Soundtrack

This song reminds me of my dad who made me listen to this until I grew to appreciate it on my own. He would sing over lyrics so I didn't miss any of the irony.



And I can't get this one out of my head. Love the old Swedish couple clapping along when they do a sweep of the crowd.

Sold

Today I sold my house. The picture is my former backyard and it was for that view that I compromised on everything else I thought I was looking for when home shopping some seven years ago. It is an otherwise modest townhouse in a quiet cul de sac, many miles from Washington up a difficult stretch of 95. It was my dog's first home too. The hardwood I replaced the carpet with bears many scribbly claw marks and the wall in the hallway outside my old bedroom bears a light shadow from years of her body settling for the night in that spot.

What strikes me most about this sale though is how it came about. I knew I was leaving in February last year to move here and heaped coals on my head in advance for all I wasn't going to do to prepare the house for sale. When I finally left in September, I came back almost every weekend to do additional painting and repairs, finally putting it on the market for two weeks before becoming pissed at my realtor and demanding she just put it up for rent. Almost the same day, I had this fantastic renter and a mere two months after she moved in, she sent me an e-mail asking if I would be willing to sell it to her. Now for the two weeks I had the house for sale last year, I was getting feedback from my realtor about what my house wasn't. Over the years I had invested in the infrastructure of my house, replacing windows, floors, doors, heat pumps, water heaters and fixing anything that would compromise the integrity of the structure from within. All this meant my house was solid but not terribly big on the design elements. It was lovely enough but it wasn't exceptional. Do you see where I'm going here with the house as an analogy for me? I don't mean to beat a sick horse to death-that one is for you Boomka.

I was smug yesterday when the FedEx package came with the closing documents. I was thinking, 'Ha! I didn't need a slick and fancy new stove so that someone would want my house. Someone loved it and recognized the value of what I put into it.' Today thinking of the house again as an apt analogy for how I approach the world, my smugness is tempered a bit. I work on myself, I want always to be better, but I focus most of my effort inside or into accomplishments and competency and not so much on the window dressing. Just like when I was showing my house, the feedback is something along the lines of, "I really like her, she's got a lot of great features. For the price though, I think there should be new appliances and countertops. Pass or see if she will accept less."

I know I can do better with reflecting my value to the world in the way I dress. We probably all can. As much as I view this sale as validation that value can be recognized, even when it isn't vying for your attention with fancy tile work and elegant staging, I also think there is room in my life for improvement to sometimes try to look as awesome as I am. To really knock it out of the park and wear good deodorant to hide the anxiety that attention to my "staging" would bring.

But the big object lesson in this for me is realizing that after all the fretting I'd done before moving about getting the house on the market, and then getting feedback about what my house didn't have, someone came along out of nowhere and just wanted it. She wanted if even if the appraisal came back for less than I was asking. She wanted it as-is and did not ask me to change or fix a thing as a condition of sale. I can't help but hope that I'm as lucky in love.

ODB

I love old black men. They love me too. I don't know James but he approached me at the train today, asked me my name, told me I was beautiful, and wanted to get together with me. I pulled out my handy fake boyfriend but he did not care about my boyfriend Slash Thudkill (that's my fake boyfriend-I don't refer to him by name but when I think of his name, it makes me smile like he's real). If I wasn't married, I was fair game. He just kept on trying to extend our conversation and secure himself a date. I used to take that kind of thing personally and wonder what stink of desperation or non-verbal cues made this guy break into my reverie to proposition me. I know it's not that deep so I just enjoyed a random guy telling me I was beautiful and an opportunity to laugh to myself imagining what Slash Thudkill would look like if he was real.

Do The White Thing

I was walking the dog today when I passed an interracial couple pushing their gorgeous baby past in her stroller. She was black, he was white. I thought, "Where is my white guy?" I don't even know how to explain myself. I've explored the obvious themes of secret self loathing for my race and acceptance gained through being chosen by someone white. I don't know what to make of that honestly. That might be deeper than one need go when discussing attraction, I'm not trying to diagnose an illness after all. Aside from what I would describe as a natural attraction to many white guys, I think a part of me just wants what won't have me. I've turned it into a "thing." I wonder how any black woman with a white man did it, I wonder if he always dated black women or if their coupling had special circumstances. I wonder, wonder, wonder. I wonder if any of the guys I knew ever hesitated making a move because they assumed I didn't date outside my race. I had a long conversation on a road trip with a guy in college who felt it was wrong for the races to mix, mostly he said because of the children having such a hard go of it. I don't know but I'm pretty sure that's going to survive in at least the top 20 of most thinly veiled racist things I've ever heard. Wish I knew where he was now. I wonder how he feels about our President.

