How To Get Rid of the Bad News Dude

This is a long post, but many of you will need to read it today.

Jasper: You know what I was thinking? When you get back to London, maybe we could sneak off somewhere together. Maybe Venice. You and me in Venice could be good.

Iris: Do you mean that? I mean, are you free to do that?

Jasper: Darling, I've just traveled halfway across the world to see you, haven't I?

Iris: [Iris & Jasper almost kiss before Iris pulls away] Yeah, that doesn't exactly answer my question. So, are you not with Sarah anymore? I mean, is that what you've come here to tell me?

Jasper: I wish you could just accept knowing how confused I am about all this.

Iris: Okay, let me translate that. So, you are still engaged to be married?

Jasper: Yes, but, I mean...

Iris: Oh, my God.

[Iris gets up from the couch]

Iris: This was a really close call. You know, I never really though I'd say this, literally never, but I think you were absolutely right about us. Very square peg, very round hole.

Jasper: You cannot mean that.

Iris: The great thing is I actually do. And I'm about three years late in telling you this, but nevertheless I need to say it. Jasper. Wait, I need the lights on. Jasper, you have never treated me right. Ever.

Jasper: Oh, babe.

Iris: Shush. You broke my heart. And you acted like somehow it was my fault, my misunderstanding, and I was too in love with you to ever be mad at you, so I just punished myself! For years! But you waltzing in here on my lovely Christmas holiday, and telling me that you don't want to lose me whilst you're about to get MARRIED, somehow newly entitles me to say, it's over. This - This twisted, toxic THING between us, is finally finished! I'm miraculously done being in love with you! Ha! I've got a life to start living.

[Picks up Jasper's jacket, walking to the door]

Iris: And you're not going to be in it.

Jasper: Darling.

Iris: Now I've got somewhere really important to be, and you have got to get the hell out.

[Opens the door]

Iris: Now!

Jasper: What exactly has got into you?

Iris: I don't know.

[Pushes Jasper out the door]

Iris: But I think what I've got is something slightly resembling, gumption.

[Slams door shut in Jasper's face. Lifts hands up and screams with joy]

(Source: The Holiday)

A while back, I wrote about The Bad News Dudes, in summary, there are those dudes who have that control over you that you know you should not let anyone have over you.  Somehow, you just can’t seem to get away from them.  Asking yourself how many more New Year’s texts or birthday tears are you going to waste on this guy.  I know, trust me I know, you’re tired of waving your hands at your favorite blog or author because it’s like he or she takes all the things in your head and puts them on paper perfectly to explain your situation with your Bad News Dude.  Truth be told, you’re going to have to stop it.  Back in the day, Jackson used to be smoking PCP, and it would send me into these crazed highs in which I could not be moved to stop chasing ass around the club.  My line brother had this tendency to grab me by my shoulders and slap me across my face.  Yes, this negro would literally slap me across the face and say, “Jackson stop this shit.”  So without further delay, this is the follow up post to Bad News Dudes but more accurately described as a “slap across the face.”

In the last post, I told you that the way the BND is able to keep you in his spell is because of the female flaw of hating to lose, or always needing to have the last word.  What you will want to do is learn how to lose the game, but win a championship.  If a boxer fought every round like it was his last, he’d lose more matches than he ever won.  Sometimes when the 4^th quarter comes in a football game, Tom Brady has to make the decision that in order to make it to fight another day, he’s not going to expound all his effort on this one game.  Nobody said the game wasn’t important, nobody is saying that if you tried hard, you couldn’t win either.  What I’m telling you is to realize that it’s just not worth it.  What are your goals in life?  A girl told me one time that she always imagined she’d be married by now, but she is in love with a guy who isn’t trying to get married anytime soon.  I gave her a verbal slap across the face.  I told her, Kevin Garnett played for the Minnesota Timberwolves for over a decade.  He was trying every year to win a championship with the team that drafted him straight out of high school and made him the highest paid player.  Every year somehow the Timberwolves organization or roster would let him down and tell him, “Don’t worry Kev, we’ll get them next year.”  Kevin is a stand up guy, and he wanted to succeed at what he had set out to do.  One day, Kev looked at his situation and thought to himself, “I’m never going to win this battle, but I won’t lose this war.”  He left Minnesota and went to Boston.  He won the war in one year.  The point is, you can’t miss out on winning the championship because you’re hung up on one game.

So you want to know how to get rid of this guy?  You’ve got a few things you can do, these aren’t steps, they’re all mutually exclusive, however if you want, feel free to do all of them.

Crash the Car

You guys remember my post, Crash the Car?  If you don’t then take a minute and go back and read it again.  If you don’t have that type of time right now, let me put it this way, sometimes you have to get in the car and then crash it.  But why would you crash your own car?  Simple, because the BND is never going to let you crash his car.  So how do you crash the car with your BND?  I can only tell you this much; you have to convince him that you’re actually in the car.  Don’t make him feel like you’re willing to give it a try, convince him that it’s not as simple as trying, convince him that you’re ALL IN.  Once you’re in the car, drive it for a little, make him feel like he can feel comfortable taking a nap.  When he’s just about ready to doze off, crash the car into a pole and save yourself. 

This can be done various ways:

• Make him an option, just like he makes you.  For some reason, men don’t like when this happens to them and they quit the game.
• Do what most women won’t do when they need to, just start asking questions.  Ask a lot of questions, sound interested, but just ask so many questions it makes him uncomfortable.  Men hate questions because they’re pathological liars, the more questions you ask the more their chance of getting caught in a lie increases.
• Tell him you’re pregnant.  When he asks if its his, tell him, “I’m not sure.”  You won’t hear from him again until the Jimi Hendrix Experience reunion tour.

I’m only half serious about that last one, but I think you get the point.  You’re going to make him think you’re onboard, even offer to drive, and then crash that car.

The Master Delete

I would cite the post that I wrote about this, but I don’t need to, I know it almost by heart since I’m the one who invented it.  One day when you’re not upset or feeling anyway about your BND (anything done in anger never sticks), pick up your phone and delete their phone number.  Then, delete them off Facebook, delete all the pictures of you guys together (at least untag them), unfollow them on Twitter, delete them from BBM, pick up your old phone and delete the number from that phone too.  Go on gchat, filter by their email address, take all those emails and delete them, if you want to save them, send them all to a folder and name it, Past Due Bills.  I think you get the picture, what you’re going to do is basically remove their presence from your life.  You’re going to cease all connection to this person.  “But Jay, I know the number by heart” – yes you do, and you also will be reminded that it’s a reason why you don’t pick up number that you don’t have saved.  Hell if you need to, save that number as “HSBC Collections” if you have to.  Just delete the BND from your life.  (Caution: You probably have done this before, you’ll probably do it again, but each time gets you closer to actually meaning it.)

Change up your routine and Feng Shui

The last thing that the Master Delete should contain is a complete renovation of your space.  The best thing to do after you’re ready to move on to a new part of your life is to rid yourself of the energy from the previous life.  Rearranging your bedroom is the best place to start.  It’s where you begin and end everyday, (hopefully lol).  Walking into your room and seeing that place where BND used to put his shoes when he’d show up at 3AM, or where he would place his cell phone, or just looking out the window in the same way that you always did will always remind you of his energy.  You want to get rid of him, rearrange that energy and flow.  The other thing you have to do is to come to grips with the fact that you can’t do everything you always did.  You can’t frequent the same place for happy hour, you will lose the mutual friends; this isn’t a divorce, you don’t get to keep Potbelly and he can have Cosi.  If you don’t change the places you go and the people you hang out with, you’ll be destined to continue running into him.  At a minimum, do not go to the same places where alcohol is served anymore.  That’s how you end up having a few too many drinks and causing a scene or making a bad decision.

