Cell Detail

A couple of days ago I got a new phone, and can I just say that I love it! The last two phones I'd had were the same and went cuplunk for the same reasons. Finally, readjusting my budget for the month, I decided that I had to get a more current phone; one that actually played ringtones and didn't embarrass me.
So I danced on down to Best Buy and got this adorable little palm phone that looks a lot like a Blackberry but isn't of course. I raced home to play with it and went through my contact list. Most of the people listed don't call me, I don't call them, or I don't remember. So logically, seeing that I got this phone, I decided to start off clean and clear out some of my dead-weight contacts.
I couldn't.
Out of 211 contacts, I could not erase one. I still have the phone numbers of girls I had horrible friend break-ups with that I have no intention of ever calling. There are still numbers for dudes I met at greasy New Orleans bars that I never called. I have even managed to hang on to the old numbers of friends who have changed their numbers. I don't know. Somewhere in the back of my mind I feel like they are going to change their numbers back or something.
After going through the contact list about four times I took a deep breath and decided that I was being stupid. I had to get rid of some of the numbers. But all I kept hearing in my mind was, "Don't erase her! What if you have to call her for something?," or "Don't get rid of him! What if you go back to that side of town again and want to go have dinner of something?"
In all honesty, it boils down to me not being able to let go. I have discussed it with you guys in other posts. I cling to everything from mementos to trash, usually afraid that one day it will become of use. Another big issues is that if I get rid of all the useless contacts, I will have to come to terms with who my real friends are. If I did the type of SIMS card cleaning I need to do, I would have less than a hundred contacts. I don't know. I like feeling like I know a lot of people, or like a lot of people know me.
Still scrolling down the contact list, I became irritated with myself. Deep down, I knew having all these numbers was stupid. Half of the people I could not even remember meeting. So after a small pep talk, I erased one number. Immediately, I felt refreshed and liberated. I was only 99 contacts from having a clutterless life!
Unfortunately, that number was the only one I erased that day. But it felt good. Perhaps this is something I will have to accomplish in baby steps.

The Crushed Crush

Recently, I made a vow to let go of some of these boy crushes I have been harboring. Some of them I have had for nearly five years already, and not only have they long ago begun to get boring, but I hadn't revealed my feelings to the guys in question, so they are beginning to get draining. So I figure hey, it's summer! I'm working out, I'm feeling good, I've got a tan, and I'm in my twenties. Why not chuck the boy crushes for man love possibilities, or at the very least, some new replacement crushes.

Well, one of my crushes is getting married. This crush was one of the deeper ones that I have always felt low about. While in college, I formed a crush on this guy nearly instantly. He was smart. He was funny. He was cute, and he knew how to do things the sad girly men I was around at the time did not know how to do, like fix a car and work. But I knew he could not return the feelings. He had a girlfriend for Christ's sake, and I clearly was not his type. However, somehow, my crush became obvious, and he began to detach himself from me. Not totally, but enough for me to get the drift. It was a song and dance I am more than familiar with. But, dare I say, I thought he was different. Gross right?

Anyway, shall we fast forward two years? He is getting married to the girlfriend he had while we were in school. This I have known for about a year now, even though it was just recently confirmed. And since I have not spoken to him in a year, I thought I did not care. However, I went to his wedding site, and can I just say, I spazzed out!

It was crazy! All of a sudden, the reality of the whole situation just hit me like a ton of bricks! But I am not sure why I was so surprised. Was it because all along I did not believe that they were going to get married, or because I am so disappointed in myself for not saying anything all this time? Primarily, I think my initial devastation came from me thinking I was over him.

So again I pose the question, as I have in previous posts, do you ever really get over someone, or do your feelings for them just harbor themselves in the back of your mind or the bottom of your heart until you are FORCED to confront them?

The latter is what happened to me; however, I am not sure if this is the universal way that things work. What I do know is that I have my eyes on a couple of dudes, and hopefully these fresh feelings for them will send my old interests packing. Hopefully, I am more mature now at 24 than I was at 22, and when these men come and go, the spazz cycle will not repeat, fingers crossed.

Crosses to Bear

My friend Dizzle is talking to a guy who essentially does not want to go to college. He works two minimum wage jobs, which he hates, but apparently, they are better than putting one front in front of the other to apply to colleges. This is clearly a problem for my buddy, seeing that she is a third-year medical student.

I have advised her to leave it alone, for you can't make a grown person do what they do not want to do, even if it would benefit them in the long run. But Dizzle is determined. She has done everything in her power to get this guy into undergrad, including practically applying for him.
For the most part, he seems uninterested, assuming that since people like Bill Gates did not go to college, he doesn't have to get an education to do what he wants to either. I guess that is one way of looking at it, even though I wouldn't want to chance my future.

