Season Three, Episode One: Punchdrunklove

Season Two, Episode Ten: An Early Morning Interlude

I smell the faint fragrance
of honeysuckle mixed with the lingering scent of rain
it floats on the humid, yet cool
early morning breeze
birds chirp in the otherwise quiet am
occasionally punctuated by the chirp of the gentlemanly cricket
dew laden grass adds the middle note of rainsoaked earth
this is my nighttime lullaby.
–“Untitled (08/09/13.)”

Season Two, Episode Nine: Look What I Can Do

I dedicate this goofy picture to Stewart from MadTV.

Season Two, Episode Eight: Untitled Beauty

It’s been two months since I last posted. I’m finally kind of all settled into my house, I’m liking this living on my own thing…I have been neglectful of this blog because I keep forgetting to buy a modem so I can get Internet. Life has settled into a pleasant enough routine, although there are some parts I wish I could change. I’m attempting to change some of it now, but things have a way of happening on their time and not mine.

The picture I took of this rose reminds me that even in the most vicious of rainstorms, there is beauty.

Season Two, Episode Seven: Birthday Candles For My Dad

Today is my dad’s 69th birthday. I am probably the definition of a daddy’s girl. I’m crazy about my dad and I love him to pieces. He’s my best friend. As far back as I can remember he’s been my partner in crime.

My parents are twenty years apart, so my dad was 41 when I was born. His age never stopped him from chasing me in the grass in our backyard or lifting a very giggly and squirmy five-year-old Me up so that I could touch the ceiling with my fingertips (my dad is 6’4″). As I grew older, I loved sitting with him (me on the couch, Dad in his recliner) as he leisurely smoked a cigarette from his green pack of Kool 100 Super Longs and we watched old reruns of the black and white classics–to this day, I still love watching The Andy Griffith Show and Bewitched with him.

My dad would also sit and tell me and my little brother stories of his childhood on his grandparents’ farm in Morris Chapel, Tennessee and of his time spent in Cleveland at his uncle’s house. I loved hearing how life used to be in the ’40s and ’50s and looking through the old photo albums at my grandparents (my grandpa died when my dad was very young, my grandma died when I was a baby) and my great-grandparents and my great-great grandparents. My dad is predominantly Cherokee-American, so I loved seeing my great-great grandmother and her long white braid that stretched to the ground (my dad swears she lived to be 105) and my great-grandparents’ high cheekbones and stunning profiles. He graduated from high school in Washington, D.C. in 1962 and told me about the dark days of when JFK, RFK, MLK, and Malcolm X were all assassinated. He remembers Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement and he fought in Vietnam. He’s lived through thirteen US Presidents, from FDR to Barack Obama.

He’s still as funny and as smart as when I was a little girl. It’s hard for me to think of my dad as a senior citizen, because he is anything but. He’s still the head machinist at his job. He still smokes those Kool 100s. His favorite show is The Big Bang Theory. He loves being a grandpa and a great-grandpa (I have a 28 year old niece from one of my older half-brothers. She has a little girl herself.). He still criticizes the Browns every football season (he’s a Redskins fan) and reads The Plain Dealer daily and watches Jerry Springer and Maury every day after work because their insanity makes him feel like his day couldn’t be as bad as those guests’ are. He still encourages me to live my dreams and to keep working hard. He taught me that hard work and a strong education are the two most important things that a person can have next to their family. He taught me how to play Monopoly when I was five (no hotels or houses and I always got Boardwalk and Park Place and somehow won every time) and how to dance by standing on his feet in the kitchen while “My Girl” by The Temptations played on the local oldies station. He taught me to really appreciate music and told me I got my voice from my grandma. I am incredibly lucky to have him as a dad 🙂

Happy Birthday, Daddy ❤

Season Two, Episode Six: Springtime in the CLE

Winter seems never ending sometimes here in northeast Ohio, but it’s little snapshots like the one I took with my iPhone above that make all that snow and cold worth it 🙂

April is one of my favorite months. You are tired of winter and you feel like warmer weather will never come…it rains nonstop for the bulk of the month, but near the end the world looks brighter, fresher. Almost like Mother Nature washed everything with a heaping scoop of Oxy Clean and all the dirt and grayness of winter is gone. I woke up the other day to the trees at the end of my parents’ street in full blossom. Love it!

