This is my absolute favorite song right now… David Byrne, Fatboy Slim and Dizzee Rascal. I actually think the video is kind of boring, though.
Every day is fucking perfect, it’s a paradise!
Actually, Dizzee Rascal’s part seems kind of like musical stock-footage, like it could have appeared in any song or something, but overall I love it.
Also I found out that David Byrne is playing in Ann Arbor in October, but who can I go with?? *sigh*
I fell asleep last night in our new bedroom listening to M83 (Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, which is absolutely amazing). I love the new apartment — there’s just so much more space. I feel a sense of freedom that I haven’t felt in a long time. Our apartment in Detroit was huge, but it wasn’t particularly safe for me to come and go as I pleased, and that really sucked. Meanwhile, living in Ann Arbor, I could walk anywhere I wanted to at any time, but the apartment itself was very restricting in terms of size. Now, I feel like I’m at the perfect balance of physical and emotional space. It’s only been one day and I’m already disappointed that we can only live here for a year.
Cruise Elegant Dining Dress Code: Ladies - Cocktail dresses, pantsuits, elegant skirts and blouses; if you’d like to show off your evening gowns, that’s great too!
You know what? I thought that I had packed some nice things to wear on this trip that I don’t even really want to go on (why would I elect to spend 5 days on a boat with all of Matt’s family?! With the money we’ve spent on this thing, we could have gone to Australia!) but, really… elegant? What does that mean? Does that mean the shit has to have sequins on it? I figured that buying a cheap black cotton dress and some tights counted as stepping it up a bit; I’m not even entirely sure what a cocktail dress is, but I know that I don’t own one. And I certainly don’t have the shoes to go with one. I’m one of those people who would have gone to the prom in Doc Martens, if I had gone to the prom.
Seriously, I wear glasses, all of the time, no matter what, and I don’t wear makeup. I have a ton of tattoos. I think I would looking freaking sweet in something like this
but it certainly wouldn’t be a “traditional” kind of freaking sweet. Plus I don’t have $485. Jesus Christ, people.
I’m so fucking annoyed at the idea that I might be judged negatively by all of his upper-class, New York relatives because I don’t want to play dress-up. Or because we have completely different ideologies and because we’re by far the poorest, most working-class of the whole group. Matt told me that if I’m really worried, I should go to the mall today and buy something else, but we’ve already spent enough money that we don’t really have on this trip, so I’m just going to work with what I’ve got.
I suppose I could always hit up Value World or the Salvation Army. I wish I still had that hideous pink thing that I wore to the tea room when Liz and I had that prom night at work a few years ago.
Caroline laughs when it’s raining all day, she loves to be one of the girls!
This whole thing is stressful and dumb.
Why the hell did we decide to move two days before leaving for the cruise?? I don’t even know what to do right now. Things are mostly half packed but not really. We get the moving van on Thursday, and then leave for New York on Saturday.
I’ve never been on a cruise before, but unless it’s like this, I’m going to be very disappointed:
the case of her bones are softer than loose meat
Seriously, I even bought this shirt today:
Except in salmon pink so I can be the lady version of the guys in the video.
(Honestly, I’m not completely insane, but I have to do some kind of mental work to spark my imagination in order to make this trip more interesting, because from all accounts a Carnival Cruise, even one to Nova Scotia, isn’t a particularly cerebral experience.)
lol
I’ve been using this stuff from a company called Mixed Chicks on my hair, because I liked the concept of it (”wow, finally something just for ME”), but now I’m researching it a little more because my hair’s been feeling dry lately and it turns out that this product might have more chemicals in it than what I really want. But what I’m laughing about is the description:
“whether
you’re black, white, asian, latin,
mediterranean, or any glorious
combination of the above, you’ll love the
way these non-sticky, lightweight,
products leave your hair inviting to touch.”
