So apparently being a Reverend doesn’t excuse any financial debt.

Hmm...It was worth a shot?

My recent experience with the real estate market has led me to a few conclusions.

1. Mortgage companies could save big money by replacing their entire customer service staff with a hamster running on a wheel or a bobblehead or even an empty office with a phone ringing on an empty desk.

2. Real estate agents don’t do a whole lot other than act like they have the most important job in the world. Oh, and fax documents.

3. Lawyers make their legal secretaries do their job of faxing documents. Important people have secretaries, you know.

Let me explain how I’ve come to these genius conclusions. I’ve been in a state of financial distress because of a whopper of a bad real estate decision. So boo hoo. Really, a mortgage broker/real estate agent should help you make the best decision for your financial and personal lifestyle, yes? This is why they get a cut of the money, honey. I mean, if it’s strictly a matter of faxing a listing agreement, I can do it myself. So yes, I think the real estate vultures are partly to blame for my housing woes. That said, at the end of the day, it’s still my fault. Believe me, I’d like to pass the blame, but I done knew better.

Back to the mortgage company and my recent experiences. First of all, they might want to reconsider the unassigned representative policy. Every time I call in, I speak to a different person who acts like I’m not speaking English. DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE WORDS COMING OUT OF MY MOUTH?

Secondly, it’s absolutely impossible to get any type of useful information...BUT WAIT!! After 800 million calls, a breakthrough! They’re not, in fact, affiliated with the (alleged) scam company that keeps contacting me about modification/short sales, etc. WOW! Really? Because the scammer's representative seemed to know a lot more than the wads at the actual mortgage company. When I asked my rep of the day why the mortgage company doesn’t simply send a letter out to customers warning of the scam company, he replied “they aren’t getting the information from us. I don’t know how they get it.”

!! ?? !!

Hmm. Many things race through the mind at this point. Does his reply have anything to do with my question? Am I having a conversation with an automated voice? Am I on one of those horrid candid camera shows? Bleeps and blunders? Can I meet Ed McMahon? Oh wait, he’s dead. What did I ask again? Let me rephrase.

ME:

Regardless where they got the information, they appear to be a legitimate company. Can your company let people know they are not affiliated with XYZ company so that nobody gets scammed?

REP:

You should contact us directly. I don’t know where XYZ company gets the information from, but you need to go through us.

BALLS, BALLS, BALLS. Take a breath and hang up.

So in conclusion, I can clearly see how we got into this cluster of a housing situation. I will NEVER, EVER purchase another property or request the service of 1, 2, or 3 (at the tippy top of the post) again. EVER. Do we see what happens when the blind lead the blind?

Furthermore, I’ve drawn a diagram to illustrate my thoughts on the matter.

The Imageyenation Crew at Add-Mmm and Iron Giant's (Adam + Kindra) elopement partay at the Red Barn at Hampshire College.



From left to right: Cole (Add-Mmm's would-have-been best man), El Keter, Emeyesi, Miss Behavin' and Add-Mmm.

Memories!

Thanks to the sodding economy, I'm now working a reduced pay four day work week. There are literally lines for part time work at supermarkets and fast food joints so rather then take someones job who needs it more than I do I decided to sign up for volunteer work. I landed a gig at the Sarah P. Duke Gardens in Durham, NC. I volunteer a couple hours on Fridays to help maintain the gardens by weeding and "deadheading" flowers that have bloomed and need to have their carcasses removed. Last Friday was my first day and I got assigned to weed out the invasive English Ivy that was strangling a large Magnolia Tree. It was either the English Ivy or maybe some other shitty plant like it that I inadvertently handled which has caused my arms to bubble up and be mad itchy.

I've been reading the statistics about how roughly 10% of people actually develop reactions to English Ivy and yadda yadda yadda. Long story short I'm itchy as hell!

I love to cook and since I live in the south now I decided to tackle a big southern cooking tradition; RIBS.

So I headed on down to the Costco and picked me up some baby back ribs for a decent 25 dollars. Which I though was expensive till I found out my local grocery store was selling 1/3 the amount for 20 so.... score.That was Friday evening. On Saturday afternoon I did a simple salt and pepper rub then set the ribs on my propane grill with a smoker box filled with soaked hickory wood chips. Since I decided early on not to be more than 20 feet from the grill at any point I used my architecture/engineering skills and assembled a canopy for me, Iron Giant, and our pup Scully.



