VforVadge

Top 5 Reasons to Visit Puerto Rico

**Update: Hurricane Maria ravaged our beautiful second home in 2017 – please consider donating to organizations like Hispanic Federation as they continue to strive and push through the adversities of rebuilding.

Of course, the best way to support right now is to Visit Puerto Rico yourself – the service and tourism industries could use our love and dollars.**

As an island girl, I get homesick often. The beaches, the clean water and beautiful sands – nothing beats the fresh Caribbean air for me. Finding other islands of similar beauty has been super refreshing, and Puerto Rico has become like my family’s other island home.

Today I want to share with you some of my top reasons to visit Puerto Rico; this under-appreciated island. Hopefully, you’ll go and fall in love like we have. Whether you’re lovers on the run or a family looking for somewhere to unwind – this place is perfect for you.

1. The Hotels.

We have a handful of go-to boutique hotels (see Hotel Iberia) that we really love and appreciate in Puerto Rico. Typically, we opt for small places to enjoy the family-style vibe that a small business owner can truly provide. One of our favorite places to stay, Aleli by the Sea has been bought out – so I can’t even link you to the beautiful Sra. Lanchy and her abuela-esque smile. This shoutout is for her – we wish her the best in wherever the future takes her.

Check out my previous post on Puerto Rico here.

This trip, we went chain hotel since there was more family coming along. Marriott has always been a first choice for me when I’m traveling, and the new AC Marriott San Juan is absolutely beautiful. The lobby smelled like a handsome man’s cologne, the staff was friendly and helpful, and the rooms are modern and comfortable.

2. The Beaches.

I always thought Jamaica and the Dominican Republic had the most beautiful beaches, but the Caribbean just takes the cake overall for me. San Juan’s Condado beach is such an expansive line of gorgeous sand and sea. The water is clean, the locals care for their surroundings (can’t say the same for the visitors at times) – it’s a real paradise. If you bring a lover here, they’ll think you spent a million dollars on the view.

3. The Food.

If you’re not familiar with Puerto Rican food, there’s no better place to try it for the first time. I couldn’t wait to land so I could enjoy breakfast foods like Mallorca, fried snacks like Bacallao fritters and dinner like Mofongo.

4. The Nature. 

Visiting Puerto Rico can give you access to natural wonders that would otherwise be impossible for some to visit. El Yunque is a small rainforest on the windward side of the El Yunque mountains. Long story short – it’s got beautiful waterfalls and pristine waters. Super sexy place to visit with your loved ones.

5. The Vibe.

We visit each year during Noche de San Juan and Pride weekend. It’s beautiful to see people of different ethnicities, preferences and various walks of life mingling together. The music, the laughter – it’s all a refreshing reminder that human beings are innately good and loving. I hope that tradition lasts forever.

Everyone needs a little time away – even those of us who live in tropical environments. Visiting beautiful places like Puerto Rico guarantees a beautiful view, fresh air and the natural vibes of the Caribbean. Grab your photo ID, swimsuit and plane ticket – we’ll meet you there!

A big thank you to the following Resources: 

El Yunque Official Site 

Marriott.com

Tiny Kelsie 

Putting it All on the Table 

La_Leona27 on Instagram

Kimi Goes To the Philippines – Day One (VLOG)

I’m sure you just love to hear my scratchy travel voice, but I’ve got video for you, too. Being in the Philippines was such an eye-opening experience; I truly look forward to continuing this share fest I’ve got going on. If you missed my Live stories on IG and Facebook – not to worry. I’ve uploaded them to YouTube for your viewing pleasure.

As always, feel free to email me your questions to kimi@vforvadge.com (please copy vforvadge@gmail.com as I will be leaving the country once again). Thank you guys and girls so much for keeping me company on my trip – I appreciate you!

While I enjoyed my first few days in the Philippines, they were extremely lonely for me. I knew this was a long haul trip, and I didn’t fully prepare myself to be away from my daughter for so long. I’ve been away from my family and husband – we’re all grown and learn to deal. Not being able to see that cute little face every day was tough.

This trip was for business, so I spent most of my days in the office. My crew was extremely eager to learn and amazingly hospitable. I couldn’t have picked a better team.

