Thankful

1. A close family.

2. Everyone who cares about me.

3. The adoration and innocence of children.

4. A (finally) paid off car!

5. A father whose face lights up when he sees me.

6. Good teeth.

7. Cute monkeys.

8. Sunflowers.

9. Lavender things.

10. The opportunity to further my education.

11. Waking up in the morning feeling content.

12. Good smelling things.

13. Starbucks.

14. Pepperoni pizza.

15. A mother who is endearing with her ways.

16. Brothers who make me laugh.

17. Friends who are like family.

18. Second chances.

19. A pluses!

20. God's grace, mercy and love.

The Day Before Thanksgiving

I'm going home today to spend the rest of my break with my family. I love them and I'm looking forward to seeing them.

However, today, I'm also leaving. And I'm bad with goodbyes.

I know it's not that serious. Really. In our modern age, people are a phone call, a text, a tweet, a Facebook message, a video chat away. It's really not that serious. But there's just something inherently melancholy about the aspect of leaving. Yes, I know I might see you again sometime and that I'm always welcome to visit if time permits. Yes, I know we can very easily stay in touch. But it's not the same as in person. It just isn't.

What also gets me is the idea of something ending. No, not the friendship or the relationship or whatever, but the experience. Experiences are what they are because they begin and end. They exist in an ephemeral space and the only proof that they ever took place is that we remember them. That's all you're left with. The memory. (Or, in the case of a car wreck, a scar and an asymmetrical collarbone).

The fact that this is a rather dreary morning doesn't help, either. A dash of goodbye, a sprinkle of drear, a spoonful of morning airport drive . . . the perfect recipe for golden brown, bittersweet melancholy.

Folks Be Misspelling My Name For Real

Not cool, Starbucks. Not cool. As much time as I've spent with you and you still don't know how to spell my name right? Shooooot.

Superspiritual

I'm not superspiritual. Church folks know what I'm talking about. You can always hear superspiritual people praying out loud during prayer. Superspiritual people like testifying, and their testimonies consist of stories of going to WalMart and boldly walking up to people asking if they can pray for them. Right there in the middle of WalMart.

I'm not one of those people. I guess I sort of prided myself for not being one of those people, in a way.

But yesterday I was at the airport. I had just gotten off the plane and had to go to the bathroom to freshen up. Not soon after I walked in, so did another young lady who apparently worked at one of the food places in the airport and one of her friends. She walked in crying and proceeded to tell an ugly story about a man she was supposedly engaged to (because he had given her a ring) and how she had walked in on him with another woman, and how he had tried to use the fact that he had given her a ring to manipulate her and tell her that no matter what he did she was (supposedly) still his woman and was still going to be his wife, and how she was so stressed out because she was trying to move out of her mother's house and how she was stressed out about work because they were not giving her enough hours . . . it went on and on and she kept crying. I could not just stand there and brush my hair in the mirror and act like I wasn't hearing this.

My heart just went out to her because she was so young and beautiful and was in a situation where she was being manipulated and made to accept garbage. I hate it and I know that frustrating feeling. I hate it when women are in situations like that, frustrated, feeling like they have nowhere to turn, like they have no solution because I can feel the evil in it. It's palpable. It is a reality of this world. "The World" is more than just this tricky little thing that wants to pull you over to the dark side and make you want to start smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. It is an insidious system. A system of lies that people are deceived into believing, and when I see it in such concrete terms, it makes me sick.

So I did a superspiritual thing that I've never done before, and walked up to her (à la WalMart prayers) and asked if I could pray with her. I told her that I wasn't trying to get in her business, but I couldn't help but overhearing what she was going through and I wanted to tell her that she does not deserve that, that she deserves much more. She started crying even more and started thanking me and telling me that she needed to hear that. She said that I could pray with her and I just prayed that God would comfort her and give her encouragement and strength to overcome her circumstances in Jesus' name.

I'm still not superspiritual, though. I'm really not.

Old Professorial Loves

So, I got a friend request from one of my professors from undergrad today.

I remember the first time I saw him. I was a freshman. Idealistic. Naive. Susceptible to professorial crushes.

