The Musings of a Latte Queen: Narratives of Everyday Life

 It has been one week. Sabbath to Sabbath. That the world turned her attention to the place often in the periphery of being unless the news shatters the perception of innocence and assaults our eyes with the unseeable. Last week, during celebrations for the Jewish people, Hamas hang glided intentions of destruction and rained down terror upon hundreds of young people at a music concert.  They indiscriminately killed people, raped women, snatched hostages, all in the space of moments that the Israeli government was unable to respond.  It was a weekend. it was a holiday. It was planned. It was barbaric. It was evil. It was inhumane. It was terror. I was offline last Saturday, my television not tuned into the prior week incessant wrangling about the American elections and the will=they-or-won't they of the Republican congress.  My husband and I were enjoying much needed respite. Even Sunday, when I took a little road trip up to Vermont to just be, I was not fully aware ...

 America is in trouble. America is in trouble. America is in trouble. I remember sounding an alarm about what was coming when I was still a budding-reluctant-activist after a shooting happened in my new town of Kirkwood, Missouri. February 2008 was when the shooting happened. That was also an election year. I joined with other community members to talk across race, ethnicity, age, gender, and location. Oh those days of people still innocently thinking the good. When African American kids were marginalized in what looked like a literal Mason-Dixon Line in the high school. The Atlas kids, the ones who needed more educational attention despite growing up in this somewhat affluent suburban school system. Well, they mostly came from Meacham Park and their parents may have been tired of fighting the then all white school board.  White and claiming to be liberal, but white still. With one Black woman principal who had her little kingdom of this program and the Black Achievement Award...

 If you were like me, or maybe not, you were somewhat glued in to the ever-increasing-drama of a government shut down. For days on end, weeks, months, even, the news kept giving us the drama of a "will they or won't they" about the MAGA republicans attempt to shut down the government in service of their overlord, the 91-indicted, commercial fraud, sexist, racist, empty vessel tyrant wannabe dictator who is only trying to save his own skin. They were capitulating over and over and their speaker was just the 15-vote weak-willed one who couldn't hold it together. Well, except to try to blame the Democrats and the Senate when Civics 101 means that laws are passed in the Congress first and then voted on in the Senate before they are signed by the President. Didn't anyone else grow up with "It's Just a Bill trying to make it to Capitol Hill" Where is Schoolhouse Rock when you need it. Then, instead of being the leader and not just a MWM with a title, McCar...

 I have been following the WGA Strike for 146 days. I have also been following the SAG-AFTRA, AMPTP, Teamsters, UAW, and honestly, every other group of creators, creatives, and collaborators who made this country work.  Never in my lifetime have I seen all these different industries realizing there is more power together, if they stand united, than there is in an individual negotiation for pennies. When I was in California, I desperately tried to find the SAG-AFTRA strike so I could be in solidarity in person, but I ended up at the wrong location. So I have been following from across the country. The same for the writers, I put down some major writing projects including my muse/book project and  my book reviews on Tayé Foster Bradshaw's Bookshelf.  If they couldn't write, produce, and earn a living from their craft, why should I? And it has been agonizing!  Now, to be fair and transparent, I am no where in their league. No one is paying me to sit in a room with ...

 It was meant to be an ordinary after-a-busy-weekend-Monday for me. I had two small meetings scheduled. Came home to refresh and relax, and decided that the evening news was to fill the space of knowing I missed out on all weekend. The Grand Jury had been meeting in Fulton County all day on Monday. It was now past 5 o'clock Eastern Time and they were still there. I went on about my evening and one pundit turned into the next into the next and it was getting past my bedtime. Then well after ten o'clock Eastern Time, the clerk of the court, an African American woman who resembled so many that I know, walked, through a sea of other African American women and the smattering of men, to the waiting scene in the courtroom, all of this televised, but silent. She stood as the judge read through the stack of papers - looked like a full ream to me - asked her a few questions, signed them, handed them back to her. In her summer orange dress and pixie cut, she turned with that stack in her ...

 If you know me, you know that I am somewhat if a bohemian, an amateur anthropologist and sociologist, a presence who observes life and wants to be a part of that life surrounding beauty. Maybe it is the mixing of all my heritages and cultures, or the simplicity of my personality, but I like to be and just appreciate being, experiencing life and she unfolds around me. If you also know it, I wasn't able to always do that. Once-upon-a-time, I was in the early morning grind of just trying to survive, the then-divorced young mom in my mid-twenties with boys I had to get to day care before catching my train to work. Now, as I am winding down this sixth decade of my life, cruising to that Milestone birthday next year, I'm reflecting on how I am living in the moments I could only dream about. My time is essentially my own, something I could never attest to even as a working-full-time and going to school full time college student. Now, I can regulate my day as it goes and for most of t...

 I have been busy with our family transition, dealing with movers, packing, setting up the apartment, and just swamped, so it was with a bit of dismay this morning that I was finally able to sit down and have a cup of coffee to watch the news when the news was shattering: The U.S. Supreme Court struck down Affirmative Action in higher education. Now, this is more than just Harvard or UNC or frankly, any college or university. This is four decades of precedence.  Like them striking down Roe v. Wade. They have consistently shown themselves to be the most racist, mean-spirited, ultra conservative court that has ever existed. White boys are not smarter than African Americans. What they got was legacy admissions and unmerited access to generations of higher education. White boys are not smarter than the vast majority of the country and one of the things that Affirmative Action made sure was that poor white students, women, African American, Indigenous, and other people who otherwis...