Groceries got covered!

Please wish me luck on my interviews this week!

I have to take a fuckload of bus rides, and that takes planning, so I try not to have more than one interview a day (unless I can have two in rather close proximity). I also have to make sure I don't apply to TOO many jobs so I am not flooded with phone calls that want me to interview like the next day. Thankfully, some of them let me have my interviews quite a bit in advance.

Also, next month is my birthday month (hint on the day), and I'm excited about that. I reached out to a close friend of mine, and he'd be willing to do something with me.

I wanted to start getting this posted. Any and all help is tremendously appreciated, even if not the goal. $5, $10, $20, or $100 will all do a lot as well.

Cash App: $QuingCrimson

I have Venmo, Zelle, and PayPal if you would like to help through those, too!

Thank you all so much

I did this without any cornstarch coating on the chunks, but if you want a crispier texture, cornstarch coating sprinkled over the soya chunks before coating it with the marinade is definitely recommended. It'll taste great either way.

Recipe

Soya Chunks (Baked):

• 1 cup dry soya chunks
• 4 cups water
• 1/4 tsp salt

Marinade:

• 2 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tbsp vegetable oil
• 1/2 tsp onion powder
• 1/4 tsp garlic powder

Instructions:

1. Boil water with salt in it.
2. Pour over soya chunks in a large bowl.
3. Let the soya chunks sit for roughly 20 minutes.
4. Drain soya chunks, rinse them with cold water, and squeeze out excess liquid with your hands.
5. Add soya chunks to marinade after mixing all ingredients together.
6. Toss soya chunks and let the marinade coat.
7. Let the soya chunks sit for at least 15 minutes.
8. Preheat oven to 375°F (~190°C).
9. Put soya chunks on the baking sheet and cook for 25 minutes after the oven is done preheating, flipping halfway through.

General Tso's Sauce (Microwaved):

• 1/2 cup water (vegetable broth is good, too)
• 2 tbsp ketchup
• 2 tbsp soy sauce
• 1.5 tbsp rice vinegar
• 1.5 tsp sriracha (chili garlic sauce should work, too)
• 2 tsp agave (maple syrup should work, too)
• 1/4 tsp sesame oil
• 1/2 tsp garlic powder
• 1/4 tsp ground ginger

Slurry:

• 1.5 tsp cornstarch
• 1.5 tsp water

Instructions:

1. Mix all ingredients (except the slurry) together in one container; stir everything together.
2. Create a cornstarch slurry by mixing together the cornstarch and water until there are no "lumps."
3. Heat up the mixture in a microwave for about 2 minutes.
4. Add about 2 spoonfuls of the heated sauce to the cornstarch slurry, and mix it together until everything is totally combined. Add the slurry mixed with the 2 spoonfuls of sauce to the main container and stir it in thoroughly.
5. Microwave for 30 seconds.
6. It should have a "glossy" texture when it is does, meaning you should be able to see the back of a spoon in a transparent kind of way when you coat the sauce over it. If it does not have that texture yet, heat it up in 15 second bursts until it reaches that point, stirring every time.
7. Add the soya chunks to the container, toss the sauce all over the chunks, and sprinkle the sesame seeds on top.

"Lo Mein:"

• 4 oz (112 g) whole wheat spaghetti
• 1/4 tsp salt

Sauce:

• 0.5 tbsp toasted sesame oil
• 0.5 tbsp soy sauce
• 0.5 tbsp rice vinegar
• 0.5 tbsp agave
• 1 tbsp reserved pasta water
• 1/4 tsp garlic powder

Instructions:

1. Boil spaghetti with salt in water according to the package instructions.
2. Reserve 1 tbsp of pasta water, drain the spaghetti, and mixed the cooked noodles with the sauce mixture plus the 1 tbsp of reserved pasta water in a container. The sauce does not need to be heated up and should coat the spaghetti just fine.
3. Serve with the soya chunks. I added sriracha and sesame seeds on top, as you can see.

Groceries got covered!

Please wish me luck on my interviews this week!

I have to take a fuckload of bus rides, and that takes planning, so I try not to have more than one interview a day (unless I can have two in rather close proximity). I also have to make sure I don't apply to TOO many jobs so I am not flooded with phone calls that want me to interview like the next day. Thankfully, some of them let me have my interviews quite a bit in advance.

Also, next month is my birthday month (hint on the day), and I'm excited about that. I reached out to a close friend of mine, and he'd be willing to do something with me.

I wanted to start getting this posted. Any and all help is tremendously appreciated, even if not the goal. $5, $10, $20, or $100 will all do a lot as well.

