Homegirl Quel (kel) in Austin

Random encounter with creepy old dude...

The Place- Target
Him- Old-enough-to-have-wrinkles white dude (his race is important, because a black man just would not.) walking up behind me.
Me- Minding my own business on the baby food aisle looking for dry brown rice.

This is how it went down...

Him: "Hey there! You know I like that hair like that." (referring to my natural twist-out)

Me: "Thank you." *smiles with closed mouth*

Him: "Mind if I touch it there?" *reaches to touch my head*

Me: *easing away taking a couple of steps forward whilst ducking his hand and watching him with a puzzled look* "No?! No. Thanks."

Him: *hands on hips leaning back and smiling* "Well somebody woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning."

Me: "Mhm." *still puzzled in the face and walking away, but checking my back every couple of steps, because, CREEP, no you cannot touch any part of me and why are you on the baby food aisle anyway?! Then feeling kind of sorry for him because he's old, and maybe lonely and maybe he was just being friendly and maybe he was on the baby food aisle because of the recession and he's eating baby food now instead of grown up food because I've heard that some poor old people do that. But still weirded out by the whole thing and annoyed that he tried to touch me.*

I'm happier now that I'm a mom, but it's not all about the baby.

So I think I've figured out why people say becoming a parent is all sappy and happy and the best thing that will ever happen to you blah blah blah. With all that was involved in growing a whole person inside me, then being the only person on the whole planet responsible for the basic daily care and nurturing of another helpless human including the awesome figure reconstruction, the sleep deprivation and the poop, the overwhelming joy that I hear about seemed overstated. But today, as I was driving home with my son in the backseat, I noted how happy I was when I saw the rain this morning, and how excited I got at the sight of a school bus passing us on the road. I also thought about how much I look forward to the garbage pick-up guys to come by every Monday. Before becoming a parent, I didn't care about those things. And rain on a weekday morning usually evoked emotions very opposite of excitement in me. But I'm giddy at the sight of them now, because I get to show my son the rain, and the school bus, and the garbage truck, and seeing him light up the way he does just makes my insides all mushy. It's a bit selfish (which is a word that has been used to describe me, but I think everybody should be a little selfish), but the happiness my child has brought into my life isn't just about him. He makes me live inside of every moment when we're out in the world together. I'm just happier in general, I think, because I have a hundred little reasons to genuinely scream and laugh and speak in a high-pitched voice out of utter joy that, "YES! There's a CUP!"  I know the day will come when rain and big trucks won't matter to anybody in this house. Hopefully by then I will have learned to live inside of every moment and enjoy as many happy moments as I do now.

The Owls Have It

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you know that I love frog things. It actually crept up on me. One day I looked around and realized I had a LOT of frog stuff. And decided (along with my gift-giving sister) to move forward consciously getting frog things in my life.

Lately I've been all about owls. Frogs and owls--very Harry Potter, no? I don't know what it is about the birds that do it for me, but I'm all about them right now. This actually crept up on me too! After my most recent purchase of this scarf:

 

...and this dress:

...as well as an awesomely charming owl charm necklace, I realized I had an affinity for hooters. They're wise and witchy and apparently also trendy! These are just a few awesome owl things I found online. The tee and wristlet by Marc Jacobs have me spellbound and I'm watching them like a hawk to see if I can get them on sale--I love owls, but these ones in particular do not love my pocketbook. Aren't they lovely?!

Items pictured above:
Marc by Marc Jacobs Cotton owl-print T-shirt, $88
Owl Drop Necklace, $14
Stamp Of Approve-Owl Ring, $12
20x200 : Print Information : Owl No. 1, $20
Marc by Marc Jacobs Owl Appliqué Wristlet at Zappos.com, $98

Found Things

I bought this book, Black Girl in Paris, at Half Price Books (for $1! Score!) a couple of days ago. Yesterday, when I flipped through it, I found a bookmark from a specialty used and out-of-print book resale store in Maine and the postcard pictured above. The front of the postcard is all pink and red and Hello Kitty. I can't figure out the relationship between "Lovest" and "Shannie"-maybe sisters or husband and wife or lovers? There's no address or stamp or anything, so Shannie must have left it for Lovest to find at just the right moment. So sweet! I heart buying previously owned things. In case you can't read the photo, it says:

"Lovest, Have a stellar meeting. You are my star--Brilliant, Dreamy, [drawing of a star],Lasting, Hot! [drawing of a heart] Lovest you, [signed]Shannie"

