Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Sunday, October 12, 2008
"This Lifetime"--In Pursuit Of Olamide & How I Ended Up On Myspace
Actually, my first blog experience was in 2005 when I somehow was surfing the internet on my very first computer which was given to me by the husband of one of my friends. Y'see he worked as a computer tech and was always fixing computers which people sometimes failed to pick up. My birthday had been that June, and I was seriously depressed because of some mysterious pains which later became diagnosed as PLANTAR FASCITIS-- a painful ailment of the feet-- which had me unable to walk unless on a cane.
I was several hundred miles from family, friends, and such-- and my BFF's had me over for dinner and presented me with my first computer--a laptop!
Well-- I was astounded and afraid of it but it was gonna be so much fun! A welcome diversion to get immersed into something other than my own woes.
Welll--- somehow I started learning how to navigate it and would read newspapers from the midwest, which is where a lot of my family was at the time.
Summer soon passed and about the first of October, there appeared an AP article on just about every site I would visit--- a desperate plea from a young college student regarding the disappearance of her roommate--- a young African woman from the suburban Chicago area. They were both students at Illinois State University.
The name of the missing 21-year old was Olamide Adeyooye, and she had been last seen leaving a video store. A campus troublemaker, whom everyone deemed as 'creepy' and 'gross' was known to have made unwanted advances to almost every female on campus and he, too, was missing--- along with her car.
You could feel the fever pitch of concern growing to help this girl's family and friends to bring some sort of resolution to her plight. I was feeling desperate as well--here I was, a trained healthcare professional--disabled--no salary--no good to anyone--not even myself.
I remembered that I had written some words years ago as lyrics to a song. I just wanted to do SOMETHING---people were volunteering to go to Illinois for pep rallies, search parties -- I mean --this was now a nationwide search.
I wanted desperately to contribute-- contribute anything toward this nationwide plea for help. The effort was organized through this new thing that I had never heard of called 'Myspace'...
Soon all these KIDS-- young enough to be my grandchildren-- were freely and unabashedly exchanging thoughts and ideas with me--a complete stranger-- I felt such a responsibility to them all-- because they were also revealing things that showed me that each and everyone of them were in danger EVERY DAY OF THE WEEK AT THESE COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES.
WHAT was I going to do? It would have to be purely a mental effort--because physically--I was barely getting from one room to the other.... an yet they needed me. I gave what I had. I gave my words.
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox
I was several hundred miles from family, friends, and such-- and my BFF's had me over for dinner and presented me with my first computer--a laptop!
Well-- I was astounded and afraid of it but it was gonna be so much fun! A welcome diversion to get immersed into something other than my own woes.
Welll--- somehow I started learning how to navigate it and would read newspapers from the midwest, which is where a lot of my family was at the time.
Summer soon passed and about the first of October, there appeared an AP article on just about every site I would visit--- a desperate plea from a young college student regarding the disappearance of her roommate--- a young African woman from the suburban Chicago area. They were both students at Illinois State University.
The name of the missing 21-year old was Olamide Adeyooye, and she had been last seen leaving a video store. A campus troublemaker, whom everyone deemed as 'creepy' and 'gross' was known to have made unwanted advances to almost every female on campus and he, too, was missing--- along with her car.
You could feel the fever pitch of concern growing to help this girl's family and friends to bring some sort of resolution to her plight. I was feeling desperate as well--here I was, a trained healthcare professional--disabled--no salary--no good to anyone--not even myself.
I remembered that I had written some words years ago as lyrics to a song. I just wanted to do SOMETHING---people were volunteering to go to Illinois for pep rallies, search parties -- I mean --this was now a nationwide search.
I wanted desperately to contribute-- contribute anything toward this nationwide plea for help. The effort was organized through this new thing that I had never heard of called 'Myspace'...
Soon all these KIDS-- young enough to be my grandchildren-- were freely and unabashedly exchanging thoughts and ideas with me--a complete stranger-- I felt such a responsibility to them all-- because they were also revealing things that showed me that each and everyone of them were in danger EVERY DAY OF THE WEEK AT THESE COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES.