Reconnect with your friends, but don’t Vietnam vet them

Your friends should be your best support group.  I always tell people this because most people think it’s their family, but at times, it’s not.  Your family is flawed because of fear.  They don’t want to see you get hurt and sometimes they won’t give you all that you need.  Sometimes your ass needs to get your feelings hurt, your heart broken, or you just need your ego broken down to the size of what I would imagine O.J. Simpson’s ego feels like right about now.  Your friends will be there for you, they’ll hang out with you.  You can’t convince nobody to do a movie or game night like you can convince your friends.  But be careful, don’t be the Vietnam War veteran to your friends.  Vietnam War veterans hate their lives so they try and bring everyone down with them.  That’s why so many of them ended up homeless, jobless and with no family to turn to.  You don’t want to turn every outing with your friends into a BND bashing contest.  Your friends are giving you an outlet to get away from you troubles, they don’t want to be part of yours.  When you Vietnam vet your friends by bringing everyone into your misery, you become that friend who is negative about everyone else’s relationships and constantly howling all night long.

In the end, you’ll grow to love him less and HIM more

You have to move on to another guy.  This is funny, “The best way to get over a guy is to get on top of another one.”  Yeah, but nobody likes advice that tells them that sex is going to solve all their problems.  So as I close, let me be honest with you.  The day you decide that you don’t want to be with BND anymore is not the day that you stop caring about him.  That won’t happen for a long time.  I once went through a situation with BNG and it took me about 3 months to get to the point where I was over the situation, and about 6 to stop being salty about it.  But you got to get back on the horse at some point.  It’s completely natural that the next guy you date, you don’t feel for him as much as you did the last guy.  Stop thinking about that, think about the fact that each day that goes by, you love the BND a little less.  “Objects in the mirror appear larger than they are.”  You know what that means?  It means that if you keep looking at your past, it will always seem like it’s right there, but in reality it’s way behind you in a distance and soon you won’t be able to see it and it won’t see you.

I’m going to stop right there, because there’s really no better way to end this post, but…

Bonus: Detonate, don’t desecrate

Anonymous asked how you can show the BND what he’s missing out on, so I figured I’d answer this here, and maybe inspire a few posts on some other blogs.  If you use this, please link me so that I can read.  Detonate, don’t desecrate is about exacting your revenge in the best way possible.  The first part is thinking about it like the difference between the guy who plants a bomb and walks away and pushes a button, or the suicide bomber.  You don’t want to be the type of person who destroys the BND, shows him what he’s missing, but you end up taking yourself down with him.  Never be a suicide bomber.  No making a scene by throwing a drink in his face at the club, no 10 minute voicemails and never smash the homies to get his attention.  Neither do you want to desecrate.  By desecrating I mean you don’t want to hurt him or put him down to prove your point.  It’s not worth it if he is down and out when you exact your revenge.  You want him to be doing just fine, but you’re doing better.  The best thing you can hope that he does is that he gets all that he ever wanted in life, and you get what you wanted, but his just doesn’t quite match up.  If your BND never wanted to truly commit because he had one foot in the streets, give him his streets.  In ten years time he’ll still be in the streets and you’ll have you happy life, whether that be a life abroad, a husband and kids, or whatever it may be.

Forgive and forget, bitch I already forgot

I'm over the bitch, and she over the top

They say love is the key, somebody changed the lock

Well, and I wish I never met ya

And I heard you're doing you, and you heard I'm doing better

And all I had to do was put two and two together

But that just makes four, but not four-ever, damn

So much for being the perfect couple

I put in overtime, I was working doubles

I wish you the best, good luck boo

(Source: How to Hate – Lil Wayne)

Congratulations, You’re Now the Old Bitch at the Club!

You cats can't keep up like you used to.

Nikki: I have a fiancé now. Sean.
Richard: Get out of here. You're getting married?
Nikki: Yeah.
Richard: Nikki Tru is walking down the aisle?
Nikki: I'm closing the deal. Sean is in real estate.
Richard: What happened?
Nikki: Uh... I was at this party. I was talking to this guy - I don't even remember what we were talking about - and... this little 22-year-old girl walks by. And he was like,”Oh, excuse me, I got to...“ Then it hit me. You know, I'm 32 years old. I'm the old bitch at the club now. Think it was the first time in my life I was talking to a man who wasn't even thinking about fucking me. So, then I met Sean. And I said to myself, I got to make this work. So we're getting married in June.
(Source: I Think I Love My Wife)

They're good with me, but still...

Every woman comes to that point in her life when she’s got to warm up to the idea that it’s not going to last forever. They don’t all reach this point at the same time, for some it will take longer than others. But the day will come when they will look in the mirror and realize, “I’m the old bitch at the club.” A few years ago people rocked with you like you was the best thing on the block, they even rearranged their schedules to get in line. A few years later, they look at you like a throwback. Nothing you can do about that; age is a part of life, a part of life that affects women way more than it affects men. Keep it real, looks matter way more in the assessment of women, than it does to men. To me, nothing is wrong with age, I think age is beautiful. I think as a woman gets a few years on her, she gets security, confidence and a sense of understanding. Insecurity is an immature trait, and those women who need attention from a man to make their day better annoy. Confidence can cover up every blemish. Kerry Washington’s teeth are crooked as Pisa but you ain’t going to tell her that her smile couldn’t light New York City. And a sense of understanding is wisdom, I can sit and listen to a woman who has lived and reached a sense of understanding for hours; chin in hand, following each word from corner to corner of her lips.

Now that we’ve gotten the pleasantries out of the way, lol. Despite all of that, I do not want any woman to be the old bitch in the club and it’s a few reasons why.

Find yourself riding around with white people
using the n-word -- a LOT.

1. You find yourself doing little girl shit – Do you remember the first time you drank? Everyone has a story they’d like to be proud of, but it ends up making me judge their parents. Listen here, stop telling people your parents let you drink around them when you was like 12. That lets me know something about your upbringing. But the better question is do you remember the first time you were drunk? That shit wasn’t fun. It was cool to have a little alcohol on your breath or to be able to tell a story the next day, but it was NOT cool to have the ambulance called to Room #636 in Day Hall to pump your stomach freshman year. Remember something, “When you get wasted, not only do you ruin your night, you ruin everybody else’s night too.” Listen babe, it’s cool to sip and whatnot, but it’s not cool to be over the age of 27 throwing up all over the bathroom. It’s not cool for you be sitting in the VIP, legs open, sipping crushed ice, fanning yourself, and everybody standing over you saying, “You’re okay... you’re okay.” Do you know what little girls do? They think their little hot asses are invincible and nobody cares. That’s a damn lie, everybody cares. When you’re a 22 year old pipsqueak and you get drunk, dudes are looking for the tag and come in like the Legion of Doom and knock bodies down. When you’re 30, come out the club and get in car with some dude not named your boyfriend, who is married now, but everybody knows you been messing with him since you were 22, we ask ourselves, “when is this bitch gonna grow up and stop getting drunk?” And the last thing little girls do is fight. I was at work one day and my coworker was telling me about how her and her girls almost got in a fight at the Renaissance. First, that coworker was my manager. Second, if you are at a party in a hotel and DJ Kid Capri is the reason why your ass went, then your ass is old. And old people need not be fighting in the club.

