Waiting for the Results....

Your result for What Your Taste in Art Says About You Test...

Extroverted, Progressive, and Intelligent

Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. It revolutionized European art and inspired changes in music and literature. The first branch of cubism, known as Analytic Cubism. It was both radical and influential as a short but highly significant art movement between 1908 and 1911 mainly in France. In its second phase, Synthetic Cubism, (using synthetic materials in the art) the movement spread and remained vital until around 1919.

People that chose Cubist paintings as their favorite art form tend to be very individualized people. They are more extroverted and less afraid of speaking their opinions then other people. They tend to be progressive and are very forward thinking. As the cubist painting is like looking into a shattered mirror where you can see different angles of the images, the people that prefer these paintings like looking at all angles of a problem. These people are intelligent and they are the transformers of our generation. They look beyond what is seen into what things could become. They are ready to leave the ideas of the past behind and look at what the future has to offer.

Take What Your Taste in Art Says About You Test at HelloQuizzy

This Makes Me Feel Good

Class: What I Learned This Year

I found this in my mail stack this afternoon:

Dear [Kismet],

Congratulations on earning a distinctive academic honor. By placing in the top 15% of your class at University of [Hard Knocks], you are invited to join [Privilege, Status, and Class] Honour Society...

[PSC Honour Society] members are entitled to exclusive career and recruiting opportunities at a global level. Your one-time $70 student membership fee includes...

Hmm. (emphasis mine)

So if I can't pay the $70 fee, does that now mean my "outstanding academic achievement" is bullocks? Or just "this distinct honor"?

(Sorry, I've been watching BBC America lately)

Class privilege is an amazing--and invisible--thing. I never would have seen this five years ago, or even one year ago.

Interesting.

And let's not forget....

"It is important for you to accept this invitation by November 21, 2008 as we cannot guarantee this invitation will remain open after the deadline."

Nice to know I am outstanding, distinctive and honored--but only for a limited time.

Because I Lust for Spaces to Create....

Enjoy the debate? Great. If you are like me, you have seen all three debates, you have made your campaign contributions, you have made your phone calls and attended your rallies. You have blogged or at least left comments on political blogs. You've early voted.

Today is October 16, 2008. If you are like me you have chosen. And you are done.

I am quite tired of the vitriolic tone of the last week or so. And there are bigger and better political bloggers than me.

So I am changing gears. Shall we put the fall design on the blog? Coming soon. New posts on a variety of topics? Coming soon. Maybe as early as tomorrow. Let me digest my arroz con camarones first.

In the meantime, find me in a few other places. Hopefully these places will help me survive this last year and a half (knock on wood) of graduate school:

Twitter. I am twitter-pated as bfp so gleefully pointed out one tweet ever so long ago. I am not on as regularly as I used to be because I found it was not conducive to that sweet, deep thought that a dissertation writer needs. Still, I pop in. And say hi. So pop in. And say hi to me.

Nuñez Daughter. Alice Walker wrote: "How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers' names." Nuñez Daughter is a space for me to know and explore that. It is for the reflective, historian, theorist in me. In the tradition of This Bridge Called My Back. Posts will be fairly sporadic and long. Explore away.

Self Care: Revise, Revise, Revise. Behind Frederick Douglass' home in SE Washington, DC. is a tiny little hut. Calling it a cottage is too much and a room is too little, although it wasn't much more than that. He called it the Growlery. It was where he did some of his writing and thinking. I like to imagine it was where he went to vent, scream, and growl at the ridiculousness of the world. Self Care is my internet Growlery. Posts on it are even more sporadic than Nuñez Daughter; not because there hasn't been absolute foolishness in the world to discuss of late, but because when the b.s. level gets to a certain level, I tend to just Check Out. Still, if you ever want to see me rage, storm, throw pots at the wall, punch holes in mirrors, or otherwise temper tantrum my way back to sanity, go there.

African Diaspora, Ph.D. Great blog that will highlight new scholarship in the field of African Diaspora history, share thoughts on trends, and facilitate exchange of classroom, workshop and research materials. For the stuffy academic in me.

