Give us a twirl and tell us about your outfit...

Confession...I’ve been enjoying the hell out of Deflate-gate.

What?

At least ESPN doesn’t sound like an Dateline NBC survival story anymore! And hey, deflate-gate was just about the get boring, but then Tom Brady held that Nixonian press conference and pumped some life back into it. Had a sistah popping corn, pouring a vodka cran, and getting comfortable to watch SportsCenter!

Good stuff.

Anyhoo, in the midst of the mega-scandal over deflated footballs and what Tom Brady knew and when he stopped knowing it...emerged Twirlgate!

Mmmhmm, some fool asked more than one woman to “twirl and tell us about your outfit” during on-court interviews at the Australian Open.

I kid you not.

Others have already weighed in on the sexism and "EEEEWWWWW, as if!!!" factor, but my mind immediately went to how this twisted mess would play out if it were applied during this weekend’s NHL All Star game.

Just imagine...instead of the same boring kiss-ass interviews where some former hockey player asks Jonathan Toews how cool it is to be totally awesome or asks Steven Stamkos whether it is hard to be the hockey player NBC Sports announcers most want to clone...instead of that mess, the hockey talking heads could kick things off with "Can you give us a twirl and tell us about your outfit?"

Or should it be "give us a spin"...cause of the ice?

***cough***

Whatever...it would be MAGICAL.

And it'd be totally worth it just for the looks of absolute horror that would greet that mess. Maybe then...I mean, obviously we'd have to wait until after Twitter melted down from all the "Did that just happen?!?!" tweets followed by several million "Did Stamkos actually twirl for that dude?!?!?" re-tweets...but after all that settled down, maybe then we could have a discussion about why the hell something that is beyond comical to imagine going down at the NHL All Star game happens to women in professional sports.

Blink.

And yes, I’ll be asking everyone and their mother to give me a twirl and tell me about their outfit...at least until Tom Brady holds another press conference...

....or until the Colts release video evidence that Gov. Chris Christie deflated all those footballs.

Until then, happy NHL All Star weekend!

On why I stepped away...and why I'm back...

Hi y’all.

It has been forever and a day since I posted anything up on this blog. I took a step back...and it has made all the difference.

See, late last year I found myself in a very negative space. Not my normal everyday bitchitude...no, this was more along the lines of the kind of negativity that fuels the wrong kind of people and inspires the wrong kind of action.

I think the best way to explain it is through Father Karras from The Exorcist.

Hold my hand and walk with me on this one.

Father Karras was mourning the loss of his mother and questioning his dedication to the priesthood. I've been mourning the loss of...well, my sense of community. With everything that followed the killing of Michael Brown, the scab was ripped off our regional wound and all the muck expose...people I thought I knew were exposed as strangers and other folk as gleeful bigots. I was reeling not just from the loss of life and unstable nature of all things in St. Louis city...but most profoundly from the lack of humanity far too many people seemed way too comfortable expressing.

And no, I’m not naive. I know that the there are a lot of people in this world who casually dismiss the pain of others. In my decade of blogging I’ve encountered tons of them. But this time it touched off something in me that I really didn’t like...it triggered a reciprocal response that dragged me down emotionally to a level I simply couldn’t tolerate.

Kind of like Father Karras raging at the devil...only to find to his horror that the devil was within him.

Being possessed by a negative frame of mind is NOT a good look for me, so I did what any forward thinking activist would do and took a step away. Oh, I’ve been active as hell offline. But real world interactions, even the rough ones, are often healthier than going toe-to-toe on the internets.

One interesting takeaway from my brief dance with the Dark Side of The Force...once you stop seeing the humanity of others, you can justify almost anything. But that mindset isn’t empowering. It doesn’t fuel anything other than more rage and hate and dismissive blah. 

Twas like walking through knee-high mud, y’all!

Thankfully, after I walked through that sea of blah and came out on the other side, I realized I'd re-learned one precious true thing - even as we fight, we must take care to not become what we’ve been fighting against.

***pause...sip iced green tea...continue***

Anyhoo, that's why I stepped away.

And yes...I'm back.