Nicole be Thinking...

A while ago, I saw a tweet about someone getting married to a dude who is "passing" for heterosexual. Of course, having just read Nella Larsen's "Quicksand," my mind is in a very interesting place. With people comparing the struggle for equal rights for gays to the Civil Rights Movement, it made me wonder… Is "passing" for heterosexual the same as passing for white? The benefits of being white in the 1950s were numerous… White people were able to go where ever they wanted to go and enjoy the best accommodations. They didn't get beat for nothing, they didn't have to fear Jim Crow, and they had access to superior health care. Though there were miscegenation laws, they were able to marry freely. Being white guaranteed social acceptance. Now… It's easy to say that no one has to deal with any of that now, but being straight in 2011 does afford a level of privilege. Homosexuals fight for basic rights that heterosexuals take for granted, such ...

We all have our own little place in society. Our niche, our lane, our job. Confusion, frustration, stress, fights, all that shit would be reduced dramatically if people did what they were hired to do and let other people do what they were hired to do… There's a server at my job who is always complaining. Every time I look up, he's at the door greeting patrons, getting menus, telling me what table to take them to, warning me about other servers being inattentive or slow. He's not management. He's not a hostess. Just a server. Granted… Restaurants run best when it's a team effort, when everyone works together. So some degree of "looking out for one another" is necessary. But people need to worry most about doing their own job. My job is most stressful when too many people are telling me what to do and I don't have the proper tools because those people aren't doing their jobs. It works the same way in every job I have had. There's always...

didn't go as planned. at all... but it's ok... i'm learning that a good teacher is always revising her lesson plan... stay tuned.

Those of you who know me know that I have had a million jobs and I can do a million things. Before last December, I had never worked in a restaurant. I figured being a hostess couldn't be that hard. The majority of my positions have been in customer service, so I'm very comfortable dealing directly with the public. How hard can it be to take people to tables? Not hard at all. However… Some patrons are determined to make my time at work pure hell… Sometimes people do things without realizing it. I am a firm believer that I can't necessarily expect someone to perform the way I want them to if I haven't shown them how. SO… As a courtesy, a fair warning before I go the hell off… Here are five little things to plant into your brain for the next time you dine out: If a hostess seats you at a specific table, it is for a reason; stay there. Part of a hostess's job is spreading out the crowd evenly over the sections of the servers. When s/he chooses a ta...

Last week, my Modern Grammar professor proclaimed -- to prove a point about censorship -- that he doesn't believe words hold a lot of weight. And so… he uses the word "fuck" freely. However… my Modern Grammar professor is a white man at an HBCU… He qualified his statement about words having no weight by saying that there are some words he won't use because of their impact on others and possibly himself. He said he's sure there are also words we won't use. My guess is that his list includes derogatory words surrounding race and sexual orientation. But what's on my list? Any thing? Is there anything I'd never say? Not really. To some extent, I understand what he means. Words are just words. Saying "fuck" is the same as saying "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious;" it has only the meaning we give it. However, words definitely carry some weight. If my mother were to say with some force, "Pick up these clothes!" I would prob...

Officially, I'm hibernating right now. I don't really want to connect on Facebook or Twitter right now. However… from time to time, I'm bored and reading that stuff is still mildly amusing… A couple things I noticed while tip toeing around Facebook: A lot of these "friendships" are super manufactured past the point of being fake. They simply don't exist. There are people I'm friends with on Facebook that I don’t want to be bothered with in life. Am I afraid to delete them? Perhaps… Well… I deleted a bunch of them just a moment ago. (Part of my hibernation is purging…) But… why even bother to begin with? Having said that… I discovered that I'm NOT friends with some people I should be. I'm missing out on some connections. A while ago, I deleted EVERYONE while in an angry "fuck friendship" mood. I'm STILL re-adding and re-discovering people from that episode… If it makes you feel...

i've been absent from you but not on purpose. i really only have time to blog when i'm sitting at work and then i have all the time in the world (8.5 hours to be exact) to do whatever i want on the computer because i'm sitting there staring at it. anyway... i'm going to run down my links (another unintentional trend that has started here...) with some of my commentary... enjoy: Chris Rock to Bill Clinton: "Hilary Lost!" Dear Governor Palin: Why So Afraid of the Fourth Estate? R.I.P. Nancy Hicks Maynard 75 Books Every Woman Should Read I endorse these: Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys Beloved , Toni Morrison A Good Man is Hard to Find (and Other Stories) , Flannery O'Connor [really anything by her...] Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston Wuthering Heights , Emily Bronte A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith Assata, Assata Shakur (not on the list) I read this article about how black women have 5 times the number of abortions that white women have...