Haven’t we been over this? NO, YOU CAN’T TOUCH MY HAIR! Or, to the people like the white chick in random hicktown, Michigan, who just came up to me in the store and groped my dreads when I had them, THERE IS NO INVITATION, please do no RSVP. I know the company probably didn’t mean anything by it, but this idea is pretty basic when it come to the politics of ethnic hair, so… come on.
Although the temptation to buy a t-shirt that says “Have you been done by Mixed Chicks” is pretty strong (would I wear it or would Matt wear it??), I think I’m going to be switching to
This stuff, because it’s all natural, and I bought the shampoo and conditioner yesterday from Whole Foods and they are glorious. Now I just have to find the hair butter… (they have it at WF but I don’t want to drive out there again).
Today my boss at the coffee shop and I were talking about my tattoos. She wanted to know if I was worried about how future employers might react to them. Now, first of all, I don’t have anything extreme and/or potentially offensive like radical political statements or bare-breasted pin-up girls or whatever, and nothing that I do have would even show in a typical business situation as long as I’m wearing long sleeves. But her idea that an employer would react to me differently because of my tattoos tickled something in the back of my mind: Even without the tattoos, people react to me based on my skin, so have I really done myself some kind of disservice by adding another layer to prejudice to my body? It’s almost like I’m saying to people who might look down on me “I didn’t choose to be black but I did choose how I am going to adorn the skin that I have because I love it.” I feel like it puts some of the power back into my own hands, where my skin can no longer be seen by others as something that just happened to me, but as something that I am interacting with on a personal level.
On a related note, I also have a tattoo on my chest, between my breasts, that shows when I’m wearing tank tops or v-neck shirts. It has been an interesting experience to be out in public with it visible, because it makes gives me a sense of a new level of bodily awareness that I never had before: I feel modest. Why should I now feel shy about wearing a shirt that shows a part of my body that I never cared much about covering up before? Because there’s something there now to attract a bit of extra attention? We’re so desensitized in this society that cleavage alone is hardly enough to warrant a second glance! Now that I’ve had this tattoo for a while, I tend to keep it covered most of the time, because I like the feeling of having something special that not just anyone can see, and by default that means I’m also keeping my chest covered up more often, as well. It’s created a sense of modesty and respect for the privacy of my body that didn’t exist before. And modesty can be sexy!
When I was in elementary school, maybe second grade, a white classmate asked me the deep, probing question: “When you get married, is it going to be to a white man or a black man?” To someone like me who is biracial, this question is probably up there with “Are you adopted?” and “Can I touch your hair?” But even at 7 years old, I felt that this was silly — how could I possibly know who I was going to marry so far in the future? And why would I care what color he was as long as he had all of the stereotypical Prince Charming qualities that little girls are taught that men should have? And besides, my 7-year-old self pointed out, what if he’s going to be Asian or Native American?
I can thank my parents for instilling in me the idea that people are people, and that it’s cool to date whoever you want. In fact, both of my parents were practicing misceganators before they got married to each other. My white mother and her black boyfriend once got kicked out of a Catholic church in the 1960s. When my parents got married in the 1970s, someone in the supposedly ultra-liberal college town that I grew up in would routinely slash the tires on their cars overnight. They raised me to believe that, despite the crap that they went through, the world was becoming a better place every day and that by the time I was an adult, I there would be nothing to worry about when it came to interracial dating.
Of course, real life didn’t work out that way. No, I never had people damaging my personal property or ostracizing me for my choices. But what I did find was that the interracial dating revolution from my parents’ time, when things were about challenging the status quo and being willing to take shit from everyone around you in the name of love, was highly romanticized compared to the pitfalls and quirks that I encountered when I was old enough to start spending time with boys. Given my status as biracial, pretty much anyone who I chose to date could have earned me the moniker of “interracial dater,” but I think that my skin is dark enough that it was assumed that by dating black guys I was dating with “my own” race. Still, throughout middle school and high school, I “went with” (as we called dating back then!) guys of various backgrounds.
