The Old School Lunch

I didn’t think bathroom problems could get any worse than what happened a little while ago. Well, they did. After claiming to have fixed the problem, I stayed in the apartment after they had the inside of the bathroom completely cleaned and the carpet cleaned as well. OK. Then just earlier today right when I’m about to leave for Mother’s Day late lunch with the family (reservations were made) what happens? The toilet first starts to bubble then the water in the toilet disappears. OK, not a big deal, there’s no leak. Not yet. After I call maintenance, I notice that my bathtub is filling with some unusual water. Then, as luck would have it, both the bathtub and the toilet begin to fill up with water at great speed. What comes out into the bathtub? Toilet sewage and, after the maintenance guy took a look at it, “laundry water” as it had turned black and gray. Then the toilet starts to overflow and I don’t mean it leaked a little bit over the rim, I mean it was bubbling out as whoever was in the floor above took their showers, used the toilets, did the laundry. At this point, i’m frantically calling the leasing people and the maintenance guy but alas he’s stuck in traffic. He says he’s going to call Roto-Rooter again and they’re going to come out. As i’m about to lose it, I take a giant plastic bowl I have and start scooping the toilet water into the sink which is the only place that isn’t backing up. I do this a few dozen times but when I realize that the water on the ground is almost an inch deep, it’s no use. At that point, I wasn’t really freaking out because it was just so ridiculous and I knew at this point they would be forced to move me to a new room. I tell them that I want a completely new room in new area not on this floor but they say no can do. I then move into the adjacent room which to my surprise, is about the same size but lacks one closet that the original room had and also has about 40% of the kitchen storage space. There’s nowhere to put my plates, seriously. But this, i’ll deal with management tomorrow. So to try and bargain, they give me a free month’s rent which is nice but that doesn’t give me my 8 hours of my life back nor does it reverse time so I can make the mother’s day lunch. Nor does it give me back the hours I spent moving all my shit into the other room.

Shit.

And yes, another used condom did float up from the toilet. Except this time I didn’t think it was that bad because there was also bits of shit in there as well. At least they’re having safe sex.

My brother recommends legal action unless they give me exactly what I want. I don’t want to be difficult but I’m tired of looking at other people’s used condoms.

What irritates me the most about anyone who criticizes women’s fighting (whether that’s boxing of MMA) is the “I love women too much” line of thinking. They say that even though women can fight, we as men just don’t want to see our baby’s momma get mangled (or mangle someone else) in the ring. This sort of baloney chivalry is a complete bag of crap because if men really didn’t want to see women physically beaten to shit day in day out, they’d say something about the rates of men’s violence against women. They’d go all Michael Vick on athletes who beat their wives, not their dogs. They’d beat the shit out of men who rape women. They’d raise awareness to the rates of sexual assault in high school. But do they? If they are, I don’t hear about it.

Gina Carano crushes the nail on the head when she (to paraphrase) says that men can’t have fighting as a gender. If fighting is to be seen as a vocation, a lifestyle, how do you designate that solely to men? Men have been trying to “own” and place their completely bogus stamp on every vocation that is of any worth to people. Men don’t want to be seen as cooks, as women are seen, but they’ll be seen as high paying chefs to the stars. Men don’t want to be seen as teachers, like the elementary school teachers stereotyped as babysitters but they’ll take the high paying, illustrious professor jobs. Men don’t want to be seen as nurses, only doctors, men don’t want to be seen as maids, only janitors, the list goes on and on. The point is this is both a cultural gender stereotype thing and also a money thing. There’s big, growing and young money in MMA and when men say they don’t want women involved (like men’s golf tours, where the biggest paychecks are) it’s another way to disenfranchise women and put them at an economic disadvantage.

If you start to hear men complain and attack women’s fighting, what you’re really hearing is men fearing that they won’t be the high draw with the biggest purse.

I have almost my entire music collection on my iPod and when at the gym, unless I make a playlist I put the thing on shuffle. Sometimes instead of skipping to tracks I want to listen to, I just listen to whatever comes on.

One song was Jermaine Dupri’s “Coming Home With Me” which I remember being huge when I was in high school. I’ve listened to this song hundreds of times but some of the lyrics only struck me at that moment.

The general plotline of the song (rap songs have plotlines?) is that JD, being the popular dude that he is, is at a club and he meets a woman there. They return to his place and he proceeds to tell her a few things first before they have sex, which he admittedly videotapes. Then, because he’s JD, he says right when he’s done he’s going back to the club to get another woman in the sack. Another rapper has some lines but it’s just stupid shit (not that JD’s isn’t) so I won’t go into it.