Friday Randoms

• I went to see Maxwell live with my husband this week. It was so fun! The opening act was Laura Izibor. I hadn't heard of her before the show. She's Irish,has awesome hair and is a wonderful singer/songwriter. She performed with only a keyboard and a guy with an acoustic guitar, which was all she needed. That and her AWESOME HAIR! Maxwell put on a quite sexy show. The live band was so tight. He was so funny too! He talked a lot in between songs. After the show, he was like, "Austin, I really appreciate y'all getting dressed up and moisturizin' and getting your hair did, and fellas puttin' on your cologne." He gave Austin much love and we gave it right back. I tweeted through the opening act and after the show. Did I mention how sexy his show was?
• VOTE for ME! in the Black Blog 2009 Awards. Vote <<HERE.>>
• Dear lady at the gym who caught me looking at you crazy, I would say sorry, but I won't. Because when you wear a bra top to the gym sporting a 2-liter instead of a 6-pack, you should expect to be looked at crazy. Put a shirt on!
• Reminder, to any of you guys thinking about attending Blogalicious 2009 (at the W Midtown in Atlanta on Oct. 9-11), early registration for the conference ends on July 11th. After July 11th, the fee goes up to $265. Blogalicious attendees get a special promotional rate of $149 until mid-September. So register and book your rooms early!
  IMPORTANT NOTE: The sessions and events at this conference will focus on interests and issues of the female blogger of color, but it's all love at Blogalicious 2009--we're all brothers and sisters, so to my non-color blogger peeps, you are welcome! Come! You know you want to. 
• My twin brother is here with me! And my mom AND my bff are on the way and will be arriving today! I'm going to be in my happy place this weekend. :)
• And speaking of my twin...here's a totally random photo/photo of the day:

And yes, that's me with a LOT less hair. We'll talk more about that later. Happy Friday! :)

I think I witnessed community service/hard labor today

It was the strangest thing. I was at the park with Zack this morning and a Parks & Recreation truck rolled up and parked near the play scape. This older, overweight woman gets out of the passenger side, dressed in her own clothes--no neon orange vest or anything--holding a bright blue plastic bag and one of those poles with a spike at the end for picking up trash without bending over.  It was such a strange sight, this older woman, struggling in the heat to even walk, picking up trash on the playground, while the P&R guy leaned on his truck, smoking a cigarette and later kind of hovering over her while she searched around for trash to pick up. As I watched them, I tried to imagine what crime that woman could have committed to land her here. Whatever it was, she was definitely paying for it--at 9AM it was already like 90 degrees out and she did not look comfortable. 

In case y'all were wondering how to gross me out...

Try sitting in an upholstered armchair at Barne's and Noble after riding in on a bike, dripping sweat, then getting up after about a half-hour of thumbing your sweating fingers through a magazine that somebody is probably going to buy and leaving a big wet-spot where your sweaty booty was. And on top of that, he looked like Professor Snape from Harry Potter. Gross.

Overheard in a nail salon:crickets for prosperity apparently

So I'm in a nail salon in Memphis when this woman comes in to chat a bit with her regular nail technician. She begins to explain to the tech why she needs to move her weekly appointment up--she's going out of town to someplacecountry MS before her regular appointment. I gathered that from a twenty-minute conversation she had with the tech, the woman the tech was working on at the time, the tech who was doing my manicure and a couple of other customers who were waiting. During this conversation, I learned that...she's forty, recently lost her job, met a nice sixty-year-old guy who is opening an Exxon gas station, went out with him the day they met and after a week of phone chats will be joining him for a weekend in his home in someplacecountry MS, and needs her nails done and her roots stripped and dyed blond to match the rest of her hair (which is styled like any member of White Snake) before her trip.

The nail technicians, all black ladies, freely voiced their disapproval of her getting into his car the first time she met him--in someplacecountry MS at a dinner party of mutual friends--which of course could have ended in rape or murder. They backtracked almost completely, when she got to the part about him opening an Exxon gas station. At that point, "guuuurl" and "sugar daddy" and "good for you" and "sounds like a nice guy" and "no wonder you got in" and "I woulda got in too"s came from no particular person, and all at once from every corner of the room. The funniest part was how she lost everybody and totally killed the conversation.

If I had a nickel...

If I had a nickel for every time I've seen a black dude at the bus stop straddled atop the trash can riding it like a lasso-twirling cowboy, I'd have one nickel. I only wish I had my windows down so I could have heard the words that were coming out of his mouth.

Seen in South Austin on the way to Newflower Farmer's Market yesterday.

So I saw a celebrity in the Miami airport

Well...not a celebrity-celebrity. Maybe I should just call him an actor. So I saw an actor in the Miami airport. You see neither Billy nor I could remember his name or exactly where we knew him from. If it hadn't been for his (super skinny, too-glammed up for airport travel, extensions down to there, toting a pocket sized-pooch in a LV bag) travel companion, we prob'ly wouldn't have even noticed him. He was also really tall and super skinny and carrying a garment bag that I recognized from paparazzi celeb-shopping photos. It was fabric, maybe carrying one suit, and was solid brown with one word, Gucci, printed on it in gold letters. 