I've no frame of reference for dating a white guy. I know I don't want to educate him about being black as if it is a singular experience and I represent it. Nor do I want to date a white guy (or any guy) who calls me 'boo' and shows me that he's down with brown by throwing out lines from random hip hop songs. I normally don't know what they are, and it just makes it awkward for both of us. I'm annoyed that you just rapped to me and you're annoyed because I'm not black enough for you. It would just be easier to date the bus driver who tries to get my number within three block of me getting on the bus and call it a day. I don't have to explain my hair, my dad can talk about white people and black people without having to censor himself. No one will have to explain that the white boyfriend is not free to talk about how 'black' something was that anyone did, regardless of race. Everyone can just be black in one corner and white in the other. We can be friends, co-workers, neighbors but never really force ourselves to talk honestly around one another.

I do think I want a white guy to embrace me as something special and unique and to embrace my race as part of that. I've met one guy (who happens to be white) who set the standard. With him I didn't feel like a novelty, he just loved black women the way l like white men. The woman he was dating was a scary but stylish black woman. I think he liked the challenge of her. We had some measure of affection and attraction for one another but never dated. I was always very cautious when we were together to be good for the both of us. He was a shameless flirt but he was also just easy to be around, I just slipped into his company like my favorite dress. I always felt good with him. No matter what I was doing, what I was wearing, I never even thought of those things. I just liked being around him and the feeling was mutual as far as I could tell. Had I been a different woman, I think something could have happened. And if it did, there would have never been the white/black conversation because as much as he was primarily attracted to black women, he was attracted to individuals who were black, not just black women for the novelty of it.

I loved not having to explain myself to him like I was born on the planet Krypton. We could walk down the ethnic beauty isle without me having to explain the products (even the ones I didn't use) like we were at the zoo. I bought a shower cap and we didn't have a 15 minute conversation about how often I do or do not wash my hair. I've never seen a white guy or girl that interested in what the other was putting in or doing with their hair. I don't like answering questions about my hair. I feel like I'm defending it and explaining something that only applies to me to someone who assumes that they've just learned something about all black people. I've never heard white girls ask eachother how they get their hair in certain styles to the degree I've endured the same questions about my hair. I'm sorry for the rant, I definitely have an issue with the hair questions. I don't know why anyone thinks it is acceptable to ask me if my hair is real or want to touch it and remark with surprise that it is soft. It is usually innocent but it implies so much to me about your assumptions about me simply because I'm black. My point is that although he knew the score, he didn't care. It wasn't a point of discussion. At most I think he said he liked the way something smelled. Being there with me was being there with me, not an anthropological field trip. I want to be an object of affection, not an object of study.

And I could avoid all that angst by just coloring in the lines and being with a nice black man. The only guy I ever seriously dated was black and I remember being surprised that I was attracted to him, surprised even more with how hard I fell for him, and relieved that after all those years of assuming I would marry a white guy and possibly deal with people on both sides who were disappointed with the partnership, we could just be. If I didn't like his mom or she didn't like me, there would be no racial undercurrent. I wouldn't wonder if my race had anything to do with it. No hair explaining, no debunking myths about black people not being able to tan, no dealing with random comments from people who think they should register their opinion about your relationship for the record. No integration of parents who grew up during the civil rights era. Just happy brown all around.

I make my life so hard for me. I should just call Batman, set a date and start making some brown babies. The costume thing will at least be fun when the kids are little. The path of least resistance is underrated.

F-ing Homeowner's associations

The place I live now has a fenced in courtyard which is almost always in the shade with a nice breeze blowing through. I was enjoying a book and a little time with the dog this morning after our walk when one of the association people stopped by to let me know that signs would be coming soon prohibiting dogs from being in the space because they were turning it into a tot lot. They mentioned that the area had just been power washed but I made no move to leave, insulted with the implication that my dog and I were considered unclean. There really aren't a lot of kids in this part of the city and even less in our 4 buildings. I can count on one hand the number that I've actually seen. Why they get a dedicated space where there are so few spaces for anything is nakedly unfair. I've only been here 6 months and I'm 90 percent positive I know who is behind the no dogs provision of the new assosication financed playground for the 5 kids in this complex. If you want a yard, move. Don't use the association's money to build one for your kid and then tell me I can't use it.