Now first let’s look at the chorus:

Now if I buy you a drink and you drink it up
Then, uh, you goin’ home with me (and all my niggas say)
And if you talkin’ at a party and we talk too much
Then, uh, we goin’ home with me
Now if you came with a friend that don’t wanna do my man
Then you need to give her your keys
Tell her to call you tomorrow or give you a beep
Cause tonight, you going home with me, ya heard?

There are several offensive things about this. Of course there’s the whole idea that if he’s going to lay down some dollars for a drink, that woman better lay down with him. And then there’s this whole thing of “we’re hitting it off and let’s get down to business. But wait, you can’t do shit unless your friend nails my pal over here and if she doesn’t, tell her to hit the bricks.” Now I can say this is pretty common in a lot of rap songs. Jadakiss talks about it in “Ride or Die Bitch” (which was another popular song in high-school) but there he talks about how a woman is so great because she “don’t have no problem hittin’ us all.”

But anyways, back to JD.

Now, is it because my name’s Jermaine? no
It’s all about how I kick my game, you know?
I just flow with it, spend a little dough with it
Entertain, before you know, I’m in your brain doing my thang
Tellin’ you how good you smell
Send you up for a drop top cruise through the A-T-L
Now when they tipsy, it’s risky, you don’t know what you facin’
Fuck around and end up like Anthony Mason
So I let’em know a few things before we leave
Like, “it’s true, I tapes damn near everything”
So don’t even think about lyin’, baby
Or try baby, to set me up for rape cause it’s all on tape
Where you said put the cake
How you fed me the grapes
What I did with the ice that made you shake, shake
Now when the night’s over and the girl is gone
I’m back up in the club singin’ the same damn song

My bolds there. Of course what he’s saying here is, “listen, now that i’ve got you all drunk, we’re going to have sex and i’m going to videotape it too because you women lie when you’re drunk and have sex. You cry rape because i’m famous and you think you can scam me.” So yes, seriously, this is actually spoken in a song.

All this, in a what was then a popular club song. This is, I believe, some of what people are talking about when they say “rape culture.” Agents of rape culture, songs like this, on varying levels tell folks that women lie about being raped, that women who say they’ve been raped are just after money and are drunk idiots who don’t remember the night before.

I don’t think this hurt JD’s image very much as he’s still making music. But then again, you can video tape yourself having sex with an underage girl (and then claim it was your lookalike brother) and still sell albums so I guess it’s not much of a comment.

The next song up was Kanye West’s “Stronger.” Now I love a lot of his music. I think his production did to music what Timbaland did with Aaliyah (and what he’s doing now with JT) but Mr. West also does some very dumb shit as who else would rhyme “Klondike” with “blonde dyke”?

i don’t know if you got a man or not,
if you made plans or not
god put me in the plans or not
i’m trippin’ this drink got me sayin’ a lot
but i know that god put you in front of me
so how the hell could you front on me
there’s a thousand you’s there’s only one of me
i’m trippin’ i’m caught up in the moment right?
this is louis vuitton dime night
so we gon’ do everything that kan like
heard they’d do anything for a klondike
well i’d do anything for a blonde-dike
and she’ll do anything for the limelight
and we’ll do anything when the time’s right
ugh, baby you’re makin’ it (harder, better, faster, stronger)

So the same old rap shit about how he’s such a stud and yada yada but then he manages to get in there that since he’s famous and this woman/women will do anything to get a piece of that spotlight, they’re going to have sex.

Oh wait, wait, that’s not even to mention how he thinks God himself is (at least in this story) drawing the cards so he meets this particular woman. And when he says “so how the hell can you front on me?” he’s really saying, “It was God’s plan for me to meet you so you better put out.”

Sometimes I wish he’d just zip it and not say anything like some of the other producers. Or, at the very least, just say what everyone else says and keep it to how much of a prize catch you are and how you really want this one (sometimes multiple) woman like Pharrell.

It’s almost 5 in the goddamn morning and guess what’ i’m doing? I’m blogging about how my apartment’s resident tech is snaking the pipes of the toilet. Why? Because a few days ago my toilet started leaking from the base. They checked it out, said they couldn’t find any problems. Happened again and this time they ripped out the entire toilet and then when I left for my Sunday errands, I came back to find that the toilet is still ripped out with an exposed pipe. I go to sleep when I start to hear water bubbling. That’s right, every time someone on my floor flushed their toilet those magical contents would come shooting out of my toilet’s main line. And what do I find besides water and dirt? Cigarette butts and condoms. Used condoms along with a magnum brand wrapper. Motherfucker.

