Color Me Bad as Hell

"Stronger" by Kanye West

...i know i got to be right now / cuz i can't get much wronger...

I'm following a young lady's blog. She's Black, she's a woman, and she's a lesbian, my three favorite minority statuses.

But she is remarkably brilliant, open-minded, and eloquent. I of course do not know this young lady, but her blog reveals her to be the aforementioned adjectives.

I just read an entry about her depression and her embarking on therapy. She is kind of upset about being in therapy, which I think is an interesting thing about people in therapy. I remember that I knew I needed (and currently need) to be in it but there is something shameful, disheartening, and annoying about being in therapy.

Especially when you are smart and understand psychology, you feel as though you should be able to treat yourself, handle yourself. It can be demoralizing. I am aware of the life circumstances and history that make me who I am, I am aware of who I am in a way that I don't think most people are, and I know what I need to do and the thinking that I need to change/implement.

However, I am unable to make the connection between what is wrong and how to rectify it. Emotions, especially those of childhood that have been allowed to develop just as one has physically, and those of resentment and anger, do not give a damn about intellect. I try to give myself therapy, but I don't listen.

That is the magic of therapy. There is a professionally trained person objective enough to make you aware of the reality you choose to deny by remaining "sick", burdened, guilted or whatever emotion you punish yourself with.

Anyway, after I read her entry, I realized that I say nothing about my depression, although if one reads these blogs in their entirety, it is painfully obvious. But I don't think I have ever said "I have depression". I just tell my blog how pointless I think life is.

Well I have depression. And I don't want to be ashamed of it. A lot of unfortunate things happened to me and I made a lot of bad decisions for my life. But I am/was just living my life like everyone else was doing. These (take a look at my current life) are the results. There are no directions to living. Each person does what they want, what they know. I ended up with depression (although I am genetically predisposed to depression because there are a gang of people who seem to suffer from depression in this African family).

I even cried today over the frustration I feel about my life, although the thunderstorm outside made me quite vulnerable to my own dormant sadness (not even that dormant).

I say all that to say this: I am not ashamed. I couldn't really help it but I can help myself out of it. I have been telling my depressed friends and family (a bunch of us are heading to therapy, need therapy, or in therapy in my circle right now) that they deserve to be happy. I may even believe that I deserve to be happy.

I will go back to therapy soon and I will unabashedly describe my thoughts and progress.

Switch Lanes

"All I Want for Christmas" by Mariah Carey

...I won't ask for much this Christmas / I won't even ask for snow / I'm just gonna keep on waiting / underneath the mistletoe...make my wish come true / baby all I want for Christmas is yooouuu...

Merry Christmas. Or Happy Holidays.

I am having a wonderful time with family in Northern Virginia. I've been here visiting for the break for almost two weeks now. There is a lot of life here. My cousins and my aunt are so energetic and funny.

We talk loud, eat a lot, make a mess, insult each other jokingly, and sleep late everyday.

The house is warm and the televisions and game systems are plenty. And the merriment makes the walls all glow and we're all brighter for it.

Yesterday night we had a Christmas Eve dinner and had a pseudo-party as we cooked. We brought a CD player down and acted a fool to old and new dance songs from back Home. I haven't been able to have such moments with family and it felt so nice. I felt kind of human...and loved maybe.

We have been wrapping gifts for the past couple of days and have stuffed them under our small tree. There were 13 of us in the house for Christmas and about three times as many gifts under the tree. Although I argued that we would be ruining tradition if we didn't wait until we woke up to open our gifts, they were definitely unwrapping at 12:01am.

It's a wonderful Christmas. My younger cousins aren't so young anymore and they all have jobs and bought gifts this year. They are all such sweet, generous, considerate people, very different from the children I had to wait on hand and foot a few years ago.

We're all just happy, even if it's just for these few days. And I don't know if Christmas does really have magic about it, if it's all the food and drink, or if it's the media telling us to be happy during this season, but whatever it is, I love this season.

I love how kind people are to each other, how considerate, how selfless people are. This is how I wish the world could be all year round.

I don't think highly of my fellow human being to be honest. I think that we are a selfish bunch. We care about ourselves and possibly the few around us. We let party lines, religion, racial lines, culture, etc. to divide and categorize us such that we are evil to one another.

But during this time of year, the animosity seems to subside a little bit. We extend a loving hand that is rather paralyzed during other times of the year.

I read an article on CNN's website about another family facing foreclosure after some mess had occurred earlier in the year with illness and a jobloss. A friend put their story on her blog and set up an account so that people could make donations.

In under 2 weeks, the blog had raised over $11,000. How amazing is that? The really amazing part are the people who donated. They were people who had also lost their homes, had cars repossessed, lost jobs and the ilk.

This is a sad Christmas for a lot of people and I'm glad that despite it, people are able to preserve the spirit of the season and think of people above themselves. Go team human race. Maybe I underestimate us.

Gold State Politics

"You Don't Know Me" by T.I.

...when you see me in the street / homey, you don't know me...

I am ashamed of myself. I spent several hours of my day on a blog that is exclusively about "hating" on Beyonce. It was hilarious. Click here to go to the blog.

I read many of the entries and skimmed the others. I even read some of the comments by readers. It is such an involved blog. I want to put it on the list of blogs I follow but I feel bad because I do like Beyonce. I'm not a ridiculous fanatic, but I gets down with her music and her style (her acting, not so much).

But, I love celebrityism and gossip and all that. Bossip, MediaTakeOut, and Young, Black, and Fabulous are all great gossip blogs in the different ways and I sure do follow them to nourish my celebrity obsessed, idle, fantacizing side.

But I have never seen such an extreme thing as this blog. It has the fervor of a political movement and it's just about hating on Beyonce.

It got me thinking about celebrity culture. I love it and I hate it. I just don't understand how celebrity became such a lucrative institution. I am upset with the level of wealth of the people considering the level of poverty most of the world suffers from. I do understand that there will always be a discrepancy in earnings but it shouldn't be so ridiculous and right now, I think it is ridiculous. However, that is another entry in and of itself.

And it has taken over our culture. Celebrities are the news for the most part and it is becoming easier and easier to become a celebrity given the internet and 24 hour news. I wonder if there are any people in the world who don't want to be famous, even for something good. Even if I do something amazing with my life (which I hope I do), I'd rather not be famous. I just hope I do something for the good of humanity and go about my business.

Additionally, should I become ridiculously weathly, I'm taking all my family back to Sierra Leone so they never have to work again (aunties, uncles, cousins, and any friends that want to go) and then I will begin a campaign to get rid of all my money that I can before they put me six feet under by helping to rebuild Sierra Leone and ultimately the whole world.