Marry Christmas and Happy New Year !!! (I said Happy New Year to someone yesterday and they informed me that the year is now too old to continue using that greeting... but HAPPY NEW YEAR anyway ) I hope everyone's holiday season was wonderful :) ... Now sometime ago I promised that I would review the 50 shades of Grey trilogy, and although it took me quite some time to read the three books in between work, school and a genuine disinterest, I was done in enough time to have published the post long before the end of last year, I guess a bit of laziness and not knowing where to start took over... But anyway here goes...

I was idly "googling" myself and realized that an article I had written for the UN Chronicle magazine two years ago, for a competition, was actually published although I did not win the contest. CLICK HERE    to see the article in all its glory... I am so happy I could burst lol, I have also copied and pasted the contents here ... Happy reading...

 When you hear the phrase "a ticket to your dreams" you automatically think of the lottery... I'm sure that has been etched in our minds since we were pretty young; watching TV with your parents and in between the news or after the newscast came the evening's lotto draw. Remember the days when there was only ONE lotto draw per day; now with so many gambling options we're up to at least four times a day with those games being offered by Supreme Ventures, but I digress. The word ticket  means: Noun: A piece of paper or small card that gives the holder a certain right, esp. to enter a place, travel by public transport, or participate... Verb: Issue (someone) with an official notice of a traffic or other offense.  (courtesy of Dictionary.com)

Jamaica is 50 this year, boy if you missed that you must have been in a coma for more than a year, because the buzz surrounding our half -a- century anniversary has been nothing less than CONSTANT.

Now, we all know that Jamaica has the most churches per square mile [ funny enough I was looking for the source of this "fact" and all the websites stated the Guinness Book of World Records as the source but there was no trace of it on their website...] and people are very sensitive about religion, generally... So I know this blog post may cause some amount of controversy, but these things need to be said. For the purposes of this post "religion" and "church lessons" will refer to Christianity and its teachings as declared by some denominations.

 Did you miss me? Let's hope so... I was having an intellectual conversation with a group of intelligent graduates recently (bear with me as I create the scenario) and we were discussing the issue of social class in Jamaica and whether  identity is a product of social class or if it is an independent entity. In arguing either point of view the factor of perception came in: whether the person wants be perceived as the class they belong to or another group. Let's look at how all this affects....  di loose hole gyal . Social Class refers to a certain stratification within society where its members share common characteristics: be it in concepts about political, economic and social structures, be it colour... whatever it may be... they have some common characteristics. Identity is defined as a person's conception and expression of their individuality or group affiliations (eg: cultural identity). We see then that identity is a fully  SUBJECTIVE phenomenon. Need ...

This is the phone I've had for some time... the BlackBerry 9800 ... At first I didn't want this phone because I know how clumsy I am and a touch screen phone was never in my thoughts, and then it was also a SLIDE UP phone.... I swore (thankfully not on my life nor any of my family members') that I wouldn't get this phone... But months later look who is in love with her BlackBerry 9800.