We’re flying out this evening to Puerto Vallarta to meet up with the family. It’s 1pm and we don’t check out until 4 so we’re both just laying in bed chilling after a late breakfast.
I don’t feel Christmasy at all but I expect that’ll kick in once I see everyone and break out the rum, ponche creme, pastelles and rum cake (we bringing Trini Christmas with us to Mexico!). I miss my family so much. I’m so excited to see them.
Whether you are celebrating or not, I hope you all have a wonderful day today ❤️
In a private cemetery in small-town Arkansas, a woman single-handedly buried and gave funerals to more than 40 gay men during the height of the AIDS epidemic, when their families wouldn’t claim them.
–Source
One person who found the courage to push the wheel is Ruth Coker Burks. Now a grandmother living a quiet life in Rogers, in the mid-1980s Burks took it as a calling to care for people with AIDS at the dawn of the epidemic, when survival from diagnosis to death was sometimes measured in weeks. For about a decade, between 1984 and the mid-1990s and before better HIV drugs and more enlightened medical care for AIDS patients effectively rendered her obsolete, Burks cared for hundreds of dying people, many of them gay men who had been abandoned by their families. She had no medical training, but she took them to their appointments, picked up their medications, helped them fill out forms for assistance, and talked them through their despair. Sometimes she paid for their cremations. She buried over three dozen of them with her own two hands, after their families refused to claim their bodies. For many of those people, she is now the only person who knows the location of their graves.
How have I never heard of this?
People like her should be remembered. And even more importantly, we must remember that there was a time in our history when we needed someone like her.
“When Burks was a girl, she said, her mother got in a final, epic row with Burks’ uncle. To make sure he and his branch of the family tree would never lie in the same dirt as the rest of them, Burks said, her mother quietly bought every available grave space in the cemetery: 262 plots. They visited the cemetery most Sundays after church when she was young, Burks said, and her mother would often sarcastically remark on her holdings, looking out over the cemetery and telling her daughter: ‘Someday, all of this is going to be yours.’
‘I always wondered what I was going to do with a cemetery,’ she said. ‘Who knew there’d come a time when people didn’t want to bury their children?’"
I haven’t slept well since I got here. The pillows are way too high and have been giving me a neck ache and for some reason the room won’t stay cold enough for me to sleep (I need it freezing) and I keep waking up.
We got back earlyish today and I was exhausted and eager to get some rest. And hey here I am five hours later still wide awake and Chris passed out two hours ago. It’s like my body has given up on the idea of sleep. Fuck me.
They say that before you settle down with someone you should take a trip with them. And that if you can survive that, you can survive anything. I tend to think it’s true. Traveling with someone is a really good benchmark of compatibility on all levels. It’s like lifeX100. An acid test. So yeah, if you get through it and still like each other, you’ll probably do ok.
Thankfully Chris and I pretty much have the same approach to travel so we do just fine. But I’ve also experienced the other side of the coin with people who our travel styles totally clashed and it can be really stressful. It’s seriously one of the best litmus tests I’ve ever found. So if you want to know… do it.
Perhaps the problem is not the intensity of your love but the quality of the people you are loving.
happy christmas adam to all men’s rights activists
Please stop pestering us with things like this. This has nothing to do with men fighting for their rights. Eve is short for ‘evening’. Please don’t turn activism into a joke. Thanks.
Someone isn’t having a good christmas adam
Christmas Adam: December 23rd. Comes before Christmas Eve and is generally unsatisfying.
Can’t believe I actually got to see this incredible work of art in person. I’ve read so much about it. “Man at the Crossroads” by Diego Rivera. This is just the center part of this extraordinary mural. (at Palacio de Bellas Artes, México, D.F.)
Holy shit. You know I realize that some people just see us as a business and don’t think about the person behind the business. And that’s really fucked up and self centered. And I’m not accommodating anyone who doesn’t understand that I don’t exist to serve their needs.
Ok I edited my automatic response on fb messenger to say that we’re closed and will reopen on this day and please contact me then.
