Musings of the Socially Aware

soashulmedia:

As I stood in my dimly-lit kitchen this morning pouring a bowl of cereal—Frosted Mini Wheats and Raisin Bran (cereal mixologist, coining the term)—I couldn’t help but notice that to have only 1 cup of cereal would be an unreasonable request when even the mini-est of wheats command too much space and volume. Like maybe 6 mini wheats fit in a cup, are they nuts? Why even do serving sizes exist?!

This is a rhetorical question as obviously serving sizes were created by male scientists who have no concept of the energy needed to combat environmental and emotional factors.* If they understood these factors, we would no longer have serving sizes, and scientists might run the risk of looking bad because some humans are like bunnies and will eat themselves to death if there isn’t a numerical explanation to deter them from doing so.** 

Any reasonable person knows that the serving size for tortilla chips, chocolate bars, and Cinnamon Toast Crunch is “until you hate yourself,” but what about  the outside factors that affect the actual serving sizes?

Environmental Factors:

1. Perhaps all of the clean moderate-to-small-sized dishes are dirty or inaccessible and all that’s left are those behemoth Thanksgiving plates at the bottom of the dish pile. How dumb are you gonna look if you don’t pile more food on to compensate for the additional land area?
2. You put salsa in a bowl because the jar it comes in is too small for dipping, and now you have too much salsa for the chips you planned to eat and putting it back in the jar is essentially double-dipping to a terroristic degree.
3. All those breakfast bars you bought at that great sale that one time are about to expire and if being from the South taught you anything it’s that letting food expire is a character flaw.

Emotional Factors:

1. Maybe you’re a huge Scandal fan, and Olivia Pope and Fitzgerald Grant are screaming back and forth about how much they love each other even though it is inconvenient and unfair to the 1st lady and you need to finish that pint of ice cream for it all to make sense.
2. Maybe one of your friends doesn’t watch Scandal so you can’t recap it with them and now you have to talk to some spaghetti about it.
3. Maybe Scandal is going on one of those mid-season hiatuses and now you’ll have to watch something else at 10pm on Thursdays.

*It is possible that the environmental factors could be avoided by transitioning into adulthood and buying more dishes/washing the ones you already have. And it is also possible that maybe watching a less thrilling, evocative series on TV could remedy your desire for bad foods. Anything is possible.

**Math deters most people from proceeding further in most areas of life. Use it for manipulation.

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politicalsubversities:

February 13, 2013

Akilah Hughes - Guest Writer

Habari Gani! If you didn’t know that the correct response to that exclamation is “Umoja!” then you’re in for a treat: It’s Black History Month again! Just when you thought Kwanzaa and MLK Day were enough, we’re bringing you a full 28 days of melanin. Not only will we be sharing all kinds of wondrous Black info, but we’re also providing you with an almost exhaustive list of things not to say to Black people for the rest of February, courtesy of the Monthly Black People Meeting Council:

1. Why Do Black People…? No. Stop. None of the Black people you talk to are the spokespeople of their race, not even Bill Cosby or Morgan Freeman. Their opinions are their own, even if they are commonplace. Plus, lots of people refer to kool-aid as its color rather than its flavor.

2. Why Isn’t There a White History Month? Whooaaaahoahoahoaaaa. Sorry to wake you, Snorlax, but the past 11 months were White History Month.  Remember when we talked about how basically every White president was known for being honest—as if that’s the most interesting thing a person can be? Yeah, those were the White history months.

3. So Were Your Ancestors Slaves?  Pump the brakes! Here’s a good rule of thumb: If your Black friend has a very Caucasian sounding last name like Miller or Stewart, you can assume that yes, that’s the case. No need to single them out.

4. Why Do Black People Get Ashy? Rude. You’re ashy too, promise. You just can’t see it. You might want to start using lotion now so as not to resemble a leather purse in roughly 5-10 years.

5. How Often Do You Wash Your Hair? What a peculiar question. No one’s asking you how often you brush your teeth! Hair washing is personal, and is often done less than our paler counterparts simply because our hair has the problem of being too dry rather than too greasy. Imagine, then, how damaging consistently washing hair could be to our precious curls. Let’s just keep all grooming questions to ourselves.

6. Rap Music is Terrible Though! Why Should We Care About Black Music!? Listen up, homie: Black music led the way for most forms of popular music today. Where do you think Rock music comes from? It came from Jazz music performed by Black jazz musicians. Also, stop basing your perception of an entire genre on your limited exposure to good music.

7. How Come Black People are so good At Sports? What? Why are you asking us this? How can we possibly know?Our guess would be that physical ability is viewed as a profitable skill in lower socio-economic brackets because the educational system in America is biased against those groups and it is their only way to transcend poverty—but again, totally inappropriate to ask.

8. Why Wasn’t the Underground Railroad Actually Underground? Us Black people don’t have too many slave friends to reference for these questions, but our assumption is that between working longer than full-time hours in a field and then plotting and executing an escape route, there wasn’t much time left for creating an uptown express subway train to freedom. Read: not the smartest question.

We hope you learned something valuable here today. These guidelines should help you avoid getting slapped or having heavy shade thrown in your direction during the next few weeks. You are now free to experience Black History Month.

 …

 

Akilah is a 23-year old hot mess studying improv at UCB. She’s sometimes a Barack Obama Tribute Band and other times a blogger at Its Akilah, Obviously , vlogger at Smoothiefreak , and @kiwirabbitfru on Twitter!

Hey, I contributed this thing!