Autumn Holiday in Berlin, Germany

Berlin: Fascinating city and history.
Grumpy angry people.
Don't expect any customer service.
Non-existent.
Still worth the visit.

Most of the pictures were taken in the former east Berlin. Some are very recognizable. The Brandenburg, Slab of the former wall, The Holocaust Memorial, which is very moving to be near, The 1936 (Jesse Owens) Olympic Stadium which is also magnificent, and the bomb church was moving to see.

Hmmmmm.

I don't know if there is any woman that can make him happy. Good luck!

My Mother....and my crazy azz family. Just Venting...Arrgh!

My hard headed 69 year old Mother could not wait to travel home to check on the services for Grandmother's for one more day, that after one of her seven sons told her he couldn't leave a day earlier she hops on a Greyhound bus from Dallas to take her to Arkansas. She left her glasses, her cell phone charger, her long distance phone card and of course no one has the numbers to our peeps in Arkansas because mom took them all with her. Basically no one knows WTF is going on with Mom!
My Family is unbelievable. They never seem to surprise me.

At this moment no one even knows if Mom has made it to Arkansas safely.
Lord can you please send some common sense to my siblings. You just don't let your Mother take off anywhere by herself at this emotional time in her life. Yes she is a strong woman, Yes she could have driven herself, but she is still going through some things that we may never understand.
I was so close to flying home two weeks earlier just to make sure my Mother got to Grandmother's funeral safely and now I'm a worried mess. But none of my siblings seems to think nothing is wrong. Maybe I'm over re-acting, but if something happens to Mom I will blame myself.
Now I have to wait until about 10am Arkansas time, 4pm our time here in DK to call someone to see if she is Ok.
Plus, plus my crazy younger brother is trying to get his ex-wife and his son and ex-mother-in-law, whom I love, travel to the funeral just so he can show people that they are still a family. Even telling my sister & niece that they would have to ride in the far backseats of his SUV because he is taking his 'family'.... HE'S DIVORCE. I told my sister-in-law (she is still my in law...to me) Don't do it. I wish that she had never married him. She is too good for him. Even after the divorce (3 years now) he still gives her Hell. He is not stable..... trying to perpetrate. Please.
And, And, One of my older brothers offered to take my 74 year old prostate cancer/bad heart Alzheimer's Dad and one other brother with him but they have to find their way back home to Dallas because he is staying for the weekend to hang out with the cousins because he hasn't seen them in years.
My crazy, selfish family. I need to vent more but why.
I still don't know where my Mother is?

This Noisy Woman....

At at party and this lady started asking me all kinds of personal questions. My first response to her was that I don't know her that well to talk about such personal things. I went on to tell her that I know it's a European thing to ask such personal questions when you first meet someone, but I'm American and unless you are paying bills at my house, you don't get to know anything but my name. (Me trying to lighten the atmosphere) She goes on to say after some women began to talk about their lives and children:
' Either you're a woman who can have children but doesn't want them or you're a woman who can't have children and want them.'

I said I'm neither, I'm a woman who makes her own choices. No family or society pressures here. That's not for me.
And all the while she's all up in everybody elses' business, her husband is having an affair with a woman who has no children and doesn't want any children but has been a surrogate for two other women (who were at this same party). Go figure!

Grandmother has died........

On Thursday my Grandmother, my mothers mother or as they say here in Denmark, Mormor died. It has been a while since I last seen my grandmother. It's been so long that I really can't remember the last time that I saw her, but I know that it was within the last ten years. I remember that because I remember showing her our wedding pictures and we just celebrated our tenth year wedding anniversary. But I also remember seeing her in 2004, but I'm not sure...... I guess you can say that the family was really estranged from Grandmother because we only saw her at Family Reunions once a year, as for my 'Farmor', Fathers' mother or 'Madear' we saw her at least 3 times a year , if not more, when I was child until my adult life. But she passed away 15 years ago.

