The Urbane Urbanite

There I am happily eating in a dark diner after Hurricane Irene Over the weekend, Hurricane Irene crippled the eastern seaboard, flooding towns, knocking over trees and taking lives. And in New Jersey, where I live, 617,000 people were without power. My lights were out for almost 18 hours. Meditation and light-skin-did Oreos helped me maintain my sanity. I had access to my gas stove but didn't really feel like cooking. So I hit the streets and went to my favorite diner a few blocks down from my apartment. They were without power as well, but that didn't keep them from serving customers and me from going in for something to eat. Here are six tips on how to chow down during a power outage.

I started working on my novel (for real, for real) in January of this year. I sat down and pumped out a couple of decent chapters. And I got some good feedback that propelled me to keep writing. As I started to use the momentum to pump out more work, something stopped me dead in my tracks: Procrastination. I would set aside time to sit down and write or brainstorm or jot down notes and plot ideas, but, instead, end up on Twitter shooting the breeze with hundreds of folks I do not know. I quickly zeroed in on the problem and scaled back on my tweets. In the past two weeks, Foursquare check-ins and blog promotion aside, I've only tweeted 23 times. That equals out to about 1.6 tweets per day. And more than half of those tweets were replies to messages sent directly to me. Just when I thought I had tamed my social media activities and was back on the road to literary success, my clever, crafty ass found o...

For the past five months, Paul Shaw, an internal consultant for a government agency in the nation's capital, has called a cozy row house home. Situated in Trinidad, a gentrified section of Northeastern Washington, DC, is his completely renovated two bedroom, two bathroom abode where African masks, chocolate browns and vibrant artwork pepper a sun-drenched open layout. Shaw, a native of St. Louis, MO and frequent entertainer, took me on a tour of his welcoming 1400 square foot digs, which includes a Club Monaco inspired friendship wall, a skylit bathroom - and an upscale kitchen that serves as the soul of the home.

The day after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Kathryn Stockett found herself sitting in her downtown New York City apartment, reflective, lonely and terribly homesick. "I was thinking about my family and thinking about this woman named Demetrie," said Stockett. "She was the African-American woman that worked for our family for 32 years and for the first time in my life, I started to ask myself 'what was she thinking all of those years?' I had totally taken it for granted. I was so naive as a child. She knew everything about us and I didn't know anything about her. So I started writing in what to me was her voice." Ten years and over 60 rejection letters later, Demetrie's voice has become the bona fide literary phenomenon that is The Help . Stockett's debut novel about the complex relationship between black maids and their white female employers during the dawn of the civil rights movement in Jackson, Mi...

I attended my very first (and certainly not my last) National Association of Black Journalists Convention & Career Fair in Philadelphia last week. The Philadelphia Convention Center was the nerve center for everything NABJ: Ceremonies, panels, receptions, parties, film screenings, celebrity performances and a huge career fair. Although I was in reporter mode covering the event for VIBE magazine, I still managed to attend several panels, a couple of receptions and one lively film screening.