Top 30 Things You Should Know About This Blogger

So I realized something about this amazing blog and equally extraordinary audience – if you are new to my blog, you probably don’t a great deal about me.  And I further realized that my life has been a testimony to chapters of extraordinarily interesting and fascinating life experiences (yes, I just got a little wordy but it’s for a point).  Here is an ironic list  numbering 30 items  that offer some more insight into who I am as a person, more than just an educator.

#30:I love Christmas music during the holidays!
#29:I love Eggnog! No one in my fam likes it but I get it every year! Then I know it’s Xmas!
#28:I have a special reverence for The Nutcracker – I was a toy soldier and rat (not in the same production) in my dance school’s production when I was a kid. Yes, I was a ballet dancer and I still miss it!

#27: When I got into DC, a strange feeling comes over. I feel this sense of pride and awe being in the region where major decisions in our country are made. And I am THAT CLOSE to meeting the Obamas! Hey, it could happen!

#26: I am so proud of my younger brother! He is my rock (even if he doesn’t know it and gets on my nerves sometimes)!

#25: I hate the smell of chitterlings! When I was younger, my parents would love to cook it on the stove and the entire house had its disgusting smell. To this day, I will never eat a bite of it!

#24: I learned how to type so fast from the Mavis Beacon computer program. When I graduated from middle school, my dad put me on this schedule to work on the program every day, almost all summer. To this day, I rarely have to look down at the keys (really just for the numbers because I don’t use them as much as letters).

#23: I used to be really jealous of my brother when we were little. When he was a toddler and my mom was filming him with the video camera, when she wasn’t looking, I would knock him down softly. LOL! But eventually, I got over it.

#22: In middle school, I used to like this boy but he wouldn’t be honest if he liked me or some other girl. He called me up at home and I got so tired of his crap that I played the chorus in Janet Jackson’s song “If” and hung up the phone. Look it up, kiddies. Boy, did I have some guts as a kid!

#21: My cousin let me ride with him on his motorcycle when I was a teenager. We went REALLY fast! It was so much fun but my mom was so afraid for me. I couldn’t stop laughing!

#20: My mother has an obsession for all things Ralph Lauren, especially when she was pregnant with me. She named me after her favorite designer and perfume.

#19: I am the oldest sibling in my immediate family. My younger brother is my new roommate.

#18: Initially, I attended college in hopes of being a doctor. I took an internship in HS with an orthopedic surgeon and fell in love with the practice. But once I started taking the required math and science courses (and started failing those classes even with all help in the world), I quickly switched to English.

#17: I worked in the Human Resources Department in the University Library when I was a sophomore at UF. I learned a great deal about the inner workings of payroll (like library staff gets really agitated when their checks aren’t correct).

#16: No, I have never been married (and I have no kids) but I would like to be someday.

#15: For a school trip in HS, I went to Europe. The class and I went to Italy (Venice and Verona), Germany and Switzerland. Talk about a great Spring Break!

#14: I am a chronic bibliophile. Currently, I’m reading Think Like A Man, Act Like A Lady by Steve Harvey and I just got uploaded Grimm’s Fairy Tales (you got to know the classics, right?),  a lot of Oscar Wilde, Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, and W.E.B. DuBois on my E-reader application on my laptop!

#13: I love Spoken Word Poetry. I have two locations in Miami that I used to when work wasn’t too hectic. I have yet to find a new place in the DMV area.  Any suggestions?

#12: If I had to choose a TV character that was the most like me, I would say either Brenda Lee Johnson from TNT’s The Closer or Kate Reed from USA’s Fairly Legal. Their mix of strength and vulnerability is something I can DEFINITELY identify with.

#11: I met Hill Harper at Yale where he held a luncheon for young people for his book Letters to a Young Brother. He is incredibly nice and well-spoken. My HS students were trying to hook me up with him. How embarrassing (but he did call me “exquisite”)! Not bad for a HS teacher!

#10: I am a closet romantic. I hate to say it but it’s true. I love listening to my fave love songs (mostly from MJJ) to go to sleep to.

#9: I buy at least two new fashion/celebrity gossip magazines every other Friday. I am also a loyal follower of The Young, Black, and Fabulous celebrity blog since 2003. A lady has to stay current on ALL kinds of news!

#8: I secretly want to be a DJ. I actually tried it out at a friend’s party and I was terrible (but I loved every minute of it!). I have this secret talent of creating the most amazing mixed tapes/playlists for every mood. My iPod and Blackberry are full of them.

#7: My parents raised my brother and me to appreciate the rich history of African-American music and film. We listened to all the Motown greats (The Temptations, The Four Tops, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Jackson 5/The Jacksons), Sam Cooke, James Brown, 70′s and 80′s Soul/R&B singers (Earth, Wind, and Fire, The Emotions, The Pointer Sisters, Phyllis Hyman, Whitney Houston, Luther Vandross, Freddie Jackson, The Commodores, Lionel Ritchie, Donny Hathaway), and 90′s R&B (Michael Jackson, Jermaine Jackson, Janet Jackson, Anita Baker, Vanessa Williams, Tevin Campbell, Boyz II Men, Usher, TLC, En Vogue).  I tend to gravitate to those greats and compare everyone else on the music scene to them – sorry, new artists!

#6: I was not popular in HS. I was/still am really tall (almost as tall as the teacher), a tomboy (I played volleyball and preferred jeans and Chapstick to dresses and lipstick to wear to class), was a novice writer (I wrote a vampire novel for fun and it became a Freshman sensation) and liked to listening to SKA and rock music (long live No Doubt, Prince, and Lenny Kravitz!).

#5: After not having an “exit strategy” for graduating college, my parents moved me to CT in hopes that I would go to grad school at Yale. Yale didn’t work out (I worked full-time in a bookstore and in retail for a year instead) but Columbia eventually did. Not bad for a runner-up.

