Los Angelista

White Brothers and Sisters, if You Do Nothing...

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Dwyer) — Tue, 26 May 2020 22:16:00 +0000

Anybody else just feeling that deep kind of anger today?

"I'm going to tell them there's an African American man threatening my life."

New York City 2020. Christian Cooper, a black man in Central Park — WHO IS WATCHING BIRDS NO LESS — asks Amy Cooper, a white woman, to leash her dog, and she calls the police. Tells the dispatch he's African American and threatening her life.

I've sat with this news story for HOURS now and the more I think about it, the ANGRIER I am.

Amy Cooper knew EXACTLY what she was doing and she should be charged with all the charges, and never be employable in the United States again unless she starts going around giving talks about how she has transformed her heart and dedicated her life to eradicating white supremacy from the United States. OTHERWISE? Nah.

OK. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. At least until an officer in Minneapolis decides to KNEEL ON YOUR NECK.

George Floyd's alleged crime was FORGERY. AKA Forgery While Black.

This brother got a knee on the neck and gasped for breath until he stopped breathing. For your own sanity, DO NOT watch that snuff video. I wish I hadn't watched it. Because it's been hours since I watched and I still want to scream every cuss word I know cos wow, think of Dylann Roof who shot up Emanuel AME Church, murdered NINE BLACK PEOPLE WHO WERE PRAYING. Got no knee on his neck. Got escorted to a squad car all nice and polite and friendly.

My white brothers and sisters — it is YOUR friends, and co-workers, and family, and neighbors who are KILLING US. It needs to get real within your six degrees of separation about eradicating racism because you are a bystander if you say nothing. You are a silent participant in and beneficiary of white supremacy if you do nothing.

Books Tuesday: What Is Your 2020 Reading Goal?

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Dwyer) — Wed, 08 Jan 2020 07:59:00 +0000

The summer before my senior year of high school I read "The Count of Monte Cristo" in one day. I think the edition I checked out from the library was somewhere around 1,000 words. These are the insane things you do when you're a teenager, right?

But why the rush?

Well, I'd set a goal of reading one book every single day that summer just to see if I could do it. The books couldn't be fluffy "Sweet Valley High" type books, either. So along with the Dumas classic, I read Gloria Naylor's "Linden Hills" and went through my mom's entire Toni Morrison collection — she had all her books — which led to a lifelong love of Morrison's work.

I remember my dad telling me that I'd never in my life have the opportunity to spend entire days, day after day, reading. That has, so far, proved to be true. So when I see folks posting on social media that they have the goal of reading 200 or 300 books in 2020, I'm like, HOW, SWAY?

I've never set a reading goal since that long-ago summer, and I'm wondering if one book per week is slacking. Do you have a reading goal, and if so, what is it?

A Sidewalk Death in the Neighborhood

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Dwyer) — Tue, 07 Jan 2020 06:39:00 +0000

A dozen candles on the sidewalk. When sunset arrives they're lit, illuminating a makeshift wooden cross leaning against a dingy wall. A small plant and a thin bunch of flowers encased in plastic complete the memorial. These are the things that mark the spot where someone died in my neighborhood.

The memorial has been there for a week. I don't know the details of what happened, whether the deceased was a man or a woman, or how old they were. Whether they noticed that they were taking their last breaths beneath the words "FAX COPY" and hated fate so very much for that fact.

Every time I pass this spot my eyes travel from the memorial to "FAX COPY" and my mind starts to wander. I mull over how faxing is still huge, especially in Japan and Germany, and how here in Los Angeles the bail process can be initiated via fax. And then my gaze trails back down the wall to the candles and the cross and the plant and the flowers.

I feel guilty. Instead of speculating on who sends faxes in the second decade of the 21st century — and why — what I should be wondering is what actually happened to the person who died here, and how come no one seems to know for sure?

On Nextdoor someone alleges that the person who died is a victim of the COLD BEER and FINE WINE of the liquor store. "It would apear [sic] to be one of the guys who hangs out by the liquor store there which is ground zero for providing cheap booze and other supplies for the addicted and downtrodden," they wrote.

It could be true, but there's no news story to back this up. In a city of millions, one dead body on the sidewalk doesn't register in the news cycle. And so the Nextdoor thread took a swift detour into whether our local elected officials and law enforcement would care more if this had happened in front of an establishment a block away that's generally associated with gentrification. Eventually, the thread devolved into profanities.

I don't know who lights the memorial's candles when the sun goes down. On Saturday night I saw two older men standing in front of it, their heads briefly bowed in prayer. I watched as they made the sign of the cross, the movement heavy with the sadness and regret of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. They shuffled away after a moment and stepped through the open door of the liquor store. Surely heading to FAX COPY.

Flashback Friday: 'Smooth' by Santana and Rob Thomas Turns 20

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Dwyer) — Sat, 04 Jan 2020 07:59:00 +0000

The thing about it being 2020 is that I keep thinking about the year 2000 — how RELIEVED we were that when the clocks changed on Dec. 31, 1999 that the world did not end. Because if you're of a certain age, a whole LOT of folks thought that was going down.

Remember Y2K? Remember that mess? If you've put that out of your head, I bet you remember grooving to "Smooth" by Santana and Matchbox 20 vocalist Rob Thomas. It topped the Billboard charts this week back in 2020 and listen, "Smooth" was such a jam.

But do you recall how MUCH of a jam it was? The song spent 12 weeks in the No. 1 spot on Billboard and went on to win a whopping three Grammys, including Record of the Year and Song of the Year.

Twenty years old but still sounding timeless.

Would You Eat in Dr. Phil's Dining Room With Guns on the Walls?

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Dwyer) — Fri, 03 Jan 2020 07:57:00 +0000

Two days, y'all. That's all it took for 2020 to go completely off the rails. And if we need to blame someone, how about blaming the Los Angeles Times because Wednesday afternoon they tweeted photos of Dr. Phil's house along with an article about it being for sale and wow. Like, ALL the wow.

As Times staff writer Jack Fleming described the home: "A dozen guns adorn the dining room wall. Bizarre figurines of bears and rabbits eye you from every living space. L.A. has gobs of outlandish estates, but Dr. Phil’s Beverly Crest home — which just hit the market for $5.75 million — is as unusual as they come."

"Unusual." Yes, that's one way to describe it. It was unusual enough to make Dr. Phil the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter. Which is where I came across the photos of this home while in a checkout line at the grocery store. I gasped aloud when I saw the snap of the guns up in the dining room, which caused the guy in front of me to ask me what I was looking at.

"This LA Times article says Dr. Phil's house has a dining room with guns all over the wall," I said while showing him the photo. "Would you want to eat dinner while looking at all those guns?"

The checkout guy immediately chimed in. "I would! That sounds kinda fun." The man in front of me agreed that a gun-filled living room "sounds dope!" And the dude bagging my groceries was equally enthusiastic. He also, ahem, informed me that "girls would decorate with '50 Shades of Gray' stuff."

It's hours later and I'm still not clear what exactly that "50 Shades" decor would be. Wallpaper made out of books about escaping controlling narcissists maybe? Moreso, would you eat dinner in this gun-filled dining room or nah?

Here's What Happened When I Documented 1 Second of My Life Every Day for a Year

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Dwyer) — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 07:45:00 +0000

The Los Angeles premiere of Depeche Mode's "Spirits in the Forest". My reaction after viewing the documentary — which I'm in —for the first time on my laptop at home. Taking my oldest son to college. Going to the gym. Going to the gym some more. Watching my cat groom my dog. Hugging my friends. Climbing Mt. Hollywood. Going dancing. Feeling sad. Getting sick. Stressing out that I maybe had cancer again. Taking my youngest son to the ER. Watching him being wheeled away for emergency surgery.

All that happened to me in 2019, and then some. But if a picture is worth a thousand words, how about 368 seconds worth of photos (and videos!) to tell the story of the past year?

"Imagine a movie that includes every day of the rest of your life." That's the tag line for the app 1 Second Everyday. I found out about it last December and had two reactions: horror and fascination.

Fascination because I have a terrible memory and this seemed like a great way to remember what actually happened to me. Plus, it seemed more doable than writing in my journal every day.

But I gave the app a side-eye because even before downloading it, I could feel the pressure to wrap my existence up in ponies and rainbows. One second of daily perfection. If that's not a HORROR SHOW, I don't know what is. After all, no one wants to see one second of me crying in my car while driving from Los Angeles to Santa Cruz. And crying on the way back. Heck, I don't even know if I want to see that.

But curiosity won and I started uploading pics and videos on Dec. 29, 2018. I kept on through Dec. 31, 2019. It's not everything that happened or everyone I spent time with. It's a highlight reel look at what my life was like last year. Minus the crying. I promise.

Will I do it again?

I already uploaded something for Jan. 1, 2020. She ready.

Ben Carson's Not the Only One Who Doesn't Get Why Slaves Weren't Immigrants

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Dwyer) — Thu, 09 Mar 2017 05:37:00 +0000

Once upon a time in the late 1840s some of my Dwyer ancestors voluntarily got on a boat and left Ireland for the United States. Their goal: Escape the impoverishment and mass starvation of the Irish by the British...and one day have that experience made fun of by folks who get trashed on St. Patrick's Day and offer to buy you french fries. Because "potato famine."

Sometime between 1619, when the first African slaves were brought to Jamestown, and 1859 when the Clotilde, the last known ship to bring human cargo to the U.S., docked in Mobile Bay, Alabama, my—NO IDEA what their surnames were because those got stripped away when they were abducted—black ancestors arrived in the United States. Their goal: The same as any kidnapped person—stay alive in the hopes that you'll be rescued.

Which one of those two stories is about immigration?

On Monday, Ben Carson, our new secretary of Housing and Urban Development, put the spotlight on the national confusion over the definition of a slave and the definition of an immigrant.

“There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less," Carson told employees of the department. "But they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great-grandsons, great-granddaughters, might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land."

