Sandra Quinones's blog

If you could have any musician or band play live - just for you and your friends - who would you pick?

Bruce Walker, or Jason Mraz, or Bette Midler, or - I don't have just one....

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Patchouli at play.....

.....she's such a sweetie kitty......

.....here she's playing with Shrek on the scratching post....

Getting up on things they shouldn't....

Kaylee

Shrek

Biscuit

Berlin

Sleepy kitties.....

Biscuit, Patchouli and Ruby

Shrek Biscuit & Patchouli

Ruby, Biscuit & Patchouli

"Can I hear a kumbaya?"

"I have long believed that part of our problem with resolving race issues in America is our inability to accurately name what we are. Aside from the occasional Johnny and Edgar Winter, there are no white people. Any child with a box of crayons can tell you that white people are, in fact, beige. The sickly ones are gray. Following this crayon logic, one can easily see that there are really no black people. They are brown. Or perhaps raw umber. Or maybe burnt sienna. Frankly, every time I hear someone comment on America's first black president, I can't help thinking, "No, he's not. He's more like caramel." Which is why I think we should all get in the habit of calling each other what we really are. How can you racially slur a man by calling him "beigey" or "umber?" The answer is you can't. Because that's exactly what he is. The melanin doesn't lie. Buy a box of Crayolas and see for yourself. We are all members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Can I hear a kumbaya?"
  ~ Chuck Lorre Vanity Card

Decline of motivated males attributed to uninvolved fathers by John Rosemond

November 18, 2009 - The Herald-Dispatch

I recently spent some time with a friend who has three children. My buddy, whom I've known since fifth grade, is a college-educated responsible guy who has never failed to do right by his family. When describing him, "well-rounded" comes to mind. He's masculine but not macho, sensitive but nowhere near maudlin, perceptive, intuitive, caring, compassionate. Like I said, well-rounded. His wife is as solid as a rock.

His oldest son, 40, never earned as much as a high school diploma, has had perennial problems with alcohol, and presently earns a living working in a record store. His youngest, another son, is rapidly approaching 30. Like his older brother, he's clearly intelligent and capable, yet he's barely supporting himself at menial jobs, still taking college classes, and has no sense of what he wants to do with his life. By contrast, my buddy's daughter, the middle child, is a go-getter. She's a top performer at her workplace and seems overall in command of her life.

For the first time in any culture at any time in history, females are emancipating earlier and more successfully than males. This crop of young adult males is certainly shaping up to be the most underachieving generation of men (perpetual boys?) to ever inhabit the U.S. I shared the following observation with a recent audience, "When one hears of an individual in their mid 30s who's still living at home or largely dependent on parents for support and has no clear sense of direction in life, it's almost always a male. It starts in high school, where nearly every video game addict is a male. In the adult world, women are graduating from college in larger numbers and have taken or are taking over a number of previously male-dominated professions." Everywhere, heads nodded.

It would be simplistic to attempt to attribute the ongoing collapse of the American male on one particular variable, but I think the main problem can be summed up thus: The role of father, and therefore his ability to model traditional masculine virtues, has been considerably diminished by several factors, beginning with the most obvious: the father-absent home.

Involved dads push their sons to grow up and accept responsibility and encourage their daughters to find men who are grown up and responsible. The less involved the father, especially during the pre-teen and teen years, the less able he is to be that influence in his children's lives.

The divorce rate has contributed greatly to the diminishment of male influence in child rearing, but the problem is compounded by divorced dads who, when they're with their kids, are little more than Good Time Charlies who are fountains of fun and games. The DisneyLand Dad winds up enforcing little if any accountability or responsibility and acts like the world is one big playground. This does not send a good message to children, especially sons.

But even many of those dads who are involved, caring and in the home have unwitting diminished their ability to transmit masculine virtues to their sons by subscribing to the new ideal in American dad-hood, which is to be your children's best friend. Dad, your son doesn't need a 30- or 40-something-year-old buddy (this applies to your daughter as well). He needs a dad who steps up to the plate of leadership and swings the bat.

Then there's what I term the Magnificent Maternal Micromanager, the mom who not only micromanages her children's lives from morning til night, but micromanages her husband as well, directing him as to how to be a father. The result is almost inevitably a Milquetoast dad who's allowed himself to be stripped of masculine virtue. He's his wife's "parenting aide" and his children's buddy: not a child, but not quite an adult either.

That's the short list. There's more--surely enough to fill a book. The bottom line is that we have a growing crisis on our hands, one that only America's parents can fix. That's going to require a completely new set of self-imposed marching orders. Unfortunately, bad habits die hard.

Family psychologist John Rosemond's Web site is www.rosemond.com.

"SPOT ON!"

Lawn Man

Josh Kilmer-Purcell grapples with turning the big four-oh.

By Josh Kilmer-Purcell

The moon landing. The Manson murders. Woodstock. Chappaquiddick. Hurricane Camille. Abbey Road. Days of Rage. The My Lai massacre.

