Month: October 2011

The Guest List: When Friends are Family

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I think the first thing Genuine and I did after getting engaged was sit down with my laptop, pull up an Excel spreadsheet and begin typing out names for our guest list.

Who do we want to come to our wedding?

I’ve learned a lot about weddings in the past several months, mainly the different traditions. In traditional weddings, the parents of the bride host the wedding. However with many couples opting to get married later and later in life, moving across country and just generally being non-traditional, things have changed a lot.

It wouldn’t make sense for my parents to host the wedding now (though them paying for it would be GREAT!), so Joe and I are hosting our own wedding. We’re pretty much throwing a party for ourselves. This seemed like a given at first, but now it is actually sort of weird to me because I know that isn’t how it’s traditionally done.

Our parents will still be involved, but we are picking the date, time, place and guest list. This makes the guest list difficult.

Continue reading →

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Going Relaxer Free…and Hating Every Minute of It.

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It seems every time you read a post about a black woman “going natural” after years of relaxing her hair, the writing is normally a glowing, OMG-this-is-the-best-decision-ever, wish-I-woulda-done-it-sooner review.

Well, it’s been almost 11 months since I decided to stop getting relaxers in January and let me speak for all of those who agree and say: THIS. SUCKS. Continue reading →

For Single Women Everywhere: There’s Hope

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He was standing on the curb next to his shiny black sportscar dropping quarters in the parking meter when he caught my eye.

Dressed in a crisp white shirt, tucked into slim fitting grey dress pants held up by a black leather belt, he looked apprehensive. He must have felt me looking at him cause he glanced over at me after he finished loading the parking meter.

I knew him.

“Brian?” I called out.

He did a quick double take and smiled, “Hey Alissa!”

We were both heading into Chipotle as we started chatting.

Brian was a friend from elementary school, two years my senior. I’d only seen him a handful of times since then — the last time being a few years ago when I was still in undergrad and he was just starting law school.

We both were on a lunch break from our jobs, so we only had a few moments to talk but managed to cram in quick updates on ourselves, our families, and our career. He was working at a law firm downtown, but getting ready to leave the 9-5 to take up traveling and working on a new business venture he started in Hawaii fulltime. We talked about entrepreneurship and the importance of finding what you love to do and doing it now while we’re still young.

After getting our food, we promised to catch up again in a few weeks and went our separate ways.

As I walked away, I began to think: who convinced women there are no good men left? Continue reading →