Ain't nothing about you like a virgin.

2. Everybody knows your ass – Don’t you want to go where everybody knows your name? Not if you’re a woman. “If too many people know your name, change it … and then change it again.” – S. P. Diddy Combs. Think of it this way, the hottest clubs are the ones that not everybody knows about, there’s exclusivity. But when you walk in the club and it seems like every dude in the joint knows who you are, it looks like you been around the block. And yes, but what do they know? Valid question, irrelevant question. Remember, “it’s not what you can prove, it’s what people think.” You want to be in a place where not everybody knows your name, where everybody doesn’t know your history, you want people to hold you in a certain light, the high light. When it’s a man, he’s well respected as he ages and it seems like everybody pays respect before they go to the bar, get a drink and get at ratchets. When it’s a woman, think about it like Lisa Raye, Lauren London and Paula Patton. When those girls first came out they was fresh meat, they was the things dreams are made of. A few years later and everybody know about their ass and now they just as basic as the next light skin chick in Hollywood. And now Zoe Kravitz winning over here.

That's messed up your friends left you like this...

3. You can’t keep up with the young b*tches – I was out on a Wednesday, a work night, I had work in about 8 hours and I was in the club. It was 11:30 and the club was empty. I was waiting on a friend because it was her birthday so I knew it was going to be a long night, but she was nowhere to be found. Now I realized that it wasn’t my birthday and I wasn’t sleeping with this girl so I wasn’t trying to buy a bottle or nothing, so I did what every other cheap ass dude does on an occasion like this, I got to the club before 11PM like we all should do more often. Anyway, I’m in this club, trying to sip a $9 drink as slow as possible because I got work in EiGHT hours. At 12:30, the club started to fill up, but it still wasn’t packed. “It’s Wednesday!” I thought to myself. Almost as soon as I said that, like clockwork, I went to the bar to get a drink which took about 10 minutes and I turn around and the club is packed! These young b*tches came to the club at 12:50 ready to get it in. They walked in with their best dresses on, 5 inch heels, and salon curls. (Look here, if you want to see which of those chicks ain’t got jobs, look at the size of those curls. Grown ass women do not spend $300 on a curling iron.) It was around the same time that all the old chicks in the club was like, “Shit what we gon’ do now to keep the guy’s attention?” They ain’t got a chance, their ass is tired. Look if I can’t keep up with a generation whose jeans get tighter every other Friday and color arrangements get more outrageous on the 1st and 15th, then there’s no way you can keep up with these little women who are doing everything in their power to use their looks to get a free drink and couch to stand on. Them young girls can club night to night, when you’re old, you can’t do two nights in a row even when you’re on vacation. When you’re young you start drinking at a cookout at noon and you party until 7AM the next morning. If you start drinking at noon on Saturday, your ass will be sleep by 8PM and you not making it out the next day. Hangovers last until you eat and drink a glass of water at 21, when you’re 30 hangovers last two or three days.

You ain't slick Eva, your ass getting old too!

4. You need to tuck this in and cover that up – Keep it real, no matter how much you try, unless your name is Stacey Dash after a certain age, your body isn’t going to look like a 22 year old’s again. Because of that fact of life, they created contoured clothing and all types of stuff to help you cover up your blemishes. When you were 19, you could afford to say, “I hate wearing a bra,” when you’re 35, put a damn bra on, nobody want to see your breasts giving everybody thumbs down in the club. And as you get older, bras get more expensive because they got to do more work. If you need spanx to keep it all in the right place, then maybe you should find something that is more fitting to your body type. And if you have flip flops in your purse because your feet can’t take standing in heels all night anymore, reevaluate your wardrobe. Point is, at a certain point, you’re wasting more money on keeping your beauty than should ever be spent. Look Michelle Obama is older than Barack, quite frankly, if that guy has gray hair, then you KNOW, Michelle has a few, but you won’t see one! Michelle ain’t in the club though, she’s in the oval office and she can afford to keep dying her hair every two weeks. But if you need to get that jet black hair dye kit every two weeks to keep touching up, your grays… embrace that sh*t boo boo, your ass is getting old. A gray streak is cool, gray strays are not. Muffin tops and feet that look like Bojangle biscuits are a sign that it’s time to take it home from the club.

5. You’re ready to settle for less than desired options – I went to my boy for some advice on some thoughts I had about a few women that we’ve idolized since we graduated from college. He’s a few years ahead of me and I asked him, “Let’s say a dude wifed her down and threw a ring on it, would people look at him like he won, or would they look at him like the dude she finally settled down with?” No matter how we sliced that pie we kept coming up with the same solution, if you wait until the girl has decided that she’s ready to settle down, you’re never the first option, you’re the last. As women get older they have to think about their “draft position.” The older you get, you may be able to still pull a couple guys in the club, but those rookies are threatening to take your spot. You’re no longer in your prime, you’re looking at retirement. I’ve seen some chicks in the club who were like Brett Favre, trying to give it that last go. If I had to break old b*tches in the club down in terms of football analogies; the older chick who on any given day could give a younger sister a run for her money, like a Stacey Dash is Brett Favre with the Jets, she can still find a job, but we all know she’s 43. The older chick who really doesn’t have any business still out there trying to play with the little b*tches even though she still got a fatter ass than most of them, like a Lisa Raye is Brett Favre with the Vikings. That older chick who’s not quite that old, but she got a kid so dudes take that into consideration when deciding if they want to deal with her, like a Lauren London is Jim Tressel. LOL… I’m sorry I was waiting to say that all post long, anyway you get the point.

This is just nasty...

I try and told my female friends how to change their reputations from being considered boppers to being taken seriously and it always came down to; act your age not your shoe size, know your size not what size you used to be, and stop being in the damn club all the time. If you don’t hear anything I’ve ever said just pay attention to this, you can’t do everything a man can do, sometimes you have to do what a woman has to do. Men are lying if they say they don’t go to the club to meet a girl, my mom and dad met at a party, my aunt and uncle met at a house party thrown by the same people, it happens. I tell you one thing though, my mom wasn’t 32 when she met my dad, she was 24 or 25, it made sense that she was still frequenting the scene. When a man is looking at a chick that’s gotten a little older and she’s in the club playing the field, or trying to get chose, questions just run through his head all night long. Why is she here? Is she still talking to that promoter? Seriously, no shoes on? You 30 with no shoes on in the club? I wonder when she’s going to figure out that she’s not 25 anymore? It’s Tuesday, how do you have a real job if you in the club at 2AM on a Tuesday? (I’m lying like shit, how I know she there if I’m not? LMAO.) Anyway y’all see my point. Don’t be asked to leave the club, leave on your own accord. You just don’t ever want to be in the position where you have to hear this:

Debbie: I'm not gonna go to the end of the fucking line, who the fuck are you? I have just as much of a right to be here as any of these little skanky girls. What, am I not skanky enough for you, you want me to hike up my fucking skirt? What the fuck is your problem? I'm not going anywhere, you're just some roided out freak with a fucking clipboard. And your stupid little fucking rope! You know what, you may have power now but you are not god. You're a doorman, okay. You're a doorman, doorman, doorman, doorman, doorman, so... Fuck You! You fucking fag with your fucking little faggy gloves.
Doorman: I know... you're right. I'm so sorry, I fuckin' hate this job. I don't want to be the one to pass judgement, decide who gets in. Shit makes me sick to my stomach, I get the runs from the stress. It's not cause you're not hot, I would love to tap that ass. I would tear that ass up. I can't let you in cause you're old as fuck. For this club, you know, not for the earth.
Debbie: What?
Doorman: You old, she pregnant. Can't have a bunch of old pregnant bitches running around. That's crazy, I'm only allowed to let in five percent black people. He said that, that means if there's 25 people here I get to let in one and a quarter black people. So I gotta hope there's a black midget in the crowd.
(Source: Knocked Up)

Why You Don’t Like the People Who Like You

Edith Evans: You know what I wanted. I wanted to know where we were. Now I know.
Jack Linden: And?
Edith Evans: You love the person you're having the affair with.
(Source: We Don’t Live Here Anymore)

If a person tells you how to mend your heart but has never had his broken, don’t believe them. They will give you anecdotal evidence but it won’t work. You got to have money to make money, you got to have heartbreak to be able to fix hearts. You wouldn’t go to a surgeon who had never performed the procedure before, don’t take advice from someone who hasn’t done it before either.

I like to think we’re all in this rat race of romance and love. I’m guilty as charged, I didn’t have it in me to admit it at the time, but looking back I think I turned out okay so I can say this. I chased a couple girls who wanted somebody else. It wasn’t that what I was offering wasn’t good enough, it was that it wasn’t good enough for her. I realized years later what happened and why I couldn’t ever get those girls to like me the way that I liked them. A few years later, I’d be on the other side of the situation, I have a girl chasing me, and meanwhile, I was chasing something else. It’s amazing when a woman lays down and opens up to a man that she’s all his, 100%, but he ignores it and keeps it moving. There’s a few reasons why this happens, it actually all makes sense. I may be going too far to say it makes sense, it’s probably more accurately described as, it can be explained.

Men date down and women date up

Shhh… don’t tell women this, but they run the whole show. A man’s goal in life is to convince the woman that she has absolutely no power, and a woman’s goal in life should be to actually take her power and stop waiting for it to be given to her. Men want the baddest girl in the club, they will almost never get her. That girl doesn’t want a single man in the club, she wants the man who owns the club. That’s how men think and that’s how women think. There’s people in the NFL who are looking to be the highest paid player in the league, and then there’s a chick labeled as a groupie wants to marry the owner. When a man approaches a woman he does a quick analysis of whether he thinks he’s going to get anywhere with her, this is where most men bow out. Many men will bow out because they start to infer all types of things about a woman based on her looks, her clothes, and the people she’s surrounding herself with. The thing is that no man approaches a woman that he feels he’s has no chance with. Contrary, women will sit around and contemplate how they can get the guy they got their eye on to notice them. For those of us who went to college, think back to your freshman year, did it make sense that just about every girl had about six or seven guys in their sights? And just to drive this point home, most of those six or seven guys turned out the campus, and although the freshman male population idolized six or seven girls too, they ended up sleeping with everybody but those six or seven girls. Men date down, and women date up. Since they’re never on the same page it’s impossible to ever get with the one you actually want.

It’s Too Easy

To be perfectly honest, I realized that my approach in my younger years made it too easy for a woman. You can’t walk up to a woman, lay it all out in front of her and expect her to accept it. People want to work hard for what they get, they don’t want it given to them. When I offered to get my ish together, not move around too much, cuddle and spend time holding hands, take a chick out on a date and not sleep with her friends, she immediately slid me into the “friend” zone. Maybe they thought something was wrong with me, maybe they wanted a challenge, either way that shit ain’t work, so I stopped doing that. Now when I met a girl, went out on a few dates, and saw her homegirl out and tried to holler at her too – all of a sudden, both of these women are interested in me. That doesn’t make an ounce of sense. Jedi Mind Trick #386: Don’t call women, just text them. Only call them out of necessity. Why? If I don’t call you, you will ask me why I don’t call you because you want me to be the one who calls, but the guy who will call you, you don’t want to call you, so you never ask him to call. You’ve already admitted the interest, so stop trying to make a man jump through hoops. I can never call and it won’t even matter.

It’s not fun, there’s no glory

There’s a girl who has a good thing. She got a dude who brings home his check before he goes to the club, he has a dude who talk marriage and makes wise financial decisions, he treats her with respect, doesn’t mind that she won’t have sex with him but once or twice a week, and you know what she does? She f*cks his irresponsible best friend. There’s just something about having sex with that person you shouldn’t be having sex with that makes it worth it, or so they think. There’s something about that scene in Brown Sugar where she decides she’s going to try and sleep with him, despite knowing that she was about to get married the next day. Have you ever seen Indecent Proposal? There’s something about taking the woman away from another man’s kingdom and putting her in yours. That’s something you can look at later on in life and be proud of the chase. When I was in elementary school, it was cool to send notes to a girl that you liked and say, “I Like You, do you like me, check: yes or no.” All the chicks that checked “yes”, we went together for a couple weeks or days, but I spunt my whole 4th grade on Rena when she asked for a pencil, drew a box, checked it and wrote, “maybe.”

You can do better

Truth be told, you can always do better. The hardest is the first million dollars, but after that it’s easier to make two, three, 10 or 50. For a lot of us, that’s how we think about our love lives. Once you found that girl or guy that you never thought you’d be able to pull, your sights are set on, well what could I do now?! It’s never about being happy with what you have. Our love lives are the only parts of our lives where we are encouraged not to be progressive. We want more money, better jobs, better houses, better cars, but when it comes to a relationship, we are told that once you get something you should stop wanting something better. I don’t know if that’s fair or not, but what I will say is that when a guy pulls the baddest girl in the club, he doesn’t think to stop and enjoy the fruits of his labor, he thinks he can do it again. So that’s what a man does, he continues to keep trying to do it again and again, until finally he craps out. …Because in the end he will end up dating a level below than what he really wants.

It all comes down to this, “Quitting while you’re ahead is not the same thing as quitting.” The first time I heard that was in the movie American Gangster, but I’m sure its origin was well before that picture came out. But like every flaw in every gangster or hero, they just could never stop and smell the roses, they had to keep going. Tony Montana didn’t want to stop and it ended up costing him his life. Frank Lucas wouldn’t stop and it ended up costing him his life. I’m sure there was a guy who wanted to love and adore Halle for the rest of her life, but she didn’t want them and now she’s in the place she is today. I guess all I can do is explain to you that no one ever wants the people who want them, and hope that the next time you’re in this position you either have the strength to walk away or the strength to stay.