I hate associations. I hate them because they really aren't associations, they are a handful of your neighbors who use your money to send you newsletters about being and good neighbor and telling you what colors you can paint the exterior of your house. And it's not the cool, laid-back neighbors who run associations. It's the people who have impossible gardens and homes staged like a Better Homes and Gardens or Architectural Digest crews could stop by at any moment. Whatever their issues are, the sublimate them through blocking the sale of a house until their neighbor has requested after the fact permission to put green brick edging around their rock garden (true story). It's fucking nuts and offends me deeply. I paid for my house and the land on it, why the fuck do I have to ask for permission to improve it? And how dare you come on to my porch to measure the circumference of my pots. Get a fucking life.

They consider the common areas extensions of their actual home. When I'm sitting out in the courtyard enjoying the sunshine, they walk by as if I'm in their living room. That is the cancer of associations. People use them to advance and enforce their lifestyles on the rest of the tenants. They are not content to shape only their lives, they build rules based on what personally annoys them about the people they chose to live around. It is a little slice of socialist heaven for the upwardly mobile. There are no cigarette butt holders anywhere but they recently put out a note requesting people not throw them on the ground or in the potted plants. I don't smoke but I don't know where people are supposed to safely dispose of their butts if they don't throw them on the non-flammable ground. I'm annoyed about the anti-dog nature of the tot lot but I'm probably more annoyed that we have many owners in the complex that fuel that sentiment. They let their dogs piss and crap in the common areas within the complex. It's like having your dog take a crap on your deck, it's completely inappropriate. But people who don't like dogs anyway don't think that given the volume of dogs here, if everyone were that disrespectful and irresponsible, you'd have to swim through the crap and piss in the common areas. They just look at me when I walk pass with a palpable disdain like I just took a steaming dump at their feet.

They are the people who come prepared the the association meetings with detailed agendas regarding the willow trees that they want trimmed using community funds so they can see the lake better. They are the people who suggest it would increase our sense of community if community funds were used to put no trespassing signs everywhere. Much better. Now I feel like I'm in prison. Everyone knows that ne'er do wells see no trespassing signs and remark to themselves 'Well, I was going to come in and steal the packages sitting in the mailroom but that was before they put a sign. I guess I better find somewhere else to be thieve-y.' The real issue both here and where I lived before is keeping the unwashed masses at bay and advancing some kind of sad middle class bourgeoisie agenda. Renters are practically the AntiChrist.

It's not that I don't believe in basic community standards to maintain property values and safety, I've just never seen an association actually manage that well. They govern from an assumption that left to their own devices, individuals will sit in their own filth and allow their property to become a blight. Instead of fostering a sense of community, they become arbiters of good taste and judgement and instead of talking to Debbie in 1A about how much it annoys them when she puts her boxes outside her door and leaves them there for days, the association creates a new by-law with punitive fines prohibiting boxes, shoes, umbrellas, and tacky rugs that say 'wipe your paws' from being in the hallway longer than 24 hours and then sends a newsletter to the residents to inform them of the new rule.

Pisses me off.



The picture is of a common area in my old neighborhood where an association member put this sign. She has a dog and walked it in the common area grass in front of my house every single morning but felt the common area by her house should not be used for such unseemly things. I think it is a hilarious sign but it is against the rules to post signs and such in common areas and I have a have a mind to bring it up with the association to force her to take it out. Another reason why I hate associations. Everyone becomes afflicted with Stockholm Syndrome and uses the very rules they hate to oppress their neighbors.

Okay...I'm stepping down now.

Passer-by pushes suicide jumper in south China

An excerpt (click on text to go to full article:

BEIJING – Chen Fuchao, a man heavily in debt, had been contemplating suicide on a bridge in southern China for hours when a passer-by came up, shook his hand — and pushed him off the ledge.

Seems he was fed up with the delay on the bridge because of this guy and decided to call the man's bluff. I thought the story was hilarious. The article is worth the read.

Larry Miller had a joke about a jumper who was shot off a bridge with beanbag bullets by the police. He imitates the jumper saying 'I'll jump!' and then a noise like a shot being fired and the police saying, "No. You'll fall." I tried to find a clip on youtube because I can't do the joke justice. I couldn't find it so enjoy some Mitch Hedberg instead.

Brother Bear

Today is my baby brother's 30th birthday. He's on his way to a music festival or something. I'm glad that he knows how to celebrate his birthday. Happy birthday, Brother Bear. You are a wonder. I love you.