Cash App: $QuingCrimson

I have Venmo, Zelle, and PayPal if you would like to help through those, too!

Thank you all so much

I'm having a hard time sitting with the fact that Black people so frequently push for ideas and logic that are antithetical to understanding race and thereby antithetical to Black people truly being liberated.

I'm baffled by how Black people can make sweeping generalizations about "biracial" people and nobody will see anything wrong with it, e.g., "Biracial people aren't Black because they have totally different experiences!"

Which ones!? Which "biracial people" are you talking about? Why are we taking a category of people who is so overwhelmingly and undeniably diverse and trying to reduce their presence in society down to a singular archetype that inherently erases the experiences of a multitude of people? How is it not obvious that this is extremely reductive?

This is why I say that Black people have an unhealthy relationship with race science, and it is a one-sided love. They love race science, but race science sure does not love us.

I never hear any actual arguments for this "Biracial people aren't Black" nonsense. It's always:

1. A meaningless tautology being pushed as an irrefutable axiom of sorts, e.g., "Biracial people are biracial. Black people are Black."
2. Race essentialism; something about biracial people not having "pure DNA." (It's 2026, and many Black people still don't know that race is a social construct. Geez.)
3. Something that erroneously assumes that there is a universal "biracial experience." By extension, people often assume that there is a singular "biracial phenotype," but this man is "mixed," this woman is "mixed," and this man is "mixed," so what the fuck are we talking about?
4. A misinterpretation of the one-drop rule so that they can posture and pretend that biracial exclusion is about "rejecting the slavemaster's ideas." Accepting biracial people as Black is not the one-drop rule. It is not the one-drop rule to look at a person who is unambiguously Black in their appearance and assuming they are Black even though they might have one non-Black parent. What the one-drop rule would actually be like is a person who has blonde hair, blue eyes, and pale skin being considered "Black" socially and systemically, regardless of how they personally want to identify, just because we discover that they have 8% Wolof ancestry or something like that. Many people find it very much understandable when a white-passing biracial person does not identify as Black. The problem is that these people do not want to reject the one-drop rule's problematic foundation: viewing race as a scientific, genetic, and biological thing. You cannot truly reject the "one-drop rule" without properly categorizing race first, and that's why, ironically enough, many of these Black people are effectively engaging in an inverted one-drop rule.

And, to be clear, I am not saying I believe that all biracial people (with a Black parent) should identify as Black. My point is that the race essentialism that tries to enforce a strict, uniform "biracial" categorization needs to be rejected, period. Like I said, experience can vary from person to person, so if someone feels like their experience as a biracial person is not a Black one, and, for that reason, they do not feel like it is accurate for them to identify as Black, I understand.

However, when someone like me, who has called myself "Black" my whole life, is being told that I am somehow "not Black" because of my Trinidadian Dougla heritage, I have to sit and wonder, "Where the fuck are we? How did we get here?" It also shows how US-centric this thought process is. Most people in the US hear "biracial" and automatically assume "Black American mixed with white American."

Speaking of Dougla heritage, by the way, something I find interesting is that I rarely see people "correcting" Black liberals trying to guilt-trip people and accuse them of misogynoir when they are screeching about people who did not vote for Kamala Harris. Though I have seen people deny Harris' Blackness, it's ironic how the race policing often stops when people need to fulfill a certain agenda that frames the electoral loss of a genocidal, neoliberal politician as being due to a "hatred of Black women."

In fact, people tend to be selective about this shit overall. People will start saying "That's it! We gotta exclude biracial people from Blackness altogether" when a racially ambiguous biracial person is expressing anti-Blackness on TikTok, but I rarely see people go out of their way to say that Bob Marley, Barack Obama, Beyoncé, J. Cole, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, Malcolm X, Amy Jacques Garvey, and Rosa Parks are "not Black."

And, honestly, this is just me getting into one facet of Black reactionary thought that tends to LARPs as revolutionary.

Race essentialism is one problem and a huge one at that, but we also have cisheteropatriarchy, prejudice against non-Christians, ableism, and Black capitalism causing so many fucking issues as well.

I am very, very proud of my Blackness, but I'm gonna be honest with you: I often feel like I have a hard time associating with a lot of Black spaces and Black people due to these reactionary impulses.

Honestly, I gotta make it a goal to interact with Black people who genuinely understand Marxism, race, and revolutionary thought because whatever the fuck this is, I'm not taking it.

Just as Black people can endorse any other reactionary tendency, Black women still can uphold toxic liberal feminism, too.

What the fuck.