Yesterday at work everybody was talking about this…links below. But if you click it you better come back and read the rest of my post.

Members of Dating a Banker Anonymous

http://dabagirls.wordpress.com/

Funny. Women who date men in Finance now rendered impotent by the Fall of the Titans.

The blog is cute. Me likey a lot. It’s funny. These women are witty. And sarcastic. Like me! And I’m going to refrain from social commentary here because who am I to judge? I’m not a hater. Not. at. all. Not bitter either. Not. one. bit. bitter.

Not at all bitter that I busted my butt getting a very expensive MBA that intimidates men so much they don’t call after I tell them where I went to school. Or start acting really, bizarrely macho or try to prove how much more they know than I do. Really, it was my choice right? Nobody told me to go to a good school so I could get a good job (which I desperately cling to these days like everyone else).

Really, I understand. Everyone knows smart, driven career women give their men too much lip.

I am also so NOT bitter that I spend so much time at my Finance job that I don’t have time to be massaged and personally trained and coiffed and styled courtesy of the guy who who sits next to me (figuratively speaking), who then goes out and dates non Finance chics exclusively. As in these women keeping this blog. I mean, why would a guy want to date a woman wasn’t necessarily in awe of his profession? Otherwise he could risk her being a bigger BSD* than he is, right?

Not bitter, not one bit bitter.

I’m not bitter that there are women out there who work 8 hours a day plus an hour lunch break at their secretarial/PR/teaching/non profit jobs who sleep at least through sunrise, never pay for their own drinks, got Cs in school, don’t have a clue what a Bloomberg terminal is, who have more diamonds and Chanel and Jimmy Choos than I do. In fact I don’t HAVE any Chanel or Jimmy Choos. Not that there is anything wrong with those jobs at all…some of my best friends work for non profits. And nobody told me to be a masochist and get up at 5am every day to go to work! I chose this life.

I am so NOT a hater. So NOT bitter.

If you’re a DABA girl, more power to ya honey. In my next life I’m gonna be you. Being smart, working hard and paying your own way is totally over rated. Plus I recognize the hard work in the form of gym hours and such that is required of a truly high post DABA girl. If this were a liquid market I’d short IQ points and go long hot points at the open and ride that trade right into some banker’s Tribeca loft. Real talk.

*BSD = big swinging d#%k, from the book “Monkey Business”. Or was it “Liar’s Poker”? Whatever. It means baller in the Finance profession. Yeah, it was Liar’s Poker. But Monkey Business is good too, very funny.

I could rant for 300 pages straight about this topic but I’m going to show restraint here, plus I’m sleepy.
What got me thinking of the dumb a$% names some people name their children is the next wave we’re going to see, which all things considered, has got to be better than “Shardunae”. At least it’s rooted in a good thing.

I’m sitting here watching Coming to America and was reminded of a long standing beef I have with Eddie Murphy. I recognize his brilliance, especially his dominance in the 80s, but I need to take a moment to call his behind out for some really obvious discrimination against sisters who look like him. In fact quite literally who look like him since he himself has played the object of his disdain. The buzz is this cost him the Dreamgirls Oscar (along with that drama with my girl Scary Spice) because people couldn’t bring themselves to vote for him once Norbit was out. That movie also brought weight into the discussion but here I’m focused just on the other issue because I can only do one thing at a time. Anyway, those awards are a popularity contest just as much as anything else is. Like Homecoming Court on steroids. 
If you take a look you will see that Mr. Murphy has a long standing pattern of strongly favoring the lighter sisters not only in his personal life but also in his leading ladies. Let’s review, starting roughly in the beginning…leaving out Trading Places since he was so new to the game and probably didn’t have any casting authority then. I’m also leaving out the action movies because the romance was secondary. But, if you look those up, the facts support my thesis.

In Coming to America, as Prince Akeem of Zamunda, Eddie rejected not one but two beautiful brown skinned sisters in pursuit of his fair queen, the lovely Shari Headley (of whom I was a fan from All My Children...y’all remember she used to date Daryl the Cop on there?). Anyway you can’t really hate because why would he want the mindless Imani Izzi (Vanessa Bell Calloway) who actually barked like a dog on request, or the loose gold-digging Patrice McDowell (Allison Dean)? 
As Marcus Graham in Boomerang Eddie famously finally chose good girl Angela Lewis (Halle Berry) after falling in lust with bad girl Jackie Broyer (Robin Givens). Call me nitpicky, but again Eddie cast the light skinned girl in the virtuous, feminine, more innocent role while the sexually adventurous man eating diva was darker. Not to mention Grace Jones as Strangé. No making sexy on screen with Miss Halle other than this hot kiss after Thanksgiving dinner, but we saw plenty happen with Miss Robin. I’m just sayin’! But again here you’re rooting for Angela too cuz Miss Halle is just so adorable and sweet, right? 

