Fandango’d the ticket for Sinners for this morning at the theater up the block. a friend of mine has been waiting for me to see it so we can discuss it.
she’s anxious to know my thoughts, but I haven’t movie’d in a while; a little over two years, to be exact. theaters make me feel out of place… the awkward coughs, people who talk when the movie begins, cell phones ringing when they should be on silent.
my nerves usually become so worked up, I find it hard to focus on the movie. therefore, if I go, I show up early in the morning, a Sunday, preferably, when most people are God’ng themselves to death.
and that’s what I’ll do today. when I have had my fill of a movie that hasThe Green Mile of hype, I’ll come home to get a little more God, too.
AI Generated Image: A Black woman looking ahead with a frustrated look while pondering a few photos she is holding. She is wearing gold hooped earrings, her hair is braided and pulled back into a bun, and there is a blurred background of what appears to be a home’s living room.
Memory hadn’t considered how life would be with Rodney. They were high school sweethearts. She thought going with the flow would be essential: stick with him, he’s a good guy, loves her, cares about her, and would do anything to appease her. But now that they’re both older, he is well . . . boring. She reminisces while sifting through wedding photos, shaking her head at their decision’s haste and considering the welcoming mat of divorce. Where would this lead them, though? Divorce is final and Rodney is a huge chunk of her life. He isn’t some man she decided to shack up with – they’ve invested time, love, effort, and work into each other. Rodney is . . . bigger than regret.
temporarily filled with regret as peace moves calmly into view
Why are we here with this topic? Well because, I am sick and tired of seeing young women well past the baby stage with baby hairs casually laid across their forehead and edges in almost every hairstyle dreamt up by current and trending stylists who want to keep this God-forsaken look alive when it should be dead, eulogized, buried, and left ALONE!
I said to my best friend and cousin in a text message the other day: “I really, really hate those stinking fake baby hairs these young women have in their hairstyles. I cringe every time I see it. *Sighs*” My cousin, ever the optimistic, responded, “It’s a fad. This too, shall pass.” It’s a fad that doesn’t need to be a fad that makes absolutely no sense.
Back in the day when this style was IN, circa the 70s, 80s, and 90s, little girls and young women actually had baby hair or slick hair with which to lay their edges and forehead. These young women are creating curly Qs and baby hairs where they just aren’t supposed to be and doing so in such a way that requires calculation and geometrical tactics, and I just have to shake my head. Exhibit A: feast your eyes on this YouTube short of someone teaching her audience how to apply baby hair to a hairstyle:
I should have prefaced this by saying if this is your thing . . . do you, boo. Please, do you. There are a ton of other things I could be soapboxing about, but this here is the hill I chose today, so here is where I stand. I love people expressing themselves in every way they choose, but what I do not like are folks grabbing hold of something they think is new and running that thing into the ground without being keenly aware of why that thing existed in the first place.
The crush’s daughter loves this baby hair trend. I told the crush how I felt about it and she is in agreement. Her response was, “You know these kids gotta do what they see others do. Makes no sense to me, but that’s how it is now.” And yes, that is HOW it is now. There is no originality, no uniqueness, no want to build and create something that may not have happened before or to at least put such a spin on that thing that folks believe it has never occurred before.
I am going to segue briefly to the fact that I encountered a clerk at The UPS Store a few days ago while mailing a package who could not read cursive. I spelled my name, my mother’s name, the addresses, etc. And she still did not type the info correctly into the system. I finally had to pull out my driver’s license, hand it to her, and say, “Please just look at my license and get my information. I’ll repeat the recipient’s info momentarily.” I was so frustrated with this child that I had to take several deep breaths when exiting the store. This is what happens when cursive and penmanship are removed from schools.
The younger generation has a foreign language before them when one writes in cursive. It’s perplexing to me, and I will never understand it!
Back to the baby hair issue. My godsister had a style with baby hairs when I went home to Savannah, GA to visit this past April, and it took everything in me not to word-vomit all over our brunch every time I looked at her. She’s in her 30s. WHY, boo?! WHY? LOL. She asked me a few times, “You okay,” and mildly, each time, I’d say, “Yeah, I am good.” Because my food was too good to allow the likes of someone else’s hair to ruin it and the mood was far too great for me to actually dampen it with something over which I have no control. I wasn’t going to rain on everyone’s parade. I know when to reel it in and act accordingly. But boy was it hard!
It is becoming evident that my generation is old and bold and the younger generations behind us are young and shunned. We can survive with little to nothing, display ingenuity when it most requires it, have lived through getting home before the streetlights came on, know what VHS and cassette tapes are, and can probably quote 75% of the movie The Color Purple (1985) without hesitating or flinching.
If you are a habitual baby hair applier, I wish you peace. I hope you find the hairstyle that fits perfectly with your face and head, and that you do not continue to beat a dead horse that should have never been resurrected. And if you intend to carry this trend deep into 2025, at least, use gels and spritzes that won’t push your hairline back five years from now. Think of your forehead, children . . . think of your edges. What have they ever done to you to deserve this?
