All About Me

"I am too intelligent, too demanding and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself."

Simone de Beauvoir



Me and ... Al Franken, taken at the National Press Club in 1997. I think you can figure out who is who.
(Cathy C. snapped it, Laura E. scanned it)


"At the end of the day, there's nothing like being an articulate, intelligent person who knows who they are and where they came from."

Aaron McGruder




My full name is Valarie Nichelle Jackson.

My name came from my father's favorite character on the soap opera The Edge of Night and my mother's favorite actress at the time, Nichelle Nichols of Star Trek. I am not, to my knowledge, related to any of the famous Jacksons— the Jackson portion of my family is very small and, but for my dad, comprises mainly women. I'm an only child and the youngest of eight. Just go ahead and try to figure it out!

I was born October 29, 1968 at 11:27 pm, resulting in a very fixed Scorpio with an Aquarius moon and Leo rising. Home is Richmond, Virginia, where I grew up on Church Hill.

My father was a deputy sheriff for 16 years, until his retirement in 1990. A highlight of his law-enforcement career was a stint as one of two trainers in the Henrico County Sheriff's Department's first K-9 patrol. My dad's many years of dedicated K-9 work resulted in me becoming a cat person.

My mom was a licensed practical nurse. She specialized in geriatric and substance-abuse nursing. She is the reason I am an outspoken, independent thinker.


"There was so much freedom that by eighth grade, many of us had lost the faith, because they made questioners out of us, and they never really had any answers."

George Carlin (1937-2008)


I'm a second-generation Catholic school survivor. I attended St. Patrick's Grade School in Richmond from kindergarten through grade 8. Like many Catholic schools across the US, St Patrick's shut its doors for good in June 2004 because of low enrollment.

St. Patrick's is the reason that St. Patrick's Day is among my favorite holidays and my favorite color is green, but mainly it challenged me mentally and emotionally, exposed me to different cultures in a place where and a time when that was difficult, developed in me a desire to read and ask questions and gave me an enthusiasm for learning strong enough to survive my subsequent years in public school.

I would have happily remained in Catholic school, but wanted to go to college and figured my parents needed at least four years to save for it.

"I look back and see what's happened to the kids who were way popular, and I'm glad I wasn't ever popular in school."

Edie Brickell


"I don't have low self-esteem. I have low esteem for everyone else."

Daria


So I went to public school. This was the first of my bad choices in life, but I not only managed to survive the experience, but graduate with honors, thus giving everyone who didn't know better the illusion that the experience really hadn't been as painful as it was.

I finished Armstrong High School, then Armstrong-Kennedy High School, in 1986. I can count the good teachers I had on one hand with fingers left over and can only recall two things I learned from the experience—it's a good idea to duck when a fight erupts and a bad idea to say what's truly on your mind. The jury remains out on whether these were good lessons, but I learned to play tennis and I won an Outstanding Youth Award from the City of Richmond for my volunteer work in 1985.

"Sometimes I think I need to go back to school. But the problem is that if you're black, you get more respect for going to jail than for going to school. You come out of jail and you're the f***ing man. You come out of school, nobody cares."

Chris Rock



I decided that 13 years of education at predominantly black schools was more than enough, so I went to James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, mainly in an attempt to learn what it was like to be the disenfranchised minority people kept telling me I was.

That wasn't among the lessons I learned, but I stumbled upon an interesting and often overlooked perk of being black at a predominantly white school—I finally had the chance to be myself with no repercussions. That was the best part of college. I no longer had to justify my tastes, my thoughts, my feelings or my choices. I met other blacks who preferred Led Zeppelin over hip-hop, read different types of literature by different types of people and were more enthusiastic about being themselves than "keeping it real," which should be the same thing, but apparently isn't.

I majored in journalism, which I had been flirting with since 5th grade when I discovered I was the only person in my class who knew what a journalist was.

Precociousness wasn't my sole motive. I noticed early that journalists got a chance to be everywhere, needed to know a smattering of everything and didn't have to do a lot of math, which was highly appealing because I've never been very good at it. I learned decades later that you had to do as much math as any other profession, but your colleagues were highly forgiving of your mistakes because they are just as bad at math as you.

Sticking with journalism turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made. I can't think of anything I love to do more than write, except read and listen to music.