WHAT was I going to do? It would have to be purely a mental effort--because physically--I was barely getting from one room to the other.... an yet they needed me. I gave what I had. I gave my words.
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox
Tuesday,October 23, 2005 8:45 p.m.
"THIS LIFETIME"
When I think of this lifetime--
I think of all the places... the people...I might have been
Compliments of this lifetime-- but sort of in between the story...
that might have been...that might have been
Soft, cool, and clean---Angel spread out your wings and let's fly thru the clouds and the melee--such a happy day..and I just wanna play...
...But we're moving on --
this life is just a stage where all the stars can't wait to get on---
The die is cast--take your places now, we've just got to get started...
before it's time...before it's time...
Remember all your lines.
Gotta get the story told---
--do you know the time?
I get so excited!
to fade away.
But in that life was such a happy place and still it lives...is here to stay...
Within my heart, a special place, where love can gleam---
A firefly---with angel wings----
and they dance---
and they dance---
and they dance.
@1997niambi steele
A Look Back On The Not Too Distant Past
I thought I would post some of the stuff that I've got on other blogs--cuz just like Staind says-"It's been awhile..."
I'm gonna start with--not a blog--but a letter-poem that I wrote to my friend Joy-- which is why I started writing on this blog in the first place--she was so amazed that I expressed myself in a poem--now The Cranberries are singing about "...like dying in the sun" and all that means is I didn't die--so I write.
My friend Joy Leftow is truly an amazing woman--she rescues animals of all types, mostly cats and humans who need them. She's the "Hello Dolly" of the Human/Cat Needy Society. I mean she is just a magnet for that type of stuff--she even does it on vacation. That's why I love her-- she is very natural and before you know it you're all matched up and relating to something that was only a persistent, unfed hunger of an undistinguishable dimension the size of the black hole that is as yet unidentified in your existence. Now Horace Silver is playing "Song For My Father" and that really is it --- the space I try to fill with all sorts of things-- so I write instead of die the little known death of disappearing right before my very eyes. .. and Guru is now singing about walkin'...."down the back streets" I love that man's voice.
Now before I go any further --I gotta listen to my twin Tupac (we be born on the same day 24 years apart) and Scarface rap they little hearts out on "Smile" -- R..I.P. home slice.
So here is the ORIGINAL version of my letter to Joy which she liked so much that she posted it on HER BLOG (Joy's Poetry Blog)--after she edited it of course. Like my twin Tupac said --- I ain't mad at cha, Joy! PEACE
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox
Saturday, September 27, 2008 10:56 p.m.
Dear Joy---
I just wanna know one thing-- do you ever speak into the telphone anymore
Or has that part of life become too much of a chore
Duly noted is the genius of your epitome's and metaphors
But jesus christ I wanna get back to the used to be's and gone befores
I know that isn't fair to your new found sense of discoveries and recoveries
But have a heart for us old farts who still live in our reveries and miseries
Some of us just want our friends to be a familiarity
Not a new design on a runway like a freaked out fashion week.
I want to be part of your joyous new discoveries
But its hard to imagine someone who remains such a mystery.
I've never even been introduced to the new man in your world
But every time I turn around I am forced to meet him in the words he's learned to twirl.
I'd like to meet him at a gathering meant for more than just you two
I feel so out of place meeting him through you
The world I live in is populated and free
The world you live in seemingly has no place for me...
... and I feel it everytime I get electronic, cybersonic word windfalls
Instead of incoming, on purposeful, personal phonecalls.
xoxooxoxoxoxxxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxooxooxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo
If you'd like to listen to my musical choices--- http://www.playlist.com/niambi2020
I'm gonna start with--not a blog--but a letter-poem that I wrote to my friend Joy-- which is why I started writing on this blog in the first place--she was so amazed that I expressed myself in a poem--now The Cranberries are singing about "...like dying in the sun" and all that means is I didn't die--so I write.
My friend Joy Leftow is truly an amazing woman--she rescues animals of all types, mostly cats and humans who need them. She's the "Hello Dolly" of the Human/Cat Needy Society. I mean she is just a magnet for that type of stuff--she even does it on vacation. That's why I love her-- she is very natural and before you know it you're all matched up and relating to something that was only a persistent, unfed hunger of an undistinguishable dimension the size of the black hole that is as yet unidentified in your existence. Now Horace Silver is playing "Song For My Father" and that really is it --- the space I try to fill with all sorts of things-- so I write instead of die the little known death of disappearing right before my very eyes. .. and Guru is now singing about walkin'...."down the back streets" I love that man's voice.