He strode in. Tall, lanky, hair coiffed in a tidy afro, bespectacled. He stood at the podium and grasped it. Silence. After a few seconds pregnant with expectation, he spoke. He didn't introduce himself, didn't speak sentences, he simply began to slowly, calmly intone single words:

"Myths," he said. "Ideology," he continued. "Constructions. Dominance." He paused and looked up, breathing in the spellbound air. He introduced a phrase that branded my tender, green, budding academic mind and the imprint has ever remained: "Dominant ideology."

I learned, and have never unlearned, the fact that everything, everything in this world, no matter how near, how far, how related, how unrelated, can always, unequivocably, undoubtedly be traced back to dominant ideology. Why is the drink I'm sipping out of a straw right now called Dr. Pepper? It's because the dominant ideology of the culture in which this drink was manufactured created the myth of Dr. Pepper that we accept as a soft drink. Why did I wake up this morning and take a shower? It's because the dominant ideology of American culture mandates that we bathe daily so that we can all comply with the myth of the "Clean American." See? Everything can be traced back to it.

He changed my life. When I beheld that tidy afro, those lanky limbs, and saw myself reflected in those bespectacled eyes, I knew I was a changed woman.

I began to hang around after class to "ask a question" where we would finish our conversation in his office. He asked who my favorite writers were and when I answered with such trivialities as "Edgar Allan Poe" and "Shakespeare" (both steeped in dominant ideology, no doubt) he took it upon himself to enlighten me. My gratefulness was boundless.

After one of his rants against the system, I asked him, oh, so innocently and politely, "What political ideas do you espouse?" He paused, and a roguish smile slowly spread across his face. He replied, "Let's just say that I believe in . . . sharing."

In seriousness, though, he was one of the first professors to encourage me to pursue a PhD. And at long last, here I am. Though my crush has long since abated, I still look back upon that enraptured time with fondness.

Procrastinator's Prayer

God, I know this is getting redundant. Please forgive me. I do this same thing over and over: I apologize and berate myself for being a poor steward of my time, and then I fall back into the same procrastinatory pattern. Despite this awful pattern, somehow, I still get it done, and I end up still getting good grades. I know it's not me, though. I know it's You. I'm trying to break out of my procrastinatory mold, though. For example, I'm going to try to write this Afro-Hispanic Idenity paper today even though it's not due until Tuesday. I guess part of the reason is that I know that I better do it today because I'm not going to really have time Sunday and definitely not Monday night. Unless I want be delirious come Tuesday morning.

God, You're so sweet. I mean, You try to help a sista out as much as You can. I just want to avoid that dreaded thing that's always floating around in the possibilities of my fears. That one day I'll fall back into my procrastinating ways and then come to at the last minute and shake myself like Sampson, but not realize that Your come-through-in-the-end power had departed from me.

That idea really fills me with dread. The idea that I'll have to come face to face with something less than a final A at the end of my first semester of a PhD program, when there was absolutely no excuse for that to have happened. If it happens, I won't die, but part of me is afraid that You will allow it to happen to teach me a lesson. Don't do it, God. I'll understand if You do, but I'm kindly asking You not to. Watch me finish this paper tonight. Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak: Peradventure I finish this paper tonight. And he said, I will not do it for the paper's sake.

The Careful Blogger

I've learned throughout my years of bloggery that getting personal, even in pseudonymical, hypothetical terms, on the World Wide Web is a bad idea.

So I've kept everything pretty devoid of other characters for a while now, and for all intents and purposes, I plan to keep it that way. I mean, I suppose I do mention my family and close friends every once in a while, or the occasional person I come into contact with during this new gig as a PhD student, but that's about it.

I like that people come to my blog to read what I have to say. It's nice to have a little . . . platform, if you will, to share a few thoughts and experiences from my corner of the world. And therein lies the rub: I know that people are reading this and so I've (wisely, I think) omitted a lot of things as well.

However, part of me feels like I can't just act like stuff isn't (potentially) going on.

