what does the coffee/tea do?

Two things:
1. Henna requires an acid to get the color release going and while coffee & tea are acidic, I’ve found they aren’t nearly as harsh or drying as lemon juice (which is the generally recommended acid ingredient). ACV is pretty harsh too, but I only used a little to loosen my curl a little. 

2. I have dark brown hair that lightens significantly in the summer and adding strong coffee or black tea slightly alters the color that the henna deposits so my hair gets really dark. 

Here’s my favorite site on henna & hair [www.hennaforhair.com]. Enjoy!

10 Ways to Love Others

I started in on a massive perfectionist’s list of resolutions full of well-intentioned and optimistic promises to myself for what I would like to think will make me happier, make me feel more accomplished, make everything easy again. Then I came across this little nugget. I may sound a bit naive in saying so, but I think this might be the only list of resolutions I’ll ever need. Number 10 hits it right on the nose. Thanks for sharing Caits!

1. Tell them about their brilliance. They likely can’t see it and they don’t know its immensity, but you can see it, and you can illuminate it for them.

2. Be authentic, and give others the gift of the real you and a real relationship. Ask your real questions. Share your real beliefs. Go for your real dreams. Tell your truth.

3. Don’t confuse “authenticity” with sharing every complaint, resentment, or petty reaction in the name of “being yourself.” Meditate, write, or do yoga to work through anxiety, resentment, and stress on your own so you don’t hand off those negative moods to everyone around you. Sure, share sadness, honest dilemmas, and fears, but be mindful: don’t pollute.

4. Listen, listen, listen. Don’t listen to determine if you agree or disagree. Listen to get to know what is true for the person in front of you. Get to know an inner landscape that is different from your own, and enjoy the journey. Remember that if, in any conversation, nothing piqued your curiosity and nothing surprised you, you weren’t really listening.

5. Don’t waste your time or energy thinking about how they need to be different.  Really. Chuck that whole thing. Their habits are their habits. Their personalities are their personalities. Let them be, and work on what you want to change about you—not what you think would be good to change about them.

6. Remember that you don’t have to understand their choices to respect or accept them. 

7. Don’t conflate accepting with being a doormat or betraying yourself. Let them be who they are, entirely. Then, you decide what you need, in light of who they are. Do you need to make a direct request that they change their behavior in some way? Do you need to take care of yourself better? Do you need to set a boundary or to change the relationship? Take care of yourself well, without holding anyone else in contempt.

8. Give of yourself, but never sacrifice or compromise yourself. Stop if resentment is building and retool. Don’t do the martyr thing. It helps no one and nothing.

9. Remember that everyone you encounter was created by divine intelligence and has an important role to play in the universe. Treat them as such.

10. If you want to keep growing emotionally and spiritually for the rest of your life, accept this as your mantra and try to live as if it were true: Everything that I experience from another human being is either love, or a call for love.

(via caitsmeissner)

the vice guide to north korea

a very interesting three-part video series giving us a rare look inside north korea through the eyes of a journalist pretending to be a tourist. 

Getting into North Korea was one of the hardest and weirdest processes VICE has ever dealt with. After we went back and forth with their representatives for months, they finally said they were going to allow 16 journalists into the country to cover the Arirang Mass Games in Pyongyang. Then, ten days before we were supposed to go, they said, “No, nobody can come.” Then they said, “OK, OK, you can come. But only as tourists.” We had no idea what that was supposed to mean. They already knew we were journalists, and over there if you get caught being a journalist when you’re supposed to be a tourist you go to jail. We don’t like jail. And we’re willing to bet we’d hate jail in North Korea. But we went for it. The first leg of the trip was a flight into northern China. At the airport, the North Korean consulate took our passports and all of our money, then brought us to a restaurant. We were sitting there with our tour group, and suddenly all the other diners left and these women came out and started singing North Korean nationalist songs. We were thinking, “Look, we were just on a plane for 20 hours. We’re jet-lagged. Can we just go to bed?” but this guy with our group who was from the LA Times told us, “Everyone in here besides us is secret police. If you don’t act excited then you’re not going to get your visa. So we got drunk and jumped up onstage and sang songs with the girls. The next day we got our visas. A lot of people we had gone with didn’t get theirs. That was our first hint at just what a freaky, freaky trip we were embarking on…
— VICE Founder Shane Smith

12 things you were not taught in school about creative thinking

2. Creative thinking is work. You must have passion and the determination to immerse yourself in the process of creating new and different ideas. Then you must have patience to persevere against all adversity. All creative geniuses work passionately hard and produce incredible numbers of ideas, most of which are bad. In fact, more bad poems were written by the major poets than by minor poets. Thomas Edison created 3000 different ideas for lighting systems before he evaluated them for practicality and profitability. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart produced more than six hundred pieces of music, including forty-one symphonies and some forty-odd operas and masses, during his short creative life. Rembrandt produced around 650 paintings and 2,000 drawings and Picasso executed more than 20,000 works. Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets. Some were masterpieces, while others were no better than his contemporaries could have written, and some were simply bad.

10. You do not see things as they are; you see them as you are. Interpret your own experiences. All experiences are neutral. They have no meaning. You give them meaning by the way you choose to interpret them. If you are a priest, you see evidence of God everywhere. If you are an atheist, you see the absence of God everywhere. IBM observed that no one in the world had a personal computer. IBM interpreted this to mean there was no market. College dropouts, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, looked at the same absence of personal computers and saw a massive opportunity. Once Thomas Edison was approached by an assistant while working on the filament for the light bulb. The assistant asked Edison why he didn’t give up. “After all,” he said, “you have failed 5000 times.” Edison looked at him and told him that he didn’t understand what the assistant meant by failure, because, Edison said, “I have discovered 5000 things that don’t work.” You construct your own reality by how you choose to interpret your experiences.