Morning Mail – 8.25.11

Sheeni Saunders: You got me expelled.
Nick Twisp and Francois Dillinger: I'm sorry, Sheeni.
Sheeni Saunders: Do you realize what life is like for me here? Do you have any idea?
Nick Twisp and Francois Dillinger: Sheeni, I've been alone my whole life. I know what it's like. Sheeni, I burned down Berkeley for you. I destroyed both of my parents' cars. And I've lied and manipulated and had you sedated, and I did all that so we wouldn't have to be alone anymore.
Sheeni Saunders: You're him, aren't you?
Nick Twisp and Francois Dillinger: I'm him?
Sheeni Saunders: You're my François. You're the one I've been looking for.
Nick Twisp and Francois Dillinger: Sheeni, I want what you want. I want to live all over the world and have adventures, but I'm not François. I'm the guy who saw you and fell in love with you and would do anything for you. That's who I am.
(Source: Youth in Revolt)

That has nothing to do with anything today, but I watched it last night and thought that was a very interesting line. Heads up, there will be two posts here today. I have another post lined up, but I’m overdue for some Morning Mail.

So I’ve got a flaw. I get annoyed very easily. You ever have someone tell you that they would rather you bring something up as soon as it happens so it doesn’t build up? People tell me that all the time, but I can’t do anything about that. I get so annoyed all the time, but the thing about me is that I learned a long time ago that just because it’s not how I would do it, don’t make it wrong. Doesn’t mean I don’t get annoyed, it just means I can let it rock because I respectfully disagree. Now if I brought everything up as soon as it happened, people would always think I didn’t like them. My mother says I don’t like people like my dad. She says that for as many friends I have, when I go in the house at night, I disappear and rarely reach out to anyone.

If you noticed on Twitter the other day I was talking to my boy @JMikey and I said that I prefer to go to strip clubs to relax because that’s the only place I can be certain that no one is looking at me. He said that’s common for introverts who everybody think are extrovert. Just because you see me out there, don’t mean that I’m actually extrovert. I realize that I have tons of friends and only a couple actually know who I am. And when one of those people is my mother and the other is my best friend, that makes it hard for anybody to think they really know me.

This causes me problems because once that annoyance boils over, I have to just get away. I throw up the red dot on gchat, I get curt with my coworkers, I stop answering my phone, and I am on the verge of a Randy Moss moment. The Randy Moss moment is when you get so annoyed with a person that you result to squirting a Gatorade bottle at them while they aren’t looking. It’s in my nature to be there for everybody, but often there’s nobody there for me. People always ask me questions, but I rarely ever answer them. They may know the stories I’ve told them, but they never know who I really am. So when everyone is constantly coming to you with their problems and their life, where is the space to vent when your life is crazy. You develop relationships with people and they are so used to telling you about their life, that when you feel you need to share about yours, you just cut the relationship off. No need for that conversation if we never had it before.

I thought back over this and I realized that I’ve actually lost friends because I wouldn’t tell them anything about me. I’ve had women plead with me that I’m so enigmatic that it’s a turnoff. That I put up walls so that no one can ever really know the real me. In my opinion, that’s called being safe, and protecting my intellectual property. I realize that it has its flaws and all, I’m willing to deal with that. Maybe not too much longer, but I just don’t think I want everybody trying to put their two cents in my plate. If I could get a dollar from one or two people then it would be fine, but two cents from twenty is annoying. My mother thinks that it’s the fact that so many people have access to me. I think that’s true. I can’t count how many people feel like they want to talk to me in a day. It’s like popup video on gchat, I never can keep enough windows open on gchat for all the friends I’m talking to. Lately, I’ve been feeling like @slimjackson, “I reserve the right not to respond.”

I wonder if anyone will ever see this movie the way I wrote this scene
The people in your life, characters or writers, do you know what I mean?
I’m tired of this week already, it’s Thursday, but Friday can go see Irene
I seen a lot, but what I wouldn’t trade to look in the mirror and see green
Why does everybody want an explanation, I’m starting to hate them more
Relax and release, I’m just doing my thing, and checking behind every door
I learned a long time ago not to go through those I been before
I’ve been carrying bags in the store so long my back gets sore
I wonder if I’ll ever get some peace, quiet, calm and redemption
Or will I have to opt for voluntarily segregation, call it separation
This is getting too deep, so hold your breath, never asphyxiation
Got to weigh my options, do I want to be the focus of my own celebration
I elect not to answer the hard question, plausible deniability
But my word has to be oak in order to keep my reliability
The hardest advice to take is your own, personal inability
Perhaps I’m crazy, what can I say, no collision, only liability

If You’re Going to Break Up With Her, Do It Fast

Look at Ye's face in this picture for five minutes.

I have a friend who spends a lot of time complaining about his relationship with his girl. His problem is very odd to me because he’s at the age where he’s looking for a life partner and to be perfectly real, he doesn't see that in the cards for this girl. I was talking to him one day and I told him this story about NFL quarterback Matt Leinart.

He knew! He always knew!

Matt Leinart won the Heisman trophy and National Championship in his junior year at USC. At that very moment he knew that the next stage would be the NFL. He knew that if he left USC immediately after his junior year, he’d be an early first round pick. He could potentially be the first pick in the draft. Matt made the decision to return to USC for his senior year and contend for another national championship. Matt looking at his future decided that playing another year with Reggie Bush and the all star cast of players at USC was too much to pass up for the money in the NFL. Not to mention as we would later find out, college life was great for the USC Trojans. In that completely unnecessary senior season, Matt Leinart would contend for the Heisman trophy again and also the National Championship. Matt lost both. He left USC after his senior year and his draft status slipped to 10th in the 2006 draft. Matt made a decision to stay in a relationship that he knew was over and it caused him to lose out on millions of dollars, and the first pick in the draft.

How did this relate to my friend? I told him, well there are times when men stay in situations way too long knowing that they won’t be with her in the long run. They will eventually let the relationship die its slow death and then get back on the scene and it will affect their “draft position.” To take it further, a man can be in a relationship with a woman at the age of 27, he stays with her until he’s 30 or 31 and then he’s now a 31 year old man in the club trying to bag shorties. And for a man that’s not all that bad, but to be perfectly honest at 31, you’ve lost a step to the younger 24 and 25 year old whippersnapper. Had that man made the decision to break up with his girl at 27, he would have a better chance, but at 31 he’s seen completely different.

I know some guys who would have paid good money for
her ass six years before he dumped her like trash.

In addition to the fact that he ruins his draft position he also ruins the girl’s position. Men catch and hold 25 year old women for 4-5 years and then drop them at 30. That’s horrible! As a man we know the importance of a woman’s twenties when it comes to finding a partner. She can still go on to lead a normal life, but here we are again speaking about a woman’s love life like she has an STD she can’t get rid of.

I read this in GQ one time, “Once a gentleman decides he does not want to be with a woman any longer, he breaks up with her directly and never calls again.” Deep. That’s actually the absolute truth. Moreover, it’s not just for her and her feelings, but it’s for his livelihood. Every moment you waste in a failing relationship is time wasted that could be better spent looking for a better option. As men in failing relationships we start to create a list of “places we’d be open to a trade to,” but we stay in that relationship and those options keep growing. Think about it this way, my friend told me to invest in Gold when it was $690, but I may have valued that cash in my bank account more than I valued picking up the investment. Three years later, Gold is still trending up, but it costs $1,800 a share now. I can’t afford that share anymore, had I seized the opportunity earlier I would be doing okay for myself.

True... true.