#4: I lived in NYC for two years. While at Columbia, I stayed in Harlem with my great uncle. It was wonderful and I miss it terribly.

#3: I saw the musical The Color Purple two times: once on my own dime in NYC and once when my parents came to NYC. As far as the rest of my family goes, I have become an adopted New Yorker.

#2: As a result of #4, I am a huge fan of  Sex and the City. Yes, I have seen the entire set of the series and yes, I own the movie (and I have seen it at least three times so far).  Unfortunately, I was a little disappointed with its sequel – Carrie, you married the love of your life! Work stuff out TOGETHER! You don’t need to go OUTSIDE your marriage to feel complete in your marriage! I’m just sayin’.

#1: I have fallen love in with New Orleans a year ago at a conference and hopefully, I will be able to spend my summer there for some volunteer work that can beef up my resume.

President Obama’s “Hope” for America: The Promise of a New Beginning

Prof. L. D. Robinson

So one year after the most historic Presidential Inauguration of any American generation, critics and cynics question whether President Obama still has his political message of “Hope” even as a new Republican takes over the late Ted Kennedy’s senate seat in Washington D.C.

In the current climate of high American unemployment, traumatic coverage of Haiti’s latest developments, the journey of a controversial health care bill and stimulus money being sent to elitist and greedy financial institutions, people wonder what has happened to the sweeping excitement and enthusiasm that was exhibited during Obama’s campaign of 2008 and last year’s Inauguration.

I can tell you what happened.  The honeymoon ended.  After the euphoria of Inauguration 2009 wore off and the nation’s problems mounted, President Obama’s “To Do List” Agenda got thirty pages longer, at least. 

The Recession of 2009 hit the United States cruelly and millions of Americans lost their jobs.  As a result, Americans fell deeply behind in their mortgage payments and their homes were foreclosed upon.  Millions of Americans emerged in 2009 without health insurance, unable to pay for basic services because of those lost jobs and limited income. As a result of Americans’ being unable to use credit, financial institutions shut down in the worse “traffic jam” of the century.  What would you do? Crawl under a rock and wait until it all disappeared? You wish!

Against your own primal instincts of flight (running away from its problems), President Obama and his administration plunged headlong into the problems last year.  Stimulus money was dispersed for more unemployment coverage for a longer period of time.   The President initiated a new Health Care Bill to insure that every American that needed insurance would have the same access as any congressperson, senator or elected official in the country. Also, more stimulus money was given out to jumpstart the stagnant financial institutions to reset the economy. Is there anything really wrong with that?

In retrospect (which notoriously has 20/20 vision), the President now admits that he could have focused more attention to creating jobs but wasn’t he, in some way, addressing that issue already?  I’m not saying that he did everything humanly possible for it but I am just asking didn’t he make an attempt at helping unemployed Americans in their hour of need at the beginning of the recession when he took office?

If you ask the critics (or American Idol’s “Simon Cowells” of Washington D.C.  and beyond as so artfully described by the President on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno last year), they may reply that the Obama administration has thrown millions upon millions of American taxpayers’ dollars at the current problems instead of solving them.  They would claim that the new Health Care Bill is the administration’s attempt at controlling Americans, citing “big government” as the root of all evil in the lives of “true”, red-blooded Americans.

But what these “true” Americans seem to forget is how the nation got into the problems that it is in now.  Whose administration let financial institutions run wild with little to no regulation on its practices, giving themselves excessive bonuses and participating risky investments at the cost of Americans’ retirement and financial portfolios for eight years?! Whose administration ignored Americans’ need for equal access to quality health care as an American right of the many, not a privilege for the elite few?  Who was the Commander-in-Chief who started a war in the wrong country after September 11, 2001 that is costly millions of dollars to fund every year while putting our military in harm’s way for almost a decade?

Now, the answers may be hard to swallow but they are the truth. BUSH ADMINISTRATION! BUSH ADMINISTRATION! BUSH ADMINISTRATION! PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH!

If you are a logical (and truthful) person, you can see that the blame resides with the former president and his administration.  So what does that mean to the current president?

That means that President Obama is making the best out of a bad situation.  It may not have been the perfect implementation of solving the country’s problems (and who is REALLY perfect anyway?) but you have to give the President credit for having the courage and the internal fortitude to at least take them on in his first year of office.

It’s like living with an irresponsible roommate who loves throwing loud and crazy house-parties every night at your apartment for eight years.  The apartment furniture begins to reek of stale beer and cigarettes. The carpet is stained with red wine, tomato sauce, dirt, and vomit.  There are empty pizza boxes littered all over the kitchen and living room.  The top of the pantry in the kitchen is “decorated” with hundreds of bottles of empty liquor. The sink and dishwasher are full of dirty dishes, drinking glasses, and silverware. The television needs to be replaced.  You had to buy your own refrigerator and a small cupboard to put it in your room and lock up your food because your “roomie” has played host with it too many times.  Thank God you have your own bathroom!

At the end of the eight years, she gets kicked out of the apartment but your name is still on the lease, so you are responsible for the apartment.  While it may have been easier to move out too, you feel like the apartment is still salvageable; it is just going to take a lot of work.  So you make your “To Do List” Agenda: you throw out the old furniture and buy new ones (on sale, of course), hire a carpet cleaning company to steam-clean the carpet, recruit your “entourage” to help throw out those pizza boxes, “souvenir” liquor bottles, and dirty dishes (do you really want any semblance of your former roommate in your apartment?) and buy an affordable flat screen television with a new DVR system.  

Now while the “To Do List” is long, you take each project on step-by-step.  Eventually, over the course of six months to a year, a brand new apartment emerges that is clean, welcoming, and becomes home.