Today's Ramble

>> *nods* damn near impossible to find wired mice these days. Although I bet you could find them in job lots on eBay.... you said there was a specific type. What is it? <<

The kind with a cord instead of wireless, and a ball underneath instead of a laser. Most brands of that seem to work. But the more electronic and less mechanical a thing is, the less it works for me. The entire trend of technology is moving away from things I can use, which is maddening. The last wireless mouse I tried to use lasted two weeks. >_<

>>I would be willing to bet that, given where you are, there are quite a few mixed-race folk.<<

That is certainly true of Champaign-Urbana, which has a thriving black community and also lots of other ethnicities. Charleston is mostly white but there's still a generous scatter of others, it's just that instead of clumping together you see them in ones or twos spread everywhere. CU is big enough for ethnic neighborhoods, and it can support small businesses to match.

>> And one look at that hair, and they know you belong there... YAY for stores and people that have what you need and accept who you are! <<

That is true in theory, but this is the first time I've seen it in practice. Usually people look at my skin, not my hair, and that includes when I'm shopping for hair care supplies. Most of the time I keep it braided -- what's called a protective hair style -- and in that configuration the nap isn't obvious unless you look at the curl of my bangs or the very end of the braid where it corkscrews. But that's more a thing in recent decades. Until it got well past my shoulders, and before it routinely picked things up and threw them, I used to leave it loose and it would turn into a froth of curls. People still didn't recognize that as nappy which is probably a good thing because the kind of harassment that black women get about their hair would have driven me utterly bugfuck.

It's ironic that a century or two ago, hair was more a marker of African heritage than skin, because the skin washes out faster. You can clock one African ancestor even generations later, because European genes produce S-curve curls, not the true spirals of African heritage. So one of the tests for curl type is to take a freshly washed and dried strand of your hair and lay it on paper. The shape it makes will tell you its structure. Most curl types are wiggly but don't lift off the paper much. African types are like slinkies, they stand right up. Another test measures how far your hair will stick up before falling over. Of course mine is so long now that the weight pulls it down from my head, but it balloons out the farther down it goes. If I hold it nearer the ends, it will stick up for 4-6 inches before flopping over.

One of my partner Doug's suggestions was that, if I can't figure out an adequate solution with research and experimentation, just wash and dry my hair and walk into that shop with it loose. Here is what's been happening with my hair, here are the products I've tried, this is what it looks like now, got any ideas? I'm actually hopeful that would work if I need it, although given the wide range of products available, I probably won't. The nap is easy enough to detect, it's just that most people see the bisque skin and assume that I'm white so they don't look any farther.

If you look at a few of my characters, you can see a similar pattern, like Zhonn. He's got long hair that holds beautifully in cornrows, and his skin is barely tinted but still has the African tendency toward keloid scarring.