I've been so consumed with work lately, that I haven't had time to think and ponder over the implications of a journey I am to embark upon next week. And in a way, I'm really glad for that. I've been so focused on getting done what I have to get done that I haven't had time to sit and ponder and obsess over it. Because I really hate when I do that. It's annoying and it's draining and a very poor use of mental energy.

At the same time, however, I don't want to trivialize it. Go into it flippantly, shrugging my shoulders, with the air that this is just a routine stop on my way to wherever. I certainly don't want to imbue anything with meaning that it doesn't have, yet I don't want to ignore the potential it does have.

In the meantime, I've got to get more work done. (Imagine that.)

Procrastinatory Testimony

I know I need to get my work done. I need to delve into it with abandon. I need to get my act together and envelop myself in this mass of work. I need to wrap myself in a work cocoon and not come out until it gets done.

These are things that I know. And these are things that I don't do as purposely as I should, and so I find myself hanging onto God's coattails, relieved that somehow it got done. And I raise my hands and let the gratefulness wash over me. Part of my worship is letting the panic wash away, purposing in my mind to believe that He's going to get me through it, thanking Him for already getting me through things thus far.

This inertia, this reluctance, these habits. They're not an excuse. But maybe they're what keeps me grasping onto God's coattails, so to speak. They're what keeps me all too aware that I can't do this on my own and that I never have.

Academese

1. agency - Usually used with the verb "exercise," agency is self-will. If a character in a text "exercises agency," that means they made a choice or took action on his or her own terms or to exert his or her own will.

2. centric - Academics love to talk about centric stuff. Eurocentric, afrocentric, phallocentric, ethnocentric . . . we can't get enough of it.

3. construct - Used as a noun to describe what everything is. Commonly used with the adjective "social." Race is construct. So is gender. So is class. So is language. For academics, nothing you can think of in the world is preexistent, so it is a construct. That's a fancy way of saying we made it up.

4. de - Academics like to "de-" things. Demystify, deconstruct, delegitimize . . .

5. deconstruct - No academic worth his or her salt could get by without deconstructing something. Whatever it is that has been constructed, it just means to break the joker back down.

6. demystify - Not to be confused with "demythify" which is deconstructing a myth, demystify is to take either an esoteric, misunderstood subject, but more likely a taboo, usually erotic subject and "expose" it (read: talk about it ad nauseum) so that it loses its mystique.

7. dialogue - Used as a verb. It's a way to describe what happens when two discourses meet over drinks. The feminist discourse dialoguing with the racial discourse, or how class dialogues with gender for example.

8. discourse - Used to denote any kind of speech, thought or concept. Feminist discourse, national discourse, hegemonic discourse . . . the list goes on. Just add "discourse" after any adjective, and you've got an instamatic academically smooth term to bandy about.

9. dominant - Whatever is white, male, European, upper class, has political power, is slave-owning or colonizing.

10. hegemony - Composed of or held by whoever or whatever is "dominant". The adjective form "hegemonic" is also a favorite to be used in tandem with "discourse."

11. ideology - More or less a synonym of "discourse" except it usually has a negative, propagandizing connotation.

12. myth - What some ideology or other ends up constructing that academics end up taking on the burden to deconstruct for the greater good.

13. neo - A prefix academics add to make an old, played out concept fresh again.

14. phallus - No matter what you're talking about or where you are, the phallus is going to pop up in academic conversation. It's bound to. So get ready.

15. post - Another prefix academics add to make an old, played out concept fresh again.

16. wave - For some reason, for academics, feminist thought arrives to the world at large in waves.

This is my 1001st post!

What? I guess I have been blogging on this thing for a minute. My first post was a couple of months before I graduated from undergrad in 2005. Crazy. I've been blogging for almost 7 years. That's off the chain.

All I was going to do was tell my girl Gert that I finally finished her paper. Don't worry hun, I'll put a really cute picture of you on my PowerPoint. Girl, I'm gonna present your novel so good, it'll make Ignacio wish he put a ring on it. The only reason anyone even knows his trifling behind ever existed was because you wrote him mad love letters. Ha! His entire life has been reduced to "that guy Gertrudis was sweatin." Mmm, mmm, mmm. If you only knew how much brainpower people through the ages have invested in you, Gert. You'd be proud of yourself.