Young Black Professional. Headed by the young Frederic Mitchell. I am not there as often as I should be. I need to get back into the fray. And I plan to. Whether I am there or not, jump on in. Hey, maybe you can help me find my way. What should my main subjects be? Politics? Race and Gender? Black Latinidad? Books and history? Afrofuturism? So much deliciousness to choose from.

Quirky Black Girls and Firewalkers: Black Women Doing Women Studies. Jump on in. Mix it up. Debate with us. Love us for being just who we need to be. Find my note to a bus rider in the QBG mag. Buy me L.A. Banks new edited volume. Write me a love letter.

Monday White Girl Magic

Waiting for the bus in Georgetown. In a line.

Asian man in a suit in front. A young, blond female behind him. Me and my 'fro behind her.

Bus pulls up.

Asian guy steps forward, shakes his head and seems to think again, then steps back. Motions for the blond female to proceed before him.

I step forward.

Asian man in a business suit steps back into line in front of me and behind her.

He gets on the bus.

I get on the bus behind him.

*crickets*

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~**~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~**

This racialicious moment brought to you by White Girl Magic: The Elixir that Makes the World Go 'Round! Available in three delicious flavors: "White Girl Tears"; "Blond, Buxom, and Barely Legal"; and "Lost and Missing Save Me From the Third World!"

Links to Love (with a couple Random Thoughts Thrown in)

Dr. Yolanda Pierce wrote a heartfelt piece on the frustrations of being of African descent in the U.S. at the Kitchen Table. As A.D. Nix commented on this post at Racialicious, mainstream white America wants everything but the burden.

Alisa Valdes-Rodrigues has an equally heartfelt piece on the pleasures and burdens of being pro-life and pro-Obama.

Really confused by this blog. You hate misogyny, gay-bashing, and other such violence...and you would vote for Bush Part Two? Hmm. Are you part of that AP/Yahoo poll we keep hearing so much about? Never mind....

First Daddy Yankee, and now this? Come on gente! Come on!!!!

I need skinny jeans. I am not skinny. Where can I find some?

Margaret Cho throws down. Don't question her Christianity. (H/T Bitch, Ph.D.)

A straight-forward and interesting re-view of A Time to Kill @ Religion in American History. Interesting because I love that movie for all of the complicated subjects it tackles and the climax which is as simple and powerful as it gets ("Imagine she is white." Yes. Do that.) Anyone who does African American history, African diaspora history or Southern history is familiar with the violence religious fundamentalism breeds. The Ku Klux Klan just happens to be the U.S.'s version of it.

Books and Politics. Does it get much better?

Single mothers choosing to be single mothers. "Can you relate to their experience?" Can you?

What IS this '60s soul fetish? I dunno. I like it though.

You and your baggy pants are safe. Congratulations.

M.Dot's got a zinger on what is and is not political. Not sure I totally agree, but what say you?

The Villager breaks down the educational background of our November contenders. I say, damn. No contest. Call me uppity if you wanna. I don't give a fuck. I admire excellence.

And that, kiddos, is the purge of my Google Reader for Monday, September 22, 2008.

Last, but not least, happy birthday to my co-blogger, K-Iris!

Erzulie & Oshun

"Erzulie continues to articulate and embody a memory of slavery, intimacy, and revenge."

Joan Dayan, "Erzulie: A Women's History of Haiti" (2005)

I miss you guys. Lurkers and commentators alike. And once my wireless is fixed at home I will be back to regular blogging.

In the meantime, here's some Afro-Atlantic religion for your palate. I'm off to Brazil in a few days; I figure it is appropriate.

Catch the Twitter tag #DNC08 for Democratic National Convention updates. Or pop into your favorite DNC blogger and support.

And if you start school this week or next week, happy brand new pencil days to you!


[Update: Mean old picture geezers won't let me post the Erzulie image I found. Sorry, mujeres. But Oshun is just as lovely....]

Waiting 2 Speak is Twittering....

...as @waiting2speak. Follow us!

www.twitter.com/waiting2speak

As Summer Wanes...

...remember when music videos had a range of colors, body types and layers of clothing?

If not, let's reflect.

(I used to love this song!)



