Vixen Chronicles

 Y'all know that I wanted a Apple Watch, but when my Luvster told me it was not on the plan for my holiday, I was good with it. I certainly didn't need a new device and I absolutely have everything that I could ever want. I was resigned to the idea that I was not going to get an Apple Watch as a gift, left to contemplate buying one myself, when about 6 days before Christmas, I get a bank alert that someone spent an Apple Watch amount at the Apple Store.      This posed an interesting dilemma, did I say something and make sure that no one was making merry with our money and possibly spoil my surprise (even though he knows I get these alerts since every time he buys burgers and fries without me, I send him a "nice Nina-gram" to gently remind him to make better dietary choices), or did I keep silent and risk eating 500 bills?  I decided to take the latter route, kept a poker face and then pushed the whole thing to the back of my mind.    ...

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This will piss some people off.  In America, I am Black first. As a result, we tend to codify many things by race. It is a travesty, though, to contrast the media coverage of the Paris terror attacks and the Kenya University shootings as a function of race. I realize that doing so, for some people,  is an avoidance of a collective social hurt.  There has been a war on Christianity since the crusades. It is not new  is certainly independent of color. In all likelihood, the shooter in Kenya was black. This does not make it un-terrible. What happened in France was also independent of race. The news reported two Americans died. I saw one  man who was as at the Stade show his almost-wound. His phone saved him. He was black. He was also African. And French. What happened in France is better compared to 9/11, when we, Americans of all ilk felt suddenly naked as the terrorist attacks stripped the proverbial wool off of our western sense of security and safety we enjoyed...

I wrote Just Short of Crazy: The Stage Play years ago. After mounting Marrying Up, The Stageplay , I learned so much about taking a story from book to stage. In Closer to Crazy (Web Series ), I took the same characters and continued their story. Watching them on stage left me with some unanswered questions for some of the characters and I was fortunate enough to be able to see it play out on film. BY the end of the process, I was full of love for the theater, and absolutely cognizant of the amazing opportunity and abilities that I had gained during the process of taking the characters I'd dreamed up and REALLY breathing life into them. It was as if I had created a pop up book that had somehow become three dimensional. Something about having to shop for clothing for a character you created makes you really think about them and their lives and motivations in a way I had never before. Most writers never get to go through this process. So often, if your work gets optioned, you sell ...

For Labor Day, and other holidays, my house ends up being the house where you can go to eat and hang out. Ever since I became an adult, it has been this way. I don't know if it's because I moved away from home after college, or because I'm just social, but having friends over has always been one of the things I enjoyed about holidays, any holiday. On the menu today: Ribs, and Jerk Chicken, Cornbread (which I can't eat), BBQ Beans and fresh grilled corn. Living away from the proverbial "Home", that place where you grew up, where your parents live, forces you to rethink family. Your blood relatives will always be your family, but 2500 miles between you and your kin forces you to create a new kind of family, one filled with people you collect in your travels, people you feel some kind of kinship with. Distance forces you to curate your collection of friends as others might an art collection. Desert: Some spades, adult beverages, Cards Against Humanity ...

When I woke up from my surgery, I was clear as a bell. I guess the anesthesiologist did not lie when he said he was the most important person in the room. I felt no pain, but enjoyed a deep annoyance of the tubes that were coming out of either side of my body. I had Jackson-Pratt drains attached to me, and they did quite a job of making my feel like a Cyborg or a person in the last installment of the Divergent movies, floating in the air with these tubes attached. Unlike in the movie, I didn't grab them and snatch them out. (After experiencing waking up with tubes, I must tell you that those characters in any movies that do that are REALLY bad ass.) In my head, I felt as if I had been tied to the bed by the Lilliputians, so I opted for as little movement as possible. That only lasted so long. They were pumping fluids into me like I was a dry swimming pool and the fluid had to go somewhere. Before long, I had to pee. I had to get up. In fact, I was commanded to do so. I will s...

My husband laid 4 quarters on the table yesterday, lined up in a straight line, and proposed a toast. The quarters measured almost 12cm across, the size of the cancer removed from my body. He toasted the blessing of clear margins and lymph nodes, and i almost cried.  I was almost brought to tears because he gets it.  I've had two weeks of people talking in hushed tones around me, alternated with me showing my new chest to anyone who asked. People who don't know me and my family well seem Perplexed about my joy.  I met with my doctor to review my pathology report and listened intently when she told me that they couldn't see anything like this on imaging. There was no way they could see this much disease. They also couldn't see the rare melanoma that was Inside one of my breasts. They couldn't see that one of the suckers was trying to kill me and the other had been laying in wait, slowly formulating a backup plan should it's partner fail.  I am a rational woman, s...