I’ll just put it this way, men break up with women because she doesn’t have it, or she’s pissed him off and he doesn’t want to be there anymore. There are various reasons why a man breaks up with a woman. 1. He doesn’t like her personality as much as he thought he would. 2. He is not sexually satisfied with her and realizes that the relationship is not great enough to stay the course. 3. He likes her a lot, but he does not feel that he could spend his life with her. So what happens when you stay in that relationship after you’ve made all these conclusions? You waste your time with a woman who annoys the hell out of you, you have bad sex and you get stressed out by conversations about spending the rest of your life together. There’s nothing worse than sitting on the couch with your girlfriend talking about “our kids are going to” but in your mind you think, “but we’re not having any kids…” And trust me, since I’ve been dating women, I’ve found that after they fall in love, they start up marriage and kid conversations almost immediately. Oh no, they’ll tell you they’re not serious, they’re just playing around … but she ain’t playing! That’s really what happens when those hormones get to moving around in her. I’ve seen a man wait until he had bought a ring, a house and was planning a wedding before he finally broke down and told his girlfriend, “Baby, it’s not going to work.” Do you know when he and all of his friends knew it was not going to work? Years before. YEARS!

When he was in college he started dating this chick after he found out she had a bit of a past. Hey everyone has a freshman year and do some crazy things, but he said, “I’m just smashing, I’m not wifing her down.”

When he got out of school he was still dating the chick and now he’s showing up to events with her and people are saying on the side, “Yo remember when that chick was in the house doing…” but he said, “I’m just smashing, I’m not wifing her down.”

Couple years later, I said, “Let’s look at this situation, you are only sleeping with her, you are seen with her in public, she has her shit at your house, it’s obvious that she’s only sleeping with you and you get emotionally disturbed when she does something you don’t like. At what point will you admit that this is your girl?” He laughed, but he said, “I’m just smashing.” Two weeks later, “Maybe that’s my girl.”

Noodle.

Over the next few years the following would happen:

1. She would lie to him about dudes in her past.
2. She would accuse him of sleeping with women that he’d been friends with forever and never slept with.
3. She demanded that he inconvenience himself countless times. She was completely inconsiderate of his life. Long story short, there’s a story around here about the time that she demanded he leave the club after he purchased a few bottles and come pick her up and take her home because she was drunk.
4. She said to him numerous times, “I don’t want kids, I don’t like what they do to a woman’s body.” And this fool wanted a big family!

All this was happening and he’s just staying in this relationship thinking that by some divine intervention it would work out. And you know what at a certain point, he knew it wouldn’t but that didn’t stop him from buying that ring.

When he said, “So I went ring shopping this weekend” we all looked at him and said, “Word?” As a friend, you can never say, “DUDE THAT’S A HORRIBLE IDEA!” It gets awkward once he gets defiant and still ends up marrying her anyway. So we did what anyone else would do, we waited until he got around to telling us why he was marrying her. This guy said this, “You know, I’ve been with her for so long that I figured, might as well just get married.” And we all looked around and said, “That shit ain’t gonna last.” (We didn’t say that aloud, we just said, “Word.”) And sure enough, right around the moment he decided that it was time to come clean, do you know what happened?

He was now a man, 29 years old, single and with $500,000 worth of debt because of he paid for a ring, house and down payments of a wedding. Now when a woman is looking at my friend, they’re thinking, “He’s a great guy, but that’s a lot of debt .” He f*cked up his draft position by staying with a chick he knew he didn’t want to be with too damn long.

Get the hell out of there.

How Can I Mess Up Your Self-Esteem?

"How the eff i'm gon' eff up how you feel about you?! --
It's called self-esteem, it's esteem of yo' effing self!"

Over the weekend I had the pleasure of sitting down with a friend of mine who told me something about my post last week. She could see that it was having an effect on me and she wanted to give me some words of encouragement. I didn’t really want to talk about it because it’s just a sore spot and most people don’t seem to get it, even after I explain it to them. They keep going back to, “But you said you have a preference and that’s really not that big of a deal.” Meanwhile, I’m like, “I didn’t say that, but whatever.” Over the weekend I thought, “You know, I look at the friends I have and most of them went to the same school as me. Does that mean I have a Cuse preference? Or does that mean, that I looked at the friends I have and assessed that the majority of them went to Cuse?” I digress. She said this to me:

“Jay what you have to understand is that those girls do not have a problem with you, they have a problem with their selves. You can’t let that affect you, or weigh you down, there’s nothing that you can do to make them feel better about them.”

You had to hear her say it too, she made it sound so sexy too. She said some other things, but that was the best part. It really summed up our conversation about that article. Now another friend as I mentioned on Tunde’s blog the other day, said, and pardon the ignorance of this statement, “You can’t do nothing about bitches with no self-esteem.” As soon as he said that, I immediately had the idea to finally write this post. It really came down to this for me:

I found it funny that these girls were trying to tell
women how to feel "pretty" they probably never had
a single problem.

1) No one can make you look at yourself in the mirror and feel pretty, if you don’t

I used to end each of my blog posts and radio interviews with, “When you wake up, go look in your mirror and tell yourself, you’re beautiful. If you don’t tell yourself that everyday, you can’t expect anyone else to.” That was something that people probably thought I was just saying, but I really believe that. Do you know why there are so many women who tweet photos of themselves in the mirror everyday? Because they see themselves in that mirror and they say, “Damn I look good.” I’ll be honest with you, not every twitpic that I see is of an attractive young lady, but you know what counts? They think they’re beautiful. Your daddy and your husband will tell you that you’re beautiful every time you ask, but those men are supposed to tell you that, that’s their job in life. But if you’re waiting on society to validate your beauty, then you’ve forgot that no one should have to tell you something that you already know. I wonder all the time when I’m out on the town why some women wear outfits that are unbecoming. I don’t think high waisted skirts look good on short and skinny women, but that doesn’t mean anything. I got the answer to why women wear outfits that are unbecoming, it’s simple; because they don’t think about that, they think their ass is the flyest in the club.

2) It shouldn’t take you long to realize that just because you’re not a supermodel or video vixen, you’ll be just fine in life

Growing up my mother always bought my shoes a half-size bigger than my foot so that I could grow into them. Then one year I went to school and I got my shoe measured and it was the same size as last year. It was here that I came to realization that I probably wasn’t going to be tall. I still tried and rock out with a half-size bigger, but after a few months of that annoying fold in the front of my shoe. I went to Foot Locker and dropped down to my real size and got some shoes that fit me exactly. And I’ve been wearing the same size shoe since then. It took me four months to get over the fact that there was absolutely no chance that I’d be one of those tall guys, so I decided to just be the best I could be at my height.

You should Youtube this at least once a week until
you really start to get it.

Growing up, I looked at guys who all the girls were attracted and I thought to myself, “Why wasn’t I born with light eyes or ‘good hair’?” And after staring in the mirror trying to tell myself that my eyes were brown instead of dark brown, I decided that it didn’t matter, wasn’t going to stop me from trying to date the woman of my dreams. I looked around at dumb ass noodles in high school who begged their mom for colored contacts for Christmas and I thought to myself, “Those fools have no idea how dumb they look. Your eyes ain’t turquoise and neither are Lil’ Kim’s.” Even now, I know that I don’t look like Idris Elba, Boris Kodjoe or Michael Eady, there’s nothing I can do about the fact that I look better than all of them. #seewhatididthere.