Then there was The Nutty Professor when he fell in love with Jada Pinkett. Who was in charge of that awful wig they made her wear I wonder? Because that ‘do was just blasphemy I’ve pictured her here looking properly fierce. Now I’m a fan of Miss Jada especially of the way she’s held it down after popping out all of them babies…and I love the rock band thing…but clearly Eddie’s pattern is manifest in his choice of her as a leading lady.

And the one that really sunk his ship, popularity wise, because it was 2006 and quite frankly we are supposed to have evolved beyond all that by now, being post racial and progressive and conscious and inclusive, etc, was this, casting Thandie Newton as the virtuous Kate Thomas juxtaposed against the repulsive Rasputia played by himself.

He pulled the Norbit nonsense pictured above while simultaneously publicly dissing the only kinda brown skinned woman he had ever publicly dated (Scary Spice Melanie Brown) and down down down went his star. And the baby WAS his! In the end it totally boosted her career. I think they call that Karma.

Frankly I think he deserved the Oscar because he really is super talented and brought tears to my eyes in Dreamgirls. But unfortunately he followed the Norbit and Scary incidents closely with another spectacular debacle with ex Mrs. Babyface Tracey Edmonds and the wedding that wasn’t a real wedding and a “marriage” that was over within a few weeks…and his fate in the public’s eye was sealed. 

By the way here he is with his ex wife and the mother of most of his many many children. Nicole has also held it down quite admirably after popping out a ridiculous number of babies. Smart girl. 😉

Has anybody heard from Eddie since all that mess? What’s he up to? Is he in redbone rehab?

Y’all remember perhaps the greatest of all dances, “The Bump”? (*note: tragically, the video below was originally set to “Bust a Move” but YouTube made the poster change the music to this wack porn movie soundtrack ish, which really isn’t nearly as funny as it originally was.)

As featured on iconic shows such as Good Times and also too in your wood paneled basement when your folks had friends over for grown folks parties that you used to sneak down and watch in your footsie pajamas? You always wondered why it smelled so funny down there and why mommy didn’t talk to daddy the next day at the breakfast table? Thinking about that makes me think about the glorious Thelma and my mother’s supreme afro which literally was a whole foot tall. By the way, Miss Thelma is seriously holding it down, check out this then and not-too-long-ago comparison…she’s about 55 I think:

Anyway another kind of bump was recently brought to international attention. The Fist Bump. Apparently this is some sort of militant but cool gesture that black people do to each other. Pardon me but I didn’t know that. I thought fist bumping was just in the occasionally used hand gesture repertoire. As in, without an ethnicity attached to it. But it just so happens the Obamas did it on TV at a key moment, and everyone got all excited like it was something special or even revolutionary. Really, wasn’t all that hoopla a bit absurd? I think The New Yorker captured the essence of the absurdity quite well in its cover.

This phenomenon has filtered into my personal life in more ways than one, unfortunately, with all kinds of randoms fist bumping me all over the place. Ow, that HURTS! There are several examples but the most interesting recent one is an excursion I had with a couple of girlfriends. 
I was down in the Magic City over New Years and went out to a bar/club on Brickell with a couple of my girls who live down there. One is Dominican, one is Puerto Rican. I mention that to illustrate that I was the only black girl in the group. In fact I was probably the only black person in that entire place that night. Which is totally cool for me…but makes other people act funny sometimes.
So we get approached by a young fella in town from South Dakota who had spontaneously flown in that morning after temperatures reached sub zero out there. Plus I suppose he was a bit lonely since only like 3 or 4 people live in South Dakota. Anyway he was REALLY EXCITED TO BE THERE. So he chatted us up a bit. Didn’t really offer to buy any drinks though, so he obviously doesn’t know how things work in Miami. But anyway…he starts chatting and making absolutely inane conversation which really was making me quite sleepy. Somewhere along the way as he got progressively drunker he kept fist bumping me to accentuate his sentences for a total of about 100 fist bumps at the end. It went something like this:Boy from South Dakota: Wow the weather here is great, isn’t it?Me: Yep, much warmer than in New York right now.Boy from South Dakota: Totally. [Fist bump]Me: Uh, ok.Get it?
So after we peeled ourselves away from perhaps the most thrilling evening of our collective lives we deconstructed what happened in the car on the way home…Puerto Rican friend: Aww that guy was so nice, such a cutie patootie.Dominican friend: I don’t know, he seemed a little weird.Me: Yeah and what was up with the fist bumps?Puerto Rican and Dominican friends in unison: Que? Fist bumps?Me: Yeah, he was fist bumping me after every sentence, he didn’t do that to you?Puerto Rican friend: Nope, he didn’t do that to me.Dominican friend: Me neither.Me: Wow. [pause]Me: Do you think he did it because I’m black?Dominican friend: You’re black? Let me outta the car! Puerto Rican friend: Yo, I think that’s it! [loud ass laughter]Dominican friend: What a loser.Me: Well at least he was trying to connect.The moral of the story is that fist bumping is appropriate only in very rare instances just like before. Unless I’m your wife and you just nailed your party’s nomination for President, let’s not fist bump, ‘kay?

