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

Morning Mail – 8.11.11

Roman Pearce: What you checkin' her out for?
Brian O'Connor: I'm not checkin' her out.
Roman Pearce: Yes, you were.
Brian O'Connor: No, I wasn't.
Roman Pearce: I seen you checkin' her out man.
Brian O'Connor: Ok, I was. Now shut up.
Roman Pearce: You shut up. Don't tell me to shut up.
Monica: Both you girlies shut up.
(Source: 2 Fast 2 Furious)

Eva Mendes on top right now, I don't think that's debateable. Shout out to D.  Great weekend, did that headache go away?

This is why I don’t wake women up. They always got something smart to say in the morning. People don’t like being woke up, that’s a fact. I don’t like it either. I always try and wake up before everyone else. But if I wake you up all you got to say is, “I’m sleep.” Snapping at me, and I’m going to be offended. Yep, offended.

Jordan’s daughter going to Cuse. Cats trying to be Lisa McDowell, but Patrice get more play in real life.

Guarantee you that not everybody get that.

My mother said that she hasn’t seen me smile in a long time. I’m not sure how to fix that. It’s been a rougher year than most people will ever know. That’s some personal shit I had going on. And even still I got a lot more people leaning on me than I’m leaning on them. I don’t smile anymore because I can’t think of a good reason to smile. Not that I’m mad or sad, I just got some expectations for myself that I haven’t achieved yet, so I’m not satisfied.

I don’t want to talk about the post from Tuesday. Anything I would say at this point would seem mad emo and argumentative. Let’s just say it was put perfectly right here: “son the reason you got ethered (or they attempted to) yesterday is because i think the women who read sbm have put you in a box. they already judge you on certain topics without internalizing what you’re actually trying to say. i bet a lot of women really just skimmed the post yesterday and came up with their own conclusions.” - @MadScientist7

Last time I pay someone a compliment around these blog streets. Going back to this, “Cost me nothing to pay you no mind.”

Word.

When OSU gets the death penalty don’t say I didn’t tell you nothing. I think Michigan is actually behind all of this. When you get caught for something that everybody is doing, it’s typically because someone blew the whistle on you. I remember this used to happen in Cuse all the time. And no, you won’t see me throw any shade on one of the GREATEST athletic departments in college basketball. Konrad’s would get raided because Faegans or Harry’s would call the cops on them. Talking about, they letting in chicks with doctor’s notes that say they’re 21. Listen, if your doctor says you’re 21, then you’re 21. But you catch my drift?

Tiger Woods and Chris Brown are the same people. People always wonder why these fools is going bat shit. I’m like listen the problem is when a man jumps off the deep end but he feel like he got the support of chicks. He won’t listen to anybody. Tiger will let his yacht sink to the bottom of the ocean and be in NYC chilling like, “I’m in one big room, full of bad bitches.”

#WTT - Whenever I listen to any track that Jay-Z drops I always put my Jordan98 goggles on... Jay-Z the greatest rapper ever in the game, so then when I listen to something I judge it against that. I think the album is solid, but did anybody have any doubt that Jordan would win a chip in 1998, nope. But we enjoyed watching the series and even the final shot. Jay-Z never gonna have another Reasonable Doubt, Vol. 2, or Blueprint, just won't happen, at this point we watching him drop classics, but that's what winners do.

Kanye changed the definition of cool. Back when Kanye said, "Like Pat, don't say Jack" people thought that was wack. Now he'll say the same thing and people will be like, "OHHHHH WORDPLAY!" But at the same time, Kanye has excellent music, he's lyrical, and he's got vision for an album. In terms of production and creativity, he's the best. I expected nothing less.

Here's the biggest problem with WTT, it's actually only 11 tracks. And of those 11 tracks on the actual LP, you skip about 4 of them. That's a problem.

The tracks that go hard, go hard though. I give it solid 3.5 out of 5. If you look at it like your job, 3 meets expectations, 4 above expectations, and 5 significantly above expectations; I don't think anyone would disagree with me. Could have done better if Jay-Z had some more beats that suit him best, and maybe not come across so pompous. We ain't really felt Jay since Blueprint because after that he started explaining his life too much to cats, like we was dumb and he was putting us on to shit.

I think a lot of the hoopla has to do with the fact we haven't heard from these cats in a while. We were anticipating it so much that we might have been already leaning forward, it was easy to knock you out your seat.

