My Achilles Heel

I am a super laid back person who enjoys having peace in her life and practices patience to the extent that I am not easily angered. That being said, I am human, and I have my triggers like everybody else. One thing that really gets my goat is people who feel as though they have some right to challenge my authenticity as... ANYTHING... but mostly as a New Yorker.

Now granted, I spent a great deal of my life in upstate New York, but I am from the Bronx and I am proud of my roots. I am a NATIVE New Yorker and I rep it to the death. In fact, there is a song by that title that makes me really emotional to this day, though it isn't played much anymore. People everywhere take pride in their heritage or where they are from and it pisses me off when someone feels like they can take that away from them. Who gave you the authority to validate or invalidate somebody's existence?

I appreciate my time upstate and the lessons I learned while there but the reason I left - the reason I always knew I would eventually leave - is because I identify with my roots and have always felt a pull to return to them. You wanna piss me off? Challenge that. Challenge my recollection of the fire hydrants exploding in the summer.... cuchifritos on the corner.... pizza slices as big as my head. Challenge my recollection of the walk to P.S. 53 or the afternoons I spent with "Mother" or my mom's friend whose house smelled like moth balls. Tell me I didn't fall on the decline from the Boys n Girls Club where I skinned my knee and the scar is still there to this day. Tell me the pics of me and my family skating in central park aren't real and I didn't have coconut icees that froze my teeth.

You cannot invalidate my authenticity. I wouldn't care if I was born on January 1st and we were on the first flight to Rochester on January 2nd - I am a REAL New Yorker and your insistence otherwise does not change that these are my roots and this is my history. I don't owe anybody any justification and you can't take it from me. But if you want to piss me off, just try. Try. I promise you will see a side of me most people never do. I don't see it any different than people being proud to be black.... or italian... or military. It's part of my story. It is what it is.

A guy got me so upset today behind his "real New Yorker" commentary, I probably would have fought him if he were in front of me. I might need to sit myself down and have a talk with myself, but I felt so disrespected. One thing you will not do is tell me who I am.

Digfiles: Aaaaaaand we're back...

Y'all.... I swear, I can't. I seriously CAN NOT!

This dude hits me up on POF last weekend, right... A little flashy for my taste but def my brand of cute, so I respond. We go back and forth a little bit and eventually exchange numbers. He texts me a whole rack of pics and when I look, I'm like "Oh this is THAT dude." I remembered having seen those pics before. I figured I must have come across his profile before and just never said anything to him. Like I said, he's a little flashy for my taste. Anyway, dude calls me a little while later and automatically I feel something is off.

First of all, he told me he was "a lawyer." I don't know any lawyers who call themselves lawyers - they tend to say "attorney" - but hey, whatever. I also don't know any lawyers who dress the way he does in those pics, but again, whatever. Can't judge a book by the cover, right? But he also didn't speak like a man that's educated to that degree either. Secondly, he denounced one-night stand types on his profile but all he could talk about was how sexy I am. Literally ALL he talked about for the 5 minutes we spoke. So we hang up and I go back to his profile.

His blurb said he was from Trinidad, moved here at 12, went to school here and got his masters in law, now practicing. Now I don't know if you all are aware - he clearly isn't - but while a masters in law (LL.M.) may allow you to practice law in some countries, it does not qualify you to practice in the US. You need a JD. So right there, I know this guy's not on the level, but I hold my mule.

He texts me over the next few days, saying nothing really.... hey....wyd... that typa shit. He calls me in the middle of my work day on Wednesday and I'm busy at the time so I don't pick up. I do call back though. He's in a stairwell, talking to whomever he's with about how they have two more flights. Neither he nor the person he was speaking to sound like they are in any kind of professional space - physically or mentally LOL. I mean, he sounded like he was with the homies.... IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAMN WORK DAY LOL. He says he will call me back when he gets upstairs. He doesn't but texts me later that night asking for sexy pics (nigga what? LOL). I ignore it and go to sleep. Next day he repeats the request and I'm like no, nigga, damn. A whole day later, you still think I didn't see when you asked me the first time? LOL FOH.

So fast forward to this morning. I'm up at like 6:30 and I have POF notifications so I go into the app. All the active conversations I have are sitting in my inbox and I see this pic of someone I KNOW I haven't been talking to. I'm like who the fuck is that? LOL I go into the message and it's our thread. WTF??? I don't know what prompted him to put them up, but I assume those are his real pics. He sounds a lot more like the guy in these pics - his personality did not at all match the flashy exterior of the other guy and if you know flashy guys, they are flashy through and through. So I get out of the app and sit here fuming, pondering what I should do. I watch enough Catfish, The TV Show to know the first order of business; find the guy in the pics.

So I run a couple google searches and can't find a match to any of the pics. Fake dude's POF profile didn't even come up so I was probably doing it wrong LOL. But I'm resourceful, y'all. Don't sleep. Dude is wearing the same clothing line in every single one of his pics. Even the most loyal label whores wear something else SOMETIME. Not this dude. I think this must be HIS line. I google it. BINGO. I find a YouTube commercial for the line from about a year ago. Definitely the right dude. He's a designer from Florida. And look, we not only have an email address but a phone number too! How convenient!