Did I mention the hotel was awesome? The F1 Hotel Manila deserves its own review – which I’ll share with you this week as well.

I hope you enjoyed my little ramble for today, I’ll be back soon to share more of my experience in the Philippines with you!

Hey Vadgesters – I’m here!

I’ve arrived in Bonifacio City (Philippines) after a very long set of flights, and I’m finally settled and able to start sharing with you. This episode covers a bit of my flight experience, what I immediately learned about trans living in Manila and self- pleasure while traveling. I’ve got pics for you as well, and goodies to come!

This has been such a great experience so far, and I hope you’ll stay along for the ride!

Listen to Kimi Goes to Manila by The V Word on #SoundCloud here:

My first few days in Manila started off alone, so most of my photos are selfies. I didn’t want to look like a super tourist, so I snuck my phone out periodically to take street photos. Don’t judge me!

Initially, I felt a bit out of place, but that changed once I met with the team I would be training during my stay. The rest of my trip was awesome – check out my VLOG here, too.

Fetish Life – The V Word Podcast (Season 2, Ep. 2)

I’m back with more guests and more wine! On this episode of The V Word, the ladies and I are chatting about fetishes. What are they, why we people have them and some of the strangest ones we’ve heard of.

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Listen to Fetish Life by The V Word by VForVadge

I brought out a few visual aides to help enhance our conversation as well.

Crystals helped cleanse the air and allow honesty to flow. Peep my favorite Umie in the background!

If you watched out Facebook Live video and were wondering what that squishy thing was, here she is! We named her Trapnisha and she rests on the butt plug we passed around.

She’s a masturbation sleeve and is determined to spice up any bedroom. Threesome, you say?

Get Out: How Black Stereotypes May Ruin Your Sex Life

If you’re like many of us who have watched Jordan Peele‘s polarizing (pun intended) film “Get Out,” you noticed quite a few symbolic references to Black life. As a Black Sexpert, I couldn’t help but see things from an intimacy point of view. I’ll be discussing my takeaways each day this week.

“Size Does Matter” Thinking Was Perpetuated by Slavery:

Sure, every culture has their version of a “pissing contest,” but few cultures can provide historical evidence of being generationally objectified and hyper-sexualized. In “Get Out”, the main character Chris, (played by Daniel Kaluuya) was assumed to be genetically predisposed to physical fortitude because he is Black. Furthermore, he is objectified by older, White women (and others) and one even asks “is it true?” The question alluded to an age-old stereotype that Black men come with larger phallic equipment than their non-Black counterparts. Large penis size is then attributed to sexual performance.

The problem is, generational stereotypes can (and often are) insidious in their ability to push past the reality we know and rest directly under our innermost insecurities. This leads us (yes, women get it, too) to be uncertain of our actual capabilities as well as our worth as intimate partners and humans if we don’t live up to these predisposed expectations.

If you’ve spent your whole life thinking a bigger penis is necessary to please your partner, you may feel dejected and thus unable to reach your actual (and adequate) potential. This goes for women and body ratios as well (i.e. the big butt phenomena).

Throughout slavery times, the Black male was objectified in every facet of the word. Used for their physical strength, they were sized like farm cattle and sold in similar fashion.  To add insult to injury, many of them were used as sex slaves for heterosexual and homosexual slave owners. Prize fighting further reduced the Black male slaves’  worth down to fighting for one’s life, often while scantily clad or naked. I don’t have to explain how sexual that is in nature. In the non fiction memoir ” When I Was A Slave,”  former slave John Finnely recalls witnessing slave fights on the Alabama plantation where he was held captive until his freedom.

As many of us who have had more than one sexual partner can attest to, size is not necessarily relevant to sexual prowess or performance. Size doesn’t equal skill, nor does it guarantee any specific level of intimacy. Black men have been praised for their sexual prowess and physical aptitude while simultaneously being vilified for those same traits. Ultimately, this stigma has created a paradox where men do not know whether to exhibit their virility for all to see or keep it intimate and be seen as lesser than.

