Category: Opinion

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Dear Journal: Shutting Up

Dear Journal, Why haven’t I learned yet just to keep my mouth shut? Maybe that’s the real reason I’ve lost so many friends over the years. They just got tired of listening to me, probably. I mean, I’ve never entertained ideas that I was a quiet person who didn’t speak unless spoken to. That’s not … Continue reading Dear Journal: Shutting Up

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Closing Time

ktflkda-l_i_get_awesome“So gather up your jackets, move it to the exits. I hope you have found a friend. Closing time. Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” -Semisonic

You know how it is at the end of the night (or the early morning in some cases), when you’re so tired you can barely hold your eyes open, but you know you have to somehow make it home, so you do. You don’t remember how you got home, but you woke up in the late morning hour with a hangover and a dreadfully hazy recollection of the night before. Perhaps you even have a text sitting on your phone from someone you don’t know, or at least not that you remember anyway, and their words hint at the two of you being best friends. You scratch your head and chalk it all up to the drinking, telling yourself you won’t get that drunk again.

But it’s a vicious cycle: the partying, the staying up until all hours, the random people you co-opt into being your “friends” for the night, and always the alcohol permeating everything else. I should know. I used to live that lifestyle. It was called my late teens. For some people it’s their entire twenties. For others it’s still going on now, and for those people I have a wealth of sympathy. It can be enticing, to get that buzz, to lose your inhibitions and do things you wouldn’t do sober, but it has its consequences. Believe me. Why do you think AA is so pervasive in our society? People want to stop, but it’s so difficult.

I’ll tell you a story. It was one night just like many others during that time period for me, when we had gone out drinking, then stumbled to somebody’s house (not sure who lived there, actually, even to this day), and the drinking picked up again. There was beer, and wine coolers, and hard liquor, and grain alcohol, and pretty much anything else you could think of. Sometime along the way I had gotten that pleasant, warm feeling that made me feel invincible. I called it my Superman buzz. It made me the life of the party. Continue reading “Closing Time”

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What Men Don’t Do

man_vacuumingNearly fifteen years ago there was a movie called What Women Want that saw Mel Gibson shed his chauvinistic ways when he begins hearing women’s thoughts. It teaches him that women are sentient creatures too, and they deserve to be understood and appreciated for that. It also shows him that perhaps his way of always doing things isn’t such a good path to take when it comes to dealing with women, and with the things he thought defined him as a man as well.

Often men are generalized, but those generalizations come from a vast majority of them actually being a particular way. How often have you known a guy who won’t ask for directions no matter how lost he is? When was the last time you saw a man cry in public? Can you count on more than one hand the men you know who would skip a sporting contest to go to the ballet because the woman he loves wants to go? Perhaps you know some men who are the exceptions, but here’s a list of some generalizations that generally stay true.

What men don’t do:

  1. Admit when they’re wrong
  2. Know when to give up
  3. Accept their faults
  4. Wash their hands
  5. Plan their wedding
  6. Act their age
  7. Talk about their feelings Continue reading “What Men Don’t Do”
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4th of July

I am a black man living in the United States of America. You know I hardly ever use the race card, but in this case it is , very much relevant, so I mention it. On July 4th in 1776 a fledgling nation professed its independence in a bombastic declaration. While John Hancock was affixing his “John Hancock” to one of the most famous documents the world has ever known, a document that freed many people from oppressive rule, my ancestors were still suffering under a different kind of oppressive rule. So, how do I feel about Independence Day?

I love it (and not just because I was a bicentennial baby). Continue reading “4th of July”

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— Feeling Left Out

App not. Want not.

I admit it. I love Facebook. The FB app is on the first page of my phone’s apps, so when I turn it on it’s staring me in the face. I love Facebook so much that I even have the separate FB Messenger app, and the FB Page Manager app, even though I could probably do both of those things just fine from the original Facebook app. I just like being able to say I have three FB apps on my phone. Yeah, I’m just cool like that.

But I noticed something in the last couple of weeks that causes me distress. It seemed like everybody else who  used the mobile FB app could display how they were feeling in their status lines and I couldn’t. Heck, I still can’t. And I’m beginning to think that it’s some kind of conspiracy. Maybe not quite on the level of the “grassy knoll” thing, but pretty darn close. It’s like identity theft or something, but instead it’s app functionality theft. Continue reading “— Feeling Left Out”