“That’s one way to describe slavery,” The Daily Show host Trevor Noah quipped in response on Tuesday night. “It makes them sound like they work at Walmart.”

After getting dragged on social media for his remarks, Carson defended them, challenging folks to look up the definition of the word immigrant. As you'll see in the video below, Noah did just that, and, ahem, Merriam Webster's definition is giving Carson a serious side-eye.

I ran into the phrasing on Saturday night in Los Angeles, in a space that I was surprised and saddened to hear it—and no, Ben Carson was not present in the room. As Noah points out, this language has also popped up in the speeches of President Obama. "It's seductive to believe that African Americans share in the American immigration story. It's nice to try to sell unity," Noah said.

"The truth is it doesn't matter who says it, slaves weren't immigrants because an immigrant has choice. They choose the country they're going to because they hope it will bring them a better life," Noah said. "Saying that slaves are just another group of immigrants erases how black people were uniquely oppressed in America. It helps justify blaming African-Americans for their hardships."

Sure, Noah made me laugh with his jokes about twerking, the fake Siri response, and his reference to the Eddie Murphy classic Coming to America. But you can see on Noah's face that he wants us to understand. Now that we know better, how about we do better with our word choices?

Chance the Rapper to Politicians: This Is What it Looks Like to Care About Black and Brown Kids

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Dwyer) — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 05:21:00 +0000

You know those folks who like to complain about an artist's social activism? The ones who say that actors, singers, or dancers need to shut up and stick to performing? On Monday, Chicago native Chance the Rapper essentially told all those complainers to have a seat.

The hip hop star, born Chancelor Bennett, showed up at Westcott Elementary, a campus in the South Side neighborhood he grew up in, and announced that he's donating $1 million to support arts programs in the cash-strapped Chicago Public Schools.

"Our kids should not be held hostage because of political positioning," Chance said during a classroom press conference, which he livestreamed on Twitter via the Periscope app. If Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner doesn't agree to provide $215 million to the district, "CPS will be forced to end school 13 days early, which means over 380,000 kids will not have adult supervised activities in June and could possibly be put in harms way," Chance said. Summer school might be canceled, too.

Of course, if folks in power don't really care about black and brown kids, they won't worry about what happens if those youth are out of school on June 1. Perhaps it's more politically expedient for some elected officials to stoke white folks' fear of black and brown kids who live in highly segregated neighborhoods in Chicago. And maybe the underfunding of Chicago Public Schools is deliberate.

Indeed, a suit the Board of Education of the City of Chicago filed in February against the Illinois State Board of Education and Rauner alleges that racism is at the crux of the fight over unequal school funding.

"The state treats CPS's schoolchildren, who are predominantly African American and Hispanic, as second-class children, relegated to the back of the state's education funding school bus," says the lawsuit.

Kids living in the suburbs around Chicago are reaping the rewards of inequality. "In Fiscal Year 2016, the State spent 74 cents to educate Chicago's children for every dollar the State spent to educate the predominantly white children outside Chicago," says the suit.

But don't think that just because the Chicago Board of Education is suing over funding inequities, that its hands are clean. In 2013, the board, which is appointed by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, made the controversial decision to shutter roughly 50 schools that it said were underutilized due to low enrollment.

These schools were mostly located in low income neighborhoods of color on the South and West sides of the city. A couple of months later, however, the board encouraged charter school operators to apply to open campuses in some of the same neighborhoods where schools had been closed.

An analysis released in July 2016 by WBEZ found that when it comes time to improve old campuses or build new ones in wealthier, whiter parts of the city, the district has plenty of cash to spend. Since Rahm Emanuel took office, "$475 million or 73 percent of all money went to schools where white students make up more than a quarter of the student body. That’s in a school system in which only 12 percent of Chicago’s schools have more than 25 percent white students," according to WBEZ.

It's no wonder then that in a post on its blog, the Chicago Teachers Union wrote that the district's "'civil rights' lawsuit against the state is a cynical political ploy designed to divert attention from the failed leadership and flawed decision-making of Mayor Emanuel, who has failed to adequately pursue progressive revenue for the city’s schools."

Draconian funding cuts have made it difficult or impossible for schools to "provide wrap-around supports for students dealing with unprecedented levels of trauma as a result of the threats of deportations and violence in their neighborhoods and the severe cuts to special education services for some of our most vulnerable students," wrote the union. "By our count, Chicago school communities have suffered over $2 billion worth of cuts under this Mayor’s 'leadership.'"

With his donation, Chance is calling out all the hypocrisy of politicians who engage in handwringing and buck-passing about the city's murder rate while making decisions that allow the schools to be defunded.

"Everybody and their momma knows about what's going on in Chicago, it's constantly talked about. But we're about to enhance the conversation," Chance said at the press conference.

The rapper explained that he met with Governor Rauner last Friday "to urge him to do his job." According to Chance, Rauner can use his executive power to allocate the money to the district, which would "give Chicago's children the resources they need to fulfill their God-given right to learn."

In response to Chance's plea for action, Rauner "gave me a lot of vague answers at our meeting," Chance said.

Rauner made a follow up phone call to Chance over the weekend but he,"still won't commit to giving Chicago's kids a chance without caveats or ultimatums," Chance said. This was probably Chance's face while he was on the phone with Rauner:

But the Grammy award-winning artist said his frustration and disappointment with the situation "will not stop me from continuing to do all I can to support Chicago's most valuable resource: It's children."

He challenged other local and national corporations to offer their financial support—and he hopes individuals will help him close the rest of the school district's $215 million budget gap by contributing to a fundraising drive on the website of SocialWorks, his Chicago-based nonprofit. At the same time, he explicitly cautioned against relying on the generosity of the public to fix Chicago's education inequities.

"Charitable donations certainly help fill gaps to provide enrichment opportunities inside and outside of the classroom, but can't make up for less-than-adequate state funding of our schools," he wrote on his website. "The state of Chicago Public Schools needs to be remedied, and it's the Governor's job to lead that effort."

Help Me Meet Depeche Mode, and I Promise I Won't Throw Undies at Them

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Dwyer) — Sat, 04 Mar 2017 18:55:00 +0000

Fresh off their pointed denial of being the musical inspiration of the alt-right, Depeche Mode did something that made fans like me lose our &#^*^@&@ minds: They announced a contest where one fan at each stop on their upcoming tour will have a chance to meet the entire band. Not just meeting Martin Gore (Exhibit A and Exhibit B of that happening to me) but Martin, Dave Gahan, AND Fletch.

Ladies and gents, I want to be one of those fans. And I need your help to do it. Like, FOR REAL. Two minutes of your time. All you have to do is click on this link and sign up before 11:59 PM ET/7:59 PM PT today.

You don't have to buy anything. You don't even have to like Depeche Mode. Just HELP MEEEE!

Yeah, I'm that desperate that I've taken to begging online. But this is a chance to meet all the members of the ban I've loved and adored since I was 11, the band that I've sat on public sidewalks for six hours to see, the band whose t-shirts I wore every time I got chemotherapy cos I needed a reminder of better days.

Here's the deal: Depeche Mode announced a presale for their tour, but to get around ticket scalpers, folks who sign up on that presale website—which run by a company called Strobe—get ticket purchasing priority. You get assigned a spot, and according to the site, "the higher your spot, the better your access to tickets during the fan presale. End up at the very front of the line for your city and you'll be invited to meet the band before the show."

Ready to take action and Help Liz Meet Depeche Mode? Awesome. You already have your phone out so after you click on this link you'll be taken to a page that looks like this:

STEP ONE: Just click on the arrow. Easy.

STEP TWO: Now you'll get to a page that tells you Depeche Mode is coming back to North America. Scroll down and you'll see links to sign up through Facebook or through your email.

Click "Get Access": I'm not crazy about signing up for stuff using Facebook. But this is for a good cause so I sucked it up. If you're the same, just do what I'm doing and delete Strobe's access on Tuesday after the presale is over.

Or sign in without Facebook. You are not worried about your spot in line—remember you're just helping me. You'll register with an email. It'll ask you for a password. Just make up one to use on Strobe's site. THIS IS IMPORTANT: You'll need to confirm your email so check your account for an email from Strobe and click on the confirmation link. Otherwise I get no points for getting folks to register.

STEP THREE: This red page pops up. It might have Los Angeles pre-filled. It might have the name of the city closest to you filled in. I was so confused by this when I registered, but you have to actually type this in still. Type in Los Angeles—or if you really want to register for the presale, type in a city you want to see the band in. Now Click "confirm location."

Now it'll take you to a page where you can see your rank in the pre-sale competition, it might suggest that you buy a CD or something. Remember, you don't have to do ANY OF THAT. You've already helped me. And I really appreciate it. Thank you. THANK YOU.

There's a part of me that worries that somebody tech-savvy with a lot of cash has simply hired someone to create fake emails and do this all day so they can end up in the top spot—and so I'll never get the chance to meet Depeche Mode. But I figure I have to try. I've been so hesitant to ask folks, cos I do not want to be an annoying spammer—and I hate how this puts me in competition with my other Depeche Mode fans—but DO YOU SEE MY FACE when I met Martin Gore?

(And really, AS IF I'd ever throw underwear at anybody.)

Do All Lives Matter? Not According to Black Women's Breast Cancer Mortality Rates

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Dwyer) — Fri, 15 Jul 2016 06:10:00 +0000

"As a picture of herself, She's a picture of the world..." #dressedinblack #melroseavenue #depechemode #losangeles #streetart

A photo posted by Liz Dwyer (@losangelistaxoxo) on Jul 19, 2014 at 4:32pm PDT

I didn't have much of a smile in this picture taken in the summer of 2014. I was still reeling from getting the news on July 14, five days before it was snapped outside of Stir Crazy coffee shop on Melrose Avenue, that I had breast cancer.

I wanted to wear that Depeche Mode t-shirt in the picture above to work today. I wanted to give huge hugs to my friends and family who showed up for me so that I didn't lose my mind while I went through chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation.