So then I frantically start vacuuming the water that’s coming out with the wet vac that the guy left here and when it stops I try calling maintenance. Well the number they gave me was wrong. I then try calling the main office and they have the right number for the guy. I call, but I don’t know how to leave the message. I later learn that it’s a paging system and I have to send my number. In the frenzy, I call a 24 hour plumbing service and after talking to the slowest customer service agent, they say they’ll call me back if they can get someone. After I figure out that I have to page the maintenance people, the dude calls back and says he just left all the shit there because when he came back, he knocked twice (at 9pm on a Saturday night) and assumed I was sleeping and he didn’t want to wake me up. He says he’s coming down so I cancel the emergency plumbing folks. He come by 30 minutes later, apologizes and he proceeds to snake the pipes.

I used to work in a hygiene center for homeless folks and I have never been this grossed out. Or angry.

Fuck.

The snaking of the pipes is loud and I don’t know what the fuck he’s doing but it’s taking a while. The wet vac is extremely loud so I wonder what the neighbors must be thinking. I wish someone (or the neighbor that used the condoms) could come by so I can tell them that my toilet is overflowing. And then so I can ask them why the fuck they flush condoms (and the wrapper) down the toilet. Who the fuck does that?

Shit.

The day I moved in, about 5 other folks did. That day, I found 6 or so wireless signals all locked up. The only service you can get here is Comcast which, from what i’ve read, isn’t such a great company. It would’ve been pretty expensive to sign up for their internet unless I wanted to get the voice and cable package, both of which I don’t need. I thought I was out of luck. I tried looking into wireless cards and such but those are just as expensive. Then (this is where it begins to sound like an infomercial) a friend turned me on to ClearWire which is just about the easiest thing to set up. Supposedly my max speed is 1.5 mps which I thought was going to be ok. Then my other friend with Comcast says he gets 15 on average. Oh well. I really didn’t want to line the pockets of Comcast and i’m glad I found an alternative, a slower one it may be.

So I moved into The New Place and am getting settled. It’s just me which means no sharing of costs so things are costing some but this is what I signed up for. There’s a nice restaurant right next door with a nice view and the parking has been great so I can’t complain.

There are two parks nearby, one with a trail/picnic area and another with tennis courts. It should make for a good summer combined with my latest effort to actually sit down and try and get into school.

If you’re in the neighborhood, do drop on by.

Saturday at long last i’ll be moving down to Seattle and I imagine starting tomorrow i’ll be offline for a while unless I can leech a signal from a neighbor. And I cancelled the SK data package so no emails either. Pretty much just the phone.

I’ll write about the moving process and going to different apartments and meeting shady characters later. One story involves a landlord telling me: “you can cook with your wok on the stove!”

In two words, he’s right.

Other Black athletes have been saying this to varying degrees but none of them have been the darling of the public eye like Griffey. When hot-heads like Sheffield and Milton Bradley say it, people just think they’re batshit crazy. It’s like if Carmelo Anthony started talking about racism in the NBA. Nobody believes you unless you have a spotless record. And while Griffey has had his moments, for most people he’s still The Kid. Maybe it’ll get people to start talking. Will it affect change? I doubt it. We did see, after all, the Houston Astros trot out in #42s while having no Black players on their squad. Which makes the Oakland A’s seem like the UN.

Close to home there is a coffee stand, station, hut, whatever you call it across the street from a gas station and next to some car window retailer. The coffee joint is called “Bikini Hut” and it brags that the women, err, “girls” in there are wearing bikinis. Baristas in bikinis, basically. I get gas at the local station and I always see a parade of trucks and stereotypically macho beat up cars driving up to the window. I thought the embarrassment of actually going to a place that advertises that their female workers are working in two-pieces would be enough but apparently not for these gentlemen. I got a glimpse of one of the women working there and she looked like she was in high school. And judging by the time of day, she probably was in high school. And to skeptics, when I was in high school I remember a classmate who was a senior working at Hooters so yes, those places are staffed by people that still have to have their parents’ permission when missing school. Now people tell me I look like i’m in high school but the point is that you have a place of business where you pay for coffee and slobbering all over some woman with your eyes. I wonder if the women working there, when nobody’s at the window, cover up and wear a bathrobe only to take it off when a customer drives in. If you think about it that way, it is very literally, like a coin-operated strip club. Except with this you get something to drink.

