After brooding and broiling over what to do besides strangling with my son a.k.a. Huh Whatever, a.k.a. Man-Dork, I've decided to launch an all out assault against him in the same spirit of Heathcliff Huxtable, one of the first "black dads" who broke the mainstream mold/opinion of what black fatherhood. Like my own father, Heathcliff, was waiting for Theo at every turn ready to shut him down and set him straight. And if he found out about Theo's shenanigans after the fact, as I'm doing with Man-Dork on a weekly basis, there was always hell to pay.

Stay tuned for updates from the front lines and enjoy the clip below.

I, for one, will be feeding my inner nerd. Hopefully, this weekend.

One of my blogging hermanos, Latinegro, wrote a review for the Watchmen Movie over at his blog. The movie is based off the great graphic novel, Watchmen, and written by the same gentleman who brought the world V for Vendetta.

I believe it is Friday. I've truly had an exhausting week outside of cyberspace, crisscrossing NYC, re-enacting my own version of Taxi Driver (without the mohawk and the killing) for toddlers, teens and senior citizens.

Besides, I love giving shine to others when I can. Especially since it's been that kind of week for me.

I couldn't resist blogging about a comment I left at my blogger buddy, Brooke's, spot last week. Her point was that Facebook and all of its distractions is making her fat. She ain't the only one. Not only does it make you fat, it just keeps you from functioning normally. Forget about work, with national morale in the toilet, I say the more distractions the better. But I'm talking about the homestead, when you're supposed to be enjoying your self and time with whatever (whomever) it is. Instead, you're are a slave to that demonic blue and white template littered with everyone's pictures from grade school.

On nights when it's really bad, life at my home happens a little like this:

1. Like Brooke, I come home, power up the laptop, do what I need to do with myself and the family, all the while checking my blog, my Facebook page (to promote my blog), Twitter and all da rest a'dem and dey mama.

2. My wife then accuses me of cheating on her with my laptop and we eat dinner. I pull myself away and use every ounce of my strength not to log back on as soon as I'm done eating (instead, I sneak off on my iPod Touch and log back on).

3. I begin to fade while watching TV and my wife screams at me to stay awake. We put the kids to bed.

4. After the kids are asleep, my wife tells me she's got to check on ONE thing on our desktop (either a work email or some website she's researching) before going to bed.

5. About an hour after number 4, I wake up on the couch to the sound of my wife laughing to herself. I go over to the computer to see her on Facebook with no less than 4 IM windows open. One is a coworker she saw a few hours earlier. Another is a former next door neighbor of hers. The next is a former college roommate she was barely cool with at the time. And finally the last is some former high school classmate who now lives in the deep, deep South.

6. Then she says, "I really need to go to bed." I have a meeting first thing in the morning.

7. Then she stays up a little longer.

8. The next morning she wakes up ten minutes before she's supposed to catch her train.

But I'm the one with the problem.

Since this posting things, have gotten a little better. But at the end of the day, Facebook is crack.

Yesterday was a great day for me. I just so happened to have a piece published over at BlackAndMarriedWithKids.com on the same morning Essence.com did a feature article on them. I spent the day salivating over the new skyrocketing traffic that flew over here to MakesMeWannaHoller.com.

By late afternoon I had to resume my parental duties. I took my daughter to her allergist and then headed straight from there to my son's school to attend an awards ceremony for the winter sports program in which he participated as a member of the basketball team.

When I finally returned home around 9 pm, I was exhausted. I had a splitting headache from my Invisalign and a hyper, hungry female toddler in serious need of "nite-nite."

After a quick meal whipped up by the wife, I "plugged in" and found an email from the CEO of MochaManual.com containing only the link below. By the end of the day yesterday, this blog received the same amount of traffic in 24 hours as it I did the entire month of May 2008. I'm also happy to report that yesterday at 6:39 pm someone from Fort Meyers, Florida became my 10,000th visitor!

God works in mysterious and beautiful ways, none of which I question too much anymore. When His timing comes around the harvest is always plentiful. There are no coincidences.

Enough of my rambling. Click on the link:
The Mocha Manual: When A Man "Sweats" A Woman. Why I Love Eric Payne

They say a picture's worth a thousand words...

During a rough patch just before our marriage my then-fiance had a brief breakdown and put her head on my shoulder as I assured her all would be fine. I'm not sure why, but one of our closest friends whipped out her cellphone and snapped this grainy pic of this moment of embrace. It's a telling photo of who we are when we're not at each others throats.

