Sometimes a cigar...

The Wife was telling me about a dream she had last night featuring me, her Ex, a bed and disturbing lack of pants. I'll not go into the details (without explicit written approval from all aforementioned parties) but suffice to say outcome = I win! She also brought home some awfully cute board shorts from the old Navy Store which are hella cute and which I am excited to see alot more of as the months roll on, heh, heh, heh... eh hem. sorry. moving on.

In other news, got this link from Mr. Travelin' Man who is one of the remaining few readers out there who is still actively attempting to pry reasonable, nuanced, political commentary out from between the lines of these posts -- wherein Latoya Peterson curates some dialogue around Cultural Appropriation, namely "Views on Global Hip Hop Culture".... I'm assuming this forward is tied to my earlier mocking of a certain Texan someone who has suddenly decided he's much more "down" than he ever was previously and while i do appreciate the thrust back into actual scholarly consideration, I would still like to put out there that this in no way changes my earlier designation of aforementioned CS's new found personae as "straight up silly!"

K. Having gotten that off my chest... The article and accompanying comments were actually pretty interesting. i'm someone who has done quite a bit of thinking/conversing/arguing around what is "o.k" for a person or a group of persons to lay claim to -- especially since my outsides tend to get me grouped with a set of people who really find me and my world view laughable at best (insulting after we've had a few drinks) so discovering that the thinking around this has shifted, it seems, from "you are your color! Deal with it." to "Ask yourself a series of questions -- is it hurting the group of people from the originating culture? How are these people being damaged or insulted or disrespected or taken away from, and to what extent? Are there people who view it as appropriation versus borrowing a minority opinion, or a majority opinion? And what is the level of power disparity between the originating culture and the appropriating/borrowing culture... the power disparity that determines the relative attention being paid to people who complain?" makes me pretty happy. Because, as I hope we all know by now, my favorite shade is grey.

Interestingly also, that longer quote came from a person who writes her own blog called: Upside down adoption which ALSO happens to be something I'm acutely interested in so, win-win all around i think! Thanks, MTM! :-)