Dear Readers

Replace the pencil with my computer, and you have my mind state for the past six months...

Fancy being back, isn't it? The last post published on Dear Whoever was almost six months ago. Since then, a lot of things have changed in my life, some for the better and some for the worse. Regardless, this blog was one of the things that had to suffer. Between job searching, starting projects, ending projects, reviving some relationships and ending others, existential crises, and reading obsessively, I somehow lost that fire to write everyday. It's a sad feeling. People ask you about your blog, and you have to come up with some half-assed answer or tell them you've got 'something in the works' (I actually do have something in the works, but that's another post). You try to lift the pen or type a few words, and everything sounds stupid. You wonder why you even started writing the blog in the first place.

Something changed to make me take this hiatus. I can't quite put my finger on what it was, but recently some small part of me said 'Ev, quit grab-assing and just write whatever your feel like'. I'd realized that the problem wasn't that my writing bug had gone, but that I was trying. Dear Whoever started out as a collection of rants about music, sports, sneaker culture, technology, politics, and whatever else I felt necessary. As the site grew, I found myself adhering to too stringent of a formula for posts. It started to get mechanical. After a while I had trouble coming up with content, because the letter format only lends itself to certain kinds of writing. You can't write a letter for everything, especially analytical letters with the intention of entertaining and informing. To borrow the words of one of my best friends, I turned into a professional hater, rather than an honest critic. My writing suffered because it was stifled and overly angry.

So here we are, readers. Dear Whoever is still alive, albeit a few changes. First, I'm going to be writing less letters. The Dear Whoever moniker will stay, but there'll be a lot more articles/essays/whatever-you-wanna-call-ems. Like I said, the letter format was constricting. Secondly, I won't post every day like when I started. The pressure to throw something up can kill your creativity and make my passion of writing seem too much like a job. Why post something if you know it isn't your best work? Why turn something you love into a chore? If it's no fun or uninteresting for me to write, I can only imagine how much it could've sucked to read.

If there's one thing I hope you have or will learn about me through my writing, it's that I'm a person who thrives when he loves what he's doing. I think that's what threw me off my game more than anything: the love was missing. Whether it took a six-month sabbatical, or I had some growing to do before I could love my writing again is a mystery to me. Either way, it feels good to hit that 'Publish' button again. The circumstances that brought me to this point were no coincidence, and I thank God for bringing me back full circle. That said, readers, I pray you'll support Dear Whoever like you did for the past three years. Aside from writing as an outlet, I write for my words to be read. If this is your first time reading, enjoy. If you're a longtime reader, welcome back. I do this for y'all! It's gonna be a hot summer! You know what it is! ... never mind. Let's get back to the writing...

Dear Racial Ambiguity

In about 200 years (pending the End of Days, 2012 and any catastrophic world disasters), when we look back on the cultural and biological makeup of humanity, this will be considered the beginning of a society of homogeneous people. This letter is weird to write, for two reasons:

A) How easily skin pigmentation fragments us. No matter how much people want to say that they are color blind, the skin (and it's color) are the first thing that one sees. People take skin color to indicate much more than it should, even in today's 'post-racial society'. That a newborn child has more or less broken every rule we knew about genetics, and skin color, is a shock to most people nor an easy pill to swallow. The birth of this 'white' baby to these 'black' parents (note the quotation marks) is the beginning a new era in human genetics: that of racial ambiguity. Because of you, the entire notion of skin color will die in a matter of centuries. People won't be too happy about that either. For many, skin color is a delineating mark. With your advent, there is one less marker for people to judge with.

B) As a black person, proud of my heritage, it's exciting, yet disconcerting to think that race may die out. Where will the culture and folklore I've grown to know end up? Will they be celebrated as a part of your new hold on humanity, or will some cultures scatter like dust in the wind? Will some parts of your 'new race's' culture hold still, while other parts get discarded as useless or classless or outmoded? How can we be sure that in 200 years black or Hispanic or Asian culture won't die out or that one won't be held up over another?

