.This site explores the idea of black women accepting their hair. Many people may not know this, but Caucasian hair is held up as ideal in American society. Turn on BET and you'll see a lot of black women with bone straight hair, but that is not natural, and requires a lot of processing.

If you have ever seen a woman or a man with an afro, that gives you some idea what black hair actually is like. It is pretty kinky, and while versatile, some people think it looks ugly in its natural state. I think it looks fine, and want to get back to my natural state, since I hate having my hair relaxed.

This is pretty awesome. I didn't even know that this existed til a few minutes ago. Well, there goes my calc homework.

I have had several dreams lately, but I remember only fragments.Today's dream involved me in fields of grass and concrete, searching for pieces of songs. I remember being in a car with my brothers, one of their friends and two guys I have never seen before and they were in a band. I remember the big performance, too.

The band was both performing and watching the performance. My oldest brother had a chorus line of girls dancing next to him, and some guys in the front were getting pretty crazy. Some of my schoolmates( black, one clad in a head wrap, wrap around shirt and long skirt) were painting glittery textiles. The friend of my brother remarked we all smoked because of his brother.

Another dream involved me living with my Japanese teacher. I kept spilling bowls of rice and having to vacuum it up with an ineffective dust buster.

In another, I was wandering around the mall. I think I was looking for the platonic shoe ideal, and a hair dresser. One said they couldn't do my hair there, it was closing, but gave me a list of all the chain in the area and their phone numbers. I was eternally grateful.

Today has been a great day for links. We Love The Iraqi Information Minister is full of hilarious quotes from our favorite reality challenged Iraqi.

Also, I find the idea that there is some sort of ideal vagina pretty strange. Also, the weirdest part about this site is that someone has some sort of vested interest in making people feel bad about their vaginas. A quote- "Men are not interested in female genitalia which present deformities, although most men will have intercourse with a woman who presents some degree of labial deformations. They will not seek a long term relation ship with her because of her abnormal vagina."

I can just imagine the conversation:

Man: Our relationship..it's great...

Woman: Yea?

Man: This really has been the best six months of my life, but..

Woman: But?

Man: It's your labia, they're asymmetrical.

Woman: And...?

Man: Under all that hair...oh, it's so coarse, god, your vagina..it just isn't pink..

Woman: I'm black, fool.

Man: Ooh, I just can't go on!

"Words come and go, how did nigger last so long?"- comic on comedy central.

IThere is a difference between laughing with and laughing at. 2 stories:

We were playing cards in the sci fi club and in this game, we matched cards that seemed alike or that seemed funny. Green card was the word we were trying to match. Red was our card. Green card was outrageous, and my red card was Bangkok. The guide was tickled and I was winner of that round.
A guy siiting next to me was like you crazy bitch!
and we all laughed.

Another story. At a school dance, I was taking a break from badly gyrating my body to horrible rap.
I stumble across two people- a guy and a girl who I had been slightly acquantanced with over the last semester.
He greets me in a mock southern accentas and she tries to hide her snickering

Which is laughing with and which is laughing at?

In a spirit of boredom, I have decided to modify a small portion of the Communist Manifesto. Maybe the sharper among you can guess whose voice it is 'speaking'. The modification is in brackets.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

[Oh, you're such a drama queen!}

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-masterand journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another

[It takes more muscles to frown than smile!]

, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

[Me, me, me, that's all you talk about]

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank.

[Stop whining!]

In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

[You'd be happier if you lightened up!]

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms.

[Just get over it! It's not that crucial!]

It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

[Happiness is a state of mind!]

I don't feel well today. But this page is cool.

Blogging is great. It allows everyone to attempt to get their voices heard, on a daily basis. Sure, many can't spell or write, but they can at least try to get their thoughts out there. For me, personally, I am aware that my writing is not good enough to be in magazines, to inform the masses, and in real life, my voice can not be heard over all the shouting of others.

On a completely different note, one of my pet peeves is someone who gripes when you 'whine' and then starts talking about themselves. It'd be alright to be mad at someone for whining if you never did it yourself, but if you're telling someone to shut up about how their grandma was run over by a trolley, and then ten minutes later, start to talk about how horrible your hangnail was, what was the point?

It seems more like you are saying I am more important than you, than anything about the content of that person's thoughts. That's ridiculous. Noone human being is more important than any other.

And I'll leave this with an old and busted fable spruced up in new clothes: Once a man gained the ability to see heaven and hell. In hell, he saw the usual fire and brimstone, but in one chamber, he noticed a pot. All around it were broken spoons and the bodies of the denizens of hell scattered liberally. Around him, all he could see was the flurry of bodies and all he could hear were groans of pain and assertions of superiority.

He didn't like it there, so he went up to heaven. The air was cool and clean and filled with quiet conversation. Among the clouds, there was a pot, same as there was in hell. However, there was peace, as the denizens of heaven all fed each other. The man asked about this, and was told " Who can be higher than his brother?" The man was enlightened, from that day on.

I guess that wasn't a very good story, but I just made it up in two seconds. Give me some slack.

This is the fabric I bought to patch up my jeans. They are ripped to the knee, so if I fail in patching them, it is no big loss. And here is a heart warming blog about a guy's fight against anxiety.

