Has this EVER happened to you?

I have been dressing myself for several decades...but occasionally I get it wrong (not just a Glamour fashion don't). Today is one of those days. I just noticed I have on an article of clothing which is being worn backwards/inside out.

Has that ever happened to you? :-)

Saggin Pants

My Friend Alan sent this to me earlier today, two things happenened: I learned something and I was moved and therefore, I'm sharing!

Letter from a college student

The other day, a friend of mine visited me in the lobby of my dorm just to chat while her laundry was drying. As we were chatting, two young freshmen came by. One of the 2 boys wanted to 'talk' to my friend (as in date). She asked him how old they were, and both of the boys replied 18. My friend and I both laughed hysterically because we are both 22 years old.
After my friend left, the young men were still hanging around and one wanted to know how he could gain her interest.

The first thing I told him to do was to pull up his pants! He asked why, and then said he liked saggin ' his pants. I told him to come over to my computer and spell the word saggin'. Then I told him to write the word saggin ' backwards.

S-A-G-G-I-N

N-I-G- G-A-S

I told him the origin of that look was from centuries ago. It was the intent of slave owners to demoralize the field workers by forbidding them to wear a belt as they worked in the fields or at any other rigorous job. In addition, men in prison wore their pants low when they were 'spoken for'. The other reason their pants looked like that was they were not allowed to have belts because prisoners were likely to try to commit suicide.. And, saggin' pants prevents you from running.

We as young Black people have to be the ones to effect change. We are dying. The media has made a mockery of the Black American. Even our brothers and sisters from Africa don't take us seriously. Something as simple as pulling up your pants and standing with your head held high could make the biggest difference in the world's perception of us. It is time to do right by ourselves..

We need to love and embrace each other. No one is going to do that for us.
It all comes down to perception. What people perceive is what reality to them is. We have to change not only the media's perception of us, but we need to change our perception of ourselves.

Remember all eyes are on you Black Man. All eyes are on you Black Woman. All eyes are on your Black Child. People point the finger at us an expect us to engage in negative and illegal activities, to manifest loud, boisterous behavior, to spend our hard earned money in their stores, buying goods we don't need, or really want. We have allowed not only the media, but the government and the world to portray us as a 'sub-culture. ' They have stripped our culture down to the point where the image of Black people is perpetuated as rappers, athletes, drug users, and consumers of junk food, expensive tennis shoes, expensive cars, expensive TVs, cell phones and not investing in homes for our families.

We are so much more!!!!!!!

To all our Black Men :

It's time to stand up. There are billions of Black Women who want to do nothing more than worship the ground that you walk on. We are so in love with your potential. We want to have your back, we want to love, support and cherish every ounce of your being. But with that you have to show that you are willing to be the head of our households. You have to prove yourselves worthy of our submission.

We need you to be hard working...Not a hustler. We need you to seek higher education, to seek spirituality. We need you to stand! And trust us; we will have your back. We know that it gets hard. We know you get weary. Trust and believe that there is nothing that a Black Man and a Black Woman can't handle with GOD on their side.

To all our Black Women:

It is also time for you to stand up. It is time for you to stop using our bodies as our primary form of communication. It is time to be that virtuous woman that Proverbs spoke of. You cannot sit by the wayside while our men are dying by the masses. You are the epitome of Black Love. It starts within you.

You need to speak with conviction to let not only our Black Men know, but the world, that you are the Mothers of this world. You are so powerful. You are so beautiful. You need to love and embrace every blessing God has given us physically, emotionally and spiritually.

For all our Black Children:

We need to love them. We need to teach them. We need to stand up for them. We need to protect them. We need to show them that there are no 'get rich quick' schemes. We need to tell them that they WILL die trying if they submit to a life of crime and deceit. We need to teach our children that no one will love them the way we can. And being a basketball player, a rapper, or a drug dealer is not reality. It's not realistic and only a small percentage of people ever make it as a rapper or professional athlete. We need to teach our children that we can be more than rappers and athletes. We can be the owners of these sports teams. We can be the CEO's of OUR fortune 500 companies.

We need to believe in literacy.

Tracking A 'Missing' Man By Virtual Bread Crumbs

I found the following story on the NPR iPhone App:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120580855&sc=17&f=1001

Tracking A 'Missing' Man By Virtual Bread Crumbs
by Alex Cohen

NPR - November 21, 2009

In this digital age, where so much information about us is available online, how difficult would it be to shed all traces of your identity and start a new life?