10Apr2013

Season Two, Episode Five: Of Quarterlife Crises and New Starts

Posted in Random, Society, Uncategorized, Writing by Lashawn

I turned 27 this past December. At the end of the year, I will be 28.

And in 2015, I will be 30.

I know it sounds stupid, but the thought of turning 30 never really was one that I entertained myself with. I was always busy with the hopes and dreams that I had in my teens and early twenties, always thinking of where I would be by 30. It seemed like a magical age that I’d reach in what seemed like decades–at 17, 30 seemed like light years away. I had so many things that I wanted to do and see “when I grew up”…I’ll share a few with you:

*Graduate from college

*Have a fabulous career where I make lots of money and am happy

*Become a singer on the side and become famous

*Fall in love with someone who loves me for me

*Get married and stay married

*Have kids

*Travel the world

*Move to NYC and live a wonderfully trendy and fabulous life that everyone back in Cleveland would be envious of

*Write a novel and get it published and have it sell very successfully…and hopefully write a few more that have the same success

*Buy a beautiful house to live in with my husband and kids

*Be happy and content

High school Me, the end of sophomore year, 2002.

I guess I’ve attained a few of those things, but for the most part I have not. I’m not married. I don’t live in NYC. I rent a house with my beautiful and funny son. I’ve traveled to a few places, but certainly not the world–more or less the eastern half of the United States and a bit of Canada. I have never finished a single story I have written, so I very well haven’t had a novel published. I haven’t even finished my freshman year of college…or become a famous singer. I suppose I have a lot of time to achieve these goals and dreams, but all this dreaming of the future all these years reminds me of a quote from one of my favorite novels, Looking for Alaska:

“Jesus, I’m not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what they’re gonna do. I’m just going to do it. Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia…You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”

Alaska was so right. You spend all of your teenage years dreaming about what you’re going to do after high school, and then you spend your college years thinking about what you are going to do after college…and then when plans don’t go the way you wanted them to, you think up a new future to try to strive toward, but you actually never achieve all the things you’ve planned. You spend so much time dreaming about what you are going to do/be when you grow up that when you actually grow up, all your expectations don’t get met the way you planned and your dream life is yanked out from under you. I think that usually you start to realize that life isn’t going to be everything you hoped when you are in your mid-twenties. You aren’t going to achieve all your dreams and holy shit, you’re an actual fucking adult. It’s weird to think of myself as an adult. I’ve never really thought about that until recently. I mean…I know that I’m an adult. I became a legal adult at 18. But in the actual physical/mental sense…it’s weird.

I guess I was forced to become an adult when I had Nicky at 19, but even though I worked full time to support him as a single mom, I wasn’t an actual real adult, in the sense of the word. I still lived at home, still relied on my parents for a ton of things. But one could also argue that living on your own doesn’t make you an adult either. I think it’s just the sum of the parts that you experience over time that become the whole…like the heartache and the growing pains and the separation anxiety and the ripping off of the metaphorical Band-Aid of Life and the new beginnings and the jobs you love and the jobs you hate and the friends you make and the ones you leave behind and falling in love and just every little thing that you go through that shapes you into who you are that makes you an adult. You are constantly always growing up. I think that becoming an adult is a life-long, ever-changing process–you are never fully “grown up”. You never fully stop experiencing life until the day you die.

I’ve also realized that I am growing older. I’m aging. I will one day die. It’s a scary thing to think of…it’s scary to think that this body that has carried me through 27 years of bumps and scrapes and fabulous memories is slowly falling apart. I looked in the mirror the other day and noticed that I am beginning to get fine lines under my eyes. I have a sunspot from my many years of disregarding the use of sunscreen as a youth…I always read about sun damage as a teenager and wasn’t worried because that happened to “old people”. Well, Stupid Teenage Lashawn, I am not old and I’ve had this stupid sunspot since I was 25. I’ve been trying to lighten it with over the counter stuff, but I think I will eventually get Fraxel to remove it. I’m starting to pay for the sins that I made out of ignorance as a teenager. I’m getting a few gray hairs. I get tired more easily than I did when I was 17. I’m beginning to realize that I am not invincible, I am not immortal. I don’t get a “do over”. There is no reset button. I can’t rewind back and try to change the things I did, the mistakes I made. I’m realizing that my parents are getting older. My dad will be 70 next year, my mom 50. They won’t be around forever. It’s terrifying to think of them growing old. I can’t imagine them dying, and I know that it is a reality that I will face in the next quarter century, possibly sooner. There’s nothing I can do to stop any of this from happening. I can’t press pause and slow life down. Time goes forward, constantly pressing onward, with or without me.