I decide I'm gonna tell the guy about the catfish. Maybe he'll do something, maybe he won't, but it's the right thing to do, especially since he's with his son in one of the pics this dude's using. I would feel super violated if it were me and remembering when I saw those pics way back, he's been doing this a long time. So I type up an email with all the background and go back to the profile so I can make note of the username. Now there are NO pics up. What the hell he doing now? Must be changing the pics again. I don't want to send the email until the pics are back up so he can actually see it for himself, so I continue my investigation on Facebook. Searching the clothing line again, I find dude's page. He really is quite good looking, I would definitely date him. Bummer. A few minutes later, the catfish has put up NEW pics of the guy in Florida and I decided to turn my email into a text, complete with screen shots of the pics I was sent.

*sent*

It's like 9am on a Saturday so I can imagine what was going through his mind reading this message from a total stranger, but he did thank me and confirmed that he lives in Florida and doesn't know who the dude is. I gave him the guy's username so he can look at it himself. I don't think he's even on POF but I guarantee you he is going to be talking about that text all day long and somebody he shares it with will gladly pull it up for him.

WTF is wrong with people? Isn't there like a cut-off age to being a catfish? LOL Who is still doing shit like this after 30? Guess I can be grateful this guy was just a fucken game-playing idiot and not something more sinister, but this is why I trust my instincts. This is also why I'm doing less and less dating online and more of catching my fish the old fashioned way.

Ain't y'all glad I go through this shit so you don't have to? You're welcome.

Insanity

Tonight, my son wasn't home when he was supposed to be. An hour after his curfew, I put dinner away as some kind of assertion that he didn't deserve for me to leave it out and ready for him when he couldn't respect my rules. An hour after that, I was worried and texting his girlfriend who said she hadn't seen him at all today but would text his friends to see what she could find out. Not long after, I learn he was with his best friend earlier, had eaten at his house and they had left together. It was a bit of a comfort to know they were together but his friend's mother was concerned as well, given the fact that neither of them have cell phones. Three hours past curfew, I am in such a panic that I'm ready to call the police. But I couldn't. The events of the past week had me so afraid for my black son's life, that I couldn't even bring myself to call the police in fear of my black son's safety. Thankfully, the Lord brought him home safely, just before 2 am, and after cursing him clean on out, I retired to my bedroom and cried.

I was honestly afraid that something might have happened to my child. He's missed curfew before, but not by this much, and it pained me to feel like the one recourse I know to resort to in this situation is one that I can't even trust right now. These senseless killings by officers of the law have me in a straight jacket. I would rather have my son taking his chances in the streets than send some cops out looking for him. There is a real problem here...

Nobody's Perfect

Sorry. Been busy getting my fucking life together LOL. But I had a funny moment a little while ago that sparked a thought process I thought might warrant some discussion.

My girlfriend emails me about this date she had on Friday. I was a little thrown because she had already said she didn't like the guy but she said she went out with him just to make sure her initial position wasn't taken in haste. Okay, I guess I get that. Long story short, her initial thoughts were confirmed but she left the date feeling a way about herself. At some point during the date, the guy asked her what took her so long to give him a chance and tells her that nobody's perfect, leaving her to question whether she was being too picky and expecting someone to be perfect.

a) There's nothing wrong with a little introspection - kudos for stopping to take a look at yourself.

b) Dude is absolutely right - nobody is perfect - but just because you're not gonna be perfect doesn't mean you shouldn't at least be fucking viable LOL.

Dudes kill me with that. That's one of those things sub-par muthafuckas say to mitigate their fuckboy-ness LOL Now you just superficial and shit cause you recognize somebody ain't checking quite enough boxes.... or any fucken boxes. Nobody's perfect. That means maybe your teeth might be a little crooked (I have a special place in my heart, personally, for crooked smiles), it DON'T mean the one in the front should be all the way brown LOL. That is not okay and it's not just about your tooth being brown. It's also about all the implications that come with your tooth being brown, like you don't take care of yourself. Like you lack ambition. Like you have low self-esteem. Some random dude's gonna read this and be like "how you get all that outta that?" Bruh LOL

Myself included, grown ass women who are after some real shit ain't just looking, we're seeing. We're understanding, granted, on a basic level, the correlation between how you present and who you likely are. Are we gonna get it right all the time? Nope. Are we gonna even catch every tell-tale sign? Nope. But the likelihood that you dodge a bullet behind something that screams "RUN!" is a lot higher than the likelihood of you missing your blessing. The older and wiser you get, the more you learn to trust your instincts. Nobody's perfect but let's not take that to the extreme of issuing passes for substandard individuals to come in and fuck up the church's money. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of superficial ass women out here who will pass on an otherwise decent guy just because he's not 6'4 or his car ain't shiny enough, just like there's dudes who will pass on an otherwise decent woman cause her ass ain't fat enough or she ain't a swimsuit model. But real grownups tend to have real reasons for rejecting you. You can be cute as hell, paid in full and USDA approved but still represent some shit someone doesn't want in their lives. And it's different for every one of us. We all - ALL, cause men reject women too - just have to accept that everything ain't for everybody and no matter what you believe you bring to the table, someone could prefer to order from a different menu.

Such is life.

That said, ladies, please stop letting that ticking clock have you out here dating like you need a fucken green card LOL. Be a little picky or something, damn. Take your time. You'll probably date a lot less but the quality will go through the roof. And if you wanna just date random guys, there's nothing wrong with that; just know you can't build with all of them. Some of these dudes ain't worth much more than that hour of your time to begin with, but I contend that even the temporary dude needs to check some boxes. Because all it takes is a slip up or some unforeseen circumstances for that dude to become a permanent fixture in your life. Think about it. Don't set yourself up LOL