Lean In. Lean Out. Stand. Sit. Run. Rest. (Guest Post)

By Lynne Adrine

Girlfriends.  All friends. Help a sister out. My rant for today.

I have been reading, with rising levels of discomfort, all the recent entries into the feminist/corporate/capitalist/lean-in/get married/mommy wars. And I think the overall discussion misses the larger point.

Could it be that perhaps we don’t need to be spending energy on how women can better fit and triumph in 2013 corporate America? Maybe our time would be better spent on changing the rigidity of corporate structure so that more people – male and female – could fit in and find a way to their best efforts without leaving their personal lives strewn on the floor like so much debris? 

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Every Walmart Is Now the Dirty Walmart

When I would go to the "Dirty" Walmart in St. Louis (if you're from North St. Louis County you know which one and it rhymes with Best Clorrisant) I would always joke "We don't hire cleaning services and pass the savings on to you!" Which just had to be true. That Walmart was just filthy. Nothing like the giant, mega Super Walmart in the "nice" part of St. Louis County. But then even that Walmart started to get a little "Walmarty," with the empty, unstocked shelves, the clutter, the old merchandise, that general "What a dump" feeling I have about most Walmarts, compared to a "Dirty" Target store, which is just being a filthy hipster Target and is dirty "ironically" as Targets ARE NOT supposed to be dirty.

And yet they are.

But anyway, Wally World, what gives?

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I'm In Florida,So Here's Story About Ponce de Leon And Other American Myths

Painting of Agueybana greeting Juan Ponce de León from U.S. Military. Painting by Puerto Rican artist Agustin Anavitate. (Source: Wikipedia)From the New York Times:

Florida probably was first sighted by Portuguese navigators, or perhaps by the Cabots sailing from England. Either way, it started appearing on maps as early as 1500. By 1510, its distinctive peninsular shape had emerged clearly on maps in Europe. By 1513, when Ponce de Léon first arrived, so many Europeans had visited Florida that some Indians greeted him in Spanish.

Sounds about right.

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The Snob Is In Florida on Vacation

Be back on Thursday!

The Snob Is Going to Watch Tyler Perry's "Temptation," Will Try to Be Open-Minded

Why is that a headline? Because I famously avoided Tyler Perry's last big release "For Colored Girls." The closest review I gave was quoting other people's reviews, then live-tweeting my friend and logo designer Jada Prather's accidental review of it on Twitter. I've since seen Alex Cross, a film so generic it should come in a DVD with a white label and black lettering, but I didn't fault Perry as a bad actor in that. (Although the physical moments where he had to jump or fight or wield a gun always illicited giggles in me.) Alex Cross was just in that it's script was of made-for-TV quality.

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Could DOMA Be Dead?

The Supreme CourtFor the conservatives on the court it's a "State's Rights" issue and for the liberals it's a "Civil Rights" issue, but both those points-of-view could spell the end of the Congress-created Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 (aka DOMA) as federal law. 

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Listen to The Snob Talk About "Where Did Our Love Go" on Atlanta's KISS FM

The Snob is back talking about love, black love in particular on this March 17 interview. It aired on Atlanta's 104.1 KISS FM and featured myself, Edward Garnes, and book editor Gil Robertson about his new book Where Did Our Love Go?, released in February. I contributed to the book, which is about the state of black love and marriage, featuring several essays on singlehood, marriage and divorce. (Mine was in the divorce chapter, called "The Problem with Marriage.") You can check out the full interview on Atlanta's 104.1 KISS FM here.

On the Internet, As In Real Life, the Onus Is On The Woman to Not Get Burned

Adria Richards speaking at a tech conference.Adria RichardsTo paraphrase Smashing Pumpkins, "The Internet is a vampire, set to troll." It can get pretty ugly out there and it's gotten very ugly for Adria Richards, who after tweeting about lewd language at a tech conference her employer was co-sponsoring, found herself out of a job. The ensuing publicity surrounding the case resulted in fine Internet dialogues like this ... and this:

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The Snob Talks Diversity, Demographic Shifts on Tell Me More

Michel Martin

Tuesday on NPR's Tell Me More with Michel Martin it was all about shifting demographics and how the more things change in the "Browning of America" the panel thought the more things may stay the same. Featuring myself, Fernando Vila, an editor at Univision and Howard Dodson, an African American historian at Howard University, we talked about "Hispanic" being a made up term, that the Americas have been minority white before (during the time of Native Americans and African slaves) and that it's about your country of origin, assimilation and skin color that may determine who is an "other" and who's simply another type of white person.

Never mind those darn Baby Boomers. We talked about them too as the country both gets older AND younger and the complications that come with that.

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