Both A) and B) are legitimate concerns, but this birth signals a pivotal time in humanity. Racial ambiguity, you've long been a heralded black sheep in genetics. Your tendency to make people 'universally beautiful' is lauded, yet people chafe at the racial issues that come into play. I can only imagine the kind of internal strife that this child will experience in it's post-latent years. From taunts to questions to weird looks, that baby's blond hair may be as much a bane as it is a blessed surprise. Then again, in this post-racial society, where your presence is heralded, she may very well be a golden child. Who's really to know at this point? What we do know is that somehow two black parents, with two black children, birthed a child who would be considered traditionally white. Racial ambiguity, it stands to say that your shroud will still be appreciated in a post-racial society, though it still may not hide you from criticism. You're something that people fear but secretly lust after. That this child achieved it through natural birth is incredible. Hopefully by the time she's old enough to write, her racial identity will be solid and understood to her, but really won't even matter any more...

Dear Over-parenting Parents & Schools

via The New York Times:

Most children naturally seek close friends. In a survey of nearly 3,000 Americans ages 8 to 24 conducted last year by Harris Interactive, 94 percent said they had at least one close friend. But the classic best-friend bond — the two special pals who share secrets and exploits, who gravitate to each other on the playground and who head out the door together every day after school — signals potential trouble for school officials intent on discouraging anything that hints of exclusivity, in part because of concerns about cliques and bullying.

“I think it is kids’ preference to pair up and have that one best friend. As adults — teachers and counselors — we try to encourage them not to do that,” said Christine Laycob, director of counseling at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School in St. Louis. “We try to talk to kids and work with them to get them to have big groups of friends and not be so possessive about friends.”

“Parents sometimes say Johnny needs that one special friend,” she continued. “We say he doesn’t need a best friend.”

That attitude is a blunt manifestation of a mind-set that has led adults to become ever more involved in children’s social lives in recent years. The days when children roamed the neighborhood and played with whomever they wanted to until the streetlights came on disappeared long ago, replaced by the scheduled play date. While in the past a social slight in backyard games rarely came to teachers’ attention the next day, today an upsetting text message from one middle school student to another is often forwarded to school administrators, who frequently feel compelled to intervene in the relationship. (Ms. Laycob was speaking in an interview after spending much of the previous day dealing with a “really awful” text message one girl had sent another.) Indeed, much of the effort to encourage children to be friends with everyone is meant to head off bullying and other extreme consequences of social exclusion.

It's a sad day and age when kids aren't allowed to just be kids. It's even sadder when adults feel the need to intervene out of some self-obligation to protect kids from bullying. I understand that bullying is an issue and that the repercussions for not attending to bullying problems can be fatal (see: Columbine). That said, trying to create an artificial 'group' of friends is downright ridiculous. Parents, while I'm no expert on child development, my childhood years are not that far behind me. I can remember having in my 10 (give or take) years of childhood 3 exclusive best friends. No, it wasn't always pretty when arguments and fights did occur, but you have to learn how to deal with it. Over-parenting parents, by making kids be friends with everyone, you're slowly yet surely weeding out discernment, among other things in a child's life. If a kid has to be friends with everyone, then he's really good friends with no one. The child gets no sense of what he does or doesn't like in a person because he's forced to like everyone. It's almost torturous to think that kids have to be nice to and play with everyone, simply because a school administrator says so. What's worse is the false sense of security that children grow up with because of such sheltering.

When I was a kid, there was freedom: freedom to make friends, freedom to stop being friends, freedom to be hurt by friends and freedom to make up the next day and go on about our days like nothing ever happened. Parents and schools who force kids to be friends with everyone, you're building up artificial security, in that these kids never will experience rejection in its most natural form. By holding the reins on organic relationships, you're allowing kids to grow up thinking everything will simply fall into place because 'that's what the teacher says'. Instead of fostering natural development, you're raising these 'bubble' kids, who have everything in their lives vacuum-packed and hermetically sealed. You don't allow them to experience pain or hurt at a young age, so when they enter the 'real' world (I don't think there will be a 'real' world in 30 years) everything is a shock to them. Kids will grow up, and at the first sign of adversity, they freak out because nothing's ever gone wrong.