Meek Mill >>>>>> J. Cole
Meek Mill, Dreamchasers - http://www.mediafire.com/?3x3qee4v1krxnvh  

People don’t even know that J is my dude though.

Life is good. God is good.

And I’m dead ass serious.

25 Random Questions with @Jubilance1922

At some point the worlds have become so intertwined that you cannot remember if you met someone by visiting their blog, or following them on Twitter.  Either way, I think all y'all should follow her blog and her on Twitter.  My personal favorite is the QOD, that's always interesting.  Personally, what I do is I search her mentions on Tweetdeck and then I can see what everyone else has to say.  Heck, if you're a blogger like me, you might get some fresh new ideas for a post.  If you're just tweeting to tweet, you'll at least have some entertainment.  I'm back with another installment of the 25 Random Questions, with none other than @Jubilance1922 from BlackGirlUnlost.com.  (As usual, my comments are in Italics.)

1. Tell me about yourself.

Well let's see....Its kinda weird to just ramble off things about myself. I'm 29, currently living in Minneapolis by way of Orlando, Atlanta, and MI. I'm a stereotypical Cancer - emotional, very loyal, and always trying to take care of ppl. Oh and I'm a blogger, check me out at: http://www.blackgirlunlost.com

2. What’s your favorite movie?

EVER??? Top 5 is Carmen Jones, V for Vendetta, The Last Emperor, The Women and Boomerang.
(The answer of a person's favorite movie is ever changing. I thought Friday was my favorite movie, until I saw Varisty Blues, until I saw The Wash, until I saw Memento, and until I saw ATL.  It's a natural progression that i'm not sure we'll ever reach any type of Nirvana.)

3. As a child, what was your favorite thing to do during recess?

Play on the swings or a good game of 4-square.

4. Have you ever second guessed yourself? Tell me about it.

I second-guess myself a lot. I have a strong aversion to fucking up, but at the same time, I tend to make decisions quickly. So I'll make a decision and then worry that I fucked up. Right now I'm in the middle of a career change and I have spent months wondering if I was really ready to give up my career considering all the time, $$$, blood, sweat and tears that I put into it, but events this year have shown me that I'm doing the right thing.
(I always notice something about the people who say, "blood, sweat and tears."  It's not something you hear from just anybody.)

5. Peanut Butter. Chunky or Creamy?

Creamy...chunky peanut butter is just weird.

6. Middle of the night or Morning sex?

I'll take both.
(Give an inch, take a mile, sigh.)

7. When you hold hands with a guy do you lock fingers?

Yup! It feels weird when a guy holds my hand and we don't lock fingers.

8. Do you prefer to wear heels or sneakers?

I really wanna say heels for some womanly street cred...but sneakers just feel better.

9. Will you watch baseball with your man, and iron out a quickie during the seventh inning stretch?

We can do the quickie, but I'll probably be reading a book while he's watching the game...baseball is boring unless you're in the ballpark, and even then I only go for the food and the eye candy.

10. Do you ever feel like you want to move to get away from family, or are you a family person to the heart?

I haven't lived in the same state as my family since I was 18. At one point I lived about 1,500 miles from them. I love them and I talk to them regularly and visit a lot, but I couldn't live in my hometown or even my home state.

11. What’s the most uncomfortable thing you’ve ever had to tell a man?

That I chose someone else over him. It sucked and it didnt go so well.
(I was on the other side of this one time. A girl chose me and had to tell her man. I might have felt bad myself. This situation backfired on me later though...)

12. Are you a dark or light liquor girl?

Light - Ketel One all the way.
(Most has me drinking this now all the time.)

13. If you hadn’t voted for Obama, who would you have voted for?

Originally John Edwards was my guy in the primary.

14. What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?

My nieces and nephew - they are the most beautiful children you've ever seen. :-)

15. You’re tired after a long day but your man is horny. The cooch or the smooch?

I'd probably let him get a quickie in and be done.
(You and this quickie thing is starting to concern me. How long is a quickie?)

16. Best gift you’ve ever received? Given?

Hmmm... this is a hard one... (That's what she said.)  Best gift I've received was a home entertainment center from an ex - that got a lot of use. Best gift I've given was a romantic dinner and a suite for an ex.
(Have you ever been told you think like a man?  I feel like men are the ones who typically say "got a lot of use."  A man's favorite gift ever received could be a shaving kit or duffle bag.)