The Message:

Self-reflection is super crucial to maintaining inner-esteem when you get woke. It’s so easy to fall into the “sunken space” and feel like you’re not enough. Once you focus on quality relationships and individualized pleasure for your partner(s), you are able to recognize the quality of your work and your abilities.

The next time someone asks you if “it’s true,” you can stand there like Captain Morgan and say “wouldn’t you like to find out?”

Resources:

Geek Tyrant

Attn

Goodreads

Amazon

Moonlight: A Meditation on Black Male Masculinity and Social Death

Great art allows you to peak into the hidden depths of another’s consciousness, and Moonlight does just that with unparalleled grace and brilliance, in recent memory. Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight offers a glimpse into black life that’s never, to my mind, been at the forefront of mainstream consciousness, black or otherwise. The film chronicles the life experiences of Chiron, the film’s protagonist, in three distinct stages: as a young child; as an adolescent coming of age; and as a grown man. A core theme of the film, the hyper-masculinization of black men and boys, in particular, is a subject for a much needed discussion that has happened but has often obscured the soul-crushing traumas that black boys experience, gay or otherwise. In this respect, Moonlight is particularly illuminating, especially in the way it presents Chiron’s relations to other boys and men throughout his life.

*** Spoiler Alert ***

A Brief Synopsis

In the first third of the movie, we encounter Chiron as a withdrawn child, who has great difficulty connecting with others in no small part due to his precarious upbringing. The opening scene begins with a young Chiron frantically running away from a group of boys his age, taunting him relentlessly with homophobic epithets and threats of violence. In a desperate effort to escape, Chiron takes refuge in what appears to be an abandoned tenement, and it is there where he meets Juan, a Cuban immigrant, who becomes a mentor for Chiron. As the narrative progresses, we learn that Chiron’s mother, Paula, is a crack addict, who is often unavailable to provide for her son’s emotional and basic physical needs. Because of this, Chiron spends a lot of time with Juan and his girlfriend Teresa, who, together, become Chiron’s support system. Later on, however, it is revealed that Juan is a drug dealer, who also happens to be Paula’s supplier; this undoubtedly leaves a lasting impact on the young Chiron. Besides Juan, the only other connection that Chiron has with another male is with Kevin, his childhood best friend, who is a constant source of encouragement.

By the second third of the movie, we learn that Juan has died, but the cause is never mentioned. At this point in the narrative, Chiron is an adolescent in high school, who is still rather isolated from his peers. The bullying has intensified, physically and emotionally, and his mother’s dependence on drugs has become so out of hand that we witness her stealing money from her son as she threatens him with violence. Teresa remains a constant support for Chiron, feeding him meals, giving him money to help support himself, and offering him a place to stay away from the traumas of life at home. Kevin and Chiron are still the closest of friends, but we witness a sexual element enter their relationship for the first time: Kevin frequently brags to Chiron about his sexual conquests in explicit detail as Chiron fantasizes privately about seeing Kevin in the act. Eventually, the two friends share an intimate moment one night, revealing Kevin’s bi-curiosity, but as the narrative progresses, their relationship quickly deteriorates when Kevin, egged on by the school bullies, punches Chiron repeatedly in order to prove his masculinity. The scene ends with the bullies repeatedly kicking and stomping Chiron bloody. Days later, Chiron retaliates against the ring-leader, striking him repeatedly with chair during class, unprovoked. Chiron is escorted off the premises by police, as a stunned Kevin watches. In the end, Chiron serves a prison sentence.

In the final act, Chiron has become an adult, now living on his own in Atlanta. He has developed his familiar thin frame into a muscular one decorated with tattoos, and he has acquired a commanding and seemingly self-confident demeanor. Like his father-figure, Chiron has become a drug-dealer, but he seems ambivalent about his habit. He lives not too far away from his mother, who resides in a drug rehabilitation facility. In his mother, we witness a woman who has become more self-aware, accepting responsibility for failing in her obligations to her child, and in Chiron, we witness a hurt son who finds it difficult to sympathize with his mother’s struggles but who nevertheless forgives her, in spite of apparently unresolved wounds.