That's not to say that we should toss children into the fire and see if they make it out without burns. It means they should be free to run, jump, slide, hang, fall and ride out with whomever they see fit. If the friendship doesn't work, so be it. Kids are born with two things inherently: a clean slate and natural resiliency. Hindering either of those leaves a huge void in their development, both socially and emotionally. Parents, stop trying to raise the perfect generation of kids and allow kids to be kids. We will never live in a Utopia, and sheltering the next generation won't ensure that anymore than brain-washing and full censorship. Word to Dystopian literature...

Dear Youtube

via The New York Times:

Early this year, the most popular YouTube video of all time — a 2007 clip of a British toddler gleefully biting the finger of his older brother — was supplanted by a brash newcomer.

The upstart was Lady Gaga’s slithering, sci-fi-themed music video for her hit single “Bad Romance.”

The shift was symbolic: YouTube, a subsidiary of the search giant Google, is growing up. Once known primarily for skateboard-riding cats, dancing geeks and a variety of cute-baby high jinks, YouTube now features a smorgasbord of more professional video that is drawing ever larger and more engaged audiences.

“Our biggest challenge is making sure we don’t taste too many things,” Chad Hurley, YouTube’s low-profile and low-key co-founder and chief executive, said in a wide-ranging interview last week.

That cornucopia of content appears to be turning YouTube — considered by many to be a risky investment when it was bought for $1.65 billion at the end of 2006 — into one of Google’s smartest acquisitions. On Monday, YouTube will celebrate its fifth birthday by announcing it has passed two billion video views a day; YouTube said it reached the one billion mark in October.

It's funny growing up in the 'computing & internet era'. While I was born as computers were just starting to take their modern form, my generation is one that saw computers and most importantly, the internet grow into the phenomenon that it is today. We started out all on Macs pining for Oregon Trail day at school, saw video games go from pixels on a screen to almost lifelike graphics, and watched as the internet changed from a geeky collaborative tool to an integral part of modern everyday life. Unlike younger kids who always had computers in their lives, we experienced a truly analog world, at least in some sense. The ease of accessing information used to be nil to those without an understanding of computers, unlike today, which brings me to my point. Youtube, 5 years ago, it was LITERALLY impossible to find a good amount of videos online, professional or amateur. If I missed something on television, I either had to wait until it re-aired or came out on video, hear it from my friends, or just be in the dark about it. If I needed visual evidence of something, I was limited to pictures. Then in 2005, a great thing happened: YOU, Youtube.

Youtube, you single-handedly launched the era of the viral internet. Online TV and movies, video-blogging, and random, funny viral videos were born from your birth. Half of the content on this blog, and damn near every blog on the internet, features your embed code in some form. Think about it. Before you, there were no video-taped rants about anything. There wasn't such a thing as Web 2.0. The internet was what was given to us by the technologically advanced heads. Youtube, you made everyone their own videographer and content provider. Content is what we want it to be. Before you, there was no Google Video, no Twitvids, no nothing. I suppose this letter is a huge neck-off, but I can't deny the impact that you've had on the internet we know today.

At the same time, you made it so that no recorded event would ever be safe. Any gaffe, faux pas, or blunder that happens to be in front of a video camera is immediately placed at your whims, whether intentional or supposed. Along with the advent of this new method of reaching content, came a whole new batch of negatives and caveats. People now pay have to pay careful attention to what they post, much like Facebook (though, you're not as invasive or annoying). Whatever the case, no one misses the days before you. Your ease of use and breadth of content is ridiculous and something kids today will grow up with. No, I'm not jealous; just curious as to how that'll affect them. I suppose only time will tell. They (whoever they are) said computers would never catch on in the 80s; look what happened...

Apparently, this was the most watched video in Youtube history?? Go figure..

Dear Cuffing Season

BAGGGGGGGGGED IT...

What's up people? I haven't written a 'general' letter in... let's just say a while (check my college posts). By general letter, I mean a letter directed at an entire population. They're more advice and my take on things happening in my world and probably your world too. This one is dedicated to the time of year we call 'cuffing season'. Yes that's right. Everyone's ready to get their spring fever on, but we've got to lay some laws down so that there isn't an Icelandic ash cloud's worth of drama and BS to deal with by the time September rolls around...