I called my mom to see how she was feeling about it, knowing that she actually never lived with her mother since she was 3 MONTHS OLD! But there was that brief period when she was 15 because the black kids down south would tease her for not being 'black enough', and her mother's husband would treat her even worse than the kids for the same reason. So she went back to Arkansas.
I had to be ready to hear some painful things. I could hear the pain in my mother's voice. Not the pain that comes with losing a parent but the pain that comes from losing a parent that was never really a part of your life. A parent that you would see once maybe twice a year at family reunions and birthdays. A parent that put a man in her life before you. A parent that would write every once in a while, but not a parent that you could share the most important events of your life with. Not a parent that taught you her family traditions. No my mother did not have those kind of parent(s).
I don't know much about my Grandmother, only that at a young age she moved from the south to the north....Milwaukee, Wisconsin of all places. From McNeil Arkansas to Wisconsin.

I wish that my older sister was still alive so that she could tell me more about our family history. I know very little of it and of course my parents don't like to talk about it. I can remember when I realized that I had two grandmothers: Bigmama and Grandma Velma. Bigmama was married to my mothers' father. I can still see the confusion on my face when we would stay with Bigmama and Bigdaddy while Grandma Velma would stay at the house down the street. I don't know why my Bigdadday didn't take my mother in. But now that I think about it he went off to the army and My Great Grandpapa raised my mother along with several of her cousins. Like a lot of African Americans, our family is mixed with the Quapaw American Indians. Our great-grandpapa was half Indian and my great-grandmother was full blood Indian. She was even buried in her traditional Indian clothes back in the late 60's. Mom use to tell us how mean she was and how hard it was to live with her Grandparents even though she learned more from her Grandparents than any school could ever teach her. But like most young women with no true motherly guidance and being the only child of her mother, she ran off and got married to my father at 17, moved from Arkansas to Texas, had 11 eleven children, including two-set of twins,........ and the rest is history.

I want to weep for my mother because I can see her pain, but there is nothing that I can do for her that will ever closed that large space she has in her heart. And never really knowing why her mother was never there for her. You expect to see something like this happening today, but not 60 years ago. Black people kept their children, for richer or poorer, bad or worst. You raised your own children.
I have said several prayers for my mother. I don't know what things are going to be like when she attends her mother's funeral. But I expect that there will be a lot of tears and those tears will not be tears of the joy for her mother's home going service .....not for my mother, they will be tears of abandonment, tears of shame, tears of fear, tears of disappointment, tears of rejection and tears of loneliness. Now that both of her parents, parents that only gave birth to her, parents that really didn't give her anything but life are gone.

Shutting it Down!

Too much going on right now to even consider doing anything with this blog.

Every time I visit Siddity's or one of my other favorite blogs they always takes me to another great blog and before you know it I have used my blog writing time on something else.
Which is more interesting now days then writing in this one.
I'll be back in a few months.

Y'all play nice out there.
Comment boards reads like war is going on in every part of the nation........ from the inside.
People are really showing who they are...... believe them.

Purpose driven life......NOT!

The best advice that I have received in a long time is that 'There is no Purpose for my life'. This simple statement has set me free, because it freed up my thinking. Free thinking is powerful when you let go of the patterns of thought. I have been stuck on doing one thing, like most of us do. Find out who we are, find a career that matches up with that and then we will have 'Our Purpose'.
Don't misunderstand before you absorb what this means. At first Purpose to me meant that I have to choose to be something, play a role that was introduce to me as a child, a role that was formed out of labeling and egoism, sexism and racism. To follow someone else standards of how to live the perfect life, find the perfect man (raise perfect children) and die with perfect praise from my friends.
Living a Purpose driven life is having many purposes for your life not just one. Having a purpose for your life means doing what you want and not following someone else blueprint. What if you choose the wrong purpose for your life. Then what? Are you allow to choose another purpose... of course.
I have never read the Purpose driven book because it's religious based, and maybe it states the same thing. I like to stay away from religious based books because they are so subjective, depending on how you were raised in the church.