So…I’m always having some sort of issue. The latest occurred a couple of hours ago. 
I wasn’t a girl blessed with either gorgeous thick eyebrows like our girl Brooke…

or long bat-worthy lashes like my girl Penelope (whose brows aren’t bad either):

This is actually totally fine because thanks to a little threading (6 bux around the corner, you can’t beat it) and Browzing by Benefit, I create the illusion of good brows on a daily basis. My eyebrow style has evolved over the years but these days I think they’re looking better than ever. I went through a too thin, tattoo-looking phase which in retrospect was kind of unfortunate (shown here): 

Why didn’t anybody say anything???? But recently I have settled in to a more natural looking groove that I’m happy with (taken at Inauguration hence the crowd reflection in my shades).

About the eyelashes. I wear a couple of coats of mascara and thick black liner on the top lid every day to create a luscious illusion. But for the Inauguration of My Boo (yes I’m a Democrat working in Finance, so what – if you’re a Republican keep reading, don’t be partisan about your entertainment)…I got a set of individual falsies that were FANTASTIC. For precisely six days.

Sidebar – I personally prefer lash extensions but they’re quite expensive. I got them once at this spot in Koreatown for about 200 bux and they lasted a couple of weeks. I wish she had made them more dramatic though so if I do that again I’ll ask the person to be more aggressive. But this post is about glued on individuals which cost about 50. Either way you have to clean your eyes with q tips which adds a good five minutes to your face washing routine. Just fyi in case you’re considering getting some.
Back to the seventh day, which was today. I’m home sick after getting kicked off the trading floor for excessive coughing yesterday morning. My co-workers were quite wise because I had a pretty hot fever (precisely what temp I don’t know, don’t have kids so don’t have a thermometer) which broke late yesterday. I still can’t turn my eyeballs though, it hurts too much. And I still cough when I try to speak too much. Anyhoo…a massive clump fell out of the right side today requiring me to follow through and remove the rest.
This process is easier said than done. After soaking my lashes in makeup remover another 50% came off. Mind you, the left eye was still poppin looking totally fabulous other than the fact that the glue gunks up a bit after that many days. My left eye is my favorite just like my girl Lisa Lopes from TLC, may she rest in peace.

Anyway after about 30 minutes of soaking and cajoling these things to come off about 80% came off easily with no trauma to the underlying lashes and 20% took at least one real lash with them. Maybe I lost about a dozen or two? One spot in particular is looking quite bare. Quel horreur! (I was a French major). They better effin grow back. Just like I wouldn’t be able to stand a hair weave (but I’m not hating, do you if that’s how you roll) I could not take the glued on lashes for long so I’m terrified of becoming dependent on them. They were fabulous while they lasted. But for real…they better grow back. Seriously.

Dating in NYC is an extreme sport no matter how skinny, rich, blond, dumb or ugly you are. It’s just a hard core experience. I choose to see this through rose colored glasses because it means I always have a story to tell. Like I am about to do right now, about my most interesting date in recent memory.
On Halloween I decided to rerun a costume from 2003 and went out and rented a top notch Bunny Suit. It is my strong personal belief that if you’re going to be daring the thing must be top quality or else you just look like trash. I went to this fabulous shop in the fashion district or whatever it’s called where they fitted me twice to get the thing just right. At the end the costume weighed probably 10 pounds between the padding and the boning to cajole all my parts into the correct formation. But it was totally worth it because the final result was pretty authentic. A tip for wearing a daring costume – put on flesh colored dance tights under your fishnets and nothing will jiggle inappropriately.