I don’t get it. You know I’m out of the country and you’re still messaging me to tell me you want to buy stuff. What am I supposed to do? I didn’t bring them with me. Can’t you just let a person have a vacation without inserting yourself into it? I mean come on man…
Not sure how else to communicate to ppl that I’m on vacation. Even those that know that I’m OUT OF THE COUNTRY keep messaging me.
I’m not answering any more until Jan 9 when I reopen officially. I’d really appreciate it if people could respect the fact that I am entitled to time off but since they can’t then they’ll just get silence.
I took this from the hot air balloon with my phone (with an added wide angle lens). The Temple of the Sun, at sunrise, on the Winter Solstice. Amazing.
my mum just bought our cat a christmas stocking even tho we are muslims and dont even celebrate christmas?? she was like ‘we dont know what religion he is we cant force him to be muslim’ hes a cat ?
You are not just here to fill space or be a background character in someone else’s movie. Consider this: nothing would be the same if you did not exist. Every place you have ever been and everyone you have ever spoken to would be different without you. We are all connected, and we are all affected by the decisions and even the existence of those around us.
So if you didn’t see the pic I posted, we did a hot air balloon ride over the pyramids today.
You guys, that was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever had in my life. The earth looked so beautiful and peaceful as we floated above it. The mountains were still covered in early morning fog and the pyramids looked so majestic below us.
I don’t know if I’ll ever get to do something like this again but I’ll never forget it. There’s no words to describe how awesome it was.
We did it! We climbed the pyramid! The view from above looking across at the Temple of the Moon. #nearlyded #somanysteps #notforpeoplewithasthma #orfearofheights (at Teotihuacan)
hey. here’s the deal. if you’re looking for a reason to stay clean, an excuse to live another day, a purpose, something to make you smile or feel less alone, this is it. if you’re looking for support, i believe in you. i am thinking about you.
you make this world a brighter place, your presence alters something every single day and you wouldn’t be on this earth if you did not belong.
i believe every decision we make leads us to where we need to be, when we need to be there. this moment right now? it isn’t a coincidence. there is a reason you are reading this sentence.
keep pushing forward. you’ll get there soon enough.
I had to put up a notice saying my shop was closed until January because I’ve been fielding messages from last minute shoppers left and right.
I actually thought it would be enough to announce my last UpMarket but a) seems some people missed that and b) they didn’t take it to mean I was closed.
It’s nice that I’m in demand and everything but I really needed to get away from work. I put up a notice because I really don’t want to be responding to anyone while I’m away. It’s stressing me out.
Today we were walking down one of the main avenues in Mexico City and we saw a Black guy walking in the opposite direction. We both got excited as he was the first we have seen since arriving here. As they passed each other, he and Chris gave each other the Black Man Nod™ and I was so delighted to catch it that I actually did a hop and a skip. And I thought of Gary* who was the first person who ever wrote about it and made me realize it was a thing.
We had dinner tonight at this restaurant across the street from our hotel and omg Mexican food is sooooo good. I’m gonna have to ask them at the hotel where we can get some good street food.
The TSA in Miami never fails to inspect my fucking suitcase. I opened it tonight and couldn’t find any of my toiletries. Upon further inspection they were strewn all over my clothes.
I had them in a built in waterproof pocket so that should anything leak or spill my clothes would be safe. So they take them out and bury them among my clothes. And of course throw in the inspection notice. It’s been years since they HAVEN’T rifled through my suitcase so I must be on some list or something. I have a cousin working in the Pentagon, maybe I should ask him.
I fucking hate flying through Miami man. There’s always some fucking bullshit. Fuck that place.
The managed to get through security without anybody putting their hands in my damn hair by wearing it in a tight bun.
I went through the scan and the lady agent told me she needed to pat down my right leg (????) so she did and then she glanced at my hair but let me go.
I immediately went to the bathroom after I was done with security and let my hair out in all its glory.
Something I was watching the other day and they were shitting all over marriage and the idea of having sex with only one person. And I thought man if you think long term sex with one person is the crappy part then you’re missing out.
looking at a picture of someone wearing a mermaid tail and thinking how I’d probably go ballistic having my legs all bound up like I can’t even stand to have two legs under the covers.