That was the premise of Wired magazine's Vanish contest. Wired promised writer Evan Ratliff $3,000 if he could go on the lam and not get caught for 30 days. It also offered a $5,000 reward to anyone able to find Evan and say the password — "fluke."

Into The Great Wide Open, Sort Of

But Ratliff wasn't allowed to just hide out in a tent for a month. He had to go places and be public — both in the real world and online.

So he picked a fake name, "James Donald Gatz," a nod to a character in The Great Gatsby, to confuse people who Googled him.

"The idea was," Ratliff says, "they would go Google that and say 'Ha-ha, you have the same name as the guy in The Great Gatsby,' and I would say, 'yes.' "

As Gatz, he traveled unnoticed from San Francisco to Las Vegas to Venice Beach, Calif.

He also set up a fake Facebook profile and Twitter account.

"I was describing where I was and what I ate," Ratliff says. "When the contest was over, I could say, 'Hey! Look everybody, I've been broadcasting exactly where I was this entire time!'"

And people all over the world were looking for him.

"I would wake up, check online to see if anything happened while I was sleeping," says Sarah Manello of Rochester, N.Y. "Then I would make phone calls until around 4 in the morning."

Manello made more than 1,000 calls looking for Ratliff. One guy in Seattle set up a Facebook application. A 16-year-old kid in Oregon created a secret chat room to share information.

Some clues were provided by Wired — Ratliff likes soccer and dive bars, and he can't eat gluten because of a medical condition.

Meanwhile, a band called the Hermit Thrushes hooked up with Ratliff through a ride-sharing Web site.

"The only rules we have on the bus is no whiners, no minors and no drugs," says drummer Sam Tremble. "And he seemed to fit the bill."

Ratliff traveled with the band all the way to St. Louis.

From there, he went on to rent an apartment in New Orleans and catch a soccer game in Salt Lake City. He narrowly dodged getting caught at the Atlanta airport.

Hiding Took A Toll

With each step, Ratliff became more paranoid. Whenever people looked at him, he worried they'd shout out the password, "fluke."

"I became more and more emotionally attached to the idea that I was going to show all these thousands of people that they had found all this information on me, but they weren't gonna catch me," he says.

"For a long time it seemed like the contest was unwinnable," says Jeff Reifman, who set up the Facebook application. Reifman was positively stumped until he saw an online video interview that Ratliff did in California.

The interview was a man-on-the-street deal, and the correspondents asked Ratliff a few questions about how worried he was about swine flu. Reifman thought that shaggy-haired guy with a goatee and glasses looked familiar.

"I recognized that disguise as an account in our Facebook Vanish Team application — someone named James Donald Gatz," Reifman says.

He followed the account to a Twitter account, which was following Naked Pizza, a New Orleans business that sold gluten-free pizza.

'A Feeling Of Freedom'

Reifman thought fast and sent an e-mail to Jeff Leach, the owner of Naked Pizza.

"When I first got the e-mail from Jeff," Leach says, "it read like one of these desperate letters from a princess in Nigeria, needing nothing more than my account number to wire me some money."

Once Leach figured out the contest was legit, he took the hunt off the Internet and onto the New Orleans streets.

He passed out photos of Evan to his staff and flagged every gluten-free order. But Ratliff was nowhere to be found.

But Wired had leaked another clue — that Ratliff was headed to a book reading.

So Leach went to a local bookstore that night with a friend.

"A guy went by on a bicycle," Leach says, "and he made eye contact with me."

Leach stepped up to the man on the bike and said the magic word: "Do you know anybody named 'fluke'?"

Ratliff says he initially froze. Then he said, "Yeah, that's me."

So he lost the contest but gained a very real glimpse of what it means to vanish.

"There was a feeling of freedom in it," he says. "And there were moments in there where I felt like I didn't have any obligations; I was just sort of out there on my own, having new adventures."

But not being able to share those adventures with his real-life family and friends, Ratliff says, wasn't worth much at all. Copyright 2009 National Public Radio

To learn more about the NPR iPhone app, go to http://iphone.npr.org/recommendnprnews

Sent from my iPhone