The central image of this final act, however, is Chiron’s reunion with his childhood best friend, Kevin, who has become a successful chef. The moment is exhilarating, at first, because the way it comes about seems so unexpected, but it quickly becomes a somber one as Chiron reveals to Kevin that he has never been touched by anyone else the way Kevin touched him so many years ago. The movie ends with a moved Kevin embracing his old friend.

Moonlight Analysis

While themes of black queer life are central to the film, it is unclear whether Chiron, or Kevin for that matter, are, in fact, gay or bisexual, which only adds to the film’s brilliance. Consider the young Chiron we encounter in the first act of the film. Clearly, the boy isn’t even old enough to know what sex is, let alone mature enough to even think about a self-identity, in any way, yet, he is constantly written off as a “faggot”, a “sissy”, a “homo”, even by his own mother. While the viewer is not privy to the specifics of what triggers the abuse Chiron faces, it is obvious that the great difficulty he has with socializing with his peers is enough. His silence, his awkwardness, and his timidity, are all traits that make him an easy target in a culture that expects young boys to be aggressive. Of course, those traits imply nothing about sexuality, but the fact that they are associated with femininity, and with male homosexuality by extension in heterosexist logic, is enough to merit the abuse heaped upon Chiron, in the eyes of so many around him.

For them, it didn’t matter whether Chiron was actually gay; his crime was his ‘failure’ to be a man, even as a prepubescent child. This child’s grave ‘sin’, in sum, is his difference. It’s, in fact, a set of differences from cultural expectations that many black boys and men share, which clearly show that LGBTQ black boys and men aren’t the only victims of homophobia, a point I’ll return to later.

Many might view the sex act between teenage Chiron and Kevin as evidence of latent homosexuality, but this judgment is colored with inconsistent cultural biases regarding sexuality and gender. In the West, we formally conceive of sexual orientation as an enduring quality that reflects sex or gender-based preferences with regard to romance, companionship, and sexual activity, but the standards for assessing sexual orientation are arbitrary in practice. Up until that intimate moment between the two teenagers, Chiron, though clearly interested in his friend, lacked any real sexual experiences whereas Kevin was sexually active with girls. No single act reasonably determines sexual orientation on its own, yet this act is the sole basis of assessing Chiron and Kevin as gay. To the point that has been repeated ad nauseam, we know that if Chiron and Kevin were girls that they would not necessarily be seen as gay for engaging in same sex activity.

The double standard is often justified by popular ad-hoc rationalizations such as the claim that female sexuality is more fluid than that of males. At the same time, it’s common-place in our society to deny boys and men the freedom of exploring themselves beyond the stringent confines of masculinity as defined by culture(s). That boys and men ‘break the rules’ of masculinized sexuality is not evidence that male sexuality is any more fixed than that of females, which together with the fact that many of these ‘sacred’ rules are arbitrary, undermine the notion of a sharp distinction drawn between female and male sexuality.

The open-endedness of the final scene between Chiron and Kevin unlocks the true brilliance of the entire film. Up until the final embrace between the two friends, it is obvious that there is a mutual urge for re-connection and fellowship, but the span in time between when we witness them as teenagers and their meeting as adults leaves us viewers with little with which to characterize their relationship. As the two interact, we’re left wondering about the motivations for Kevin to reach out to Chiron after so many years of non-communication, the intentions of Chiron in choosing to meet with his child-hood friend, and about the possibility of a romance in the future. Their contact discloses no insight into their respective self-identities or sexual proclivities, which makes the final scene all the more haunting in its poignancy. In the final analysis, those questions about the definition of their relationship are secondary to the tragedy Chiron highlights with his final words: his ongoing loneliness that he’s never been able to overcome but for that one moment in time with his dear friend so many years ago.

It’s a loneliness that can befall anyone. More than anything, the film is about the pains of growing up and coming to terms, hopefully, with who you’ve become. We are each thrown into a world that beats the individuality out of us from an early age. For some of us, the experience is far more brutal. Some of us don’t even survive. And for many of us who still breathe, we aren’t even aware of just how much of each of us is already dead.

Have you seen Moonlight yet? Feel free to share your thoughts!

Resources:

www.adorocinema.com

Nerd Reactor