at the hands of the police. I hadn’t read my google reader in a few days, and I first came across the story over at postbougie. A quick google search provided no actual news, except for blogs. I’m so pissed.
The story: around 2 am on New Years a few brown men were pulled off the train for an altercation. some were handcuffed, others weren’t. among those not handcuffed was 22 year old Oscar Grant. Apparently Mr. Grant was pleaded with the cops to not taser him, when they put him face down on the ground and shot him. Don’t believe me? It was caught on tape by two different people.
Granted it’s on a camera phone, you can still clearly see a cop holding Oscar down and another cop shotting him. What’s more crazy is that are MAD people watching, inside the train and on the platform. It’s just soo brazen I can’t believe it.
Of course the cops are trying to argue that he was trying to pull out his taser gun and mistakenly pulled out a gun. I’m sorry but a taser gun looks different than a real gun. Very different. And the worse part is that like Rodney King, these cops will probably be acquitted.
I finally found the story on CNN. Do a search for Oscar Grant and the first story is how the cop is getting death threats. Then you see the story about Oscar himself. Enough. American needs to start caring about Black men anf it needs to start now.
Previous research has suggested that the first stages of romantic love fade within 15 months and after 10 years it has gone completely, the newspaper said.
“The findings go against the traditional view of romance — that it drops off sharply in the first decade — but we are sure it’s real,” said Arthur Aron, a psychologist at Stony Brook, told the Sunday Times.
Lately, love has felt so unattainable. You see lovers move on. Or lovers who can’t move on and seem destined to be alone forever. I’m glad there is research to confirm my idealized vision of love.
Last night I came across this article on CNN about men who are using surrogate mothers to become fathers. Granted most men that employ this method of fatherhood are gay men, mostly in committed relationships, who want to become fathers. I thought it was interesting that CNN chose a Black gay man as the example of gay men, for obvious reasons.
picture from cnn.com
Jeff Walker, pictured above, wanted to be a father. He had his first daughter with his partner and a surrogate. Jeff and his parnter broke up but Jeff wanted more children so he use the same surrogate, diferent egg donor and had a second daughter.
The second example, Steven Harris, is a straight man that opted for surragacy when he became tired of waiting for the right woman to marry.
“I thought getting married was the only way to go, because I did want a family. But having Ben, I feel complete now,” Harris says.
You know how I feel about single parenthood, especially planned single parenthood, but I must say I’m happy to see men who genuinely want to be fathers and are willing to spend a lot of money to become fathers. CNN reported surrogacy can cost $100,000 (wowza).
All in all, very interesting. I had never thought about the men who can’t find the right women and go on with their family plans. It makes sense, I’ve met a lot of women who have said if they can’t find the right man at a certain point in their life, they would adopt or impregnate themselves through invitro fertilization. I need to read more on this phenomenon.
What do you guys think of these mens creating families through surrogates?
Tonight my mother and I got ino a little tiff because I wanted to give my brother $200 in hopes that he would finally enroll in a GED course. My mother went off. She said he wasn’t going to go to the class and that he’s had all these opportunities to go to different schools and he hasn’t taken them and this would be a waste of my money. Now let’s be for real, I know the liklihood of my brother taking $200 and spending it on a GED class he has been avoiding for at least 8 months is slim. I thought that by showing him that I believed that he would do the right and take some steps to get his life back together, it would motivate and empower him. Call it my Christmas wish. He’s only 17. In my humble opinion, that’s just too young to throw your life away.
Well, you would think the argument would stop there, but my mother kept going. I don’t really understand why, but my faith in the men in my life – namely my father and brothers – really pisses her off. She always tells me you can’t change people. I know that. After spending years trying to change boyfriends, my father and now my brother I know that. But I also know that people can change themselves when they want to. I don’t see the harm in encouraging my brother to get a GED and explaining the numerous benefits of having any education in this economy. The one thing my brothers know about me is that I never give up on them. Yes, I get frustrated, a lot, but I’ve never given up on them. So this Christmas, I’m going to tell my brother that whenever he’s ready for this GED course, I will help him financially.
My mother left the room muttering, “You can’t save the world Eva.” I’m not trying to save the world, Mom. I’m trying to save my brother.
The other day my friend sent me a link to Charles M. Blow’s op-ed column in the New York Times entitled, “The Demise of Dating.” The gist is that dating is essentially dead and hooking up is here to stay. Ugh.
While the article focus’s on a study conducted on high school students, I can say, in my experience, that hooking up is here to stay for young adults as well. To gain more insight on hooking up vs. dating, Blow consulted La Salle University professor, Kathleen Bogle. Bogle broke it down and said hooking up takes the pressure off as it promotes groups of friends going out and it takes the stigma off the one person who can’t get a date. Fine, that sounds good in principle. But the consL
The cons center on the issues of gender inequity. Girls get tired of hooking up because they want it to lead to a relationship (the guys don’t), and, as they get older, they start to realize that it’s not a good way to find a spouse.
