I sent three salty pretzel emojis to a friend last month when it seemed that she and everybody else I knew was enjoying ESSENCE Fest in New Orleans or the AKA Boule in Houston while I was here in DC. Of course it wasn't everybody, but it just seemed that way from the Facebook and Instagram pics. In June it was watching how my sorors were enjoying the the DST Regional Conferences (even though I have been inactive for the past year), and in May it was a slight jealousy of my Spelman sisters who were at Reunion (even though it wasn't my year). All summer I have been just a tad salty while friends were on vacation and attending festivals and having girls' nights out and going to day parties.
This new label won't be tied to a specific day, so it will just be a feature that emerges from time to time whenever something annoys me and I am in the mood to opine about it. I was trying to settle on the right analogy, so I thought through and rejected several other options. I thought that it would be better to reserve salty tears as a description for someone else's behavior. Nobody but grandparents and nursery school kids eat saltine crackers. And too many folks have peanut allergies these days (even though the tune Salt Peanuts is very catchy). So I settled on salty pretzels since unsalted pretzels are supposed to be a healthy snack food option, and the point is to be intentionally and unabashedly snarky.
I made a personal peace treaty with the idea of not dissing Omarosa because of a chance encounter I had with her at a funeral recently. I had been standing in the vestibule of the church, talking with a few friends, and somehow I ended up holding the door open for her to enter the building. It took me half a second to process and move on from that moment, and honestly because we were at a funeral, the last thing I was interested in doing was gawking at anyone. Later, there was an acknowledgment among my friends that she was there, but again, we all quickly moved on to sharing our collective grief. In that spirit, I had decided that I would not take gratuitous or unnecessary shots at her in the foreseeable future (anymore).
When news of her book and its release began to gather steam, I tried to stay true to that personal pledge. I might have tweeted out a snarky request for one person to buy and read the book to report back if there were any the noteworthy anecdotes. Then maybe I might have posted another tweet that referred to her bombshell revelations of #45s racism as being a bunch of old sad crumpled receipts. And then there was this ELLE interview, which preceded this TODAY Show interview (and I posted both to the Facebook page) and well, now I'm sitting here gorging on a family size bag of salty ranch-flavored pretzels.
ANYBODY can write a damn book apparently. Even if everybody knows this book is revenge porn and this publicity tour is just another excuse for her to glam up for the cameras. I cannot be the only person who is annoyed that this chick is the absolute worst, yet she keeps getting attention! For the love of all that is holy and decent, why does her mediocrity warrant such fascination? Why are so many decent people that I know and respect acquaintances of hers, let alone friends? When does she just go away?
My saltiness is not jealousy--it is my utter vexation that this woman has become one of the most prominent and visual representations of black women in the media. In some respects, this is a respectability rant, but in others it is pure frustration that of all the black women who deserve a platform, Omarosa can simply make an outrageous statement or allegation and that is all it takes. She is the second coming of Paris Hilton, tabloid catnip, this stupid earworm song that I cannot get my kid to stop singing. I would compare her to a Kardashian, but at least Kim accomplished one useful thing this year.
Ugh. There, I said it! WOOSAH.
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