1. First of all, I don't think any specific season should be 'cuffing season' or whatever you want to call it. Pimpmanship doesn't have an offseason, and neither should you. The people that talk about there being a cuffing season are either adding new prospects to their roster at an exponential rate (means you're getting a lot of fringe prospects) or not getting any action at all. That doesn't bode well for people like me, interested in being the happy middle ground, rather than a gross deviation. Regardless, keep your eyes open at all times, not just spring. You'll see more people that catch your eye and will be better off discerning what you want and don't, which brings me to the second point.

2. If you do subscribe to the idea of a season for cuffing, more power to you. That said, you shouldn't jump in headfirst or hit the ground running for your springtime exploits. Nothing is worse than an overly thirsty person who is overly excited to bag something up for the spring. Not only will any potential targets see that, and run for the hills, you'll probably end up going for someone that you won't be too happy with after the summer winds down. Like Fat Joe says, 'Slow down, son, you're killin em.' No seriously, doing too much in the romantic realm never does the trick. Cuffing season is no different.

3. This one is more directed at the ladies, though dudes can take heed as well. The springtime and its beautiful weather is no time to start flaunting all the curves that only darkness should touch. Seriously. Yeah, you've been in the gym all winter, getting your beach body ready and shaving off those extra pounds from all those late night 7-11 runs and extra handles of (insert liquor). That isn't a green light to come outside with two bandaids and a cork screw covering your essentials. No one likes seeing more than they need to. Take a hint. There's a difference between being sexy for spring and having too much confidence for too few clothes. It'll make you more attractive in the long run if you're beauty is conservatively veiled rather than a buffet platter at a $5 Chinese place.

4. Going off #3, keep what you do have tight and fresh. Upgrade your wardrobe, try out a new haircut, a new style or something. Also, keep yourself well groomed and hygienic. There's nothing worse than a person who doesn't know how to take care of themselves during the hotter months. Follicular and epidermal faux pas tend to happen and stick out more during the summer because the heat amplified EVERYTHING. Body odor will increase tenfold. Hair will turn into Brillo (for black people, at least). Clothes and skin will change color because of the sun hitting them. People have breathing problems due to the humidity. Whatever the bane of your physical appearance, take strides to keep them under control, so that they don't control your summer.

5. Now that you're all primped up and fresh out the box (whatever phrase you wanna use), make sure you don't go around thinking because it's 'cuffing season' you can talk to the opposite sex any old type of way. Just because the weather is nice, doesn't mean you can't be. Lose the lame lines, 'swagger' talk, and braggodocious thoughts for some respect, actual conversation and getting to know the person. Sure, you won't be knocking boots down all summer, but it's better than finding out in August that the person didn't even find you remotely interesting, much less that it wasn't their real name. Think chivalry and charm rather than game and G. Those do the trick much better in the long run and, if done right, can have just as many joints knocking at your door by summer's end. They'll probably be a lot more worth your time too.

6. Would you, as a Roman gladiator (or Zulu warrior, or whatever) run up into battle without your armor? I hope not, because you would be the first dead on Spartacus. The point is, any dirt you do end up doing, be safe. Use protection and keep your warrior out of harm's way. Point. Blank. Period.

7. Take advantage of all of the resources available in your city, town, municipality, principality, fief or what have you. Spring and summer are notorious for shenanigans and events popping off EVERYWHERE. Not only do random concerts, jam sessions, festivals, carnivals, parades, etc., make for great outdoor fun, they are cheap as hell when thinking about an activity to do with a summer significant other. I know too many heads who break their personal banks when it comes to dating. Do yourself a favor, and do some research. You'll probably have a better time, and so will your wallet.

8. Remember to have fun!! Courtship, flirting and all variants are more about the journey than the destination. No significant other is above getting dropped to the curb if another is pulling their weight better. As it stands, people take their romantic lives too seriously at our age. If you're under 25, CHILL. We've got the rest of our lives to find soulmates. Might as well enjoy the weather while you're searching...

There you have it people. 8 rules that'll have you cuffed and booed up in no time, if you want, that is. Even if you don't believe in cuffing season, by no means should you take my word for proof. Get outside, find a spot to post up, grab an icee from the Mr. Softee truck and try your luck with the opposite sex. If you don't end up cuffin, at least you'll have had a good time trying...

Had this song in mind the entire time I was writing the post. Only seems fit for the summer...