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t post anything about it at all on my blog but you know, hard to get away from.
I’ve tried to stay out of conversations because people talking about shit they don’t know about infuriates me to no end. There are so many commonly held misconceptions about the realities of domestic violence that it not only makes me angry, it makes me sad and a little afraid. Therefore …

While listening to my roomie’s iPod on shuffle just a little while ago, I immediately I thought of one of my very first boyfriends. Let’s call him Aaron. Quick story: I first met Aaron through his cousin who was one of my best friends. We were all at one of those school concerts in middle school. You know, the ones where the band plays some lame songs and the chorus sings some lame songs all dressed in white tops and dark bottoms? I played the clarinet, by the way. Anyway, …

Does having three children by three different men, none of whom were your husband, make you a “ho”? This is kind of rehashing old news but since folks in the blogosphere are bringing it back up, so will I. Erykah Badu recently gave birth to her third child, a babygirl named Mars. As an unapologetic stan for Badu, I was happy to be receiving the Twitter updates from mom and dad during the birth process. It follows that I was peeved after reading several blogs asserting that Badu was exhibiting …

Although I can watch the flick over and over again, Love Jones came out over 10 years ago. For the most part, that spoken word poetry BS can stay right back there in ’97 as far as I’m concerned. Still, I ran upon this clip from Def Poetry posted on Chile Please and I was nearly clapping at the end. Kind of got off to a slow start, but around 1:38 I was like, “oh.”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6Ce9_N4IIU&eurl=http://www.google.com/reader/view/&feature=player_embedded]

“I’m building memories on things we have not said” – Fiona Apple
While here in JPN, most of my classes have an international focus. When discussing international law and the hierarchy of authorities, treaties are right at the top. They’re like the supreme agreement between States. The thing about treaties, and it’s somewhat obvious, they cannot be unilateral. They have to be an agreement between two or more nations. A unilateral treaty is really just one nation’s forced will upon everyone else. You know, kind of like how Britain did to …

So I saw one of my ex boyfriends this week while visiting in North Carolina. Let’s call him Jordan. Apparently Jordan still has me on his AIM Buddy List and saw my away message that read: “In NC.” He IM’d me and suggested we see each other. At first I was a little hesitant. I was surprised to hear from him and one of the first things I wondered about was all of the other away messages he must have been reading. Second thing I thought about was why he …