La Negra Dura

A great title for a book. It's Mexican for a bad-ass black woman. A black woman who

1. Leaves her husband for cheating on her, even though it's 1965 and nobody does that.
2. Joins the foreign service and travels the world.
3. Let's a tribe of nomadic people live in her yard in Niger, as long as they send all their girls to school.
4. Is an alcoholic and dies an early death.

Or maybe a black woman who

1. Goes to an Ivy league school the year after it becomes co-ed.
2. Gets a law degree.
3. Marries a white man when it's still illegal in 15 states.
4. Rises to the top of a cut-throat law firm after the birth of her second child.
5. Becomes a law professor.
6. Quits law to become a world-famous artist.
7. Suffers her whole life from chronic depression.

Or a woman who

1. Is the first in her family to go to college.
2. Joins the local police force when most women still don't work outside the home.
3. Becomes a train engineer in the face of chronic sexual harrassment.
4. Marries a doctor, quits her job, has five kids, and gets left by the doctor for a younger woman.

What about a woman who

1. Overcomes racism and sexism to succeed in high school.
2. Becomes valedictorian of her class.
3. Is told by her parents that she cannot go to college because she is undocumented and was adopted illegally from a foreign country. She can't get a drivers license either, or fly in an airplane, or leave the country.

Or a 24 year old woman who 

1. Works her way into the WNBA as one of the incoming class of professional basketball players.
2. Is convicted of sexual misconduct with a minor because she messed around with a precocious 16 year old girl, and the girl's parents want to prosecute her as revenge. 
3. She gets sentenced to seventeen years in prison.

Damn, you have to be dura to be a woman in this world. It just beats you down.

Welcome Back

Hello readers! Welcome back from your holiday trips, drug or airplane induced as the case may be. I thought I might write some New Year's resolutions so that when I look back at my blog after 2013, I can have concrete, documented reasons to feel ashamed.

1. Do yoga.
I won't deny that I want a yoga butt. Still, there are plenty of other reasons why yoga is the perfect prescription for 2013. It can increase mindfulness and help me live in the moment. I think it also helps with stress, libido, dry cuticles, and vermin infestations.

2. Go cross-country skiing one damn time in my life.
Is that so much to ask?

3. Leave the cave.
Picture me snuggling under the blankets in my nice, King sized bed with fresh sheets, surrounded on three sides by pale blue walls, with some hot chamomile tea, dark chocolate, and a good book. Now imagine me doing this for four straight days, stepping outside of my room only to piss, shit, and raid the fridge. Greasy hair, sweaty pajamas, crumbs all over the bed, and a growing fear of stepping outside, ever again. Yeah, I really need to leave the comfortable, safe, cave-haven I made for myself.

4. Obligatory lose 10 pounds, see friends and family more, volunteer, and stop smoking/drinking/leaving dirty diapers under my neighbor's bed resolution.