Instead I'll settle for listening to my two sons and one of their good friends sitting in the next room laughing as they play Monopoly. Hearing them pray to land on "Free Parking" before they roll the dice puts a huge smile on my face, and makes my heart catch in my throat.

I wasn't sure I'd be here for these kinds of moments, and the reality is that too many women who are diagnosed are not around a couple years later to reminisce about the absolute horror of finding out that they have cancer. Particularly black women.

Every time I see the statistics on breast cancer survival rates for black women, I get so angry.

Although "breast cancer incidence (rate of new cases) is slightly lower among African-American women than among white women," research shows that die more often from it. Indeed, "in 2013, (the most recent data available) breast cancer mortality was 39 percent higher in African-American women than in white women," according to the Susan G. Komen website.

You know what's really a trip? "Even after accounting for differences in income, past screening rates and access to care, African-American women are diagnosed with more advanced breast cancers and have worse survival than white women," according to the website.

Black women, read up about triple negative breast cancer, which impacts us disproportionately. I never heard of it in my entire life before I got diagnosed. I never once had a doctor mention it to me, or tell me that black women are diagnosed at higher rates.

All women, but especially black women, please do me a favor and read this out loud to yourselves:

I promise that I will do a monthly breast self exam and check myself for any suspicious-feeling lumps or bumps.
If I feel anything out of the ordinary, I will not procrastinate about making an appointment with my doctor.
If I am over 40, I promise I will get talk to my doctor about getting a mammogram.

Of course, the last two are a heck of a lot easier to do if you have: good health insurance; a doctor you trust and that you know respects and listens to you; a job that has sick days and/or lets you take the time to go to the doctor without it affecting your paycheck; a car to get to the doctor or money for a bus pass, and someone who will hold your hand and tell you it is going to be alright.

Doing those things are also easier when you have no worries about your family members being killed when they're pulled over, when you have a grocery store stocked with nutritious food in your neighborhood, when you have green space and it's safe to exercise outdoors, and when you don't have to deal with the psychological, emotional, and spiritual toll that bearing the brunt of racism causes.

Black women, I don't know how many of us have all those things. Too many of us are dying, which suggests that we do not.

I have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to keep myself from freaking out every single day over the prospect of cancer coming back. But I'm still here, and now I'm going to go laugh some more over one of my sons trying to trade "all the yellows" for Boardwalk.

Bald or with hair, I still got it goin' on. 😉On #nationalselfieday and every day I thank God and UCLA oncology that I have eyelashes, eyebrows, and hair that frizzes in humidity. With 1 in 8 women in the U.S. diagnosed with #breastcancer too many cannot say the same. #diecancerdie #dearhairgrowfaster

A photo posted by Liz Dwyer (@losangelistaxoxo) on Jun 21, 2016 at 6:09pm PDT

All I Really Want Is to Hear Prince Sing Live Again

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Dwyer) — Tue, 28 Jun 2016 06:52:00 +0000

Sixty-seven days since he passed, and the tears still come when I least expect it. How long will I keep wandering over to his Twitter account to check out what he's up to? I keep doing it out of habit, and then I remember.

When my iTunes shuffles to Anna Stesia and I sing along with the final verse: "Love is God, God is love, girls and boys love God above." The tears come.

When I tell my 15-year-old son how, pregnant with him, I'd come home from teaching in Compton, hook a pair of headphones around my belly, and play hours of Prince to him in utero. I made a little mix CD to play during his birth, and it was full of Prince songs. My son rolls his eyes a bit over this story. The tears slide down my cheeks.

When Muhammad Ali passed and people took to social media to share photos of him with Prince, I adored the sweet, playful images that send a clear message: We are more than your expectations, there is more than one road to blackness. One river filled with the salt of our tears.

I wrote about Prince's death and social activism for work but I couldn't write about it for me, until Sunday night when Sheila E. poured all of her heart and soul into her tribute to him at the BET Awards.

It was the closest we'll have to a public memorial for him. I cried with her at the end—it was cathartic. But as much I was grateful for it, as much as I soaked up her fire, and felt like I was getting the Holy Ghost from it, it wasn't enough. Because she wasn't Prince.

I first heard Prince when I was seven, nearly eight, and at my grandmother's house. My cousin, who lived with my grandma, began playing a copy of Prince on his turntable.

I stared at the record sleeve, at Prince's luxurious-looking press out with its flipped up ends that rivaled Farrah Fawcett's feathered hairdo. My eyes did what they do right now—roam back and forth between the hair on his head, the mustache above his mouth, and the bit of fur on his chest, and then to his eyes.

The word "curious" comes to mind. Does he have on any other clothing... or not? And if not, what does that mean?

Start off as you mean to go on, is what we're told. And Prince disrupted our senses, got us wondering what was beyond our view, encouraged us to think about all that we weren't seeing. With Prince it was always the physical as a metaphor for the spiritual. It's tempting to dwell in the physical with him, but he coaxes us to push ourselves to the realm of the spiritual—are we willing to go there with him?

My grandmother was not. I still chuckle when I think about her putting the brakes on us listening to the record by "that boy who sings nasty."

Virtue and sin. Were we in?

The summer of 1988 I sneak-listened to a cassette tape copy of Lovesexy that I stole from my cousin. I played it with a fancy gold-plated Walkman that my brother acquired from one of his wealthy, cocaine-addicted friends. My parents didn't know about either the tape or the Walkman. Late at night, long after midnight, I closed my eyes, pressed play, and imagined. Side one, flip the cassette, side two, flip the cassette back to side one.

I was in.

I never met Prince, but like all of us who loved him, I have fun stories of my adventures "with" him. I bombed a job interview in 2004 because I went to a Prince concert the night before and was having such a spiritual hangover from it that I couldn't concentrate on proving I was worthy. What did it matter when the night before Prince had told us that we were good enough? That he loved us.

And then there were the times, I actually told people I was related to him.

When I lived in China in the mid 1990s the country was still mostly closed to the West, but there were plenty of bootleg Prince CDs for sale at the bargain price of $1 a pop. People there asked me all the time if I was related to him, or if I knew him. I was black, he was black. Our skin tones were a similar kind of black. Draw a mustache on me and voila, I'm Prince. Sometimes when I was really bored, I'd tell enthusiastic, friendly Chinese people that yes, Prince was my brother, or my cousin.

Virtue and sin.

THANX EVERYBODY 4 UR EXTRA TIME & UR...
— Prince (@prince) April 17, 2016

At least once a week I end up reminiscing about his cover of Roxy Music's More Than This. He performed at the Forum in Inglewood back in 2011 and I lost my ishtar over it at that show. Always surprising us, always experimenting, always staying true. That was Prince.

We'll never hear him sing this—or any song—live again.

The sad irony is that audio is only available now because Prince is gone. You hear that crowd screaming at the end? I was there. Tears streaming down my face, cheering with my heart on my sleeve. May it always be like this.

In Honor of My First Breast Cancerversary, Please Do a Self-Exam

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Dwyer) — Tue, 29 Mar 2016 06:54:00 +0000

That picture—that's just some of my tribe, my family here in Los Angeles, not by blood but by spirit. They're the folks that I celebrated with last year after finishing treatment for breast cancer. Yesterday was my first anniversary—my cancerversary—of the end of that grueling, often terrifying experience. How appropriate, given that it was Easter. A day of resurrection.

As far as anniversaries go, it was somewhat uneventful. I didn't have a blow-out bash to celebrate being alive another year—mostly cos, you know, it was Easter. Jesus takes precedence.

But also, the celebration has been being alive every day. So I went to the gym for two hours. I ran four miles cos I'm running a 5K race on April 9. It'll be my first race since I being diagnosed with breast cancer. I lifted weights like a beast. Okay, maybe the amount of weight I lifted doesn't make me the female equivalent of The Rock, but I still marveled over the reality that a year ago, I couldn't run around the block.

People like to ask if I'm cured and if I'm going to be okay for forever and ever. There are no guarantees that cancer won't come back. I've had about 10 migraines over the past three weeks. I had to go for a brain MRI in case cancer had come back and attacked my brain. Fortunately it seems I'm just a normal migraine sufferer. Real Talk: I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown last week over the prospect of having cancer come back. So no thank you, I don't want to think about recurrence rates and how shitty they are for folks who've had triple negative breast cancer, which is what I had. I will get to Cancerversary Nirvana: Five years without it coming back. The power of positive thinking, AMIRITE?

Warning: Graphic Descriptions Ahead. If Don't Want to Read, Go Ahead and Close This Page.
I'm in pain everyday. I can't sleep on my right side. Thanks to radiation, my breast is still a very tanned hard grapefruit. Not as burned as it used to be. I mean, the charred factor was out of control in the picture below, and I still had two weeks of radiation to go.

A photo posted by Liz Dwyer (@losangelistaxoxo) on Mar 14, 2015 at 9:31am PDT

It's not that burned anymore, but I look like I got a decent suntan on one side of my chest, and not the other. My breast swells with fluid during the day and gets super uncomfortable. The spot where I got lymph nodes removed still hurts. My breasts are lopsided. Sometimes when I look in a mirror I laugh at myself. Other times I feel so unattractive with my lopsided chest. Unattractive, but alive.

A doctor asked me in December during a checkup if I wanted to consider plastic surgery to fix things. She understood the side-eye I gave her immediately. I'm still experiencing PTSD symptoms when I merely DRIVE BY the building I had chemotherapy in, so nah, I'm good.

Is this all TMI for you? Well, I live this every day. One in eight women in the United States will be diagnosed with breast cancer. Eff your pink ribbons in October, this is the reality. People need to know what women who are being treated for breast cancer are going thru—and that it's not all ponies and rainbows for us when treatment is over.

Six rounds of chemotherapy, a lumpectomy, and seven weeks of daily radiation treatments saved my life, but none of it was a walk in the park.

The chemotherapy I had saved my life, but it was straight up poison.
I still have numbness in two of my fingers from all that stuff that got pumped into my body. I'm a journalist. Go ahead, ask me how fun it is to type all day when I can't really feel two of my fingers.