My next door neighbor was my cooking coach that day and was my savior on the sidelines. He was also our dinner guest along with his wife and grand-kid. So while the ribs sat on the grill for their 4+ hour cook time we just chilled out on the porch drinking beer and eating these effing awesome jalapeno deviled eggs our neighbors brought. So far so good right? Even Scully was having a good time with her rawhide.



This is when things take a turn.

So I put the ribs on the grill around 3pm at what I thought was 210 degrees. I knew my grills thermometer wasn't to be trusted, ever. That's something I learned from watching Alton Brown. But I thought I could safely assume there was a range it would operate in. Nope. The ribs ended up being just slightly undercooked and a little pink, which is okay but I felt defeated cause I wanted to impress the neighbors.

Also, Scully had a death wish that day. Iron Giant and I were hesitant to give her the rawhide again cause the last time we did she gnawed off and devoured one of the knobby ends in less than an hour which, according to the internet was certain to kill her. She didn't die after that so we thought that with proper supervision we could let her play with it. Wrong. She managed to gnaw off another piece and swallow it whole. No more rawhides for Scully. After we took her chewy away from her she decided to torment a small group of red ants with large pincers. When she got tired of having her nose chewed on, she scoured the yard and bushes and managed to practically clog her nostrils with pollen. She eventually calmed down and chilled on the porch for all of 5 minutes before her big finale; lodging an inch-long splinter right through one of her pads. We put her in her kennel to rest while we ate then decided to take her to the emergency vet at 9pm. You basically get charged 90 dollars just for walking in the door. Four hours later and $210 poorer Iron Giant and I got to take our drugged-up and drooling pup home at 1:30am. She cried as she laid on the floor, helpless as Iron Giant left her sight to pay the bill. It was so cute and sad. She was so pitiful looking with her head cone ($10 not used a single time) and her little pink bandage with a daisy on it to match her collar.

Iron Giant and I usually leave Scully at home during the week but we didn't want her to prematurely chew off her bandage so I opted to take her with me to work on Monday and let her sleep in the car. I went out every hour to check on her and every hour she had chewed off more and more of her bandage and managed to cover our car in hair. Every visit I paid to her she was in a new spot, favoring the drivers seat and it's accompanying foot well.



Our Sunday was pretty calm though. I was able to clean up the house and finally start a new batch of homemade beer. I love me some homemade beer. So there you have it. Hope y'all had an awesome weekend too.

You know what?

I used to be a dancin' muthafucka.

About 20 feet away from where I type this we used to thrown down. Yup. Right in the driveway. I remember being in 2nd grade and telling my classmates about "boxdancing" (CUZ WE DID IT ON CARDBOARD BOXES! DOH!) with my friend Pete and his cousin Joel.

Flashforward to middle school and me and Pete are cutting it up at local dances doing the ol' Kid n' Play, Scoob & Scrap, etc. etc...The whole kick the leg over Pete's head and have him flip me over into a split and then pull me up. Yup. We were damn fools.

A few years later I'll never forget hitting up a local club at the Eastfield Mall of all places and seeing the infamous "Dancin'/Crazy/Black Mike" and his crew owning the dancefloor. My boys and I didn't dare bust-a-move. We were shook. These dudes were fuckin' DOPE! It turned out we had mutual friends and before I knew it I was hanging out in this crazy dreadlocked kid's basement watching one of the most influential and inspirational PBS specials EVER!

I lost my mind when I found it in it's entirety on YouTube. Perpare to lose your minds as well. I present to you:

Reck 'N Shop "Live From Brooklyn" 1992







Mop Tops, Voodoo Ray, Caleaf, Peek-a-boo, Polo, Henry, Stretch, eJoe, Peter Paul, more Polo, Marquest, Rubberband, Loose Joint, Elite Force and yes even more Polo. Ah memories.

Everything changed after Reck 'N Shop. "Hip hop ya don't stop" became "house music all night long". We found ourselves in NYC, Boston and Hartford til the wee hours of the morning...And yes I was still dancing like a damn fool.

As a way to deal with the craziness of my immediate and extended families, I'd like to vent here on Imageyenation.com by posting a few choice email and IM conversations that I‘ve had with them.

Names have been changed to avoid me getting more shit from these people.

So Iron Giant and I recently adopted a dog that we named Scully. We’ve been on a huge ‘X-Files’ kick thanks to that tragedy of a show ‘Fringe.’ Below is a mass email that I sent out to various friends and family announcing our little poop factory's arrival. *Pictures Included*

We‘ve finally gotten around to taking some pictures of our new dog Scully (Kindra and I have been on an x-files kick).