The only other thing I was truly committed to in college was the ever-fledgling college radio station, now WXJM. I was the first news director of the station. Imagine heading a radio station news department where no one wanted to work for you because they would rather spin records. Come to think of it, you would rather spin records—but you were stuck doing the news, so at least you had a crew that was just as miserable as you were.

I did get to spin records, though. My main Monday night d.j. stint featured my two favorite types of music—black rock and blue-eyed soul. I'm aware the former is redundant and don't agree the latter is an oxymoron, so spare me your opinions.

I also did a Sunday morning show of jazz and old-school soul. It was my personal homesickness cure, because it was based heavily on waking up Sunday mornings to the smell of frying bacon and the sound of smooth soul emanating from my parents' record player. While others find spiritual uplift through church and other forms of piety and meditation, I seek fulfillment in the old-school soul CDs I've since acquired to replace what dad used to play when I was growing up.

Outside of WXJM, I did production and talent work for WMRA, JMU's National Public Radio affiliate. My eclecticism and preference for vintage R&B didn't fly with Ebony in Perspective listeners, so I stopped doing it and restricted my talent work to WXJM, where it was better appreciated.

Upon discovering I couldn't play what I wanted in the real world, I hung up my d.j. dreams for good and concentrated exclusively on writing. I did the occasional controversial story for The Breeze. I was never a regular staffer and, because of that, the only stories I could get were the ones the regular staffers were afraid to touch.

In Curio, the campus-based regional magazine, I wrote a piece about a halfway house for non-violent offenders and also concentrated on being campus correspondent for my hometown newspaper, a gig that led to the end of my resident advisor stint. Journalism, if done well, is not pretty.

"I like having the capitol of the U.S. in Washington D.C., in spite of recent efforts to move it to Lynchburg, Va."

Frank Zappa



That meager, but ballsy, body of work led to employment after graduation at The News & Advance in Lynchburg. Yes, the Lynchburg where Jerry Falwell was based until he died. I managed to spend five years there without getting in too much trouble—I guess I wasn't trying hard enough. I started covering education and eventually wrote features for the Life/Style section. In my journalistic travels in Lynchburg and its surrounding area, I interviewed clowns who were running for president—not a editorial comment, real clowns—cloisters of nuns who make communion wafers and gouda cheese and legions of Waltons fans.

I eventually managed to talk the features editor into letting me write an entertainment column. Writing that column was a pain in the butt at times, but mostly it was fun. It allowed me to rant, which is what I needed to do to survive five years in Lynchburg.

Then, just as I was becoming a big fish in a small pond, I left it all to move to a town where something actually happens, which brought me to the Washington area. I've been here since 1995, and some of it is just starting to grow on me, but there is too much traffic, too much anger, too much status-consciousness, too many stressed-out people, too much vermin—of the two- and four-legged variety—and too much stupidity, which is not limited to the federal government, unfortunately.

When I traveled to Washington alone for the first time in the early 1990s, I wondered how a mostly black city could have not a lick of soul. It's hard to believe Marvin Gaye and Chuck Brown were spawned here.

On the other hand:
I arrived in the area to cover health care and human services for now-defunct Business Publishers Inc., which was based at the time in Silver Spring, Maryland. At one point, I edited three newsletters there—two monthlies and a biweekly. Since 1997, I have worked on a news wire covering natural gas and power for Platts, a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies.

The world-famous Halland Oates (b. ca. 7/3/91-d. 7/17/02) and Hunter doing what they do best. Halland's butt is facing you.

I have one cat, Hunter, who has been with me since 1991. As the photo above indicates, I had two until his sister, Halland Oates, died back in 2002. She rather abruptly succumbed to complications from heart disease that no one had diagnosed at that point.

"So we've turned a lot of people into [expletive] nuts by allowing them to misinterpret the words 'feed your head'. 'Feed your head' doesn't mean take every [expletive] drug that comes along. 'Feed your head' means read."

Grace Slick


I try to "feed my head" as much as possible and have the terrible eyesight to prove it. I read just about anything, although I prefer non-fiction over fiction. I also get a kick out of reading "inflammatory literature," to see for myself just how controversial it is. Usually it is dull, but sometimes unintentionally funny.