I got about three hours sleep last night… maybe. My sinuses were acting up and I was coughing all night. Bought some shit for that today.
We went to a 10:30 showing of Rogue One at IMAX which for some reason started at 11. It was good, we enjoyed it? But I liked Force Awakens much more. Also we both fell asleep.
I’m halfway done with packing and I’m just kind of hitting a wall. I think a nap is in order. We depart at 7:30 tomorrow.
Oh did I tell y’all we got robbed again? Same M.O. Stole the money from Chris’s wallet. There was a new DSLR laying out, a brand new watch, like a host of shit to steal that he didn’t touch. He got in through the kitchen window which I guess we will no longer leave open because even on the second floor a desperate piper will find a way to enter. Chris is currently installing a security system we bought a month ago. I don’t have the energy to get worked up about it. Our neighbours saw him scale the wall around 5 Saturday morning. They were of course smoking weed in the alley. *rolls eyes* Next time call us if you can’t call the police ok? Fuckers.
We started watching The OA last night. Man that shit is weird. But also very intriguing.
I popped into UpMarket today to drop off something for another vendor. Like I literally walked in, handed them the thing and was walking out. There was a group of people standing in my path and one of the women gives me this look that makes me stop and she exclaims, “Sundara!” A lot of people think Sundara is my name because it’s the name of my brand. So I said, “Yeah.” And she tells me she’s been looking for me all day. And I told her last week was my last market and she gives me this long face and asks if I have stuff at Hotel Normandie and blah blah and I tell her yes and she says she’s gonna go there. ANYWAY long story short it was nice to know in the thirty seconds that I was there that people missed my jewelry.
I bought my niece this cute little hand painted wooden angel at UpMarket a few weeks go. Inside I put the two tiny rings I made for my niece. So she gets a little ornament with her gift. I’m so excited to see her. And bonus get to meet my new nephew as well!
I went out to dinner tonight and my friend Roger looks at me and says, “Tash, you’re looking really young.” And everybody nodded their heads in agreement.
It was an odd compliment but I get what he was saying. I handled it with my usual awkwardness and sort of blushed and took a gulp of my beer while nodding thank you.
I basically chalked it up to dim lighting and good concealer.
Sometimes I feel like I need to spend more times with my friends. Working at home can be very isolating. And if you have hermit tendencies like me you can go a while without seeing anyone but your spouse.
The problem is when I try to spend more time with my friends I end up getting fed up of them and then I disappear again. Honestly I don’t know how they tolerate me. I’m the worst.
I meet foreigners who have lived in Trinidad for a long time every so often. And one thing they all seem to have in common is that they insist they are speaking in a Trini accent when to everyone else they sound obviously foreign. I don’t know how that works. My English friend Marie swears she is speaking Trini and she doesn’t even have a hint of it. When I point that out she immediately lapses into her version of dialect for thirty seconds before reverting back to her north London accent. I don’t know how she can hear herself and think she sounds Trini, but it’s a common thing apparently. It’s perplexing. And funny.
I met a woman last night who was born and raised in Papua New Guinea.
I asked her what the language sounded like and she launched into about two minutes of speaking in her native tongue.
At first it sounded like just babbling but about halfway through I realized I was starting to understand it. It was a type of pidgin English and once I got used to it the syllables started making sense. It was wild.
Chris accidentally opened my Christmas present to him so we just decided to exchange presents early. He got me a beautiful desk easel and a set of watercolor paints I’d had my eye on but was a little too expensive for me. I’m a little bummed I won’t have time to experiment with them before I leave. Something to look forward to when we get back.
Her name is Theresa Kachindamoto, and she is a senior chief – political leader of a region with a population of about 900,000 people.
She didn’t run for election; she was appointed, without her knowledge, while she was living and working in a completely different part of the country. She just received a call one day telling her to come back to her childhood home, because she was in charge now.
So she did; and when she arrived, she discovered widespread sexual abuse of children. She browbeat 50 uncooperative local leaders into accepting her decision to annul all the marriages. She then fired four of them when they continued to allow children to be married off in their areas. She still faces widespread opposition from parents who consider it their right to sexually abuse their daughters if they want to; but Kachindamoto very evidently does not give a fuck, and is continuing to use political and legal means to protect children in the region.