As if turning 40 this year wasn’t bad enough, I had the misfortune of being born during a very busy year: 1969. Which means that all this year I’m being constantly reminded -- nay, harassed -- by 40th anniversary retrospectives of everything from Sirhan Sirhan’s conviction to the premiere of Sesame Street.

Of course, the most relevant 40th anniversary to my own is Stonewall’s. On the evening of June 28, 1969, my seven-months’-pregnant mother was splayed out on her front porch in a caftan with a Pall Mall in one hand and a G&T in the other, completely unaware that drag queens were throwing parking meters and bricks at police in New York City.

But this June, as homos all over the country pause to reflect on the current state of our 40-year-old gay-rights journey, I’m coming to grips with my own. And there’s quite a bit of overlap. Here’s what we share:

The constant urge to yell “Get off my lawn.” Now that my days are counting down and not up, I don’t have a lot of patience for people hanging around on my turf. We gays have given kudos to people for simply “tolerating” us for too long. We enthusiastically vote for pols who “bravely” endorse civil unions and pay lip service to equal rights. Meh. If you wanna hang out with me, I wanna see some action. Cancel your straight weddings. Write a letter to your senator on my behalf. Don’t come crying to me about your insensitive husbands when I can’t even have one. Just get the hell off my lawn.

Unrelenting contrarianism. Squinting backward over my youth I realize how eagerly and militantly I fell into step with the gay slogan of the moment. I clung to any crumb of scientific evidence that proved “I was born this way.” Now I can admit that I have zero conviction that either my genes or my parents had anything to do with the fact that I share my life with another guy. Don’t pity me or praise me. Just give me my equal rights and get the hell off my lawn.

Excess fat around the middle. While I haven’t started rummaging through my mother’s caftan collection yet, I have, for the public good, given away my low-rise jeans. Like my waist, most mainstream, middle-of-the-road LGBT organizations have gotten a little big for their britches in recent years, with fewer and fewer successes to show for it. Twittering twinks and grassroots Facebook frenzies are doing a better job getting both results and press. Draw up some new plans, or quit asking me for donations and get the hell off my lawn.

Failing vision. I recently had to raise the default font size on my computer just to type a sentence I could read. If only it were that easy for the gay movement. Where are we going? We need loftier goals than simply getting married. We should be ethically challenging every pillar of relationship conventions, from monogamy to bisexuality to polygamy to asexuality to androgyny to senior sexuality. If I’d listened to everyone who told me what was “right” and “wrong” when I was growing up, I’d be unhappily married to a woman and living in a Midwestern ranch house, too afraid to yell at kids to get the hell off my lawn.

Impatience. I don’t have a lotta time left to sit around and ponder eventualities. If I had a dime for every middle-aged man who sends me letters looking for advice on how, when, and whether they should come out, I could bail out AIG all by myself. C’mon. Really? When I was a kid the only gay people I knew were on Phil Donahue. Still, I made my way to a gay bar without a map or three decades of agonizing rationalizations. These days, teenagers are coming out all by themselves in the middle of Oklahoma. Which makes me ecstatic. (Just so long as they stay the hell off my lawn.)

Feelings of invincibility. I’ve learned that the secret to getting things done is simply doing it rather than seducing it. With everything this world has accomplished since 1969, I firmly expect full global gay equal rights to be in place by the time my head meets a coffin pillow. After all, our movement didn’t begin with a small step for mankind, it started with the deafening clatter of high heels.

Transformation of the back yard/garden thus far.....

The first pic shows it minus much foliage,.....

 

 

The next pic is after Lei planted a few things.....

 

 

And then we have the 3rd pic with the logs & a lone pink flower stepping stone in the center of that plot o' land.....

  

 

The 4th pic shows after Lei planted a couple of bushy like plants...

 

 

The last two shows are taken from the deck looking down on the area,....the first shot being the "BEFORE" shot of the area and the last pic being the "AFTER" shot of the area......

 

 

Posting on The Daily Dish sums up my thoughts about Michael Jackson more eloquently than I could...

There are two things to say about him. He was a musical genius; and he was an abused child. By abuse, I do not mean sexual abuse; I mean he was used brutally and callously for money, and clearly imprisoned by a tyrannical father. He had no real childhood and spent much of his later life struggling to get one. He was spiritually and psychologically raped at a very early age - and never recovered. Watching him change his race, his age, and almost his gender, you saw a tortured soul seeking what the rest of us take for granted: a normal life.

But he had no compass to find one; no real friends to support and advise him; and money and fame imprisoned him in the delusions of narcissism and self-indulgence. Of course, he bears responsibility for his bizarre life. But the damage done to him by his own family and then by all those motivated more by money and power than by faith and love was irreparable in the end. He died a while ago. He remained for so long a walking human shell.

I loved his music. His young voice was almost a miracle, his poise in retrospect eery, his joy, tempered by pain, often unbearably uplifting. He made the greatest music video of all time; and he made some of the greatest records of all time. He was everything our culture worships; and yet he was obviously desperately unhappy, tortured, afraid and alone.

I grieve for him; but I also grieve for the culture that created and destroyed him. That culture is ours' and it is a lethal and brutal one: with fame and celebrity as its core values, with money as its sole motive, it chewed this child up and spat him out.