But I'm alive. And I want you to be alive, too.

Will you do something for me in honor of my cancerversary? If you are a woman, promise that you will do regular self exams on your breasts. Click here to find out how. Promise that you will get a mammogram as soon as you can. Harass your doctor about it.

If you are a black woman under 40, you are THREE TIMES MORE LIKELY to get triple negative breast cancer. You could be 25 and think you don't have to think about this until you're older. You're wrong. Do those self exams. I found my lump that way, and I had no risk factors for breast cancer. Harass your doctor about a mammogram.

If you are a man, promise me that you will nag your mothers, sisters, girlfriends, and wives about self exams. Please do not ask your co-workers. I'd like to spare you the sexual harassment lawsuit that is sure to be in your future if you do so.

As for me, I went to the gym and ran another 3.5 miles today, just because I could. Onward. Let's do this.

Phife Didn't Choose Diabetes, But Is That What You're Doing?

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Dwyer) — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 14:02:00 +0000

"If you go up to someone and say "You on point Tip?" and they don't respond "All the time Phife." they can't be your friend." @michaelsmith
— Dave (@TrapBasquiat) March 23, 2016

I never saw A Tribe Called Quest perform—when they hit up my college campus in the early 1990s, I was too broke to buy a ticket. Yet I, like millions of other folks loved their music. Still love their music.

And I still can't process what it means to have such a prominent leader of the Golden Age of Hip Hop die, especially given the oft-cringeworthy tracks that are passed off as rap these days. But I do know that, given the crisis of diabetes in black communities, the death of 45-year-old Malik Taylor, better known as Phife Dawg from ATCQ, should serve as a wake up call.

Phife had Type 1 diabetes, which is genetic. But Type 2, which is what 90 percent of people with diabetes have, is related to poor diet and lack of exercise.

So as the tributes and memories to Phife's lyrical prowess and unique flow are posted on social media, I can't help but think about how HARD it is for black folks to be healthy. We are more likely to live in food deserts, more likely to lack access to high quality healthcare. Our children are more likely to grow up in poverty, which makes cheap processed and fast foods the affordable meal option—pints of blackberries and heads of kale are more expensive than a box of mac-and-cheese. And with a lack of safe green space to exercise, working off those empty calories is tougher.

Indeed, the website of the Office of Minority Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has some shocking facts about black folks' chances of getting diabetes.

"African Americans are almost twice as likely to be diagnosed with diabetes as non-Hispanic whites. In addition, they are more likely to suffer complications from diabetes, such as end-stage renal disease and lower extremity amputations," according to the website.

Need more sobering facts? How about these from WebMD:

Approximately 2.7 million or 11.4% of all African Americans aged 20 years or older have diabetes—but at least one-third of them don't know it.
The average African American born today has a 50% chance of developing type 2 diabetes in his or her lifetime.

My great-grandmother, who died when I was 7-years-old, had diabetes. Her legs were amputated and she spent the last years of her life in a wheelchair. No one wants to end up like that. I don't want to end up like that.

Phife didn't have a choice about being diagnosed with diabetes. As for the rest of us, if we make a conscious effort to eat right and exercise—even when it's tough to do so—maybe we'll beat the statistics.

5 Things I Learned at New Order's Los Angeles Concert

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Dwyer) — Wed, 23 Mar 2016 06:59:00 +0000

Back in the Dark Ages there was a radio station in Chicago called WBMX, and on weekend evenings it featured the Hot Mix 5, the absolute best house music DJs on the planet. Every once in awhile on their "Saturday Night Live Ain't No Jive Dance Party" they'd pull some techno, Italian disco, alternative, or new wave music into a set. And that is how I first heard tracks by an atmospheric band from Manchester, England: New Order.

I never saw them live until Saturday night at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. I went with my two sons—ages 15 and 12. They've grown up laughing with me over the sound of croaking frogs in the song "The Perfect Kiss" and heard me sing the chilling lyrics of "Round and Round": I don't care about what you do, cos if you mess with me, I'll get rid of you.

We ran into some rather rude people while waiting for the elevator in the parking garage. They were all, "Omigawd, you poor kids! Your mom made you come to this?" They didn't believe my boys when they said they were excited to see the show. It was bizarre. In any case, here's what I learned during the concert.

1) New Order is really a band of vampires: The stage was frequently dark or shadowed—no spotlights on the group—while the space above it was lit up by brilliantly colored lights that moved in time with the beat, seemingly urging us to dance alongside. No projections of the band members on screens either, which, upon reflection, is a sharp contrast to our modern selfie culture. I wondered for a few hours after the show if they were trying to hide the fact that they're Baby Boomers. But it only takes Siri a few seconds to reveal the band members' ages. Therefore, I've decided that the only conclusion can be that they're vampires and were trying to hide that fact from the audience. (I kid, I kid!)

2) Brandon Sumners sounds pretty amazing live: It's tempting to wonder if if he's lip synching or if he has a backing track, yet Sumners had that undefinable "I'm singing live and just sound this good" quality to his voice that truly great performers have. In our world of autotune, it's something that seems increasingly rare.

3) Some people will watch a WHOLE New Order show through their smartphone screen: I am not averse to snapping a few pictures, or filming a few snippets of a concert. But filming an entire 18-song set? That's what the woman next to me did. And the guy she was with? He filmed the whole thing, too. I hope they weren't on a date because if they were, WORST date ever.

Here's a tip: If you want to watch thru a screen, save your money and wait for a concert DVD to come out.

4) Angelenos are still too cool for school: Who comes to a New Order concert and sits the entire time? And who gets mad because I'm out of my seat dancing? That said, most folks warmed up by the last three songs of the main set ("The Perfect Kiss," True Faith," and "Temptation"). The venue went pretty crazy during the encore of two Joy Division songs, ("Atmosphere," "Love Will Tear Us Apart") and the stomping bass of "Blue Monday" as a finale.

5) "True Faith" is still my favorite New Order song: My love for Depeche Mode knows no equal, but I as a teenager I listened to New Order much more because my mom wasn't letting any Depeche Mode records into the house. Blame Martin Gore's penchant for leather. Or the "that music is depressing" factor. However I somehow acquired a friend's cassette tape of Substance, New Order's "best of" album which was released in 1987. And that's when I fell in love with "True Faith."

I listened to it nonstop. I rewrote the lyrics in notebooks, and reimagined it into bad poetry. Over the years since I've worked my way through the band's entire discography, all the way from their inception as Joy Division in the late 1970s, to their transition into New Order, to band members' side projects such as Electronic, and their latest album released last fall. That's a lot of music, but "True Faith" is still the essential New Order song for me.

Check out the performance, courtesy of one of those folks who filmed at the show. The lights in this performance are spectacular. At the show during the chorus at about the 2:13 mark I had tears rolling down my cheeks. Anyone else who had a childhood lost replaced by fear will understand.

Heading to the Motherland—The (Kinda) White One

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Dwyer) — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 02:27:00 +0000

I’m on an Aer Lingus flight somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, swiftly heading toward the Emerald Isle—the very place that some of my ancestors hail from.

Over the past six weeks I've sifted through digital baptismal records, ship manifests, and census documents to track my father's family. In the process I traced one line of his mom's family back to 1506. German, not Irish—go figure. But those Dwyers, they're definitely Irish. And it's been simultaneously fascinating and sobering to research how and why they came to the United States.

What's heavy on my heart is that researching my mother's family is not so easy. The bloody haze of slavery—and the stripping of the humanity of my ancestors from the black half of me—means no storied tales of arriving on a ship from Ireland and heading to California to find a fortune in the Gold Rush exist.

Of course, the Irish fled because they were persecuted, starved, and enslaved by the British. I mean, I love Depeche Mode and all, but the brutality of what happened in Ireland... let us remember that Jonathan Swift wrote A Modest Proposal in 1729 due to the plight of the Irish.

Full title: A Modest Proposal For Preventing The Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being Aburden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to The Public.

As Swift so expertly wrote:

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.

What happened to the Irish and how they were blamed for their poverty and situation—which was intentionally caused by the British—reminds me of the excuses too many Americans give when they are confronted by the effect of racism on black folks. Intentionally set policies designed to disenfranchise communities, but what we see in the U.S. is supposed to be due to lazy black folks who don't want work hard. Remember, they want a handout.

Check that image above from Harpers in 1899. There's plenty written about how the Irish became white in the United States. They escaped the yoke of oppression in part by oppressing black folks.

But if all the black folks with white ancestry in the United States started calling ourselves white, it wouldn't matter. Hiring managers, landlords, car salespeople, checkers at the grocery, can see that we are not. And whitening of resume's aside, I hope no one wants to go back to the era of passing to survive.

Janet Jackson Is Probably Somewhere Giving a Side-Eye to Our Reaction to Lenny Kravitz's Penis

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Dwyer) — Thu, 06 Aug 2015 06:49:00 +0000

I should have learned my lesson that one time I clicked on the hashtag #EggplantFridays and learned that the term does not refer to vegetarian recipes.

But on Tuesday when Lenny Kravitz's name started trending on Twitter and I checked to see what was up with the rocker...well, we all found out that he had split his leather pants open while jamming on stage in Sweden. And, ahem, he exposed his eggplant.

I was like this...

AND THIS

Plus a healthy dose of this.

Editors at websites were clearly barking out orders for somebody, anybody to drop their assigned stories and whip up a quick image-heavy post about Lenny's penis. Outlets began posting the uncensored GIF of Kravitz shredding on his guitar, squatting and thrusting as he played—and then his penis popping out. Squint really hard and you can see that Kravitz has jewelry on his privates...now there explainers out there telling us what piercing Lenny has and why.

Clever headlines borrowed from Kravitz's song catalog: "Fly Away" became "Lenny's Penis Is Flying Away From His Pants." Because this is what we have come to—all of us turning into giggling seventh graders whose juvenile tendencies drive page views and ad dollars.