She’s not just an anonymous do-gooder; she’s an effective political leader despite incredibly difficult circumstances. Theresa Kachindamoto.
I’m having a really hard time getting my day started.
With all the physical housework I did yesterday plus my hormones, I can barely get out of bed this morning. I feel exhausted.
Naturally when I decided to sleep in, someone in the vacant house next door decided to start pounding a hole through a brick wall. So that was pleasant.
I would love some coffee and an errand boy today please thank you.
Photographer Chris Crisman went around photographing women who worked in lines of work that are considered by many as unusual, to represent and normalize women in those spaces. Determined to show his children that they could be anything they wanted, he sums up the photo series’ message in one sentence: “Gender should not determine professional opportunities.”
Chris went to his other job’s Christmas party (for the college he teaches at). Partners weren’t invited which is fine by me, my back is so fucked from all that cleaning I did today that I wouldn’t be good company anyway. So it’s me and the heating pad.
I told my girlfriend (who was dating a friend of ours, who broke up and then yesterday they got back together) that she was making me sick talking about their relationship so much. I meant it. I’ve reached critical mass. I can only listen to someone obsess about another person so much. She’s making me want to take drugs.
How could she expect you to ship before payment. Unless she’s family and those vultures expect everything and given nothing. Yay 😦
No well she paid yesterday and the payment hit today (as in after midnight) so I guess she expected that I would go today to mail it out? I made it clear I wasn’t shipping it out until the money was in my account. I’m not sure that she understood that it would take a day for the payment to clear. But I mean we made this arrangement on Sunday and she said she would go the next day and pay it and she didn’t. It wasn’t until I told her (on Tuesday) that I would be travelling and could not mail it out after Friday that she did something about it.
I’m sorry but if I finished your order weeks ago and you took your cool time to pay me you kind of don’t get to give me shit about not mailing out your package today and reminding me that it’s a Christmas present for your husband. The payment only hit my bank account today.
Today I looked at the hallway and I just couldn’t take it anymore. For some reason it’s the only place in the entire apartment where they chose to put linoleum. And it’s light blue. So it gets dirty pretty much immediately. I mop it all the time but the dirt gets IN there. So I got down on my hands and knees with a bucket, some Cif and a scrubbing brush and cleaned that bitch until it was bright light blue.
As much as I love to travel, it is also stressful. So coming home to a clean house, fresh sheets and an orderly environment is a gift I like to give my future self. I have a few days to get it all in order, pack, and attend the various social functions that have all flooded in at once. I feel like I’m going to need a holiday for the preparation of our holiday.
It’s pretty sad. There are tons of plantations throughput Louisiana and many of them are open for tours and run much like the one you described. And they host weddings and are often staffed by people in period costume. Yeah. Pretty shameful.
This still happens? It did growing up, but have not seen that years
I *think* last Christmas we were by my MIL (in the Vale) and they were paranging on her street. I haven’t experienced it in many years but I haven’t spent many Christmases here either.
Well I shouldn’t be surprised. I mean those were the “glory days” for white people in the south right? I imagine you probably wouldn’t have to worry about offending any of your black friends if you throw a plantation themed wedding because *surprise* you most likely don’t have any.
@mistavybe I also hold the cards in my right hand (people hold cards in their left hand???). I play guitar left handed. I shuffle and deal cards with my left hand. I surf “goofy” which means right foot forward whereas most right handed people would but the left foot front. I draw with both hands. My mother says that when I started learning to write I used my left hand and my father made me switch. I have no recollection of that. I am right hand dominant for many things but ambidextrous or left hand dominant for others.
So back in college I was walking through campus with my friend Philip one day, when we saw a flyer posted on a crowded bulletin board. There was a marine center at north campus and they had rescued a dolphin that they named Abraham. He was weak and sick and required 24/7 care because there was a possibility that he could drown. So they were asking for volunteers to work shifts to basically “babysit” him. There was a picture of him in a shallow open tank, indoors, with two handlers.
