Becoming


I am sitting in my place of employment, working after hours in preparation for our busiest season. I am listening to my friend Shelby Jouppi's podcast 'The Beginning of the End' and it's raining; the way it should in April as we are waiting for the world to turn green again. I am only just now becoming a "podcast listener" and am well aware that I would now be considered "late" to the game. It started several months ago when someone very dear to me introduced me to Shannon Cason's 'Homemade Stories.' His tales reminded me so much of the stories my Dad tells us about his childhood growing up in Detroit, Highland Park, and Queens, NY. I'm not sure why more people don't know about him.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Then, just last weekend, I visited my friend, G, in New York who left her job at the BBC to become a podcast producer for Earwolf. G invited me to some of her live shows for New York Podfest and introduced me to S-Town which spurred my very first "binge listen." Thanks G!

Honestly though, this love affair with the "audio world" isn't my first. As children, my siblings and I (more on them later) gathered, almost daily, and nearly always on someone's bedroom floor, to listen to programs like Radio Theater, a program on AM radio that dramatized works of literature like C.S. Lewis' 'The Chronicles of Narnia' and Frances Hodgson Burnett's 'The Secret Garden.'

Avid readers, most of these dramas were books we had already read, but something about listening to these stories on the radio helped to preserve these story lines and characters far better than the screen ever could. With these memories in mind, I suppose my return to auditory media makes sense.

I would like to share a few things that have been causing me (un)necessary amounts of disdain and a few more things that have been causing me copious amounts of joy.

First, the disdain:


The shoulder cut-out fad. I thought this was just going to be a quick Forever 21 fling, but after an email from from Asos, I began to suspect otherwise.

Holding my breath, I checked in with Madewell - (MADEWELL!) and found that this fad actually has a name - the "cold shoulder." I just know that we will look back on this the same way we look back on popcorn shirts, velour jumpsuits, jersey culottes, and rhinestones. With as little offense intended as humanly possible, I cannot wait for this to end.

Also:
  • My leaky bathroom ceiling
  • My sad shoe collection
  • Extra-Detroit's lingering fascination with ruin porn 


And now for the joy:

Lent is over, so now I can eat samoas and drink MHL's. However, I've found I crave both less than I ever have.
WAS THAT THE WHOLE POINT, JESUS? WAS IT?

Now, I am back in my apartment a few miles North of Downtown. The rain has slowed to a spray and the sun is making a coquetish re-appearance just before going down.

My haven looks a little like this:

Tomorrow, I turn 28; landing me solidly in the "late 20's" bracket for the next two years until you-know-what. I have always striven to be a finisher, but I made up my mind that this year would be the year that I do what I say I will do, and then some. So far, I have held myself to that.
I released a solo music project in January, produced the second year of a cultural event I created for Black History Month in February, and played some of my first solo shows in March. The few years before this one have been tumultuous, challenging, beautiful, heart wrenching, and necessary. But I have not been wasting. I have been becoming. 

And now, I am reviving this blog, articles from my youth hidden for the time being. I have been meaning to do so for the past two or three years, but "meaning to" is not enough. The limitations of social media have become far more aggressive than is comfortable to admit, and I feel the need to require more of my mind. Many of you may not reach this point in the piece, and that's ok. This is for me, and it feels good.

Every year, in it's last moments, I listen to this song. The first time I heard it, I was 13 years old and staying in an empty volunteer dormitory in Nyahururu, Kenya with my sisters near the Great Rift Valley. It reached into my very soul and embodied everything I wanted to say and feel then, and, somehow it has not lost it's ability to reach me and move me. Listen with me, as I bid farewell to 27.

-KFW


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