However, if I look at the general pattern, I “liked” or “dated” more black guys in middle school and progressively less of them as I got older. This is a little bit of a digression, but I was always a tomboy, and the last black guy I dated, in my junior year of high school, really put me off by asking me a bunch of seemingly sexist (or at least nit-picky) questions about “what happened to your nails?” because I don’t get them done and “why don’t you try and look more cute” and stuff like that. I think at some point after that, as I made my way through college, I decided that I couldn’t/didn’t want to live up to a lot of the standards that the black men I knew seemed to have for women, because I didn’t care about makeup or getting my hair done and because I was actually a huge nerd who spent her time playing video games and chatting on the Internet (of course now I know that perfectly nerdy brothers exist too, but at the time I was feeling more than a little jaded).
Anyway, back to the main point. Out of the white guys that I dated before I got married, most of them fell into the category of thinking of themselves as “beyond race.” By this I mean that they were the kind of people who would proclaim that they honestly didn’t “see” color when they looked at people, due to some kind of extra special social enlightenment that they had attained and now wanted to brag about. I can’t remember how many times I heard things like “you know, I don’t even think of you as [black, mixed, whatever]. I just think of you as a person.” And I first, my young, naive self thought that sentiment was really sweet, because I didn’t realize the degree to which it was denying a huge facet of what made me ME. And a lot of this involved complicity on my part, as well — in several relationships, I felt that I had to be careful not to do anything “too black,” lest my beloved suddenly begin to see color again when he looked at me.
The last white guy I dated fancied himself to be some kind of a poet with an exceptional way with words. I had noticed that in his earlier writing he tended to describe “beautiful” women as having “alabaster white” skin and other such bullshit, but I ignored it, because I figured that he was with me now and therefore his idea of beauty must have changed or at least expanded. Except I didn’t really ignore it. Because I was the one who pursued him and not the other way around, I found myself always wondering if he would rather be with some skinny blond with perfect, “porcelain skin” — like the girl he dated before me. I was his first non-white partner, and I always felt like a silver medal, or a compromise.
One day he started talking, poetically, about the word “pale” and how it was evocative of a special, frail kind of beauty. And I snapped.
I asked him if my lack of “paleness” made me somehow less beautiful. He got defensive and claimed that I was misunderstanding him, that he wasn’t talking about skin tone per se, but about some abstract idea. But that was it, for me. I started to think about all of the times that he told me that he “didn’t really think of me as black — just as a person” and what that REALLY meant. Like he was being kind enough to overlook a glaring handicap or something.
However, the man I am married to is also white, but instead of being a “beyond race” person, he is an anti-racist who has always found black women beautiful and desirable. He doesn’t look past my skin but right at it, and says that it’s lovely! In the past on Racialicious, I’ve seen preferences like his sometimes termed as being a “fetish”, but to be honest I’m just happy to be with someone who likes me for me, where I don’t have to wonder if he’d rather have my personality and interests repackaged in a white girl’s body.
To me, these two categories — “beyond race” versus “anti-racist” — make a huge difference in terms of interracial relationships that involve white people.
I thought I’d press some words real quick this morning before I do some other stuff.
I’m at a coffee shop, where I plan on writing 5 pages of my paper before I go home. All I really have to do is do this three times and everything should be good. Except TIME IS RUNNING OUT. We move in 9 days, and then after that we leave for New York and won’t be back until the 24th.
I need to finish this paper, pack for the cruise and pack for moving. But I’m so unorganized. Yesterday morning at work I decided that I should make myself a detailed schedule for each day until the 14th… but then I realized that I’d have to a) Remember to make the schedule, b) Remember to look at the schedule, c) Remember to following the schedule after looking at it. I can’t do these things. I’m seriously worse than that guy from Memento.