Anywho, Dizzle has stressed herself out about this dude for long enough, but she is not the only girl I know who has tried to point a brother in the right direction...with resistance from the other end. I knew a boy in undergrad named Andrew who once said, in a nutshell, that if you wanted a Black man, his lack of drive is just something you would have to deal with. Is trying to make a Black man a better man to the point of exhaustion one of the many crosses that a Black woman has to bear? One, by the way, that you will get little to no recognition for?

I would say off hand that the answer is yes; however, this bugs me, because when I have been low on octane, it was left up to me to fill up my tank. There has never been a Black man, from a father to a boyfriend, who has ever been there to push me across the finish line. Any strength I needed to do so I needed to draw from inside myself. I feel like I was raised to have to do this.

So if I was a brought up as a Black woman to have to get my own life together without help, why were Black men not taught the same thing? And why should it fall on my lap to pick up the ball for a brother where someone else dropped it, and why should I be jumping at the chance to do so?

Now this I can not answer. All I can say is that at this point in my life, I am consumed with trying to get my own life together, but I do not feel that I am exempt from what my friend Dizzle is going through. I will probably be writing a similar blog when I am thirty and a magazine publisher about my fiance who refuses to find a job.

Dating in the Jungle: The Sad, Sad Conclusion

Recently I had a conversation with my girl Haynes, one of my few friends in a happy, committed, long-distance relationship. We got to talking about the Girlfriend's Code of Conduct, you know, that unwritten list of things that girls just did not do to other girls. I swear, by the third grade, I knew its primary principles: return things in better condition than you borrow it in, don't tell secrets, and jump in a fight if someone attacks your girl. As we got older, the rules matured: don't snitch, return money within a month of borrowing it, and oh, by the way, do not take your girl's man! Back then, the girl did not even have to be your best friend. You just had to know of her relatively well to decline advances. Boy, those were the days.

Today it is finder's keeps, baby, finder's keepers. The man in question could belong to your literal sister and in the eyes of the jury, he would be up for grabs. Maybe I spent too many nights watching the old black and whites with grandma, but I have to say, there is no dignity in dating today ( for reasons mentioned in Dating in the Jungle: The Situation).

All the women are desperate. They have a tightly stitched career and educational plans that only allow a certain amount of time for dating before they have to get married and have babies. You no longer look at your friend and her beau and hope that the same will soon happen to you, you look at you friend and her man and think that the same thing is going to happen to you when you take him-a complete disregard for and disrespect of The Code.

Sad to say, I feel that I am slowly falling into this horrid way of jungle thinking. There are a few girls that I am just waiting to have a tiff with their men so I can swoop in like a crane and snatch them by their necks. Quite a few.

It has just become easier to take someone else's somebody than take your chances on finding your own and he be a loser. And since men have no code of behavior, it is usually easy to lure him away from your pal with promises of sex before you have him on your arm.

As hard as it is out there being single and finding Mr. Right, I have made a decision to follow the code. That is, unless my girl dumps her man. Everyone knows that if she dumps him, he is fair game.

Dating in the Jungle: The Situation

I think that it would be fair to say that since I was partially raised by my grandmother that I had a conservative upbringing, especially when it came to the laws of being a lady. Sit with your ankles crossed. Never leave the house with your hair a mess, a rule that I have completely disregarded at this point. Make sure your skirt is pulled down in the back, say please and thank you, don't speak with your mouth full, and always use your indoor voice, another rule that I have tossed. These were the rules of womanhood that a good Methodist young woman did not break. But these were social rules. When it came to the rules of relationships, grandma said nothing, probably for the same reasons that she hid my Seventeen Magazines when I was eleven; she did not want me to start wearing makeup or get pregnant. When I probed her once when I was too young to see how uncomfortable my questions were making her she spat only one thing, "Carry yourself like a lady!" And that was that.

But now as a young single woman on the dating scene during a time where men have gone crippled due to the loss of their backbones, balls, and dignity, I find myself having to play the role of a tiger, not even a tigress, willing to rip the flesh off of the bones of any female that has her eyes on the brotha that is just a wee bit less disgusting than the others.

And of course, I am losing, big time, for it is survival of the fittest out here in the dating jungle, and I feel that if I were really in the wild, the other tigers would have left me to get eaten or trampled for being dead weight. I consider myself a feminist, but am I going back on the work of all the women who have asked for my rights by asking for gender roles to be more defined: for men to be men and women be women?

