Category Archives: Humor

THE PENIS PARALLEL (PART 2)

notebook-1841548_1920

The pen is

Found

Grabbed

Felt

Contemplated

Nibbled

Erected

Ball-Pointed

Used

Moved

Curved

Moved

Curved

Moved

Curved

Exploded

Finished

Renewed

Stowed

…waiting to be used again.

Please read my other written work.

I adore you for reading my writing,

blogrochellesignature_18october2016

My heart’s ode to the universe of love

frog_14january2017

Mirror, mirror on the wall

Why is my prince charming coming at the speed of a crawl?

Is it due to his high cholesterol?

As I work through my muck,

I believe my fairy godmother will send me a hunk

Thank you, in advance,

For the chance to dance with romance.

Faithfully yours, Rochelle

Please read my other written work.

Until the next time – I adore you for reading my blog,

blogrochellesignature_18october2016

Find out the 5 “F”s that Make My Family’s Thanksgiving Storied Experience Very Special

Our family’s 2016 Thanksgiving celebration took place at my 88-year-old Grandmother’s tenement apartment. This is where we gathered to give thanks for our shared histories and scribe new stories on the scrolls of time. For this reason, Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays.

Today’s Thanksgiving Paradox

I’m adultly aware, our American history is full of paradoxes. Withstanding the fact, that the origin of the Thanksgiving holiday was not a picturesque scene of provisions, but smithereens of distorted truths amplified to absurd conclusions. This Thanksgiving mythology has been narrated for generations, harvesting untruths in our historical memories. This currency of romanticized American history, where dead white men are perfect gods, subsidizes a bankrupted belief system at the expense of cultural and individual freedoms.

Standing Rock Sioux Reservation

Our historical knowledge informed our talk about the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) and the harm it will bring to the indigenous people of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.*

The talking points discussed were:

  • The environmental warfare from water contamination, and
  • The decimation of burial sites and sacred places.

My family concluded, this reckless capitalistic behavior is to aid:

  • America’s addiction to fossil fuel, and
  • To endow riches to the corporate bobble

*Newsworthy update: On 12/4/2016 the Army Corps of Engineers denied permission for the Dakota Access Pipeline to cross under a section of the Missouri River.

My Thanksgiving learned lessons are simple

  • Tradition is powerful.
  • History is repeated.
  • Freedom is at a cost.

The 5 “F”s that are at the heart of my family’s Thanksgiving storied experience

Family

My family experiment is varied and messy at times violates the Hollywood family formula. In our family, there is no room for cowards when it comes to loving each other wholeheartedly. I am thankful daily to practice courageous acts of love and forgiveness with my familial folk. And despite everything I know to be right about perfect love, familial love ain’t always easy.

Family forgiveness is a labor of love and a constant practice.

I flourish as an individual moving in this world because my family is the supporter of my intangibles, the hidden crevices that are invisible to the casual onlooker. My family provides a protected space for care, cover and cohesion for my human spirit.

“But obviously, this is not the love of complacency, or affection, that is, it was not drawn out by any excellency in its objects.”
As quoted from the: Vine’s Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words

Faith

My family is a praying body of souls. However, my cousin who is not the church-going, bible-quoting, amen-saying, religious kind, is often the first to prompt our family tradition of praying before we eat. I am unsure if it is because she is hungry or her spirit hungers for a different kind of soul food.

Loving is an act of faith.

As we prepared for our public worship of the food, we gathered around my Grandmother’s bed which included my Grandmother’s Home Health Aide. With our heads bowed, eyes lowered, and hands held together — my Grandmother led us in prayer to give thanks for our shared lives of compassion and love.

Food

Food is the love language of my family and cooking is a heated expression of that love.

For this 2016 Thanksgiving harvest, we got: “…Beans, Greens, Potatoes, Tomatoes, Lamb, Ram, Hogs, Dogs, Beans, Greens, Potatoes, Tomatoes, Chicken, Turkeys, Rabbit. You name it”! Oh wait, that was Shirley Caesar.

Our family feast included the traditional African American dishes of slow-cooked collard greens, slow-cooked stuffing (dressing), potato salad, yams (sweet potatoes), pineapple ham, turkey breast, and cranberry-orange relish to name a few. The cranberry-orange relish dish made its table debut several years ago after my Grandmother insisted on the cylindrical rippled cranberry sauce from her past. I was against such table rubbish. I decided to master-mix an old classic to appease my taste buds and hers. Upon sampling the cranberry-orange relish, my Grandmother rubbed my culinary ego and gave the dish four stars (★★★★). One thing to know about my Grandmother, she is the Czar of food reviews. In other words, she is the human upgraded version of Yelp.com with the added feature of year-over-year comparison data to spew. As heard from my Grandmother this Thanksgiving, “Your potato salad is better this year. Last year, it was a bit dry and needed more mayo”. When you are almost 90, you have the license to say whatever you feel and think. This provision comes in the aging contract.

