Just one more note

Ok, so just one more note, brief(and that doesn't happen often) about the events in the news that have transpired the past week. What's really going on? People are just going off their knockers for all kinds of dumbness and nonsense (and when I say dumbness and nonsense, yeah I am talking about tea parties. Oh yes, I am. Because when I see and hear the people who are on the tea "brewhaha" brouhaha, it seems I find more underlying and subtle (and at times not so subtle messages) in their tea talk instead of a single and solid message for the purpose of their protest and disgust. I heard more of everything (in people's messages, tones, eggings) that of which was nothing related to taxing but their "true" feelings. I mean, tell me how you really feel next time ya dig? Reading between the lines was so obvious that the pollen floating and flying in the wind could see it (and I think I am insulting the pollen while I am it).

The Coming out of Left Field Story for Today:

So for today I got some disturbing news, one of my relatives was getting divorced. Why significant? Because ever since I had been living on my own, meeking out an existence, I used to spend my holidays by myself on campus a lot. I told my relative, she couldn’t believe it that I had been doing it for that long, and insisted I come to stay with them for the holidays. This was around 2006 I think, give or take. But anyways, it took me a while to adjust their abode because they were like a family, you know, with the kids and 2 parents with careers that were actually together. See when I was growing up, on my mom’s side of the family (which raised me more or less), most of my aunts and uncles had already divorced at least once, with usually my cousins paying the prices for their sometimes irresponsible decisions (that they still pay for till this day). So when I would spend time my relatives that was married, it was like wow, you don’t’ see that happening everyday. And little by little, as I spent my holiday breaks and summer breaks and interludes between school at their house, I felt myself become attached, as if they were in a way, the parents I never had. Even though there were certain things I couldn’t’ feel myself belonging to in their family, overall I was relatively happy. Now of course I was not naïve and I knew they had their fair share of arguments and disagreements and what have you, but you know I figure hey that’s all apart of being married. Then there was this news today. When I was told this morning, I felt a bit of wind sail from me because last time my relative called last semester near my finals, he was telling me news that one of my cousins had been killed. So needless to say, I did not see this coming. I felt a bit sad (thanks to the wonderfully dreary weather of dark clouds and coldness that had been prevalent around here all day today) about it, as if they were my parents getting divorced and this was affecting me personally. I just wonder how their kids are going to handle it. Well they were reassuring me that I could still come home and stay but I don’t know, it just didn’t feel the same right off the bat, and I wasn’t going to go “home” till middle of May after my finals to get a touch up of good ole Houston.
But it made me realize, I think they were the last of maternal relatives that I knew of that had been a relatively stable marriage that was over 40. Well so much for that. And its amazing that out of my childhood friends I had, I never knew who my father was and he was deceased, a sister and brother father was deceased, one of the half-brothers father really didn’t come around to see his son and the other brother father was in the prison. And that, ladies and gentlemen, was considered the norm in the neighborhood, and the fact that we were being raised still relatively and recently good was a rarity.
Lately I had been questioning whether I would ever get married, given my current track rate of how my “dating” life and “relationship” life had been going. I sort of always had a bit of an apprehension of marriage, but it certainly did not mean I advocate shacking up with an implied common-law marriage. But regardless, its just one of those things to chalk up that marriage might be overrated, overstated or even understated in today’s world. At least I am friends with one young married couple I went to middle school with that’s starting out and they seem to be going really well. For the older crowd per se, I guess I have to lean on my close homegirls and homeboy whose folks I have met, almost met, and personally know to lean on to understand and witness what a good marriage still means in today’s world.

One less radio commentary for me to depend upon:

Note: sorry if the grammar here and there sounds a bit more choppy than usual but I am going off of raw emotion and a can of wild cherry Pepsi.