As I was telling my co-worker this, she, from Chile, tells me that there is a place there called “Coffee and Legs” where women are dressed in a similar manner. She said that originally the owner only hired stereotypically attractive women and made them wear shorter and shorter skirts to promote the “image” of the restaurant. As time went on, they wore less and less and it didn’t hide what it was selling.

I know we have our Hooters, our Cowgirls Inc. bars (a local bar that, after the success of the film Coyote Ugly, hired women to not wear a whole lot and do choreographed dances on the bar tables) and our “Daisy Dukes” restaurants but seriously, is this getting even worse? Proponents of these places say that they’re safe and harmless because everyone knows these are for “adults” (read: men) and that it’s Ok to have certain things that are for adults only. Critics of these types of places usually talk about having a “family friendly” place to which the proponents again say “I already told you, we aren’t trying to bring in the Johnson Family here, go eat at the Olive Garden.” And while i’d agree that there are some places that are and should be kept “adult only” like bars and upscale restaurants for obvious reasons, the existence of these invading the space of restaurants and other services under the guise of being “just a nice smile to look at as you get your coffee” is just bullshit. If you want to look at a naked woman or a near naked woman, go to a strip club (and the issues there with sex-work and strip clubs is an entire different issue which I won’t get into here). The idea that this type hiring and business practice is in any way acceptable in our society I think indicates just how used to the idea we are of associating women’s bodies and viewing women’s bodies with commodity, with sale and consumption hinged on the almighty dollar (and tip money, as tip money places the buyer in a position of authority over the worker, the “performer” in that sense).

My cousin works at a Barista at the giant coffee corporation. Most people would say she’s an attractive person and as such, she tells me “I always have the most in tips” while her male co-workers do not get much. Now, unlike the Bikini Hut, she actually keeps her clothes on and she has no interaction with the customer beyond saying the name of the drink and then handing it to them. The point is that she’s good looking so she gets tips from dudes that think tipping her more than they usually would (if at all) is going to get them a date or impress her. She does her job and her getting more tip money by virtue of people taking an eye to her is a comment on how we reward beauty with money and attention. She isn’t, however, put into a position by her workplace to blatantly use her body and herself to get more in tips and to attract customers. Are there some who would go out of their way to buy a coffee at the place my cousin works at? I’m sure it’s happened. But unlike the Bikini Hut (where, let’s be real, you’re only going there to look at a woman), she is second fiddle to the company and the product, not the other way around.

She said there was no love in her heart,
Cause one day a rapist attacked her and broke that all apart,
She said there was no way to fix it or to cover her scars,
Then one day a guy came along and probably could help her start,
He was sincere, made her believe it was safe, for her to trust again,
Before long she was cool with giving hugs to him,
Knew that it was right, cause something was wrong,
The alarms in her mind didn’t tell her he didn’t belong,
There was no..

This is the first, I don’t know what you call it, stanza or something from Lupe Fiasco’s song “Intruder Alert” on his sophomore album, The Cool. I’ve listened to the whole song (and if you listen to it, the entire song is not about the above story) and i’m still not sure how I feel. It seems like women song-writers and artists talk about domestic violence and even sexual assault from time to time but you almost never hear a man go into that area. Even if this comes off as lacking some sort of authenticity, I think it’s pretty consistent to his general style of music writing. Whether he’s successful in getting his point across, is up to you. In his debut album, he talked about sex-workers, white supremacists, drug dealers and tries to get the listener to sympathize with everyone on some level. In any case, I guess it takes some guts for him to write these kinds of lyrics, include these kinds of stories on such a popular album.

Is like this.

I like Mahalo Daily and though I haven’t been watching as regularly (if you can’t tell as this episode is a bit old) I like what they cover. Veronica Belmont wont be at the helm and if this guy’s turn at the mic is any indication, it doesn’t look good.

If you don’t watch the video, i’ll summarize his douchebaggery. He’s at the Wizard World convention and he walks around interviewing folks, making jokes, etc about comic books and the like. Now if there’s one thing about comic books that’s similar to the world of video/computer games, it’s the idea that women and girls, you know, don’t belong. The story goes that women don’t read comic books nor they do write, draw or play any part in the creative process. This jackass does a good job of reinforcing that in his casual sort of way by first remarking how there are no women or girls there and when he finally stumbles upon one, he jokes that she must be lost and instead was probably looking to go to the Staples center. To cheerlead or watch the basketball game right?

Though it’s a short clip, he then manages to find some woman in a bikini so he can offer her his robe and ask if she’s cold. And that’s it. I guess I should be happy that he didn’t hound some woman there and ask her all sorts of questions about “what’s it like to be a woman comic book reader?” but maybe they just left that on the cutting room floor.