H/T : The Hypesters

Think You're Anti-Racist? Take the Test

Reading this post at Racialious I came across this Adrian Piper quote:

Her observation brings to mind the groundbreaking essay “Passing for White, Passing for Black” by artist Adrian Piper. In the essay, Piper suggests peering at a white person’s features and complimentarily telling the person that he or she appears to have African ancestry, then watching the person’s reaction. She writes:

The ultimate test of a person’s repudiation of racism is not what she can contemplate doing for or on behalf of black people, but whether she herself can contemplate calmly the likelihood of being black. If racial hatred has not manifested itself in any other context, it will do so here if it exists, in hatred of the self as identified as the other—that is, as self-hatred projected onto the other.

I can think of more than a few people (white and Latina/o!) that I want to give THIS test to.

And the post at Racialicious was an interesting read. Go read it for yourself.

Flander and Flounder...

Another meme I self-tagged myself on. Karnythia called it the Book Meme.

The Big Read thinks the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books they've printed below.

01. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
02. Italicise those you intend to read
03. Underline the books you LOVE.
04. Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've only read 6 and force books upon them.

So here I go:

001 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
002 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
003 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
004 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
005 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
006 The Bible
007 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
008 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
009 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
010 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
011 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
012 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
013 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
014 Complete Works of Shakespeare
015 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
016 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
017 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
018 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
019 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
020 Middlemarch - George Eliot
021 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
022 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
023 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
024 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
025 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
026 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
027 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
028 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
029 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
030 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
031 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
032 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
033 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
034 Emma - Jane Austen
035 Persuasion - Jane Austen
036 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
037 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
038 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
039 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
040 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
041 Animal Farm - George Orwell
042 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
043 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
044 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
045 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
046 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
047 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
048 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
049 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
050 Atonement - Ian McEwan
051 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
052 Dune - Frank Herbert
053 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
054 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
055 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
056 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
057 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
058 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
059 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
060 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
061 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
062 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
063 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
064 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
065 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
066 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
067 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
068 Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
069 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
070 Moby Dick - Herman Melville Worst
071 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
072 Dracula - Bram Stoker
073 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
074 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
075 Ulysses - James Joyce
076 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
077 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
078 Germinal - Emile Zola
079 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
080 Possession - AS Byatt
081 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
082 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
083 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
084 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
085 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
086 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
087 Charlotte's Web - EB White
088 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
089 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
090 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
091 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
092 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
093 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
094 Watership Down - Richard Adams Cried like crazy.
095 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
096 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
097 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
098 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
099 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


Hmm....Definitely more than 6. And not too may italics. I guess I do get to the books I intend to read. Although some of the ones that are there (the Bible, the Color Purple) don't count. I have read them, technically, it was just so long ago that I don't remember them beyond the most publicized parts. I'm trying to be honest here, people!

Self-tag yourselves Dear Readers....

Stalls, Lulls....

...on everything. My research. My activism. My art. My blogging. My personal relationships. I need to get it together but I'm not quite sure how.

(I'm really regretting not going to AMC)

In other news, I am now Twittering as kismet4.

And in case you weren't following the updates in the sidebar, I'm also social bookmarking.

(These things keep me busy not contemplating my lull. Because if I had to actually sit still and think about how much I'm not doing, I'd probably panic.)

Totally, Completely, Utterly Jealous

That I am not here:

Meeting the rwoc bloggers I admire from afar.

But I had personal commitments I couldn't shake. :(

*damn.

Mosaic Meme

I jumped in on it. Via Aaminah. Here is me:


Who are you? Tag. You are it. Elle, Tea, and the Diva Feminist.

The Search for Self Care

I thought I had some great self care. I thought I handled my stress by writing, sleeping, moping, exercise, work(aholism) and talking to my loved ones on the phone.

But volunteering at the rape crisis center is putting all kinds of new and difficult pressures on my old systems of stress relief. All that self care above...it's b.s. compared to the work I've now gotta do. So time to get back to basics.

Sugar. Chocolate. Pizza.

Yeah.

Nothing like it.

I blame Nunez Mom. Actually, I blame my entire female line. And fie on you're good taste too.

Because I don't want just any Hershey kiss (although those are perfectly good in a pinch).

