Something Great

Something great happens tomorrow--I'm going to China for two weeks...to see what that country is all about. I know being 6 feet tall and blonde makes Asia an interesting place for me, but I just can't seem to stay away. I started with Indonesia, a few years later I went to Korea and Mongolia, and now China. I've been sort of saving Japan for just the right travel partner. I think I will know when I meet him or her.

I've had a million things to blog about from my romance with Portugal, to my newly inherited Chuck Norris DVD collection, to the fact that I've flown from New York to Lisbon and Lisbon to New York and then did that AGAIN in the space of two weeks. I'm a little over airplanes at the moment, but I always have Mark Twain's words "Travel is fatal to prejudice" burning bright in my heart.

I haven't written much about my job, and with some new things going on at home, it is very possible that I might be in Portugal until the end of the summer only. When I told someone this, they immediately wanted to roll their eyes at the thought of living in Utah (where they live). I'll write more about this later. I don't really fall into the religious demographic of the state, but all in all, and out of all the places I've lived and traveled to in my lifetime (and that ain't no small potatoes)--I just always sort of known that I might just want to settle down right there in old Sugarhouse.

Walking Home

I found this video over at First Fig--a beautiful website by a beautiful woman who is a co-blogger with me over at Exponent.

I recently returned from a little getaway to NYC. I try to return to the city I was educated in and love so much at least four times a year. I stay with friends in Harlem. And while I love that place, I can say that when I walk down the street--I have these experiences about 95% of the time. Men telling me to smile, wondering if I could handle all of them, asking for sex, demanding sex, commenting on my ass, commenting on my hair, commenting on anything and everything. I had to learn, after my first few months of living in Harlem, to block it out. Yet, at the same time, deep anger wells up inside of me that I have condition myself to block it out. Walking down the street shouldn't be such a task.

In mraynes' own words, "If men really knew how this feels, really understood what we have to do in our minds to make this ok, they would never say another disrespectful thing. I think this video does a beautiful job of showing this."