While my favorite novelists are Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Octavia Butler, Stephen Fry (yes, the British actor), Joseph Heller, Anne Rice and fellow Richmonders Tom Robbins and Tom Wolfe, I prefer non-fiction books about politics and history. To keep up with what I am currently reading, see my Goodreads bookshelf. I keep it up to date.

"People 30 years old wonder why they're not getting off on popular music the way they once did, and it's because nobody's singing for them. When you reach a certain age you're not naive anymore. Everything I write can't be a philosophical truth, but it certainly isn't innocent, because I'm not."

Paul Simon


I continue to love music, despite the belief of marketers and advertisers that my love of music should have ended when I reached 25. I prefer music for adults that isn't sleep inducing or sappy, and wish I could find more of what I want on the radio. Besides Daryl Hall and John Oates, I love to listen to Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, Steely Dan, Parliament/Funkadelic, Gil Scott Heron, Joan Armatrading, Tracy Chapman, They Might Be Giants, Bonnie Raitt, MeShell NdegeOcello, Macy Gray, Jamiroquai and Ani DiFranco. They all have earned my lifelong respect and admiration for consistently making quality music. That doesn't seem like the goal of many artists these days.



"It's always funny until someone gets hurt. Then it's just hilarious."


Bill Hicks (1961-1994)


"Popcorn is a good analogy for show business. Every time you make popcorn, there are always those fluffy, white, happy popped pieces that are fun to eat and look at and everybody likes them, but there are also always those burnt, hard kernels at the bottom that don't pop. You know why they don't pop? They don't pop because they have integrity."

Marc Maron


With Marc Maron on the sidelines of the Washington Green Festival, September 24, 2005.


There is only one thing I love more than books and music, and that is comedy. I became addicted as a kid watching a steady diet of sitcoms and sketch comedy shows with my mom. I've been a bona fide Comedy Central junkie for years. My favorite comedian on the planet was the late, great Bill Hicks. I still listen to his CDs to relax, because I find it soothing to hear the unadulterated truth. Marc Maron, who is still very much alive, ranks a very close second.

I have a comedy collection includes not only Hicks and Maron, but Lenny Bruce, the late George Carlin, Cheech and Chong, the late Richard Pryor, Brett Butler, Chris Rock and the sketch comedy of The Kids in the Hall. I'm also a huge fan of novelty music. When I was younger, I wanted to be Dr. Demento when I grew up. Sometimes, I still do.

Perhaps my only other career-oriented regret—besides not being a disc jockey, musician or comedienne—is that I never had the artistic talent to vent in my own comic strip. I practically grew up on Bill Watterson's "Calvin and Hobbes" and Berke Breathed, first with "Bloom County," then "Outland" and now his current "Opus" strip. Their relative absence hasn't lessened my interest in the funny papers, but their influence is evident in that I like my strips like I like my comedy—the darker the better.

Among favorites: Wiley Miller's "Non Sequitor", Bill Griffith's "Zippy the Pinhead", Aaron McGruder's "The Boondocks" and Darby Conley's "Get Fuzzy". On an even darker note, Ted Rall's editorial cartoons and op-ed pieces are consistently bitter and brilliant, as is Dan Tom Tomorrow Perkins' work. David Rees' "Get Your War On" has helped to preserve my sanity in this insane world and despite being hopelessly straight, I can identify completely with both Mo and Clarice in Alison Bechdel's "Dykes To Watch Out For" strip. It may help to be a lesbian to love it, but you don't have to be.

I love independent films and documentaries. I love Mel Brooks and John Waters films as well. At the risk of betraying my gender, I don't like most romantic movies. There are only three I will watch, When Harry Met Sally, The Goodbye Girl and The Truth About Cats and Dogs. The quirky factor in all three override the sappy factor that makes me loathe romantic movies.

"If you look at women's basketball and don't like it, you really don't know much about basketball."

Former Georgetown University Basketball Coach John Thompson


I'm a huge fan of women's basketball, professional and college. My favorite pro women's hoops teams are the 2007 Champion Phoenix Mercury in the western conference and the Washington Mystics in the East. Among college women's teams, I follow those of my alma mater, James Madison University and what I wanted to be my alma mater, Temple University as well as the University of Maryland Terps and the George Washington University Colonials. I'm also a devoted fan of the Baltimore Ravens (AFC), Philadelphia Eagles (NFC) and the Toronto Blue Jays.


Back to Valarie's Planet