I want Tiramisu cake from the Cheesecake Factory. Or Neapolitans from the bodega-bakery up the street. Or Potbelly's Oatmeal Chocolate Chip cookies (the bag of a dozen, not the single serving). Burger King also has really great Hershey pie. And Starbucks has all those versions of Frappucino. We won't even touch the pizza, which has to be Chicago style...which means driving to the nearest (15 minutes) Pizzeria Uno and getting the deep dish 12 inch (again, not the single serving)....

Clearly this is putting a serious stress in my wallet and my waistline. And my teeth.

Intervention requested. What do YOU do for self care? And if your self care is possible on a grad student budget, you get a gold star.

[Update @ 8:11 pm, same day - At the moment I am engaging two possible new self cares at the same time: blogging and LOTR. If that doesn't work, I'm calling the activist-crisis hotline. Actually, I may call that tonight anyway. Training was especially hard this week.]

[Update @ 8:23 pm, same day - Ok, ok. There is ice cream involved too. "Grapenut" from the Island Style Trinidad Ice Cream place up the street. Damn, damn, damn.....]

CONGRATULATIONS K.IRIS!!!!!!!

Oh wait. Wrong image....

There we go!

Congratulations. :)

Gotta Blog That: How to Pull an All-Nighter

(In honor of Entitled Mbughuni and J. "I'm Blessed" B.)

Drink Coffee

This may seem like a no-brainer but for some reason folks who teetotal coffee think that they can make it through the night. I've only known one person who can do it without a heavy nap during the day. If you can do it, more power to you. If you need to do an all-nighter and you've never tried to do it without coffee before--don't try it now. You'll fail.

The best method: Own an automatic drip coffee maker. It's fast and simple enough that you can reload even as the living dead. And you can start running your second cup while you finish your first.


Drink Coca-Cola (or at least have it on hand)

The caffeine to liquid ratio is perfect and the sugar will give you the extra kick you need after your body has built its tolerance to your Starbucks House Blend. Bump Pepsi, Mountain Dew and Lipton's Iced Tea. Nothing works better than Coca-Cola for a full all-nighter.


Drink Caseloads of Water and Alternate Your Stimulants with your Hydration

If you drink a lot, you pee a lot. If you are peeing you aren't sleeping--at least we hope you're not. Having to get up and use the restroom will break your concentration, but that's a sacrifice you may need to make when it gets down to 3 or 4 a.m. and your body is clamoring for Zs.

More important, you must alternate your stimulants (coffee, Coca-Cola, No Doze) with some water to hydrate. I'm no scientist, so I'm not sure why it works but in my personal experience, the water flushes out the coffee, et. al. and let's my body recuperate--before I start pumping it up again. Besides, after two or three cups of coffee, water is just easier to get down my throat.


Drink Your Stimulants WAY Before You Need Them

Again, this is from personal experience and there is no science I know of behind it. But every time I've waited until I was already yawning to start my coffeemaker, I end up knocking out before the caffeine can knock me up. (I think it has something to do with the high highs and low lows of the caffeine curve or hitting overload).

So I start with coffee early in the evening, usually right after I've had dinner (yes, I am subject to the -itis). And I keep drinking and alternating with water through the rest of the night. I've stayed awake until sunrise that way.


Snacks Are Your Friend

Choose something healthy. After all, you're already killing brain cells by depriving them of sleep. I'm partial to dried cranberries and coconut rolled dates from the local co-op. Munch on them when it starts really getting hard to keep your eyes open but on the water round not the caffeine round. Overload, again, will put you out like a light. You want to keep your body, mouth, or nerve endings busy but not push them so hard they drop from the race. Plus, they are a good change, again, when you get tired of coffee & Coke.


Resist the Midnight Hungry

Sometime in the wee hours of the morning you will start feeling like you want a second dinner. Resist the temptation. No matter how famished you think you must be. First of all, you eat a full dinner now and not only will you be packing on calories with nothing to do with them but type at your computer, but your odds of staying awake on a full stomach in the middle of the night are slim to none. HINT: Eat dinner at the normal time. Then you will have no excuses.


Naps Are Bad But...

If you must, do it at your desk. Yes, right there. Drop your head on your keyboard and take fifteen minutes. Oh, it's uncomfortable? You're right. And that will guarantee that you get up in fifteen minutes instead of sleeping through the night. My favorite part of these naps is falling asleep and waking up ten minutes later because my legs have fallen asleep and the pain is excruciating. Nothing jolts me awake better.


