Woodgrain Scholarship
premium words and thoughts from a cadillacademic...
yeah, so tumblr: you’re hella confusing. how does trying to follow somebody else’s blog result in the accidental creation of my own. i say que?!
this type of mishap is exactly how i got my first locs started (and… how i ended up on the soccer team, or… how i landed myself in california, even…. how i copped a five-year public policy fellowship that had me set for a job at the State Department. right. these would be the adventures of an unwitting hustler).
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in undergrad, i met this crazy weed-head named erica (or hadiya on some days) in the cafeteria. she had piercings and a headwrap, and though i would have ordinarily rolled my eyes at all that, ahem, legibility, all my “conscious” weirdo friends had graduated, so she would have to do. i think what took her over was her claim to have slept with anthony hamilton in vegas. she later divulged that he’d made them pray afterward. i remember thinking that was super fly. she called me to her room one day and said she was just going to twist my hair. like, for free. she did. days later, they began to sprout to the sky and i asked her what the hell was happening, told her she should come to my dorm right away and help me fix them.
once we got settled on the steps of my dorm porch (cuz THAT’S the kind of school i went to, cats were steady doing hair… on. the. dorm. porch.), she told me i needed to become comfortable with how unruly they’d be, that locs were wild and took a while to become trained, and anyway, didn’t i know that was the best part of the journey? she told me they were my satellites, a mode of communication to other planets. then she took another puff. it woulda been surreal (satellites, yeah, thass cool, but somebody just started my locs for free?!). only then somebody came bumpin up the hill with a metallic candy-green big body playin some triflin 50 cent, and i (along with my back edges) very suddenly snapped back! ”waiminit, waiminit, what?!”
two years later, i found myself seated between somebody else’s legs, having my stellar connections violently severed in a ridiculous display of dramatic rage and despair, only to have my lone intended audience yawn and continue flipping through the pages of his book. once the regret set in and i began to trip, he worked hard to remind me i was beautiful and so began a lightweight pax romana that got us real, reeeeeallll close to all-the-way. but then another accident switched the tracks, and anyway, you get the picture.
so… maybe this won’t make nobody’s “splash,” but my homegirl’s been saying for a while that a blog is in order (i think she just wants me to talk to a screen, a tree, hell anything so i won’t talk her ear off so damn much). if it’s anything like the cycles of my life, this will turn out to be a most beautiful accident… until it goes awry.* i’ll know it’s a wrap when you yawn and start flipping the pages, but until then, let’s see how it goes, coo? coo.