Now before I go any further --I gotta listen to my twin Tupac (we be born on the same day 24 years apart) and Scarface rap they little hearts out on "Smile" -- R..I.P. home slice.
So here is the ORIGINAL version of my letter to Joy which she liked so much that she posted it on HER BLOG (Joy's Poetry Blog)--after she edited it of course. Like my twin Tupac said --- I ain't mad at cha, Joy! PEACE
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox
Saturday, September 27, 2008 10:56 p.m.
Dear Joy---
I just wanna know one thing-- do you ever speak into the telphone anymore
Or has that part of life become too much of a chore
Duly noted is the genius of your epitome's and metaphors
But jesus christ I wanna get back to the used to be's and gone befores
I know that isn't fair to your new found sense of discoveries and recoveries
But have a heart for us old farts who still live in our reveries and miseries
Some of us just want our friends to be a familiarity
Not a new design on a runway like a freaked out fashion week.
I want to be part of your joyous new discoveries
But its hard to imagine someone who remains such a mystery.
I've never even been introduced to the new man in your world
But every time I turn around I am forced to meet him in the words he's learned to twirl.
I'd like to meet him at a gathering meant for more than just you two
I feel so out of place meeting him through you
The world I live in is populated and free
The world you live in seemingly has no place for me...
... and I feel it everytime I get electronic, cybersonic word windfalls
Instead of incoming, on purposeful, personal phonecalls.
xoxooxoxoxoxxxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxooxooxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo
If you'd like to listen to my musical choices--- http://www.playlist.com/niambi2020
Monday, September 29, 2008
I'm Proud!
I wasn't always what you would call a proud person. I had many reasons which damaged the mechanisms that would have allowed me to be proud and for a long time I didn't even know they were damaged. I just couldn't figure out what was wrong with me.
My first memories are of my grandmother and grandfather, great-grandmother, uncles, and cousins--all on my Mother's side. Then somewhere in there comes my Mother. I only remember my Father when I remember that I can't remember nothing about him but the 2 times in life that I spoke to him on the telephone.
The first time I remember hearing his voice, I remember how it scared me; something stirred in the pit of my stomach as he said what ever it was that he was saying. I just remember thinking that I wanted that feeling to happen again and again and I couldn't speak because of the intense pleasure emanating from the receiver of the telephone down to the back of my belly button. It felt like Christmas lights were blinking on and off in my brain but all over was like the warmth of logs from my grandmother's hearth. I was mesmerized by the thrill of this strange electricnicity.
I immediately felt ashamed and ran to hide. I still think that this must have been akin to a childhood orgasm; but because I couldn't really express that it was just the sheer joy of hearing, for the first time, a deep, sonorous voice of a man, that everyone said was my father who, (at last!), wanted to talk to me. I was already 10 years old and could not even remember that he was my father --- and all that got mixed in with the pre-pubescent curiosity that all of us have but few of us have a healthy guide to get us through the giddy, heady, unimaginable terror of the roller coaster ride it is to go from little child to the not-so-little-girl, man-woman relationships that are supposed to happen between parents and children.
I guess that's why I was, for a period of time, a precociously, curiously, promiscuous, lonely loner of a little girl shoplifter, ---an only child--- raised by grandparents; teased and alternately tortured by older cousins; used by uncles for their perversion and my curiosity; married as a teenager to escape from the mother and step-father tag team of designer discipline; and pregnant 2 times before my eighteenth birthday; then finally married and raising a child so that I could finally have a friend and someone to love me five months shy of my twentieth birthday.
But now? I am proud now. I am proud to have just survived myself and all of the things that I did and did not do to get here.
I graduated from high school at the age of 16 and was immediately accepted for Honors Freshman Admission in college based on my SAT not my GPA. But I did not get a degree until I was 41. I still don't have a BA--- but I think my BS is definitely of the PhD. category.