Except for The Washington Post, of course. The paper kept it classy and highbrow by telling us that, according to the footage, Kravitz is indeed Jewish: "And unless the whirl of enlarged pixels deceives, Kravitz bears what the god of the Old Testament, in Genesis 17:11, called 'the sign of the covenant between me and you': circumcision."

Are you SERIOUS, Washington Post?

Today I began thinking about how if Kravitz was a woman, folks might not be reacting in such a FIST BUMP TO LENNY manner over the incident.

I began thinking about Janet Jackson.

Travel back to 2004 to Super Bowl XXXVIII when Justin Timberlake sang "I'll have you naked by the end of this song"—and then tore off the fabric covering Janet Jackson's right breast.

We saw her boob for a blip. If we looked hard enough, we saw that Janet had some sort of nipple jewelry. And the subsequent searches for the footage of JT tearing her clothing off broke the internet.

Timberlake went on to continue his successful solo career. As for Janet, sadly enough, she was shamed by the media and many cultural critics, and was blacklisted by radio and MTV.

So no wonder that this morning I woke up contemplating what would have happened if Lenny's wardrobe malfunction had gone down back in February when he performed at Super Bowl XLIX with Katy Perry and Missy Elliot. Like Janet's incident, Lenny's exposure was a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment. But if it had happened during the sporting event, would so many people still be giving him virtual high-fives and speculating on whether he's a "grower or a shower?"

In a thought-provoking piece over at Refinery29, writer Erin Donnelly asked if #PenisGate is no big deal because Kravitz is a man.

"If Taylor Swift split her crotch during a concert, people would be outraged on her behalf if photos surfaced. Why doesn't Kravitz deserve the same response?" wrote Donnelly. "Also, why is he deemed cool, whereas a woman in a similar situation is branded a slut? A guy can get away with not wearing underwear, but a female celebrity exiting a limo can't. He's a dude, whereas she's clueless and skanky—or so the public response would have you believe."

Hmm...nowadays folks are so on Taylor Swift's jock that if what happened to Janet happened to her, all Swift would probably have to do is cry and do her "Who, me?" look. All would be forgiven and folks would probably start snapping pics of themselves with torn crotches and posting them with the hashtag #SquadGoals.

Donnelly also suggested that none of us should be looking at Kravitz's penis in the first place because it's a violation of his privacy. We should "not be so eager to turn another person's genitalia—male or female—into online fodder that we can gobble up," Donnelly added.

It's tough to argue with that line of thinking. That said it was seriously difficult to avoid the footage/images on Twitter (or is it just me and the people I follow???) The GIF of the incident popped up on my timeline multiple times because folks I follow posted or retweeted it. It began playing as I paused while scrolling through folks' updates. And it was like a trainwreck—once you've seen it, you can't stop watching...

In any case, given the world's interest in #PenisGate, it sure seems like Kravitz should be a worthy candidate for the next cover for the People magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive."

Only in Con Artistlandia Does a Curly Kinky Weave and a Tan Make You Black

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Dwyer) — Wed, 17 Jun 2015 03:49:00 +0000

Kinky-curly weave + tan ≠ Black

Con artist: a person who cheats or tricks others by persuading them to believe something that is not true.

In the late 1990s I was on board a plane that was sitting on the runway in Birmingham, Alabama, waiting for takeoff. The white man next to me struck up a conversation. "I bet you sure are proud of that Tiger Woods," he said with a grin. (This was pre-Tiger getting beat down with a golf club for cheating on his wife.)

"I don't follow much golf, but I guess he's pretty good," I replied.

"And such a credit to your race." the old man said.

His smile oozed Southern Charm. I smiled back, but inside I was a bubbling pot of Martin Gore in the Strangelove video.

Resting "Mode Face"

So I decided to check this man's assumptions and have a little fun.

"As a white person, I don't know how much I have in common with Tiger," I replied.

He shifted in his seat and looked at me like I was slow. "No, the black race. Your people."

"Oh, but I'm not black," I told the old man with a smile. "I'm white."

He physically recoiled from me, and after a few heartbeats he reached up and pressed the call button. One of the flight attendants soon arrived and he whispered to her that he needed to change his seat. The look that man gave me as he got his stuff together to move to another seat was all:

I've thought about that incident on the plane quite a bit since we entered the Era of Rachel Dolezal.

I felt empathetic when I first heard last week that Dolezal, who resigned on Monday as head of the Spokane, Washington chapter of the NAACP, had been confronted by a reporter about her racial identity. I figured maybe her parents had been passing as white and she was just coming correct and recognizing her black heritage. (It's happened before in America.)

But after it became evident that this was not the situation, I had lots of questions, namely, if we say Rachel Dolezal sounds kinda crazy, are we saying that you have to be nuts to want to be black?

In any case, I figured we'd reached Peak Dolezal on Monday afternoon. That's when I received an email from my brilliant colleague Willy Blackmore with the following subject line: "Dolezal sued Howard for racial discrimination."

Vanilla Ice and I had the same reaction:

I clicked Willy's email open and there was a link to an article on The Smoking Gun. The article explained how Dolezal, who identified as white when she attended Howard University, had sued the school "for denying her teaching posts and a scholarship because she was a white woman."

Dolezal alleged that Howard is “permeated with discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult."

So not only has this woman lied to herself and others about being black, she SUED Howard University—an institution founded because white folks would not admit black Americans to their schools—because she believes she was discriminated against because she's white.

I think I secretly hoped Dolezal would refuse to talk to the media, but on Tuesday she entered the sitting down for interviews phase of her 15 Minutes of Black Fame.

This morning with Matt Lauer on the Today show, she explained away the Howard lawsuit by saying she was told "other people needed opportunities and you probably have white relatives that can afford to help you with your tuition."

She also shared how she began feeling connected to black folks at age 5. "I was drawing self-portraits with the brown crayon instead of the peach crayon, and black curly hair," she told Lauer at one point.

I've felt simultaneously angry and puzzled by the delusions and white privilege that are inherent in Dolezal's situation—maybe that's what made it so easy to laugh at the #AskRachel hashtag and scores of other jokes on Twitter.

Lauer: Do you consider yourself black? Dolezal: Matt, the bigger question is — are we human or are we dancer?
— Gene Demby (@GeeDee215) June 16, 2015

Thank you for your interest in BLACK. After reviewing your credentials, we concluded your qualifications do not currently suit our needs.
— Mat Johnson (@mat_johnson) June 16, 2015

It's either fall out on the floor laughing or punch a wall.

As I told a couple of people this afternoon, when you've spent a good chunk of your life being called zebra or Oreo, or being told that you're not REALLY black because your father is white, and then this heffa comes along and some people are all "she's transracial" or "let her be black because race is a social construct"...it's A LITTLE ENRAGING.

Dolezal doesn't think black women should rake her over the coals for her lies. “But they don't know me. They really don't know what I've actually walked through and how hard it is," she told Harris-Perry. "This has not been something that just is a casual, you know come-and-go sort of identity you know, or an identity crisis. It's something that I've paid away.”

Cry me a motherf******* river.

I'm still waiting for black women who didn't wake up one morning and decide they feel black to be given a national platform to talk about identity and how we often feel "isolated", as Dolezal told MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry on Tuesday.

#BlackWomenWork Every day Unnoticed Underpaid Exploited Demanded Criticized Erased Plagiarized Ridiculed
— FJ (@FeministaJones) June 16, 2015

However Dolezal seems to believe black folks should stop being mean to her and start being grateful for her behavior. After all, she is reigniting the National Conversation on Race.

"As much as this discussion has somewhat been at my expense recently, and in a very sort of viciously inhumane way come out of the woodwork, the discussion is really about what it is to be human," Dolezal told Lauer. "I hope that that can drive at the core of definitions of race, ethnicity, culture, self determination, personal agency and, ultimately, empowerment."

Indeed, what makes this so dangerous is, as my friend Kelly Wickham put it:

She has derailed a real and true conversation about the violence against Black bodies while pretending to be a Black body. In the midst of discussing gated community pool parties and section 8 housing and the new Jim Crow laws, there are far too many people making excuses for a woman trying to get in on that very lifestyle. The damage she’s done in what appear to be false accusations of hate crimes perpetrated against her takes away from the real stories. She perpetrated the ultimate in white privilege: instead of allowing actual Black women to tell their stories, she told them as lies and counted them as truth.

As I listened to Dolezal talk today, she began reminding me of Kim Zolciak. Time travel back to 2008 to the first season of Real Housewives of Atlanta when Kim said:

Kim may have had fifty-eleven pounds of weave on her head, and she may have had lots of black friends, but she didn't actually start going around actually SAYING that she's black. And if she had, would anyone have taken her seriously?

If ~~Orange Julius~~ John Boehner started saying he's black, would anyone believe him?

All he needs is an afro...

He is WAY orange, but the answer, of course, is a resounding hell no. And yep, if Donald Trump and the entire membership of the KKK started saying they are black, we'd give them the gas face, too.

So, why are we taking Rachel Dolezal so seriously? Is it because she was the head of the NAACP in Spokane? Is it because she was a professor of Africana Studies? Or are we just fascinated with con artists?

Melissa Harris-Perry asked Dolezal if she's a con artist.

"I don’t think so, you know? I don’t think that anything that I have done with regards to the movement and my work, my life and my identity. It’s all been very thoughtful and careful," replied Dolezal.

Con artists are never intentionally careless, are they?

Meanwhile, let's brace ourselves for Dolezal's Fox News appearances and an announcement of a book deal, because surely, those are coming.

White Happiness? Black Misery: I'm the Mother of a Teenage Threat

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Dwyer) — Thu, 11 Jun 2015 15:32:00 +0000

When my now 11 and 14-year-old sons were little boys, I often felt uncomfortable when strangers gushed over how cute they were. It wasn't that they weren't adorable—they were and then some. But the compliments directed at them made me wonder how long it would be before they exited the adorable phase and entered the "you're inherently violent and I'm scared of you" part of life.