Don't Work in Your Bedroom

Why all-nighter proponents still try to work from their bedroom or, worse, from their bed, is beyond me. Staying bodily away from your room is the best way to guarantee that you won't succumb to temptation. If you have an office, work there. If you don't, work in the dining room. Not the living room--the sofa is just as bad as the bed. Preferably, you want to be completely out of sight of anything that looks comfortable enough to catch some ZZZs on.


Accept the Drowsiness

When it hits 2 a.m. and you feel your head begin to drop, or you find that you are going back, often, to correct misspellings, capitalization, or whatever else our fingers still type when we are falling asleep at our desks--accept it. You may not have chosen to procrastinate so badly that you have to do an all-nighter, it may just be the structural pressures of academe (*sigh) but the all-nighter still comes with its own consequences. You are inherently less productive during the midnight hours than during the day. If you need to use those hours of the day, so be it, but don't treat the all-nighter as a replacement for 10 am to 4 pm work. You will get work done, but it won't be as clear, correct or concise as you might have done during the living hours of the day.

Around 2 a.m. you are going to get drowsy. You're ability to comprehend complex ideas will decrease. You're vision will probably blur and you will probably have to do a lot of stretching (and peeing, and munching) to keep any kind of rhythm going. Just shake it off and keep plugging away as best as you can. At least something is getting done.


Do Work.

The whole purpose of the all-nighter is to get more time to get more work done. It is not to get more time to get more fun, social time in.

Turn off your phone. Don't go on Facebook. No watching movies or hosting guests. Do work. Do work. Do work. Because at 5 a.m. when you are done fighting with your boyfriend or ragging on your siblings, you will still have work to get done and you'll just be even more pissed because you won't have sleep to function on.

That said...


Take Breaks.

May seem like a contradiction, but take measured breaks. It will shake you out of the doldrums and give you a structure to get through the night. 45 minutes of work + 15 minutes of blogging.


No Email

Never. Not even as part of your breaks.

I don't know about your email inbox but mine is full of political debates, administrative concerns, and academic discussions that are never resolved in the fifteen minute break time. Which means checking email inevitably eats into my work time.

Turn off the email. No one should be emailing you past 2 a.m. anyway--and if they are, whatever it is they want can't be good. And it will wait until tomorrow.

Repeat once, but not Twice. On the Third Day--REST!

Don't do an all-nighter more than two nights in a row. The third night you'll crash or you'll feel like a crazy person. And if your work hasn't cleared up by the third night then you really need to find new organization tactics--or talk to a mentor about your work load.

Besides, if you successfully pulled off two all-nighters in a row, you deserve the break!


Happy Studying!

Various

We have our causes.

We change and grow. We sometimes need our closest friends to remind us of that.

We get frustrated about the circumstances we find ourselves in.

People surprise us.

We believe again. We pray.

We get scared for our younger sisters.

We miss home.

We try to make a difference in various kinds of ways.

Then we run out of links. And run back to the real world.

Where we get really disappointed in people that we love. And although we try to understand where they are coming from, sometimes it is very hard. Because you know they are hurting themselves.

Where classrooms stop being--were they ever?--spaces of safety and learning. Instead they become places where racist thoughts slash like knives across your identity, your history, your privacy. (This is called privilege)

Where authority is used as a mask to conceal fear, paranoia, frustration and incompetence. Where we are workers and not students, not scholars, not intellectuals. Where we are servants and contractors, not griots, not elders, not sages.

Where empathy is replaced by self-indulgence and prejudice.

Where with just a sentence, I'm disarmed, and I feel myself, my sisters, my daughtes, my aunt, and my mother spread in lewd, overexposed display.

Where we want to sleep.

Spring Cleaning

Enjoy the new template.

Cleansing....

Somewhat inspired by ThummyB, I am trying to clear my head of spring break cobwebs and academia bitterness.

I've taken myself "away" from Facebook.

I've resigned myself to only checking the Woman Warriors of Color folder on Google Reader.

I am listening to the Ani Difranco channel on Pandora.

And I am clearing out my Journler. The next blog posts are part of the purge. May they inspire someone else the way they've inspired me...