On the Road Again...

Do you judge your year on how it began or how it ended? Or I guess for us college students out here, do you judge your semester on how it begins or end?

After a week of being sick, another week spent in the hospital, and another week spent at home recuperating, I am finally back on the road to back to school in Grinnell. And honestly, for the first time, I have no idea if I'm ready. Usually, at the start of every new semester, no matter how bad the previous semester had gone (and I swear there was always SOMETHING), I was always excited to return, and start anew. And usually for about the first month or so, it goes pretty decently. I'm not saying it's smooth sailing, but pretty decently. I honestly don't know what the hell happened this year. The first semester of my 3rd year was pure hell all the way through it-- academically, socially, mentally, physically-- it was just pure hell. But still I looked forward to the beginning of this one. I had a plan-- I would take the long winter break to regroup. I had a to-do list and everything.

But then all hell broke loose with my health and everything hit a pause. I've missed the first week of school, trying to recuperate from everything that happened, and it was honestly up in the air whether or not I would return for the semester. But every time I thought about spending 4 months at home with no plan-- of getting off track, off schedule, and off grind-- I completely freaked. Since high school, I have not stopped, I've just kept it moving, kept pursuing a dream of being something more--bigger--better--whatever. Taking a break, is not comprehensible to me.

So at the same time my body is saying enough, my mind is rebelling. This is not necessarily a new thing, but what is new is the forcefulness. What is new is the doubt that, although I want to just get back to my regular neck-breaking pace, I won't be able to physically do it.

I'm tired, I physically hurt, and I'm mentally drained. I have no idea if I'm making the right choice by returning so soon after I made my body so sick (and I am convinced that I did it to myself).

What is the price of ambition? Happiness? Health? How much is it worth to succeed? I question whether or not my drive to succeed or my fear of failure is driving me more. And I truly am skeptical about my ability to handle what Grinnell chooses to throw my way this semester.

 But I'm on the road there, so I guess I'll get my  answer soon...

Black and Woman...

My father is always talking about women, especially black women, not really knowing there position...

*sigh*

:ately, I've been reading a lot of articles and posts about what it means to be Black and Woman and the issues that surround that intersection. I guess I'm just trying to figure out others' take on my identity, wondering if my experience is mirrored by anyone else. Or more so, I guess I'm just trying to comprehend my identity, find some common ground, some foundation, some understanding of my own experience as it relates to the greater social group of those both under-appreciated and devalued racially and by gender.

If I Could Fall Into The Sky....

Sometimes we have heard a song so many times that we forget why we loved it in the first place. This happens to me so often. I discover a song that I think is a gem and I play it over and over, just allowing the lyrics to wash over me, applying them to memories and people and feelings. But then the song becomes popular and everyone starts singing it, making fun of it, spoofing it....or I just listen to it so many times or hear it so much that I forget to actually hear it, it just becomes background noise. But then I don't hear it for a while and it suddenly pops up somehow, whether it be when my Zune is on shuffle or because, as in this case, someone did a cover. 

Facing Your Own Mortality...

So as luck would have it, as soon as I decide to get this blog up and running, my constant health complications rear their ugly head. I'm used to being sick, so at first this was no big deal. I figured I'd just get a lot of rest and in a few days I would be up and running at my usual ridiculous pace. However, that was not to be the case. This time I was so sick that it warranted not only a trip to the ER but a week long hospital stay and another week of crazy amounts of medication and "taking things slow".

This whole experience has given me a lot of time to just lay around and really think. I've always known that the neck-breaking pace that I typically go at couldn't last. But I also always figured that I had things under-control. That I would slow down any time I wanted to. That I would never truly put myself in jeopardy no matter how many times I got sick.

But sometimes you don't have things as under control as you think. Sometimes you miss the signs when you attempt to put things off. And sometimes when you won't slow down, life forces you to slow down. I doubt you get that many warnings. So I'm going to take this hospitalization as my warning, and hopefully as a fresh start as well....

Whites are the Saviors of the Civil Rights Movement...At Least According to the Movies...

I should have known a long time ago by my taste in movies that I would somehow end up as a history major. I have always loved historical fiction and since I was young I would especially absorb any and every movie I could get my hands on about African Americans during the times of overt struggle-- classic movies that claimed to capture the essence of the black experience in America like Roots, Amistad, the Color Purple, etc. But I had a special interest in movies that concentrated on Jim Crow era or classics about the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s.

However, there was something about watching movies that concentrated on this period that never really fulfilled me. There was always a sense of something missing when I watched movies like Mississippi Burning, but I could never figure out what it was. There was an especially bad taste left in my mouth after reading the novel and then watching the film interpretation of the movie The Help, and I just couldn't put my finger on why I disliked them both so much. So I did some research. I searched the race blogs for an answer to my confusion and I found the best one on one of my favorite blogs racialicious. The article talks about how most times when Hollywood makes a Civil Rights Era movie, it has been from the prospective of a white protagonist and they are usually the savior of the blacks of the time, as it plays out in The Help.

Survival of the Fittest?

I was reading back through some of my old high school papers and came across some of my notes from my human genetics class. In the notes I found an extremely interesting quote from a book we read entitled The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature:

"Species do not get better at surviving, their chances of extinction are random. The struggle for existence never gets easier. However well a species may adapt to its environment it can never relax, because its competitors and its enemies are also adapting to their riches. The world is competitive to the death. It does keep changing. But the world keeps coming back to where it started. The is change, but no progress"

The basis of this theory is that in order to understand human nature we have to picture the "Red Queen in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, who had to keep running just to stay in place...evolution is not about progress, but about changing in order to survive."

Room for Race in White Based Movements?

 

I have had a love/hate relationship with the "Occupy" movement. I've read and read and read about their cause until I felt like I understood it. There are plenty of things I agree with, the fact that there is so much economic disparity in the United States and no one is doing anything to fix it is something I can definitely get behind. But there have been more things than not that have just rubbed me the wrong way. This poster struck a chord with me. I admittedly don't know as much about this movement as I would like but just reading this makes me feel a whole lot better about them. These are the things I have yet to see Occupy address, and I've been waiting for it. And it's not like there aren't people of color in the movement, so why is this not more at the forefront of their mission? It puts me in mind of the Slut walks and how when that incident happened surrounding someone waving a sign that said "women are the niggers of the world"  black women had their throats jumped down by others in the movement and were told to not make it a "race issue". Made me wonder how long or how many times people of color have been/are/will be expected to put their race and "race issues" on the back burner to support essentially what has started out as or turned into a "white movement". 

Truest thing I've heard in a while

Sometimes you just need someone to shake you and wake you up. All things get better in the end...if it's not better then it's not the end...

What Mama Told Me

My Mama always used to say that I had two strikes against me: being black and being a woman, and that one identity could never be separate from the other. But balancing those two identities has always been a challenge for me. I've found it very easy for me to rally behind the causes of my race more so than the causes of my gender. It wasn't until I read the chapter in book "Freedom Daughters", about the battle between the feminist movement and black men over the right to vote and how black women were left between a rock and a hard place did I really begin to understand the complexities of my identities. And more so than that I began to recognize the reason for my discomfort with the feminist movement and getting involved in the cause. I am a BLACK woman and the normative for the word "woman" for so long has be and still is white. African American women and the feminist movement have always been at odds. And as evident by the drama surrounding the slutwalks, they still are. The struggle of Black women to navigate the cross identities is an age old one that all the black women of generations pass have had to deal with. Society seems to have demanded we make a choice, are we black or are we women? But then we can never be just one. I can never just be one. I am a complex, intricate mixture of them both. And I need to find a space to navigate that space.