Funny things happen when you tell people you have cancer, especially breast cancer. They give you "the face". The face is interesting, because it's not like a pity face or even a sorry face, it's a face that says "I'm scared shitless. What happened? If this happened to you, it can happen to me." And it can, for no reason whatsoever. That's where the scared shitless part comes in. Then they want to know details, not because they really want to know, but because they need to do their own mental checklist and measure it against yours, to see if we've done the same things. Then you tell people what you've decided to do, and it really doesn't matter if you have no logical other choice (like me), or you have options, a look of disbelief will come over their faces and you get either "girl, I don't know if I could make that choice" which is of course, ridiculous, because, of course they could. If someone says "you do this thing...

There was no lump. No bump. No discharge. No itch. No shadow. No image. There was only a hunch.  The doctor thought that what she saw was atypical hyperplasia, but she wasn't  sure. That's not cancer, she said, but precancerous and it would have to come out. I was good with whatever wasn't supposed to be there being in a test tube . I was not good with being asleep to have things happen. For my first and second biopsy, I was awake and talking. The second one was actually classified as a partial mastectomy, but I was allowed to talk to the surgeon throughout the entire procedure. My biggest question? If they can take fat  from your butt and put it in your face, why couldn't they do that for your breasts? The answer: Because. Just. Because.  I was going to have a hole.  Good thing my breasts don't define who I  am. Good thing my man isn't a boob man.  The margins were not clear after that procedure. That meant that when my Mimime asked me, I had to tell ...

I am an overachiever. The doctor told me that after he told me that I had breast cancer. He said if I had to have it (as if), I'd picked the best one possible. That doctor's statement is how I started my 2015. That was not what I'd planned. I'd planned a year of writing  two books, a patent at work and training to compete as a figure athlete in the summer, followed by a bang-up bash to celebrate my milestone birthday in a pretty place in October. I'd planned college trips and dance recitals with my children, and a beach holiday with tons of friends. Here I was, in the best shape of my life, yet I was diagnosed with the disease whose mention made every woman and quite a few men take a serious deep breath and the blood to drain from many a face. I've always known that breast cancer was coming for me. I have lived like one of TheBetween as described in Tannanarive Due's novel, someone who cheats death and because death can never be cheated, it is always lurking...

I have a friend that has the best diamond earrings. So good, In fact, that once when we went to dinner, I almost didn't hear anything she said because the color , clarity , cut and brilliance of those damned diamonds was blinding me. I was mesmerized like a cat following the beam from a flashlight.  I came home from the dinner and looked at my own diamond earrings. They seemed bright enough, but still hers seemed somehow brighter. I went on line and searched for ways to make my own earrings look bigger. No luck. Then I switched to searching for ways to upgrade my earrings to bigger, shinier ones, but I was interrupted by my children. They were fighting over dishes again. A few week  later, I went out with my friends again, this time, she wore a fabulous diamond bracelet that might have been a tennis bracelet if the diamonds were half the size that they were. Each one of the stones was as big as the ones in my own diamond earrings. Again, I was mesmerized, came  home and...

My home was visited by aliens last night. I recognized their warp signature from the last time they came to visit and abduct my sweet little girl to take her off to the planet Teen. Just like then, they left an evil imposter in her place. Although the imposters they left look like my children, they do not act like those sweet urchins that would listen to me and laugh with me and smell my hair lovingly when they were sleepy. Instead, these creatures are surly things that ignore my wardrobe advice and will occasionally talk back to me. Just like last time, the signs are there that the imposters have arrived. For Midime, she morphed from a sweet girl that wanted lime green walls and billowy curtains in her room, to one that leaves her bathroom a mess. No, scratch that, to a creature whose bathroom looks like Mogadishu after an air raid. I STILL have to deal with that.        This time, the aliens took Minime. She was my sweet baby that always took my side and would...

Finding the humor in your day can keep you sane. I had to find humor in mine this morning. I'm now doing two-a-day workouts. That means I am splitting my gym time, separating the cardio and the weight workouts. Going to the gym before works requires a lot of extra effort if you 're a girl. That means pre-thinking what you are going to wear and giving up the time spent in your closet changing your outfit. It means you have to commit to your clothes without trying two different shirts or three different pair of shoes. It also means you can't forget anything..shampoo, conditioner, hair gel, makeup and associated brushes, jewelry...shoes...and underwear. Let's not forget that last one. I tried, at first, to get up and get things ready, but that didn't work too well. I had a day where I forgot proper bottoms, so now, I have taken to getting EVRYTHING ready the night before. This is HUGE for someone who packs for a flight an hour before they have to leave for the airpor...