A very moving site about some people's struggles to educate Japanese doctors about AIDS.

It's pretty obvious our culture is not a nurturing one. Millions are popping Prozac, and many take solace in TV and shopping. I wish there was something I could do to make our culture less toxic, to make it less based on who is 'cool' - i.e. the biggest asshole, and more based on helping each other, supporting each other, making the world better.

I don't know what to do, some people try to combat it with religion, but that is just as full of folly as our culture itself. Noone listens to me, and I have no particular talents. Some people of course will wonder why I am writing about it instead of making some intuitive leap and being able to do something. I find that I must clarify what I am looking for to be able to find it.

Time.com is very interesting today. It is good to see people covering dissent without kneejerking into 'well, they MUST be anti-American, or most ridiculously, 'they don't support the troops' (which is pretty damn stupid, if they didn't support the troops, they'd want the troops to die, not to come home safely and be with their families)

There is also an article on the difference in Arab and Us news coverage of the war. Hopefully this will open some people eyes, so they realize that there is always more than one side of the story. Realizing that different people can be correct at the same time may take some doing.

Two opposing views can be true at the same time. Saddam can be evil, at the same time, liberating people with bombs can be a silly idea. Personally, I can not march for peace today, because as usual I am worried about my calculus. I should just get up the courage to do it, but I feel so weak. I simply can't understand it at all

However, I would like to caution against thinking of people as all evil or all good. People who thought that way were the real perpetuators of 9/11. All us infidels needed to be destroyed, not seeing that the 'infidels' were good and evil and most in the middle. Good and evil doesn't see the complexities of life, how both good and evil can live in one person, without one winning over the other.

Wallpaper of the week. Lain this time, of course.

(slight spoilers for Lain) My favorite part of Lain is her multiple selves. I have always felt as if I had multiple selves. I guess it started as I became aware of how others perceived me. I was something strange, an alien, but I did not internally feel that way. When gossip was added to the equation, it became even creepier.

I don't know why, but I feel slightly uncomfortable with the idea that behind your back people are forming this whole self for you that has nothing to do with you. That people are not reacting to you, but this different self they have created for you inside their heads. To me, it feels like someone who looks like you is roaming around the country and doing despicable acts, and everyone thinks that it is you.

It is like the alter lain here. This horrible diseased personage that can not be killed. The worst part is that the truth will not dissuade others from believing what they want to believe; the sounds of their own minds drown you out. Somehow the need for a scapegoat, for blood, for ritual slaughter of the enemy, real or imagined, overwhelms the truth.

I hope I'm just making this all up.

Today I feel pretentious, so I'll remark on how each day never comes again. There will never be a day with exactly this feeling. Even if I oversleep my calculus' teachers office hours again, it will probably not be with the same reason-my alarm clock did not go off) or with the same threat of the test.

Even if I pop into the Women's Center trailer again, it won't be with the same sense of adventure, the same easy summoning up of the courage to ask about the massage therapy.

Even if NPR is on all day again, the news will never be the same, for each day is different. I'll never read Writing Down the Bones again in the dorm bathroom, dubbing 'doing your calculus' in for 'writing' as the author urges us to 'cut through and write'

I think my spell has passed. Oh well.

I really like NPR lately. Not only is there interesting programs (right now I am listening to the author of 'Teaching Lolita in Tehran' talk about her experience in Tehran) one can just relax and take it in. Although I don't have a TV nowadays, so NPR is in TV's place right now.

I normally do not watch much TV, actually. I like DVD better because it works on my schedule, not theirs. But I hear about all the great programming on Cartoon Network like Futurama, and I wish I could see it.

Here is a link to a site listing some self published comics. Warning, some are not for children. Later, Sequential Tart's new content will get a look.

Now girls, remember not to douche. It can cause vaginal infections. Also, this is merely a worthy site filled with infomation that all teens should know, about stds and suchlike. So remember to donate so that the infomation can get out there. This is not such a good time to be a teen, what with the war and the rampant conservativism, so...

I have no sense of humor so I don't like April Fool's Day. Then again, if I was the lucky person who never was the butt of cruel 'humor', I'm sure I'd love it. Although something awfulis actually pretty funny this April Fool's Day, opting to be funny instead of stupid and unfunny.

I actually like humor, but only things that are funny. I don't like slapstick humor much or grossout humor. Slapstick is ok if the gag is well crafted, but I'm not going to be all ho ho ho that guy just got kicked in the nuts. Grossout humor, well, I never really was ever fixated with my bodily functions, so when someone farts, I'm just thinking 'oh, someone farted. That was supposed to be funny?"

I like word based humor best, also character based humor. However, those are the most rare types of humor because they are much harder to do, than other types.Humor based on a character's human foibles must be set up and the character must be developed, which is much harder than having a baseball hit someone in the nuts.

My most disliked type of humor is humor with hostility behind it. Everyone knows the type. This person will say the most horrible things about someone and then hide behind 'it was a joke'. Well, people like this, you are not funny. If you have something to say, I think it is better to either have the bravery to say it right out or the sense to keep your trap shut.