To the lady in the HEB grocery store toilet stall next to me...

No, I don't have a dollar for you to catch the bus.

Please don't call me "girlfriend", because 1. I'm not your girlfriend and 2. I'm not impressed by you trying to show me how "down" you are. It actually makes you look even more unstable than asking a stranger for a dollar while they're trying to handle some private business in a public place.

Yes, it's cold, Austin weather is crazy and my Thanksgiving was great, but I'm not interested in having this conversation with you in general, and especially when I'm on the toilet trying to do number 2! It's bad enough I'm forced to do this in public now anyway since I'm very pregnant at the moment, and I don't need you making it worse for me by trying to make small talk!

Thank you for not being outside when I finished to cuss me out or rob me or something because I totally ignored you after you asked the first question. You're crazy. And crazy people make me nervous.

To: Hispanic Girl at the bus stop on Westgate & William Cannon

I appreciate that you've chosen to breast feed your baby, but cover yourself when you're at the bus stop girl!
¿Dónde está su madre? (Where is your momma?!)

Bizarre

bi‧zarre [bi-zar] –adjective– markedly unusual in appearance, style, or general character and often involving incongruous or unexpected elements; outrageously or whimsically strange; odd: bizarre clothing; bizarre behavior. 

I drove up next to a city bus at a red light yesterday and saw this old Mexican man disembarked. I watched him as he crossed the street. He was wearing a plaid shirt and jeans. Normal. Unless you consider that the plaid shirt he was wearing was in 3 shades of pink (pastel, petal and little-girl), and that he was also carrying a pink girl-kiddie-sized backpack over one shoulder (he had no little girl with him), and that he was wearing jeans that hit above his ankles just enough for his pastel pink socks to peek though, above his white and pink sneakers replete with pink laces and sparkly pink stripes. He was old. He was Mexican. He wore pink. He was bizarre.   

Some thoughts

My Garden State CD has basically become white noise in my car at this point,so I don't sing along much. Mostly, I just entertain my thoughts. That CD is great white noise/contemplation background music.

On the way to work this morning I saw two people, who I would never have given a second thought to had it not been for over-exposure to the news. Not that it's bad, I'm just making an observation...

The first was a man riding a bicycle. Living in Austin, I've seen this countless times before, but this year I followed the Tour de France for the first time and am very intrigued/impressed by Lance Armstrong and by the sport...which I never considered a sport until I watched the stages and realized how hard these guys work. So anyway, this guy on his bike was obviously hard core--all suited up and super skinny/muscular. We were at a red light and I just stared at him. I stared mostly 'cause I was trying to figure out if it was Lance Armstrong, but of course it couldn't have been him. Sorry, but all those super skinny, white biker guys with sunken-in jaws look very similar alike to me. If it was Lance, why was he riding alone? Does Lance always ride with somebody in a van or with biker body guards? I wondered why this guy was all dressed up and riding a bike in the middle of rush hour. I wondered if he got paid to ride, and if not, why wasn't he at work. Was he on his way to work? Did he start riding after Lance Armstrong made riding "cool"? Is riding cool? Did he get a lot of leg cramps? All those skinny stringy calf muscles looked crampy. If he's not a professional rider, what's the appeal? He's so skinny. What would he look like in regular clothes? Why can't he feel me staring at him? I always feel eyes on me.Then the light turned green. 

Then I saw a lady walking near a bus stop. She was dressed from head to toe (literally) in black...a black burqa. She was walking alone, in Austin, TX, in a burqa...with a backpack. I wondered if I was the only person who, just for a split second, wondered if there was a bomb in there. Then I thought about how screwed up it was that I thought that...too much news. I wondered what her bus ride was like and what thoughts went through the minds of the driver and other passengers when she got on. Did people pray and ask God for forgiveness, or call somebody to say I love you. I wondered if she went into stores and stuff, and what her conversation, if any, was like with the clerks. I wondered if she felt strange/weird/out of place. I wondered if she was really beautiful or really ugly or just normal looking under there. I thought about the Larry David episode where Larry tried to fix up a lady in a burqa with a blind man and Larry got a glimpse of her face and realized she was ugly...that was a funny episode. I wondered if she was hot. Where she lived, and what kind of man she lived with...there must be a man. Was she a student? Why was she in Austin? Was this some UT student doing an experiment to see how people would react/interact with them? She must be burning up in there.