So everybody who’s anybody on BB&W knows I’m tickled to my toes to feature Lori L. Tharp’s book, Substitute Me on this month’s book discussion. Click here if you want to be in the clique.

In the course of our interview, I found out Tharps’ was preggers with her third “blanish” (African American and Spanish) baby. Guess where she found him? Whilst travelling abroad IN COLLEGE. During school. Through a program at her school. College girls, am I making myself crystalline?

She met her hubster 12 years ago in Spain, and after seven years of back and forth (which was hard and expensive, because Skype didn’t exist, and you guys have no idea how good you have it, because swirling pioneers had to walk fifty miles in snowy blizzards and paddle in canoes across the Atlantic Ocean to make it work, so I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANY COMPLAINING FROM YOU, YOUNG LADY!!)

College girls and young, single, working adults, wake up and smell the jet fuel. You’re at the prime of your beauty and fertility so work it to your advantage. Stop hiding in the dorms or your apartments giving yourself and your girlfriends bad perms and testing new nail polish colors.

It’s funny (as in a co-ink-ee-dink) that Tharps’ hubster is Spanish, because I’ve been in some pretty deep research about how color-struck some Lations and Asians can be, and how bringing home a black woman in some of those households may cause said parents to spontaneously combust. Tharpe had no such experience–his parents loved her.

This might be due in part to her education and upwardly-mobile status. Tharps observes that her in-laws had more of a conniption about another relative who married someone from a lower class, which was a COMPLETE scandal.

Ricky Rosa, 41, a Puerto Rican man in Florida, admits to the colorism issue, but education and status can make you an honorary light-skinned person. He’s one of 12 siblings, and was the only one who married and procreated with a black woman, and lurves them still, even after his divorce. Check this irony–he was once called a “nigger lover” by his lesbian sister.

Go figure.

So if you’re in college and waffling about travelling abroad, just go to the office already. If you out of college and still want to travel check out my good friend, Lorriane Spencer’s business here.