Scully is petite 32 pound stray that we adopted from our local dog pound. She’s taken to us rather well and is settling in quite nice. When the pound took her in they guessed that she was about 3 years old but at her final vet exam they changed that to 1 year old. Sooooo long story short, she's pretty much a puppy and she's a pain in the ass with all her stored up energy. But she's a good little dog and is picking up on our routine pretty quick.

Not to get too sappy on you all but it's really nice to know that this dog who was an emaciated stray finally has a warm place to sleep. It sort of tugs at our heart strings how she carries/hauls her new bed from room to room.

Well that's all. Hope everyone is doing well.

-a

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Happy belated Halloween kids.

Enjoy this clip of Miss Behavin doing her version of the "Monster Mash":

On September 11th, when everyone was remembering the atrocities of 9/11, I was getting on a plane leaving Heathrow Airport and arriving in Washington, D.C. to return to the place where I was born. It'd been two years since I had officially lived in the States and even though I'd come back and forth across the Atlantic for sometimes extended periods of time, the experience still felt unsettling.

Two years is a long time to be away. It's also a long time to live in one place, especially if you find yourself feeling at home in the place you are living. My folks came over to help me move and by the end of three days of packing, I had two years of my life packed up in seven suitcases and four boxes. Memories wrapped in clothes and shoes and books and photos...

I had a get together with friends a few days before and it was a fun last outing. Still, there is always something morbid about goodbye parties (or "leaving-dos" as the British would say). In the upcoming weeks to my departure, I felt like I was in fact dying...so many of my friends saying "What are we going to do when you're gone?" Though I reassured them all that they would be fine with out me, I realized that it's not that I won't be coming back or that I won't see them again. It's more that the time I spent in London was coming to an end and even if I did move back at some point in the future, it still wouldn't be the same. Things, time and people change. Still, it was a bittersweet feeling knowing that in some way, my presence had touched so many lives in London.

And even though there are a lot of things I am not going to miss about the UK (TV Licenses, phone contracts, terrible police forces, inefficiency pretending to be efficiency), I am still going through culture shock. I'm going to have to re-adjust how I speak, re-learn certain words and understand what it means to be an American living in America again. (I'd go into what that entails, but I would have to write about the differences between British and American identities and that's another post all together.) I'm trying to get back into the swing of things over here, but I feel like I'm starting all over again. It's a rough place to be and right now, I want nothing more than to be back in London. But that will hopefully change over time and I can feel good being back in the USA.

The night before my flight, I hadn't planned on going out. But then it hit me that it would be the last night I could party it up in Londontown for a while. So I met up with some friends and went to Favela Chic, a place where I had spent many a nights dancing and singing a long to some of my favorite tracks. It was one of the DJ's birthdays and there was a performance by Stacy Epps who was over in the UK. Then during one of the DJ sets, London rapper Klashnekoff's song "Murda" came on. I had to stop and take the whole thing in.

You see, before I moved to London, a friend of mine (my former music pimp actually) had sent me Klashnekoff's The Sagas of Klashnekoff. It was that album that was part of the reason I had wanted to come to London so much. Though after getting into other British rappers since moving to the UK, Klashnekoff is still one of my favorites. Hearing his song the night before I left felt appropriately poetic.



Later that night, when I said my final goodbyes, the friends who were with me sent me off by singing the American National Anthem as I boarded the night bus back to where I was staying. I was amazed that they knew every word.

London, regardless of all your faults and negativity, I love you and will miss you greatly.

This lil guy has been hanging outside my bathroom window for over a week now. I think he's watching me bathe.

In other spider related news, La Princesse took over Liverpool recently:



Where's Superman when you need him?

Stylin'.

Profilin'.

So we went back to Cali(fornia). We being Miss Behavin' and I. For some reason we never did any blogging about or visit there last year. So we suck and now the title of this blog doesn't make any damn sense. Then again it sort of does, becase we'll be going back again before the end of the year. So suck it.

So yeah. We went back. We took pics. Here are some of the one's I captured on my Tilt:

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The 4th started off pretty good here in NC. I dropped Iron Giant off at work and then went to the grocery store for some grillin` provisions and beer. When I got back home I hopped on my riding mower to trim up the ol` yard then started making some pasta salads for that night. I picked up Iron Giant from work then we hung out till about 6 or so when our friend Sara came over. We ate, drank, and started to light off the fireworks we bought until it started to thunder and lightning like mad! We got rained out. But here's what our display looked like.