I hope he has the peace now he never had in his life. And I pray that such genius will not be so abused again.

 

I was at the Salvation Army last week....

.......donating the last few boxes of our Garage Sale leftovers and saw a woman with her two little kids.  They looked like they could have very well come from Ethiopia or some such place as mentioned in the news article below (as she & her children were the darkest people of color I had seen in a very long time)......

Had me wondering if she, too, did not have to run away from such circumstances as stated in this news article below.....

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8,000 miles away, the past still lingers

Posted by adn_jomalley        Posted: June 24, 2009 - 9:30 pm

 People hold prejudice in their hearts like a secret, Biringanine Bagalwa told me in his Midtown living room on Tuesday. You can’t see murderous intentions in their eyes or hear it in their voices, but don’t think they won’t arrive at your door late at night wanting to kill you. That is one thing he will never forget.

Bagalwa is part of small group of African refugees resettled in Anchorage by the American government. They come from Ethiopia and Sudan, Cameroon and Somalia, Liberia and Togo, Congo and Gambia. Many have lived for years in refugee camps. They have traveled 8,000 miles to start their lives over, but the people who work with them say the traumas of their pasts aren’t left behind.

Bagalwa’s story began in 2002 in the Congolese town of Bukavu, the day militiamen fired shots into his front door. The fighters were looking for his wife, he told me. She is Rwandan by heritage and he is Congolese. The country was being swept by genocide. Rwandans were being killed, and women were being raped and tortured.

When the men broke through his door, Bagalwa’s wife hid in the closet in the next room with their daughters. Bagalwa and his oldest son faced the militiamen. He told them no one was home, but they didn’t believe him. Bagalwa’s neighbors had told them his wife was inside, they said.

In Anchorage, he ran his fingers over a sunken spot on his head. He lifted his shirt and showed me a round scar on his back. He pointed to a puncture mark on his foot and searched for the English word to describe the weapon they used to attack him. A knife on the end of a gun. A bayonet.

As we talked, his wife was curled under a blanket on their couch. She was shy about her English, but I could tell she understood. Michelle Engebretsen, a Catholic Social Services volunteer, sat next to her. Engebretsen put a hand on her arm.

Bagalwa’s attack was brutal, he told me, but what happened to his wife was worse.

“They do many bad things to her,” he said.

Since last year, close to 150 refugees have come from Africa to Anchorage, resettled by the government because the threat of violence makes it impossible for them to return home. About 20 more are expected to arrive this year, according to Catholic Social Services. Many carry scars, both physical and psychological, from the days when their lives were upended in ethnic conflicts, when their family members were killed, when neighbors betrayed them, when they were forced to flee, leaving loved ones many have never seen again.

Engebretsen works with a family mentorship program, helping refugees adapt to life in Anchorage. Her family and Bagalwa’s have been sharing meals and holidays and soccer games since Bagalwa’s family arrived last year. Engebretsen and her husband decided to be part of the program because they wanted their children to gain perspective, she said.

“You can read about it in a book, but these are real people,” she said. “I want them to know these people and appreciate their lives, appreciate their suffering.”

Most of the families’ interactions are mundane. Engebretsen has taken them to doctor appointments and to the grocery store. The grocery was shocking because they were used to outdoor markets, Bagalwa told me. They had never seen so many things wrapped in plastic.

But sometimes the differences between them become more pronounced. Like when they celebrated Christmas together. Bagalwa and his family are Pentecostal.

“It was just sort of like, we don’t do that,” she said. “They had no income. There were no presents. There was nothing unusual or special.”

Michel Villon, another volunteer, has been working with Dede Osibande and Sarah Mbombo, a Congolese couple who live in Muldoon. Osibande is Rwandan by blood. He used to be a teacher in his country, but he fled the Congo after his parents were killed by militants, he told me with Villon translating from French. Their daughter, Cynthia Ngankoy, was born while they were on the run. Now she is 7.

When they arrived last year at their apartment in Muldoon furnished by a charity with secondhand couches and dishes, they were surprised and happy, Villon told me. Africans always say American people have everything, they said. They were sure it was true.

             Villon taught them how to use the stove and shower, and how to lock their front door. He walked them to the bus stop, because for many months they didn’t have a car. Mbombo works as a housekeeper at the Marriott; Osiban is in job training. Ngankoy is taking summer English classes. Their past seemed mostly behind them, but then, on New Year’s, the sound of fireworks made them hide in their bedroom.

“They thought it was gunshots,” Villon told me.  On Monday, Engebretsen was taking Bagalwa’s daughter to soccer practice. I watched her lace up her cleats in her bright orange jersey. Engebretsen told me that Bagalwa got a job as a custodian at the airport and the family has a new car.

“They are survivors and they are going to make it,” Engebretsen told me. I could see she was right. They would get used to Alaska’s long winters and bright summers, the snow and the indoor grocery stores. Their children would learn English and find friends in school.

              But I wondered if any amount of time or distance could help Bagalwa trust his neighbors, and stop him from expecting killers from his past to show up at his front door.