Do You Believe in Soul Mates?

It's so foggy outside that I can barely see out my window. It's the kind of weather that has me wrapped in a blanket, sitting on my couch, channel surfing. I just caught the tail end of "The Bachelor" finale and a brief snippet of Tila Tequila on the Tyra Banks Show.

There's a whole lot of supposed searching for love happening on TV these days: Flavor of Love, Rock of Love, I Love New York, A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila, and of course, the aforementioned Bachelor.

The guy on "The Bachelor" didn't pick either woman. He decided he wasn't "in love". Both women cried and sobbed about how they didn't understand how he could be walking away from what they have.

Are they for real or just hoping they can get their own reality shows and extend their own fifteen minutes of fame? I just don't get what these women think they have. To me, you've got a guy who's been busy making out with a bunch of women. You've got a guy who's been laughing to himself over the cat fights the women have been having. You've got a guy who's asked a group of women to disrespect themselves, all for him. All for love.

So girls, thank God that he decided he didn't want you because not one of these "relationships" has turned out.

And why haven't they panned out? Well, if I was a guy, I'd have a hard time respecting any woman who let me roll like that. "Go ahead and kiss all on a bunch of other women but I'll be waiting right here for you honey!" Yeah, if I'm a guy, I'm programmed to believe that only hos are cool with stuff like that.

And as a woman, could I respect a guy who's also whoring himself out in pursuit of some sort of "true love"? Would I really believe this man was in love with me? Heck no!

I know, these shows are not about love, but are instead on some level about the search for fame. I get that. But they perpetuate some of the stuff we believe about love.

For example, do you believe that everyone has only one true love, one soul mate? Because these shows are all supposedly about helping someone find their soul mate.

The young lady who babysits for me asked me on Saturday night what I thought about this whole soul mate thing. It was 2 AM and I was driving her home. She's beautiful, single and highly frustrated with finding "true love" in Los Angeles. She didn't even have to go into details about the clowns she's meeting. I was able to list them out for her:

1)Men who are really only interested in sex but know women want love so they front like they want love too.
2) Men who want to act like they own you and you need their permission to breathe.
3) Men who act like they have to be super successful in their career before they can commit.
4) Men who think you're lucky they're even talking to you because they're such a good catch. And they let you know you're lucky.
5)Men who are so insecure that they can't stand it when you're more successful than they are.

I could tell I sort of disappointed her when I told her that I didn't know for sure about the whole soul mate thing. I told her how I think we've gone overboard in our culture with believing in the lightning strike, highly romantic ideal of true love, that I've tried to be much more practical and level headed about Love with a capital "L".

"Practical?" she asked. "As in you don't really love your husband, it's just a practical arrangement?"

Um, no. Not that. It's just that that "spark" thing isn't enough. That spark isn't going to keep anybody married. After all, I'm sure everyone Pam Anderson has married has really believed they had that special "thing" with her. And then, kaput. Divorce.

I told my babysitter how for me, I learned it was just too easy to get carried away by that instant spark of attraction. I'd then forget to ask the tough questions surrounding who that person really was, what they were really about, what did they really care about?

No, the lightning bolt sort of thing never turned out well for me. To tell you the truth, it made me feel mentally ill. Then I'd ignore all sorts of big red flags because of that magical lightning bolt... and then I'd find out some sort of insanity about the person and before you know it, I'd be plotting my revenge on a guy. My motto was, "You make my life miserable, I'm gonna make you wish you were dead." But that takes a whole lot of energy and wastes a lot of time.

So I had to learn to be more level headed, get to know someone as a friend first and see past the mirage of that chemical reaction that happens when you feel that spark. I had to take a step back and learn to analyze men very carefully. Grill them like nothing else and grill myself too. After all, it's really difficult to figure out who you are as a woman and what you really want in a world that has so many jacked up images of women and men...and "love".

What do you think? do you believe in soul mates, true love, following the spark? Or no?

As Promised: Soulful Jones

I had to convert .mov to .avi, rotate the image, upload it to YouTube...but finally, voila! Here's a bit of one of Soulful Jones' poems performed at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe last Friday night. I checked him out on his MySpace and it turns out he's a singer/songwriter as well. It's so nice to see a young brother doing good things and living his art.




I have a footage of a couple other poets as well and I'm working on uploading them! I'll share as soon as I can. Enjoy!

What Do You Dream?

"What do you dream about, Mommy?"

I knew my eldest son was asking me the question, fully expecting that I dream about the same things he does: being Batman and beating the Joker, getting to the end of the Spiderman videogame, and having a pet dog that catches tennis balls.

I don't dream about that stuff.

How do I tell a six year-old that I can sometimes make myself dream about people that I know just by thinking about them very intensely and praying for them before I go to sleep? And in those dreams, I am usually sitting with the person in the gardens around the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. All we do is talk, and even though it's a dream, it's as real as anything. Sometimes when I talk to the person again or get an email from them, they are telling me the same things they told me in the dream.

Or, how about my recurring dreams. In one, it's nighttime and I'm walking down the street I grew up on. I'm walking toward the house I grew up in. These very dry, brown leaves are blowing across the sidewalk and the wind is whipping my hair around my head. Then, I get the sense that something is behind me and it's not friendly. I start running and the rest of the dream feels like I'm in a foot race through every single neighborhood I've ever lived in. I slide through holes in fences in Chicago, leap over abandoned bicycles in China and scramble across the tops of cars in LA.

Most adults I know say they don't remember their dreams. Maybe we forget them because they're more complicated than dreaming about a pet dog. I fully believe that dreams are a connection to our souls, the conversation our mind has with our soul.

Maybe we "forget" the dreams because it's too hard to face our true selves.