For people of African descent in America, this isn't a cynical line of thought.

We don't need to see cell phone video footage of an officer kneeing a 14-year-old girl in a bikini in the back and sitting on top of her, drawing his gun and aiming it at her teenage peers to know that these things happen in America. We live this.

And we don't need to see photos of people holding "Black Lives Matter" protest signs after the death of yet another youth of color to know that this shift in perception—adorable to threatening—will inevitably happen to our sons or daughters. After all, this trajectory of fear is woven into the cottony fabric of America, it's soaked into the soil our ancestors tilled involuntarily, and it has been since African slaves first landed on these shores.

Don't believe me? Needs some facts?

Tamir, Rekia, Trayvon: Those deaths are the consequences.

African Americans don't need the confirmation of a study by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology to know black children "as young as 10 may not be viewed in the same light of childhood innocence as their white peers, but are instead more likely to be mistaken as older, be perceived as guilty and face police violence if accused of a crime."

No, we don't need academic bonafides to know that "black children and adults were rated as significantly less innocent than white children and adults or children and adults generally."

Selma director Ava Duvernay tweeted a telling side-by-side photo collage on Monday. The top photo shows what happened in McKinney, Texas: A black teenage child in a bikini is a threat that must be subdued. But drive two hours south and members of a biker gang that killed nine people outside of a Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco, Texas in May are able to hang out freely with law enforcement officers.

In what world are both of these accepted? Ours. #McKinney pic.twitter.com/kXAQ5jVoPt

— Ava DuVernay (@AVAETC) June 7, 2015

In what world are both of these accepted? C'mon, Ava, you just never know when a black teenager's skin might morph into a dangerous, jailhouse weapon.

"Doesn’t this cop have an obligation to protect himself?” Fox News' Sean Hannity asked during his radio show on Tuesday. “They don’t know if those same kids that won’t respect them and take their orders to leave, are they going to hit them in the back with a shank when they’re arresting someone,” he said.

Apparently, black teenagers just roll around with shanks. To pool parties—pool parties at the start of summer. And here I was thinking that the teenage party was as American as apple pie.

The officer who went buckwild on those black youth in McKinney, Eric Casebolt, resigned on Tuesday. His attorney, Jane Bishkin, said on Wednesday that Casebolt "allowed his emotions to get the better of him," and "he believed that those who fled were possible suspects."

Not teenagers—Remember, black children are seen as older, and less innocent. So they are suspects.

A petition has been launched on Color of Change asking for Casebolt to be charged. "Officer Casebolt has resigned, but it's not enough," according to the petition. "Any police officer who treats another human being, let alone children, in such an abusive, life-threatening manner must be held accountable. The Black teens at the party were singled out for abuse and none of the white bystanders experienced any police aggression. It's gravely unjust."

But our American problem is not just about Casebolt.

Karen Fitzgibbons, a fourth grade teacher at Bennet Elementary in Wolforth, Texas left a now-deleted comment on an ABC News story on Facebook where she suggested segregating "the blacks" who are the ones causing all the problems.

This is the worldview through which she's teaching her students. However, “It was not an educational post; it was a personal experience post,” Fitzgibbons told the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. She also said she “apologized to the appropriate people.”

Are those people her students? Their families? Or does she assume that because Lubbock County is nearly three-fourths white, that her students and their parents share her views.

Meanwhile, my sons—and their male and female peers with black and brown skin—are suspects.

It doesn't matter if they're wearing suits or if their pants are sagging.

Suspects.

It doesn't matter if they have a sparkle in their eyes, or if they're behaving like moody and sullen adolescents.

Suspects.

It doesn't matter if they live in the heart of the city or in the leafy-green suburbs.

Suspects.

It doesn't matter if they listen to Drake or if they're snapping up Nirvana vinyl at the record store.

Suspects.

As Frederick Douglass so brilliantly put it, "The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery."

The tip of my black misery is that it's summer. Should I worry that when my boys take the bus down to their favorite comic store in Los Angeles, something will happen because they're perceived as dangerous? When they go to the park? To the local swimming pool? When they just breathe?

This is America—I am a fool if I don't.

That White Man Is Not Your Daddy

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Dwyer) — Sat, 06 Jun 2015 00:43:00 +0000

"I like your skin. You have such nice skin. What do you use on it? Do you use this stuff?"

I talk to strangers—sometimes they're good Samaritans and will pay for your groceries when you've forgotten your wallet—so when the woman standing next to me at the Origins display in Macy's last Sunday began bombarding me with skin care questions, I answered. Maybe I was even flattered by her curiosity. It's been two months since I finished treatment for breast cancer and most of the time I still feel like death on a plate. My skin looks good? Really??? Pray tell me more, lady.

Who, me?

She asked how old I am. I briefly considered adding 10 years to my age, just to mess with her. But I was honest... which led to her asking more nosy questions.

"What plastic surgery have you had done?" she asked.

I could hear the accent in her voice. Such a direct question isn't rude in some cultures so I wasn't annoyed. None, I answered with a smile. "Where do you get your botox done?" Uh, I've never had botox. Needles kinda freak me out.

I woke up like this...

Instead, I told her about my love of Castile soap, coconut oil, baking soda, Fuller's earth, and apple cider vinegar. And, of course, I never leave the house without wearing sunblock AND concealer to cover up my under-eye dark circles. Otherwise I look like I just came out of a grave.

Where is my Nars concealer???

I pulled out my phone and looked up the brands I buy so that she could see what the packaging looks like. I told her where I purchase everything—yes, the apple cider vinegar that's available at the grocery store...yes, just mix it with the fuller's earth and put it on your skin. And then she wanted to know, "Does your mother look young, too?"

My mom puts the "B" in "Banger" so asking me this question is like dangling bacon in front of a stray dog. (I'm the excited stray dog, not the bacon, mmkay?)

"My mom is gorgeous—and everyone in her family looks really young," I said as I happily scrolled through the photos on my phone to provide photographic evidence. And then I found the image at the top of this post of my mom and dad.

"See, here is my mom," I said, angling my phone so the woman could see the picture. "Doesn't she look amazing?

The woman's brow crinkled with confusion as she looked at the picture. "Who is this man? Is he her boyfriend?"

Really, lady? Her boyfriend?

"No, that's my dad," I replied. "They've been married for nearly 50 years."

Her lips twisted as she examined the picture. "I do not believe it," she said.

"I know, right? She looks soooo young but they've been married for, like, FOR-EVAH..."

"That is not your daddy," she interrupted.

Jesus, take the wheel...

"Uhh... mmmm... what? Yes, it is," I said. I was still friendly, but in my head I was thinking the following:

1) Liz, you REALLY need to stop talking to strangers.
2. Where the hell is the damn saleswoman?

3) Am I about to have an argument in Macy's over whether my dad is actually my father?

And then she doubled down on her doubts.

"No, that is not your father," she continued with a dismissive shrug of her shoulders. "That is a white man."

THAT IS A WHITE MAN? What in the ever-loving hell???

"Yes, I know it's a white man—because my dad is white," I said. I felt like I was explaining to a small child how babies are made: You choose your words carefully and you speak slowly so you don't scare them.

She shook her head. "No, that is not your daddy. That white man is not your daddy."

"Yes, he is a white man, and yes, he is married to my mother, and I am their daughter," I said.

How long could we go back and forth like this—her insisting that my dad isn't my dad, and me insisting that he is?

Ah, there was the saleswoman. She sauntered over to us, her face bright and full of sunshine. "Are you ladies finding everything alright?"

"I think this woman needs some assistance," I said. "She's looking for some skin care products, and I told her that she should buy EVERYTHING from Origins because it will make her look gorgeous."

The saleswoman looked like she was seeing dollar signs, so I decided to make my exit. "Good luck!" I said as I walked away.

In the days since then, I've laughed about this incident with my co-workers and friends. I told it to my mom during a phone call. She thought it was hilarious, especially the whole "That is a white man!" part.

However, I am just so fascinated by how quickly the conversation shifted from a discussion about my skin care regimen to the regimentation of my family. She was happy to talk to me about all my beauty secrets UNTIL she was confronted with the photographic evidence that a white man got married to a black woman and had a kid with her.

Then there's the inherent sense of superiority—if she said that my dad was not my dad, then there was no way she could be wrong.

But I can't be angry with that woman, though. After all, isn't this so often the way things are in America?

A Murder in the Neighborhood

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Dwyer) — Fri, 29 May 2015 06:53:00 +0000

Is that the sound of a car backfiring or of gunshots? Some nights I'm not certain whether I am hearing the evidence of an engine's internal combustion woes, or if the sound echoing through the darkness stems from a more evil source.

There were sirens—but there are always sirens in Los Angeles. You begin to tune them out after awhile.

The horrific confirmation of gunfire comes in the form of a corner memorial four blocks away. Teddy bears, candles, and flowers for a teenage boy who was on the receiving end of the telltale pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.

Rumors are flying. He was shot in broad daylight, say some neighbors. No, just after midnight, say other folks. The details are sobering and scary. The shooter, says my neighbor, rolled up on him and pulled the trigger five times, blasting the teen in the head while he hung out with his friends.

The whispers are that it was gang related. One set that has deep roots across Los Angeles is reasserting their claim to turf—but a group of young guys who grew up in this neighborhood say this is their block.

Gang Related: Code words that give some folks a reason to shrug their shoulders and decide that if a teenager rolls with the wrong crowd, he gets what's coming to him.

Gang Related: What happens when you grow up in a community and the dudes you've known since pre-kindergarten are hanging out on a holiday weekend, talking about girls and cars, and whether they're gonna go see The Rock in that San Andreas movie.

Gang Related: Mothers crying. A classmate remembering him as the "quiet guy in my 4th period." More candles burning on the corner. A teacher remembering him, writing that "We will all miss his smile, his dry sense of humor, and his gentle manner."

Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.

Blood running through the streets. How I wish it had been a car backfiring.