I have been paying more attention to blogs more and more right around last summer when I was at my internship North Carolina because where I was working at for the summer; it just was not that popping at all. So for me to waste away the days and weekends, I started surfing the internet more than usual. As I did so, I had to find different ways at work to deal with the bit of the repetitive programming and planning I was engaged with day in and day out on the computer. One of the ways I began to deal with this was starting to listen to NPR more than usual, particularly this one program called News & Notes. News & Notes is a sub program on the big NPR scale that dealt with issues and perspectives from the black perspective. Issues they discussed since I have been listening to the show ranged in all kinds of issues from sports, entertainment, military, politics, musicians (the ones that you wouldn’t hear a lot on mainstream radio), health, etc. I found the show very informative and very soothing, particularly since I started in graduate school. Of course for as long as I remember, I have taken advantage of always listening to NPR because it was public radio and it was something different to listen to other than the usual so called network news. Well I said all that to say that News and Notes broadcasted its last show on Friday. I didn’t listen to News & Notes a lot this week because I was just busy all week. Today, as I work on this assignment I have been pretty much catching up with all the past shows up until its last week. When I first read on the NPR site that they were getting rid of the show due to budget constraints, all I could think of was “No surprise to get rid of certain kind of shows when there is always some kind of budget constraints”. The fact that there is no such program on broadcast radio available that offers different and cultural viewpoints than the status quo is quite disturbing in itself. And for those people who are using the line of the need of such programs because we live in a “post-racial era” needs to get real and take the sunshine glasses off their eyes and realize the kind of world that we live in. Just because of November 4, 2008 occurred did not mean that racism and prejudice was killed off in all of its forms, both subtle and glaringly as a lot of people would like to believe. If you believe that we do live in a "post-racial era", then I have beachfront property to sell you in Oklahoma. I mentioned in a previous post of how sad the state of listening to the news is becoming day in and day out. When you watch these so called network news channels you can’t tell anymore what is real news, people’s opinions, and generalizations based upon the commentary of everyone and their mama who is a blogger and somehow a self-proclaimed expert in all affairs that are news and political worthy. And I just heard the other day of more and more newspapers across American cities shutting down their printing presses because of their abysmal sales. Some are either shutting down their printing presses forever, are being forced to pimp themselves out to larger conglomerates, or forced to enter onto an online media of “printing and publishing” news which in my opinion is a horrible substitute of actual printed newspapers. I don’t when people begin to think that it was a bad idea to pay 50 cents to pick up a newspaper and read (and I mean READ) what was going on in their neighborhood, city, state, national and international fronts. Are citizens becoming such drones that they are turning over their mind to everyone else who sometimes does not have their best interests at heart? Such entities that are only concerned about getting all the dollars they can by spreading their non-stop bombardment of subliminal messages? Why-because as the O’Jays sing it, everything is done for the love of money. So don’t be surprised that as one’s soul is being sold down the river, question the way of life one is accustomed to going down the toilet. Choices one makes for not being informed and unwillingness in going to multiple sources to verify the so called “news” being fed day in and day out. Note: This is why I am checking out as of today watching any kind of news. I will tune in next week to only be recapped on what was mentioned the week I tuned out for. Go figure…

What Ever Happen to Reporting the news as news?

So I have been on boycott this past week from watching any news or sportscenter. Why or how did this start? Well last Saturday I was working out at the rec center early in the evening at my school. And these rec centers are the types that are decked out with all the latest and newest fitness equipment (cardio, weights, bikes you name it) plus tvs with satellite cable throughout the fitness room. After I got through huffing and puffing on the treadmill on the hills mode (hills ain’t no joke), I saw the breaking news on ESPN moving ticker. A-roid had admitted to using steroids from 2001-2003 when he was playing for the Texas Rangers. ( I will save the baseroids story for another day, since baseball is my favorite sport). And so looking at the ticker (I mean how else am I suppose to know college basketball scores?) it kept repeating nonstick on A-roid. Like that was all I could see. When they went to commercials on the basketball game I had been watching, their top story/breaking news was on him. It was like, gosh jolly so another one was dirty ok move on. But the sports ticker wouldn’t get off, so I got annoyed. Ok here comes Sunday morning. Now I am a self-admitted political junkie. You can ask my close friends what I whether be doing on a Friday night instead of hitting the club. So anyways, I first watch This Week on ABC, then if I can catch it, sometimes Meet the Press. With This Week, they had talked about the “stimulus” bill in the Senate, and in between that, George Stephanolous (I know, misspelled terribly) had interview Michael Steele, and some of the answers that Mr. Steele was providing left my head scratching and a bit less intelligent, but I digress. Next, I tuned the TV to CNN and after watching the news for not even 30 minutes, I was terribly disgusted with the stories being reported, or how terrible the stories seemed to be reported. Later on after that and before I started studying, I read some online newspaper (i.e. Houston Chronicle, New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune) and the headlines, the stories and the bloggers responses to the stories just made my internal thermometer bubble even more. After this, I declared to myself, I am on strike from the news. It’s the same stories over and over and over and then you listen to the headlines, all negative all negative all the freaking time. And if you watch something repeatedly negative, you begin to become negative or more cynical than usual. And that is what happened to me. And the straw that broke the camel’s back: the breaking news about the whole Chris Brown and Rihanna situation (another blog for another day). So I turned the tv off, stepped away and shut down all news and political websites, and just started doing other stuff. And as the week went by, I realized, hey this is not so bad, not watching the news all the time. Plus with me not watching the news for one week, I am still informed than probably over 90% of Americans anyways.
But I digress, I realized for a very long time (since I was in middle school) that sensation only sells, and be damn the truth. I remember how I wanted to be a journalist for a minute because of my passion and devotion to writing and expressing one’s thoughts. I also thought that being a journalist was an excellent endeavor because of the research, the background information and verification of all sources before you ran with a story. But nowadays, newspapers seem to get their news from entertainment, politically leaning and biased sources and gossip newspapers. And it’s a shame because the artistry that went with journalism in the American medium seems to be all but dead in the 21st century. All news channels seem to be just the plain devil because of the continuous loop of reporting the same stories over and over, and more and more interjections of personal and political opinions instead of just sticking to the facts.
So what is a girl to do once her moratorium ceases to exist on Sunday? I don’t know but heaven help me. It’s getting hard to find any facts and details anymore in a story.