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Single-Minded: The Tyranny of 'Keep It Moving'
”Right, dude, you gotta keep it moving. K.I.M.” That was the advice I got years ago from a good friend who moonlights as my own personal psychiatrist. She was telling me what to do after a bad breakup. Move on. Quickly. Before something — I don’t know, like, feelings — catches up with you. I…
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Single-Minded: Vampire Fever
The whole Twilight franchise is starting to scare me a bit. Bite by bite, the teen-wolf-vampire love triangle is veering dangerously toward the melodramatic equivalent of Bermuda. Whatever innocence the ”saga” once had is being sucked into a violent vortex, beginning to look less like Romeo and Juliet and more like Chrihanna-gate. Actually, both examples…
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Single-Minded: Lonesome Dog Blues
I miss my dog way more than I thought I would, which is both scary and comforting, considering my ”previous whereabouts unknown” maternal instincts. Recently a friend compared me to ”one of those teenage mothers who can’t take care of their kids” because I sent my mini-me, Miles, to my mom in Atlanta for the…
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Single-Minded: Conversations With My Mother
This morning, my mother and I argued over whether to send my grandmother a box filled with lip plumpers/appetite suppressants. If this sounds ridiculous that’s because it’s supposed to. We are, my mother and I, a reality show on Bravo waiting to happen. But doing something like that would be beyond Ms. Frances’ realm of…
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Surviving the Big 30
One of my best friends turned 30 this week. I am not 30. I am 30-adjacent. I’m next. My mother, Frances, likes to joke (or maybe it’s something more sinister) that I am now the exact age she was when she was pregnant with me. I laugh at this because 1) it’s true and 2)…
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Single-Minded: Sending My Mom Love on Father's Day
I don’t get those single women who say they’ve had to be ”the mother and the father” to their kids. Nobody can be two people. Not even Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde could pull it off, and they had mad science on their side. Thing is you’re either someone’s mother or father, the two roles…
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Single-Minded: On Slim Thug's Susie Homemaker Fetish
I just got finished folding someone else’s underwear. Like fitted sheets, skivvies are only hard to figure out once one has to dog-ear them into submission. It’d probably be easier to just ball them up and tuck them away for later, but then there are the wrinkles to consider. Same thing goes for domesticity in…
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Single-Minded: These Heels Are Made for Walking
It has been suggested more than once that I have some type of problem. ”If you’re consciously choosing to do something to the obvious exclusion of your own personal safety, then something’s clearly wrong. You need to go to meetings where people sit on folding chairs. Take a friggin’ cab!” commanded a concerned friend through…
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Single-Minded: What Comes After the Happy Ending?
The single woman is a lot like an only child. Sometimes she can be a selfish brat. Being “the head blankety-blank in charge” of herself, she rarely has to compromise, to share, or even question. And that life ain’t half bad, nor is it a half life. It’s a good one. One many women exercise…
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Single-Minded: When Does (Adult) Life Begin?
There will always be deadly debate over when life begins. Conception? Birth? 40? But the start line to adulthood is always drawn at 18—all right 21, if you’re lucky, and maybe 30, if you’re late. What no one talks about is the change that has to happen. The switch that someone (or something) has to…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