But even through all of the fears and where the hell am I going and what the hell am I doing, there is happiness. My son is growing up. We live on our own. I’ve fallen on my face and gotten back up again. I’ve had my heart broken by men who didn’t deserve it, and it made me stronger. I’ve felt incredibly lonely. I’ve been surrounded by my family. I have loved with all my heart and made friends with people who I truly care about. I have a job I enjoy. I am happy with my small successes. I am still hopeful that I will make some kind of positive impact on the world, even if it is just a small one.

But I still don’t know what I want or where exactly I’m going or what I intend to do with the rest of my life. I don’t have any of the answers. Ask me again when I’m 30. Maybe I’ll have an idea then.

“I rent a room and I fill the spaces with / Wood in places to make it feel like home / But all I feel’s alone / It might be a quarter life crisis / Or just the stirring in my soul / Either way I wonder sometimes / About the outcome / Of a still verdictless life

Am I living it right? / Am I living it right? / Am I living it right? / Why, why, Georgia, why?”

–“Why Georgia”, John Mayer

14Jan2013

Season Two, Episode Four: Baby, It’s Cold Outside

Posted in Art, Random, Uncategorized by Lashawn

“I counted till they danced so
Their slippers leaped the town–
And then I took a pencil
To note the rebels down…”
–excepted from “Snow flakes.” by Emily Dickenson

(And yes, yes I took that! I used my phone 🙂 )

11Jan2013

Season Two, Episode Three: More Than You Probably Ever Really Needed To Know

Posted in Random, Uncategorized, Writing by Lashawn

It’s been a while. Happy 2013!

I have this unrelenting habit of not posting for a very long time, even when I have every intent to do so. Things that often seem relevant at the time lose their awesomeness by the time I sit down at my laptop to tell the blogging universe. I come up with a lot of funny stuff when I’m at work, but I am a staunch believer in that you should never mix your personal life with your job life, especially on a company computer. No sir. So I often forget about whatever I planned on writing about or I’m just too tired to be witty and wordy by the time I get home at 4:40 am.

But here I am, for your reading pleasure. What is today’s post about? No idea. I figured that maybe I could just do a little “About Me” post, especially since I’m not sure if I ever really did one before, and because it’s kind of fun to read about other people’s quirks. Even more so when you are famous, which I am not, but I am still very awesome and intriguing. Read away!

Lashawn, in a series of asterisked factoids:

*I am the shortest of my siblings, by at least a foot. I am barely 5’1″.

*I am part Creole and a lot Cherokee, on my dad’s side. My mom is German, Irish, and a little Italian.

*My dad named me Lashawn, my mom wanted to name me Elizabeth.

*I am scared of heights, deep water, big dogs, needles, and squirrels.

*I have been known to sit on the couch and watch TV while eating cheesecake right from the pan.

*My favorite book is Looking For Alaska by John Green. John is a fantastic writer, and I recommend you read all his books, especially this one and The Fault in Our Stars.

*My favorite runners-up would be The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, and The Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I haven’t read any of the Little House books in years, but I adored them growing up. I even read the other series about her mother and her grandmother and her great-grandmother. I used to imagine what it must have been like to live on the frontier back then.

*When I laugh really hard, no sound tends to come out.

*I am ridiculously clumsy.

*I am a huge worrier. When I am stressed out or frustrated, I chew my lower lip. If you see me biting my upper lip, that means I am overwhelmed or upset. My lower lip tends to be slightly chapped at all times, even though I am an ardent user of lip balm.

*I am extremely nearsighted and am pretty blind when I don’t have my glasses or contacts.

*I love Double Stuf Oreos. Preferably with a huge glass of milk.

*I think I have some hoarding tendencies. And I am kind of a messy person. Life is too short to be perfectly neat.

*I am particularly fond of sweatpants and hoodies.

*I mispronounce “belligerent” all the time.

*My favorite movie is Anchorman.

*I would love to go to Venice some day.

*I have an unhealthy love of pasta. And cheese.

