Small Brown Girl Consulting

I attended my 20 year high school reunion this weekend.  It was crazy and more than a little surreal.  High school is such a strange transitional time.  You move from barely being a teenager to almost being an adult, with none of the self-directed growth you can do in college.  Basically, you are thrown together with a lot of people you probably would never have chosen.  And all together, you must survive four years of …

I recently developed a proposal for SXSW with Deldelp Medina, one of the smartest people I know.  If you knew my friends, you would know that this is really saying something.  Our proposal is about the confluence of stereotypes that keeps people like us – Latinos of our generation – out of leadership, power and influence.  You can read more about it at the SXSW panel picker. Family and friends keep asking why.  Why this, …

Sitting down to dinner tonight and the following exchange greeted me: Miss Thing:  Mommy, is a soul blue?  What is a soul? The Husband:  I want to hear the answer to this… Me (taking my time chewing to try to compose something of a satisfactory answer to my 6 year old daughter):  No, I don’t think a soul is blue.  Some people think that a soul is the thing that makes people different from animals.  …

My 12 year old god-daughter, Ariel, was diagnosed with cancer over 3 years ago. No run of the mill cancer for her, she got a very rare, very deadly form called rhabdo-myosarcoma. After an 11 month course of treatment, she was given the pronouncement “no evidence of disease”. Cancer families know that to say “cure” or “remission” is to tempt fate. NED is the moniker that is most meaningful in the initial post-treatment years. Ari …

Welcome 2010. You with your fresh promise, your mid-term elections, continued economic recovery and hope for full equality. Welcome to new challenges, old friends and new beginnings. This year, I will be trying to find a voice and rhythm for this blog. Expect postings that are personal, political and just plain random. Up to now I’ve managed only a handful of posts in just over two years. I’ve tried to keep my thoughts at a …

President-elect Obama. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. I can’t say that I never thought I would see this day. I’m not sure if I ever really entertained the notion at all, but not because I had given the matter any thought. It’s possible that I never entertained the notion because it was so far-fetched. It’s possible that I never entertained the notion because I never dreamed of being president myself…and for me, I don’t think …

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about religion lately. I was raised Catholic and at some point in high school really keyed into the hypocrisy of the Church, from Papal indulgences on down the line. Also, there is a part of the mass right before the sacrament of the Eucharist, that’s communion for the uninitiated, where the congregation says: “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I …

someone recently suggested to me that i should start a blog. i have to confess that i don’t read a lot of blogs so i don’t really get the rules here. i think ranting is generally involved, but i don’t feel much like ranting just now. i’m not sure why we are so interested in the mundane details of other’s lives…are we really so starved for voyeuristic entertainment that it is necessary to read about …