Friday, June 29, 2012

Summer, summer, summertime…

It’s summer, and that means it will be hot.

If it’s hot, there will be swimming.

If there’s swimming, hair gets wet.

If hair gets wet and you are the parent of the person who’s swimming, that means your kid’s hair dries out.

If, furthermore, you are the parent of a black girl, that means you have to deal with the question of whether or not to get your child’s hair “braided up” for summer.  Perhaps your cornrowing skills are not up to par, or perhaps you don’t feel up to a five-hour marathon braiding session.
 
If you consult your mother-in-law on this (who is not against the hot comb, on which you have agreed to disagree, so there’s your baseline right there), she will tell you to take your child to her stylist to let her cornrow your child’s hair and “add some hair.”

Barring this, she will tell you to “grease up that child’s head” with “that green grease” to protect it from the chlorine, the drying out, and the fuzziness.

You may, at this point, bite your tongue and just flat twist your child’s hair up against her head and hope for the best. Get yourself a glass of lemonade and kick back. It’s your summer too, after all.



Wednesday, June 06, 2012

Wednesday - Words of Wisdom

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always try to do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."— Mark Twain

Amen to this. Let's all try and stay on the positive.

Tuesday, June 05, 2012

Something New

In my spare time (of which, like many people, I have far too little) I have been rethinking what I want to do with this blog. Or more specifically, whether I want to continue this blog or start something completely different. And I am thinking the latter. And in that spirit, I have been doing some research to refine what I want to talk about, as well as trying to do some planning so that I actually have a cache of blog post ideas ahead of time, and even some posts written. The goal is that I might (heaven forbid) post on a regular basis.

I think Joseph Campbell said (and I’m paraphrasing here) that in order to find out what really drives you, what really interests you, you should closely monitor what grabs your attention, where your interests naturally take you over a few weeks. And when you realize that (for example) you can’t stop thinking about basket weaving and deep-sea diving, that is what you should pursue.

That’s what I’m working on here, since my blog has been really unfocused over the past year or so. I’m not trying to be mysterious; I’m just in the midst of a process I don’t want to bore you with.

In the meantime, I’ll try and post a bit more here as well so I can get in the writing practice and keep anyone who is still reading (hello?) up to date on my little corner of the world. Thanks for reading and for being patient with my evolution.

P.S. Also, rereading this post before I publish: I will try and reduce my use of parentheses.