• In times of need are you there for someone (mother, brother, lover, spouse, sister, father, friend, etc.)?
• And/or, is someone there for you?

I'd say my complexion is caramel.

My wife's complexion is that of a perfectly fried French fry.

My son's coloring is a bit richer than mine, almost Aboriginal in the way it glows all year long.

My daughter's skin is the color of parchment (faint parchment at that) or maybe that paper color, Ivory Linen.

My mother and father's complexion is about the same, a shade lighter than mine.

My maternal grandparents both had dark brown complexions.

My paternal grandmother's skin was golden and her hair was like silver silk. My paternal grandfather was brown-skinned.

During my recent trip home to Chi-Town, I visited my great aunt (my paternal grandmother's sister) on the occasion of her 97th birthday. Her skin was white and she wore her hair pulled back into one silver braid that ran down the length of her back.

And until I was informed otherwise as a high schooler, I just knew one of my cousin's fathers was Jewish.

And why do I point out all of this frivolous information?

Because for whatever reason for people of color, complexion matters. If I wanted this post to run very, very long, I could provide my reasons for why people believe this matters, and how it's been used to divide, similar to religion, political beliefs and nationality. But I only want it to run kind of long, so I won't.

Coming from Chicago I was exposed to African Americans of all skin colors. My first exposure to this was in my own family where from one family member to the next, complexion jumped from one end to the other of the color spectrum. And hair texture? When I was little, for the life of me I didn't understand why everyone on my father's side had straight, wavy or curly hair without the aid of a beauty salon or hair care products. To this day, my father's hair blows in the wind like a flag and he could care less. Sadly, I grew up believing if you were African American you had "coarse" hair and if you didn't it was either because you a) pressed the hell out of it with a hot comb, or b) had a Jheri curl. Even more pathetic, I was jealous that my father had the head of hair he did. I thought something was wrong with me because that didn't pass on to me (even though it did just before my hair fell out). So what did I do, I spent the better part of my teenage years brushing jars of grease into my head to get one or two waves to pop. I collected lint everywhere I went and wearing a hat was just disgusting.

But by the time I was a teenager, I understood that we (African Americans) took on many appearances. From my father's mother who could've easily passed for white and passed on passing to live a life of discrimination, to my mother's side and their unmistakable African characteristics: wide, flat (and proud) noses, strong (some would argue large) foreheads and brown skin.

Out East things are a bit different. I can't tell you how many times I've been told who is or is not African American because their hair is curly, or they have a fair complexion. My wife suffered through this growing up being told she must've been something else besides African American. Years ago, a workout partner told me a woman he was dating had to be Spanish.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because her hair is curly," he said.

"And that makes her not black?" I asked incredulously.

I laughed hysterically as he continued to dig a hole for himself with his teeth.

So now I'm a father. When I'm with my daughter I'm sometimes asked not if my wife is white, but if she's not black or of mixed race.

My daughter is a dead ringer for my father and when they're together she looks more like his child than mine and more like her daughter than I do his son. To the questioner, I laugh politely and say no. Only upon someone's insistence do I become a bit sharp with my "no." But as each time I'm asked is an opportunity to educate, I typically try to explain that BLACK PEOPLE COME IN ALL COLORS AND NONE OF US ARE ACTUALLY "BLACK".

The only time this foolishness is even more infuriating is when a person of color does the same thing. Last year after attending a god-awful play with my son at his school, I was standing in the lobby with my daughter while I waited for him to finish socializing. An African American woman looked at the two of us and shot me the dirty looks. I knew exactly what she was thinking. She looked perplexed when my son returned to us and was completely stunned when my wife joined us after using the ladies' room. During a Take Your Kids To Work day at my wife's job she encountered the same thing. "Is your husband white?" an African American co-worker asked, and when my son called out to her, this woman was completely confused too.

At the end of the day it's nobody's business what you or your children "are." At the end of the day who cares? At the end of the day complexion does not determine beauty or "niceness" and if it does for you, then you've got a problem.

Sometimes interracial marriage is a factor, but in cases like my family's, it is not. For anyone who is curious, people in my family (or anyone's African American family) stretch the color spectrum as do my two kids (my piano keys) because of a little thing called a gene pool. Take any grade school health class and they explain it there.

Following not to far behind my introducing you to secret agent, Huh Whatever, I thought it might be nice to take you on a tour of his secret hideout. The experience makes me say "uhm" too many times.

But I'm simply at a loss for words.



Babygirl put it best.