For a while I blamed the klonopin for my sudden onset adult ADD. I mean, when I first started school, I was like a machine — everything was completely organized, I was always on task, I could concentrate, etc. And one thing about klonopin is that it can mess with your memory. But! Stress/anxiety can also harm the memory, so if it’s a Catch-22 situation here, between giving up the medicine that keeps me from panicking all the time and thus damaging my memory because it is damaging my memory…. then it doesn’t seem like it would matter much which one I choose because I’m screwed anyway. You have no chance to win!
I used to be able to lay down in bed at night and following a narrative in my head from start to finish, but now my brain completely disregards whatever starting point I might choose and instead flits from topic to topic like how MTV used to do when they played videos, only faster, probably. Maybe the problem isn’t drugs or stress but multitasking. New tab… new tab…… new tab new tab new tab new tab. If that’s the case, then things should calm down in my neurochemistry after we move and I don’t have Internet all the time.
hahaha, Espresso Royale is playing that Elliot Smith song Needle in the Hay. This place plays the worst music of any coffee shop I’ve ever been to (except, perhaps, the one that I work at when I’m the one picking the music.). You should be proud I’m gettin’ good marksssss
I’ve been doing pretty well with changing the way I eat. I’m done with the whole South Beach thing, because it seems too gimmicky and annoying to make it a permanent “lifestyle.” But it definitely did a lot to help teach me what I was doing wrong… too much rice, too much other “white” food, too much sugar. For a while there, before I realized what I was doing, I was eating Crispex with rice milk every day, plus a bunch of Asian pastries and white rice, and whatever sugary things struck my fancy. Then I’d wonder why I would consistently end up starving and dizzy during the subsequent blood sugar drop.
But since trying that diet, even though I didn’t lose omg mega amounts of weight, I’ve been pretty good about only eating “good for me” carbohydrates like whole grain stuff, and not eating them constantly all day–I’ve found ways to add a lot of good proteins to what I eat, now that I’ve realized how carb-centric I used to be. This has resulted in no more debilitating crashes. This whole thing is funny, though, because for years whole grains were the only carbs I would eat anyway. No sugar, no white bread, no bad stuff.
I remember clearly going out for ice cream when Matt and I started dating and feeling weird about it because it had been so long since I’d had it. And then after we got married… I slowly started to just eat whatever. I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with food and my body and all of that good stuff, to the point where I’ve gone overboard with diets and restrictions in the past, so now that I’m changing things again, I’m trying to focus on being healthy and preventing sugar crashes rather than losing weight. In fact, I think I’ve probably somehow weighed the same throughout the duration of my marriage, except for maybe during the past few months when I went through my rice milk phase. That stuff is pretty insidious.
Anyway, tonight I “screwed up” and ate cone of tiramisu ice cream (yum!) and a whole bunch of wheat thins. I’m blaming PMS. It’s weird, though, because I’m framing it as a “binge” when it was really only two things, and back when I was really disordered about food (like in my early 20s) I would have eaten like ten times that amount, drank a bunch of laxative tea, and then starved myself the next day. Wash, rinse, repeat. So I guess I feel pretty good about myself!
After I dropped the husband off at his playdate, I heard the most godawful thing on the radio. I mean, I’ve heard some ridiculous stuff before, but my jaw was literally hanging open in disbelief of the absolute shit that passes for music these days. I don’t care if this makes me old, I just… oh god. Ladies and gentlmen…
GAHHHH
Just.. what?
I’m getting used to this nuisance,
And all the fags who bad mouth this music,
It’s fuckin stupid and foolish of you to think you can do this,
Your lyrics never came, never will, don’t even try to pursue it.
I took the chance, I played the pill, I nearly died for this music.
First of all, I guess this guy is calling me a fag. But, secondly… he nearly died? For this? Really? Also, there’s a part later on where white boy asks “what the fuck you know about being a gangsta?” Uh, yeah.
When they played it on the radio all of the copious homophobic bullshit was censored, of course, but the fact that it’s there in the first place and yet this band is still getting airplay on a station that was considered progressive when I was growing up? What the hell happened? I knew things were bad, but…