Figuring Out When (and How) to Replace Your Real Life 'Hard Drive'

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Dwyer) — Thu, 28 May 2015 06:59:00 +0000

Half asleep, I pressed the power button. The laptop in front of me began to turn on, a series of familiar whizzing and humming noises. And then a grey screen appeared.

I hadn't seen that screen the day before—or the day before that—but there was the usual box prompting me to enter my password. Reassured, I tapped in the combination on numbers and letters and waited for the magic to happen.

Fifteen seconds later the screen was black. The computer had shut down. Huh, what?

I went through this process five or six times on Saturday morning, and a half-dozen more times on Sunday and Monday, before I finally admitted defeat. I didn't know what what was wrong, but I knew it couldn't be good. On Tuesday one of the guys on the tech team at work gave me the terrible news: "Your hard drive is dead."

A few hours later a new laptop arrived at my desk. But I began wondering, what is the human equivalent of hard drive failure? And, at what point do we stop trying to reboot a situation that is obviously broken or corrupt, and accept that we need to start over with something new?

In our lives, no one from a tech department is going to show up and say PSST, homegirl/boy, that relationship/job/habit of yours is broken. It's dysfunctional. It may be humming and whizzing like normal, but—warning—you can't make it work no matter how much effort you put into it.

Hard drives usually give warning signs when they're about to break, but most of us don't recognize them. Similarly, in our real lives, there tend to be clues that cracks have begun to form, signs that all is not as it seems. But we sure do keep ourselves clicking and buzzing as we attempt to convince the people around us that all is well.

I grew up going to AA meetings because my brother was an addict. I learned the Serenity Prayer at those coffee-soaked, smoke-filled gatherings. The Kool and Marlboro cancer sticks burned bright as people asked God to grant them the serenity to accept the things they could not change, the courage to change what they could, and the wisdom to know the difference. At the same time, I knew all too well what went down when the addict didn't change. Sometimes something happened to bring the situation to a head. A hard drive failure of sorts.

In the end, there is no digital backup of our memories, our hearts, or our minds. Yet, what we put into the world, the good and the horrific, endures. No, I don't have any answers. There is plenty in my life that's feels as if it's on the edge of a knife, two hairs away from failure. But there is no replacement hard drive coming for me. I have no choice but to keep on keeping on.

Photo via Flickr.

Tears and Cheers: Today Was My Last Day Being Treated For Breast Cancer

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Dwyer) — Sat, 28 Mar 2015 06:18:00 +0000

Nine months ago my doctor called me and the first thing she did after quickly dispensing with the usual hello, how are you? pleasantries was ask if I was in the car driving. I knew in that instant that she was going to tell me that the lump I'd found in my breast was cancer. And so began the long journey of trying to kill triple negative breast cancer before it killed me.

Today, with one last blast of radiation from that massive machine you see in the photo above, the cancer treatment journey that I embarked on in August 2014 is officially over. You see me cheesing with my graduation diploma, but happiness is not the right word for what I'm feeling. It's like this:

PLUS THIS

AND THIS

AND A GOOD DOSE OF THIS TOO

Sigh, if I take my wig off, he still has more hair than me.

But forget my hair, I am having a hard time emotionally processing all that I've been through.

Six rounds of chemotherapy: One infusion of poison every three weeks. That hole of hell lasted from August-December.

Surgery: A lumpectomy and lymph node removal. PAIN. January was not very fun.

Radiation: Every week day for seven weeks. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Vomiting on myself in the car after my appointment because of the nausea, severe headaches where I felt like I was being stabbed, serious fatigue, blurry vision, and pain like crazy. This is what it looked like two weeks ago. It's definitely more charred now. It hurts.

Lingering effects from chemo are hanging on—my hands and feet are frequently extremely numb. It's sometimes hard for me to walk up a flight of stairs because of muscle fatigue. Taking steroids for months and being too exhausted most days to do more than walk a few blocks has also done a doozy on my body. I haven't written here at all over the past two months because I just could not function enough to do so. I come home from work and pretty much go to bed.

It's going to take awhile for me to feel "normal" again. Sadly, no magic wand got wafted over me that will enable me to run a mile in the morning. But perhaps the nadir of health is past me. Other than checkup appointments that I'll have in a couple of weeks to make sure my skin is healing properly, and then ongoing monitoring, I am in the clear.

It feels really good to type those words.

I cried today thinking about kindness and love. Kindness from all the many friends who have called, visited, texted, emailed, sent presents, and hugged me. Love from those who have taken the time to worry over me and encourage me take care of myself, even when they have so much going on in their own lives.

I cried because THANK YOU GOD that I don't have to spend eons in the car driving to Santa Monica every weekday for radiation treatment. (A good day was an hour drive one-way.)

There are also tears for so many women who have had breast cancer and did not have such a positive outcome. Not because they weren't fighters. Not because God didn't have a plan for them. Nope, it's because cancer motherf#&#)%^ sucks.

Can we PLEASE stop blaming women who do not survive cancer for succumbing to the disease? Seriously, I did not win a battle with cancer and those other women are not losers if they died. I know I was lucky to have some brilliant doctors at UCLA and my response to treatment was maybe a little miraculous. But it could have gone the other way. While my two sons kept hugging me today, their sweetness made me think about all the other women whose children will not get to hug them.

And I'm tired. I'm so tired I feel emotionally dead most of the time. I mean, Martin Gore of Depeche Mode released a solo record a couple of weeks ago and I was kinda like, IDGAF, if he can't make the pain I'm in stop, WHO CARES?

So here I am at the end of doctor interventions, still ready to punch anyone in the face who tells me that the Medical Industrial Complex probably injected cancer into me and then used their drugs on me to cure it—all so "they" could make money. Please. I'm not here for it.

I AM ALIVE BECAUSE OF SCIENCE.

By all means, do your homework and read up on treatments, but I have zero patience for anyone who tells cancer patients to go sniff hemp oil instead of actually being treated with medical interventions that can work.

Now I have to figure out how do I take care of myself so that this disease doesn't come back. There are no guarantees. I could down juiced kale non-stop and it could still come back. It will be a challenge to keep fear and worry from eating up my soul.

And finally, it's an incomplete phrase for what I feel for all of you who have loved me and wished me well from the virtual world, but thank you. I'm glad to still be here alongside you on planet earth, as we all do our best to be of service.

Yes, Vomiting on Yourself Is Totally Worth it if Cancer Dies

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Dwyer) — Wed, 14 Jan 2015 07:10:00 +0000

There got to be a point during my cancer treatment when, in the grand scheme of horrible side effects, vomiting on myself didn't seem so bad. Maybe it was the first time the chemo drugs burned through my veins and I got life-threatening blood clots. Maybe it was when I fainted in my dining room, or when I realized that bicycling three blocks made me feel like I'd just run a marathon--which made me wonder if I'd ever run again. Yet, since last August when I began the first of my six rounds of chemotherapy I've been telling myself that if the treatment killed my triple negative breast cancer, all the side effects would be worth it. Ten years from now, the misery would be nothing but a faint memory--if chemo killed the cancer before the cancer killed me.

I told myself this last Friday while I waited to have surgery to remove the tissue where the lump was and the few lymph nodes that were positive for cancer cells back in July.

I reminded myself of this as I took two Vicodin pills this afternoon. I don't like how the Vicodin makes me feel, but the awful, sharp stabbing pains in my right breast and underarm where the tissue and lymph nodes had been removed were getting to me.

As I dozed on the couch, one of my doctors unexpectedly phoned. She had my test results in front of her and she was so happy she had to call me. My body has had a "complete pathological response to chemotherapy"--which means that those horrific infusions of carboplatin and taxotere did what they were supposed to do. There are no traces of cancer cells in my lymph nodes or in the breast tissue that was removed.

I was kinda like Oprah when I was on the phone with the doctor. I cried, but I managed to hold it together as I listened to her talk. The minute I hung up...well, I hugged my sister and my 13-year-old son and bawled like a baby.

I have drawn on my eyebrows and worn wigs and smiled when people asked me how I'm doing. I realized that no one wants to hear someone reply, "Actually, I'm not doing so hot and I kinda feel like passing out under a table."

At the end of most days I have collapsed the minute I got home from work. I've been in such terrible physical shape that I have often worried that I wouldn't wake up alive when my alarm clock went off in the morning.

The numbness in my fingers has made typing feel like I'm being stabbed with tiny needles. I have seemingly endless hot flashes because chemo drugs put you into menopause. My body is a swollen mess because of the steroids I have had to ingest to keep the chemotherapy infusions from killing me. A month after the end of chemotherapy, the side effects are hanging in there. I've been so worried that the doctors would say sorry, we didn't get all the cancer, you're going to have to do more chemotherapy or more surgery. They didn't say that.

To make sure that the cancer doesn't come back I still have six weeks of DAILY radiation to look forward to. (I wish I could preemptively slap every single person who has never had cancer who thinks they should tell me that daily radiation is no big deal.) I'll have to wear a medical alert bracelet for the rest of my life on my right arm since due to my lymph nodes being removed, I'm at risk for a horrible condition called lymphedema. That's no fun. But it's worth it. I don't have cancer anymore.

Let me type that again: I DON'T HAVE CANCER ANYMORE. I DON'T HAVE CANCER ANYMORE. I DON'T HAVE CANCER ANYMORE.

Piers Morgan Has Brilliant Ideas About the N-Word Said No One Ever

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Dwyer) — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 07:47:00 +0000

Today I woke up thinking about how to my 11-year-old son has been testing my patience by talking about balls. And I'm not referring to the ones that are thrown, kicked or bounced. Some other kid got kicked in the balls at school--or got a knee in the balls--and so my son just has to tell me about it, which gives him an excuse to say a word he knows is considered rude and vulgar in our house.

Hours later, I am wondering how I could possibly have wasted my time mulling over a word as irrelevant as "balls". Thanks to British dude Piers Morgan--that same soul that got the boot from Don Lemon-friendly CNN earlier this year--I have a new mission in life. I and every other black person in America must now have a laser-like focus on eradicating just one word from the world--a word that Piers has decreed should be "tied to a literary post and whipped into such brutal submission that it never rears its vicious head again." Just like Kunta Kinte, apparently. Or Devo.