*No baby hair was harmed, maimed, or brutally criticized outside of this post. Don’t come for me, please.*
HAPPY NEW YEAR, beautiful people! If you can’t laugh, you can’t live. Peace and blessings. And may the new year be most kind to all of you.
It was a humid Sunday morning, and I was washing my hands at the sink in the women’s bathroom of my then church. A fellow usher/acquaintance came thundering through the door.
Her glasses were tilted slightly, her forehead had several beads of sweat congregating on it like the people in the pews of the sanctuary. She huffed and puffed and nearly blew the walls down, and then loudly said to me . . .
“Tre, girl!!! Help me!”
Before I could respond, this acquaintance lifted up her form-fitting black dress to her hips and tugged at a modern-day corset that seemed to be making its way down a path it was not supposed to go.
I stood there for a few seconds with wet hands, perplexed by this human who was exasperated and waiting for my assistance. I quickly dried my hands.
This was new territory for me. So many questions were running through my mind. What do I do? Where do I start? Should we just remove this thing altogether?!Why is she even asking me for help?!
So, I did what any nervously questioning human being would do. I slowly stepped behind her and said, “What do I do?”
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She began pulling her dress up even further and then called instructions out to me military style. This isn’t the kind of company I’d normally keep and at this intimate level of care, I worried that I was going to do something wrong.
“Pull the Spanx down, while I shimmy out of it.” Everything floated through my highly anointed yet VERY bisexual mind as I listened to this attractive woman in obvious discomfort instruct me on how to remove a conflicted piece of clothing from her voluptuous and striking body.
DO WHAT?! YOU WANT ME TO DO WHAT?!
I coughed to signal nervousness and then cleared my throat. “You want me to do what now, Jewel?!”
“Pull it down while I try to shimmy free. But don’t pull at it hard, pull slowly. Be gentle. Don’t tear the sides.”
UM . . .
This was my first real encounter with Spanx. The way my brain works is I began wondering why she put this God-forsaken thing on in the first place. Let your curves be free, love . . . is what I truly wanted to say. But she was wearing a form-fitting black dress, in church, during the summer months, and maybe there was something beneficial I didn’t know about to this torture.
I tugged at what felt like leather hide for minutes while she wiggled her hips feverishly to escape the clutches of the manufactured bone-crushing fabric. What seemed like forever, but was probably more like five minutes later, she was free.
She pushed her glasses perfectly on her nose, smoothed her dress down, tidied up her bun, folded the Spanx up and slapped them in her purse, then called to me . . . “Ooh, Tre! Girl, you are a lifesaver! Thank you!”
I shook my head in total disbelief but I didn’t want to be rude. “Cool beans, Jewel. You’re most welcome.”
After she left the bathroom, I washed my hands again, stared at the mirror, and said to myself, “What in the world just happened?”
A fellow usher/acquaintance was being tortured by a piece of clothing, and well . . . it was my calling to help.
*Names changed for the purposes of privacy and respect.
We, the oppressed are still chained — still bound to the walls of the majority. If we breathe the wrong way, a shot to the lungs while we’re blinking could be our demise. Yet . . . they tell us we are free. If we were free, we’d be able to roam the streets in our skin — black as night, beautiful as a half-moon, without fear.
They plummet in our direction — bullets with no names, claiming our souls one at a time. And if that’s not enough, we are being stripped of our bones while we’re already bare — naked as a newborn, cooing in the dark, crying to be held — yearning to be loved. The Powers That Be see no wrong in their ways. They’re going about business as usual while we pull at the air disappearing from our sight.
One by one, rights are being struck down — laws put in place to keep us in place, and pockets are being laced with almighty dollars to keep the loud ones quiet. Soon we will be wombless, wounded, wound up, and worked into the plan they have to be rid of us . . . And then, what?
And then, nothing. Split from the bone, the many, now the one lone splinter flees this madness seeking silence, solace, solitude; a peace, apart from malicious eyes; the swarming hornets of untended, weaponized trauma, wielding perverse justice as both heirloom and cudgel, endlessly frustrated by never striking flush with it.
They lash out in all directions — targeting the Other with retribution — both of the self-proclaimed divine and the self-indulgent, profane type — never pausing long enough to reflect, to witness that there is no They, nor is there an Other; there is, has been, and will only ever be Us. Many claim to follow someone named Jesus, who tried telling us exactly this before being killed for it.
We, the oppressed are still chained — still bound by rusted yoke of crumbling society failing to see how the tie that binds also limits their own roaming; existentially tragic how we diminish our horizons by diminishing fractions of life over the whole, all while labeling this farce Justice.
But someone says, “Have faith. Have hope. Remain open to the possibilities of change,” and we all stand on tired feet, shuffling to distant places, wondering when that “Change” will ever come.
This isn’t our first rodeo. We’ve been collaborating with one another since the early 2000s. Here are a couple of our other pieces. Thank you for reading.
A Cornered Gurl 
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