To everyone’s delight, Thanksgiving dinner wasn’t single digit body mass index (BMI) approved. Because in Grandmother’s house poultry and people ought to have meat on their bones. My Grandma would say to me growing up: “Girl, you better put some meat on those bones.” Nowadays, I’m working hard to do just the opposite.

Fun

When my family gets together, our communication rituals are multiple conversations swinging back and forth to a clock that has no arms. We are distracted and entertained by each other and not devices.

After dinner, we played the game Heads Up! This was my first time playing this game. My gaming behavior is a cross between a turtle, a shark, and a parrot. That is, I am slow, competitive, and redundant — I’m an all-around badass. Well actually, my Grandmother is the Original Badass (OB) of the family. My Grandmother participated in our tomfoolery responding with the correct answers to our animated clues and getting high-fives along the way. During the game, I doled out descriptions and stories for words shown on the screen instead of short clues. Since I was caught up in my head space, I would continue my rhetoric, long after the player guessed the word correctly. My cousin would repeatedly say, “Rochelle, move on.” My rebuttal, was “Y’all should have detailed the rules of the game in a .pdf form and provided a copy for my review. This way, I would know how to play the game correctly” Otherwise, I’m gonna make “ish” up, as I go.”

In my Smokey Robinson voice, “I’m the life of the party because I tell a joke or two.”

Freedom

My Grandmother has been talking a lot lately about a facet of freedom that occurs when flesh changes to an otherworldly form. This is the evolutionary agenda for our human condition. I fret over such monologues but understand the transitions and passages of the living.

I am thankful, my Grandmother is breathing life into our family story. Fortifying traditions at every turn. Rhetorically, wondering why freedom still isn’t free?

My Thanksgiving lessons are simple.

Tradition is powerful.
History is repeated.
Freedom is at a cost.

Read my other written work.

Until the next time – I adore you for reading my blog,

blogrochellesignature_18october2016

Tagged

12 Personality Traits That Define The Obsessed Hair Product Junkie

“I love my hair because it’s a reflection of my soul. It’s dense, it’s kinky, it’s soft, it’s textured, it’s difficult, it’s easy and it’s fun. That’s why I love my hair.”
Tracee Ellis Ross

hair_22november2016v2

I dwell in communities on and offline saturated with images of glorified crowns from colorful beauties of the global majority. These images seep into the crevices of my cranium and set a flame hair aspirations that can hardly be achieved with a brew of potions promising pretty. The over concentration of hair hustlers pushing beauty in a bottle has left me weak in my knees. It’s hard to “Just Say No”.

In my community, Korean beauty shop owners are the biggest distributors of trafficking transactional pretty to African American women. Heads up! — African American women spend an estimated $7.5 billion annually on beauty products. For which, the Korean beauty dealers monopolize the supply chain in communities of color.

Today, outside my community I pace back and forth in the aisles of one of my favorite mashup Halloween beauty shops to find the grease that will outdo this mundane mop to a magical mane. Looking for the perfect hair care product can be scary — because every label is a masterpiece of trickery. Ignoring this knowledge, I believe the flowery words of every tonic that promises my locks will blossom from weeds to Pocahontas lengths. Because of this masquerade marketing, I buy the placebo Pocahontas tonic and use it for several days to discover my hair hasn’t grown an inch. Instead, I have uncontrollable itchiness for days on end. Circle, circle, dot, dot — now, I need a hair product junkie shot.

Bewitched by smoke and mirrors, I am mourning yet another potion pushing-up-daisies in the hair product graveyard labeled “the bottom of my closet.”

I am now slouched on my sofa watching YouTube videos while simultaneously scrolling the ‘Gram to coax my latest labeled disappointment. I am lured once again by the representations, reviews, and raves about products promising pretty pictured tresses. I closely observe each Beauty reppin’ a side of the beauty shop aisle. I ponder, “Which side of the aisle do I represent”? Probably all, I muse. My hair product junkie habits are messy, irrational and hard to bottle up.

Here are the Hair Product Junkie personality tribal traits I brush-up against on my hair product exploration (scratch that) acquisition journey.