17. Hair pulled or ass smacked?

I'll take both.
(Give a mile, take ten... sigh.)

18. What’s the nastiest thing you’ve ever done in bed?

I let a one-nighter choke me and manhandle me and I loved it so much it became a two-nighter.
(Speechless.)

19. Big, small or not at all wedding?

Small, destination or Vegas to be exact.

20. How do you feel about Kobe Bryant?

Ehhh...

21. If I paid you, would you strip in my living room for a living?

I'm looking for a new job anyway, so how much is this gig paying and does it have any benefits? ;-)

22. In high school, where did you see yourself in life?

I planned to be a VP of R&D for a Fortune 500 company, with a couple of kids and a successful husband.

23. What’s your favorite thing to do for your man?

I'm a big nurturer so I love to take care of my man. Cook for him (including making his plate), giving him a bath, massage, all of that. Whatever he needs, I love to be there and just take care of him.

24. Where do you see yourself in five years?

Happy and successful. That's all I got. What it looks like, I have no idea.. But I know the Universe has great things headed my way and I'm ready and grateful.

25. What are your words to live by?

My personal mantra - "I love life and I am changing in a positive way. I live fully and freely in the Now, getting from life and the Universe exactly what I give to it. I am grateful and happy to be alive, and I express health, happiness, prosperity and peace of mind."
(I dig this. This is cold.)

My fave quote -"Truth cannot live in those whose heart is not free" - John Coltrane

(Thanks Jubilance.  Until next time, Life is Good, God is Good.)

The Man's Guide to Fights and Beatdowns

Watch out for the Rugrats they are always the most dangerous,
 it's the low center of gravity.

There are few things that you can count on in your life. One, you will pay taxes, you will catch the common cold, you will die at some point, and you will get in a few fights. I’ve long been a fan of not fighting, I just think it’s the most pointless shit in the world. A few things about fighting have always turned me off: 1) It hurts to get punched, 2) Fights rarely end when they end, and 3) You never know who you’re fighting. Every time I think to myself, “I think I can take him.” I get this flashback memory of The Hangover and I imagine a Chinese guy hopping out of the trunk of my car and beating my ass with a crowbar. Truth be told, by being a mature adult you can pretty much keep yourself out of trouble for most of your life. There will be a few occasions over the course of your life that will require that you fight and for that you must go to the mattresses. But for the most part you can avoid fights altogether by never leaving your house, never drinking alcohol, never partying in a place where someone else there may or may not be using steroids, never being in a place where there are attractive women and other men who you do not know or are familiar with, never getting angry about anything that bothers you, even if it offends you, and hiding under your desk at work.

Yes, I think that about sums it up. The point is, you’re going to get in some fights at some point of your life. So I’ve decided to break down the various fights and why they are either hilarious, stupid/foolish, or necessary evils of Man.

He spent more time on his back than a two-bit whore.

1) Incompatibility-related beatdowns

Growing up I had this dude who basically was jocking just about everything I did. I went to a new school, he needed to go to the new school. I started playing the keyboards and now he wanted to play the keyboards. I didn’t want a typical Madness keychain, I wanted a neon green joint to go with my uptempos, now HE has to get a neon green keychain. On the surface it appeared that we were friends, but each time he copied something that I was doing to set myself apart, I would think to myself, “I wish you would just go somewhere.” Anyway, tension began to build between us and one day on a crowded bus afterschool, he started jone’ing on me about something and I don’t know what it is about young black boys in DC but we love to say this, “Hit me and I’ll steal you.” For a boy under the age of 16, that’s just about the same thing as saying, “I will shoot you.” Well, would you believe this fool hit me in the face?! Oh hell no, I may have been all of 5’4 and 125 lbs, but you wouldn’t have known it that day. He hit me and then I turned red, and then he had this surprised look on his face. I push him back across a seat and I started punching him with a flurry. It was like a TKO but since this was an afterschool fight nobody broke it up. He tried to roll off the bus and so he kind of made his way to the back exit and before you knew it to add insult to injury, I kicked him off the bus. I take nothing back about that situation, he had that ass whipping the first day he showed up with the same shoes that I took my ass all the way out to Tyson’s Corner to get before anyone else would cop them the next Saturday.

Ricky Hatton's wife after he got knocked out in a Casino.

