To Thy Self Be True

The snowflakes that are coming out of the sky right now are HUGE! It looks like confetti, or like 3 or 4 flakes frozen together to make one.

I finally saw The Last Days of Left Eye, the documentary about the final days of Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes on VH1 this past Thursday. It happened to be on while I was watching TV and trying to avoid doing something else. I love documentaries that show the human side of celebrities, especially the mainstream ones that people tend to idolize. They always boil down to one thing to me; these people that we think have everything that anyone could ever want really don't have what we think they have.  And I think the reason celebs agree to do these types of things is because they have a need to show us the side of themselves that the "industry" forces them to shed once they sign that contract.

I think the thing that bothered me the most about this documentary was that Lopes never really looked like she was very happy. Yeah, she was laughing and playing when her friends and proteges were around, but during those points in the film where she was by herself she always seemed like she was in another melancholy world. I can't believe she was as old as she was because she looked like a pre-teen in the film. She seemed like a beautiful and intricate person, inside and out.

I was a sophomore at Hampton when Lopes died, and her death was the second of two big shocks to the hip hop community. Aaliyah died the August before in a plane crash. Both of them seemed to die just as they were discovering their true selves and leaning toward showcasing more of this side of themselves through their work. I think if anything what I learned from this is that you can't waste a lot of time living for other people. When you finally decide to be who you are, you may not have enough time to enjoy it. Here's the video from "Block Party", a song from her solo album that she worked on before she died. Her label declined to release it, but after her death many TLC fans demanded it.