Everytime KD and I visit Dallas there's always one person trying to sell us 'Jesus' so to speak. Just someone trying to convince you that the way they worship, pray, interpret the bible is better than your way. And if you're not doing it their way then you're doing it the wrong way and you're not right with GOD. Please.

What something means to you does not hold true for me. And I'm not afraid to let you know. I don't live in a place where I will be shunned if I don't go along with the masses. Hell my husband is white. I left the masses long,long time ago. That, go with the flow, get in where you fit in. No thank you. How about thinking for yourself and doing what's best for you. All that other crap is old thinking, scare tactics. Plus the people that usually pass judgment on you are the same people you wouldn't even invite over for dinner anyway. We have many purposes for our lives and in our lives. Not just one. Our job maybe our purpose, our hobby maybe our purpose. Purpose is everywhere. Letting someone get the better parking space serves a purpose. Smiling at someone who probably had a bad day also serves a purpose. Attaching purpose to religion excludes people. I'm quite sure that even atheists and agnostics have purpose, because everything, yes everything we do has purpose and it comes from human kindness. And no religion has a stake on that.

No matter what, there is Purpose and it doesn't have to be driven anywhere. It just is. You don't have to read a book or go to church or study the bible to find yours. It may help but it shouldn't be a requirement.

Just don't have the time anymore.....

I'm done. I do more reading than writing when it comes to this blog anyway. I would love to write something everyday and one day I will. At least that's my goal.
I'm basically trying not to get too caught up with what is going on in the states. I find myself commenting on message boards like there is no tomorrow. I finally realized after reading Rupert Everett comments about Michael Jackson (and then the through something about President Obama being bi-racial) That was it for me. I had to control myself as I was writing my comment on ABCnews website. Then I went over to USA today's website and posted comments there too.

As I was writing I was thinking that there is a reason (or reasons) why I decide not to work in politics long ago when I volunteered for Ann Richards when she became governor of Texas. Even though I enjoyed every minute of it and learn a lot about politics during that time.

There is a reason why I have a low tolerance for stupid, ignorant people. - Just read message boards anywhere on the web you will find that there is no Post-racial America that term is only used to make people of color feel a sense of acceptance or some bull until they get a dose of reality like the Harvard professor. ( Who was turned in by his own neighbor and arrested by an 11 year veteran of Cambridge... one of them should have known what he look liked and that that was his home)--The Invisible Man.. at least until you get the cops called on you for trying to open your own front door.

There is a reason why I defend people who are being attack because they are different.
And the list goes on but what I really realized is that there is a reason why I live in Denmark. To escape the hourly nonsense that goes on on American tv stations and radio. I don't know how people do it. No matter where you turn the news is bias towards one group or the other. You can't believe everything you read and now you can even believe everything you see.
RIP Walter Cronkite. The only trusted name in news......well maybe Peter Jennings.

Don't Care

I hate it when I get into these "I don't care" moods. It means that my behavior will dictate the day and that's never good because now my emotions are making all of the decisions for me. I think that I will spare my husband the pain and stay in and watch movies all day and let him have some peace. Hopefully by tomorrow I will be at least half of my old self again.

For So Long

I have been neglecting this blog for so long I might as well shut it down. But I won't. Just been really busy since Feb.

Now I have a month to catch up on all of the things I have been missing out on.

Human Behavior

Human Behavior has not changed very much in 4000 years.

Caught Up

Didn't know that this would be the year that I would get myself caught up in so many things. Good things. New friends, new adventures and even a new computer.....No....... a new Apple Macbook Pro.

Do you ever have that ' why didn't I do this sooner feeling '. I have been feeling that way a lot lately. Maybe it's because I'm letting go of some of my conservative issues, or maybe it's because I'm getting older or maybe there are just no reasons at all. It is what it is and I'm happy that it is.

Now it's time to go and conquer some more of my issues with fear, that keeps me stuck in that 'paralysis by analysis' phase. First I have to tackle my shyness issue, which I have been told is related to my trust issues..... Looks like an busy weekend for me.

Happy Friday, It's May 1st, 2009.