Hey Sarah,

Are you still in school? has school let out in new york?

I don't think the woman lives around where I live anymore. The last I heard was that the girl that hated my sister had a baby out of wedlock just like her mother. It's so amazing how the same patterns keep repeating over and over again in some American families. My mom also had me and my big sister out of wedlock and we also have two different fathers. My dad is white but my sister's dad was half-white. My mom said he was no good so she left him once she realized he was going to kill one of his family members.

I saw quite a bit, especially as a kid. I remember going to this one gas station downtown and seeing this one lady moving back and forth because she was high on coke or heroin. I also remember when I used to live in the same neighborhood as I do now hearing about how this one girl who hated my sister had a mother who was a crack addict. She had three kids, but I think all three of them had three different fathers but the last baby came out okay.

The neighborhood where they lived was very rough just like so many other neighborhoods in Cherry Hill. I remember one warm summer day riding down the street in my mom's car seeing some junkie walking down the street with his arm swollen up from his heroin fix.

Oh man. That's harsh. My aunt and my cousins used to live in this section of Baltimore called Cherry Hill. A lot of the people that lived there had to get air conditioning units that you find from the store because the places they lived in didn't have air at all. My aunt had a portable air conditioner hooked up in her room whenever it got hot outside and my cousin got one for her room once her baby was born.

Do you have any air condition? My apartment does courtesy of the management. Are you in school right now or did they let everyone go home early because of the heat?

It's so hot here in Baltimore. How is it in New York?

Around the time that Richard Takaki said this, it was when Barrack Obama was first elected. This other girl was on the radio with him too. She was a half Asian girl named Jen Chau. I assume her mother is white and her dad's Asian. She is the director of this group called Swirl. She practically agreed with this guy when he said what he said. Richard Takaki also praised Tiger Woods, who's really multiracial and not just Asian and Black, because he considered himself more than once race despite what people were telling him.

Most of the time being part black and part white, or a mulatto, doesn't feel any different then someone's who's a whole race. :) I usually say that I'm black even though my dad is a full blooded white guy. My mom always told me that even though I'm mixed that I'll always be considered as black because of her. This one Japanese-American professor whose name was Richard Takaki was saying the same thing. He said on a Public Radio show once that if someone is two or more races, they're considered to be that particular race that they have more of in their blood. He called it the one drop rule.

However, our melting pot here in Baltimore is nothing like New York or Newark. There are still more Latinos who live in New York and in New Jersey.