New recipe. New job. New shoes. New movement. New haircut. New leader. New year. We love beginnings--I love them. There's a giddiness to that first step, leap, and bound. Possibilities ahead, the disappointments of the past cast behind, and you plan and dream for that dewy, shining land stretched before you, waiting to be conquered. … Continue reading do it again, do it again
Read part I here... In middle school, there was this expensive Japanese procedure that promised to straighten your hair--permanently. It was trending among some of the girls in my class, and I remember when the girl who sat next to me in Social Studies had it done. Her hair flipped over her shoulder, glossy and … Continue reading being ethnic: part II
I cheered when Diana Prince climbed the trench ladder and walked onto the battlefield. Incoming bullets smashed her steel wrist-plates and flew apart as her arms raised to meet them, and in that moment I think a lot of women felt a jolt of validation as we watched her charge forth across No Man's Land. … Continue reading #metoo
I saw a spider once. I was 14, absently pushing the lawnmower forward across my front yard, and then I froze. A web hung only inches from my face, suspended between the spiked branches of a fir tree. And there it was--the spider. The size of a glass bead, it watched me with a dozen … Continue reading storm progression
I wrote these words two months ago, but the events of the past weeks in regards to Philando Castile and Charleena Lyles drew me to revisit them today and finally post this... I take a seat at the diversity training the way I usually do: leaned forward and legs crossed. I nod at a few … Continue reading fragile
What are you? Human--unless aliens a la Star Trek secretly inhabit my body (sometimes I do wonder...). I also happen to be, as you see, brown of skin with curls that I am currently avoiding the impulse to drag my fingers through. I am also a loquacious nerd with an affinity for Thai curry, but somehow … Continue reading being ethnic: part I
“A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.” Albert Camus Last night I committed an act of resistance: I allowed myself to feel. When the hashtags announcing the death of another person of color cease as a trend and become a weekly inevitability, numbness feels like … Continue reading the sisyphus prayer