Philip and I thought it sounded interesting, so we called up and were given a shift the following Thursday. When the day came we were pretty excited. We took the long drive up to north Miami and talked about what we could expect.
We finally arrived at the marine center and got out of the car. There was no one there to greet us so we wandered around looking for some sort of direction. There was open water to our left. I’m not sure if it the bay or a river leading to the bay.
Facing the beach there was a small jetty on the left. Next to the jetty was an area probably about 100 square feet that was fenced in on three sides. The fencing extended into the water, and in that area were about three people who were supervising Abraham. He had apparently gotten healthy enough to swim in this larger, open space.
We both stood there for about five minutes watching. The water was dark so you couldn’t see Abraham, but the people with him seemed to have a good handle on him. We decided to take a walk to the marine center building to see if we could find someone in charge.
Suddenly out of nowhere we heard a commotion in the water. There was some shouting and a whole lot of splashing and the next thing we knew, Abraham shot up out of water into the air, his tail beating frantically. It looked like he was going to clear the fence. Instead he hit one of the pylons with a sickening thud, and then slid back into the water.
The three people in the water started diving underneath to find him. They became more and more desperate. Meanwhile Philip and I were just standing on the shore, frozen in shock.
One of the girls began yelling for help. It did not register to me that she meant me until she looked directly at me and screamed, “HEEEEEEEELLLLLLP!!!” at the top of her lungs.
As if in a trance, I felt my legs move as I waded into the water fully dressed. Once I was up to my neck I dove several times to see if I could find Abraham. He was swimming around in the enclosure at a pace. He had churned up all the sand at the bottom so the water was cloudy and we couldn’t see a thing. He swam past me once or twice and I could feel the immense power of his body.
Then he stopped swimming. Nobody felt any movement in the water. And our efforts to find him increased frantically because we knew that he could easily drown. At this point there were probably about ten people in the water. It was total chaos, people yelling, everyone trying to dive down to find him.
Finally someone located him near the bottom of the deeper end of the enclosure. We were able to pull him through the water up to a slanted concrete platform on the shore. It took about four of us to get it done, he was massive. And unconscious.
The guy who took command at that point told us what to do to help him perform CPR on Abraham. He first had to clear his blowhole which was filled with silt. Then we took turns turning his body from side to side while he tried to get air into Abraham’s lungs.
We did this for probably a couple of minutes until it became clear that Abraham was dead. We all crawled out of the water in a daze, crying.
I walked up to Philip who was still rooted to the ground in the same spot. I told him we were leaving. I didn’t want to stick around. I got in the car in my soaking wet clothes and drove back to south Miami. We said very little on the drive home.
A friend of mine posted a link about a report on a woman who owns an old plantation in Brazil. The plantation used slave labour back in the day.
These days she runs the plantation as a historical attraction. Except that she dresses up in the clothes of the era during which slavery was still legal in Brazil (she is white of course) and employs Black people to play her enslaved servants.
In the video they show a short clip of her in which she is very defensive, insisting adamantly that she is doing nothing wrong.
As I get older I am surprised by less and less things. But the one thing that absolutely never fails to shock and surprise me is white people’s absolute insensitivity to the issue of slavery. Like, I just DO NOT get it. You don’t have to be Black to understand how incredibly horrific and painful this issue is. You don’t have to have personally experienced it to feel the pain of it. I just don’t understand.
I can only conclude that to some white people we really are not seen as truly human.
The larger one I got is a brand called Smiley Daisy. I was looking up reviews and recommendations and came across a site that tested a whole bunch and rated this the top one. I got the one that has a nice wood-looking finish. It’s very attractive too. I bought it off amazon but if you go to their website you can get a coupon code.
I recently bought two essential oil diffusers. I’ve always been interested in the idea of aromatherapy, but truly I think I just like things to smell nice.
I tried out one of them last night but it was too small for our bedroom so the scent barely dispersed. I used the second one today and it definitely is a good fit for the room. Right now there’s a pleasant, lingering scent of lemongrass in the air. It’s very relaxing. I’m looking forward to trying out some more scents from this set of essential oils I recently bought.
soulsistrin 