...a daytime shot

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Here I am looking all Moses and shit with the massive amounts of fireworks me and Iron Giant picked up. Actually, it doesn't look like much and it's for a good reason. Lighting these fireworks off can get old pretty fast since they're basically glorified sparklers. Me and Iron Giant decided to save our money and forego purchasing the $100 dollar pack that easily stood a good 6" over my head and was just about 3 feet wider than me. I could barely lift that shit up! *Sorry no picture of that*

Anyway, we decided to just light what we have then have a nice fire and drink some frosty ones. I can't wait!

On the last Saturday of every month, there is a party called Gullyver at the uber trendy club Plastic People. It's run by DJ MK, who happens to be one of the UK's leading Hip Hop DJs and is also a really good friend of Roots Manuva. Now, Gullyver is one of the better parties out here, so of course I didn't miss it. And it's a good thing I didn't, because this week Mr. Manuva was actually present and hanging out.

I think I have mentioned before on here how I have always wanted to hear what Roots Manuva sounds like when he's just talking. Actually, I think the specific phrase I wanted to hear him say was "Excuse me."

Well, while I didn't get to hear the specific phrase, I did get a chance to have a brief chat with him. It went something like this:

Me: Um, excuse me...could I possibly have a picture with you?
Roots Manuva: Of course! Wait...are you Canadian?
Me: No...not really.
Roots Manuva: Oh, well where are you from?
Me: Washington...D.C.
Roots Manuva: Well that makes sense...that's close to the border isn't it?
Me: Um. Actually, D.C. is no where near the Canadian border.
Roots Manuva: (Makes a really embarrassed face)

I didn't meant for what I said to come out so harsh and I'm sure he didn't hear me say D.C. He probably thought I was from Washington State, which is actually next to the Canadian border. So yeah. The main point is that I a) got a picture with him and b) got to hear him talk to me.



Sometimes dreams really do come true.

NOTE: The photo looks like that because it's a scan from a negative. Also, please ignore the date on the camera...I never changed it, so it's reeeeeally off.

I'm a bit of a pyromaniac, so needless to say I love the 4th of July. Growing up in Massachusetts made being a pyro a bit difficult though, since sales and use of fireworks was illegal. But now that I'm in North Carolina that obstacle changes slightly. I can buy fireworks from a tent right outside my favorite local diner which, for someone like me, is fucking awesome! But here in NC the sale of the good kind of fireworks is still illegal, meaning bottle rockets (rockets in general) and firecrackers (lady fingers, bricks of firecrackers, and M-80's, etc...). Unfortunately what I'm left to buy is basically glorified sparklers. I could go across the boarder into South Carolina or Tennessee and buy the good stuff but according to my neighbor it's legal to posses the fun stuff but illegal to set them off in NC. To me that's like owning a gun and not being able to fire it or hiring a prostitute and not being able to have sex with them. But considering the situation I'm coming from, I'll take what I can get. I'll still enjoy drinking a cold beer while I set off sparklers in my backyard.

Here's Animal Collective's "Fireworks" to help get you psyched for the 4th!

I wrote this entire post this morning and then for some reason it wouldn't post. Then I lost the whole damn thing. But it was a good post, so I'm gonna try and write it again.

The past few weeks have been really hard. I wish I could say that they were hard because "being in between jobs" is no fun and looking for a new job sucks. But no.

The real cause for my misery the past few weeks is actually the bane of every young woman's existence: Men.

Yes, you guys. You are the banes. Don't try and deny it.

Anyway, I haven't watched enough of Sex and the City to write a gritty detailed essay about why heartache sucks or why men just don't seem to understand women, etc. I used to take photographs when I was in pain, hence the result above (and yes that is the fearsome Lady Glock and yes it is a rather old photograph...I'm really opening up here, huh?).

More recently, however, I've started using music as comfort (No idea what I was talking about here) I've ALWAYS used music for comfort. And I've decided to share some of that music with you. So after the jump, you can listen and watch some of the songs that help cure heartaches by being so eloquently on point about love that it makes you feel like there's someone else out there who understands.

These aren't in any particular order, and I'm not explaining any of them, because I feel the songs really speak for themselves.

Now, after I've cried everything out and the feeling of numbness sort of eases through me, I'm going to sit back, listen to these songs, eat some comfort food (yay mac & cheese) and I'm going to heal.

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