crack babies

there was a massive flood of facebook statuses in my "newsfeed" earlier that were all complaints about the twitter site being down. the general vibe was "damn it! twitter's not working (what to do?! what to do?!).. oh heeyy, whats good facebook?" and just like that those godforsaken tweeters were treating my darling facebook like the secondhand chick - the one who's cute but won't get any attention unless her dime of a best friend is cold-shouldering dudes all night. i couldn't decide what was sadder, the fact that, in their statuses, those tweeter's sounded like drug addicts being denied a fix or the fact that i was mildly offended that all of those ex-facebook fiends were trying to come back to their first love only because their new bitch was acting funny.

while i was comparing the weight of these "pathetic dependencies" in my head, i remembered some stories my mother was telling me a few days ago. my sister had just given birth to her second child and her fiancée was telling us that he was so anxious the night before that he chugged a pitcher of sugar water to calm his nerves. makes no sense, right? i mean, sugar livens you up, it puts you on edge, right? well, not exactly. he explained how when he was growing up on the cape verde islands, he remembers that his grandmother would give him a tall glass of sugar water every evening and send him off to bed. to him, sugar water is associated with comfort; it rejuvenates him and relaxes him at the same time. as my brother and i listened on with curiosity and confusion my mother decided to chime in and explain. she told us that when she was growing up in cape verde her grandmother would cut a piece of cloth from a dish towel, spoon two loads of sugar in the center of it, gather the edges of the cloth square, twist them around and tie it with a string, she'd then lightly dip the sugar lump end into a glass of warm water and give the crack-bag to my mother so she could chew and suck on it - like a homemade lollipop. my mother said that every time she was with her grandmother (or rather, any cape verdean child of the time was with a grandmother) she would follow her around all day, tugging at her apron and whispering to her to "let her have some of that stuff." my brother and i immediately looked at each other and i knew that what he was thinking was exactly what i was thinking: our mother has crackhead tendencies. my mother must have done that whole mother's intuition, i-know-what-you're-thinking-because-i-gave-birth-to-you thing because she quickly tried to save herself. she explained that in cape verde families were very large, you'd have lots of children in order to have more hands caring for your crops, but sometimes the harvest would be so bad that you couldn't feed all of the children so what they did was spoon them sugar and warm water through the day and before bed in an attempt to fill their stomachs with something sustainable. now, it all made more sense to me after that touching ending, but i still couldn't shake the image of a baby version of my mother, snotty nosed and ashy, hanging on the coattails of some big black woman, begging for kil cuza, "that stuff."

it's all so clear to me now. i've always wondered how my generation could come to be so heavily dependent on such miscellaneous things as websites, but now i know why i log into facebook pretty much everyday and why almost every post on this blog was conceived on my "newsfeed" homepage: i am a crack baby. we're all crack babies. associatively speaking, that is. if i come from a long line of sugar pouch suckling fiends then it's no wonder i can't resist an addiction to a measly website. easily falling victim to a little temptation and temporary pleasure is in my blood. the next time my mother complains about me always having my nose in my laptop i'm just going to shout over my shoulder "well, i got it from my mama!" then i'll probably scratch at my arm and update my status.