2) Love Interest-related beatdowns

I was dating this girl one time and she had a nice rack, nothing she could do about that, she was born that way. Problem is she would never do anything to cover them up, they were always at least 2 feet in front of her and standing up near her chin. Occasionally when we’d be out a guy would say something disrespectful to her and she’d look at me as to say, “What are you going to do about that?” I looked back at her like, “All those damn mirrors in your house and you didn’t think anybody was going to say something ridiculous to you about your ridiculous cleavage?!” I wasn’t about to get in a fight over that. Now in addition to that, I’ll come clean, there’s a few things that I won’t fight a guy over when I’m with my chick; if he says anything off the wall about her, I’m likely to walk away, and also, call me what you want, but I’ve never been the type of dude who flips out because another dude flirts with you in public. As a matter of fact, tell him you’ll take two drinks at a time and get your boy a Heineken for the road. However, there is a time when we all have to fight over our lady’s honor and that’s only and I do mean, only, when an onlooker says something about you. If I’m walking down the street and a guy says, “Damn ma, you sure do know how to pick them, you got a perfect chump.” Now we gotta fight. I can’t have that. That’s like written in The Bible, “Thou shalt not be a bitch and let someone call you a bitch.” Now fighting for your woman’s honor is a little touchy. There’s only two ways to do it. You either have to know you can take the guy, OR, you know that you had no chance to beat this guy anyway. For example, I’m about to fight this 6’5”, 240 lbs guy who’s clearing drinking Muscle Milk for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I got to do what I got to do, but I’m not looking forward to winning this one. The reason why this is so key is because if you get your ass beat by somebody who is an equal opponent than you, your girl will never respect you for that again. No matter how many times you say, “But baby he has silver gloves!” she will still look at you like the little bitch that you are.

3) Family-related beatdowns

I love my family dearly but if it’s anything that you can never mess with is a man’s family. This is a one way ticket to a beatdown. I know a guy who was locked up for 3 years on a petty breaking and entering charge. About 3 weeks before he got out he found out someone called his mother a bitch. This guy waited three weeks to get out of jail, he came home, went in the kitchen and got himself a knife and went out in the parking lot of his apartment complex and stabbed the guy 10-15 times in the back. He didn’t kill him though. He is back in prison for another 10 years now. He wasn’t free 36 hours before he was headed back to jail.

4) Obligatory beatdowns

There’s things that happen from time to time and I don’t really find them offensive but just because of the principle, I have to do something about it. A couple weeks ago in NYC, I was walking out of a nightclub with my boys. And you know what, this may have been my fault. I need to stop going places where I’m the only … well nevermind. Basically, I come out of the nightclub and this white guy is in front the club, drunk out of his mind talking about the n-words who were in the club tonight. He may have said it seven times. I turned to my white friend and said, “Did I just hear that?” And he did what I’ll talk about a little later on, he just got quiet and said, “Wow.” Because what else could he say? So I had to do what I had to do. It was no way I could tell somebody a story that goes,

Me: So this white guy is calling people the n-word out front the club
Spearmint: Yeah so what did you do?
Me: I walked over and explained that you shouldn’t use that word to talk about Black people.
Spearmint: You’re a bitch, you know that right?

So I knew I could take this guy and although he was drunk, I was obligated to do something. So I picked up a water bottle that was still full and I threw it at him, knocking him back onto a ledge and then I went over to exchange cordials (a push in the face). You will never believe what happened next, and I’m going to talk about this later too, his boy comes out the club and -- it’s a Black guy! I looked at that Black guy and said, “Is this your mans? No, wait, is this your mans? Ask him why he got his ass beat.” The Black guy sighed and walked his friend to safety, but then he said this, “Yo man I keep telling you to stop saying that word.” That disappointed me so much I just left the situation alone after that.

5) Cautionary beatdowns

From time to time you are not sure if you need to fight or not. My daddy always had a rule, “In times of uncertainty, hit him first and then figure out the rest.” There’s always going to be a tense situation where you’re standing face to face with a guy who you got beef with. You’re breathing heavily, your palms sweaty, you could pass gas and not a person would hear it that’s how tense your ass is right now. You’ve both got something to prove and it seems like it’s not just 10 or 12 of your friends looking on, it’s THE WORLD! So you have to just do what anyone else would do in a similar situation, just swing on him and see what happens.