I don’t even like this guy all that much, but I can tell he has high self-esteem; Lebron James. That guy has no intentions of looking into a Rogaine prescription; he looked in the mirror one day, while biting his nails and said, “Damn my hairline going back quick as shit.” Then he proceeded to acknowledge that he was f*cking rich and that wasn’t going to stop him from winning a championship or having sex with as many women as he pleased. Him and his early hair loss was just fine.

3) There’s always something to bitch about, but it takes an adult to move on, or start a revolution

Sophia started her sentence saying, “All my life I had to fight” and the only people who heard the rest of that quote was the women in the audience. No one really cares about your story and why you feel like you’ve been hurt or had to go through a lot to get here today. They care about what you did despite your messed up circumstance. This might sound insensitive but you can tell the world that your whole life people always tried to holla at your older sister because she was light skin and had “good hair,” and no one gives a shit.

Robin had presence. Halle just was a cute face.

Listen to me, in real life, Lisa McDowell might have gotten the Prince, but Patrice didn’t let that stop her. She carved out some space, put some makeup on, and went and got hers too. And in real life, the Prince would have smashed Patrice off first anyway. Those fairy tales endings only happen in movies. If you don’t believe that ask most of the men you know about Gina and Pam. Yeah, people loved them some Gina, but on the low, a few good men would always say, “But Pam had ass for days, I would have probably got at her.” There’s countless examples of this even in Boomerang, Halle Berry was light skin and pretty as hell, but if you asked most men they would say, ”That shit was unrealistic, I would have got at Robin Givens.” Robin Givens had her molars removed by Mike Tyson in the 7th grade and she has a forehead the size of Cowboys Stadium, she didn’t let that affect her and she went on to be one of the most attractive women in Hollywood. And if you can’t move on then you’ve got to do something about your situation. You think Jennifer Hudson sat around on that set thinking, “Damn this bitch Beyonce is stealing the spotlight, nobody is checking for my ass.”? Nope, she Spartan’ed up and killed the performance and showed you the true meaning of, “And you… and you… and you… you’re going to love me!!!”

Low point for the man Ye.

4) Stop taking everything as a personal attack (Bear with me, this is important)

Look I can’t tell you that I don’t get offended and defensive when someone personally attacks me. That’s natural. If you say my writing is wack, I’m going to say you’re wack for saying that shit. That’s fine, fair exchange is no robbery. However, if someone tells me that they like dating guys over 6 feet. I do not steal the mic and start complaining. I always low-key judge men who say weak statements like, “We all the same height in bed.” What does that mean? Her statement ain’t have nothing to do with you. I think we need a strict No Country For Stealing the Mic. There’s only one Kanye in this world, and he’s the only one who could get away with some hoe shit like storming the stage when he was upset about the outcome. However, I think women take the cake here. I’ve seen a blog post about football and how women shouldn’t talk so much in between commercial breaks turn into a discussion on how she found out her husband was cheating on her because he was always watching football with his “boys.” Nobody cares about that, it wasn’t about you.

If I make a post about Latinas, then I make a post about Latinas. Don’t get on there and talk about, “Another brother with an issue with women who look like his mother.” Look my dad was born with blonde hair and blue eyes, so when you think about it, my mother is darker than me for me to end up being this brown. My mother has had natural hair since I was in the 5th grade, and she’s had locks for most of those years. My mother is one of the most beautiful women on the planet. People rarely even believe she has a son my age, and I appreciate the fact that I’ve got those genes, I still get told that I look like I could be in college. (Never mind the fact that I have on skinny jeans and Vans and I’m going to the club.) The point is, I know who my mother is and I know she is beautiful, I don’t have any issue with that. I told my dad I needed a ride to the movies to take my girl out in middle school, he asked who she was, I said, “It’s Gabby from school.” He said, “That little white girl? I hope she’s not wack.” He didn’t go off on me about not dating a Black girl. I had done that already, and I would do it again later. He wasn’t tripping, he didn’t feel any type of way about it. All I’m saying is, the post wasn’t about dark skinned women, it wasn’t about African-American women, it wasn’t about societal norms or how everybody wants to be Europeans, it was about Latinas. That’s what it was about.

Last story about mic grabbing, in New York they have this program called HEOP and that allows kids from lower income families to go to school for free. At graduation they always have a reception for them, I’m sitting there watching all these kids get their certificate and this girl sitting at my table start a rant about how her mother makes too much money and she had to pay full price, but they’re not rich and she had to struggle. I looked at her and said, shut the hell up, this is not your part of the show. Show some respect for these people.

You would too. You would too.

5) If you let other people determine how you feel about yourself, you’ll always feel like a piece of shit

“They said I couldn't play football I was too small. They say I couldn't play basketball I wasn't tall. They say I couldn't play baseball at all. And now everyday of my life I ball.” – Dwayne Michael Carter. If you let the media tell you, Lil Wayne would think that he was a gay midget Martian. But he shook that off a long time ago and then he even went back to joke about it, “Damn right I kiss my daddy” and “I am not a human being, I am a Martian.” I was listening to the Donnie Simpson show one morning in DC and one of the hosts said, “He kissed Baby” and the other guy responded, “But he kissed Lauren too!” And that sealed the deal for a lot of people listening. His grandmother called him, Tune, because she said his voice sounded funny and he was always singing. He took that and turned it into a multi-millionaire dollar marketing ploy. He went to jail and Tunechi dropped an album and it went platinum. This should show you something about each and every one of us. We all have the power to feel good about ourselves even when the world tries to make us feel bad. I was really feeling this chick one time and she said to me, “I just feel like I would break your little ass.” You know what I did? I said, "Eff you, I’m bringing skinny back.” I wasn’t going to let someone else make me feel inadequate in anyway.

Everytime I get a comment or an email, yes I get hate mail, that starts off with, “People like you are the reason why women …” whatever else they say I rarely pay attention, I immediately think to myself, how in the hell can I do that? How can I change the way you feel about yourself? Does another person really have the power to determine how you feel about yourself? Damn that’s rough. I don’t think anyone should have that problem. You have to learn to define yourself for yourself. Lot of these articles, the TV we watch and even the music we listen to will have you bamboozled if you don’t first determine who you want to be and then be happy with the person you become.

Still my favorite picture ever.

Morning Mail - 8.15.11 (Ignorance is Bliss)

Douglas Freeman: In all the years you've been doing this, how often can you say that we've produced truly legitimate intelligence? Once? Twice? Ten times? Give me a statistic; give me a number. Give me a pie chart, I love pie charts. Anything, anything that outweighs the fact that if you torture one person you create ten, a hundred, a thousand new enemies.
(Source: Rendition)

You’ve got a choice as an American. This is a choice that for some strange reason most Americans will never take advantage of. You have a choice not to know. You have the choice to go to sleep at night and wake up the next morning turn on the news and the worst news that you’ll probably see is a homicide or maybe a house burned down and a family lost their home. Worst case scenario, Casey Anthony is allowed to adopt a child. What you won’t hear is that at the Starbucks near your job, 30 people were killed and 70 injured in a bombing. That’s a liberty that Americans take for granted every day, they can rest assured that they are protected.

I’ve posted this here before, but I’ll post it again, as some of you are new to the blog.

