Category:

Why I Hate to Love My Friends... No Seriously...

3/11/2013

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.”
~ Toni Morrison, Beloved

Friends are ridiculously troublesome... They pull you places you don't want to go, they know ALL of your business and they tell you everything you don't want to know about yourself. Sometimes they like to do things and MAKE you do things with them. They make it really hard to like them... but I do

Pushy, just plain pushy... All of them.. Well, at least the ones worth while.

I didn't really have more than 2 friends at one time most of my life until I arrived to the Bay Area... Totally my fault. I'm terribly hard on my friends. I can be known as difficult, harsh and closed off to everyone. The friends that survived are more amazing than can ever be imagined. I'm still only 1/2 as good as they are if I am at all. I barely even call... and they still love me... God Bless them because I have cut folks off for less. Seriously, Ask around...

Having friends can totally be a pain. By definition, they tell you what you need, not want to hear. Like "let it go, he's not worth it..." or "No,its not them, its you honey. It's better you hear it from me (totally has happened to me)." I sit there and listen to them tell me why I'm wrong or why I overreacted (which I tend to do) ... And I sit there... And I Sit there... while I slowly plot ways to excommunicate them from my life for telling me what I needed to hear. I hate them for that. Seriously... at least for a while...

But the one thing about friends, they support you no matter what, They tell you "he's not worth it, because you're worth more..." Even though they will point out what YOU did... the sentence sounds like " Here's where you're wrong... But if you want us to roll up over there, We're good with that too. Let me get my keys" And even though you KNOW you overreacted they promise they won't tell anyone and they back you no matter what. They even back my crazy Ideas, like having a group of women speak their mind on some blog folks felt inappropriate (ahem... like this one), or to have a podcast that is now 2 years old. Or to start a network that helps underrepresented groups understand Autism... These friends of mine... They just say stuff like "That's totally a good idea! Let's do it..." AND .... They tolerate all of the Ratchet that is me... ALL OF IT, DO YOU HEAR ME!!!!

See, Just tricky with their support... and their help... and their being nice and awesome... and stuff...

I spent this past weekend with the greatest people in the world to me. All of them have taught me (hopefully) to be a better friend than I used to be. They didn't even have to yell at me (well, not a lot... and even when they did want to, they just shook their heads instead). They showed me by example how its done.

Bunch of Tricky folks... The whole lot of them .... Dag gone them and their goodness.

I hate that I love them to death.. But Lawd knows I do...

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The Black Woman: Pretty Awesome in ALL Forms

1/11/2013

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There is something about the Black Woman... All of us... that makes people stop in their tracks...

Whether we are "Housewives" or "Dignified" (mind you, those two types of people are interchangeable) or The Bitter, Essence buying, Terry McMillan reading, Man Hater I was described as a couple months ago (Don't ask..), There is something... folks don't even know what.. they love us.. and have no idea why.

We are awesome in everything we do. Whether we are the Admin you can't get past, or the First Lady, or one in a group that dares to call themselves Educated Hood Chicks. We are ALL valuable in EVERY way.

I have always believed those "How to be a better Black woman" books were a little much. I' m a Black woman... But not the one that considered "refined" like all those books say. I really don't fit the criteria of the women that are usually discussed by "Conscious" folks about how I should be like Michelle Obama and NOT NeNe Leakes... AT ALL.

I laugh inappropriately at jokes and watch reality shows. My Spotify playlists would make "Revolutionaries" cringe. If it wasn't for college, folks wouldn't listen to me at all. Even the way I got through college is not "ideal." I got to college through luck and got through it by Grace.

And here lies the problem with only defending the "Michelle's" of Black America... It creates a perception that the less refined shouldn't be defended at all. When Evelyn from VH1s "Basketball Wives" had a domestic dispute with Chad Johnson, a majority of the response was "Well... YOU'VE seen her, she is Ghetto, I'm not saying she deserved it, but I'm just saying..."

The better treatment of the "refined" isn't new. In March of 1955 in Montgomery, AL, teenager Claudette Colvin was arrested for not moving to the back of the bus. Black organizations at the time didn't believe she would be a viable "Icon" because 1) she was a teenager and 2) she didn't have "The right look." Rosa Parks did...

"Her skin texture was the kind that people associate with the
middle class," says Colvin. "She fit that profile."

In a realistic world, you can't defend Michelle Obama as a Black woman without defending Condelezza Rice or NeNe Leeks or what ever YouTube video star that has no time for any of it. But in this new Social Network world in which we live in would rather us put the "refined" on a pedestal and spit on the "Ghetto" or "Hood" folks.

We are All Black Women and we are all awesome. We may not always be the awesome you want, but we all have the power to shape the world.

But what do I know...

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Allow me to re-introduce myself...

2/8/2012

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So apparently, this is the point where I guess tell folks about myself. I'm Monika...

I'm the tall one, the dorky one, the highly awkward one, the one that LOVES Hip Hop (Not as much as Andrea. But I can hold my own), and I watch politics like some folks watch Love and Basketball (I Live tweet the Debates. Even the unimportant ones).
I have known these ladies collectively forever... Well joyfully it seems that way. I am not sure what the other ladies think of me..Most of the time I drive them crazy. I am not sure why they still invite me places, unless its because its cheaper and easier to invite me than for them to move or something..

We all have our "thing" that makes us awesome. Check out the personalities of each of us and you will figure out how the puzzle pieces of our personas fit in. Or, you may wonder "How the heck did that combination happen... That's possible too.

Why did we do this? Well, besides the fact that someone said, "Hey, we should have a website..." We're not really sure. but trust me you will want to know what we have to say. If you think we are beneficial to each other, wait until the rest of you listen to us...

So to make a long story short... if you keep coming back to us blame Ava. She started it...

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