(via kissmyblackads)

30 things to stop doing to yourself

1. Stop spending time with the wrong people. – Life is too short to spend time with people who suck the happiness out of you.  If someone wants you in their life, they’ll make room for you.  You shouldn’t have to fight for a spot.  Never, ever insist yourself to someone who continuously overlooks your worth.  And remember, it’s not the people that stand by your side when you’re at your best, but the ones who stand beside you when you’re at your worst that are your true friends.

an argument for becoming a "weekday vegetarian".

some of you might remember my numerous half-realized attempts at becoming vegetarian, but now that my health is becoming even more important to me, i’ve got even more resolve to make the leap. with so much research leaning towards vegetarianism as the more healthy, environmentally responsible and economically practical option, it seems just plain stupid for me (and i really mean me, not you) to keep eating as much animal derived food as i do. i don’t eat much red meat anyway and i’m lactose intolerant, but i still love cheese and chicken and the odd turkey burger.

anyway, this “third option” seems so doable! 5 days veg, 2 days whatever i want. i suspect that at some point, i’ll lose my appetite for animal products all together. that’s the goal. check out the clip on tedtalks (via knowing is helping)

CNN: Where is the love in R&B music? ... Love music is not gone, it's just harder to find

One of R&B’s most popular current hits is “Quickie” by Miguel, who declares, “I don’t wanna be loved. I want a quickie.”

 There’s nothing wrong with singing about sex. Few songs are as sexually charged as Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.” And few singers can evoke bedroom heat like Al Green. But black men don’t even bother to romance women in love songs anymore, says Kimberly Hines, editor-in-chief of SoulBounce, an online progressive urban music site.

  Consider a recent Valentine’s Day song by popular R&B artist Chris Brown called “No Bull S**t,” in which he sings about inviting a woman over to his place at 3 in the morning because “you know I’m horny.”

  Then he sings to her to take off her clothes because “you already know what time it is” and orders her to “reach up in that dresser where them condoms is.

“What happens when millions of young listeners — regardless of color — learn about intimacy from songs that reduce love to reaching “up in that dresser where them condoms is”

 And what happens to black people if we can’t sing about love?

 So where do you go if you want to hear good contemporary R&B? Critics say to check out independent labels, neo-soul websites and Internet destinations like iTunes.

Boykins and a collection of other artists are trying to start a “new romantic” movement in R&B to revive the genre. He says he still listens to artists like Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye for inspiration.

There you’ll find singers like Jesse Boykins III, a 26-year-old with a supple, soulful voice that would’ve fit right in during the classic soul era. “They taught me that it’s OK to be vulnerable as an artist,” he says.

“Love music is not gone, it’s just harder to find,” he says.

Music was never just about entertainment in the black community. It was about hope. From the spirituals that slaves sang to survive brutal racism to civil rights anthems like “We Shall Overcome,” love of God, self and one another was the message in much of our music.

It was a message that made a difference.

(Source: colormysoul, via fmsharp)

Haitian Activist Patrick Elie: "Haiti is Controlled by Foreign Governments and Foreign Interests"

On the first anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti, Patrick Elie, a longtime Haitian democracy activist and Haiti’s former Secretary of State for Public Security:

“I don’t think, truly, that the Haitian people have to be pitied or mourned. They have to get true solidarity in their endeavor to rebuild,” Elie says. “We must resist the impulse to rebuild Port-au-Prince the way it was: a city of exclusion, of hyper-concentration and of shanty towns, which contributed very, very much to the high toll that we’ve paid after the earthquake.”

Wesleyan Professor Alex Dupuy: Haiti Transformed into the "Republic of the NGOs"

One year after the massive 7.0-magnitude earthquake that devastated Haiti, reconstruction efforts have barely begun. Alex Dupuy, a professor of sociology at Wesleyan University:

“There is a dramatic power imbalance between the international community—under U.S. leadership—and Haiti. The former monopolizes economic and political power and calls all the shots,” Dupuy writes. “This unequal relationship is reflected in the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission.” The IHRC is co-chaired by Bill Clinton.

Haiti One Year After The Earthquake

Haiti’s Yearlong Aftershock

No doubt, many of the NGOs saved lives and provided badly needed care. But their efforts are uncoordinated and often at cross-purposes with government policies. For example, the flood of volunteer doctors providing free emergency care has forced several Haitian hospitals into bankruptcy, weakening an already fragile medical ecosystem. Camps run by charitable organizations or celebrities like Sean Penn have discouraged some Haitians from leaving the overcrowded capital or returning to habitable homes. Haitians have taken to calling their country “the nation of NGOs” and begun to wonder if foreign aid is bad for them in the long term. It’s an important question: Thousands of organizations, many of them well-meaning, have toiled in Haiti in recent decades; they have made little discernible difference in the lives of most Haitians.

(Source: abbyjean, via so-treu)

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junkprints by chanel kennabrew
i’ve been a fan of chanel and her work at junkprints since her days on etsy.  her clothing, accessories, and artwork is bright, blunt and yards ahead of what’s “in”. follow her on her dookieblog and check out her store at junkprints.com.

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For Colored Girls -- Film Review

unfortunately, this what we all predicted.

dopegirlfresh:

a quote from the review itself:

No, it never was going to be easy, but someone needed to put creative sweat into this one, to reach for cinematic solutions to the theatrical challenge. All Perry does is force conventional plots and characters — utter cliches without lives or souls — into the fabric of Shange’s literary work. The hackneyed melodramas get him from one poem to the next but run roughshod over the collective sense of who these women are.

Then, when Perry arrives at the next poetic passage, the switch in writing between him and Shange is jarringly pronounced. The words belong to different worlds.

this is just what i predicted/ expected.