I became a Licensed Practical Nurse in this impractical world of health care. I have been fired from jobs because I spent too much time caring for the patients--- while on the other end of the spectrum-- I have had to work 18 hour days because the state mandated that I would be fired for abandonment of patients when the next nurse did not show up at her appointed time and the facility would not or could not find a replacement for me even though it was my fifth day of working 12-hour shifts. That I could hold down a job---actually have a career--- and one that I would still be doing today were it not for being hit by a car in 2006--- is something that I am extremely proud of especially since it is the service oriented professions that everybody takes for granted but in fact we rule the workforce.
I am proud of myself for all that I have done to myself and survived. I am proud of myself for all that was done to me and I smiled . I am proud of myself to be able to just get up and see another day whether it be rain, or heat.
I am proud. I'll try to let someone else know that I am proud of them too. I may not know your story--- but I am proud that you're still here to tell it.
Will you please let me know if you have something to be proud of? I'm right here knowing that you may have not had the courage to talk before the last day, hour, minute or second ago. But because you took the time---I'm proud!
My first memories are of my grandmother and grandfather, great-grandmother, uncles, and cousins--all on my Mother's side. Then somewhere in there comes my Mother. I only remember my Father when I remember that I can't remember nothing about him but the 2 times in life that I spoke to him on the telephone.
The first time I remember hearing his voice, I remember how it scared me; something stirred in the pit of my stomach as he said what ever it was that he was saying. I just remember thinking that I wanted that feeling to happen again and again and I couldn't speak because of the intense pleasure emanating from the receiver of the telephone down to the back of my belly button. It felt like Christmas lights were blinking on and off in my brain but all over was like the warmth of logs from my grandmother's hearth. I was mesmerized by the thrill of this strange electricnicity.
I immediately felt ashamed and ran to hide. I still think that this must have been akin to a childhood orgasm; but because I couldn't really express that it was just the sheer joy of hearing, for the first time, a deep, sonorous voice of a man, that everyone said was my father who, (at last!), wanted to talk to me. I was already 10 years old and could not even remember that he was my father --- and all that got mixed in with the pre-pubescent curiosity that all of us have but few of us have a healthy guide to get us through the giddy, heady, unimaginable terror of the roller coaster ride it is to go from little child to the not-so-little-girl, man-woman relationships that are supposed to happen between parents and children.
I guess that's why I was, for a period of time, a precociously, curiously, promiscuous, lonely loner of a little girl shoplifter, ---an only child--- raised by grandparents; teased and alternately tortured by older cousins; used by uncles for their perversion and my curiosity; married as a teenager to escape from the mother and step-father tag team of designer discipline; and pregnant 2 times before my eighteenth birthday; then finally married and raising a child so that I could finally have a friend and someone to love me five months shy of my twentieth birthday.
But now? I am proud now. I am proud to have just survived myself and all of the things that I did and did not do to get here.
I graduated from high school at the age of 16 and was immediately accepted for Honors Freshman Admission in college based on my SAT not my GPA. But I did not get a degree until I was 41. I still don't have a BA--- but I think my BS is definitely of the PhD. category.
I became a Licensed Practical Nurse in this impractical world of health care. I have been fired from jobs because I spent too much time caring for the patients--- while on the other end of the spectrum-- I have had to work 18 hour days because the state mandated that I would be fired for abandonment of patients when the next nurse did not show up at her appointed time and the facility would not or could not find a replacement for me even though it was my fifth day of working 12-hour shifts. That I could hold down a job---actually have a career--- and one that I would still be doing today were it not for being hit by a car in 2006--- is something that I am extremely proud of especially since it is the service oriented professions that everybody takes for granted but in fact we rule the workforce.
I am proud of myself for all that I have done to myself and survived. I am proud of myself for all that was done to me and I smiled . I am proud of myself to be able to just get up and see another day whether it be rain, or heat.
I am proud. I'll try to let someone else know that I am proud of them too. I may not know your story--- but I am proud that you're still here to tell it.
Will you please let me know if you have something to be proud of? I'm right here knowing that you may have not had the courage to talk before the last day, hour, minute or second ago. But because you took the time---I'm proud!
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