Crack that whip!

We're talking about the n-word--a word that I've never heard either of my sons say. I'm pretty sure they don't say it when I'm not around either. (Psst, Piers, despite that study on Twitter's usage of it, not all black Americans are card carrying members of N.W.A. Hang out with more of us and you'll learn that.)

However, my boys have been called it plenty of times over the years by their white, Latino, and Asian-American peers in this fair city of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula. According to Morgan, however, that's the fault of other black folks, not those n-word saying children, their parents, or the deliberate system of oppression that exists in our society.

Or at least, that's what he insinuates over at that bastion of Kim Kardashian gossip, The Daily Mail. Morgan (or one of the click-hungry editors over there) actually titled his post, "If black Americans want the N-word to die, they will have to kill it themselves."

To sum up Morgan's argument, black Americans use the word left and right and that makes it really really hard to tell white people that they can't use the word too.

Gee, I had no idea white folks are waiting for direction from black folks on how to behave regarding the n-word. WHO KNEW black people had so much power over white folks' n-word usage??? Also, according to Morgan, white people are WAY confused by contrary black people and their pesky "It's different when it ends in 'ER' instead of 'A'" distinctions. GOSH, black people, stop being so complicated!

"Your average dim-witted, foul-mouthed bigot – and there are plenty of them as Twitter can attest – thinks: ‘If they use it, why can’t I?’" wrote Morgan. "They hear African-Americans say the N-word to each other and claim victory: ‘See, that’s what they even call themselves!’"

I don't know about that, Piers.

Hmm... I can't help but wonder if Morgan includes the late John Lennon and Yoko Ono in his foul-mouthed bigot category. After all, back in 1972, those two released a song called "Woman is the Nigger of the World". Then again, John and Yoko probably heard Stokely Carmichael saying the n-word--or Lil Wayne--and that made them decide it was just perfect for a song about gender inequality.

Also, doesn't Morgan's argument that white people would stop saying the n-word if black people stopped remind you of people who believe men would quit sexually assaulting women IF ONLY the laydeez would cover themselves from head to toe in brown burlap sackcloths? (Note to Piers: Please don't troll the world with a post for The Daily Mail titled, "If women want men to stop raping them, they will have to kill it themselves.")

No, I wouldn't be heartbroken if I never heard the n-word again. Sure, it's BEYOND annoying when white folks rap "Jigga My Nigga" at a party and they ask you whycome you won't sing along with them? But I also know that we can have 10,000 n-word funerals and/or essays from Piers Morgan on the word (please, God, no) and both overt and covert racism will still exist.

Actually, maybe the Queen can drop Piers a note telling him that racists don't have to use the n-word. Ever.

A landlord who never uses the n-word can keep on telling black folks that sorry, the apartment is already rented. A school system that never uses the n-word can keep right on tracking black kids out of honors and AP courses, and an employer that never uses it can keep on passing up resumes with black-sounding names. If Piers wants to write some real talk about how white folks need to stop doing those things immediately, by all means, he needs publish away. I have a feeling that black America is totally waiting to click and share that.

7 Unexpected Things About Breast Cancer That No One Will Tell You (But I Will)

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Dwyer) — Tue, 04 Nov 2014 07:41:00 +0000

I'm helping one of my sons study for his big history test. It is strictly drill-and-kill time in our living room. So while he's sitting next to me cramming (I'll grill him in 10 minutes) I've been thinking of a few things I didn't know about before I got triple negative breast cancer. It's been hard to type lately because I have terrible neuropathy. That means your hands and feet are numb. But lately I'm just ignoring the pain. I can't hold a pen to sign my name very well but I like writing too much to stop typing completely. So here are seven things:

1. Taking steroids will make you have new questions for Barry Bonds: I can't sleep. I feel angry. I want to eat ice cream. Is this how Barry Bonds felt? What about Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire?

If so, they probably felt super angry one minute (I hissed at someone today) and depressed (I cried 13 times today) the next. Don't judge, you'd be sobbing too if you had to do chemotherapy tomorrow morning like I do. It's effin horrible. Let me repeat that with all caps: It is HORRIBLE. But back to Barry Bonds and crew--how do these athletes voluntarily take something that causes you to feel like this every day? That seems way crazy to me now.

2. You will be really happy when October is over: Pink pullover. Charity cream. Hero hair. Eff that ishtar. No one will tell you how much you want to drop kick companies that are trying to burnish their brands' image through supporting breast cancer walks and selling pink ribbon candies. That is CAUSE MARKETING, people. Companies know we will think highly of their brands if they get behind Breast Cancer awareness. I don't want to see another pink ribbon again ever unless the company agrees to donate ALL PROCEEDS to cancer prevention and a cure. By the way, pink socks are still a yes in my book. Coffee mugs with pink ribbons and NFL logos with pink ribbons on them are a hell no. Along those lines...

3. After you get educated about the breast cancer industrial complex, you'll be pissed: This highly informative, often enraging and shocking documentary, Pink Ribbon$, INC., will help you learn about gross things like Kentucky Fried Chicken putting pink ribbons on buckets of chicken. No time for a documentary? Visit Think Before You Pink and learn about their "calls for more transparency and accountability by companies that take part in breast cancer fundraising, and encourages consumers to ask critical questions about pink ribbon promotions."

You can also learn how the pink ribbon was seemingly hijacked from a 68-year-old woman named Charlotte Haley who had created a peach colored ribbon that came with a card that said, "The National Cancer Institute annual budget is $1.8 billion, only 5 percent goes for cancer prevention. Help us wake up our legislators and America by wearing this ribbon." That's sure not the purpose of that ribbon now.

4. You will want to slap people who can not shut up about their miracle cures: Listen up, folks. When someone in your life gets breast cancer, and then the chemo is actually working, that is not the time for you to tell that person to stop their treatment (because you think Western medicine is nothing but an effin conspiracy theory) and tell them to go to Mexico and smoke weed. I mean, really, this was my face:

Also, folks can also shut up about how the breast cancer patient should just do (insert wack idea here ______) and she'd be saved. If it was so simple, so many women would not die from this disease. Just zip it. Keep it to yourself.

5. People will actually tell you to just be positive: NEWSFLASH, this ain't the disease equivalent of being at a Depeche Mode concert. I would like to be positive 24/7. But when it gets to that point in the month where I can't really walk unassisted (that'll be this coming weekend, thank you very much) my Rakim face is on and nobody's smiling.

No one tells you before you get breast cancer that there will be people who will tell you to "just stay positive" after you've told them how you are only just hanging in there physically and emotionally.

You want to know how awful chemo is? It is totally insane to think this, but the thought of dying sometimes seems preferable. Not often, but sometimes. I had terrible headaches this weekend and I also have blood clots in my veins from the chemo. I wondered if I was having a stroke. I was a little like, well, if I do and I die, at least no more chemo. Like I said, HORRIBLE.

Don't get me wrong if I cringe or my eyes glaze over when you tell me to "stay positive." Getting your head right is always a good thing. I love positivity. I don't believe it's helpful to cry all the time and fall into depression and sob about "why me?" I don't sit around all day every day thinking I'm gonna die, or that the cancer is gonna come back even if it goes away for awhile. That isn't good for your body or soul. But I have those thoughts sometimes. That's just real. And if you ever get breast cancer (1 in 8 women do these days), you might really want the emotional reality deniers who have drunk the cheerleader happpy, pink ribbon flavor of breast cancer Kool-Aid to just STFU.

6. You quickly find out who your real friends are: The people who start fundraisers for you (I damn near fainted this morning when I opened up a bill from UCLA so thank you to everyone who has donated) and bring you veggies and fruit and hook you up with chai. The people who send you little notes of encouragement and socks with peacocks on them. The people who say prayers for you and text you hugs and send you flowers. The people who call just because they miss your voice and want to see how you are doing. The people who drive you to work, pick you up from work, and take you home. The people who let your kids spend the night so the kids don't have to see you vomiting and unable to get off the floor. The people who take your kids to tutoring, who take you to lunch on that ONE WEEKEND A MONTH when you feel kinda normal between chemo treatments. The people who text you jokes to make you laugh, who come over to visit you and spend time with you. Yep, those people are amazing and you will remember who they are.

7. You might feel like a fraud when you go out in public. I was joking last week that I was gonna post a before and after picture of myself--me before I put on makeup and a wig, and me after. You actually might not think it's the same person. The magic is all due to a "Look Good, Feel Better" class hosted by the American Cancer Society. They get makeup artists and hair stylists to teach cancer patients how not to look like a cast member from The Night of the Living Dead. I paid attention like my life depended on it and I learned some super helpful tips--like how to draw on my eyebrows and how to maximize concealer and blush.

The downside of knowing how to hide an illness: Sometimes when I come out of the house, people tell me I look great or that I don't look sick, and that can be disturbing. I don't want to be told I look terrible, but that's not really the problem. A few times folks have said, "Well, you sure don't look sick," to me in a tone that sounds like they think I'm lying about how terribly chemo lays me out.

It makes me feel like I should come out with my horrible bags under my eyes and my raccoon eye dark circles just so those folks can check their "Here Is What a Cancer Patient Looks Like" biases. Yes, I am sick. I feel like shit most of the time. Ahem, that is NOT my real hair because all my hair fell out.

Still, I try to get up and handle my business like I'm not someone with cancer who is voluntarily putting a poison called chemotherapy into her body so she'll be alive at this time next year. I am getting better at covering up how absolutely horrid I feel. And gosh, it takes me SO LONG to get ready in the morning now. I still miss my own hair so very much. Missing it will never go away. Looking at pictures of my hair from this summer makes me want to cry again.

And on that note, the studying boy keeled over on the sofa long ago. Time to try to go to sleep even though the steroids (and anxiety over having chemo tomorrow) have my brain racing.