Enter double edged sword stage left. And this is what I see happening to my peers. Women hook up to get a boyfriend, while men hook up to avoid having a girlfriend. You see, everyone enjoys consistent sex but the ways men and women view the future of such relationships are very different. Women view consistent sex as a first step in a committed relationship. Men view consistent sex as the end result – that’s all they wanted, the sex without the commitment (read: drama and work).
In talking about this with some friends a while back, some women decided that they were not going to have sex unless they were in a committed relationship. That is, they would withold sex from the man they wanted more from, but would still hookup with guys they knew had no relationship potential. This way, they would avoid the “I don’t date girls who are easy” tactic. However, this plan backfired as the guys who were relationship material resented the fact that they had to wait for sex with a woman when she was having sex with other guys easily.
They, like myself, could not find a way to win.
That’s not good. So why is there an increase in hooking up? According to Professor Bogle, it’s: the collapse of advanced planning, lopsided gender ratios on campus, delaying marriage, relaxing values and sheer momentum.
Aw man – we have to work against the collapse of advanced planning (I personally do not think she’s talking about women’s advanced planning), lopsided gender ratios on college campuses (that’s not going to be easy (or quick) to solve), delaying marriage (I could write a million posts about this) and sheer momentum (I get it, why would these men give up all this non-committal sex and freedom if they don’t have to?)
So it looks like hooking up is here to stay, and I for one am not happy about it.
that doesn’t make me want to tear my hair out. So i was reading/lurking on postbougie and they hat tipped TNC (another place where i lurk) and he was explaining why he decided not to marry the mother of his children and (i’m assuming) his girlfriend.
When I read what it was about, I was ready to tear it about. After all, I’m all about (healthy) marriage and it’s one of my two policies of choice for change in the Black community. The other is education if you must know.
While I don’t necessarily agree with his reasons not to marry, I can certainly understand and respect them. It’s not that I think that marriage is a magic pill. I understand that they take a lot of work and a lot of patience. A marriage is a commitment – not just to a wife, but to your children as well. And I guess some of the reasons TNC said he didn’t want to marry, this insurance, is what I thinkis the missing piece to child stability in single parent families. I think a relationship that TNC appears to have is rare outside of marriage and this is the type of relationship that intiatives like The Healthy Family Initiative are strivig to achieve. It’s not so much the contractual relationship as it is the loving partnership that policies, and society, are trying to achieve.
for AIDS victims. A friend put me onto this article that says that a bone marrow transplant has not only cured a man’s lukemia, but apparently also AIDS. The article is quick to say that bone marrow transplants will never be standard treatment for AIDS but hopefully they can learn something from this that can help people.
AIDS is just so terrible and I can’t wait for it to go away.
I’m reading the secret life of bees, and i got to part that involves a kiss and the feelings you get inside and love. I think of love often and the funny way it works. I think of myself in love – an idea that I can’t figure out if I’m scared of it or if I’m just really over it. I think of abstractly. I thought of it abstractly. Until last Sunday, when I learned that he was here.
This is my new little brother, I call him baby k. it’s crazy, I found out about him on sunday (even though he was born last tuesday), i got a picture of him on Monday and I fell in love with him exactly three seconds later. Every time I look at this picture (which is all day since it’s my blackberry background), I smile. That is love. That is something I haven’t been able to feel in a very long time.
Ours is not a traditional family. Every additional sibling is a total surprise. My father, as it turns out, is incredibly fertile, as are the women he chooses to date. Unlike my other siblings from my father, I have been expecting Baby K for a few months now. His mother is pretty stable, so I’m sure I can maintain a strong relationship with him. I wish I could say that was the case with my other siblings
especially her. My little sister. I have seen her only once, when she was born. I felt like this when she was born. Although I was much younger then, I couldn’t help but smile to look at her, to think of her, to dream of her.
And then she was gone. Due to circumstances out of her (and my) control, she was adopted. Her adoptive family left the country back in the 90′s and my father has not done the best job of keeping track of where she is.
I miss the tiny baby I met for a few moments. I wonder what kind of woman she is turning into. I wonder how she would look at Baby K. I’m sure she couldn’t keep herself from smiling.
do we have all these hood long-shot-under-dog movies to show white people we can make it out the hood, or to show people in the hood that there are other ways out?
The $150K on bad suits. And then saying that it couldn’t have been that much.
Her makeup artist being the highest paid McCain staffer?
Her dissing the interational research community by joking about research on fruit flies.
Her ignorance of what exactly the vice president does?
She can’t be for real. I refuse to believe it.
And while I’m talking about crazy, Ashley Todd. Where could I begin? Where would I stop. White people, when you fuck up, please stop blaming the black guy. It’s old.