12 Personality Traits of the Obsessed Hair Product Junkie

  • Miss. Black Market — This Beauty only buys B L A C K.
  • Miss. Budget Friendly — This Beauty is price sensitive and buys products that are easy on the pocketbook.
  • Miss. ‘cone FreeThis confused Beauty doesn’t mess with products that have ‘cones but will use other products with ingredients that coat the hair strands and don’t easily wash off with water.
  • Miss. On the ground — This Beauty cops products that are locally stacked on convenient store shelves.
  • Miss. Free Loader — This Beauty product acquisition tactic is based on reaching the purchase quota to obtain free shipping.
  • Miss. Ingredient Identified — This Beauty buys products like she orders her meals. It can’t have this, this, and that.
  • Miss. Naturally, Organic — This Beauty demands every product she buys be environmentally friendly and made with easily pronounced ingredients that are between 1 to 3 syllables, each.
  • The Kitchen Chemist — This Beauty buys primary products to master mix hair libations to intoxicate the dullest strands back to liveliness.
  • The Follower Influenced — This Beauty buys products based on her favorite social media personality. It doesn’t matter if they don’t share the same hair type.
  • The On-Sale ‘Couponer’ — This Beauty picks up products only on sale or with a coupon code. She scours the internet for a coupon code and feverishly tries multiple codes before one works to complete her online purchase.
  • Miss. Better Bulk-up — To protect from production delays in the kitchen supply hair care chain, this Beauty buys products in bulk. Because her favorite boutique hair care mixologist is frequently out-of-stock of the top-selling items she enjoys.
  • Miss. Eye Candy — This distracted non-woke ‘Beauty school drop-out’ buys products based on imagery.

After spending six hours on the internet, I identify three products to conduct an investigative discovery to the product’s mysteries. I start by identifying the ingredients of each of the products. This time I will outsmart myself and I will not be bamboozled by the brands. These bombastic claims are weaponized marketing. With this knowledge — Why not create a computer program to differentiate the product ingredients among the three product choices I’m eyeing? Genius. I start writing the program and I am interrupted midway by thoughts of hair product junkie brilliance. “Why not, also associate each ingredient’s benefit and apply a ranking system based on the value attribution of the benefit? The value attribution is to give a higher rank to the natural ingredients and the ‘cone-less ingredients when compared to the other ingredients”. This is when I stopped and came to my senses. I navigate to the website to make my online purchase. My buying decision was based on the imagery, the coupon code I found after a two-hour search on the internet and the free shipping I received after having to buy $500 worth of products.

“Hi, I am Rochelle and I am hair product junkie”.

Read my other written work.

Until the next time – I adore you for reading my blog,

blogrochellesignature_18october2016

3 times when having ‘dirty’ breath is good for those around you

“Sir, I had thought all men breath had smelled so”.The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

Today, I had the usual for lunch — my green juice tonic. After guzzling down my lunch, I walk the mazed pathway to my cubicle. Before arriving to my seat, I am signaled in mid-gait and questioned about a technical glitch from a team member. I abruptly, did a little pirouette twirl from my runway walk to address his earthly concern. I am standing outside his domain, separated by his cubicle fencing. I respond with the data I have around the systemic known issue. After I spew all the ‘dirt’ I have — I then stop talking to give him time to digest my words.

My co-worker responds “Do you smell dirt”?

I reply “What do you mean by dirt? There is no wrongdoing involved. The code is broken”.

He replies, “No. Dirt. Soil. Don’t you smell it”?

My muddled mind struggles to process his words. “Is he referring to the dirt from the earth”? At that point, a floodlight of sun clears the cache in my brain and I am reminded today’s green juice was actually my red juice. My Bordeaux juice. My juice of the earth which consists of beets primarily and other secondary vegetation.

Still not certain it was my lunch he was smelling, I neighborly step inside his cubicle entryway. I need more data that the lawn smell is coming from me. My distance is HR approved. I lean in and begin talking. He leans back.

badbreathimage_4november2016

He is now talking in exclamations “What did you have for lunch”!?

I reply in green juice jargon. “Bordeaux juice”.

Him “What the heck is Bordeaux juice”?

Me: “Green juice with beets. And for the record my breath doesn’t smell like dirt”.

Him gasping for air “Yes, it does”.

Me: “My breath is nutrient dense for the record. Your casual sense of smell doesn’t know perfectly PH balanced breath when it’s slaying you in the face”.

Him: “What I know is your breath is an occupational hazard”.

Me: “I’m doing my part by spreading health one breath at a time.”

We laugh. I offer him what’s left of my juice. He adamantly declines. I return to my seat with my good vibrations intact. I put my hand up against my mouth and blow a few times. To me, my breath smells fine. I pop a piece of gum in my mouth for special effect.

3 times when having ‘dirty’ breath after consuming green juice is good for those around you.

  1. The spread of wellness.Sharing green juice by any means necessary is a win for all.
  2. Cleaner air.‘Dirty’ breath from green juice may detoxify the surrounding airspace and spark brain activity in others.
  3. Lower health care costs.‘Dirty’ breath resulting from consistent green juicing sows the seeds of improved health outcomes which may cause the pool of health care costs to go earthward.

******

Until the next time – I adore you for reading my blog,

blogrochellesignature_18october2016