That's So Handy

One day earlier this week, I was in my bedroom putting clothes away. My husband was in the dining room doing some work. I was listening to an audiobook on my phone but I intentionally made sure the volume was low just in case he called back to me. If there was a "hey baby", I wanted to respond to it, making him confident that I was available to hear what he wanted to tell me. The action of turning down my phone's volume was based on  relationship . I can make certain decisions because of details that I know about my husband! Some people have an alternate thinking process: Don't yell to me if I'm in another room. Wait until I come back . And if people know that about them, they will follow suit and wait. My husband and I have a relationship where I know that while I'm in another room, he has a tendency to call to me and tell me stories, ask me questions, or ask me to bring something to him when I come out. Since I know this about him, I made arrangements to be ...

I grew up in a household where all of a sudden, we started boiling water and refrigerating it instead of filling our cups with faucet water. Not knowing the reason, sometimes I got lazy and would still just get water from the sink, but I could tell that there definitely was a difference in taste. Today, I live in an area where the hot water is cloudy and it makes me wonder if simply moving the spigot from one side to the other would make the cold water suddenly safe. So we followed a recommendation from a friend to buy a water filter. The thing is, we don't just use the water solely for drinking. A few years back, I started wondering about the negative affects of this water on our hair as we wash it, on our bodies as we shower and bathe in it, on our digestive system as we use it to cook. Having children, I wonder what influence it would have on them; on their functioning, on their skin, etc. I mean residing in one of the poorest counties in Maryland and one of the lowest counties ...

Black Panther was one of my favorite movies because I felt like I didn't have to have all the background Marvel knowledge in order to enjoy it. It was just a great movie by itself. I've never been into the comics and such, which brings me to the main reason why I thoroughly respected Black Panther. Growing up, you didn't have to be a comic-head in order to be aware of Spider Man, Super Man,  Batman, Wonder Woman, so many characters. Not often was it common to mention the Black superheroes; even in fiction we were marginalized . So when this movie was due to air in theaters, Black people showed their culture. And I'm sure we got on people's nerves but it's pretty natural to represent when you're represented. During "rep your city" segments, when the mc, host or deejay calls out where you're from, you make noise. When your alma mater is shouted out, you make noise. Even at graduation, when you're name is called, your section of family and fr...