A girlfriend and I (she was dressed as a ballet dancer) went to this party in Tribeca where our fellow revelers seemed to have invested similar energy into their costumes. I think I was the only Bunny though. Apparently people seem to agree that the Bunny-in-a-Bag thing doesn’t convey the same vibe as an authentic costume. But enough about Bunny. The real point to all that background is that going hard like that attracts a lot of attention and it is how I met the gentleman who is the topic of this post.
I met a few cuties that night (which wasn’t necessarily the point, I just wanted to party) but one really followed up. He was a bit aggressive but I stalled him for a few weeks to make sure he was really interested and not just Bunny-struck. He seemed legit and pretty nice over text and a convo or two so we made a date for dinner right after Thanksgiving.
He very thoughtfully chose a restaurant in my neighborhood where I met him on a strangely balmy early winter evening. I was feeling really good about myself so I wore flats (ie I didn’t feel the need to tart up with heels, he’d already seen me as a Bunny anyway) and walked over. That detail became important later. He arrived a few minutes after me wearing a bow tie and looking quite handsome. Let me say, I was glad to see he was good looking (tall, curly black hair, bright blue eyes, juicy pink lips) because I feared he may have been a strobe light honey. I was even impressed by his in-the-know choice of restaurant – a low key storefront neighborhood spot with an unassuming sign and packed full of locals.
Five minutes into our dinner – during which time my date told me how gorgeous I was no less than 25 times – he excused himself to go to the bathroom. The effusive praise was flattering the first 3 times but the latter 22 were just creepy. I shrugged it off thinking maybe it was because he’s from Kansas and/or was also relieved I wasn’t a strobe light honey. In fact because of his being from Kansas let’s call him CornFed.

So when CornFed returned the waiter was ready to take our order. CornFed had a hard time deciding even though he had mentioned he went there all the time with some of his friends. He also seemed to be unaware that they didn’t sell alcohol so as soon as the waiter left he popped up and ran across the street to a bodega to buy us some beer. I was a bit stressed out about ordering because I don’t eat meat and we were at a kebab restaurant, but I ordered the one fish dish on the menu. I’m trying to phase out fish altogether but dating and work interfere with that endeavor. Before I go deeper on that topic let’s just say at this point I was looking forward to the beer. CornFed was gone 10 minutes this time and since I know the area and the bodega he went to, that was about 4 times longer than it should have taken. Time check: 25 minutes into our 1st date ever, CornFed had left me alone for 15 of said minutes.
When the beer came with Mr. CornFed in tow, I had started eating. He started grilling me about work:CornFed: So, you work on Wall Street?Me: Yep!CornFed: How do you like it?Me: I love it, it’s an awesome job. Glad I still have it.CornFed: But tell me, most of the people you deal with are really bad people.Me: No actually, they’re not. They’re really nice.CornFed: No, you can tell me, they’re really terrible.Me: No. They’re not. Pretty cool folks actually.CornFed: But really, they’re really awful, right?Me: Funny enough, I really like my clients and my coworkers too.CornFed: You don’t have to be nice, most of them are bad people.Me: [pause, smile] Nope. Great folks! How’s your food?CornFed: But really, you’re just too nice to say it.Get it?
Then…CornFed: I have to go to the bathroom.At this point I was thinking, poor guy, he has the toots or something. How awful on a first date! But then after about 7 minutes sitting there alone AGAIN, I looked over my shoulder and witnessed him, back to me, intensely conversing with our waiter. Hmmmm. When he walked back to the table after at least 10 minutes total he asked if I was ready to go. Mind you I had a mouth full of food at the moment. And he had only taken one bite before shooting off to the bathroom for the second time.CornFed (still standing): You ready?Me: Huh?CornFed: You finished? We’re all settled up here.Me: What?CornFed: We’ll come back, next week, we can come back.Me: Uh, ok. Where are we going?CornFed: Wherever you wanna go, the next spot, a party, whatever!Me: Um…Waiter: NO! I DON’T WANT YOU TO COME BACK. DON’T COME BACK EVER.Me (lightbulb!): Ok while you settle this up I’m going to take a call outside really quick.CornFed: Ok.And I gathered my things, stepped outside and proceeded to literally sprint like FloJo (may she rest in peace) for the next three blocks, until I got out of eyeshot. I didn’t want him to step outside the restaurant and see me walking away! When I got home I sent him a text, “Thanks for dinner, sorry I had to split” and CornFed proceeded to wear down my battery calling and texting maybe 14 or 15 times. The last one said, and this is a direct quote because I saved it and am looking at it now: “@ a party with gossip girl crew…care 2 join?” But I think he eventually got the point. Thank goodness he doesn’t know my last name or where I live (just the neighborhood). In the future I’ll screen guys for total weirdness and/or general cokehead behavior before they get the phone number. I mean really, why else would you get kicked out of a restaurant unless you got caught doing blow in the bathroom?
Just a hazard of dating in the general pool out there. Y’all be careful! And wear flats in case you have to run away.