That's not really me.

6) We was just having fun beatdowns

I used to get in a fight every year on St. Patrick’s Day. I don’t really get violent when I drink Henny, but when I have too many shots of Jameson, I get ignorant. I don’t know if that makes me Irish, but I dig redheads so we’ll see what happens. And I’ll tell you how it all goes down too.

Everybody’s pounding back beers and shots. There are women there. There are men that we don’t know all that well there. For some strange reason when they play, “Born In the USA” in a bar, I usually try and get my ass out the way. If you ever want to know what this scene looks like, think about when they play “Move Bitch” or “Bia Bia” in a black club. That’s actually what it looks like in a bar when they play that Springsteen song. I fight may break out, we’ll all scuffle, the bouncers will all throw us out and we’ll go to Johnny Rockets and tell the war story while eating fries dipped in smiley face shaped ketchup.

When you said, it was over race I totally missed the memo.

7) I’ll have to sit this one out beatdowns

So above I spoke about a situation where race was involved. Well, there’s this time where I had to sit a fight out because I couldn’t get in the middle of it. There was this night in college when one of my really good friends, a white guy, said the n-word. Yes, these things happen. He was trying to tell a story and a famous basketball player who wore number #15 just happened to be walking by and it got real. Somebody was drunk, or something was going on. PAUSE.

I enjoyed NC17’s post about, Can A White Girl Say The N-word? I thought it was kind of on point, but there was one thing I told Spearmint earlier that applies here: “I'll put it like this, my white friend said that shit around me once and I was like. Yo don't say that shit. Honestly, I don't think it's fair that Black people use it and then y'all can't. But rules is rules. The problem is this... if you get your ass beat, I am going to look like an ass, turncoat and Uncle Tom for jumping in, so I gotta let you get your ass beat.”

UNPAUSE. So at this point it’s two black guys, a Mexican, a white kid, and a few members of the basketball team in a staring contest. I took my ass in Acropolis and said, “Man this ain’t my fight.” I watched from inside the restaurant and there was pushing and shoving, a little squirmish and an article about it in the school paper the next day. Thing is one of my friends, the black guy, stayed out there with him, so you know the next day people were like, “I can’t believe [such and such] let that white kid get away with saying the n-word.” People said, “Matter fact, where was you Jax?” And I said what anyone else would say, “I wasn’t there. I was in Toxicated.”  That's actually a real place, there's a location in every city.

(Just to explain this story all the way to its end. We actually are all still friends and that’s going to make a hell of a chapter in my book, but basically we just told my friend, the black guy, to say he said it and the whole thing was a big misunderstanding. No sooner than the second he told everybody, “Actually I was the one who said it.” It went away.)

Haitians and Jamaicans ain't never gonna get along.

8) This ain’t over yet beatdowns

This is actually the reason why I don’t fight or like to fight. Fights never end. They just don’t. If you fight someone and you’ll see that person again, please believe you’ll be fighting every day until one of you is dead or too embarrassed to come back for more. And since nobody wants to be the bitch, once you fight someone, you should just plan on fighting them every time you see each other for the rest of your life. I got two cats that I grew up with, in high school out of nowhere my boy comes to me and says, “Yo you seen Rob? I’m gonna beat his ass when I see him.” I ain’t know what it was about and so I was like, “Word? Nah I ain’t seen him lately.” Turns out Rob f*cked my boy’s girlfriend to “prove” she was a hoe. Funny thing about my boy’s girlfriend she was pregnant. That happened like 11 years ago. Last year at the Block Party around my old way we all sitting around drinking Budweisers and talking about old days and Rob shows up. My boy was a little liquor’ed up and he walked right over to Rob and knocked him out. Rob could never fight, but Rob had the heart of a lion. Rob got back up and squared off and we looked at these two fools fighting in the middle of a Block Party. Oldheads were looking on like, “Those two youngins still fighting over that.” And we like, “Yeah, I doubt they ever stop fighting over it either, at this point, it’s off principle.”

And there you have it, those are 8 types of fights or beatdowns that always come up in your life. I’d be interested to hear some of your war stories. I’m sure this list gets almost beyond hilarious when you factor in women. Women have epic fights and beatdowns. Nothing like grabbing a fistful of hair and spinning that girl around like a top as her entire weave unravels and still losing the fight because she was lighter on her feet.