I almost fainted the other day when I realized that, after all these years of thinking it, "I aint e'en ghetto". Can you believe the remarkable shock that must have gone through my body? All this time, I've been out here waving my rag and talking that "hood tawk". What's worse is how I even got to recognize that I wasn't ghetto. It was such a shock to me that I decided that I needed to share it with you (please keep in mind that, because of long years of being hood, it's going to be hard for me to avoid the hood tawk):
I was talking to one of my for real hood friends one day when she started to tell me about eating sugar sandwiches. Now, I've eaten lettuce and mayo on bread, but I ain't neva had no sugar sandwich. I mean, how broke do you have to be to eat one of those? Then another friend of mine was telling me about living in a place where the roaches would fall into your pot after the cover was taken off and the steam rose to the ceiling. Come on now! You gotta be kidding me. Now, I have my own hood stories - of buying foodstamps with cash and using the foodstamps to buy chinese food. I even have stories about being mandated to see a counselor in our afterschool program.
People who drank sugar water or that had water in their dry cereal, make me laugh as well. Or even people who washed styrofoam plates and cups. I guess maybe, there are levels of ghetto. It's been so long for me that I can't even remember half the things we did. But, I do know that the ghetto that I came from and the ghetto that some of the people I meet come from, is a very different place. When I get to know those folk they help me realize that "I aint hardly ghetto".
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