According to Wikipedia (because of course I haven’t read the book…YAWN), the Black Swan Theory as articulated by Nassim Nicholas Taleb refers to a large impact, hard-to-predict and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations. Wiki goes on to say that, “the term black swan comes from the commonplace Western cultural assumption that ‘All swans are white’. In that context, a black swan was a metaphor for something that could not exist. The 17th Century discovery of black swans in Australia metamorphosed the term to connote that the perceived impossibility actually came to pass. Taleb notes that John Stuart Mill first used the black swan narrative to discuss falsification.”
Thanks Wiki! Who doesn’t love Wikipedia? And Google. What did we do before Google? And before we had Google on our phones? We were just loud and wrong all the time. But I digress.
This blog is called Black Swan even though it seems narcissistic to refer to oneself in such grand terms because 1) there are very few people like me who do what I do (unfortunately) and 2) when I say “like me” that really doesn’t mean what it seems to mean on the surface, 3) I should capitalize on this feeling of isolation, 4) I went through a long phase lasting at least 20 years that could be called ugly duckling years and 5) blogging is narcissistic and self indulgent anyway so why not just run with the grand name, right?
So…I’m taking a real stab at this after keeping an Inauguration blog that my friends seemed to really enjoy. I also had a little student blog during be skool that had a small following. But all of that was controlled. Now I’m putting myself out there on the entire world wide Internets for people who don’t know me or aren’t connected at all to read.  Oy vey am I nervous.
Anyway the subject of this blog will be my life and my sarcastic observations thereof. I live in Manhattan and enjoy having adventures either personally or vicariously via reality TV. I’ll check in at least once a week but perhaps more often.  Hope you like it!
PS No I don’t know what falsification means either but that’s beyond the scope of this post.

So don’t get mad. I was away for a while but now I’m back. No I was not locked up. It’s just I have new inspiration and new fans (!) so I decided to start checking back in periodically following the hiatus.
Following a holiday season and a visit to the family back home in an East Coasterly city (DC), along with a witty short essay from fellow atheist Ricky Gervais, I got to thinking about morality and religion and a basic psychological concept called intrinsic motivation. As compared to extrinsic motivation.

What got me thinking about this is some church goers be doin some really ill mess. And my more agnostic friends to a person are really quite moral. They don’t litter, they don’t lie cheat and steal, they tip well, and they have a very strong sense of right and wrong and live through that daily. They don’t talk about their failings to live up to any standard, they just live up to it and accept the appropriate consequences and guilt when they don’t. Unapologetically. I like that style.

Note: I am not implying church goers litter more than non church goers. This essay is conceptual.

Anyway, because I’ve taken more than a psych class or three I started to mentally marinate on this concept of intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation with respect to moral behavior in observers/believers and non-observant people. Basically – is the threat of eternal damnation combined with the promise of eternal salvation and immortality actually a disincentive for moral behavior? What if the idea of confession, or the concept of a game winning shot on one’s death bed…or death row, say…this Christian construct of forgiveness for absolutely anything in exchange for deference and devotion, creates a conscienceless unconscious?
Let’s rewind for one sec and review these definitions, courtesy of Wikipedia (to which I donated $5 the other day because if 1% of people who use it do so, it can stay free, you should do it too):

Intrinsic motivation refers to motivation that is driven by an interest or enjoyment in the task itself, and exists within the individual rather than relying on any external pressure.
Extrinsic motivation comes from outside of the individual. Common extrinsic motivations are rewards like money and grades, coercion and threat of punishment.

Social psychological research has indicated that extrinsic rewards can lead to overjustification and a subsequent reduction in intrinsic motivation. In one study demonstrating this effect, children who expected to be (and were) rewarded with a ribbon and a gold star for drawing pictures spent less time playing with the drawing materials in subsequent observations than children who were assigned to an unexpected reward condition and to children who received no extrinsic reward.

So…these studies about education demonstrate an idea that could possibly be extrapolated to why people act morally or not. If your reward is Heaven and your punishment is Hell for acting or not like you have sense, and you can just keep repenting or testifying or confessing every time you “fall” and it’s all good and your reward is back in place…what happens to your intrinsic motivation to behave? Why is this Heaven vs Hell dichotomy even necessary to compel us to act correctly? Why can’t we, in the main, just internalize the Golden Rule? Why can’t we learn to be empathetic enough to realize that any bad act we commit offends another person…usurps their freedom to live unmolested…would suck if it were done to us? Why is that not enough to keep us all in line? We can burn the outliers at the stake.