8Nov2012

Season Two, Episode Two: I <3 NYC.

Posted in Culture, Humor, Travel by Lashawn

I went to NYC like almost a month ago.

I know. I suck. I am a procrastinating fool, and have kept my pictures to myself for nearly a month. In that month, however, life had been lived, tears had been shed, misunderstandings made, and Hurricane Sandy decided to be a bitch to pretty much everyone in somewhat close proximity to the East Coast. It was my first brush with a hurricane, and although it wasn’t actually a hurricane per se when it came ashore (Pfft to those guys at TWC–no one cares that it lost tropical characteristics right before landfall. That shit was a hurricane to me. I’m from Ohio. Trust me.), there was a lot of havoc that was wreaked and shit got crazy. Lake Erie was all over the place and I dealt roulette in the midst of a superstorm. Things may have been forgotten in the course of time. My bad.

But anyway, I went to NYC. And it was fantastic…well…kinda. it probably would have been fantastic if I hadn’t been all touristed out. So many tourists. I have never heard so many people speaking French in my life…and I live across the lake from Canada. Plus I’m short and navigating successfully through large crowds of tourists is particularly awful, especially when said tourists are rude–the actual New Yorkers that I came into contact with were actually pretty nice and I liked them a lot. Gold stars all around, Mayor Bloomberg 🙂

I’m probably going to get some shit for this, but NYC felt a lot like Chicago…and a lot like home. I know, I know, NYC is the greatest city in the world, how the hell can I even begin to compare it to CLE? How can I even say “meh” to the glorious glittery concrete jungle that is New York City? Well…Cleveland is actually kind of architecturally similar to the Big Apple. We used to be called the Plum or something back in the day when people didn’t really make fun of us for burning rivers or shitty sports teams. They film movies here and trick you into thinking it was actually filmed in NYC. So it kind of felt like home. And Chicago. Because of the urban chicness of it all and the vastness. I don’t know…maybe I am blind. Or jaded. Or both. I don’t know.

Don’t get me wrong though. I loved a lot of it. I loved most of it. Our hotel was in Hell’s Kitchen, and I loved the area around it. We were right down the street from the Port Authority Terminal. And Papaya Dog’s papaya juice was delicious. Cornerstone Cafe in the East Village was quaint and the penne bolognese was so good. The hot dogs at Crif Dog were amazing. I loved the random $0.99 pizza shops sprinkled throughout the city, and the seemingly hundreds of delicatessens on every block. I adored the East Village and I loved that Times Square was literally a ten minute walk from our room. The Forever 21 store at Times Square was the biggest Forever 21 I’ve ever been in and the clothes were fabulous. MoMa was breathtaking. I could have spent all day at the Met. The 9/11 memorial was beautiful and silently tragic and I recommend that every American should try to go to Ground Zero and just absorb the magnitude of horror that happened there. It’s silly but I loved the sidewalks and how the concrete literally sparkled in the sunlight–I remember reading somewhere that glass was ground up into the cement so that it would sparkle. Central Park was everything I’ve ever imagined. Uniqlo was quirky, I’m so glad they have an online store now…SoHo was eclectic. The raspberry swirl cheesecake from Junior’s was so good. I did so much walking that my calves and feet were on fire by the time Sunday morning came around–I ate so much good food that even with all the walking I did, I still gained five pounds in four days. It was great. I really enjoyed myself and the time away with my boyfriend…my only regret is that we did so much touristy stuff that we didn’t get to see the city for all the brilliant little facets that make up the entire jewel of NYC, and in that we didn’t get to truly enjoy all the time we had together. I would love to go back again and see everything that we didn’t have time to see 🙂

On to the photos!

Hahaha…I was walking through the airport terminal and I just couldn’t resist.

You may laugh, but I was completely blown away by this little contraption that was in the cab. It’s a TV/GPS/sorcerer in a box–AND you can pay your fare with a freaking credit card. Sorry. I’m from the Midwest 😛

Times Square at dusk. Loved it!

I was sitting on a bench across from the Ed Sullivan Theater when I took this picture. I didn’t really notice the guy with the flowers until later…I wonder if he was heading to a first date or the hospital to see a sick loved one or if he was bringing those flowers to his girlfriend/wife as an anniversary surprise or as an apology…or if he’d brought those flowers and had been rejected and was out walking to clear his head. Only me, haha.