i took this week off from life, sorta. what sucks most is that when i do that, i can't really remember what happened all week so it's hard to update you all... basically all week i just kinda went through the motions. james's birthday was tuesday so we've been celebrating all week... next week my discipline starts... no REALLY. we're on a 2-year-plus plan right now... planning out the next two years so that the plus years after that will be wonderful. anywho... i'm at work, bored. since i've taken the week off i haven't really seen or heard anything that has me ready to blog... i have read a bunch of things from a variety of sources so we'll do my favorite links from this week, Snippets from my Day style. Belmont is hosting Presidential debates in October I don't know if you all know that or not, but yeah. one would assume that this is a wonderful thing. actually... LOTS of ones think it's a wonderful thing and MOST of these people do not go...

hello all... a note to those of you who read the blog, are google users, but don't have blogger: i have just made it possible for you to comment too...=] anywho, i spent most of the week in the bed, missed 4 days of work and therefore skipped every blogging opportunity. lots happened this week... i've had many blog-worthy thoughts... i'll try to summarize my week the best i can, "snippets..." style. i'm done with friendship... that might sound harsh, but i think i am. in the span of a week, i've deleted both my myspace and facebook. i deemed the latter semi useful when i needed it to get someone's contact info. in order for my brain to accept that i was going to continue to indulge in this "social networking tool," i cut my friends list down from around 276 to 93. i'm no longer interested in friendship. i thought i had real friends but we're not on the same page. i let the belief that i had all the friends i need keep everyone else a...

most mornings i wake up and watch american morning on cnn. it's "the most news in the morning" they say... i mean... really they just repeat the same news over and over again, but hey, it's a valuable part of my day. i usually listen to the tom joyner morning show on my way to work. and then when i get here, i go and read the news on cnn.com. they have the political ticker and lately, since they're pro-black these days, they've been linking to stories on essence.com. that routine led me to my snippets... usually my snippets are random, cover a wide range of subjects, and follow my entire day. today you just get politics. i can't take anymore. all this frowning is going to give me wrinkles... by 2042 minorities will be the majority the morning this story on american morning caught my ear and made me sit and listen. the main idea is that when taken all together, the number of minorities in america will be more than the number of white people in america. 3 t...

random thoughts are my favorite to blog about, especially on days that are just l o n g as hell and full of them... here are some of the random thoughts i remembered to write down... michael vs. usher so... there is this inevitable comparison between michael jackson and usher. thus far i can see the parallel between the two. look at off the wall and 8701. they were break out albums for both artists. then you have thriller and confessions, both WILDLY successful monster albums. after thriller mj did bad. usher is about to release here i stand. will it be bad? no. jim jones he sucks as a rapper. hands down. i don't really know if there's anything he doesn't suck at. we tolerate him always looking like he needs a good bath. we accept the fact that he always needs his hair braided. and we ignore his stupid ad libs on all his verses. however... it occurred to me today that jim jones doesn't have anybody to be his hype man and ad lib for him. and that made me feel bad. =[ alo...

so... i just realized that i haven't had a day off where i didn't have anything else to do since i started this job. in the beginning i had you know... THAT to do everyday. and then it got to the point where the only day i had off was tuesday and i was at school from 9 to 9 on tuesdays... TODAY i don't have to work. and i DON'T have anything else to do. well... there are things i could be doing but... you know... it's exciting. just exciting... =] tomorrow AJ will be here. 800+ songs on my ipod and i've been listening to the same 34 since i found out he was coming. i look at his facebook profile a million times a day. he has too many pictures up and i've seen all of them. i find someone who is everything i want, has none of the drama i have vowed to stay away from, is going places in life, and where is he? 2000 miles away from me. it's not frustrating though... it's nice. i'm excited. have you seen rihanna's hair? i want mine like that... whe...

conversate is not a word. it's just not... don't know where that came from. today a girl who's probably in high school was relating a story about how "cory gets mad when [she] coversate with other guys." this could be because she is young... but i doubt it because grown ass people say it, too. the correct word is converse... not CONverse like the shoe, but kunVERSE. now... that doesn't sound as ghetto as conversate - perhaps there's the reason the word exists- but it's correct. it rained today! no. you don't understand... the other day me and chuck were getting in the car and i had a bunch of stuff so i put my arizona raspberry tea on the roof of my jeep so i could put my junk in the car... so i put my stuff in and drive off and all of a sudden we hear banging on the roof and chuck lives in the apartments on 12th, right by the ghetto, so her face was like "whaaaa?" [lol]. i forgot my tea and it rolled and dripped down my back window and m...