Col. Jessep: Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinburg? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to.
(Source: A Few Good Men)

In my personal opinion, most people in this country think they have some clue of what’s going on in this country and what we are doing internationally to protect our interests. We’ve been subject to so many #gotems over the years, that I’m fairly sure most Americans are convinced they have a clue and have no clue whatsoever. I might have been the only one who noticed that a helicopter went down in Afghanistan that was carrying the Navy Seals who took out Osama Bin Laden. I might have been the only one who then noticed that the terrorists who we said were responsible for this were taken out a few days later. Am I the only one who wants to see some fucking due process? I’m sorry I’m sure they are all guilty, but I would like to hear what these people have to say for themselves.

But then again, do I really want to know? Because my life is pretty peachy and fine today.

I’ve posted this here before too:

Durant: My government will never negotiate for me.
Abdullah 'Firimbi' Hassan: Then perhaps you and I can negotiate, huh? Soldier to Soldier.
Durant: I am not in charge
Abdullah 'Firimbi' Hassan: Course not, you have the power to kill, but not negotiate. In Somalia, Killing is Negotiation.
Abdullah 'Firimbi' Hassan: Do you think if you get General Aidid, we will simply put down our weapons and adopt American democracy? That the killing will stop? We know this. Without victory, there will be no peace. There will always be killing, see? This is how things are in our world.
(Source: Black Hawk Down)

We’ll go to work today, we’ll think we’re safe. We’ll get on public transportation and we’ll go to our jobs and we’ll imagine that somehow our lives are all working to help keep us safe. But we’re all just plugged in safely to the Matrix. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but I will tell you this much, WMATA scares the shit out of me. If someone really wanted to set it off, that’s probably where they’d start. I’ve rode trains in NYC too and the same exists there. There’s just nothing stopping a terrorist attack from happening. Terrorist, I really hate that word.

I think terrorism is a ploy. It actually doesn’t exist, it’s a term that we created to make people scared and legitimize wars that are fought over issues that we really don’t want to talk about publicly. And if it does exist we’ve got no way of dealing with it. It’s just war, and it’s a war that under the current way America does business we can’t win. This happened before in history too and we just didn’t peep it all that well. Actually when you study it, every superpower always falls because they a new form of warfare comes out and does away with the old. England was able to overthrow Spain because of a superior Navy. America was able to overthrow England because we stopped fighting wars with our chests puffed out and started wising up to using our environment to tactfully win. And Germany almost took over the world with the machine gun. Until of course America installed our current Air Force which has left us as the “superpower” that we are today. But terrorism… or what we define as terrorism today is a new beast.

Around the time that Osama was killed I said that I actually think that he was already dead, or that he never existed in the first place, or maybe they always knew where he was and just neglected to pop him. You see, we needed Osama more than we’ll ever know. We needed to see war the way that we grew up seeing war. For example, kill Hitler and stop the Nazis. What we are not capable of conceptualizing is that you can kill the presumable leader of Al-Qaeda and nothing changes. That’s why you needed to sell Americans on the fact that we were looking for this ambiguous figure called Osama. As long as we were looking for him then we were coming THIS much closer to ending the War on Terror. Well they killed him, and nothing has changed. So what’s the excuse now? And seriously, when do we see this War on Terror ending?

But then again, you have a right not to know any of this and to just plug into the Matrix.

Can you figure out how to love?

You had a lot of crooks tryna steal your heart
Never really had luck, couldn’t ever figure out
How to love
You had a lot of moments that didn’t last forever
Now you in this corner tryna put it together
How to love
For a second you were here
Now you over there
It’s hard not to stare, the way you moving your body
Like you never had a love
Never had a love

When you was just a youngin your looks were so precious
But now you’re grown up
So fly it’s like a blessing but you can’t have a man look at you for 5 seconds
Without you being insecure
You never credit yourself, so when you got older
It’s seems like you came back 10 times over
Now you’re sitting here in this damn corner
Looking through all your thoughts and looking over your shoulder

People hate this song. I reacted like many when I first heard the song, the first thing that came to mind was, “Why is Wayne singing again?” I personally don’t think that many of the R&B artists in the music industry can really sing when you take out the filters and auto tune, but I just prefer that Wayne raps than sings. It wasn’t until we were forced to listen to the song on the radio over and over again that I started to actually listen to the lyrics. And that’s when I thought to myself, “If you people would shut up for a second and listen to the song, you’d see there’s some truth to it.”

The first thing that stands out to me is that there are two types of beautiful people in this world; ones who don’t know they’re pretty and ones who know they’re pretty but don’t want their looks to determine anything for them. For many pretty people society is going to constantly tell them they’re not pretty, or they’re going to continuously bring them down. This isn’t about the pretty people, it’s about that people who don’t have any self-esteem will always insist on bringing others down so they don’t have to live in the reality of their own world. Instead of spending more time working on how they can feel better about themselves, they want pretty people to feel bad, so they can feel what they feel. You also have those people who are pretty but you can never pay them a compliment without it being thrown in your face. I get it, I understand it, you never want someone to just assume that you aren’t smart because you’re pretty. I’m a man, and I’d be lying if I didn’t experience a bit of this in the workplace. The problem is, I have worked with young ladies who weren’t all that smart but they were attractive. Myself, I don’t really judge a woman’s brain by her looks, but if her brain is dumb, and she’s attractive, then I may judge all her accomplishments by her looks. But if you’re ever the type to preempt a compliment by refusing to accept comments on your beauty because you’d rather have comments on your wit and smarts, then you’re defensive and that’s offensive.

You had a lot of dreams that transformed to visions
The fact that you saw the world affected all your decisions
But it wasn’t your fault
Wasn’t in your intentions
You the one here talking to me
You don’t wanna listen
But I admire your poppin bottles and dippin’
Just as much as you admire bartending and stripping
Baby, so don’t be mad
Nobody else trippin
You see a lot of crooks and the crooks still crook

Me and my line brother always tell girls, the greatest benefit of dating younger women like 21 and 22 is that they still have hopes and dreams. The world gets to you. Once the world gets a hold of your mind it will change your perspective on dreams. You’ll start to doubt your ability to ever achieve your dreams. I know some girls who chase their dreams until they meet a few men who they thought were good guys but they turned out to be wack. They abandon their dreams and aspirations for men and then when these men disappoint, they lump those dreams up in the same with that dude. That ain’t right. The world will convince you that you can’t dream. It’s funny the world makes you pessimistic. It will change you from chasing your dreams to paying your bills.

When you get these women it’s so hard to date them because they are always full of reasons why shit won’t ever work out. That pessimism weighs heavy on a man. A man sometimes don’t think you’re a bad girl but he think that you’ve been so scarred that you irreparable. Most men spend mad time trying to get you to look in the mirror and realize that you have to learn how to love. You have to learn that all that assertiveness and aggressiveness has its place, but it’s not in your relationship. Dudes want to approach way more women than they do, but it’s because of the circumstance that you feel you may be talking to some women who is not ready to hear what you trying to say that dudes will throw her by the waste side. It’s a lot of quality women out here who lose out because they don’t know how to love.

See I just want you to know
That you deserve the best
You’re beautiful
You’re beautiful
Yeah
And I want you to know, you’re far from the usual
Far from the usual

You see you had a lot of crooks tryna steal your heart
Never really had luck, couldn’t ever figure out
How to love
How to love