Beam me up, Professor

This could be me, and probably would be...

You’ve probably figured this out already, but I love the sound of my own “voice”.   Well, maybe that’s not really accurate.  I love to think, to figure things out, put ‘em together, and then expound upon them at great length.  Since I’m unemployed at the moment, and none too jazzed about my former career, I’m exploring my options.

Perhaps I can be an author, write a book about my life experiences.  They’re pretty interesting if I do say so myself, and if nothing else my friends and family would buy it.  In the interest of full disclosure, I toyed with the book idea during a hospital stay, and it seemed like a great idea.  Maybe there was nothing else to do.  Maybe it was all the talking about my feelings or whatever.  Maybe I needed a laugh.  Anyway, the book would be filled with the sarcastic and humorous observations I made during two weeks in a psych hospital.  You read that correctly.  I see it as a cross between Girl, Interrupted, 28 Days and Madea Goes to Jail.  In my head, it’s Black Girl, Interrupted, and don’t you DARE steal my title.  You know, the funny side of mental illness, because there is one:  it’s not just nervous laughter you’re hearing during visiting hours.  You’d be amazed how many intentionally hilarious people I’ve met in treatment, and I’m just the kind of person to write about it.  More disclosure:  in my secret dreams, this blog is the springboard to my life as an author, and perhaps someone in publishing (Cherise, we still need a meeting!) will see it and give me a deal.  Perhaps not.  Anyway, I still think it’s a good idea and I can envision myself on Oprah and The Today Show promoting my tome.  The problem is that my vision gets cloudy somewhere around the time of my second book, or my inability to get a full-time job because I’ve written extensively about being in the nut house.  Yes, I use “nut house” is a term of endearment, so deal with it but don’t use it yourself unless you’ve had occasion to occupy said domicile.

So maybe I can’t sustain a career as a writer, but I could get my PhD and become a professor!  Very often I opine about the papers I’d write if I were still in college, where I discovered my particular brand of intellectual wit.  One of them is about the prevalence of young, butch, Black lesbians in New York.  You’ve seen the girls on the A Train wearing cornrows, wife-beaters and

Maybe Prof. Lloyd wouldn't be arrested, but I'm thinking my haters would be on the tenure committee.

sports bras?  Grabbing their crotch and shouting “hey girl” at the ladies.  Are they lesbians because they love women and having sex with them? Or is their appropriation of the Black male thug persona, and the corresponding attraction by their femme counterparts, a result of a society without appropriate father figures where young women must recreate popular masculine and feminine roles?  The preceding is a real theory I developed over 3 years of living in Brooklyn, taking the subway to my corporate job where I frittered away my intelligence dumbing down full sentences for the PowerPoint culture.  Or I could study cultural anthropology and write my dissertation on public rituals.  I don’t have a particular thesis yet, but after years of getting my hair braided by African women and witnessing how they prepare for weddings and baby christenings – both of which are all-day affairs with multiple costume changes, film-quality makeup and partying until dawn – I’m sure there’s something there.  Or I could study women and hair and race, since the preoccupation with Michelle Obama’s wardrobe and the twists in Malia’s hair is simultaneously enraging and intriguing.  Spending two years working for SoftSheen-Carson and letting my own hair go natural makes me somewhat qualified to comment, so my post-MBA career wouldn’t have been a waste.  I’m sure I could come up with some grant money to go back to school, because another degree is just what I need.  Sometimes I think I need another Ivy League degree because some of my friends have two or three, and the competitor in me thinks I’m falling behind.  I long for the perceived freedom of academia, where I can formulate my own theories, write about them, get young people to read them, and churn out a generation of people who think like me.  No more corporate politics or sales meetings or talk about “making the number” and saying “incentivize” and “let’s take this offline”.  Then again, there are the politics of the canon, and since I can never really keep my mouth shut, the tenure committee would shoot me down because of my attitude, no matter how much publishing I did.

Apparently I’ve got to figure out a way to say what I want to say, be honest about my life, and somehow get paid to do it.  Maybe I should become a reality TV star.  Or just a TV star.  Or I can continue to star in my very own life, burning brightly among my peers with an occasional twinkle just for laughs.