What do I mean by this? Well, back in the day, when my grandparents met, grandpa approached grandma. He did not stand to the side grabbing his crotch because he knew that as a college educated Black man he was a commodity. Hell, he was even more of a commodity than brothers are today! He approached her because that is what men did, even though he was five years younger than grandma.

Sadly, my grandma has Alzheimer's, but she would lose her mind anyway if she saw the state of things today. Women fighting over men. Men living off of women financially. Women in the club wearing next to nothing to get attention. Women having sex before marriage to gain a commitment, not as a result of one. She would probably shake these women, after she roller set their hair and applied their lipstick correctly of course.

It scares me that women, especially young ones, have silently decided that since they now bring home the bacon that they no longer deserve to be treated like ladies and now have to be men. And this is in other facets of society, not just the dating scene.

When I finally get a man, I am going to take him to my grandma's nursing home with my hair wild, dirt under my nails, and claw marks all over my back. When she asks me why my hair isn't together, as she undoubtedly will even in her state, I will have to explain that I could not just sit around with my ankles crossed any longer; that I had to stop carrying myself like a lady to get a man.

Thug Love

There is a man that goes to my gym that I am pretty sure has killed someone. He has one of those tattooed teardrops on his face and hundreds of tattoos on his body. With huge muscles and a face that automatically gives off attitude whether he means to or not alerts me that he has probably been in prison. Dare I say that I think I have a crush?
I have only spoken to him once about coming to the Saturday morning Yoga class. The convo was going well until I noticed the teardrop and blurted, "Oh my God! Have you killed someone?!" He didn't get mad, even though, for a split second, I was sure he was going to punch me. He also didn't answer.
OK. Crushes with beaus. A beau with a baby on the way, and now an ex-con. I know it seems like I am going from bad to worst. But he seems nice! He waves to me when he sees me. Plus, minus the tear drop he has beautiful skin and minus the tats he has a nice body. Besides the whole prison thing, he is hot!
What is it about bad boys that is so alluring? Maybe not even bad guys, but the idea of "the wrong guy;" the man that has nothing you are looking for besides a body and a nice car. My guess would be that they are just more fun than the guy with the formal education and the kid-ready minivan.
I say that I am guessing, because I don't know...yet. I have been toying with the idea of asking this 36-year-old gang-banger out on the town. Maybe to Applebee's for a Mangorita? Now I know that I said that I had sworn off men and the idea of dating. But he's cute and I'm young. Plus, I hear that bad guys like good girls. You can't get any cleaner than I. Who knows, this could be the "one." If not, I could at least get some time out with a cute older man and a Mangorita.
Let's just hope his former lifestyle is just that. I'd hate to be the story behind his second teardrop.

The Mother Load

I think that it is safe to say that me and mother have problems sometimes with liking each other. We love each other, but I do not think we really like each other at times. Our relationship over the years has been, for lack of a better word, shaky for tons of different reasons. We have gone from Roseanne and Darlene to Norman Bates and his mother in the course of the past three years, coincidentally correlating with my graduation and move back home.

With her birthday coming up, I find myself wondering what she was like when she was a young woman. Seeing that she had me when she was 21, I can not envision her as a young woman minus being my mother. So I also find myself fantasizing about what it would have been like if we went to the same high school or something. She probably would have thought me to be a spoiled snob, and I would have thought her to be rude and obnoxious. I am betting that she would not have voted for me for class office and I would not have sat at her lunch table.

We just argue all the time and rarely agree with each other. Is it like this with every mother and daughter, for I feel like my friend Tiesha and her mother are so close that they wake-up in the morning to skip through their front yard hand-in-hand. Or do some mothers and daughters just pretend to get along while the rest of us don't know how?

As I think more about it, I have come to the conclusion that this is why it is important to graduate and NOT go back home. You want to live your own life, free of critiques and remarks, minus the idea of a mommy, which will cause conflict at home, but your mother will undoubtedly try to rear you, even though you are CLEARLY passed rearing age. In my opinion, this causes the Norman Bates effect, even though he technically only left home when he was escorted by they state to the nut house; however, I feel this further proves my point.

Also, riddle me this: at our age, our maternal relationships worth repairing or molding into what we have always wanted them to be? I wouldn't mind arguing less with my mommy, but I can't imagine us being the mother and daughter team that joined church fashion shows or sat around the kitchen table drinking green tea and he-heing about menstrual cramps. I can not say that I would want that.

Madonna, the singer not the deity, once said that she better understood her mother once she had her own kids. Maybe one day far far from now when I am with child, I will understand where my mother has been coming from.

But until then, she will probably still be on my last nerves.